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Has anyone had any experience using Holden Shearer's Powered by the Dark stuff to run oWOD games in a PBTA framework? The VtM one can be found here, the rest are also free on his Patreon. I'm thinking about using it for a discord PbP game with some friends, but wanted to see if anyone else looked at it, discovered any pitfalls, etc.
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Oct 17, 2018 19:15
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Loomer posted:It's a lesson even WW learned by about, uh, around 1997-8, when they stopped going 'there are exactly 20 black furies in this town, and 7 bone gnawers there, and...' and just went 'yeah there's like, 200 or some poo poo, who knows. Here are the interesting ones, make the rest up, change it however you need'. I remember calling it out but the black furies explicitly state that there are only 25 members of the tribe in Australia, and 15 of them are specifically in places that aren't the two caerns on opposite sides of the continent that they are supposed to be in charge of.
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Oct 17, 2018 19:19
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Mors Rattus posted:Unless you go near Alice Springs, which is a hellhole and has crazy Fire-Touched. TELL ME ABOUT AYERS ROCK. I am sure it's a place of Great Dreamtime Energy etc.
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Oct 17, 2018 19:48
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Loomer posted:It's a lesson even WW learned by about, uh, around 1997-8, when they stopped going 'there are exactly 20 black furies in this town, and 7 bone gnawers there, and...' and just went 'yeah there's like, 200 or some poo poo, who knows. Here are the interesting ones, make the rest up, change it however you need'. Ars Magica has this same problem. Once, I put together all the demographics across the books for each Tribunal and compared them to the total population numbers for the Order and each House and... there need to be like 2-3 times more wizards for everything to actually make sense. Specifically Ireland is woefully underpopulated for the complex factional dynamics they're trying to have
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Oct 17, 2018 19:56
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Dawgstar posted:TELL ME ABOUT AYERS ROCK. Uluru is barely mentioned, except insofar as the Outback areas in general are full of large and powerful spirits. The Alice, though, is a bad place.
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Oct 17, 2018 20:03
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Mors Rattus posted:Uluru is barely mentioned, except insofar as the Outback areas in general are full of large and powerful spirits. I'm going to call that progress.
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Oct 17, 2018 20:37
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Dawgstar posted:I'm going to call that progress. It's an improvement from W:TA and the Uktenna murdering all the bunyip and telling the Aboriginals that the bunyip died fighting the wyrm but don't worry the Uktenna will take care of them. Because the Bunyip wouldn't let the Uktenna onto their sacred land, you see.
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Oct 17, 2018 20:55
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Read Richard Matheson’s “Shipshape Home” and had to check and make sure I wasn’t reading a CoD fiction collection
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Oct 17, 2018 20:58
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Kurieg posted:It's an improvement from W:TA and the Uktenna murdering all the bunyip and telling the Aboriginals that the bunyip died fighting the wyrm but don't worry the Uktenna will take care of them. Because the Bunyip wouldn't let the Uktenna onto their sacred land, you see. And because they were apparently secretly jealous of their massive dongs. That's one of the oddest gotchas I've come across in cWoD.
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Oct 17, 2018 21:04
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The Changeling posted:Has anyone had any experience using Holden Shearer's Powered by the Dark stuff to run oWOD games in a PBTA framework? The VtM one can be found here, the rest are also free on his Patreon. I haven't used them myself, but after following the link and checking them out, I'm extremely interested in trying them out, if you're looking to run a game
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Oct 17, 2018 22:44
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Dawgstar posted:And because they were apparently secretly jealous of their massive dongs. People keep saying this but I'm not sure I believe it, even for WoD. I probably *should*, but I don't.
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Oct 17, 2018 23:36
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Mors Rattus posted:The Alice, though, is a bad place. I think I said this before but yeah, basically when you have the Pure openly putting up recruitment posters you deserve whatever you get for staying put.  Also Dawgstar posted:And because they were apparently secretly jealous of their massive dongs. What?
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Oct 17, 2018 23:39
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nofather posted:What? quote:Staunch defenders of marsupials, however, claim the qualities of marsupials have been given too little consideration, simply because they apparently lost the evolutionary race with placentals. Some of these biologists say this defamation stems from "pouch envy" and the fact that marsupial males' genitalia are much bigger in comparison to those of placental males. The Bunyip, by the way, bred with marsupials... Kurieg posted:And places that revelation opposite this piece of art.
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Oct 17, 2018 23:48
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I caved and bought V:tM5e, mostly to see how the canon has advanced. Book is messy, but production feels nice, I suppose?
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Oct 18, 2018 00:35
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I'm not even going to bother to imagine why 'pouch envy' is a thing.
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Oct 18, 2018 01:29
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Closed by the Fur Affinity mods after 12,000 pages of heated debate, the greatest thread ever, "Pouch Envy is Real" is considered one of the defining debates of our generation by most scholars & experts in the field
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Oct 18, 2018 03:05
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I'm still stuck in the early years doing the werewolf clean up, which is part of why it's dragging. I have to recheck all the lovely old books for dates and clarifying unclear entries from before I really systematized the data entry process so it suuucks. I actually had to reread Rage Across Australia like, three weeks ago as part of it.
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Oct 18, 2018 03:09
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Alice Springs IRL is probably just as bad as the one in CofD.
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Oct 18, 2018 03:16
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bewilderment posted:Alice Springs IRL is probably just as bad as the one in CofD. My partner lived until recently in a part of Queensland only a stone's throw from being Bumfuck Nowhere, and believe me when I say it sounds like most of rural Australia would give Unknown Armies and Kvlt a run for their money in the bleak, horrible weirdness department. She has multiple anecdotes that involve meth shacks exploding, and one popular local hobby was to steal the concrete testicles off a statue of a bull. They kept replacing them, see, but then people would steal them again, so they eventually stuck giant metal rods in them to deter theft. It apparently didn't work.
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Oct 18, 2018 03:27
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Daeren posted:My partner lived until recently in a part of Queensland only a stone's throw from being Bumfuck Nowhere, and believe me when I say it sounds like most of rural Australia would give Unknown Armies and Kvlt a run for their money in the bleak, horrible weirdness department. She has multiple anecdotes that involve meth shacks exploding, and one popular local hobby was to steal the concrete testicles off a statue of a bull. They kept replacing them, see, but then people would steal them again, so they eventually stuck giant metal rods in them to deter theft. The balls on those people.
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Oct 18, 2018 03:31
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I think I've read a doujin with that premise.
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Oct 18, 2018 03:31
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I mean, even as someone in suburban Queensland (Once again, let's game QLD goons) we specialise in having some very weird poo poo that only seems weirder in a World of Darkness. Can you imagine the WoD version of Fortitude Valley?
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Oct 18, 2018 03:35
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Yeah, small town Australia can be loving dark. While we're a very wealthy nation nearly all that wealth is in the major cities and on the coast, so when you go inland it can swiftly get straight into a gothic horror novel. Unsurprisingly, Australian Gothic is a whole thing and there's a huge undercurrent of it in a lot of Aussie works, and has been since the beginning. The sheer emptiness alone is terrifying in its own right, for those not prepared for it. You want really hosed, check out some of the FIFO worker towns - they go from like, 10,000 to 1,000 over the space of a week or two when the work drops off, like the eeriest loving ghost towns filled with the huge amounts of negative energy created when thousands of greedy, desperate men and women sever their social networks and supports to go work in the mines or fracking, and emerge into a culture of violence, misogyny, and drug and alcohol abuse on an epic scale. If that isn't a natural setting for a Werewolf chronicle of either stripe, I don't know what is.
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Oct 18, 2018 03:38
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poo poo, what does it do for the local supply of Pathos and Glamour when that happens? Some good stories they're.
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Oct 18, 2018 03:40
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Imagine the Vampire power dynamic in those towns.
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Oct 18, 2018 03:44
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Throw in the Theosophist's hope that Australia would be the birthplace of the new kind of Man and you can cast all of it into the terms of a great battle between those who seek to keep man bound to greed and those hoping to elevate us if you're doing Mage. Those FIFO worker towns become the latest battle site between mammon and his enemies, cancerous growths that threaten to derail the entirety of human spiritual evolution.
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Oct 18, 2018 03:44
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Kaza42 posted:Ars Magica has this same problem. Once, I put together all the demographics across the books for each Tribunal and compared them to the total population numbers for the Order and each House and... there need to be like 2-3 times more wizards for everything to actually make sense. Specifically Ireland is woefully underpopulated for the complex factional dynamics they're trying to have Never underestimate the power of academia to have pointlessly overcomplicated politics.
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Oct 18, 2018 04:22
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Anyone interested in the horror potential should watch one of the few greats of Aussie cinema, Wake in Fright (which was also remade very recently as a TV miniseries). My partner put it on to watch as a horror movie, and I joked as it started "heh, the real horror is just living in outback Australia". Yeah, no, that's actually the movie. The real horror is just living in outback Australia. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oqWvWR8KYFw There's barely anything dated about it, those places are still like that today. One of the scariest lines in the movie is just the other 'educated', 'sympathetic' character in the movie saying "It's possible to live forever in The Yabba without money. As you probably noticed, some of the natives are very... hospitable." with the undertones that the place is like an endless hell. MonsieurChoc posted:Never underestimate the power of academia to have pointlessly overcomplicated politics. I'm basically taking out the role of "Provost" in my campaign because the idea that there are councilors but then those councilors have someone else to actually do things for them seems kinda nutso in anything beyond super-metropolises. Five-ish councilors (including a hierarch) Five provosts I dunno how many heralds, like three ish? A cabal's worth of sentinels That's already like 20 mages with Consilium positions in any city. Provosts are the easiest ones to ditch, just combine them with either sentinels or the councilors themselves depending. bewilderment fucked around with this message at 04:34 on Oct 18, 2018 |
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Oct 18, 2018 04:30
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As an American, I feel the strong urge to "anything you can do we can do better," so I'd like to point at Wind River (2017) for the "deserted company town out in the middle of nowhere" vibe and Hold The Dark (2018) for the "life at the savage edge bleeding into evil leftover from how brutally white people colonized the place" vibes. Wake in Fright sounds great though, and is going on my list, thanks for shouting it out. To be fair, Hold The Dark is set in Alaska, but Wind River is in the continental states and still has that good good desolation. Also to be fair, I'd 1000 times rather be stuck in the middle of Alaska than the middle of the outback. Your whole continent seems like it was designed to murder people.
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Oct 18, 2018 04:47
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PHIZ KALIFA posted:Closed by the Fur Affinity mods after 12,000 pages of heated debate, the greatest thread ever, "Pouch Envy is Real" is considered one of the defining debates of our generation by most scholars & experts in the field You joke, but there was a guy who got banned from Shadownessence because of his rather... militant belief that since Garou could breed with Dingos they should be able to breed with domestic dogs.
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Oct 18, 2018 04:59
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Kurieg posted:You joke, but there was a guy who got banned from Shadownessence because of his rather... militant belief that since Garou could breed with Dingos they should be able to breed with domestic dogs. ...Why is that important? Are Werewolves going around 'ensuring the next generation of soldiers against corruption' at all times? 
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Oct 18, 2018 05:07
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Crasical posted:...Why is that important? Are Werewolves going around 'ensuring the next generation of soldiers against corruption' at all times?
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Oct 18, 2018 05:11
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I honestly could not tell you. Near as we can tell it was either anger that Dingos were somehow "better" than dogs, or that dogs weren't "good enough" for gaia.Nessus posted:What Auspice is Zapp Brannigan A braggadocious lothario that will end up getting everyone killed? Galliard.
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Oct 18, 2018 05:13
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Now, in fairness, being able to mate successfully with domestic dogs would be a huge boost to the Garou's potential breeding capacity. Lupus garou mature much more quickly and fight just as well as anyone else, so if it could be done it'd be great. You get both an enormously expanded breeding pool and a decrease in the lag time to both reproductive capacity and fighting capacity from like, 16 years to 2 or so.
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Oct 18, 2018 05:14
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It seems like domestic dogs would have too much, like, Weaver Juice in them to actually produce a Garou, though.
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Oct 18, 2018 05:17
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Kurieg posted:You joke, but there was a guy who got banned from Shadownessence because of his rather... militant belief that since Garou could breed with Dingos they should be able to breed with domestic dogs. Zereth, ironically debating Garou breeding is still debating Garou breeding. Let's not repeat mistakes, unlike the Garou, whomst can only repeat mistakes.
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Oct 18, 2018 06:02
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PHIZ KALIFA posted:Zereth, ironically debating Garou breeding is still debating Garou breeding. Let's not repeat mistakes, unlike the Garou, whomst can only repeat mistakes. When I say militant I mean Militant. He would derail tangentially related threads to talk about his pet issue and would brook no argument that wasn't tacit agreement. Considering the only other people I know that got banned were a guy who literally wished death upon the children of White Wolf developers for not hand delivering M20: This Time With More Steampunk to his door, and a guy who said that the best way to help out rape victims in your gaming group was to surprise them with a rape scenario in game so they'd get over it(He also loved Clanbook:Baali) it should speak to how strongly he believed that Garou should be able to breed with fido.
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Oct 18, 2018 06:18
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I think we found the target audience for staghorn mcbigdong.
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Oct 18, 2018 06:20
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Digital Osmosis posted:As an American, I feel the strong urge to "anything you can do we can do better," so I'd like to point at Wind River (2017) for the "deserted company town out in the middle of nowhere" vibe and Hold The Dark (2018) for the "life at the savage edge bleeding into evil leftover from how brutally white people colonized the place" vibes. Wake in Fright sounds great though, and is going on my list, thanks for shouting it out. I would say that visually, a key difference between Wind River (which is a good movie that I have seen) and Wake In Fright is that you can make an argument that (especially when snowy) that the locales have a "stark beauty" to them. As an Australian, I say desert outback Australia has nothing beautiful about it, it's just hot and hellishly empty in every direction. There's nothing particularly savage about it, either. The USA still has bears and wolves and even angry moose. Nothing in outback Australia will actually kill you viciously like that - sure, you might die of a snakebite or spider bite, but they're not quite the kind of things you build bulwarks against. No spooky trees or unknown caves or lonely mountaintops. Just emptiness. The drug and alcohol abuse themes are there in both, though.
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Oct 18, 2018 08:03
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White Australians also have a much more hostile relationship with the land, if we're being honest. Most (white) Americans are descended from people who voluntarily went, whether it was as settlers or traders or even indentured servants, whether recently or four hundred years ago. While most Aussies also descend from those who chose to come here, our national identity is tied up in the Convict Story - where we were a bunch of mostly urban people who did something wrong and were exiled to hell. We didn't get to choose, we got shoved here whether we liked it or not, and what we got was a place where all the animals are weird, the seasons are backwards, the sky burns above us and the land catches fire yearly, and where the closest thing to 'civilization' (in the Western sense) was a brutal penal colony where our forebears were sometimes literally tortured to death, routinely worked to death, often murdered for looking at someone wrong, and where the only women to be seen were either convicts, prostitutes, or missionaries for years. We're also haunted by the guilt and horror that comes from having committed one of the most effective genocides in human history (you can see it in how defensive many of us get around things like Australia Day or Native Title), so we simultaneously inherit a legacy of being the victim and the monster. We were chewed up and spit out by the industrialized horrors of industry, and then in turn, we murdered and raped hundreds of thousands of people in a blind attempt to prove we were worthy of the label of 'civilized'. There's a deep, deep root in the White Australian psyche that springs out of these origins, and it conspires with the emptiness to make the great empty spaces sinister. It's slowly fading out and being replaced by a sense of identity as belonging here rather than being fundamentally alien to the land and vice versa, but that's only really begun to take shape over the last 20 years outside of specifically localized identities with the family farm, etc. You have to remember, (non-Indigenous) Australia is a very young country, and many settled areas were completely untouched except for the Indigenous peoples until late in the 1800s. That also leads us to a weird mix of racism, superstition and respect, where extremely racist old farmers won't go near a certain hill because an old black fella told them a Bad Story about it once and they aren't willing to test their luck, or where they plan out their flood and fire plans according to what people they wouldn't give the time of day told them about mythic flood stories.
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Oct 18, 2018 09:08
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