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Tias posted:Thanks for an (as always, I daresay) awesome discussion about the aspects in C:tL! That's an extremely good chronicle outline, can you be in the NYC area and be looking for another player TIA. The uh, metaphyisics of the True Fae chat actually doesn't need to intersect with your chronicle all that much. If one of your players is, in character, interested in the mechanics and lore of the Fae - an Autumn Sorceress, and Antiquarian, etc. those are some answers you can give them. Otherwise what it means is your rear end in a top hat Fae Lady is also her nightmarish manor house and maybe some of her faceless minor servants. Just gives you some more creepy to work with, or allows you to pull a "to be continued...?" if you want where they kill the Lady (the an "actor" title of the true Fae) but the core rear end in a top hat entity is still around. It also might let you do something cool like finding a reason to kill the whole Fae entity and then have your party escape her crumbling Arcadian realm? Lastly it might give you a sense if if you want to use other Fae in interaction with her - you could, for example, have your Motley travel through a neighboring Arcadian realm that's eternally at war with your Lady and helps your players get to her... thinking they wouldn't have a shot at actually defeating her, and turning instantly hostile once their frienemy / hostile life partner is actually killed. If none of those appeal, then don't use them! This is some nerdy, high level, often pointless poo poo. Kind of like how you don't need to know the origin of good and evil in Middle Earth to follow the Lord of the Rings, but there is still The Silmarillion if you're into all that. But do consider grabbing Equinox road, it talks a lot about the shape of chronicles that go back to Arcadia and offers a number of freaky Arcadian realms. Winter Masques too, weirdly, has some ideas for Arcadian Realms, in the sense of "this is one environment that might have turned a Changeling into this particular Seeming."
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Dec 11, 2018 16:26
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Yeah, the main interaction most Changelings are going to have with True Fae Story Metaphysics are 'this is the role my Keeper forced me into, and I loving hated it, and it twisted me.' And then they escape and must fight the things the Keepers send back to capture them. For most Changelings, how a True Fae actually works on a metaphysical level is completely irrelevant information except insofar as it can be wielded as a weapon against them.
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Dec 11, 2018 16:36
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I really enjoy CtL myself. If I weren't running mage, I might run changeling instead, but I'm not sure I'd like the type of group I'd get for it? I've run it in the past and it has always taken a turn into dark territories that are not from the True Fae, but really from the changelings (players) themselves. Really needs a good group to succeed I feel and not some random pick up group of people who don't know each other or the table style. For now, I've found success in having the mages in my game cross paths with changelings. They had a lot of fun with that, and they were taking aspirations like "attack faerie" and then going and finding a way to do it. It let them flex their magic muscles and do things like conjure dragons and fly through the air without worrying about breaking people's brains for a bit. That and they broke free a changeling with mage parents and simultaneously toppled the stranglehold a True Fae had on a local goblin market town. All while buying their cabalmate back from slavery and ending up with a whole string of philosophical issues because suddenly two of three members were slave owners and one was also a slave. Now they have two changelings that also seem to live in their bigger-on-the-inside Airstream camper trailer that's in the middle of their 4th floor walkup hedgefund office space. When I say it aloud it sounds completely absurd, and those few sessions were a lot of fun. I may give changeling alone a one or two shot with my current group when 2e comes out in book form (because my eyes bleed from reading docs that long on a screen). I say this, but I'm also definitely running geist 2e when the book is in my hands. There are significant others from my group that are interested in that game too (but not mage), so we may just do a couple geist garden parties.
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Dec 11, 2018 17:22
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Has your game come down on the Arcadia / Arcadia thing one way or the other yet? Always wonder how those worked out in actual play. edit: and I'd love to hear some CtL pickup group horror stories, if you feel comfortable sharing
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Dec 11, 2018 18:10
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Digital Osmosis posted:Has your game come down on the Arcadia / Arcadia thing one way or the other yet? Always wonder how those worked out in actual play. Absolutely they ran into it. I hinted at it constantly to make the Acanthus pull his hair out. I don't remember exactly why, but by the end of their time in the market town, the Acanthus was sufficiently cursed and frustrated, and ended up using time magic (+paradox) and ended up shorting out his own timeline until they left the hedge (the shorting out was because the player couldn't be there that week), but the magical faerie curses started about 20 minutes after they were there because instead of asking a Magpie how their family was, they cast awakened magic at it to figure out the riddle. So the magpie cursed the poor Acanthus and it was nothing but a mess the rest of the trip. I changed how paradox worked in the hedge too, because it was more fun to add subtract paradox dice due to narrative and not because of witnesses. Basically, the more they tried to change the narrative of how that part of the hedge functioned the more likely they'd actually get into paradox trouble. Sometimes they'd get room for extra reaches because narratively it worked great (flying dragon mages), and sometimes they got less space because they were imposing their world view on the story. Mechanically, that worked out to between +2/-2. Also, the Arcadia/Arcadia question was absolutely not resolved, because it's more fun (and a better story) that way. Bad games are bad for many reasons, but the most common for me was that one player wants to do whatever they want to do and everyone else had better get on board or they're going to mess things up for other people. Basically, they boil down to everyone not communicating expectations before starting the game, and then being consistent about those expectations during play.
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Dec 11, 2018 19:35
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Jhet posted:Also, the Arcadia/Arcadia question was absolutely not resolved, because it's more fun (and a better story) that way.
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Dec 11, 2018 19:46
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Time shenanigans in-character as a justification for a player missing a session is a favorite of mine too. My Dungeon World game is set after a mana ebb made the surface of the earth hospitable again, previously the magic level was too high and interdimensional cthulhu monsters ravaged poo poo (a concept shamelessly stolen from Earthdawn, if you know it.) One side-effect is the timeline and barriers between reality are still quite wonky - one character pops in between this game and a D&D campaign when he's back home in California, another couple were literally retconned into the first session, a third simply was frozen in time for a session. Interestingly, because of how some choices my PC made interacted with my prep for the first adventure and because most of my party is neutral to evil, I'm building up the main antagonists up from what was going to be the good guy faction, a group that wants to solidify the barriers in reality. Throwing things back to Changeling for a second, the discussion of bridge burners as antagonists really helped me figure out how to portray these guys as zealous antagonists instead of helpful mission givers. I've also used bored, terrifyingly powerful, fickle Fae as background villains - not sure I'll bring them back but I wanted to give myself room for some Changeling fuckery. I think... I think I actually just want to run Changeling, guys.
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Dec 11, 2018 19:52
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Yawgmoth posted:I don't know if you meant it this way but I love the idea of Arcadia in-universe actively resisting the question being answered because it makes for a better story. I meant it exactly that way. I think it's amazing. The person playing the Acanthus wanted answers. There were none to be had. I completely understand how it should be and is frustrating to a player to not know things, but when you think about it, how could you even measure the difference? The ambiguity makes for a great story and a great obsession for a mage.
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Dec 11, 2018 19:58
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To be fair part of the difference is that entering the Supernal Arcadia would, one expects, totally unmake you both forward and backwards in time. If Supernal Arcadia doesn't do that, you'd also need to explain why going and carving out a little chunk of Fae Arcadia isn't Ascension to the Supernal. But, like, these are open questions, not 'therefore this is bad.'
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Dec 11, 2018 20:36
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Joe Slowboat posted:To be fair part of the difference is that entering the Supernal Arcadia would, one expects, totally unmake you both forward and backwards in time. I think we spent probably 2 hours over the course of 4-5 sessions talking about the Arcadia/Arcadia problem, which at the end of the day was really a lot of fun. At the end of the day, as the omniscient storyteller, I could have just said yes or no when the question was first posed, but then we'd have missed those 2 hours of fun. The player in question is really very good at finding questions that don't have easy answers in this game, so it was a wonderful thing that occurred. At the end of the day, it's not really my job to answer all the questions they have. It's my job to make finding whatever answers they can find to be interesting along the way. They're also not super good with the metaphysics of mage, because this is collectively their first time playing and the 2e core the bulk of what they've read. The Mystagogue player has read some of the Mysterium book, and another read the fiction anthology.
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Dec 11, 2018 21:01
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Joe Slowboat posted:To be fair part of the difference is that entering the Supernal Arcadia would, one expects, totally unmake you both forward and backwards in time. 1. Fae Arcadia is an emanation realm of Supernal Arcadia, albeit one that rubs really close to the supernal. It's that little bit of dilution that keeps you from melting. 2. Supernal Arcadia is a place of stories and narratives, and thus doesn't so much "unmake" you as it remakes you into whatever it currently needs for a given story. This would potentially mean that a given true fae might at one point have been an overly ambitious mage. 3. The Wyrd might be (in whole or in part) the creation of some 10 dot fate/time spell, which protects certain beings from the unmaking power of this particular supernal realm (conditions apply, of course).
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Dec 11, 2018 21:08
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Yawgmoth posted:3. The Wyrd might be (in whole or in part) the creation of some 10 dot fate/time spell, which protects certain beings from the unmaking power of this particular supernal realm (conditions apply, of course). How about it's an Exarch-style "big" symbol? Maybe one of the Old Gods that never got deposed?
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Dec 11, 2018 21:26
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That reminds me, does Fae Arcadia have much of a Time deal? Are the True Fae able to turn back the clock outside manually resetting things in their realms? Because Wyrd can clearly be read as Fate doing full-scale Ludicrous Fate Shenanigans, but there doesn't seem to be much Time in Changeling magic.
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Dec 11, 2018 21:35
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Joe Slowboat posted:That reminds me, does Fae Arcadia have much of a Time deal? Are the True Fae able to turn back the clock outside manually resetting things in their realms? Because Wyrd can clearly be read as Fate doing full-scale Ludicrous Fate Shenanigans, but there doesn't seem to be much Time in Changeling magic. I don't remember per the books, but I just draw from the influences of faerie tales. So time moves differently when I run it. Not necessarily even the same across all the realm, but it moves as the narrative requires. Otherwise, there were one or two contracts I think that touched on time, but it was more a consequence of the narrative again. More akin to Acceleration than Shifting Sands though.
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Dec 11, 2018 21:41
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That Old Tree posted:How about it's an Exarch-style "big" symbol? Maybe one of the Old Gods that never got deposed? Joe Slowboat posted:That reminds me, does Fae Arcadia have much of a Time deal? Are the True Fae able to turn back the clock outside manually resetting things in their realms? Because Wyrd can clearly be read as Fate doing full-scale Ludicrous Fate Shenanigans, but there doesn't seem to be much Time in Changeling magic.
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Dec 11, 2018 21:44
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There are a couple that deal with time, yeah. I think one might straight up be called "The Contract of Hours." One of my favorites is a power that lets you alter the rate of time in the real world that going into the hedge takes, so you could theoretically pop in there for a half hour and have a day pass or vice versa. But it's not as prominent as what a Mage would think of as Fate magic, no. How going into Arcadia wouldn't straight up unmake you if Arcadia (Changeling) and Arcadia (Mage) are the same thing: Only high Wyrd Changelings can do it, and high Gnosis Mages don't get unmade (well, Archmages) so why would Changelings? Also, carving out a little chunk of Arcadia means, effectively, turning into a True Fae - and how different is that from Ascension to the Supernal? Like, it might literally be the same thing, if the True Fae are Old Gods of the Supernal?
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Dec 11, 2018 21:47
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Digital Osmosis posted:There are a couple that deal with time, yeah. I think one might straight up be called "The Contract of Hours." One of my favorites is a power that lets you alter the rate of time in the real world that going into the hedge takes, so you could theoretically pop in there for a half hour and have a day pass or vice versa. But it's not as prominent as what a Mage would think of as Fate magic, no. Humans wander in occasionally and changelings started as humans forced into our.
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Dec 11, 2018 23:25
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End count of 20th century active, not-dead-by-1990 only is at least 147,000 supernatural creatures active in the Final Nights, excluding fomori, spirits and wraiths. The global overall population ratio is around 1:40,000. They're spread over ~1200 known locations.
Loomer fucked around with this message at 04:01 on Dec 12, 2018 |
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Dec 12, 2018 03:55
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xanthan posted:Humans wander in occasionally and changelings started as humans forced into our. But humans who are kidnapped are taken by a Fae, who would be it's own plot of Arcadia, thus shielding it's prey. Likewise if a human wanders in, it's likely to a specific keepers realm. If the two Arcadias are actually the same place.
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Dec 12, 2018 04:04
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I've always just concidered changeling arcadia the fallen version of supernal arcadia; the shadow is the fallen version of whatever the thyrsus realm is called, the underworld is fallen version of the moros realm, the inferno from infernals is the fallen pandemonium and the fallen aether is the promethan pinciple or whatever their energy is called.
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Dec 12, 2018 04:12
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Pyros and the Principle as a manifestation of the Prime and Forces arcana in the Fallen world would explain a lot. You can look at the Exarchs' ascension as the forcible "humanization" of reality, and in particular, of magic. This is then reflected in the spontaneous generation of a force which responds to human ego and acts of creation, and ultimately creates human beings through the medium of Prometheans -- and releases cataclysmic destructive energies (Forces!) if they don't continue to move towards this goal.
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Dec 12, 2018 05:20
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Tuxedo Catfish posted:To be honest, I wish Changeling had something like the three-way Geist endgame, where what you become depends on what you do and how you get there. The inevitability of it is a little disconcerting, even if the risk is a very cool element. I probably need to read the 2e glowup for Giest. My only actual issue w/ Becoming Nightmare is that it Spinal Taps the top-end of power accounting, but I do like that the choice to gain Wyrd (i.e. gain power) creates the inevitabiliy.
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Dec 12, 2018 06:10
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Tuxedo Catfish posted:Pyros and the Principle as a manifestation of the Prime and Forces arcana in the Fallen world would explain a lot. You can look at the Exarchs' ascension as the forcible "humanization" of reality, and in particular, of magic. This is then reflected in the spontaneous generation of a force which responds to human ego and acts of creation, and ultimately creates human beings through the medium of Prometheans -- and releases cataclysmic destructive energies (Forces!) if they don't continue to move towards this goal. We've had remarks before on what Pyros is most associated with, and it's not Prime. It's Fate, as the manifestation of directed change. The divine fire bit's more a motif than a signifier in that regard.
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Dec 12, 2018 08:53
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Obsession is what allows a human to draw on Pyros, and that has gently caress all to do with Prime or Forces. In addition to strong aspects of Mind and Fate, there's also the patently obvious ties to Life, considering you can make yourself immortal or create clones with the stuff. Nah, trying to tie poo poo into Mage tends to fail when you really break things down.
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Dec 12, 2018 09:49
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Imperial Mysteries explicitly lays out the theory that The Principle is an Aetheric counterpart to the Arcadian Old Gods of the Thistle. It's not nearly as much of a stretch as you're making it out to be.
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Dec 12, 2018 10:09
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Tuxedo Catfish posted:Imperial Mysteries explicitly lays out the theory that The Principle is an Aetheric counterpart to the Arcadian Old Gods of the Thistle. It's not nearly as much of a stretch as you're making it out to be. I'm not sure if the Old Gods of Thistle exist anymore as of 2E. I think they're just the True Fae now since they've gone ahead and been pretty explicit that cArcadia and mArcadia are not the same thing, what with one being a horrific world where narrative holds law and the other being a Supernal World Acanthi overlay across the real world in Mage Sight.
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Dec 12, 2018 10:24
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If anything, the problem here isn't using Mage as a framework -- that's a good thing and literally the point of the Arcana in the game's cosmology. The problem is that the Arcana as building blocks of reality on the one hand, and Supernal magic -- specifically, the set of practices which Mages wield as a tool -- aren't interchangeable. Arcadia and the Wyrd use Fate (and I suppose Time) to create their own set of practices wherein Changelings can do things like "make a deal with the concept of fire," which you can use in an applied manner to do things that would be very out of character for an Acanthus and likely require dipping into other (and even inferior) Arcana. For a Mage, Fate is a verb; for a Changeling, it's a whole language. Pyros is divine fire that manifests as blazing angels and ensouls things. It is dangerous in the hands of the arrogant, and significantly linked to hope and spiritual fortitude. It is power, but there seems to be a singular will behind that power. It transforms things by burning them until they're pure. poo poo's so Obrimos it hurts. Ironslave posted:I'm not sure if the Old Gods of Thistle exist anymore as of 2E. I think they're just the True Fae now since they've gone ahead and been pretty explicit that cArcadia and mArcadia are not the same thing, what with one being a horrific world where narrative holds law and the other being a Supernal World Acanthi overlay across the real world in Mage Sight. Sure, and even in 1E it seems likely that "Old Gods of the Thistle" is just an extremely Mage-y name for True Fae. That's not really my point though; I'm just saying that Pyros's aesthetic, effects, and process are all very Aetheric, and seem to have originally been conceived that way. (Along with an alternative suggestion that maybe they're from somewhere beyond the Supernal altogether.) Tuxedo Catfish fucked around with this message at 10:36 on Dec 12, 2018 |
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Dec 12, 2018 10:25
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Tuxedo Catfish posted:Sure, and even in 1E it seems likely that "Old Gods of the Thistle" is just an extremely Mage-y name for True Fae. That's not really my point though; I'm just saying that Pyros's aesthetic, effects, and process are all very Aetheric, and seem to have originally been conceived that way. (Along with an alternative suggestion that maybe they're from somewhere beyond the Supernal altogether.) Pyros's processes aren't that Aetheric at all; Prime's mostly truth and Forces is, well, physics. And the rest shares motifs with Aether, but that's only relevant if you assume that the Obrimoi perspective of the Supernal has a monopoly on angel and fire motifs. Either way, this has been remarked on by the folks who work on this stuff: Pyros is more closely associated with symbols of Fate, as its role in terms of change.
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Dec 12, 2018 10:38
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Ironslave posted:Pyros's processes aren't that Aetheric at all; Prime's mostly truth and Forces is, well, physics. And the rest shares motifs with Aether, but that's only relevant if you assume that the Obrimoi perspective of the Supernal has a monopoly on angel and fire motifs. Either way, this has been remarked on by the folks who work on this stuff: Pyros is more closely associated with symbols of Fate, as its role in terms of change. Prime isn't just truth. It can unleash celestial fire (without needing support from Forces), wither the land and living things by locally cutting off the connection to the Supernal, impose purpose in the form of a holy mission, and, notably, create animated constructs. I'm looking forward to Signs of Sorcery and its take on the cosmology of 2E, but as retcons go, this one is profoundly unnecessary.
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Dec 12, 2018 10:51
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Pyros has always been the agent of change, abstractly suffused through the world, since Promethean's inception as a line. It's only a retcon if you assumed that two things that like to be referred to as "divine fire" must be the same or similar. They're not; one is semi-literal fire and the other is the abstract notion of the ability of things in the world to transform over time.
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Dec 12, 2018 11:23
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The only crossover information in Signs of Sorcery (nearly out of editing) is three facts about the Exarxhs: that any diplomacy between them and God-like beings from other lines (say, how the Nemesis interacts with Helios) are strictly handled by Ochemata out of the sight of Seers, that they totally have Exarch-worshiping Mystery Cults in other supernatural beings' societal fringes and yes, they get benefits (eg a vampire Exarch cult might get an auspex devotion to understand High Speech) and, finally, that they appear to get on disturbingly well with the God-Machine and send Seers to help out GM-angels every now and again, and Seers sometimes find it reciprocated without asking. It does have a lot about proper Arcadia in it, though, which may help distinguish it from any namesakes in lesser gamelines. 
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Dec 12, 2018 11:47
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Tuxedo Catfish posted:Prime isn't just truth. It can unleash celestial fire (without needing support from Forces), wither the land and living things by locally cutting off the connection to the Supernal, impose purpose in the form of a holy mission, and, notably, create animated constructs.
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Dec 12, 2018 12:36
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Zereth posted:This is such a change from oWoD Prime, which I remember not being able to do much of anything at all on its own beyond manipulating quintessence, but needed as a supplement for a lot of things you'd want to do with other Spheres.
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Dec 12, 2018 12:48
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Nessus posted:oMage's Prime was like the liberal arts pre-requisite for doing like 40% of the poo poo you'd want to as an all-powerful arch-wizard.
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Dec 12, 2018 13:23
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Conflating Supernal Arcadia with Changeling Arcadia seems more difficult in 2e, because as far as I understand new Mage, the former doesn't exist anymore as a separate realm. It's only an overlay for Acanthus that translates the Supernal symbols into understandable imagery. As soon they Ascend to archmastery, Arcadia stops existing for them.
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Dec 12, 2018 13:39
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Gantolandon posted:Conflating Supernal Arcadia with Changeling Arcadia seems more difficult in 2e, because as far as I understand new Mage, the former doesn't exist anymore as a separate realm. It's only an overlay for Acanthus that translates the Supernal symbols into understandable imagery. As soon they Ascend to archmastery, Arcadia stops existing for them. "What Supernal World do Archmages see in Mage Sight" is something I'd never thought to ask, but now that you've mentioned it I can't stop wondering about it.
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Dec 12, 2018 13:41
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2e has made the two Arcadias explicitly not the same.
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Dec 12, 2018 14:06
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Mors Rattus posted:2e has made the two Arcadias explicitly not the same. Good. Keep your filthy Mage outta my weird fairy game 
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Dec 12, 2018 15:27
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Gantolandon posted:Conflating Supernal Arcadia with Changeling Arcadia seems more difficult in 2e, because as far as I understand new Mage, the former doesn't exist anymore as a separate realm. It's only an overlay for Acanthus that translates the Supernal symbols into understandable imagery. As soon they Ascend to archmastery, Arcadia stops existing for them. I mean, it's not really that difficult. The players aren't omniscient and neither are any narrators that they're likely to run into. Maybe if they're crossing paths with a bunch of archmages, but it's not really difficult at all in play. How often mages even go to visit the changeling Arcadia is easy to manage in the game, because it's your game. Internet discussions about the cosmology aside, the players don't have that information with any solid assurance. It's like studying any sufficiently difficult branch of science, philosophy, or religion. There's a lot of trust that is put in the tools for observation and maybe still at the end of the day the character is just going to need to believe. So that's how it comes out at my table.
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Dec 12, 2018 15:53
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Jhet posted:I mean, it's not really that difficult. The players aren't omniscient and neither are any narrators that they're likely to run into. Maybe if they're crossing paths with a bunch of archmages, but it's not really difficult at all in play. How often mages even go to visit the changeling Arcadia is easy to manage in the game, because it's your game. It's more a question of definitions? For a 2e Acanthus, being told somebody was kidnapped and carried across the Hedge to Arcadia is the equivalent of being told somebody was kidnapped and stolen away to mathematics. Brb prepping game about dealing with the Great Mathvasion
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Dec 12, 2018 16:18
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