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Terrorforge posted:When a mage does that, they're projecting their mind (not their soul) on the same "wavelength" of Twilight that Goetia exist on. It seems reasonable to assume the same would be true of a mortal pulling that trick, though as always it's up to you. I get it, but I'll probably ignore the part about being soulless, since I'm pretty sure that regaining a soul is beyond the capabilities of a mortal party. At least within the timespan of two weeks, or however long it takes to become a mindless thrall. Although, it might be able to be waived lorewise if the body they jump into already has a soul. Hmmm It's probably not worth thinking about further, since this is getting into the "contingency of a contingency" level of planning. The original idea was just something I thought about because one of the players is doing astral projection and dream travel as a major part of their character, so I thought it'd be fun to see what I can do to gently caress them over if they do something stupid (like leave an undefended body where enemies can find it).
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Mar 2, 2018 18:14
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Terrorforge posted:... wait, isn't that basically what the Strix are? Pseudo-ephemeral entities who possess corpses and sick the life force out of people? This is wild speculation since I haven't read up on the little beasties, but a vampire does kind of look like what might happen if a Strix fused with the remains of its victim, soul and all.
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Mar 2, 2018 18:19
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I can't stop myself from thinking about it even though I should, and just decided that if they run out of willpower after their body is destroyed, instead of just vanishing they should absolutely become a ghost. That just makes sense.
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Mar 2, 2018 18:26
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Zereth posted:I remember seeing some theorizing with some evidence to back it up that Strix might be the origin of vampires, yeah. Vampires don't have a single origin - each clan appears to have arisen independently. At least one clan is confirmed as originating with the Strix (Julii), and several others are heavily implied (Ventrue, Daeva, possibly Gangrel). The Mekhet and Nosferatu explicitly don't - their origin stories make no reference to shadows or owls, but rather to ancient, cthonian creatures of strange and inhuman nature (for Mekhet, the cave beast, and for the Nosferatu, the Worms). To my mind, that suggests...well, the Cthonians, the natural inhabitants of the Underworld.
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Mar 2, 2018 18:31
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Terrorforge posted:... wait, isn't that basically what the Strix are? Pseudo-ephemeral entities who possess corpses and sick the life force out of people? This is wild speculation since I haven't read up on the little beasties, but a vampire does kind of look like what might happen if a Strix fused with the remains of its victim, soul and all. VtR dances around giving any concrete answer to this question (as you might expect) but I thought the prevailing theory was the other way around -- vampires (or at least the beast) are basically baby Strix who haven't "overcome" their humanity yet. Also, notably, the origin of vampires and the beginning of the connection between vampires and Strix aren't necessarily the same event.
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Mar 2, 2018 19:11
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Terrorforge posted:... wait, isn't that basically what the Strix are? Pseudo-ephemeral entities who possess corpses and sick the life force out of people? This is wild speculation since I haven't read up on the little beasties, but a vampire does kind of look like what might happen if a Strix fused with the remains of its victim, soul and all.
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Mar 2, 2018 19:36
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The plural of 'strix' is 'striges'. It's a Greek thing.
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Mar 2, 2018 19:47
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Xinder posted:Although, it might be able to be waived lorewise if the body they jump into already has a soul. Hmmm That was more my line of thought. At that point it's kind of academic whether they were suffering degradation due to soul loss or body loss, but depending on the philosophical leanings of the character in question it could be a fun bombshell to drop. "No, Clarice, you didn't just kill him and take his body. It's so much worse than that. That rot you felt, that dissolution of the self? That's not what it feels like to lose your body. That's what it feels like to lose your soul. And in your selfish desperation you just reached out and took one that wasn't yours." Mors Rattus posted:Vampires don't have a single origin - each clan appears to have arisen independently. How reliable are those accounts? A lot of the history the supernaturals claim for themselves falls somewhere between the understandable miscommunications of a thousand-year game of telephone and outright fabrication. Also for what it's worth it's semi-canonical (as in not explicitly in the books but Dave confirmed it was the intentional implication) that the Strix are entities from the Lower Depths, which could arguable qualify them (or related entities) as ancient and cthonian. Though frankly I don't really want to make that argument because I kind of like the disparate origins. Though that raises the also interesting question of why all these different strains of mostly unrelated blood curses manifest as what is inarguably the same type of undead being with subtle variations. Tuxedo Catfish posted:VtR dances around giving any concrete answer to this question (as you might expect) but I thought the prevailing theory was the other way around -- vampires (or at least the beast) are basically baby Strix who haven't "overcome" their humanity yet. Well that theory is probably more well-justified than my off-the-cuff outburst of "wait this sounds familiar". I would expect it to be something along one those lines though, because there is definitely an air of "Wow these guys are really simialr to vampires in some ways, huh? Really makes you think" over the whole affair. I suppose they could also be some sort of "cousins", products of the same Lower Depth blood magic various cthonian middle managers apparently keep doling out to random mortals they really don't (or really do) like. But that kinda undermines the whole "even darker reflection" vibe they have going. Terrorforge fucked around with this message at 20:45 on Mar 2, 2018 |
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Mar 2, 2018 20:19
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The Nosferatu clanbook mentions them potentially coming down from a great worm deep in the Earth. Not coincidentally, Werewolf's Predators book has Zmai, the Worm.  As you can see, there's people clinging to it. It's because the entity has addictive ichor, able to secrete a mutative, addictive narcotic. It lives underground due to its sunlight allergy, and it's explicitly called out as a potential origin for vampires (though warns Vampire players may find this anticlimactic).
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Mar 2, 2018 20:33
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Yawgmoth posted:Strix (strices?) also hate hate haaaaaaaaaaate vampires for reasons that (as far as anyone can really nail down) boil down to "dammit you are all doing it wrong! just loving eat people as food and terrorize them as entertainment, don't care about them or play their stupid society game!" Which gives a lot more questions than it even attempts to answer.
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Mar 2, 2018 20:41
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Terrorforge posted:How reliable are those accounts? A lot of the history the supernaturals claim for themselves falls somewhere between the understandable miscommunications of a thousand-year game of telephone. Also for what it's worth it's semi-canonical (as in not explicitly in the books but Dave confirmed it was the intentional implication) that the Strix are entities from the Lower Depths, which could arguable qualify them (or related entities) as ancient and cthonian. The Mekhet account is reliable - it's told in first person, in the form a vision experienced by Frances Black as she uses the Glass Armonium, which allows her to experience the lives of Mekhet along her bloodline in the past. The furthest back she goes is a tentacled monstrosity in a cave. The rest are all rather garbled. The Gangrel one references darkness and hunger and beasts in the dark, the Daeva one refers to owls and a goddess, the Ventrue one is almost complete bullshit but talks about shadows and gods. The Julii one directly says 'the striges did it for Romulus'. The Nosferatu one is about the Brothers Worm and their journey underground, where they come upon some giant, monstrous worms that take them as adopted children and change them.
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Mar 2, 2018 20:42
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Until the Strix stuff came up I always wondered if vamps were an Abyssal Intruder writ large, the Mekhet origin in particular seems ripe for that kind of origin.
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Mar 2, 2018 21:09
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Mors Rattus posted:The Julii one directly says 'the striges did it for Romulus'.
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Mar 2, 2018 21:25
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My favorite theory on why a bunch of different origins produce approximately the same monsters is pretty Mage-influenced, but works with God-Machine or other metaphysics, as long as there's a coherent rule to the world: vampires are an evolutionary niche, an archetype. If you create a parasitic humanoid, the Kindred Vampire is simply the most effective expression of that thing. Perhaps there's a Supernal symbol of the ur-Vampire, or a god fallen from heaven whose shadow in the phenomenal is vampirism. Perhaps the natural result of loving up death or life in a lower depths fashion is to produce a blood-drinking, sun-fearing creature whose soul is dissolving in shadows and blood, no matter what does the up-fuxking. Vampirism is an emergent property of the universe. My best example of this is Blood Bathers from the Immortals blue book; they are so clearly a proto-Vampire clan, and it seems inevitable that they could stumble upon a ritual that makes them true vampires, with Disciplines and Humanity. That's my broad sense of Vampire origins, and I think it allows for individual origins to matter hugely to a clan, but not necessarily require an overarching divine malefactor or single origin.
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Mar 2, 2018 21:40
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Now I'm imagining the God-Machine discovering yet another goddamn sect of blood-drinking undead demonspawn, heaving the machine-god equivalent of a weary sigh and booting up file_under_vampire.exe
Terrorforge fucked around with this message at 22:02 on Mar 2, 2018 |
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Mar 2, 2018 21:57
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On the other hand, I like the idea of the term Vampire being more of an arbitrary and semi-political idea where obviously all of us are capital V vampire because of x (except for these exceptions to X), Y (except that some of us don't have to deal with Y) and Z ( Z may or may not apply).
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Mar 2, 2018 22:07
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Mythologies had already origin myths for vampires. The one I liked is that the first vampire of a clan comes from someone who is afraid of dying so much that they manage to stick around. Each clan is based off a different fear.
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Mar 2, 2018 22:11
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Can Dracula beat up the God-Machine in order to recognize his desires, or that of his homie Death?
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Mar 2, 2018 22:17
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AnEdgelord posted:Until the Strix stuff came up I always wondered if vamps were an Abyssal Intruder writ large, the Mekhet origin in particular seems ripe for that kind of origin. Vampires probably aren't, but there are a couple of faint hints scattered around 1E books that suggest the True Fae might be, and if anything the clarification in 2E that Arcadia and Arcadia aren't the same thing makes that possibility even more attractive.
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Mar 2, 2018 22:27
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Joe Slowboat posted:My favorite theory on why a bunch of different origins produce approximately the same monsters is pretty Mage-influenced, but works with God-Machine or other metaphysics, as long as there's a coherent rule to the world: vampires are an evolutionary niche, an archetype. If you create a parasitic humanoid, the Kindred Vampire is simply the most effective expression of that thing. Perhaps there's a Supernal symbol of the ur-Vampire, or a god fallen from heaven whose shadow in the phenomenal is vampirism. Perhaps the natural result of loving up death or life in a lower depths fashion is to produce a blood-drinking, sun-fearing creature whose soul is dissolving in shadows and blood, no matter what does the up-fuxking. It's not explicitly so, but the idea of vampirism as sort of an emergent wound related to loving up the interplay of life and death is one that has been implied. It's an explanation as to why all the clans end up developing in similar ways and developing similar powers, like how the Jiang Shi are starting to look a bit kindredy (from what I remember).
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Mar 2, 2018 22:51
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Terrorforge posted:Now I'm imagining the God-Machine discovering yet another goddamn sect of blood-drinking undead demonspawn, heaving the machine-god equivalent of a weary sigh and booting up file_under_vampire.exe I had this sort of idea in a game/setting I was working on myself. The idea being that Magic is Lazy, and when casting any spell it prefers to run over well trod paths. So if someone casts a spell to make themselves immortal it will run through "immortal beings" until it finds a best fit that requires the least amount of energy. Actually forcing enough magic into a spell to make something new is rightly seen as fairly terrifying by those in the know.
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Mar 2, 2018 23:03
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Nessus posted:Can Dracula beat up the God-Machine in order to recognize his desires, or that of his homie Death? Yes, but only by having a Mage build a Castle using the power of the Abyss.
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Mar 2, 2018 23:14
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while it'd be a poor game to run, having castlevania as an in-setting thing that exists is sorely tempting
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Mar 2, 2018 23:23
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Xinder posted:while it'd be a poor game to run, having castlevania as an in-setting thing that exists is sorely tempting
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Mar 2, 2018 23:25
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Nessus posted:You'd need to really come at it the long way around the barn and have tidbits and assorted details that veil the truth until - well; until when? The ideal is that they reach the center of the place armed in their splat appropriate gear and are challenged to answer: What is a man? You STEAL mens SOULS and make them your SLAVES. The same could be said of all Mage Paradigms. But enough talk, have at you!
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Mar 2, 2018 23:37
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"What is a man?" And then all the Prometheans just stop, dead.
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Mar 2, 2018 23:48
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Night10194 posted:"What is a man?" And then all the Prometheans just stop, dead. "That's what we're trying to find out! That's what we've been working on this whole time!"
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Mar 2, 2018 23:51
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"WHAT IS A MAN!" Asked Dracula. "A Tasty snacktime treat!" answered the beast. "Actually I really like this castle, the asthetic is nice but I can think of some places that need improving. What's your opinion on darkness and lava?"
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Mar 3, 2018 00:05
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Joe Slowboat posted:My favorite theory on why a bunch of different origins produce approximately the same monsters is pretty Mage-influenced, but works with God-Machine or other metaphysics, as long as there's a coherent rule to the world: vampires are an evolutionary niche, an archetype. If you create a parasitic humanoid, the Kindred Vampire is simply the most effective expression of that thing. Perhaps there's a Supernal symbol of the ur-Vampire, or a god fallen from heaven whose shadow in the phenomenal is vampirism. Perhaps the natural result of loving up death or life in a lower depths fashion is to produce a blood-drinking, sun-fearing creature whose soul is dissolving in shadows and blood, no matter what does the up-fuxking. Pretty sure is is what a bunch of VtR stuff was sort of leaning towards even without Mage - the 'vampire state' is just a kind of convergent evolution. In the same way that a lot of aliens in scifi (Star Trek, Star Wars, etc) end up looking humanoid because that's apparently the most efficient shape for a technologically advanced society, anything that has limbs and eats blood (or fat, or body bits) looks sufficiently vampire-like to be considered a vampire and have its powers seem like Disciplines.
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Mar 3, 2018 00:18
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nofather posted:The Nosferatu clanbook mentions them potentially coming down from a great worm deep in the Earth. World Of Darkness Megathred: All Vampires are of the Worm
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Mar 3, 2018 01:04
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Night10194 posted:"What is a man?" And then all the Prometheans just stop, dead. "can you NOT"
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Mar 3, 2018 01:17
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Xinder posted:"That's what we're trying to find out! That's what we've been working on this whole time!" "Sorry, my pen broke, gimme a sec... you said a miserable little pile of secrets? Is the misery optional?"
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Mar 3, 2018 04:28
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Poltergrift posted:"Sorry, my pen broke, gimme a sec... you said a miserable little pile of secrets? Is the misery optional?"
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Mar 3, 2018 04:33
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bewilderment posted:Pretty sure is is what a bunch of VtR stuff was sort of leaning towards even without Mage - the 'vampire state' is just a kind of convergent evolution. In the same way that a lot of aliens in scifi (Star Trek, Star Wars, etc) end up looking humanoid because that's apparently the most efficient shape for a technologically advanced society, anything that has limbs and eats blood (or fat, or body bits) looks sufficiently vampire-like to be considered a vampire and have its powers seem like Disciplines.  Actually, the Star Trek species all look like that because the first sapient species to emerge found the universe empty, and decided to seed it with life that would eventually develop to look like them.This is pretty much the only thing I know about Star Trek, but it's a fun thing to know about Star Trek
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Mar 3, 2018 08:02
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cptn_dr posted:World Of Darkness Megathred: All Vampires are of the Worm World of Darkness Megathread: Goth without rhythm and you won’t attract the worm
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Mar 3, 2018 09:24
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Terrorforge posted:
I figure that the seeder species had at least one guy who looked a lot like Jeffrey Combs in heavy makeup and that's why he keeps repeating throughout the galaxy as different aliens.
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Mar 3, 2018 09:56
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unseenlibrarian posted:I figure that the seeder species had at least one guy who looked a lot like Jeffrey Combs in heavy makeup and that's why he keeps repeating throughout the galaxy as different aliens. It did have someone who looked like the female founder which made things really confusing during the later seasons of DS9.
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Mar 3, 2018 16:13
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Kurieg posted:It did have someone who looked like the female founder which made things really confusing during the later seasons of DS9. Same actress, IIRC. Also, my players seem to really enjoy the Grant Morrison-esque game of Wizard Detectives I've been running for them. Lots of symbolism, and one of them has a deposed Supernal deity of Death-in-Battle as a pet/ally/stalker who keeps following them around and giving him meaningful looks from time to time, when it thinks he can't see it. I also added a twist to Supernal entities, both to make them something that can more easily understood and interacted with by the players, and to give them a rough way to eyeball how powerful they are. Each Supernal being is composed of one or more Supernal symbols, that manifest to most Mage Sights as glyphs of High Speech - except the Mage Sights corresponding to the Arcana symbol that forms the basis of their being. For example, aforementioned Death-in-Battle has the Base rune of Death, with the symbols that correspond to 'Combat' and 'Contest' forming the rest of the being. But only someone with the Death Arcana can actually see/hear/interact with them as a discrete being, while to the party's Obrimos and Mastigos, it just looks like the glyphs, floating roughly around where the entity itself is. Furthermore, the fewer symbols that comprise it, the more 'pure' a truth the being is - and the more powerful the being is. So Death-in-Battle is more powerful than, say, Death-by-Shrapnel-and-Explosions, but less powerful than just Death.
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Mar 3, 2018 16:37
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Mors Rattus posted:Vampires don't have a single origin - each clan appears to have arisen independently. As a neat little  heavy side note: The Julii may actually have come from something in the Underworld. I can't remember where it is, but there's an origin story where a relative of one of the emperor's of the Roman empire was pissed that he was basically passed over. Cue him either stumbling into or tearing open a gate to head down below and make a deal with something down there. One which ultimately came to bite his entire species in the rear end centuries down the line while he was canonically in torpor.Meanwhile there's a lot of hints in the various clan books that came out in 1e that the Ventrue may actually just be a Gangrel bloodline that teamed up with the ancient era equivalent of Belial's Brood and the Lancea et Sanctum (Which also wanted to destroy the Camarilla for religious and power related reasons. Something that is also supported by the fact that the Sanctum has ancient rites that let them dedicate their souls to Belial of all things.) when the Strix got genocidally pissed off at them for acting like the lords of men and not insane monsters. At which point it's suggested that they had the Brood perform some sort of arcane rite or trickery to get the Strix to murk the Julii instead of the Ventrue. Which brought down the Camarilla and let the Ventrue step into their place and claim that they're the descendants of them. Notably, this is kind of supported by other 1e books too. All of the Senex characters are listed in their book as Julii, despite some modern day Ventrue claiming that they are of the same bloodline. Even the ones that are unique Julii bloodlines as an extension of the Julii clan. Even more interestingly, some Julii bloodline characters like Macellarius and Eupraxus are explicitly Julii and not Ventrue. This is despite the modern day bloodline members being Ventrue. It wouldn't be the first time the Ventrue pulled a trick like that too. A big plot point on why at least one former kindred nation in India (I believe. Either that or Tibet? I'd have to check.) is such a vindictive wreck (and incredibly antagonistic towards western kindred to the point that they want to basically execute the undead equivalent of a crusade against them) is that the Invictus and Lancea mucked in after the Camarilla died and sabotaged everything over the course of centuries (Again, like they may have done to the Camarilla.) to try and take control. All while the Ventrue joined them and mass diablizered their entire religious caste to take on the bloodline traits for themselves in an attempt to claim that they were the rightful religious rulers of the vampires there. Except that they may not get away with it (Again, history repeating there.) due to the possibility of a curse put on them by the last of the Mekhet they ate. Regardless of what you're supposed to take as true there's an old rpgnet thread where someone tried to puzzle out the metaplot of the clan books and it became apparent that the ventrue have a lot of bullshit in their past that they're trying to cover up. Of course then the writers started chiming in and started contradicting each other on what was what. One said that the Ventrue clan book was telling the truth while another said that they had wrote prior content with the assumption that it was all bullshit, etc, etc. It seemed like all this got retconned with the shift to 2e until they revisited this plot thread in a recent 2e book. That Secrets of the Covenants book has a section where some feckless Ventrue starts poking around Rome to figure out his clan's true origins. He ends up discovering that Mithras (IE: Which is commonly also known as Sol Invictus. Or as people familiar with the really old OWoD might know him as: The Unconquered Sun. A neat little Exalted reference there. And not the first one either. Not really relevant though.) worshipers may have unintentionally had a part in destroying the Camarilla. That, and that what may have been the early era Invictus and a bunch of "demon worshipers" helped bring it down. Which is pretty familiar to anyone that nerded out over the clan books back when they came out. Then he tries to take a selfie with a Strix possessed vampire that's been stalking him and things go...Well, uh, as expected, really. A excerpt from that segment, which also goes on to detail how the Invictus cleans up that particular "leak" in the truth of their history posted:The cave held some of the same motifs as the mithraeum, but it seemed dedicated to a female deity. Isis perhaps. Or maybe Lilith. I saw owls carved on the walls, so I think maybe Lilith. The stones were still singing to me like a chorus falling over itself to tell me what it had witnessed. The song filled me with understanding and I knew then. I knew what the Praetoriani did. How they betrayed the Camarilla, a covenant to which they had sworn allegiance. TL;DR: There's a neat little metaplot going on that's entirely optional and pretty well hidden. And there's an optional origin for the Ventrue that you can roll with that you'll only notice if you've been paying close attention to all the little details and discrepancies in the in character claims in the various books. Edit: Also, here's the old thread on RPGnet I mentioned. It's a really neat read and has multiple people attempting to decipher just what the gently caress was going on in the background of the clan books. I'd have made this post shorter, but...Well, just take a look at that thread and you'll see why it's so long. It's a bit of a mind gently caress and does a great job at clearing up the various little plot lines in them. https://forum.rpg.net/archive/index.php/t-464972.html An excerpt from that thread that's even more TL;DR than what I posted:The Strix: The Strix are the owl-witches of the ancient world: they possess people and vampires, eat their souls, and perform acts of unspeakable horror. They may have created the first Daeva. They may share a common origin with the Gangrel, avian where they are bestial. They have had a grudge against the Ventrue for about three thousand years. In Ancient Rome, they should have destroyed the Ventrue; but somehow, through manipulation of the ‘seven Perfecti’, the Ventrue were able to channel them towards the Dead Julii instead. The Julii were exterminated; but now the Strix are coming back, and they don’t intend to make the same mistake twice. The Dead Girl believed that she could protect herself from them through mass ritual murder of women and girls, but she may just be crazy. Archonex fucked around with this message at 06:05 on Mar 4, 2018 |
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Mar 4, 2018 03:56
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Uhhhhhhh. I never really got into Vampire but brb gonna go kidnap people to play VtR. gently caress that sounds dope.
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