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Tias posted:Getting into C:tL and it's a really awesome read so far, but a few questions: True Fae are extremely one dimensional by nature. They are what the titles they own make them and whatever the stories associated with them need. Nothing else. They may not even be sapient. Changeling life span is linked to Wyrd rating, and I think it's on the table. It's maybe 200 years or so? Not sure on the Gentry lifespan.
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Dec 9, 2018 16:51
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Nessus posted:There were a couple of little details in the original Exalted 3e art, like Chejop Kejak the cosmic star exalt conspiracy man just having Age of Empires on one of his Most if not all of his "Seeing Panes" were the box art for various Steam games.
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Dec 9, 2018 17:11
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Loomer posted:So I managed to get my hands on the WoD documentary and I'm only in the intro and it's so loving try hard already. I can't even make it five minutes in without laughing at how intensely 90s the intro itself is. I liked parts of the doc. I felt like the origin story of Masquerade was pretty cool, but they basically gloss over every other game they released that isn't Masquerade and that's pretty annoying. The way the Cam/WW lawsuit is talked about and spun is incredibly stupid especially when they have someone straight up contradict the bullshit narrative they're pushing. The complete "Requiem was a failure and that was the end of the WoD because it failed" is also really obnoxious because that's just not true. I get that it's supposed to be about WW, but yeah, throwing OP under the bus and HAVING GOD drat JASON ACHILLI THERE BUT NOT ASKING ABOUT loving REQUIEM?! It's a mess of a movie with some good and a lot of cringey bad. Especially the LARP stuff. Tias posted:Getting into C:tL and it's a really awesome read so far, but a few questions: Hi fellow C:TL newbie! I'd recommend checking out "The Huntsman Chronicles" short story collection [url=]https:// https://www.amazon.com/Huntsmen-Chr...path+publishing[/url] As it's got some really good stories that help give you an idea of what C:tL can be. Other than that I'm still hammering stuff out myself.
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Dec 9, 2018 17:35
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Don't they also forget a ton of early White Wolf writers who contributed a lot to the game?
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Dec 9, 2018 18:14
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Crasical posted:...and promptly catch flame. The players willingly walking into the sun to die is probably the most positive ending you could have in a vampire campaign.
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Dec 9, 2018 18:26
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Hey, that's not true. They can willingly enter torpor until a cure for their horrific affliction is found too!
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Dec 9, 2018 18:33
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Mulva posted:Hey, that's not true. Or Golcanda. Or did they ditch that in revised? Or does Golcanda just make you a better Vampire? I haven't gotten that far in my read through of 1e because lol why not read 1e.
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Dec 9, 2018 18:48
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Tias posted:What are True Fae supposed to be like? Do you have access to the 2E book? It has four example True Fae, and goes into a fair amount of depth in terms of what their personality is like and how they interact with their captives. One of them is a pretty traditional old witch / crone who kidnaps children, with the twist being that she's trying to build her idea of a perfect family and forces each of them into stifling, superficial archetypes and makes them play the role or else. She's superficially sweet and kind but turns into a monster when angered -- think Other Mother from Coraline. There's an exiled True Fae who is allowed to return to Arcadia when "one hundred madmen dream as one," so he makes a project of giving people crippling nightmares until he can finally go home. He has a kind of "19th century professional" aesthetic, and his realm in Arcadia was modeled on a sanitarium. Another takes the form of three stereotypical Grey aliens, along with the usual alien abduction narrative that goes with them. It's probably the least developed out of any of these ideas, I think it's just there to explicitly give the nod to "yeah C:tL and UFO mythology go together really nicely" and leave you to do whatever you want with it. The last one is the one that most emphasizes that True Fae are stories, not just characters -- it's called The Year of Plague, and it's an endlessly recurring year in a blighted, rural wasteland where all the inhabitants are slowly dying of disease. Changelings abducted by its minions might try to cure the plague (becoming Wizened) put everyone out of their misery (Ogres) and if you don't escape before the year resets you're erased, or possibly turned into one of the local inhabitants of the Year who are really little more than automata.
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Dec 9, 2018 19:45
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Tias posted:Getting into C:tL and it's a really awesome read so far, but a few questions: gently caress YES Changeling chat. The book you're looking for is Equinox Road, although IIRC one of the four "season" books also goes into the True Fae a bit. Equinox Road just lays all the cards on the table and also includes a discussion of Arcadia, some potential places in Arcadia, and how to structure a campaign around going to Arcadia. The tl;dr is basically that True Fae are basically a tiny bit of nothing that somehow talked their way into being a tiny bit of chaos. They can manifest, sometimes at the same time, as people, places, or things. Arcadia, in so much as it's a place, is made up entirely of True Fae and maybe the corpses of some dead True Fae. Anyway, Fae literally need conflict - specifically, story-shaped conflict - to exist and survive. So if a Fae is in an eternal duel to the death with their neighbor, that involves their respective "Kings" (the Fae) fighting over a borderlands (also the Fae) with an army (you got it), they're actually kind of best friends because the endless war is literally keeping them both alive. It's implied they abduct mortals and make Changelings specifically because sometimes Changelings manage to twart their plans and, well, you can't have a story without conflict! So their motivations are "whatever the dramatic motivation of this role I'm playing right now" is, with a meta-layer of "gently caress gotta keep things interesting or I will actually atrophy and die." A lot of their weirdness comes either from not understanding how things work because they're such strange, alien beings, or from thinking that a bit of pointless mystery and terror will add a nice dollop of flavor to the story they're trying to tell. they rule so loving much
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Dec 9, 2018 19:45
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You could also more or less steal any raksha from Exalted, they're also chaos fairies who need narratives to exist, and are also great.
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Dec 9, 2018 19:55
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The main difference is power - beating a True Fae in a fight is nearly impossible without a lot of work.
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Dec 9, 2018 20:05
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Who first came up with the idea that fairies are creatures of narrative, anyway? It shows up everywhere now. Exalted, WoD, and Ars Magica all have it work that way.
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Dec 9, 2018 20:45
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Tuxedo Catfish posted:Do you have access to the 2E book? No, just 1st ed core, but you're not the only folks to recommend the seasonal sourcebooks, so I'll probably try digging there. Thanks everyone!
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Dec 9, 2018 20:56
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Rand Brittain posted:Who first came up with the idea that fairies are creatures of narrative, anyway? It shows up everywhere now. Exalted, WoD, and Ars Magica all have it work that way. I think that's probably an idea that's much much older than role playing games like we play. I'm not an historical literature expert by any means, but that seems like it's been around for a long time by my understanding of it. It's a great way to tell a story though, so it's a great marriage for changeling.
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Dec 9, 2018 22:10
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Am I the only one cursed to find the Equinox Road stuff kind of dumb? I feel like the metaphor suffers when you replace an unknowable, possessive, volatile abuser with a shapeless non-entity - a tvtropesivore that excretes archetypical conflict as a byproduct of its narratobiology.
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Dec 9, 2018 22:10
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Kurieg posted:Most if not all of his "Seeing Panes" were the box art for various Steam games. I thought a lot of those were either wips or placeholders? Or was the ex3 core book actually filled with poser art?
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Dec 9, 2018 22:16
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The True Fae being wrapped in stories doesn't make them not basically volatile and capricious abusers, it just means that they have something they want (you to play the parts they've assigned you) and a method (their aesthetic). The True Fae are abusers whose self-justifying narrative doesn't have to be one that declares them good people, it just has to declare that they exist and are more important than you, and you need to play your role for their benefit. I can see the issue with 'narratobiology' but it seems like the narrative predator model works well for producing a wide variety of faerie tale abductions and abuses.
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Dec 9, 2018 22:25
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UrbicaMortis posted:The players willingly walking into the sun to die is probably the most positive ending you could have in a vampire campaign. As for the faeries thing, I don't know if I can figure out exactly who it was, but it seems clear that it was someone in the 70s, probably in Britain.
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Dec 9, 2018 22:27
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Der Waffle Mous posted:I thought a lot of those were either wips or placeholders? Nah that was a "we are about to make our final release, please start sending us typos or really major errors you notice" step. The Kejak thing was egregious art theft and it got replaced, and they even went ahead and replaced the terrible Poser art of Chompy even though its only crime was being really ugly. I don't remember hearing about any other art explosions (from the core book, anyway).
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Dec 9, 2018 22:40
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Five Eyes posted:Am I the only one cursed to find the Equinox Road stuff kind of dumb? Making the True Fae kind of lame when you strip away their mystery and illusions is exactly the right way to portray what are functionally abuse elementals, imo.
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Dec 9, 2018 22:40
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Rand Brittain posted:Who first came up with the idea that fairies are creatures of narrative, anyway? It shows up everywhere now. Exalted, WoD, and Ars Magica all have it work that way. It was pre- and post-figured by Mage: the Awakening, whose influence extends both forward and backward in time from its phenomenal publication date.
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Dec 9, 2018 22:41
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Like the Gentry are entities that have to tell a story about themselves to exist, because they are the story. It's only natural that that story be simplified, solipsistic, full of internal contradictions that threaten to tear it apart, and ultimately less compelling than the truth. They're still frightening because they are creatures who have the power and the superficial aura of romance to force you to participate in these stories, and maybe at one time (typically before the part where you actually start playing the game) to make you believe it. But they aren't really cool, or glamorous, or meaningful in the final measure, and the game's themes would be compromised if they were. e: this is also why they need Changelings; your experiences and decisions are real in a way that theirs will never be Tuxedo Catfish fucked around with this message at 22:57 on Dec 9, 2018 |
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Dec 9, 2018 22:46
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I don't think that having an actual internal universe and real, selfish, scummy emotions makes abusers "cool" or "meaningful." I think that people that abuse others for their own satisfaction are more pathetic than alien automata that abuse others because that's how they eat. Joe Slowboat posted:The True Fae being wrapped in stories doesn't make them not basically volatile and capricious abusers, it just means that they have something they want (you to play the parts they've assigned you) and a method (their aesthetic). Do the "Storied Gentry" actually want anything? Outside of role-postures, they're jellyfish. They float on a Campbell current and absorb nutrients through staged dramas. They're not capricious because of anything that's happening in their mind or some emotional deficiency, they're capricious because that's their role in this scene, or because your noncompliance is impeding their ability to process nutrients.
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Dec 9, 2018 23:02
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The fact that they eat people's suffering doesn't make them nonsapient, it just means they're like vampires. They want to go on existing and they want power in their society, which is made up of a bunch of similar entities who see humans as a source of food and service. The fact that they draw up contracts and establish stories by their own decision points to something alien but also cognizant of its behavior and capable of communication and planning.
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Dec 9, 2018 23:46
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They don't need to eat suffering. They don't need to eat anything [Unless of course some aspect of their Titles dictates they do]. They create situations because things exist in relation to other things, and the generation of specific relations defines their existence. That's it. They are nothing seeking to be something, and you only see the something because you can't see nothing. They live in the space allowed by the abstractions they cobble together. Titles and Names and Contracts define the something they can be. The more ties they forge the more something they are. Conflict is a situation that allows them to assert the central facet of their existence: They are. Everything they do is a stage on which to shout their own reality. Without that opportunity they wouldn't be. And that's about it as far as they go.
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Dec 10, 2018 00:30
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Which brings me back to my earlier question: The 1E Swords At Dawn book introduced something called "Talecrafting" - it's an ability where a Changeling can force the universe to regard them as a character in a story, and so be subject to classic story conventions. It basically introduces PbtA-style elements to C:tL, and it's a great idea, just lousily executed. It's super hard to invoke, becomes addictive, and the mechanical benefits usually aren't great. Has it been updated for 2E yet? If not, has anyone made it actually fun and interesting?
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Dec 10, 2018 00:35
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It's worth mentioning that Second Edition is walking back the "Arcadia is made of stories" take, and the working model for what the Wyrd as a universal force is has less to do with narratives and more to do with a cosmic equivalent exchange and network of associations. The motives of the Gentry are mysterious, but further obscured by the fact that each Other is plural in nature. Their core identity is their self-defining Name, but they are primarily known and experienced through their subsidiary Titles. The Keeper with whom a changeling is familiar is likely only one Title of several which make up one True Fae, all of which fulfill transactional roles in pledges with each other and with Arcadia and the Wyrd, the sum total of which are what give the Name definition and power.
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Dec 10, 2018 00:40
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Joe Slowboat posted:They want to go on existing and they want power in their society, which is made up of a bunch of similar entities who see humans as a source of food and service. I don't know that I agree with the use of "want", here. (A lion "wants" food and it "wants" dominance in the pride, right?) Equinox Road proposes that, despite the false bodies they wear, the Gentry are in fact a box of archetypes. If not exercised, the box containing the archetypes fades into nothing, so it spins them into bodies and places and plays out stock dramas. There's no "person" within a role, only a posture that creates an interactable person-gesture. Vampires aren't monstrous because they consume blood. If that was true, leeches and vampire bats would be monsters. It's the things that they, as people, knowingly do to other people to acquire the blood, power, and security they crave. The Gentry behind the Actor Dracula doesn't really feel ambition to impose their hypnotic will on others or carnal desire to extract blood from mortal thralls. They re-enact vampirism not because they want to be a vampire but in the same way that a plant bends towards the sun.
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Dec 10, 2018 01:08
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I mean, there is the idea that some un-thing went out of its way to start existing - they didn't spontaneously generate, they cut deals and made pacts that would allow them to exist. Now, that's a fundamentally paradoxical motion, so it's probably fair to say that we can't really characterize it... but my understanding of that kind of entity in a fantasy story is always that there's some kind of will or drive there that isn't just a pure urge. After all, nothing existed to have the nature which entails an urge. Though if this is being rolled back anyways, that hardly matters. I just think that self-created conglomerations of titles layered around something that Should Not Be to let it cheat the universe is very much the kind of antagonist I see as having a will and purpose, rather than just pursuing a program blindly. They themselves constructed the false selves they play out, after all.
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Dec 10, 2018 01:46
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Hell, a “human” antagonist is just a bunch of proteins and water molecules really.
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Dec 10, 2018 02:47
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joylessdivision posted:I liked parts of the doc. I felt like the origin story of Masquerade was pretty cool, but they basically gloss over every other game they released that isn't Masquerade and that's pretty annoying. Yeah. Personally, I get that the LARP scene was a bit of a big deal at the time it emerged, but there's a definite agenda from NuWW in presenting it as the core of the hobby. In my region, there are zero vampire LARPs and there was only one shortlived one in the 90s, but VtM was still popular and to a degree still is (university towns: they love RPGs of all kinds, the more pretentious the better) just for tabletop. It's almost a little Messiah complex-y. I also had to laugh at its insistence that these theatre types don't want your normal tabletop experience. I run a DnD game for theatre folk - right down to a couple of dudes who got scholarships and positions in the Australian drama company - and their ilk and it's DnD because that's exactly what they wanted. They didn't want to 'become the monster', they wanted to drink beer, laugh, kill a dragon and steal its gold and not be 'on' as actors every moment of the game.
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Dec 10, 2018 02:49
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The notion of "Vampire is an alternative to DnD for theatre types" is hopelessly outdated. I also hate NuWWs glamorizing the LARP scene. LARPing in the States (I can't speak for the world) was considered an activity *even nerdier* than just playing an RPG. You got dressed up in whatever you could find at a thrift store and had to find a venue that somehow blended, "large", "private", and "free." It was a thoroughly embarassing experience outside of it's context, and a lot of fun within it. The idea of high end private LARPs where people walk around in 2k$ + costumes is like - yeah, anybody would do that if they enjoyed roleplaying. It was stigmatized because you had to wear a lovely suit jacket and convince the room it actually represented expensive attire. Hyper wealthy SM parties where you also roleplay is like... not that.
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Dec 10, 2018 03:47
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Five Eyes posted:I don't know that I agree with the use of "want", here. (A lion "wants" food and it "wants" dominance in the pride, right?) Equinox Road proposes that, despite the false bodies they wear, the Gentry are in fact a box of archetypes. If not exercised, the box containing the archetypes fades into nothing, so it spins them into bodies and places and plays out stock dramas. There's no "person" within a role, only a posture that creates an interactable person-gesture. They don't need exhaustively detailed biographies with yarn-board motivations to be sufficiently horrifying, because the thing that makes them horrifying is that it just happened to you because you were there. They're the antagonists of The Strangers, and you were home. Scene.
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Dec 10, 2018 04:20
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Mendrian posted:The notion of "Vampire is an alternative to DnD for theatre types" is hopelessly outdated. I've been tempted to go to VtM larps around me a couple of times, but you're absolutely right about the stigma. I can convince a couple friends to play some table top game no problem but nobody wants to check out a LARP.
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Dec 10, 2018 04:24
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joylessdivision posted:I've been tempted to go to VtM larps around me a couple of times, but you're absolutely right about the stigma. I can convince a couple friends to play some table top game no problem but nobody wants to check out a LARP. Ironically I find dressing up in a cheap costume and pretending it isn't a cheap costume less offputting than the alternative. The idea that you need thousands of dollars to play a LARP without feeling weird is just wrong.
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Dec 10, 2018 04:38
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yea the LARPs I hit up were all the 'get something out of your closet, if your vamp is the type to dress up just wear whatever is a good approximation that you don't mind moving and all in you don't need to actually buy an Armani suit just to be a Ventrue.' It was never some grand elaborate affair it was a bunch of typical WW fan theater kids hanging out to basically improv with a loose (let's be real, dogshit) rule system around it to keep Jeff from just pulling a Michael Scott and winning every scene by pulling a gun out. It sucks because NuWW trying to act like that wasn't the case really kills what actually made it fun. It wasn't because we were ~too artsy~ to want 'normal D&D' or whatever, it was just because it was fun to pretend to be a loving vampire with schemes and poo poo. I'm sure there were tons of pretentious wads who thought we were somehow doing it 'better' than D&D night or whatever but that was never really the vibe as a whole.
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Dec 10, 2018 04:49
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I mean, in much of europe, 'roleplaying' means... larping. If i tell people 'my hobby is playing roleplaying games' i then always have to clarify that it's primarily not larping. Larping here is concidered generally sorta childish, but not to a degree where it's too strange to play as an adult. And while blockbuster larps are expensive - a 600 dollar ticket and a trip to poland isn't cheap - they are the sort of thing you might do as a fancy and wierd vacation. anyway, in general, here where i'm from, tabletop roleplaying games are definately the even wierder and nerdier version of larping in the public conciousness. if i tell people i larp, they will say 'oh, yeah, i did that when i was 15, it was fun'
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Dec 10, 2018 04:53
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Chernobyl Peace Prize posted:They don't need exhaustively detailed biographies with yarn-board motivations to be sufficiently horrifying, because the thing that makes them horrifying is that it just happened to you because you were there. It would be "horrifying" to be caught in a landslide and gradually crushed to death by a heavy rock, but that doesn't make a landslide a good antagonist. None of that has anything to do with biographies and detailed motivations, and I'm not sure how you arrived there? Equinox proposes Gentry that aren't abusers so much as abuse engines. You can speak about their effects in the passive voice. There's a place for that in fiction, but I think it's better served for, say, the God-Machine, where the senseless impersonality serves the metaphor of relentless, grinding institutions. I don't see how Changeling is improved by saying its chief antagonists are semi-autonomous abuse drones executing a script. Chernobyl Peace Prize posted:They're the antagonists of The Strangers, and you were home. Scene. Do you think The Strangers would still work if the killers were automatons that had been programmed to kill? Or is "You were home" effective because there's, y'know, a mind involved in deciding that killing is an acceptable pastime?
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Dec 10, 2018 05:04
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uh, according to the official geek hierarchy tabletop gamers consider themselves less nerdy than LARPers, so that's obviously the truth. But yeah, in my experience here in the states LARPing was a whole 'nother level of nerdy. All that "lightening bolt! lightening bolt!" poo poo. I had jocky friends who would role some dice and murder some kobolds while getting drunk, and some of them absolutely had a bit of the theater kid in them and would put a lot of effort into costume parties and the like, but I get the impression actual LARPing would be beyond the pale. Hell, I wear my nerdiness on my sleeve, tell strangers about my campaigns, and happily relate spending my summers in camp playing D&D, and I'm still a little ashamed of the one time I did a Star Wars LARP. It's actually kind of sad now that I think about it, because it sounds like the kind of thing I might enjoy every now and them, but I do think in American culture it's seen as the one of the geekyist things you can do. otoh there was that paul rudd LARPing movie, and everything he does is charming and endearing, so...?
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Dec 10, 2018 05:05
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If people wanna LARP more power to 'em as far as I'm concerned, but it's tremendously silly to me to neglect the tabletop side of things in a history of the WoD. Funnily enough, when you pay close attention to the docco most of the actual White Wolf crew are talking generally about Vampire and the setting as a whole and how 'holy poo poo it was wild days', and it's mostly the NuWW crew and the Camarilla guys ranting about how much better LARP is and turning up with fangs and costumes and poo poo.
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Dec 10, 2018 05:13
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