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Interesting Beast Fact: According to the reports I've recently heard (at second-hand, from people who know), BHM actually had very little to do with the... Beast-ness of Beast. The story I've gotten is that he inherited the outline after the original developer left, was largely uninterested in it, and let the new-hire freelancers on the mailing list do whatever they wanted. What they wanted, apparently, was to get really into examining the cycle of abuse, and not to figure out how to make these concepts come across as likable, which is traditionally the developer's job. His only major personal contribution was Heroes, which seems to have been the main thing he was personally invested in.
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Mar 11, 2018 16:14
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Bedlamdan posted:I see... Doesn't this include people who got it from the Kickstarter? I feel like everytime the codes go out for a KS game book, it instantly shoots up to the top five because a bunch of people just redeemed their copies, which is a $0 transaction.
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Mar 11, 2018 17:46
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Rand Brittain posted:Interesting Beast Fact: According to the reports I've recently heard (at second-hand, from people who know), BHM actually had very little to do with the... Beast-ness of Beast. The story I've gotten is that he inherited the outline after the original developer left, was largely uninterested in it, and let the new-hire freelancers on the mailing list do whatever they wanted. What they wanted, apparently, was to get really into examining the cycle of abuse, and not to figure out how to make these concepts come across as likable, which is traditionally the developer's job. His only major personal contribution was Heroes, which seems to have been the main thing he was personally invested in. He made a thread on the Onyx Path forums where he said he was struggling with the outline and wanted to see what the players wanted from the game. He seems to have mostly put that stuff in. Also it's clear he's based most of the game line around Stephen Asma's On Monsters, which is likely where the 'fear the Other' came from, as it was the only one mentioned in the book that didn't make it into the core. Is it the job of developers to take writers stuff and make it 'likable'? That seems weird. RocknRollaAyatollah posted:Doesn't this include people who got it from the Kickstarter? I feel like everytime the codes go out for a KS game book, it instantly shoots up to the top five because a bunch of people just redeemed their copies, which is a $0 transaction. No, I asked about that. I do believe it's time based, though, so if something sold a billion copies now it might slip down the list past something that sells a thousand copies in a month. Plus it's not a Kickstarter reward. Some people like the game. I checked around last night and /tg/ said more good things about Beast than bad, one poster even claiming it reminded them of Planescape and Ravenloft. nofather fucked around with this message at 18:53 on Mar 11, 2018 |
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Mar 11, 2018 18:48
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"4chan likes beast" is a fairly damning endorsement.
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Mar 11, 2018 18:53
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Kurieg posted:"4chan likes beast" is a fairly damning endorsement. I only saw yesterday and today's thread. I suppose anons could have been freaking out on release day. I imagine if someone said something pro Beast that was anti Mage they'd have much more of a negative reaction. But there's clearly people who like the game, they're already working on homebrew for it to expand some of the new things on the OP forum.
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Mar 11, 2018 18:56
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nofather posted:I only saw yesterday and today's thread. I suppose anons could have been freaking out on release day. I imagine if someone said something pro Beast that was anti Mage they'd have much more of a negative reaction. The reaction I noted was "Beast is poo poo, but the player's guide is at least better than the core"
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Mar 11, 2018 18:58
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Kurieg posted:"4chan likes beast" is a fairly damning endorsement. EDIT: In fact, I found the thread with the poster doing the Planescape/Ravenloft comparison and in context it looks like it's just one person who has a really odd take on Beast (like they seem to think it's way more about exploring the multiverse of CofD than any other discussion of Beast I've seen has made it out to be). Warthur fucked around with this message at 19:10 on Mar 11, 2018 |
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Mar 11, 2018 18:59
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There's a lot to like about Beast, it's just that very little of it is the game we actually got. It marches right up to the theoretical space of something real real cool, it just by and large decides to poo poo itself and run away screaming once it does.
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Mar 11, 2018 20:34
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Mulva posted:There's a lot to like about Beast, it's just that very little of it is the game we actually got. It marches right up to the theoretical space of something real real cool, it just by and large decides to poo poo itself and run away screaming once it does. Wraith, Vampire and Werewolf all kind of nailed it, or were close enough that you just needed to adjust some details; or else they wouldn't matter to your actual tabletop game because they were setting conceits.
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Mar 11, 2018 20:41
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Rand Brittain posted:Interesting Beast Fact: According to the reports I've recently heard (at second-hand, from people who know), BHM actually had very little to do with the... Beast-ness of Beast. The story I've gotten is that he inherited the outline after the original developer left, was largely uninterested in it, and let the new-hire freelancers on the mailing list do whatever they wanted. What they wanted, apparently, was to get really into examining the cycle of abuse, and not to figure out how to make these concepts come across as likable, which is traditionally the developer's job. His only major personal contribution was Heroes, which seems to have been the main thing he was personally invested in. Beast bears very little relation to the game Matt originally pitched that fateful CCP Pitch season*, but he in no way inherited the outline; he was working on it while I was outlining Mage 2e. * Which is not all that unusual. Geist was originally a "possessed by Angels" game. I still don't actually know whose idea Deviant was.
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Mar 11, 2018 20:43
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Warthur posted:In fact, I found the thread with the poster doing the Planescape/Ravenloft comparison and in context it looks like it's just one person who has a really odd take on Beast (like they seem to think it's way more about exploring the multiverse of CofD than any other discussion of Beast I've seen has made it out to be). I seem to remember there being a lot of Beast elements that implied it was good for that? Mostly the relentless crossover focus that comes from them being weird metamonsters rather than just... monsters, and the fact that they have fiat-level abilities to thrust themselves into everyone else's corners of the cosmos only to be greeted with "Hey, it's Poochy! We all love Poochy." I would love to see if any Beast fan has suggested that the Beasts can force their own entrance into the Supernal Realms and survive there, because that seems like an obvious wires-cross one could arrive at from the Beast framework for interacting with the CoD. And by love I mean I think it would give me an embolism, but I still have a need to know. ...this is why I play Mage, clearly. Speaking of Mage, since we have Brookshaw in the thread: Do you have any insider info on the inspiration and design for the Atlantean runes? I would love to know what the framework behind them was (other than 'it should look like Enochian' because I picked up on that), since I've been really taken with making my own.
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Mar 11, 2018 21:08
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Joe Slowboat posted:I seem to remember there being a lot of Beast elements that implied it was good for that? Mostly the relentless crossover focus that comes from them being weird metamonsters rather than just... monsters, and the fact that they have fiat-level abilities to thrust themselves into everyone else's corners of the cosmos only to be greeted with "Hey, it's Poochy! We all love Poochy." They're mostly Tibetan, with a dash of enochian.
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Mar 11, 2018 21:12
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Dave Brookshaw posted:They're mostly Tibetan, with a dash of enochian. Fantastic, thanks. EDIT: Yeah, I can see a number of uchen script forms in the basic rune set. Obviously uchen script doesn't have the weird combinatorial style of Atlantean rune design, which is probably for the best because glyphic scripts like that are incredibly unwieldy, even if they look fantastic carved into the walls of temples. Joe Slowboat fucked around with this message at 21:33 on Mar 11, 2018 |
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Mar 11, 2018 21:29
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Joe Slowboat posted:I would love to see if any Beast fan has suggested that the Beasts can force their own entrance into the Supernal Realms and survive there, because that seems like an obvious wires-cross one could arrive at from the Beast framework for interacting with the CoD. Well, if they can find a gateway to the supernal realms then they can explicitly force it open with one of the baseline beast power. And the BPG talks about beasts travelling up from the primordial dream into the Bright Dream, and down from the primordial dream into what the beasts call The Mother's Heart, but is actually the soul of the earth itself, which is a really bad place to go as it actively rebels against any supernaturals other than werewolves, eating up more and more of their health the more powerful they are. Beasts can theoretically go anywhere they want to go as long as they're willing to spend the time and energy traveling through other realms to get there.
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Mar 11, 2018 23:05
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The joke there is that the Supernal Realms are not actually material or even immaterial places, they're symbolic filters for understanding reality's underlying system of operations. EDIT: By which I mean, the Beast ability to gate-crash is sort of bad for having a setting where every otherworld or realm isn't effectively just a parallel dimension with a certain decor. I think, RAW, Beasts can use their natural abilities to rip open gateways to the Lower Depths and the Abyss as well, and instead of just instantly dying are necessarily able to survive there??? Joe Slowboat fucked around with this message at 23:24 on Mar 11, 2018 |
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Mar 11, 2018 23:22
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Joe Slowboat posted:The joke there is that the Supernal Realms are not actually material or even immaterial places, they're symbolic filters for understanding reality's underlying system of operations. Well, no. The Supernal Realms are reality. They are the real part. The part we're in now? Is the physical, phenomenological shadow cast on the cave wall. That's not to say the Supernal is material, or Shadow, or anything like that. It's not. It is a world entirely unlike our understanding of a world. Because, again, we're living the shadow the Supernal casts on the cave wall of existence, and the Supernal itself is the thing casting the shadow.
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Mar 11, 2018 23:24
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Mors Rattus posted:Well, no. My point was that the Supernal is made up of conceptual rather than physical objects, being a literally idealist cosmology, and therefore you can't 'go there' except in the sense of translating yourself into a symbol among symbols. I just used the shorthand version that takes less of a detour through Neoplatonism to express. EDIT: And the Supernal Realms are absolutely the symbologies individual paths use to understand a Supernal that is all five of them and more; the Paths are ways for the human mind to understand the thing-in-itself that the Supernal is. One can look on the Supernal World in five flavors, with more as you enter into other symbolic registers through Legacy and so on, while never necessarily leaving a specific part of the phenomenal world. The Supernal is closer to the five realms all overlaid on each other at the same time in all places than to any one of them alone. Joe Slowboat fucked around with this message at 23:29 on Mar 11, 2018 |
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Mar 11, 2018 23:25
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Joe Slowboat posted:My point was that the Supernal is made up of conceptual rather than physical objects, being a literally idealist cosmology, and therefore you can't 'go there' except in the sense of translating yourself into a symbol among symbols. Even for mages, getting to the Supernal Realm (as opposed to the Supernal Worlds - Stygia, Arcadia, etc, which is what they enter when they use Mage Sight) is surprisingly easy. Find an Emanation Realm, access the Iris to the Supernal proper that's at its heart. The trouble is that doing so is not just instantly fatal, but so fatal you get erased from existence retroactively and never lived at all. Other supernatural beings often assume mages want to leave the Fallen World for the Supernal, but any educated mage knows that's suicidal - leaving it safely is Ascension.
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Mar 11, 2018 23:30
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My impression was that the instant fatality comes from attempting to shove a phenomenal body (hehe my mage has a phenomenal body) into the ideal, and that working about as well as attempting to translate a book into radio signals by throwing it into the sun. That, for example, if you used Supernal Summoning to bring a Supernal being into the phenomenal world, then shoved them through the iris at the heart of an Emanation Realm, they'd be fine. Actually, there's a question - say it's Yggdrasil, an Emanation Realm of Spirit, and I summoned a Supernal entity of Matter, and then shoved it into the iris (ignoring how I'm doing the shoving). I would assume it makes no difference - the Supernal is the Supernal, indivisible and infinite, once you step through the iris - and the entity would simply return to its normal condition. Is that about right?
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Mar 11, 2018 23:52
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Joe Slowboat posted:My impression was that the instant fatality comes from attempting to shove a phenomenal body (hehe my mage has a phenomenal body) into the ideal, and that working about as well as attempting to translate a book into radio signals by throwing it into the sun. That, for example, if you used Supernal Summoning to bring a Supernal being into the phenomenal world, then shoved them through the iris at the heart of an Emanation Realm, they'd be fine. It's more that when you enter the Supernal unguided, you naturally interact with the Supernal symbol of yourself, damage it by landing inside it, and erase yourself. And yes - in 2e, there's five Supernal Worlds, and one indivisible Supernal Realm. The entity will be fine.
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Mar 11, 2018 23:54
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Dave Brookshaw posted:It's more that when you enter the Supernal unguided, you naturally interact with the Supernal symbol of yourself, damage it by landing inside it, and erase yourself. I feel like the only acceptable sound effect for this is a Three Stooges noise. A cosmic rending three stooges noise.
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Mar 12, 2018 00:10
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Joe Slowboat posted:I feel like the only acceptable sound effect for this is a Three Stooges noise. A cosmic rending three stooges noise. I think I understand this discussion on an academic level, but the only coherent mental image I'm forming is of a Beast trying to squeeze into an Iris only to implode from the "pressure" and turn into a children's picture book.
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Mar 12, 2018 00:17
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Terrorforge posted:I think I understand this discussion on an academic level, but the only coherent mental image I'm forming is of a Beast trying to squeeze into an Iris only to implode from the "pressure" and turn into a children's picture book. I assume the picture book about a monster under the bed is then ejected out of the Supernal iris with a burp.
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Mar 12, 2018 00:19
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Joe Slowboat posted:I assume the picture book about a monster under the bed is then ejected out of the Supernal iris with a burp. Exactly.
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Mar 12, 2018 00:24
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Joe Slowboat posted:The joke there is that the Supernal Realms are not actually material or even immaterial places, they're symbolic filters for understanding reality's underlying system of operations. It does sit uncomfortably with the nature of the Supernal Realm, but at least, as I recall, the ability to kick open dimensional doors doesn't actually provide for the Beast's ability to survive in the realm they enter. So a Beast who somehow finds and kicks open a door into the Supernal Realm or the Abyss and dives right in is as hosed as they deserve to be.
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Mar 12, 2018 00:33
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Demons have that ability too, right? Gate Crashing or something?
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Mar 12, 2018 00:50
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Beasts have their Skeleton Key as a universal splat ability. One of the powers individual demons can buy is Rip the Gates, which unlike Skeleton Key doesn't require a preexisting gateway, but also unlike Skeleton Key only busts into the Shadow, the Underworld, the Hedge, or the Astral Realms.
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Mar 12, 2018 01:01
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I Am Just a Box posted:Beasts have their Skeleton Key as a universal splat ability. One of the powers individual demons can buy is Rip the Gates, which unlike Skeleton Key doesn't require a preexisting gateway, but also unlike Skeleton Key only busts into the Shadow, the Underworld, the Hedge, or the Astral Realms. Interesting that the Supernal, Lower Depths, and Abyss are missing from that list. The Lower Depths in particular is surprising.
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Mar 12, 2018 07:16
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AnEdgelord posted:Interesting that the Supernal, Lower Depths, and Abyss are missing from that list. All three would be instantly fatal.
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Mar 12, 2018 07:32
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AnEdgelord posted:The Lower Depths in particular is surprising. "See? SEE? Stop calling us demons, dammit! I mean uhh blessit."
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Mar 12, 2018 07:34
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Dave Brookshaw posted:All three would be instantly fatal. I always thought that the lower depths was more of a "slow wasting away if you dont find exit that probably doesnt exist" than a "instant non-negociable death" kinda place.
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Mar 12, 2018 07:35
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AnEdgelord posted:I always thought that the lower depths was more of a "slow wasting away if you dont find exit that probably doesnt exist" than a "instant non-negociable death" kinda place. I was under the impression that the Lower Depths, being a broad category of different worlds and almost-realities, wasn't categorically unable to sustain visiting life, but rather that it depended on what quality was lacking from that particular realm. That might be a misapprehension from the Inferno having been called out as one of the Lower Depths but perhaps being poorly representative. But if the Inferno from its titular book is indeed a Lower Depth, my takeaway wasn't that to enter Hell bodily would be instant annihilation, but simply that it was a Very Bad Idea. Possibly the same with Mummy's Duat, though that of course suffers from Mummy being far too coy about actually telling the reader what it is describing. A lot of other Depths would still simply be annihilatory, though. You're not going to survive visiting The World Where Space Is Not Separated by Distance even briefly, because total colocation is not kind to human physiology.
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Mar 12, 2018 09:09
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nofather posted:Demons have that ability too, right? Gate Crashing or something? There's an Exploit called Rip the Gates, but it's specified to only open gates to and from exactly the Hedge, the Shadow, the Underworld and the Astral Realms.
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Mar 12, 2018 10:45
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If you really want to bust into some other place, just make a gadget exploited with Rip the Gates and put a near field effect on it. If that's too easy for you, lambda it with something that makes sense, Show of Power perhaps?
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Mar 12, 2018 11:30
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How much WoD/Chronicles play actually takes place in the (bewildering, frankly kind of redundant) number of otherworlds the games present us with? I always figured that in your typical campaign most play would unfold in the regular world and otherworld trips would be a clear minority of play time. After all, the underlying meta-theme of each WoD/Chronicles game seems to be "It's the everyday world we are familiar with (or a gothic-pubk pqrody of it), except creature type X exists in the shadows." Major exception would be Wraith; I've only read 1E but it seems like most of the action in that is focused on underworld shadows of our world rather than the world of the living.
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Mar 12, 2018 12:21
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Warthur posted:How much WoD/Chronicles play actually takes place in the (bewildering, frankly kind of redundant) number of otherworlds the games present us with? I always figured that in your typical campaign most play would unfold in the regular world and otherworld trips would be a clear minority of play time. Depends on the gameline, really. YMMV, but I'd categorize it thusly:
GimpInBlack fucked around with this message at 12:32 on Mar 12, 2018 |
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Mar 12, 2018 12:29
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Warthur posted:How much WoD/Chronicles play actually takes place in the (bewildering, frankly kind of redundant) number of otherworlds the games present us with? I always figured that in your typical campaign most play would unfold in the regular world and otherworld trips would be a clear minority of play time. Varies from splat to splat and chronicle to chronicle, but you generally aren't expected to spend a majority of play time there unless that's a specific focus of your chronicle. But in terms of the average game, making trips into the Shadow is borderline mandatory for werewolves, whereas Geist infamously presented all this neat information on the Underworld and how to get there but didn't actually give you any reason to do it. e: and of course your vampires, prometheans etc. have little to no ability to enter such realms under their own power, so it's probably not happening at all unless the ST very actively contrives for the chronicle to take them there Terrorforge fucked around with this message at 12:41 on Mar 12, 2018 |
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Mar 12, 2018 12:35
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I think Changeling is the only game I've run where there's ever been real reason to go to an otherworld. I'm thinking about maybe giving my Second Sight game an Avernian Gate and seeing if the mortals are dumb enough to find a way to open it. It'd be an "answers are found much faster, but being there is much more dangerous" scenario and the same answers could be found if they just spent more time mystery solving in the regular old human world.
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Mar 12, 2018 13:24
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The reason in Werewolf is 'this is where tasty, delicious spirits live, and also the spirits who are your friends, I guess', and the reason in Mage is 'huh, this is funny. guys, I wanna figure out what's going on here.'
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Mar 12, 2018 13:34
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I Am Just a Box posted:I was under the impression that the Lower Depths, being a broad category of different worlds and almost-realities, wasn't categorically unable to sustain visiting life, but rather that it depended on what quality was lacking from that particular realm. That might be a misapprehension from the Inferno having been called out as one of the Lower Depths but perhaps being poorly representative. But if the Inferno from its titular book is indeed a Lower Depth, my takeaway wasn't that to enter Hell bodily would be instant annihilation, but simply that it was a Very Bad Idea. Possibly the same with Mummy's Duat, though that of course suffers from Mummy being far too coy about actually telling the reader what it is describing. Inferno could be a place without Death (and, therefore, souls and its related stuff, like virtues and vices). In that case, entering there would not be instantly fatal, but you would become reduced to a Thrall pretty quickly.
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Mar 12, 2018 13:49
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