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Mors Rattus posted:This is a very funny book, mostly because I recognize a lot of the corporate language here. The corporate language comes from our direct experience of real-world corporate poo poo. "Company values" and "mission statements" and all that hollow garbage that's designed to disguise just how bad pretty much every corporation is if you're not a C-level or shareholder. As with so much about Pentex, the subsidiaries' sections cleave a lot closer to real-world corporate evil than people might think. Especially Sunburst (on-site facilities so workers never need to go home is a Google feature, and startup ideas ripped from tech-bros), RED (the Daily Mail and the Murdoch Empire, down to the clothing guidelines and insane partisan slants), and Tellus (so much of what's there is drawn from the experiences of ex-EA employees).
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Jan 24, 2018 10:17
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Frankly, some of the corporate evil seemed too weak compared to real companies.
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Jan 24, 2018 10:50
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Loomer posted:Frankly, some of the corporate evil seemed too weak compared to real companies. See Nestle's "People don't really need water, right? If they want to have the necessary fluids to live they should just pay us for the right to do so!" as an example.
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Jan 24, 2018 14:23
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I think my favorite so far is Endron running an alternative energy company and using them to "prove" that alternate energy doesn't work, such as by having them "prove" that wind farms cause domestic violence, because of spinning.
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Jan 24, 2018 14:27
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Mors Rattus posted:I think my favorite so far is Endron running an alternative energy company and using them to "prove" that alternate energy doesn't work, such as by having them "prove" that wind farms cause domestic violence, because of spinning. Still can't beat Nestle's "Our board of director's saw Tank Girl last night and really liked it to the point that we want to share the plot with the world." thought process regarding water and the rights to it therein. I mean, honestly. There's evil and then there's comic book "Lock him in the hydration tubes!" levels of super villain evil. Edit: Or anything to do with Goldman Sach's. Good lord. They'd give a vampire in this setting a run for their money when it came to predatory behavior. Archonex fucked around with this message at 15:15 on Jan 24, 2018 |
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Jan 24, 2018 15:07
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Archonex posted:Or anything to do with Goldman Sach's. Good lord. They'd give a vampire in this setting a run for their money when it came to predatory behavior. See also: anything De Beers. Archonex posted:Still can't beat Nestle's "Our board of director's saw Tank Girl last night and really liked it to the point that we want to share the plot with the world." thought process regarding water and the rights to it therein. I mean, honestly. There's evil and then there's comic book "Lock him in the hydration tubes!" levels of super villain evil. Also: wut?
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Jan 24, 2018 15:41
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I love that Tellus, a canadian Telecom my friend works for, is officially Wyrm-owned.Loomer posted:Frankly, some of the corporate evil seemed too weak compared to real companies. A classic: http://www.somethingawful.com/comedy-goldmine/most-evil-companies/1/
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Jan 24, 2018 15:44
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Foglet posted:See also: anything De Beers. I was also about to mention Debeers. They've probably tried to kill/actually killed whistleblowers for leaking about their practices in obtaining diamonds, if some old articles are to be believed. The Nestle thing has to do with the CEO and higher ups in the company trying to claim that water is not a "human right" (He criticized the right to it as an extreme/radical position to take, in fact!) and that people should have to pay to have it (Bottled water is one of Nestle's products, to give some perspective.) or die suffering. This took place awhile ago and left people both confused at how stupid of a statement it was and enraged at how blatantly evil such a corporate belief is. They eventually tried to reverse course and say that it is a human right after people rightfully excoriated the company for literally ripping off the plot of a schlocky dystopian action movie but that just lead to people making jokes about how they couldn't make up their minds and ultimately continuing a number of minor boycotts of their products. This links into the Pentex thing because...Well, how the gently caress do you even top that? Archonex fucked around with this message at 16:03 on Jan 24, 2018 |
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Jan 24, 2018 15:58
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Archonex posted:Still can't beat Nestle's "Our board of director's saw Tank Girl last night and really liked it to the point that we want to share the plot with the world." thought process regarding water and the rights to it therein. I mean, honestly. There's evil and then there's comic book "Lock him in the hydration tubes!" levels of super villain evil. Oh, it's not the worst, I just think it's funny as hell.
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Jan 24, 2018 16:00
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Archonex posted:The Nestle thing has to do with the CEO and higher ups in the company trying to claim that water is not a "human right" and that people should have to pay to have it (Bottled water is one of Nestle's products, to give some perspective.) or die suffering. This took place awhile ago and left people both confused at how stupid of a statement it was and enraged at how blatantly evil such a corporate belief is. Don't forget the incredibly salient fact that this was said in the context of their California plant pumping millions of gallons of water out of a spring, bottling it and shipping it off to be sold elsewhere in the middle of a drought. Terrorforge fucked around with this message at 16:06 on Jan 24, 2018 |
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Jan 24, 2018 16:03
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Terrorforge posted:Don't forget the incredibly salient fact that this was said in the context of their California plant pumping millions of gallons of water out of a spring, bottling it and shipping it off to be sold elsewhere during a loving drought. Oh yeah. I forgot about that. TL;DR: Nestle's board of director's is basically staffed by a bunch of water vampires. If I could find a gif of that scene from Tank Girl of Malcom Mcdowell stabbing some guy with a water bottle and sucking out all of his bodily juices out in the form of water I would post it here. Because that's literally, literally, Nestle's higher ups in human form. They just haven't perfected the tech for it yet. Archonex fucked around with this message at 16:17 on Jan 24, 2018 |
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Jan 24, 2018 16:06
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I thought Wraith was supposed to be the most depressing oWoD game.
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Jan 24, 2018 16:57
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MonsieurChoc posted:I love that Tellus, a canadian Telecom my friend works for, is officially Wyrm-owned. The Canadian telecom is Telus (with one L). So it's only probably Wyrm-owned.
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Jan 24, 2018 17:19
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It's like the problem Leverage had. A lot of their plots were inspired by actual corporate and/or rear end in a top hat behavior, but some had to be toned down because nobody would believe someone would be that saturday morning villain evil.
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Jan 24, 2018 17:28
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Terrorforge posted:Don't forget the incredibly salient fact that this was said in the context of their California plant pumping millions of gallons of water out of a spring, bottling it and shipping it off to be sold elsewhere in the middle of a drought.
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Jan 24, 2018 17:43
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Prism posted:The Canadian telecom is Telus (with one L). Trust me, with everything my friend tells me, it'S definitely Wyrm-owned.
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Jan 24, 2018 17:50
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Kaza42 posted:It's like the problem Leverage had. A lot of their plots were inspired by actual corporate and/or rear end in a top hat behavior, but some had to be toned down because nobody would believe someone would be that saturday morning villain evil. Exactly. Everything mentioned already in this thread is something I've had in mind, but that would have caused backlash if it'd gone into the book as being "too over the top". Werewolf already gets dinged as "furry Captain Planet", if we'd included the Nestle-water-thing as an example of Pentex' malfeasance people would claim we were leaning into that rather than just including poo poo that happens in the real world.
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Jan 24, 2018 17:52
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Kaza42 posted:It's like the problem Leverage had. A lot of their plots were inspired by actual corporate and/or rear end in a top hat behavior, but some had to be toned down because nobody would believe someone would be that saturday morning villain evil. Yeah. IIRC, they did an episode on For-profit prisons bribing a judge to sentence people to them so they could get a kickback for meeting state capacity requirements. How was it less evil than reality? The real world case it was based on was a juvenile facility and the judge was being bribed to send children there.
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Jan 24, 2018 17:56
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Archonex posted:If I could find a gif of that scene from Tank Girl of Malcom Mcdowell stabbing some guy with a water bottle and sucking out all of his bodily juices out in the form of water I would post it here. Not a gif, but you want to start at 3:20 here. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bIfMAhK7Boo&t=200s
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Jan 24, 2018 18:08
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ulmont posted:Not a gif, but you want to start at 3:20 here. Oh god, I think he drinks from it after that too. The top comment is quote:A glimpse of Nestle's CEO in the not so distant future. 
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Jan 24, 2018 18:28
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Kavak posted:I thought Wraith was supposed to be the most depressing oWoD game. At least if it makes you angry, you're probably in the right headspace for Werewolf.
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Jan 24, 2018 22:45
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Dawgstar posted:At least if it makes you angry, you're probably in the right headspace for Werewolf. Well unless you are transgendered or want to use birth control.
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Jan 24, 2018 23:04
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MuscaDomestica posted:Well unless you are transgendered or want to use birth control. I will note one of the parts of the Pentex book that made me go 'uh, really, you really want to go here?' was the bit where they talk about Pentex-run abortion clinics that use the aborted fetuses, kept alive by dark magic, as incubators for banes, and then laugh at werewolves who kill the bane-babies. That was, um, kind of gross on an OOC level, like, 'why did you write this'.
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Jan 24, 2018 23:06
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Mors Rattus posted:That was, um, kind of gross on an OOC level, like, 'why did you write this'.  Though if the fandom's made anything clear it's that some people like what other people don't.
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Jan 24, 2018 23:34
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DigitalRaven posted:Exactly. Everything mentioned already in this thread is something I've had in mind, but that would have caused backlash if it'd gone into the book as being "too over the top". Werewolf already gets dinged as "furry Captain Planet", if we'd included the Nestle-water-thing as an example of Pentex' malfeasance people would claim we were leaning into that rather than just including poo poo that happens in the real world. I was super glad they did the Black Hand book for V20 so those who wanted to add the Vampions wackiness back into the game absolutely could if they wanted to, and kind of wish Werewolf had a similar supplement.
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Jan 25, 2018 16:22
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Warthur posted:To be honest, for my money I can only really enjoy Werewolf by leaning real hard into the "furry Captain Planet" angle, mostly because I tend to find ChroD a better platform for serious takes on serious issues and I like the classic World of Darkness for its grand guignol excesses. The black hand had serious meddling from WWP to tone down some of the "Sillyness" and even remove some poo poo that was true in the old black hand books because it no longer fit the tone that WWP wants to set for the game. Specifically, vampires no longer have souls unless they have undergone Golconda. Which means any vampire Wraiths have obviously achieved Golconda. Even the Sabbat ones who abandoned Humanity millennia ago and have humanity 2. I imagine any wacky fun werewolf book would be editorialized to hell and back to make it appropriately grimdark and rapey since Werewolves are all about popping out babies now.
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Jan 25, 2018 16:39
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Kurieg posted:Specifically, vampires no longer have souls unless they have undergone Golconda. Which means any vampire Wraiths have obviously achieved Golconda. That still feels like a bizarrely arbitrary decision on nuWW's part. Are they trying to make Golconda a win condition?
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Jan 25, 2018 17:10
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Warthur posted:To be honest, for my money I can only really enjoy Werewolf by leaning real hard into the "furry Captain Planet" angle, mostly because I tend to find ChroD a better platform for serious takes on serious issues and I like the classic World of Darkness for its grand guignol excesses. I can promise that the Pentex book is still pretty full-on wacky, it's just written in corporate-speak and super hyped about what it's doing. E: Except, you know, for the abortion bane fetuses. And some stuff about werewolves and anti-vaxxers that I found blackly hilarious but which some of my friends felt was too much. E2: Short form, there's a note about a Pentex-made vaccine that is like 'this antivaxxer group claims this causes autism. it doesn't. it does cause depression, schizoid disorders and possession by banes, but not autism. good work, werewolves, great job picking your allies.' Mors Rattus fucked around with this message at 17:14 on Jan 25, 2018 |
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Jan 25, 2018 17:12
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DigitalRaven posted:Exactly. Everything mentioned already in this thread is something I've had in mind, but that would have caused backlash if it'd gone into the book as being "too over the top". Werewolf already gets dinged as "furry Captain Planet", if we'd included the Nestle-water-thing as an example of Pentex' malfeasance people would claim we were leaning into that rather than just including poo poo that happens in the real world. I don't like werewolf or owod but I will buy the book if you do this.
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Jan 25, 2018 17:38
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Mors Rattus posted:I will note one of the parts of the Pentex book that made me go 'uh, really, you really want to go here?' was the bit where they talk about Pentex-run abortion clinics that use the aborted fetuses, kept alive by dark magic, as incubators for banes, and then laugh at werewolves who kill the bane-babies. BvD: The Next Generation.
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Jan 25, 2018 18:33
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Kurieg posted:The black hand had serious meddling from WWP to tone down some of the "Sillyness" and even remove some poo poo that was true in the old black hand books because it no longer fit the tone that WWP wants to set for the game. To be perfectly fair, the V20 Black Hand book still survived in a form that largely catered well both to the desire for bizarre high-level exaggerated craziness and to the preference to not get all-out stupid with it. I didn't find it particularly grimdark. That's not to say that White Wolf Publishing AB's interjections are generally good, just that when they're doing it to an Onyx Path book, sometimes they have significant impact, sometimes less so. (V20 Black Hand did have some super bad Path of Enlightenment writeups, but well, that's Paths of Enlightenment for you.)
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Jan 25, 2018 22:38
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The issue is that their injections to the latest Werewolf book were very very bad. Tone warpingly so.
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Jan 25, 2018 22:55
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Okay, so is White Wolf doing justice to the old World of Darkness? Because I see people complaining about things like this, that they add in things that are over the top, but that seemed to be a big aspect of old World of Darkness to begin with. And there's posters that clearly approve of these things. Is it a matter of people remembering the game differently? Or some wanting White Wolf to have 'modernized'?
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Jan 26, 2018 02:23
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nofather posted:Okay, so is White Wolf doing justice to the old World of Darkness? Its a game being created in the modern day and they will charge you modern dollars to purchase. And its not 'back to', its explicitly worse for really badly explained reasons save for adhering to Altright  .
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Jan 26, 2018 02:30
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nofather posted:Okay, so is White Wolf doing justice to the old World of Darkness? It's not that they're adding poo poo in that's over the top. It's that they're adding poo poo in that is gross and bad, in TYOOL 2018, with the same out-of-character grace and subtlety as the worst parts of the 90s.
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Jan 26, 2018 02:32
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nofather posted:Okay, so is White Wolf doing justice to the old World of Darkness?
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Jan 26, 2018 02:36
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It's also important to remember that Original Coke White Wolf can and did make weird sexist or racist stuff all the time; but I really think some of those were accidental transgressions that got walked back in subsequent editions as the writers became more socially aware. It's not up to me to forgive those kinds of transgressions, such as Gypsies or Kindred of the East; but I do think that those same writers knew after the fact that they had made some mistakes. Enshrining, doubling-down and enhancing on those transgressions is the problem.
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Jan 26, 2018 02:43
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nofather posted:Okay, so is White Wolf doing justice to the old World of Darkness? So, here's the thing. All crazy over-the-top weirdness in oWoD is not created equal. Some times you have the fun Black Hand weirdness with stuff like the True Brujah returning with their time powers. Some times you have incredibly skeevy weirdness like Clan Giovanni being a bunch of necrophiliacs that makes you want to put the book down and never mention this in a game ever. Having that latter kind of thing is technically part of what oWoD did and I guess you could interpret the modern stuff having that kind of thing as them honoring that part of oWoD if you squint really hard. The problem is that if something thinks that those sleazy parts of oWoD need to be honored you're going to want to never interact with them because how many people that think that kind of edgelord poo poo is a fun thing to include in your game do you really want to talk to in 2018? Lurks With Wolves fucked around with this message at 02:51 on Jan 26, 2018 |
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Jan 26, 2018 02:48
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nofather posted:Okay, so is White Wolf doing justice to the old World of Darkness? Proudly hired a sponsor of harassment campaigns, of all their fiction republishment options chose the one that had been edited by a child predator, injected the Werewolf passage Kurieg alluded to which arbitrarily makes both the werewolf culture and the Werewolf universe aggressively transgender-hostile, creative lead contributed a short story with the turn of phrase "full rear end-rape stiffness" and has commented on how his vision for the World of Darkness should directly tackle and incorporate the September 11th attacks and would be a good fit for revisiting World of Darkness: Gypsies. The old World of Darkness was many things, some crazy and some just dumb, some outlandish and some just gratuitous. White Wolf Publishing AB has been kind of aiming for the edgelordiest, most culturally oblivious parts.
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Jan 26, 2018 02:50
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Another point is, as lovely as it sounds, back in the 90s White Wolf was progressive for including transgender characters, even if they were depicted as monstrous and other skeezy poo poo. The fact that they existed at all was more than most people were willing to admit. But it's been 20 loving years. Times and people change, culture changes. And pretending that they didn't is actively harmful.
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Jan 26, 2018 03:08
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