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Archonex posted:No need for that. There's at least one canonical line. The Mara are the first one, which are basically ocean dwelling pagan vampires that are incredibly alien compared to most kindred due to their bloodline traits (They can only feed if they're submerged in water.) meaning that they basically never come onto land except to hunt. Outside of the Circle even other Kindred are freaked out by them as a result. You can find them in the Circle of the Crone book. You're probably thinking of the Rötgrafen, a Ventrue Bloodline. Though they're more ship-dwellers than truly aquatic like the Mara or the oWoD Mariners.
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Mar 4, 2018 21:14
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Terrorforge posted:You're probably thinking of the Rötgrafen, a Ventrue Bloodline. Though they're more ship-dwellers than truly aquatic like the Mara or the oWoD Mariners. Yeah, that's them. The Mara are straight up ocean vampires though. Their entire thing as far as recruiting and survival goes is that they're basically gangrel and innocent humans that decided to go swimming in ocean and never made it back.
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Mar 4, 2018 21:16
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Harold Holt, Vampire Prime Minister.
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Mar 4, 2018 21:36
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cptn_dr posted:Harold Holt, Vampire Prime Minister. One of the semi-funnier SCP articles has him as a selkie that managed to escape again.
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Mar 4, 2018 23:10
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Anyone seen Messiah of Evil? That kind of feels like the iconic "elder vampire who hangs out in the ocean until it's time to rise" movie.
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Mar 5, 2018 01:12
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Is there a book or any official material with updated Bloodlines for Requiem 2E? Most of the ones that just add another existing discipline and bane are straightforward enough, but most of the unique disciplines are kind of weak when compared to the new standard.
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Mar 5, 2018 01:14
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Terrorforge posted:You're probably thinking of the Rötgrafen, a Ventrue Bloodline. Though they're more ship-dwellers than truly aquatic like the Mara or the oWoD Mariners. The oWoD Lasombra had a minority who liked to do that, play pirate captain. They were never any kind of official bloodline as I recall.
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Mar 5, 2018 02:41
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ZearothK posted:Is there a book or any official material with updated Bloodlines for Requiem 2E? Most of the ones that just add another existing discipline and bane are straightforward enough, but most of the unique disciplines are kind of weak when compared to the new standard. They said they wanted to step away from having unique discipline powers for every bloodline, or at least have it done a different way. We've had three 'official' ones posted on the website. The Neglatu, who are a revenant bloodline http://theonyxpath.com/lonely-together/ The Khaibit, one of the more popular 1e ones, Egyptian shadow-sorcerer-hunters http://theonyxpath.com/the-shadow-and-the-asp/ And the Kerberos, who focus on Lashing Out and Beast stuff http://theonyxpath.com/the-jaws-of-the-beast/ Although none technically have discipline spreads, the Khaibit show how a new bloodline can allow for devotions, with the other having their Bloodline power as a Merit or unlocked power. There's also the Morbus in one of the Dark Eras but people didn't seem pleased with how it was done.
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Mar 5, 2018 03:40
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Tollymain posted:what does the extreme deep end of the weirdness/power scale look like for vampires, known or theoretical Ugh Silent Knife was an awful book. They're depicted in things like Night Horrors, with vampires who just passively feed off of entire domains simply by ruling there, or become giant worms. There's 'people' like Zagreus who seem like a thing that fell out of a Scion book.  They're big, scary forces of nature that don't really participate in domain level stuff except when they're passing through. A few pop up in the clanbooks, one lives in a volcano, has mouths in his hands, and eats people the villagers throw into the volcano to him. Sorry the internet isn't fishing up any smaller pictures of that and apparently Doctor Who made something called Zagreus that isn't making the search easier. nofather fucked around with this message at 03:54 on Mar 5, 2018 |
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Mar 5, 2018 03:49
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That's BP 9? I've never played in a game that had BP go above 4 but geez, I kinda assumed poo poo like that would be the extreme top end, as in 10. But I guess once you get above 7 it's all more or less the same thing. e: Hold on, that only costs 3 vitae? His pool is 50. He could wax poetic about things he wants to happen all night long and still not run out of vitae. Xinder fucked around with this message at 04:19 on Mar 5, 2018 |
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Mar 5, 2018 04:13
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sleepy.eyes posted:Wouldn't work, the Moon rotates, but we just never get to see it because we do too. Still sounds awesome. Now the Polar Craters, on the other hand, only get very, very infrequent sun...
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Mar 5, 2018 04:33
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Xinder posted:That's BP 9? I always like to measure Vampire powers in the cost of human life--because, of course, it's right in the name. In this context, each use of the Devotion means one person in need of urgent medical care, at least how my group runs it. Some of the big-dick physical devotions in the 1e elders book require the effective sacrifice of one human being per round. Mister Olympus fucked around with this message at 05:05 on Mar 5, 2018 |
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Mar 5, 2018 05:03
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Was XII or XIII or whatever it was an oWoD or a nWoD thing? I remember them having a splat but still not being all that fleshed out.
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Mar 5, 2018 06:39
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Basic Chunnel posted:Was XII or XIII or whatever it was an oWoD or a nWoD thing? I remember them having a splat but still not being all that fleshed out. VII is nWoD. It got a book with a few different versions and some advice on making your own, and then Requiem for Rome set up a possible new origin. Man, I loved the "toolbox" approach of 1E nWoD. So great as a ST.
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Mar 5, 2018 06:47
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I'm torn on VtR because on one hand I love this ancient conspiracy poo poo mixed in with cool vampire tropes but on the other the language of the books and the description of peoples game sessions lead me to believe that the actual moment to gameplay is more like a Goth Soap Opera than the pulpy urban fantasy stuff that I like. Its a similar problem I have with Mummy where its a lovecraftian horror show where you are lashed to the ineffable will of a Reality-Eating horror of the Lower Depths but rather than engaging with that you mostly just play a tabletop version of Dungeon Keeper crossed with a Tycoon game where you manage your cult.
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Mar 5, 2018 06:52
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My impression is that VtR, like Mage (and to a lesser extent Werewolf), has a flexibility of tone. I haven't played much Vampire compared to running Mage or playing Werewolf, though. Vampire is clearly built around personal drama and the ravages of addiction... but it also has plenty of space for taking your undead addicts on adventures. I'm pretty sure the difference between conspiracy pulp vampire and 'monster I am lest monster I become' vampire is one of player and ST style.
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Mar 5, 2018 07:13
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AnEdgelord posted:I'm torn on VtR because on one hand I love this ancient conspiracy poo poo mixed in with cool vampire tropes but on the other the language of the books and the description of peoples game sessions lead me to believe that the actual moment to gameplay is more like a Goth Soap Opera than the pulpy urban fantasy stuff that I like. Its a similar problem I have with Mummy where its a lovecraftian horror show where you are lashed to the ineffable will of a Reality-Eating horror of the Lower Depths but rather than engaging with that you mostly just play a tabletop version of Dungeon Keeper crossed with a Tycoon game where you manage your cult. My own attempts at running Requiem ended up looking a lot like Snatch with fangs.
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Mar 5, 2018 07:56
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The ancient conspiracy poo poo gets muddled a lot by the effect of torpor on vampire memory, so even somebody who was actively involved in the poo poo going down thousands of years ago is not a reliable source on what happened.
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Mar 5, 2018 08:25
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MonsieurChoc posted:My own attempts at running Requiem ended up looking a lot like Snatch with fangs. Yeah, seconding this. Not so much that it always has to be Snatch with fangs, but rather that the tone and preferences of your group going in have far more impact on the tone of the game in play than the voice of the writing. (I also think the voice of the writing in my more preferred Requiem supplements already skews a little further away from gothic melodrama, the clanbooks in particular.) Requiem is confident enough in itself to have things like the Daeva clanbook, where pretentious socialite articles are chopped up with sarcastic indie vampire comix, and the highest level liar and player of the game in the book participates in the form of an over the top Underworld style screenplay. Those aren't there to break up the tone, but part of the tone as well. You need sincere perspective to chase the tragedy down, and part of human perspective is the ability to laugh about it.
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Mar 5, 2018 09:54
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Mister Olympus posted:I always like to measure Vampire powers in the cost of human life--because, of course, it's right in the name. In this context, each use of the Devotion means one person in need of urgent medical care, at least how my group runs it. If you really want to gently caress with your players and they're the type to actually get into their games or play high morality characters then point out to them that the amount of blood needed to sustain most vampires for a week is roughly equivalent to one human fatality in terms of blood loss. And that's without using their abilities. For optimal "Oh god what the gently caress." reactions do this after they've done the whole blood-addicted-goth-super-hero thing all over the city for a few sessions. That way they can get why vampires in the setting create so many bullshit self-justifications and lies about what they do to survive. Also why only low morality elder vampires tend to even have the abilities like what you posted. Nothing makes them realize "Oh gently caress, i've been having my character act like a careless monster." like realizing they blew through three humans worth of blood in less than week and a half when they could have taken a slightly harder or longer route to get whatever tasks they had done. Then start introducing them to characters that have had a few decades or centuries to come up with explanations or self-justifications on why acting careless like that is okay. Or the former high morality characters that came to the same realization and wouldn't or just couldn't find a way out of the situation they walked themselves into, rapidly degenerating into a feral monster. I've found that really helps nail just why the vampires in the setting consider it a curse to someone who doesn't get the game. Vampire really is a game of ravaging addictions and tragedy. But it's also a game that looks at Mage and says "Okay, how can we shove the results of how much of a gently caress up you are even more in front of your stupid rear end?". The blood loss stuff is just this side of subtle so that it's easy for players to forget that they're basically attempted murderers by proxy and not just chugging Archonex fucked around with this message at 12:50 on Mar 5, 2018 |
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Mar 5, 2018 11:31
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A helpful reminder that new, weak vampires can absolutely get by on animal blood if they wanted to. And at the point they can't, well, they can sleep until they can again. No vampire has to feed on people, nor do they particularly have to spend a lot to use their powers. Even some of their more passive and no cost abilities still give them vast supernatural ability. You really have to be a special mix of weak and predatory to go out and feed on people in most situations. At a certain point you have to recognize that it's not being a vampire that's making you do terrible things, it's just that you find it easier to do terrible things than taking the effort not to. Really about the only thing that can force you to spend a lot of blood on the reg is having to go around fighting a lot of jackasses. And to some extent that can be out of your control, because there are a lot of groups with a lot of thoughts about what a vampire is and how it should act, and they may not be comfortable with you trying to fit outside the box they've made. Outside of that external pressure though, there's nothing intrinsic to being a vampire that forces you to nom down on randos.
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Mar 5, 2018 11:43
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Xinder posted:That's BP 9? Dude is a 2000 year old vampire that has basically never had to enter torpor unless he wanted too. Also, he doesn't forget anything he does unlike most vampires. That's a lot of time to really explore just how powerful vampires can get. He's inferred from other text to not be an elder but a straight up near methuselah like some other unmentioned characters are. Characters like that show up a few times and they are invariably able to do poo poo that even mages envy. There's a vampire in that 2e book about elders that's almost as old. She turned into an entire forest into some sort of weird illusionary death trap that reads like something more out of Scion or Exalted. She hates vampires too so the only ones that can even chance going in without getting hunted down and knocked off are members of VII/Akhud. There's also an (insane) ancient vampire that grew an arboretum underground in a city and turned it into a forest straight out of that Tsukihime vampire forest example someone mentioned. It's also unique to anything else in the game. As in, it straight up eats people parasitically if they're stupid enough to wander in to ask her for an audience. All of her older mortal family members that she likes to spend time with spend eternity blissed out as roots grow into their veins and it (and by extension her) uses them as perpetual fertilizer. Ditto for any vampires that are dumb enough to piss her off. A little excerpt of a weird vampire, since a poster yesterday asked posted:Had a boy come to my place, he was delicious. TL;DR: She's basically something out of a plant based horror movie. She's probably not hurting for blood either as a result of having a small army of people and monsters embedded in the trees and plants down there. Probably effectively more than her total vitae cap is too. Doubly so since I think it's implied that instead of putting on a show when it comes to troublemakers the prince just sends criminals to her looking for an "audience" regarding some sort of information. Which I imagine also has the added bonus of keeping her and her forest down below and to not just start bursting up through the streets to start eating people. Heck, she uses the place as some sort of eldritch farm that creates vitae laced fruit that vampires are capable are eating...and are implied to be considered a delicacy by vampires all over the world. Pretty much none of them are aware of what it is they're eating, too. So she's almost certainly got at least partial vinculums on unwitting vampires across the world as well. Keep in mind that in some game lines a power stat of over 5 is straight up godlike in power. The more we get of older types of vampires in actual writing the more it seems like that's true too, only with age factored in as whether they qualify. Unfortunately by that point most of them aren't really capable of thinking like humans any more. Archonex fucked around with this message at 13:06 on Mar 5, 2018 |
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Mar 5, 2018 12:49
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that's sick as hell i don't think she's insane though. her mind's just evolved (or evolving) into something different. young vampires still fundamentally think like humans. old vampires have had a lot longer for the nonhuman part of their mind to... develop? not sure what word to use
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Mar 5, 2018 13:08
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So, *has* there been a vampire of Blood Potency 10 yet? Because if these are all 9, I can't even imagine what 10 looks like.
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Mar 5, 2018 13:11
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Xinder posted:So, *has* there been a vampire of Blood Potency 10 yet? Because if these are all 9, I can't even imagine what 10 looks like. If we're going off of OWoD or Exalted standards then 10 is literally "It can literally do whatever the gently caress it wants. Pray to (insert deity here) that it doesn't want to eat you.". There haven't been any NWoD examples that I know of yet outside of maybe the mysterious "tier 4" characters mentioned in some early books, hence me using them as examples. Heck, there haven't even been any playable/given mechanics in Exalted outside of the higher tier divinities since the devs couldn't quite figure out to conceptualize "Can literally do anything given enough time and volition." into a game play format. Ditto for the OWoD since outside of the Antediluvian's there's pretty much nothing in OWoD either. It's always been kept kind of toolkit as a result. Odds are though that even in the NWoD/CoD they're certainly not directly interested in the world given the lack of their presence in the day to day lives of the characters. The tier 4's are implied to be even more powerful than arch mages though, since they're mentioned in 1e as a potential source of the resources arch-mages are required to have to perform the really big spells that can gently caress with reality on a large scale. There's certainly something that exists as a vampiric t4 too, since it's a plot point in 1e that it's most likely what's keeping an exarch or well intentioned arch-mage from just casting a spell to wish them out of existence. At that point (Depending on their actual age. A newbie elder that somehow survived diablerizing his way to BP 10 isn't going to be as scary as someone that's had millenia to figure out what he can do at that level.) i'd say you're talking about something that's probably more a facet of existence or living divinity or something like that. It's not so much a character as much as it is a force of nature that may or may not still think like a human. I'd go with them being things like the Crone that the Circle worships or maybe the Warden Moon for the werewolves if I had to factor them into a game. But the real question is that if you're doing that then why aren't you just playing scion or 2e exalted? The CoD is all about the lower scale of power and the interactions and consequences that come from not being able to get whatever you want without a bit of trouble in the process. Archonex fucked around with this message at 13:32 on Mar 5, 2018 |
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Mar 5, 2018 13:18
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Xinder posted:That's BP 9? He still has to get it from somewhere. And he's a BP 9 elder, so he has to specifically get it from other vampires. Mulva posted:You really have to be a special mix of weak and predatory to go out and feed on people in most situations. Yeah, like maybe you'd need to have some kind of insane, bloodthirsty Beast lodged firmly in your soul. Like I get what you're trying to say and while it's technically true that a vampire can live without harming humans, we're not talking "give up dessert" kinds of willpower, here. We're talking about a heroin addiction you can never, ever shake. The ecstacy of consuming human blood is the only thing that makes a vampire's unlife remotely liveable. Giving it up doesn't equate to say going vegan - something which most people can't even do, by the way. It's more akin to adopting one of those ridiculous ascetic lifestyle where you eat three grains of rice a day and sleep on a bed of nails - except oh, you're also addicted to crack and you don't even get the endorphin rush from inflicting suffering on yourself because you're a walking corpse and your brain doesn't work. There's a reason Golconda is the stuff of myth and religious fixation - achieving even basic human decency with the the Beast and its hunger breathing down your neck requires the literal patience of a saint. Yes, vampires are the parasites they are because they're not prepared to make the effort not to be, but that's largely because the level of effort required is simply beyond most people's ability.
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Mar 5, 2018 13:27
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It seems to me, from what you're telling me, that a BP 10 (and maybe 9) vampire has more place in a mage game than a vampire game
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Mar 5, 2018 13:28
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Tollymain posted:that's sick as hell Is there a practical difference between someone being insane and their mind evolving to a thought process utterly alien to humanity? I suppose insane people may make choices that lead to negative consequences for them because they no longer have a grasp of reality while an old vampire is still capable of making reasoned choices, it's just their values and priorities are totally bizarre from a human perspective.
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Mar 5, 2018 13:31
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Xinder posted:It seems to me, from what you're telling me, that a BP 10 (and maybe 9) vampire has more place in a mage game than a vampire game It really depends on your personal interpretation of things. As of now we have plenty of evidence that an ancient BP 10 vampire could be insanely overpowered if it was allowed to stick around for a bit. However in 1e we only had speculation due to a lack of explanation on what the gently caress was going on at the top tier of power. Heck, we didn't even really have a solid idea of what a BP 6+ vampire would like outside of Zagreus and a few other things until recently. Now that the elder vampire book is out though we know that the really old ones can do some pretty absurd stuff by default as a result of ever increasing stats post BP 5 even without relying on their disciplines and devotions. So i'd say you're free to do whatever works best for your game. But yeah. If you're going with some of the more recent stuff then it's kind of not in the realm of direct "street by street" Requiem games outside of maybe someone that was newly at that level of power. If I had to work in a group of BP 10 multi-millennial vampires interacting then i'd liken it more to the rules for playing as a True Fae. They don't even have hard mechanics and don't interact with the rest of the game world outside of occasionally chancing across and being antagonists to PC's. Of course that can be an advantage for lower tier characters too. If you're standing tall like sort of demigod you're not as likely to see some newly embraced punk come along and Paul Bunyan his way into chopping you down to size out of sheer dumb luck when you get careless. So whatever works. Outside of that situation i'd make them have some sort of weakness that could exploited to get away from them or defeat them. Zagreus is an excellent example of that. Sure, he can pretty much warp reality into whatever form he wants with a few spoken worlds and a bit of patience but like a lot of high tier mages he has no real control in seeing how his "prophecies" play out. He's also bored out of his skull as a result of having that sort of power at a rate that even some mages would envy and thus is willing to entertain/ignore things that otherwise would be no threat to him if he was willing to put up a real effort. There's an entire book long story in Immortal Horrors that shows why "potentially omnipotent powers don't equal up to actually always winning". The main antagonist of the story tries to make a deal with Zagreus. Zagreus accepts and they start some sort of scheme only for the Unholy to come along a story segment or two later and rip the lesser vampire's head off due to prior events that occurred before Zagreus entered the picture. Which effectively derails the whole thing in a way he couldn't predict. Archonex fucked around with this message at 13:50 on Mar 5, 2018 |
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Mar 5, 2018 13:40
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Xinder posted:It seems to me, from what you're telling me, that a BP 10 (and maybe 9) vampire has more place in a mage game than a vampire game I don't think that's necessarily true, though yeah in terms of the headspace different gamelines occupy, people tend to assume Mage is the game people play if they want to truck with cosmic forces. (And this feeds into the inferiority/superiority complexes people tend to have about Mage vis-a-vis the rest of the line). But Vampire has room for occult mystery and high strangeness as surely as Mage has room for medium-stakes politics and interpersonal intrigue. The last Vampire game I ran had more archmages and elder spirits and old gods in it than any Mage game I've ever run or been in.
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Mar 5, 2018 13:48
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There's also the fact that a BP 9/10 vampire would be rare. Not like, one in a city rare. Like "99% percent of all vampires will never even encounter one." rare. And that's assuming the BP 10 vampire thinks it's worth their time to even reveal they're so powerful. It's a plot point in the aforementioned book about methuselah/millenia+ elders that they're secretive about what they are and can do by habit due to spending so long being told that it's important to hide even from your peers. The reason being that if you go around flaunting your power inevitably some dipshit elder (or worse, a bunch of neonates) is going to kick in the door to your haven at the worst possible time (Possibly while you're in the middle of something really loving important.) and try to eat your soul in the hopes of gaining ~ultimate power~. And that's without considering that there's at least two secret covenants dedicated to destroying vampires and/or making their lives a living hell, alongside the Strix. Which would love to get a host body with all that power and prestige since they're pretty much the most outwardly dickish things in the setting. So many of them don't even interact with vampire society at all. Archonex fucked around with this message at 14:02 on Mar 5, 2018 |
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Mar 5, 2018 13:53
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Well, this is unlikely to be relevant to my games anyway but I just had my curiosity piqued and had to ask. I'm slowly rotating my current group of players through (most of) the CoD lines since they were new to the setting. Vampire might be soon, but if I get the finished Changeling 2e book first, we're doing that instead and pushing Vampire back. Depends on how long my other games run. The idea is to, by the end, have them get the feel for each line and know what they had the most fun with. Afterwards I'll probably run crossover games between their favorite lines or something. This also gives me plenty of practice, because half of these games I've never had the pleasure of running. For vampire, I've already decided to start them as neonates in the Requiem for Rome setting. Partially because I still love history stuff and that's a good history setting. But also because this is easier on my players, since they don't need to worry about all the different Covenants at first. There's just the one. As an added bonus, or actually probably my biggest reason for choosing Rome, if they can survive to the end of the game they get to reuse their characters in a later game centuries down the line. That's one of the biggest appeals of playing an ageless undying monster, imo.
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Mar 5, 2018 13:54
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wouldn't they have to interact with vampire society at least a little to get that sweet distilled vitae
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Mar 5, 2018 14:41
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spoilers: Zagreus is actually not a well-written or interesting character
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Mar 5, 2018 14:44
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Tollymain posted:wouldn't they have to interact with vampire society at least a little to get that sweet distilled vitae I posted two examples up above that don't really need to do that. Though I didn't really think about it until now. The Dirt Mother just keeps other vampires and a number of vitae plants she can feed on on stock in some sort of gigantic hosed up organic plant network while Zagreus can just say something like "I predict that I will never go hungry this year." and potentially willing or unwilling vampires will stumble across his path. Zagreus's method is pretty lovely though, and it's only saving grace would be that he's canonically such a twit that he would take pleasure out of whatever chaos and danger that would result from such a thing. In the fiction he shows up in it's heavily implied that he also cuts deals with elders and some younger vampires to use his powers on their behalf in exchange for a continuing supply of entertainment and food. He's basically doing the whole Invictus patron thing from the perspective of the patron. Albeit from a really eldritch and over dramatic perspective. One of the art pieces featuring him even has him sitting on a throne in the middle of a room whose floor is made out of seamlessly interlinked willing victims for guests to feed on. When he has a guest he needs to feed on or is hungry he has one detach from the mass and offer his or herself up to him before rejoining it. Which was a nice early hint that really old vampires can be really loving weird and disturbing. But yeah. It stands to reason that some do need to go hunting for vitae. Hence why so many vampires just go into torpor once they get around 5 or 6 BP instead of letting it keep climbing. Though if you've been around for that long to earn that level of power without relying on diablerie then it stands to reason you've got some pretty sturdy feeding methods set up. Mors Rattus posted:spoilers: Zagreus is actually not a well-written or interesting character He's basically a turbo-daeva that's had a few thousand years to go from the usual solipsistic cloistered celebrity-ish weirdness they get into as they get older and their capabilities with majesty get stronger and stronger to become something else. Or to put it another way, he's basically the equivalent of the guy who looks at Charlie Sheen undergoing a psychotic breakdown on TV while raving about the miraculous properties of tiger blood and waving a machete from the rooftop of his mansion only to be bored out of his mind and straight-facedly say "Psh. Been there and done that. Show me something new!". It's pretty much a hit or miss thing, yeah. But I can't say that the implications on how you could use him aren't interesting. He's basically a walking and talking embodiment of how boredom and ennui can twist immortal characters into something ugly and depraved. Archonex fucked around with this message at 17:24 on Mar 5, 2018 |
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Mar 5, 2018 14:46
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Archonex posted:Zagreus can just say something like "I predict that I will never go hungry this year." and potentially willing or unwilling vampires will stumble across his path. His power explicitly cannot enforce time limits, and I'd personally argue that "won't go hungry" isn't really an event you can cause to happen. Then again, I guess all he'd have to do is say "I will find a reliable source of potent Vitae" and it'll eventually sort itself out.
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Mar 5, 2018 17:10
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Terrorforge posted:His power explicitly cannot enforce time limits, and I'd personally argue that "won't go hungry" isn't really an event you can cause to happen. Yeah, that's what I meant. Basically a lot of the listed really powerful elders/methuselahs/whatever seem to be able to exist at that level of power at least partially because they've come up with some ridiculously powerful ways to keep themselves fed. Just about everyone else just goes into torpor or starts bleeding off humanity incredibly quickly as they're forced to do some pretty awful things to stay awake. That doesn't mean that there aren't flaws that can't be exploited against them though. It also helps that his devotion is so powerful that he's basically every politico or schemer's wet dream. So the moment they realize he's in town they all bee-line to him looking for a favor. At which point he can bargain for regular deliveries of vitae. Archonex fucked around with this message at 17:28 on Mar 5, 2018 |
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Mar 5, 2018 17:26
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Characters like that really seem like oWoD holdovers, rather than meaningful to the cyclical nature of CoD vampire life. You get powerful, you sleep, power bleeds off, you have to get power again. It's basically the entire purpose *of* the Invictus, old vampires making a social club that holds power for them while they sleep. Even things like the Unholy aren't exactly orders of magnitude better than what other vampires are doing. She's just faster and stronger and a bit weird in a fairly occult way. Most of what is terrifying about her is how far she'll go to screw with people if she has a mind to, but that doesn't particularly need a particular level of mystical ability. If she dropped a bit in power, she'd still be terrifying. There's literally nothing interesting about Zagreus that isn't his power. Thankfully they have a whole new edition that somewhat tweaked things.
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Mar 5, 2018 18:42
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Most of the giant monsters from the book Zagreus is in are not very good. The Unholy's okay, Hunyadi Dorjan is excellent, and then... .
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Mar 5, 2018 18:56
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| # ? May 13, 2024 02:04 |
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Mors Rattus posted:Most of the giant monsters from the book Zagreus is in are not very good. The Unholy's okay, Hunyadi Dorjan is excellent, and then... There's only six 'giant monsters' though, so that's half. There's also the Sightless Mother who I'd say is pretty good, better than Hunyadi Dorjan, at least. Anyways, if someone doesn't find Zagreus an interesting NPC, it is at least interesting to see the way vampires are meant to develop. He is meant to be a representative of high Blood Potency, his Dark Decree is not a gift he stole from a god, but something his Vitae has forged after several lifetimes of being a manipulator and storyteller. Now he doesn't just manipulate people and tell stories, he manipulates fate and foretells stories. He's not meant to be 'this is standard vampire antagonist B.' Having him in a vampire game fits in the way something like Final Destination does, it puts the pressure on, it makes you careful, and at the end it has you trying to dodge a fate you're more likely to bring upon yourselves.
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Mar 5, 2018 21:15
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