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Chernobyl Peace Prize posted:and I think cyborgs.  Beep boop bark.
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Apr 23, 2019 17:16
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Crasical posted:
Or was that an entire faction? I feel like it could've gone either way.
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Apr 23, 2019 17:39
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Rand Brittain posted:Instead of the usual argument, I'm going to mention that I'm extremely annoyed with M20 for deciding that the Crafts weren't actually massacred, because 'the Technocracy are protagonists, and therefore it would be unsympathetic for them to have committed a pogrom.' Yeah, this is dumb as hell. I actually like playing as Technocrats who realize the organization they are a part of is ultimately bad even if the things they believe are not.
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Apr 23, 2019 17:52
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Chernobyl Peace Prize posted:Am I confusing this with another NPC or is this the one who got all robomagicked up and couldn't leave Crinos anymore (bc too much metal) and just hung out in the Umbra doing werewolf adventure bullshit? i think ToT was part of the cyberdogs faction that at some point gets killed for falling to the weaver or something isn't he?
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Apr 23, 2019 18:42
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Rand Brittain posted:Instead of the usual argument, I'm going to mention that I'm extremely annoyed with M20 for deciding that the Crafts weren't actually massacred, because 'the Technocracy are protagonists, and therefore it would be unsympathetic for them to have committed a pogrom.' I thought the Crafts were un-massacred so Brucato could tell us how the old group of disparate magical traditions banding together in the face of adversity were actually bad because they'd been corrupted by the Nephandi, but fear not, all the Crafts and their disparate magical traditions have banded together to fight this new threat?
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Apr 23, 2019 18:44
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The Technocracy is mostly about Capitalism and Imperialism crushing everything. Much like the White Man's Burden, their spiel about scienc eis mostly bullshit. That's why they killed the Craftmasons.
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Apr 23, 2019 18:55
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LatwPIAT posted:I thought the Crafts were un-massacred so Brucato could tell us how the old group of disparate magical traditions banding together in the face of adversity were actually bad because they'd been corrupted by the Nephandi, but fear not, all the Crafts and their disparate magical traditions have banded together to fight this new threat? That too, but it was fairly specific about "we decided the Technocracy didn't kill the Crafts because that would be a pogrom and pogroms are obviously very bad."
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Apr 23, 2019 19:01
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I'm just glad metaplot in M20 is considered multiple choice in every book, because I don't care for Nephandic infiltration of the Traditions or the Technocracy. The nephandi make a good setting element when used sparingly. Having them co-opt the leadership of the traditions and the technocracy means that it stops being a game about subaltern cultures fighting exploitative authoritarians. I like M20, but I'm really not looking forward to the Book of the Fallen, which I expect will be the big metaplot heavy book of the line. Rand Brittain posted:That too, but it was fairly specific about "we decided the Technocracy didn't kill the Crafts because that would be a pogrom and pogroms are obviously very bad." I don't think it's too crazy to worry about having a protagonist faction cross a moral event horizon. I'm suddenly hoping it's a long time before Paradox/White Wolf Entertainment turns its baleful eye on the technocracy. Octavo fucked around with this message at 19:50 on Apr 23, 2019 |
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Apr 23, 2019 19:31
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Octavo posted:I don't think it's too crazy to worry about having a protagonist faction cross a moral event horizon. I'm suddenly hoping it's a long time before Paradox/White Wolf Entertainment turns its baleful eye on the technocracy. I mean, the point is they do pogroms all the time. Doing a capital-P pogrom which they call "the Pogrom" is pretty much what makes them the villain faction in the first place. Anyway, has anybody developed an opinion on Contagion Chronicle yet?
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Apr 23, 2019 20:49
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Rand Brittain posted:Anyway, has anybody developed an opinion on Contagion Chronicle yet? All the buzz I've heard has been negative; incoherent mashups (in stark contrast to e.g. Dark Eras), villain factions that don't make much sense relative to the usual antagonist splats, mechanics that suggest the devs don't understand the difference between oWoD and nWoD, that sort of thing. Haven't seen any of the text myself yet, though.
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Apr 23, 2019 20:56
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Rand Brittain posted:Anyway, has anybody developed an opinion on Contagion Chronicle yet? It's really not my thing. A couple of the settings seem interesting, like the one with the mummy that eats memory, but idk. Fighting or controlling an infinitely variable contagion that sickens the god machine just didn't seem like the greatest locus for crossover. I don't know if it's the concept I don't care for or the execution.
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Apr 23, 2019 20:58
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Octavo posted:It's really not my thing. A couple of the settings seem interesting, like the one with the mummy that eats memory, but idk. Fighting or controlling an infinitely variable contagion that sickens the god machine just didn't seem like the greatest locus for crossover. I don't know if it's the concept I don't care for or the execution. The Sworn powers are cute but like...not worth the book itself. This is probably the second Kickstarter I've dropped my pledge level a few tiers on after seeing the content, and the first was Exalted 3rd Edition, so uhhhh....yikes.
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Apr 23, 2019 21:35
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MonsieurChoc posted:The Technocracy is mostly about Capitalism and Imperialism crushing everything. Much like the White Man's Burden, their spiel about scienc eis mostly bullshit. The Craftmasons were too Good and Pure for this world.
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Apr 23, 2019 21:46
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Chernobyl Peace Prize posted:This is probably the second Kickstarter I've dropped my pledge level a few tiers on after seeing the content, and the first was Exalted 3rd Edition, so uhhhh....yikes. This is the second Onyx Path KS I've dropped my pledge on after Changeling the Lost 2e. I'm going to have to carefully note the developer and lead designers involved before I buy anymore Chronicles of Darkness games, I think. Awakening is still gold, of course and by all accounts Deviant is going to be good too.
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Apr 23, 2019 21:53
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Contagion Chronicle was the first OPP KS I looked at without knowing much of anything as to what it was about, and coming from that perspective it was pretty much a no sell for me. Like, I couldn't even tell reading the overview what it was supposed to be about, just some rambling about infections and crossovers, and a list of chapters that just vaguely told me there'd be factions and stuff. Maybe I missed something on the KS site, but are all OPP kickstarters laid out this way, where they seem to assume you already know what they're making and are on board? Even off the KS, the promo stuff has been...not good. I was looking at the "running the contagion chronicle" blurb on the OPP site, and it still didn't really tell me much of anything, coming in without prior knowledge. I've pieced together what its about from forum posts and other places, but that was a slog that killed pretty much any interest I had in backing.
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Apr 23, 2019 22:17
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Desiden posted:Contagion Chronicle was the first OPP KS I looked at without knowing much of anything as to what it was about, and coming from that perspective it was pretty much a no sell for me. Like, I couldn't even tell reading the overview what it was supposed to be about, just some rambling about infections and crossovers, and a list of chapters that just vaguely told me there'd be factions and stuff. Maybe I missed something on the KS site, but are all OPP kickstarters laid out this way, where they seem to assume you already know what they're making and are on board? While they do presume you're on board if you're backing it, I think the description was given in the first paragraph of the About section. "The Contagion Chronicle is an overarching compendium of chronicle hooks, riveting settings, and Storyteller aids to help present all the Chronicles of Darkness game lines with one consistent story. In the chronicle, the Contagion acts as a motivational force and inspires the formation of factions where vampires, werewolves, mages, mummies, etc. come together in new and unique ways." Obviously miles may vary when it comes to how riveting the settings are, but the Contagion is a motivational force to get gamelines to team up. It's not, like, Time of Judgment Redux where everyone's story is ending, it's events that can have an impact on different gamelines and give them a reason to do normally out-of-context things (or not so out of context, in some cases). The storytelling advice section is the one that gets into whipping up your own Contagions, though even that requires Storytellers to make up some stuff. Most Kickstarters have been for core books, and tend to spend more time describing what the game is about (some of the earlier ones offered the mostly-complete manuscripts from the front page). But this, and Dark Eras, presume you know what Chronicles are about in general and this (and Dark Eras) probably aren't good starting point if you're just getting into Chronicles. Though based on the questions I've seen from people new to the game wanting to run vampire/hunter/mummy, it's probably not an awful starting point. nofather fucked around with this message at 01:17 on Apr 24, 2019 |
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Apr 24, 2019 01:14
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The Contagion sounds a lot like the crossover chronicle that the Mind's Eye Society ran a few years back, in which reality was being slowly invaded and devoured by an extradimensional thing that necessitated cross-splat teamups to fight.
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Apr 24, 2019 01:25
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Loomer posted:The Craftmasons were too Good and Pure for this world. I wonder how many players wanted to play as "the last Craftmason", instead of the more popular "last White Howler" or various rare bloodlines like Salubri.
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Apr 24, 2019 03:40
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Pocky In My Pocket posted:i think ToT was part of the cyberdogs faction that at some point gets killed for falling to the weaver or something isn't he? More or less. Teeth-of-Titanium was a Red Talon picked up by the Cyberdogs faction of Glass Walkers and cyber-ized with invasive metal Fetishes because WEAVER WOOOOOOOOOO!
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Apr 24, 2019 03:55
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Rand Brittain posted:Anyway, has anybody developed an opinion on Contagion Chronicle yet? As a big crossover mark: it's not good. For a book that was previously pitched as the Crossover Chronicle, its contents really don't have a lot to do with taking advantage of the individual game elements colliding. It's mostly focused around new details, whether Contagion outbreaks or the agendas of the new Sworn and False factions, into which you just mix character types sort of blindly. There's little I saw taking advantage of parallels and contrasts like, say, how the Ordo Dracul and the Cheiron Group would try to take advantage and maneuver around each other, or how the Arisen's view of interacting with the Lancea et Sanctum might be informed by their perspective on Theban Sorcery. The most glaring example of how everything is just kind of superficially interchangeable is how it follows after the Beast corebook's blind assumption that kinship powers mean everybody's just kind of chill about teaming up with beasts, despite their Hungers driving them towards becoming blights on supernatural territories. On a thematic level, it makes no attempt to suggest to blend the themes of the games you're combining, instead overwriting everything with its own theme of "loss of control." There's a lot of glaring errors that made it past the developer's redlines stage, like mechanical references to rules from the old World of Darkness and talk of rolling against "thresholds" (which I assume are, again, just World of Darkness success requirements). The writing style of the setting is very reminiscent of the World of Darkness in a particular way as well: It paints "exotic" locales in broad strokes (the theme of Kyoto is tatemae and honne, seriously?) that I've heard secondhand some residents have taken on a spectrum from "laughably inaccurate" to "borderline offensive." It plays fast and loose with mixing history with fiction, such that the entire setting of Odense revolves around an actual historical king being revealed as a vampire methuselah conspiring to destroy the city. The layout isn't great either. You get several chapters in before you actually get an answer to the basic question "what is the Contagion?" (And I mean from a Storyteller's perspective of "what is this thing you're asking me to run," not in the sense of cosmic origin or whatever, but just getting a sense of what is thematically appropriate for it to tend to do.) When you do get that answer, it dances back and forth on whether the Contagion is an emergent property of the God-Machine or something else that it just talks about infecting the God-Machine in particular a lot. This book has a lot of hamfisted proper noun usage when it comes to namedropping the God-Machine more than necessary. I remember when the God-Machine Chronicle book first game out, and a lot of people got confused and upset because they thought it meant the God-Machine was becoming some kind of ur-cosmology that would lurk behind all the CofD gamelines at a fundamental level, and everything would have the God-Machine jury-rigged into it somehow. This book sometimes reads like it is the book those people were afraid they were going to get.
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Apr 24, 2019 05:03
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I Am Just a Box posted:It plays fast and loose with mixing history with fiction, such that the entire setting of Odense revolves around an actual historical king being revealed as a vampire methuselah conspiring to destroy the city. According to my Danish friend, the Odense writeup is mostly trash: the book's description of the city covers less than the official tourism website and completely brushes or leaves unmentioned over Odense's vibrant student and immigrant communities (it's the hub for multiculturalism in Denmark). It wants to depict the peaceful, crime-free life in a Scandinavian paradise being upset by the Contagion, which falls flat because Odense is and has a reputation as Denmark's most violent city (it has 1.5 times the national violent crime rate!). Further, Odense has a reputation as a city where people will actually talk to strangers (a very un-Scandinavian thing to do!), but despite the theme being social alienation, this is not remarked upon or explored.
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Apr 24, 2019 09:54
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LatwPIAT posted:According to my Danish friend, the Odense writeup is mostly trash: the book's description of the city covers less than the official tourism website and completely brushes or leaves unmentioned over Odense's vibrant student and immigrant communities (it's the hub for multiculturalism in Denmark). It wants to depict the peaceful, crime-free life in a Scandinavian paradise being upset by the Contagion, which falls flat because Odense is and has a reputation as Denmark's most violent city (it has 1.5 times the national violent crime rate!). Further, Odense has a reputation as a city where people will actually talk to strangers (a very un-Scandinavian thing to do!), but despite the theme being social alienation, this is not remarked upon or explored. I heard that, but it's weird, because apparently the writer actually lives in Odense.
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Apr 24, 2019 15:47
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MonsieurChoc posted:I wonder how many players wanted to play as "the last Craftmason", instead of the more popular "last White Howler" or various rare bloodlines like Salubri. Oh, which reminds me. I'm reasonably certain Jay-No-Name, the garou/bastet/mage/cyborg's garou heritage was white howler. Also the player character from the cancelled werewolf video game was going to be a lost cub white howler.
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Apr 24, 2019 15:52
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nofather posted:I heard that, but it's weird, because apparently the writer actually lives in Odense. Unfortunately one thing that the Chronicles/WoD books have taught us is that being resident in a place absolutely isn't an actual substitute for research. It's very easy to have an extremely personal and idiosyncratic experience anywhere, I imagine, and an RPG book is meant to be general, not specific.
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Apr 24, 2019 15:55
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Kurieg posted:Oh, which reminds me. I'm reasonably certain Jay-No-Name, the garou/bastet/mage/cyborg's garou heritage was white howler. Is the W20 White Howler book about bringing them back or just for historical games?
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Apr 24, 2019 15:56
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Dawgstar posted:Is the W20 White Howler book about bringing them back or just for historical games? Mostly historical, it offers some ideas for if you want to integrate them into modern day but it devotes large amounts of pagespace to the level of technology/agriculture available to the picts and how to run a period game without running roughshod over history too much.
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Apr 24, 2019 16:03
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Joe Slowboat posted:Unfortunately one thing that the Chronicles/WoD books have taught us is that being resident in a place absolutely isn't an actual substitute for research. It's very easy to have an extremely personal and idiosyncratic experience anywhere, I imagine, and an RPG book is meant to be general, not specific. Doing some research it looks like Odense has crime rates overall lower than the national average, including violent crimes. While I appreciate that sometimes people living places, or writing fictionalized versions of them, may not make them entirely accurate, it's also not unheard of for people to complain about things with little reason to, or for personal reasons not involving content. It's possible LatwPiat's friend is just as wrong as they're accusing the writer of being. nofather fucked around with this message at 16:14 on Apr 24, 2019 |
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Apr 24, 2019 16:05
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Unless LatwPIAT knows exactly the same Danish friend I do, (theoretically possible) the complaints about it come from more than one Danish source.
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Apr 24, 2019 16:46
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MollyMetroid posted:Unless LatwPIAT knows exactly the same Danish friend I do, (theoretically possible) the complaints about it come from more than one Danish source. Where are they getting their information on crime stats? Recent and in the past Odense doesn't seem to ping much on crime.
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Apr 24, 2019 17:08
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i mean they're saying that odense doesn't feel like odense idgiaf about "crime stats" I give a gently caress about a bunch of people from the area going "this is not a really good representation of the area being portrayed"
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Apr 24, 2019 17:09
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I mean, I was more thinking generally; I don't know anything about Odense. Though the student and immigrant communities thing stands out more to me than anything else? Especially since from an American point of view, Scandinavian violent crime rates could be doubled or halved and would look about the same?
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Apr 24, 2019 17:09
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Joe Slowboat posted:I mean, I was more thinking generally; I don't know anything about Odense. Though the student and immigrant communities thing stands out more to me than anything else? Especially since from an American point of view, Scandinavian violent crime rates could be doubled or halved and would look about the same? It mentions students moving in and construction being done to facilitate the new populations. Knud does seem pissed that Odense is not his ideal version of Odense. I suppose they can talk about it to the writer if they're interested, or just keep complaining to other people, which is probably more satisfying.
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Apr 24, 2019 17:15
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Well I mean what they can do is not back the project and tell other people to not back the project and that's way more relevant here than your high and mighty "well they can just complain then"
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Apr 24, 2019 17:17
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People complaining that a migrant-centric representation of their city doesn’t feel right? Hmm. Those same people dramatically overstating violent crime rates in that area? Hmm!
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Apr 24, 2019 17:28
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Basic Chunnel posted:People complaining that a migrant-centric representation of their city doesn’t feel right? Hmm. Those same people dramatically overstating violent crime rates in that area? Hmm! the person I know Molly is talking about is himself an immigrant, and has never said anything about crime rates - he just finds that the writeup actually does not address the existence of his community or others like them
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Apr 24, 2019 17:37
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Let's take another example, because Chicago has been used a lot. Most people who live here would take a look at most of the WoD/ChonD stuff with Chicago in it and go... that doesn't seem like Chicago. Because it's a fictionalized imagining of it. I haven't read the Odense stuff, and probably never will unless someone buys it for me (I don't need a book for crossover stuff, ChronD's toolbox works well enough without it). But the point is valid for most any of the settings. They're not going to really feel like where-ever it is, and that's kind of a blessing. No one would want a Chicago that is largely okay for a large city, excepting for some areas with more flashpoint violence. It's too boring for a world of darkness, and it's much more fun to have ties to gangsters from the 20s and ties to organized crime (honestly, I only read half of the VtR stuff from the book), and slimy politicians and police and gang violence. But when you start to get closer to real world Chicago it just starts to get a little too depressing to play a game about darkness in, because it's not play-horror, just the real sort of horrible. So I hope they keep making terrible generalizations about Chicago and all the other real-cities as dark settings. Really, I hope they ham it up a bit. Make it so people can have fun playing a horror game about ghosts and vampires and wizards, etc...
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Apr 24, 2019 19:15
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So I picked up Call to Battle: The Saga of Jay No-Name on a dare. Jay jut got so angry he went double-crinos. He also immediately fell in love with literally the first kinfolk woman he saw, and she with him. So much so she's basically pledging her life to him after knowing him for about 3 days, of which they were only conscious and in each other's presence for about 3 hours.
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Apr 24, 2019 20:06
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Jhet posted:Let's take another example, because Chicago has been used a lot. Most people who live here would take a look at most of the WoD/ChonD stuff with Chicago in it and go... that doesn't seem like Chicago. Because it's a fictionalized imagining of it. I haven't read the Odense stuff, and probably never will unless someone buys it for me (I don't need a book for crossover stuff, ChronD's toolbox works well enough without it). Kind of like how in The Dresden Files, Jim Butcher's Chicago is like you threw a few landmarks and place names onto a map, smudged geography so hard you broke your eraser, and called it a day. That's Odense. Kurieg posted:Jay jut got so angry he went double-crinos. Chernobyl Peace Prize fucked around with this message at 20:10 on Apr 24, 2019 |
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Apr 24, 2019 20:08
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He... he grew a second Crinos head or...?
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Apr 24, 2019 20:16
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Chernobyl Peace Prize posted:go on... Jay is apparently the result of a progenitor mage with a literal basement full of Fera in bacta tanks. And he managed to genetically engineer a garou-bastet hybrid. While fighting a bane in his (wolf)crinos form he got so angry he somehow also went bastet-crinos on top of it? He's still keeping the truth of what he is hidden from his pack so there hasn't been a real explanation.
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Apr 24, 2019 20:20
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