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Nessus posted:It is lame as hell although I suppose in books written in 1993 by people from Stone Mountain, Georgia, a certain degree of casual ignorance is no great surprise. One bit that always stuck out at me was in Rage Across New York where it asserted that while awful white Wyrmbringers were awful and waged war for any reason under the sun, the Pure Tribes only warred with each other for noble and pure reasons.
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Apr 13, 2018 15:17
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blastron posted:The most basic level of it is available to all mages. There’s a big fat “if you want to do more than this ask your ST” line, but the core of it is instead of trying to soak Paradox successes as bashing, you can roll Gnosis and control that many of the Paradox Reach. This is literally three tiny sentences on page 239 of the core 2e book; I would have missed it entirely if I hadn’t been specifically trying to figure out what the villains of my current chronicle would be. Yarp So, like Ironslave says, this is a simplification of two distinct stages of Abyssal infection that we put into the corebook because we only had room for three tiny sentances. Type 1 Scelesti - Rabashakim - are normal mages who intentionally gently caress their spells up. They need an Antimonian Rote or Praxis to do so, but can cast any Praxis as such if they know it's possible, or record Antimonian rotes if they happen to be a Master. Type 2 Scelesti - Nasnasi - can improvise antimonian spells.
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Apr 13, 2018 18:38
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Loomer posted:I should also point out that Uluru really... Isn't that special, to be honest. It's sacred to the local people and had a role in initiatory rites, but outside of the Pitjantjatjara, it isn't terribly significant. It has exactly zero role to play in most Australian dreaming cosmology. Giving it this special role that OPP keeps doing as the 'sacred heart' of Australia or time itself (Shattered Dreams) or Australia's dreaming has far more to do with New Age nonsense and White Australia's co-opting of the site's actual significance than anything else. Second edition Forsaken has an Australian Hunting Ground in the MacDonnell ranges, which I think is close geographically, but doesn't seem to mention Uluru. It does have the NSA base, though. The bigger problems there are azlu (spider hosts) and Fire-Touched (religious werewolves). 
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Apr 14, 2018 00:38
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The best part of Forsaken Australia is the super chill Predator Kings, because they have run of the outback, which is full of crazy big spirits of nature for them to hunt, so they have no beef with anyone else.
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Apr 14, 2018 00:52
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Does the book have anything on Australia's hellish problem with invasive species? Cause I want to run a game where a bunch of wolves hijack a jeep spirit to go four wheeling through a swarm of enormous puffed up Bane Toads. If they're blood drinkers, would that make them Caine Toads? I'll stop.
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Apr 14, 2018 01:01
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PHIZ KALIFA posted:Does the book have anything on Australia's hellish problem with invasive species? Cause I want to run a game where a bunch of wolves hijack a jeep spirit to go four wheeling through a swarm of enormous puffed up Bane Toads. If they're blood drinkers, would that make them Caine Toads?
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Apr 14, 2018 01:07
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is it true that cane toads enjoy climbing into toilets in order to make their ribbit mating calls? my wife claims the deep outback has to have special Toadproof Toilets in order to stop the horny idiots from climbing in and getting crapshatted on, cuz they bloat and clog the pipes apparently? "Shatted On Dead Toad In Cabin Toilet" is my headcanon Beast family, telling you all now makes it official.
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Apr 14, 2018 01:09
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PHIZ KALIFA posted:Does the book have anything on Australia's hellish problem with invasive species?
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Apr 14, 2018 01:10
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They eat trees, Yawgie! TREES! Strip the bark right off them and girdle the whole majestic thing. They're monstrous, I think Australian rabbits are actually on par with domestic cats as far as destructive capacity is concerned, the rabbits graze so heavily that the area becomes barren and eroded. Frankly, "tribe of spirit rabbits depleting the spiritual ecology of an area" would make a solid mage OR werewolf plot, depending how you approach it. I think it'd be great fun seeing a bunch of apex predators realize the inefficiency of hunting invasive pests one-by-one.
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Apr 14, 2018 01:15
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The Forsaken and Pure are kind of portrayed as an invasive species. It was apparently geographically and metaphysically distant enough that the Firstborn totems (at least the more well known ones) didn't have a footprint there. You don't exactly have a bunyip situation, no one went and killed off all the Uratha there, they just started converting.
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Apr 14, 2018 01:30
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Dave Brookshaw posted:Yarp So, like Ironslave says, this is a simplification of two distinct stages of Abyssal infection that we put into the corebook because we only had room for three tiny sentances. Thanks for the clarification (thanks to Ironslave too). Gonna need to do a little bit of rewriting now... Granted, this will never come up, because my group’s followup to “did someone use time travel to intervene when we sort-of-accidentally killed someone” is “let’s find and storm their sanctum” so there’s a good chance they wind up getting murdered by a pylon of really pissed off Seers.
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Apr 14, 2018 04:40
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blastron posted:Thanks for the clarification (thanks to Ironslave too). Gonna need to do a little bit of rewriting now...
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Apr 14, 2018 05:16
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blastron posted:Thanks for the clarification (thanks to Ironslave too). Gonna need to do a little bit of rewriting now... Dropping a grimoire of useful befouled rotes into their hands beforehand might be a good incentive for them to start snorting gulmoth powder. Edit: especially if that grimoire has other associated powers, and especially if any of the players are Thearchs; they're a bit notorious for doing that "just this once" excuse.
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Apr 14, 2018 09:31
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Art Bell, paranormal radio show host and inspiration for many WoD games has died.
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Apr 14, 2018 14:37
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neaden posted:Art Bell, paranormal radio show host and inspiration for many WoD games has died. oh god no edit: https://www.reviewjournal.com/local/local-nevada/pahrump-based-radio-host-art-bell-dies-at-72/ it's true, gently caress. Art Bell's show kept me going during a really dark spot in my life so this is hitting me hard. Loomer fucked around with this message at 16:57 on Apr 14, 2018 |
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Apr 14, 2018 16:38
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Ahh, gently caress. He may have been a crank but he was the greatest of all cranks. The world's a little less weird without the man. Though I do think his ghost is probably laughing about punching his ticket on Friday the 13th.
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Apr 14, 2018 17:02
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How far away is deviant likely to be? Soonish? Later this year? or is that optimistic?
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Apr 14, 2018 19:26
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Daeren posted:Ahh, gently caress. He may have been a crank but he was the greatest of all cranks. The world's a little less weird without the man. He and Stephen Hawking have joined the Poetic Date of Death society.
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Apr 14, 2018 19:31
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Pocky In My Pocket posted:How far away is deviant likely to be? Soonish? Later this year? or is that optimistic? It's still in redlines on the Onyx Path blog so I'd say that's very optimistic.
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Apr 14, 2018 19:40
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Pocky In My Pocket posted:How far away is deviant likely to be? Soonish? Later this year? or is that optimistic? At a guess, late 2019 at the earliest
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Apr 14, 2018 19:42
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Ah. Ok
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Apr 14, 2018 19:49
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You know what would have been a genuinely interesting spot to put the Australian glade for Freeholds? Botany Bay. Your hooks write themselves - it's definitely a place of tremendous wonder, inhabited for like five thousand years with Cook and co coming along and being fairly awestruck by the stingrays and plantlife, the first real spot of European influence over the continent, a mythologized place. You've got tensions that will make the Dreaming intense - manifestations of both the true Australian Dreamtime and the imported dreams of botanists, schoolboys, prisoners and captains - and urban encroachment to give a source of banality to fight against. Questions of whether or not to destroy the dreaming manifestation of Cook's statue, bargains with seahorse spirits, efforts to make peace between two violently conflicting ideas of dreaming right where it really began. But nah, gently caress it. Uluru!
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Apr 15, 2018 06:19
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Hire Consultants
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Apr 15, 2018 06:28
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or whatever the name is for the arrangement you make w temporary consultants idk
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Apr 15, 2018 06:29
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So more fun game story: Party enters 2nd floor bedroom, window is broken with glass spread on the inside, there's a brick on the floor, the man in the bed is dead with his throat slit and the blood staining the sheets. "Perhaps he was killed in a dream. You can do dream combat, right? Try to determine if he was killed in his dreams." "I could, but this wound looks like it was made with a knife in this world, not in a dream." "I'm going to spend willpower for the Communion ritual so I can ask my dark god if this guy was killed in a dream." "Are you sure you want to?" "Absolutely." [I roll in secret, it's a failure] "You feel sharpness and see lots of red. It's hard to interpret what it means, but you're pretty convinced it's about dream murder." [10 real life minutes of dream murder arguments later, that i mostly stay quiet through] "Okay, so new theory: What if the murderer didn't enter through the dreams, but launched the brick from above in a sort of...dirigible. Do we know of any possible murder suspects with a dirigible?" "If the brick was thrown fast enough, it could have even been the murder weapon! It could have grazed his neck and sliced it open!" "Genius! I want to roll to see if I can think of anyone in town who owns a dirigible." [me between laughs] "No, there's no dirigible owners you know of in this town." This is the same players as the incompetent civil servants, as should be obvious. I'm like 99% sure they all knew what happened in that room and were intentionally avoiding reasonable assumptions for fun. They know how to make me laugh at least.
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Apr 15, 2018 06:54
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Well, one of the Freeholds writers seems to be of the opinion customary Dreaming law - as in, proper Dreamtime law, the stuff that shapes the spiritual landscape of Australia and which, by the description of glades, should shape them too - doesn't apply to changelings. This is going to be a painful discussion.
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Apr 15, 2018 15:48
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I think you're going to need to use your words a little more carefully if you want to break through a layer of granola—somebody at low levels of wokeness is going to be confused if you keep using "Dreaming" to refer to the actual religious concept without falling over yourself to clarify, because they only understand the gaming concept where it means a hippy-dippy fairyland. Still, I have tried to clear things up a bit.
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Apr 15, 2018 16:33
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Rand Brittain posted:I think you're going to need to use your words a little more carefully if you want to break through a layer of granola—somebody at low levels of wokeness is going to be confused if you keep using "Dreaming" to refer to the actual religious concept without falling over yourself to clarify, because they only understand the gaming concept where it means a hippy-dippy fairyland. Yeah, it probably isn't helping. Likewise their confusion over Law.
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Apr 15, 2018 16:41
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Okay, so, let me get this straight. Time 3’s Shifting Sands spell lets you, with a Reach, send you one scene (functionally one hour) back in time. When someone does this in a way that puts them in direct conflict with previous versions of the characters, should I just have them play out the scene while asking them to kindly pretend to forget what happened the previous time around? One of their main antagonists is an Acanthus with Time 4 whose pylon has an obsessively thorough network of contingency plans in place, including indefinite-duration hung spells to bounce someone back in time an hour if they say a particular nonsense word so that they can redo things (once) if they suddenly find themselves in mortal peril, so it’s very likely that the players are going to hit this at some point.
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Apr 16, 2018 06:11
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Loomer posted:Yeah, it probably isn't helping. Likewise their confusion over Law. I mean there's a certain irony if they're saying that non-native folks can just institute their own Dreaming laws.
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Apr 16, 2018 06:24
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Nessus posted:Are there any commonly used native Australian terms you could use directly? Not terribly easily, no. Dreaming/Dreamtime is useful as a broad gloss, even if it's a misleading one, because all the different incarnations of what we use the word for are subtly distinct in important ways. There are often twenty or thirty words in the languages for concepts we just call 'Dreaming', and while most of the 300-odd languages are extinct or poorly documented, it remains difficult to find a commonly agreed on word that'd fit. I could use Pitjantjara words but I'm not too familiar with them (I've stuck to trying to learn the local language and some of the neighbouring ones) and I'd be concerned about using the wrong one. What I'm currently doing is establishing a clear demarcation between Dreaming, referring to the actual Dreaming, and dreaming with a lower case d for the game's 'dreaming', or where more distinction is needed, dropping in a 'changeling' before it. It's a little clunky but if I keep it consistent it should hopefully work.
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Apr 16, 2018 06:33
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Loomer posted:Not terribly easily, no. Dreaming/Dreamtime is useful as a broad gloss, even if it's a misleading one, because all the different incarnations of what we use the word for are subtly distinct in important ways. There are often twenty or thirty words in the languages for concepts we just call 'Dreaming', and while most of the 300-odd languages are extinct or poorly documented, it remains difficult to find a commonly agreed on word that'd fit. I could use Pitjantjara words but I'm not too familiar with them (I've stuck to trying to learn the local language and some of the neighbouring ones) and I'd be concerned about using the wrong one. I'm not even clear if this was for oChangeling or nChangeling!
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Apr 16, 2018 06:43
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Nessus posted:Makes sense, and given the context you don't want to pick out a frequent term and use it like "Honor" or whatever in the ~oriental adventures~. oChangeling, of course. I somehow doubt it'd be the same issue with nChangeling, between the uluru thing and the book being dedicated to McFarland.
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Apr 16, 2018 06:44
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One thing I can't figure out is, is there a concerted effort to move away from drawing inspiration from real world indigenous practices post-God Machine Chronicle, or are the authors just drawing from sources I don't immediately recognize?
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Apr 16, 2018 18:51
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PHIZ KALIFA posted:One thing I can't figure out is, is there a concerted effort to move away from drawing inspiration from real world indigenous practices post-God Machine Chronicle, or are the authors just drawing from sources I don't immediately recognize?
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Apr 17, 2018 01:33
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I don't even mind drawing inspiration if they do it well. Like, Uluru is played out as a thing to pick, but if you do there's all kinds of angles you can work in just by actually acknowledging the taboos of the site and the climbing ban. Things like clashes between chimerical 'ideals' of the Great White Explorer and the local tjukurpa spirits becoming increasingly violent due to the debate around whether it's okay to climb the rock or not, resurgence of some of the tjurkupa but not others when the site is featured in international media, questions of what to do with the male changeling who trespasses into secret women's business but had no way of knowing he was (kill him or severely wound him would be appropriate, but then there are questions as to whether you can hold what is essentially an idiot child truly responsible and whether it's appropriate to the spirit of the Law), etc. Half my irritation at the writing of it is that not only is it disrespectful - it's supremely lazy. It's squandering the possibilities of picking that specific area in favour of ideas that are as generic as gently caress ('oh no things invade from the deep dreaming; oh no the local prince wants to seize the glade and make it a freehold; oh no I have to go on a quest, come with me so my friends can stay here and defend the place') while completely ignoring the complex and controversial issues around the site. They're just picking it because, gee, that's a cool lookin' rock, right? New Scion's seeming to be mostly a good example. It doesn't go 'cool we want to just pick Aesthetic and ignore the rest', it goes 'we want the rest, arguably more than we want the Aesthetic.'
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Apr 17, 2018 08:37
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Loomer posted:New Scion's seeming to be mostly a good example. It doesn't go 'cool we want to just pick Aesthetic and ignore the rest', it goes 'we want the rest, arguably more than we want the Aesthetic.' Like there are compromises but they seem to be more "the premise of the setting involves this broad macro-concepts" and those concepts are more like "a formalized recognition of stories existing" than "Joseph Campbell must be constantly praised." Is Vegemite Banal?
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Apr 17, 2018 09:04
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Nessus posted:Yeah Scion would absolutely be about what you're describing; probably the biggest challenge is that I don't know if there is a clear "Pantheon" that could be situated in Australia, but I imagine something could be drafted since "god" is kind of a nebulous figure in the setting's systems. (Confucius is a god despite his complaints on the matter.) It'd be tricky, and made trickier by a lot of the traditional practices being either extinct or completely secret business not for outsiders, giving an incomplete picture to say the least, mixed in with all kinds of taboos over who can use what motifs and designs and poo poo. That being said, I think the Dreaming as a sort of broad encompassing concept - the whitefella idea of the dreaming, to an extent - may actually play very nicely with Scion, given the nature of a lot of the stories - men becoming animals, animals becoming men, hills being made by children playing with clay, and everything sort of sharing the same divine nature to an extent, all dovetail quite nicely with playing children/chosen of gods and archetypes. It'd be best to divide the continent's peoples into some major language clusters and then give them each distinct pantheons drawing from the most common figures in the stories of the relevant peoples, coupled with some colonist figures on the fringe. It does mean you might wind up with the scions of six different Rainbow Serpents yelling at each other over who made the Murray while the confused incarnation of the Whitefella's idea of the Murray scratches his head before loving off for a smoke, but to be honest that seems like a feature, not a bug, when it comes to Scion. The reactions we get out of foreigners using vegemite render it too much a source of laughter to ever be banal.
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Apr 17, 2018 09:27
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Loomer posted:It'd be tricky, and made trickier by a lot of the traditional practices being either extinct or completely secret business not for outsiders, giving an incomplete picture to say the least, mixed in with all kinds of taboos over who can use what motifs and designs and poo poo. That being said, I think the Dreaming as a sort of broad encompassing concept - the whitefella idea of the dreaming, to an extent - may actually play very nicely with Scion, given the nature of a lot of the stories - men becoming animals, animals becoming men, hills being made by children playing with clay, and everything sort of sharing the same divine nature to an extent, all dovetail quite nicely with playing children/chosen of gods and archetypes. It'd be best to divide the continent's peoples into some major language clusters and then give them each distinct pantheons drawing from the most common figures in the stories of the relevant peoples, coupled with some colonist figures on the fringe. It does mean you might wind up with the scions of six different Rainbow Serpents yelling at each other over who made the Murray while the confused incarnation of the Whitefella's idea of the Murray scratches his head before loving off for a smoke, but to be honest that seems like a feature, not a bug, when it comes to Scion. That said Scion as a game line would probably be like "sure, have six Rainbows Serpent, why the Christ not" and start contemplating just how big a monitor lizard can get.
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Apr 17, 2018 09:42
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Since I cannot escape the man, I'm morbidly curious. How in depth is this dedication to McFarland in "Imperialism in Australian Dreams"?
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Apr 17, 2018 15:05
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