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Tias posted:After I selected my country, it said shipping would be 45 drat. Maybe just wait wait for PoD? Though if you go premium heavyweight print it might not make much difference. You might check out some of the other core books on DTRPG just to see what the price would be. Roland Jones posted:This crossover talk is making me think about looking at the same thing except for CoD. It's been a while since I read some of their things, though, or I just never did, so I can't remember some stuff and am not sure if it's any better there; some seem like they'd work fine, like Prometheans being able to fit into whatever with little issue because their "grandest" thing, the Principle, is a mystery even to them does doesn't seem to do much anyway, and whether the God-Machine exists or not doesn't affect most other lines since it can just be doing its thing in the background and is probably a demiurge figure rather than the true creator even in its own lore. On the other hand Beast's lore makes everyone else (except Demons) much less interesting if it's true, but that's because Beast is dumb and terrible. Yeah, though you can pick out deep lore from them, the CoD games benefit a lot from keeping the True History pretty unreliable or at least vague. Even when they do stuff like Sundered World, they only go so far back as to be right after the fall from grace for both involved games, without disappearing up its own butt explaining Atlantis created Father Wolf or Father Wolf taught humans supernal magic or whatever thing that's totally cool to do at one table but not at all the tables.
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Nov 29, 2018 12:39
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Roland Jones posted:whether the God-Machine exists or not doesn't affect most other lines Like, on an individual level, a person can be screwed over by an angel replacing them for some inscrutable design down the line, but that's just fluff for random NPCs. For other splats, the effective result is a moment of paranoid horror when Suckyfang McDaeva realizes "wtf, my ghoul was a robot imposter all this time and I never noticed. What is up with that?" It won't actively come after you the way the Exarchs are a game-shaping setting fact for Mages, though.
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Nov 29, 2018 12:44
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The only good crossover game is Hunter (because having a myriad of different kinds of monsters pop up to deal with is kinda its deal). I like having werewolves as a mysterious menace in my Vampire or vampires as a corrupt blight on a city in my Werewolf, but I don't see the point in worrying about if my Werewolves finding out that vampires believe they descend from literal Caine. Why would a Vampire care what alien spirits told a bunch of animal men about creation myths? Mage is a different kettle of fish because knowing the secret truth of reality is kinda the point. Other supernatural may know more about the universe than the average person, but they don't get to view it with the enlightened mind of a person who can change reality at a whim. Beast is the game mixed group players deserve.
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Nov 29, 2018 13:07
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quote:Mage is a different kettle of fish because knowing the secret truth of reality is kinda the point. Compared to nMage's "there used to be a place called Atlantis and everything was awesome, now Atlantis is gone and everything sucks" theosophy knockoff setting, it makes you feel so much more like your character actually matters that it isn't even funny.
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Nov 29, 2018 13:19
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Roland Jones posted:This crossover talk is making me think about looking at the same thing except for CoD. It's been a while since I read some of their things, though, or I just never did, so I can't remember some stuff and am not sure if it's any better there; some seem like they'd work fine, like Prometheans being able to fit into whatever with little issue because their "grandest" thing, the Principle, is a mystery even to them does doesn't seem to do much anyway, and whether the God-Machine exists or not doesn't affect most other lines since it can just be doing its thing in the background and is probably a demiurge figure rather than the true creator even in its own lore. On the other hand Beast's lore makes everyone else (except Demons) much less interesting if it's true, but that's because Beast is dumb and terrible. Beasts are deluded in a way that means their schtick still works - they're partially astral beings, and the Primordial Mother is the god-Ranked Goetia of "Fear," so she has the relationship to monsters they claim without it being *literally* true. Think of it as being like the Temenos entity representing humanity's shared concept of Vampires coming to Earth, Claiming someone, and the resulting dude-with-pop-culture-vampire-powers then meeting some Kindred. Only larger scaled. The Exarchs and God-Machine get on very well and send their servants to help each other out on mutual projects, as noted in a couple of books. The Principle might not be a discrete thing depending on your view of what Pyros is. Luna and Helios are very large spirits. The Deathlords don't exist unless you need them to when changing the Underworld as an endgame plot in Geist, the Gentry have their own world happily off on a right angle to the human soul/mind divide and the Supernal "Realm" is more like physics rather than a place. Duat is a Lower Depth stealing Sekhem from the world to maintain the shan'iatu. And there's no single origin for vampires. Dave Brookshaw fucked around with this message at 14:10 on Nov 29, 2018 |
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Nov 29, 2018 13:24
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Vampires: We Just Don’t Know.
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Nov 29, 2018 13:52
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Dave Brookshaw posted:And there's no single origin for vampires.
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Nov 29, 2018 14:45
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I like the idea the Requiem clans had what amounts to five cases of parallel evolution (or less, if you like the idea that, for example, one clan might be a bloodline of another that's just become very widespread).
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Nov 29, 2018 14:48
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Oh yeah no for serious, the idea that 'vampire' is just a shape that apparently is the ideal for any kind of magical blood-sucking night monster and so every one of them eventually assumes that shape is a pretty great idea.
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Nov 29, 2018 14:52
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While I really enjoyed the whole Caine mythos, this is probably my favourite change from oVampire. It's perfectly possible for Dracula to claim that he was personally cursed by God and have it be true, because there's no longer a combination of setting and mechanics making it so that being personally cursed by God is equivalent to being the ur-nexus and "Combat rules: You Lose" apex of vampiric power. It's so much more flexible and satisfying than the old game where every clan's lore on their origins came with an implicit footnote of "they're all full of poo poo and none of this matters, because we know for a fact that all vampires came from literal fourth human ever Caine."
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Nov 29, 2018 14:58
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I always thought it would be fun to explore the implications of at least part of Genesis probably being explicitly true due to the Caine mythos. Like, do Vampires ever realize El-Shaddai is out there, because he's got to be, because he made them? And didn't Lillith teach Caine or something, meaning that both the first and second creation account in Genesis probably happened along with the apocryphal 'Lillith rejects Adam' stuff?
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Nov 29, 2018 15:15
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Plus it lets you have weird one off vampires like you'd get in some strands of Dracula flicks where "Human curses god, becomes bloodsucking night fiend because -someone- was paying attention at time." ..Which someone pointed out while I was typing, whoops.
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Nov 29, 2018 15:18
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quote:Like, do Vampires ever realize El-Shaddai is out there, because he's got to be, because he made them? Because Wodgod is an "absentee deadbeat father" kind of guy and never actually does anything after he got done with loving things up for everyone, individual vampire groups (who have never seen any proof of his existence and have no way to tell creative storytelling from the genuine mythological accounts of real events) have their own and differing beliefs about the matter, but the setting on the whole isn't shy about saying "they're wrong."
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Nov 29, 2018 15:21
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Cardiovorax posted:And in one of the WoD games' few real masterstrokes of making mechanics tangibly support and represent the setting fluff instead of just existing more or less kind of alongside it, the change from a generation to a blood potency trait makes it so they actually don't even need to have one. There could absolutely be multiple ways that vampires came into existence independently and in wildly different ways from each other, because there's no longer a baked-in trait that represents descent from one specific, universally shared ancestor. It represents how vampires work, not where they come from or what powers them. In my current Mage game, one of the major Mysteries at work is one of the Bound, in a labyrinthine ruin below the city who was the Supernal symbol and patron for the much more high-fantasy and powerful vampire precursors from the Time Before. As such, the absence in the Supernal shaped like a vampire is why there's both a metaphysical niche for them and the reason they're so varied and inconstant. They're growing into a semantic hole left by something comparable to what the Ordo Dracul arguably wants to become. This is also the origin of their solar weakness - the Sun is symbolic of reality in a very straightforward way, and becoming a vampire of whatever kind makes you less transcendentally real in that particular way. In this cosmology the Strix are still out of place, being either just Lower Depths shadows of this semantic flaw in what is, or the servants of the Queens of Blood who were so founded on her symbolism that they got inverted and unmade and fell out of reality almost entirely. I've been having fun with this and my players have started piecing together the core bits. Oh and the local Tremere definitely think this Bound is the Sixth Watchtower, and they might be right.
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Nov 29, 2018 15:42
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So proto-vampires are essentially Bram Stoker's Dracula walking in sunlight, teleporting onto unhallowed graves and having weapons pass through him like mist, while in-setting kindred are always some of that but never all of it? That's kind of neat.
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Nov 29, 2018 15:49
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Rose used to say that the different origins of Kindred were like the difference between cutting ypurself on a razer, broken glass, and paper - vampirism is a wound, no matter how it's been inflicted. Also, she would sometimes muse about how the blood drinking, sunlight allergy, Disciplines, etc are symptoms of a human soul broken from Integrity onto Humanity, not the other way around. That *that* was the foundation of Kindred Convergent evolution. Stayed with me, and you can see (or will see, rather) echoes of it in Deviant, which like Vampire is origin-story optional and treats its mechanics as common symptoms, not unifying traits of a "race".
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Nov 29, 2018 15:58
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quote:Also, she would sometimes muse about how the blood drinking, sunlight allergy, Disciplines, etc are symptoms of a human soul broken from Integrity onto Humanity, not the other way around. So yeah, I gotta give the nVampire writers real kudos for managing to take the most fundamental, defining themes of the Caine myth and making them perfectly applicable to the new line despite having completely different origins in basically every other sense.
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Nov 29, 2018 16:05
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Cardiovorax posted:So proto-vampires are essentially Bram Stoker's Dracula walking in sunlight, teleporting onto unhallowed graves and having weapons pass through him like mist, while in-setting kindred are always some of that but never all of it? That's kind of neat. Plus some high-fantasy bullshit from living in the Time Before, but, basically I imagine them as rivals to the pre-Fall Awakened, which is why their patron deity was already in exile from Atlantis when the Nemesis showed up during the Fall to drag her/them into a sunken prison. As such they probably ranged from Bram Stoker's Dracula to Castlevania's Dracula.
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Nov 29, 2018 16:18
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Joe Slowboat posted:Plus some high-fantasy bullshit from living in the Time Before, but, basically I imagine them as rivals to the pre-Fall Awakened, which is why their patron deity was already in exile from Atlantis when the Nemesis showed up during the Fall to drag her/them into a sunken prison. Awaken, ancient proto-vampires.
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Nov 29, 2018 16:21
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I think that integrates very well conceptually with the whole overarching "everything was bigger and better back in the Golden Age, even the villains" premise that Mage runs on, as much as I personally dislike that part of it, and I can see why your players have fun with that. It feels like a natural fit for the setting and just makes intuitive sense when you look at how much everything else also works like that.
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Nov 29, 2018 16:24
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Cardiovorax posted:I think that integrates very well conceptually with the whole overarching "everything was bigger and better back in the Golden Age, even the villains" premise that Mage runs on, as much as I personally dislike that part of it, and I can see why your players have fun with that. It feels like a natural fit for the setting and just makes intuitive sense when you look at how much everything else also works like that. To be clear, I think the Time Before was almost certainly not utopian - the Silver Ladder as it currently exists didn't build the Star Ladder, and their humanistic goals for reality were not necessarily the goals of the Atlanteans. What the Time Before was, was unbounded, because the Exarchs are the limiters of reality. Entropy is an Exarch, after all, and the rest are even more reductive of the world. I am also broadly writing my campaign with the belief that (most versions of? Multiple timelines maybe?) the Time Before ended in the late Bronze Age, maybe the Iron Age. The Ocean Spire Civilization managed feats of magic not imagined in the Fallen World except by the Exarchs, and that means they built the Star Ladder long before what would be the 'equivalent' of the present day. So any proto-Dracula corpses found in the world might have bronze armor and swords of indestructible apeiron. Also I keep being told I need to watch Jojo's.
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Nov 29, 2018 16:36
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"Bigger and better" in the sense of "more powerful, more pure and closer to divinity." Mage is pretty unapologetically Ancient Greek Nostalgia: the game. The "before times" work like how the Greeks imagined the first age, i.e. the Golden Age, to work. Everyone was just better, if not necessarily nicer, and even the monsters were titanic creatures of legend that were opposed by literal gods throwing literal lightning at them from the heavens. I'm not personally fond of it, because it results in a setting that dwells on the lost glories of the past rather than trying to make things better in the here and now, but it's narratively powerful, which is pretty evident by how many fantasy novels work by that template 3000 years later.
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Nov 29, 2018 16:42
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Joe Slowboat posted:Also I keep being told I need to watch Jojo's. As long as you can tolerate people narrating loving everything, JoJos is an extremely good time. The Pillar Men are honestly a pretty good stand in for the kind of crazy powerful 'vampire as unstoppable abomination' stuff you used to get in elders in oWoD too, Mors is not wrong at all.
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Nov 29, 2018 16:42
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Cardiovorax posted:"Bigger and better" in the sense of "more powerful, more pure and closer to divinity." Mage is pretty unapologetically Ancient Greek Nostalgia: the game. The "before times" work like how the Greeks imagined the first age, i.e. the Golden Age, to work. Everyone was just better, if not necessarily nicer, and even the monsters were titanic creatures of legend that were opposed by literal gods throwing literal lightning at them from the heavens. I guess I just don't agree about the necessary impact on the setting, because I think the Ascension War is a far more glorious effort, under much worse conditions, than whatever Atlantis was up to. The Fall has in fact left mages wiser, and the Pentacle has been forced underground by paradox but they're waging war on the gods in the name of human liberation. The past is where they dig up weapons from, but the future is where they aim. Not to say the Pentacle doesn't constantly fall short of its aims, but then, so do real-world revolutionaries all the time, and the struggle is still heroic.
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Nov 29, 2018 16:54
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Sure, that's cool, it's definitely a matter of personal taste for me. I imagine, for example, that you could run a game of Mage as working basically a whole lot like an Assassin's Creed game in overall tone and subject matter. For all that you're actively doing and sometimes even improving things in the here and now, in the end you're still structuring your entire conflict and even society around cleaning up the gently caress-ups of people who have been dead and gone for 10000 years, instead of the oWoD-style conflict that's based entirely around what you want and what you think the world should be like. It just makes me care less, I guess, because it feels like I'm playing second fiddle in someone else's story.
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Nov 29, 2018 17:02
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Cardiovorax posted:"Bigger and better" in the sense of "more powerful, more pure and closer to divinity." Mage is pretty unapologetically Ancient Greek Nostalgia: the game. The "before times" work like how the Greeks imagined the first age, i.e. the Golden Age, to work. Everyone was just better, if not necessarily nicer, and even the monsters were titanic creatures of legend that were opposed by literal gods throwing literal lightning at them from the heavens. It may help you to keep in mind the (fairly frequently presented) possibility that the Before Times were actually the After Times, because time was literally broken and at least some forms of evidence point to the "ancient prehistory" actually being the far future. We must build the Golden City that has always will be have existed.
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Nov 29, 2018 17:16
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Mors Rattus posted:It may help you to keep in mind the (fairly frequently presented) possibility that the Before Times were actually the After Times, because time was literally broken and at least some forms of evidence point to the "ancient prehistory" actually being the far future. We must build the Golden City that has always will be have existed.
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Nov 29, 2018 17:26
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Cardiovorax posted:Thanks for pointing that out, although it's not really about the actual facts of the setting so much as the feeling the entire presentation conveys to me. I'm just conceptually not fond of the idea of playing a game set in a "fallen world" where everything used to be better and a major part of everything that goes on is chasing after the lost glories of an Elegant, More Civilized Age. Even if it's actually a misunderstanding based in time fuckery, it just encourages too many tropes and themes that I find personally distasteful, and with the whole supernal world/Exarch/Abyss situation being what it is, it's too deeply ingrained into the setting to easily ignore. Mage might just not be your game, then - the Fallen World is kind of part and parcel with the Gnosticism that it is going for. The physical, real world is fallen and false, a lie meant to keep us from reaching the truth of godhead.
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Nov 29, 2018 17:40
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 Oh, I totally realize that it isn't and that I actually just wish they had made MtAscension 2.0 instead. I'm not angry at the game for not being what I'd rather play, because there's a perfectly good and intensely flexible setting already right there, I just have to take the updated mechanics along if I want them. I was just trying to explain what it is that bothers me about it. I can't take a game seriously that runs on a general premise of "what if Helena Blavatsky was actually right," for entirely personal reasons.e: FWIW its worth, there are a lot of things about it that I really do like. The Abyss makes for a wonderful alternative to Nephandi that genuinely delivers what it promises, you just have to be willing to live in horrorterror nega-reality. The new "flavours" of mages feel more symbolically and narratively powerful than the Traditions ever were, because they actually signify what your magic has done to you, rather than just the specific way that you're wrong about the real truth. That kind of thing. Cardiovorax fucked around with this message at 18:00 on Nov 29, 2018 |
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Nov 29, 2018 17:46
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I would say that's very reductive and not actually what Awakening posits. It's more like "what if Simon Magus was actually right."
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Nov 29, 2018 17:57
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The only good game about wizards is Ars Magica because the whole point is having a unified theory of magic that everyone believes in, but actually no one every fits into it perfectly and some things you can do don't make sense under it (Wizards communion). Cutting edge research means trying to find out a flaw in the theory, or maybe defy God depending on which rule it is.
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Nov 29, 2018 17:59
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Cardiovorax posted:
I really don't think Blavatsky was coherently right about much at all in NMage? Like, the aesthetic is very Theosophical in the sense of being a syncretic occultism with a very early 1900s vibe, but really the setting is Neoplatonist, which is not really Theosophical. More generally, we can agree to disagree - I think Ascension ultimately devalues human effort, because the total relativity of what exists makes all human conflict and divergent ideals purely a mistake. Anybody's utopia can work in OMage, regardless of how ideologically bankrupt. Plus OMage is all about a Golden Age - the Technocracy are literally modernity, and the Mage protagonists want to break away from it back to a previous era of sorcery. All of OWoD is in the modernist tradition in that sense, aching for a kind of meaning and magic that the modern world erases with banality.
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Nov 29, 2018 18:02
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Mors Rattus posted:I would say that's very reductive and not actually what Awakening posits. actually now that I think about it, it's more "what if Vadinho was actually right" every man is a god, every man is free
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Nov 29, 2018 18:07
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Mors Rattus posted:I would say that's very reductive and not actually what Awakening posits. quote:Plus OMage is all about a Golden Age - the Technocracy are literally modernity, and the Mage protagonists want to break away from it back to a previous era of sorcery. Cardiovorax fucked around with this message at 18:10 on Nov 29, 2018 |
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Nov 29, 2018 18:08
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Currently playing in a M:tAw 2nd edition set in the Victorian period, and you'd think that'd be prime for peak Theosophy but it hasn't been our experience so far. (Victorian M:tAw works real smooth, actually. We're using the Seers of the Throne as backers of the worst atrocities of European colonialism, but also dipping into the idea of a whole swathe of the other mage factions having somewhat paternalistic ideas as to how to liberate the world, with the Free Council being an uneasy alliance between genuinely progressive advocates of the marginalised on the one hand and the sort of anarchists who think spiking people's drinks with psychedelics is an awesome way to Freak Teh Mundanes. It helps that we're steering into the idea that Mages are pretty much inherently hubristic assholes, including our PCs, so our recurring theme is how people's bids to reshape the world in their personal vision inevitably becomes a thing of horror if it's done without consideration for the effect on others.)
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Nov 29, 2018 18:12
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Cardiovorax posted:If you don't mind then that's the kind of debate I'd rather just not have, because everyone can read the details differently and my entire point was really just that it viscerally reminds me personally of phony pop-culture spiritualists pretending to be real gnostics, by way of 1920s pulp fiction concepts and certain types' apathetic nostalgia for a rose-colored "Golden Age" that never really existed. Enough so that I just don't enjoy it for all the negative associations it brings up for me. That's cool At this point I just wanted to point out that the driving element of the entire Silver Ladder is literally the mantra of a dude from Pumaman
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Nov 29, 2018 18:15
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In some ways I really prefer the oMage approach of Traditions being basically purely aesthetic, in other ways I really like just how many of the nMage covenant-analogues remind of me Planescape factions. The Silver Ladder would make for great Believers of the Source.
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Nov 29, 2018 18:24
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Cardiovorax posted:I always thought of it as more of a "different but fundamentally equally valid ideas struggling for what they think is the best way to empower everyone," but that's the kind of thing no two Mage sourcebooks can agree on, so I'm not going to argue.
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Nov 29, 2018 18:27
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Loomer posted:Don't be absurd. Just go and unlock the immortality quest chain and then become a satanist to destroy your enemies with black magic like all true rulers. In retrospect, knowing your Great Work, assuming you didn't play CK2 was a poor decision. Cardiovorax - Your opinion was my own after reading the nMage 1E core book. I think the people giving you different "readings" of the Atlantis myth and what it means for mages are giving you what is basically the official party line now, further in the game's life. They really did pivot away from "Atlantis was an actual time and place and it ruled let's reclaim it's lost glory!" Some of that was metaphysical (some of the later books really heavily play up the "the past is the future so let's build Atlantis!") and a lot of it was political, actually. When you have a fully fleshed out ideology and praxis for the Silver Ladder, it's easier to see how nMage can be a forward thinking, dynamic game. A more detailed view of the Seers also works to this end, because knowing more about the enemies of progress shows you a bit what progress is and looks like. Even the most backwards looking mage groups, like the Mysterium, have this inclination towards change and hope built into them, because the writers told us more about what they're hoarding magical secrets for. I'm not trying to argue with you or anything, I'm just trying to point out the difference of opinions here might be a result of some people sticking with the game line after it evolved to deal with some of your totally valid and real criticisms. But also like, if oMage is your cup of tea that's dope too! oMage also rules.
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Nov 29, 2018 18:32
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quote:Every mage thinks "I am right and gently caress everyone who disagrees with me" stacked on top of the usual high school cliques but with powers. Like, even the shittiness of the world feels like an empowering thing because it's not something you have imposed on yourself by ancient curses from the beginning of time or corrupt spirit horrors fighting over who gets to be head arsehole, but rather because people made mistakes - people who were exactly like you and could do everything that you can now also do. And what you're capable of screwing up, you're no less capable of fixing and making better than it ever was. Everything you do and believe makes a difference. quote:I'm not trying to argue with you or anything, I'm just trying to point out the difference of opinions here might be a result of some people sticking with the game line after it evolved to deal with some of your totally valid and real criticisms.
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Nov 29, 2018 18:34
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