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Slimnoid posted:So wait, where is Jesus's write-up in oWoD? He never had a full one, just references here and there and a story in Dark Destiny 2, the second of the anthologies written by writers with only a loose grip of the setting in 1994, 1995, and 1996. They're actually pretty fun reads on the whole. Notably, Dark Destiny 1 was chosen by Swedracula to be the first reissued oWoD item, so they're clearly near and dear to nuWolf's heart, and now they have the official WoD stamp to boot.
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May 4, 2018 17:34
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Now I'm trying to remember if they ever gave Caine a character sheet. He didn't have any stats in Gehenna. Yeesh, a lot of Gehenna is the PCs watching meta-powerful NPCs fight, or fighting those that have been brought down to fightable level by the Red Star, but still without stats.
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May 4, 2018 17:36
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Halloween Jack posted:Now I'm trying to remember if they ever gave Caine a character sheet. He didn't have any stats in Gehenna. Didn't he famously have a sheet that just listed all his combat stats as 'you lose'?
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May 4, 2018 17:37
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The sheet that says "You loving lose" is a proto-meme from MrGone's page. But I think Gehenna has a note that flatly tells you that if you fight Caine, you lose.
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May 4, 2018 17:41
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Halloween Jack posted:Now I'm trying to remember if they ever gave Caine a character sheet. He didn't have any stats in Gehenna. I loved Gehenna but it would mostly be the GM reading you cutscenes while your cool 8th Gen Vampire Neonates watch.
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May 4, 2018 18:13
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Mors Rattus posted:e: honestly, 'Cain is a vampire' is a pretty Christian mythological take, too, though prior to Dracula it'd be more commonly 'Cain is an immortal fae thing'.
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May 4, 2018 18:31
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Couple of quick charts while I grapple with some less than friendly anomalies in the data. Antiquity to modern nights is skipped in uncertains because it had over 9000 entries. The uncertains are of more utility when it comes to potential survivors of the middle ages than of antiquity because of how they are used. Basically, vampires fall into one of three categories for an era. Certain active (includes torpor, so it's more just 'did it exist?' than 'was he eating people?'), uncertain, and certain non-active. Uncertains could either be likely - e.g. the vampire embraced in 1475 probably had a sire who existed in 1400 - or extremely unlikely (the no known detail unnamed shovelhead could, feasibly, be a methuselah in disguise, but definitely isn't. But because no other information exists, he's listed as unknown for all categories except 1900 - 2004) with the end result being that 'active from antiquity to now' is hugely bloated by uncertains. When we exclude uncertains we get a more strongly demarcated and probably more useful setup, but it's useful elsewhere to have the uncertains - e.g. listing vampires active in the 1800s, possibly active in the 1600s, and definitely not active in the 1200s.  Why's there a big swell for the middle ages? Well, for the simple reason that we had a lot of books set between 500 and 1450, so we fall into our overrepresentation trap. Fun fact - if we take all those known to have been active in that time period as our sort of abstracted example size (nevermind half died early, etc), and apply it to a European population total at 1230AD of 70 million, we get a rough ratio of 1:18,900 - roughly half of what we should be seeing. Do the same for c. 1850, it's 1.2 billion worldwide, giving us a known ratio of only 1:738,000, which admittedly is complicated by the lack of cainites in Asia and Africa at the time. For the modern world as of 2004 (6.39B), using all 20th-21st century pops, our known ratio excluding population entries, comes out to some 1:740,500. We have, at most, something like a 15th of the world's 'proper' ratio, and of the stated population of 40,000, only some 22%. The most populous modern settlement using the same abstraction and a census date of as close to 2000 as possible is Mexico City, at some 500 cainites, for a ratio of 1:36,914. NYC is a close second, 396 - 1:20,200. LA, 295 not including KJ, 1:12,555 or 1:42,000 if we consider the greater metropolitan area. Chicago, 1:12,700 city only or 1:40,850 metropolitan. Paris, 1:13,000 or 1:59,000. To go to some different areas and not just densest, Boston's 60 sit at some 1:9819 or 1:73,000 (but most of the rest of MAss should also be added to that one, the state ratio as a whole is 1:67,500.) Brisbane, Australia is at 1:40,000.
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May 4, 2018 18:34
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Halloween Jack posted:I haven't studied it as much as some people, but I don't think you can really reconcile the cosmologies of the different oWoD games. In the Ars Magica cosmology you have the Divine and Infernal Realms opposed to each other, and then the Magic and Fae realms as a sort of orthogonal axis to that. (This is a convenient way of having pagan mythology and Platonist cosmology being both real and not-real for the purposes of the setting at the same time: all those legends happened, but the gods involved weren't the "real gods" but were powerful Faerie entities, and likewise the Platonist conception of the realm of archetypes has actual reality as the Magic Realm.) Once you grasp that, it's surprisingly easy to peg various WoD games as relying more on one axis or the other. Vampire and Demon both very much work on the Infernal/Divine axis (note how often outright demonic entities show up in Vampire); Werewolf, Mage, and Changeling, on the other hand, tend to sit on the Magic/Faerie axis, with Mages being more to the Magic end, woofles being more to the Faerie end, and Changelings naturally being butt-deep in the Faerie Realm. Hunters more or less pop up anywhere; Wraith doesn't quite fit into any of them but that sort of fits the Wraith underworld as being this weird sort of waystation where people seem to be hanging around with no higher powers taking responsibility for them. (Presumably if you go to one of those far shore afterlife realms it resembles the afterlife you were angling for.)
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May 4, 2018 18:36
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In practice it feels more like the Mage cosmology subsumes everything into it, with Kindred and Garou and their respective mythos just being weird little corners of a kitchen-sink universe that has unicorns and cyborgs innit.
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May 4, 2018 18:42
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Halloween Jack posted:In practice it feels more like the Mage cosmology subsumes everything into it, with Kindred and Garou and their respective mythos just being weird little corners of a kitchen-sink universe that has unicorns and cyborgs innit. Though that would be remarkably clever and insightful for old school White Wolf to set up intentionally.
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May 4, 2018 18:47
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Wasn't Kupala retconned as an Earthbound, more or less?
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May 4, 2018 18:56
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More or less, yes, though not with any great certainty.
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May 4, 2018 18:58
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One of my favorite things about Demon the Fallen is that the demons are freaked out about vampires because they didn't create them. Then they learn their origins and go "YEP, sounds like something God would do."
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May 4, 2018 19:07
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Mage cosmology subsumes everything in the sense that mages put a name to anything, but it doesn't subsume everything in the sense that anything with its own book behaves the way Mage cosmology implies it should.
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May 4, 2018 19:26
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Mage cosmology has always been of the same credibility guy writing you as a Nigerian Prince asking for your bank info. In some paradigms, it might actually be true.
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May 4, 2018 20:32
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ZearothK posted:I thought Jesus was a Risen.
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May 4, 2018 20:40
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Uh the best wod fiction is eternal hearts i think you'll find
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May 4, 2018 20:56
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Werewolf's cosmology is also pretty accepting of basically everything except for Demons, which I'm not sure ever got an explanation beyond "Shits freaky yo."
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May 4, 2018 21:00
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Garou have a place for everything in their worldview because when in doubt, it's of the Wyrm.
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May 4, 2018 21:02
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They're reasonably certain that Changelings are of the Wyld in some fashion, or at least Gaian. But they aren't sure of the specifics how. Also Hunters are distinctly not wyrmtainted but they're not sure what they are.
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May 4, 2018 21:10
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Kurieg posted:They're reasonably certain that Changelings are of the Wyld in some fashion, or at least Gaian. But they aren't sure of the specifics how.
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May 4, 2018 21:22
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Nessus posted:You know, I just got the idea of a party in a World of Darkness game having to deal with some kind of spirit outbreak problem which is initially comparable to whatever they're used to but ultimately comes down to "these things are the blunt instruments of an Author attempting to Fix or Make Sense of the Universe, largely through murder and humiliation." I suppose that'd be a nWoD True Fae, perhaps.
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May 4, 2018 21:31
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Nessus posted:You know, I just got the idea of a party in a World of Darkness game having to deal with some kind of spirit outbreak problem which is initially comparable to whatever they're used to but ultimately comes down to "these things are the blunt instruments of an Author attempting to Fix or Make Sense of the Universe, largely through murder and humiliation." I suppose that'd be a nWoD True Fae, perhaps. Godmachine as author trying to retcon something it doesn't approve of?
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May 4, 2018 21:42
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Kurieg posted:Godmachine as author trying to retcon something it doesn't approve of?
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May 4, 2018 21:54
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I wonder if they will ever do a Hunter20 at some point. Hunter was one of the big games that I could convince people to actually try out that were not deep into WoD.
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May 4, 2018 22:01
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Rand Brittain posted:Mage cosmology subsumes everything in the sense that mages put a name to anything, but it doesn't subsume everything in the sense that anything with its own book behaves the way Mage cosmology implies it should. That or all the other cosmologies are proof that you can get away with a hell of a lot of poo poo so long as you construct a worldview where Paradox doesn't exist.
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May 4, 2018 22:03
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Nessus posted:Kind of - although the idea I had had, is that the main antagonist is trying to do this, and meeting with some success, but since they aren't actually a god or the author of objective reality, it's causing a poo poo-ton of problems and complications even before you get at what their desired end state is. I'm not sure how well this plays with the God-machine stuff but most of my backing is in oWoD; I could see this broad concept working for any splat, although the nature would of course vary drastically. It having a comprehensible overall goal would be new, though. To the point it's an open question in Demon society if it even has one, let alone what it is, and they're the people best informed about the God-Machine who aren't Angels still working for it.
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May 4, 2018 22:47
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Kurieg posted:Godmachine as author trying to retcon something it doesn't approve of? A Malkavian methusela starts writing Gary Stu fic about himself, reality warps to accommodate.
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May 4, 2018 22:49
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the ineffability of the demiurge, rather than yahweh
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May 4, 2018 22:52
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Zereth posted:(possibly literally, the God-Machine is very physical.) That's one of the bits of Demon that I really love. Yes there's a massive, world-spanning cosmic threat in this setting, but if you try hard enough you can find a bit of it and run a tractor-trailer full of explosives into it.
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May 4, 2018 22:52
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Zereth posted:Well, God-Machine stuff can have weird side effects even when there aren't PCs throwing wrenches in the works. (possibly literally, the God-Machine is very physical.) I'd argue they know more about it than Angels do, since Angels seldom ask questions about it and If they do, they tend to end up as Demons.
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May 4, 2018 23:01
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Lord_Hambrose posted:I wonder if they will ever do a Hunter20 at some point. Hunter was one of the big games that I could convince people to actually try out that were not deep into WoD. All this Reckoning talk got me to re-read my old books. Still loving it. I'm still missing a few to have a full collection though.
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May 4, 2018 23:13
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Kurieg posted:Werewolf's cosmology is also pretty accepting of basically everything except for Demons, which I'm not sure ever got an explanation beyond "Shits freaky yo." It's accepting in the sense that Werewolves are both morons and religious fanatics, so they just yell "Weaver, Wyld, Wyrm" at things and stop thinking about it. And if they can't slot it into one of those things.....they stop thinking about it. Like they don't really think about the implications of the Fae or Wraiths or any of that poo poo. It has nothing to do with their world view so they largely ignore it. It's profoundly easily to have a comprehensive world view when your default answers are "Kill it" or "I don't give a poo poo".
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May 5, 2018 00:22
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Kurieg posted:Werewolf's cosmology is also pretty accepting of basically everything except for Demons, which I'm not sure ever got an explanation beyond "Shits freaky yo." Stargazer Revised had a camp dedicated to fighting Demons. They didn't have a big write-up though.
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May 5, 2018 00:27
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MonsieurChoc posted:Stargazer Revised had a camp dedicated to fighting Demons. They didn't have a big write-up though. They're called the Demon Eaters but what they're described as fighting doesn't really fit the capital D "Demons" very well. Also Stargazers Revised hovers somewhere just above CoG Revised in terms of quality.
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May 5, 2018 00:42
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MonsieurChoc posted:All this Reckoning talk got me to re-read my old books. Still loving it. I love the... can't remember the name of it now, but it's the one that takes a look at the world continent by continent strictly via a local Imbued's perspective. Great read. Also Avenger, Wayward, and the one that focuses on the zombies/ghosts and has "Sheep with shotguns" Carpenter join the Hunter mailing list. Kurieg posted:Also Stargazers Revised hovers somewhere just above CoG Revised in terms of quality. Agreed, although I recall it more being plain boring than CoG's offensive. Also looking it up just now I think I'm startled Chuck Wendig wrote it. Not somebody I'd expect to whiff so hard.
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May 5, 2018 01:51
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What was bad about CoG Revised?
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May 5, 2018 02:00
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There's a FATAL & Friends. Give it a read.
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May 5, 2018 02:23
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Dawgstar posted:Agreed, although I recall it more being plain boring than CoG's offensive. Nessus posted:What was bad about CoG Revised? They let the guy who wrote Breedbook Mokole and contributed to Freak Legion solo write the book about the pacifist tribe. It opens in media res at the 1999 Seattle WTO Protests before cutting back to Woodstock 1999. The POV character is a gay ~16 year old homid Ahroun that's in a relationship with their lupus Theurge. The author includes his friends' playtest characters as self inserts throughout the book. The book includes a gift that lets you literally gently caress someone until they're healthy, also a rite called the "Rite of Clouds and Rain" that consists solely of having an orgy in Crinos form. http://projects.inklesspen.com/fatal-and-friends/kurieg/tribebook-children-of-gaia/ Kurieg fucked around with this message at 02:30 on May 5, 2018 |
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May 5, 2018 02:28
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Oh poo poo. There's a bunch of debate over what splat Jesus was. Who is the only other figure who provokes this kind of debate? Rasputin. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=__HBBf_eDLM
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