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jakodee posted:And people will get really, really mad about the oppression-fighting game for treasons they can’t put into words (those are start of the liberals and leftists fighting).
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# ? Apr 30, 2019 16:16 |
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# ? May 24, 2024 21:08 |
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Warthur posted:(Emphasis mine.) "Treasons They Can't Put Into Words" sounds like an underground romance novel from Paranoia or something. It’s a mistype I’m extremely proud of tbh.
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# ? Apr 30, 2019 16:24 |
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I just think that the 'actually the Pentacle can never win' side is misrepresenting the themes of the game and the space of play; also, again, I got called a rapist for saying 'maybe having a world without slavery is good.' I genuinely enjoy the discussions of the setting, though I do wish people would take more interest in what the metaphysics mean for.the actual ground game of fighting the Exarhs rather than purely getting caught up in the effects of victory... except Mulva, whose argumentative style is grotesque. Also one thing that's actually fun about Mage is getting Supernal beings sicced on you when you start actually threatening the status quo; the Exarchs don't rewrite your brain to make you a capitalist if you succeed in fighting scarcity, they send Capitalism's Burning Avatar to ruin you and yours. I've had a plot idea in my head for a while about an ochema of the Father, but lesser Exarchic servants are also a lot of fun if you want to get in magical fights with angels etc.
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# ? Apr 30, 2019 16:32 |
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Joe Slowboat posted:I just think that the 'actually the Pentacle can never win' side is misrepresenting the themes of the game and the space of play; also, again, I got called a rapist for saying 'maybe having a world without slavery is good.' I really love that about Mage. I think that particular one got statted up or at least described in detail in Imperial Mysteries. I had my group fight the Ochema of the Prophet aka the incarnation of "History is decided by Great Men." They ended up drop-kicking the rear end in a top hat into the Abyss via a crumbling Wending, thus causing Napoleon to get exiled to Saint Helena.
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# ? Apr 30, 2019 16:38 |
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Octavo posted:I really love that about Mage. I think that particular one got statted up or at least described in detail in Imperial Mysteries. That's extremely good (the Prophet is not one of the most potent Exarchs but by the Hoary Hordes of Horlock, I hate the Prophet conceptually the most). Ochemata are really fun, and yeah, the Chancellor's Ochema in Imperial Mysteries is dedicated to undermining the concept of charity and generosity, and more generally any humanitarian expenditure - the Ochema spreads the idea that all of that should be considered in terms of the profit it produces. Literacy programs? Only if they produce economic growth! It's a nicely monstrous and insidious archon of the Exarchs, and got sent into the world specifically because an Archmaster was trying to get people to be more generous (I can't help but imagine that Archmasters as Santa Claus). E: in general, as someone whose undergrad degree is in the History of Science, the Prophet is a really underrated villain Exarch, connected to how the Time Arcanum is more the time of the philosophers than the physicists: experiential time. The Prophet shapes how history is understood, with 'Great Men' and whiggishness and all the other historiographical flaws that reinforce the status quo. I'm sure the Lost Cause of the South scholars who perverted the historical record from the 1920s on would fit comfortably in the Prophet's Ministries; very much a 'control through manipulation of collective memory' there. Joe Slowboat fucked around with this message at 16:49 on Apr 30, 2019 |
# ? Apr 30, 2019 16:43 |
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I misread that as you dropkicking him through Napoleon's wedding.
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# ? Apr 30, 2019 19:00 |
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So, I may have mentioned at some point that we came up with a dozen or so new minor Ministries so that every Major Exarch had at least two. We managed to squeeze naming them all into Signs of Sorcery’s rundown of the Exarchs, without any description, but there’s at least one stated Seer character... Somewhere in an upcoming book who’s a Prelate of the Prophet. The Prophet is an rear end in a top hat. Even among Exarchs.
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# ? Apr 30, 2019 19:06 |
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Although, to be clear, if you attempt to fight them in an organized way you are as bad or worse.
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# ? Apr 30, 2019 19:24 |
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Ferrinus posted:Although, to be clear, if you attempt to fight them in an organized way you are as bad or worse. Organization for mutual benefit is a tool of the TYRANT-GODS.
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# ? Apr 30, 2019 20:58 |
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Octavo posted:They ended up drop-kicking the rear end in a top hat into the Abyss via a crumbling Wending, thus causing Napoleon to get exiled to Saint Helena. I want to know more about how these two things are related. Also, is the Prophet the feeling you get when you're at a protest and people just decide to walk on by without engaging?
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# ? Apr 30, 2019 21:22 |
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Love how not a single person has given a useful solution to the Mage problem other than "kill all mages". Spoiler Alert: Literally 99% the reason Mages Are Dicks is because Mages Are Rare. Most people who become Mages are going to be like that because they were probably already pretty hosed up to end up accepting poo poo like "the reality is a Lie". If everyone was a mage, I bet you MOST of them would stay the same as they were pre-maging, but just with fireballs. Billy Bob the trucker isn't going to become Magneto: Hill Billy Edition, he's probably just going to use his newfound teleportation powers to make his job easier, and pick up cute chicks/men. "B-but what about kkk or neo-nazi mages?" What about Antifa and Social Justice Wizards? The kkk pyromancer gets his head blown off by the Air Bending SJW and the neo-nazi necromancer who wants to bring back hitler gets teleported into the center of the sun by the Antifa Space Wizard. Now minorities actually have a loving fighting chance against fascists, who knew? Not to mention only Humans will get Magical Powers. Which translates to literally nearly every villain in NWOD losing. Vampires will find themselves getting blown the gently caress up by their "unsuspecting" prey, The Pure gets teleported to the Moon only to find they can't loving breathe in space, The True Fae captures some Random Joe only to find that Random Joe can turn anything into sliver with thought. But things won't automatically become a magical paradise overnight. That's okay because shockingly, Minorities being able to actually be as privileged and powerful as the majority without the need for money and having a different skin color is literally better in everyway than the lovely world we have now. But nope. Just kill Mages and keep the World Of Darkness a boring place full of sadness, because letting the lower class have magic is a bad idea.
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# ? Apr 30, 2019 22:03 |
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Axelgear posted:Also, is the Prophet the feeling you get when you're at a protest and people just decide to walk on by without engaging? I think that's plenty of Exarchs, actually! But that is one of their basic goals, yes. I would associate feelings of futility with the Ruin, while the Prophet loves feelings of self-importance or self-abnegation; anything that prevents people from accurately understanding how to join together and act collectively, rather than thinking of everyone as either nobodies or WORLD-HISTORIC GREAT MEN who do everything single-handedly. A lot of Pentacle Mages definitely get caught out by the second thing, because mages definitely have a tendency to thinking of themselves as not just special - in the sense of having more power to act - but more important than other people. If it were up to the Prophet, every conflict would be understood as two strong leaders who disliked each other getting into a fight, and democracy is doomed because it asks the vast majority of people to be something they're not. Randian thought is deeply aligned with it as well as with the Chancellor (as I understand Rand).
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# ? Apr 30, 2019 22:03 |
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I mean, accepting that reality is a lie is actually...kind of fundamental to being a mage because the thing about Mage Sight is it doesn't turn off. It's constantly there, letting you know that everything you see in phenomological reality is a reflection of symbols that are more real than reality. When a Moros looks at an object, they don't just see the object, but also what it is made of, how it was made, how it is being slowly worn away and destroyed, because what they are seeing is the true form of Matter within it rather than merely the physical object. When they look at a person, they see how that person is dying. When they look at a corpse, they see how it is rotting, how long it's been dead. So...yeah, Billy Bob can throw fireballs. He also instinctively and constantly is aware of every wi fi node around him, the temperature of everything he sees, the pull of gravity all around him, the movement of sound through the world, and the primal truth of magic within everything he looks at, at all times. The symbols of truth start to supersede the realness of physical reality. Always. Forever.
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# ? Apr 30, 2019 22:14 |
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I think trying to frame people who see Mages as dangerous as just being because Mages can hurl fireballs is not really getting the point. The point is that the kind of people who learn to throw fireballs in the first place usually aren't terribly stable. Awakening self-selects for people who are mentally unbalanced enough to just completely trash their old life in the pursuit of some crazy idea that any sane person would call crazy. Isaac Newton is a great example of what a Mage would be like, and anyone who knows the first thing about the man is aware why that isn't a compliment.
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# ? Apr 30, 2019 22:41 |
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That’s why, properly speaking, Pentacle mages should be more powerful than Seers one to one. They’re way more psychotic.
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# ? Apr 30, 2019 22:55 |
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Mage sucks and is boring. When does Chicago by night come out?
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# ? Apr 30, 2019 23:13 |
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I think Mages have a tendency to extreme behavior but then, they all had an intense religious experience in which they saw cosmic truth and it gave them the power to shape reality. Some people respond to that by becoming worse, sure. But, I'd expect just as many mages to suddenly become more dedicated to being a good person than they were before, as well as weirder. After all, even if it turns out the universe is amoral or even evil, mages have very personal proof in their experience that there's a larger framework of meaning out there that does, in fact, care about them personally in some sense. They've signed their names. Every mage knows they made their mark on the watchtower, which is probably a meaningful part of why the Pentacle associates the watchtowers with morality and fighting the Exarchs; not just because the Exarchs don't want the watchtowers to do what they're doing, but because every mage has a sense of connection to their Path. The Oracles want YOU to fight God for Humanity! Join your local Pentacle today! Etc.
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# ? Apr 30, 2019 23:37 |
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Mors Rattus posted:I mean, accepting that reality is a lie is actually...kind of fundamental to being a mage because the thing about Mage Sight is it doesn't turn off. It's constantly there, letting you know that everything you see in phenomological reality is a reflection of symbols that are more real than reality. When a Moros looks at an object, they don't just see the object, but also what it is made of, how it was made, how it is being slowly worn away and destroyed, because what they are seeing is the true form of Matter within it rather than merely the physical object. When they look at a person, they see how that person is dying. When they look at a corpse, they see how it is rotting, how long it's been dead. They're not all these things, though. They're constantly aware when something actively supernatural that's not deliberately concealed happens, all the rest of that is when they choose to turn on Active Sight. Mage Sight is more you're having dinner with your family, when suddenly there's a light like a flashlight somewhere outside the window in the darkness and suddenly your mashed potatoes taste like iron. You could just keep eating. You could try to ignore it. You could attempt to have a good evening with your husband, tuck your kid into bed, and then prepare for work tomorrow. But something is going on. Sure, it... probably has nothing to do with you. But what if it does? Don't you want to know? Don't you want to be sure? Turning on Active Mage Sight is an amazing experience that pushes you into an amazing world where everything is pregnant with meaning, but what Peripheral Mage sight does is act as a constant temptation for a Mage to break from whatever they're doing to go stick their noses in things, because you can't stop noticing it. Joe Slowboat posted:I think Mages have a tendency to extreme behavior but then, they all had an intense religious experience in which they saw cosmic truth and it gave them the power to shape reality. Some people respond to that by becoming worse, sure. The Seers had these profound visions, too. Religious experiences and conversions often create obsessives and fanatic, and mages are, to a one, definitely obsessives. Magic is this brilliant, wonderful, profound, and addictive thing, and given that it's not really surprising a bunch of people make following the will of the Exarchs or seeking the secrets of the Thrones (to topple or supplant them) either one of their Obsessions or a path to one of their Obsessions, or why a number eschew all of this for the sake of trying to transcend existence for a mode of being which has no real indication is inherently better or more joyful than their current one, but definitely more magical and more "important." Ironslave fucked around with this message at 00:16 on May 1, 2019 |
# ? May 1, 2019 00:10 |
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I don't think Mages "become worse", to be honest, or better. I think they're just themselves but more so, like anyone given power. Who they were is amplified to the nth degree, and that results in them doing plenty of good and plenty of evil. More often than not, though, the general habit of a human being is to help those they think about and hurt those they don't. I.E. We might give some money to a political cause or to a person we see begging in the street, but we don't usually think of the people slaving in factories to make our computers or harvest our bananas. That's usually the way Mage behaviour manifests too: They're good (or "good") to the people they care about in ways they perceive as good for them, and they're evil to the people they don't think of at all in the equation. (This is actually a Guardian conceit: All souls are flawed, all thrones are false. If you're anything less than perfect, you will infect what you touch with the bad parts of yourself, and thus no-one who is anything less than perfect can be allowed to attain ultimate power. That is the Hieromagus; the ontological necessity to their worldview, without whom salvation is impossible.) The intensity that drives the Awakened will usually drive them to try and do what they feel is right. It's just that what they feel is right and what's good can often be out of whack, and the fervor they put into these things can lead easily to extremes. A member of a Legacy that believes ghosts are karmic anchors that must be sent on to the next life to alleviate the weight of the Lie upon the world is going to seem like a really nice person for the most part - they're helping the dead move on and the living find peace - but they're going to be obsessed with the mysteries of death and karma. That means seeking out and observing manifestations of it; learning from it; watching people suffer and die without intervening... Or intervening to experiment. It also means they'll eventually run into conflicts between their ideal goal (helping the dead move on) and other ethical or moral concerns. What happens when what a ghost needs to move on is horrible, or when the living have very good reasons for not wanting to help the ghost find peace? And that's before we get into the question of ghosts who don't want to move on. There isn't really a middle path of coexistence there. Even a good Mage is going to do bad things now and then, because they're human and that's what humans do. The problem is, they're so powerful that, when they do bad things, they tend to be veeeery bad.
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# ? May 1, 2019 00:14 |
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They also tend to be able to dodge a lot of the consequences of their own actions, putting them in a privileged position of rarely needing to stop and consider and instead determine that next time will be different, or that these sacrifices, losses, or failures were worth it. Or which makes it easy to confuse personal ambition with moral good, as people are often prone to doing.
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# ? May 1, 2019 00:19 |
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I was just talking about the rhetorical reasons for the Ladder to frame the Oracles as paragons; I very much don't think becoming a Mage makes people morally better or worse. Though I do think it's a bit rich when people make the jump from 'an expanded field of action creates more moral hazard' to 'therefore nobody should have an expanded field of action, because been good people screw up' because it applies in principle to anything that makes a person more capable of changing the world. It's a very, very wide-ranging argument. Mages experience a heightened condition, not an alien one, in terms of personal capacity. It's really only their altered perception, their awareness of a truth outside the phenomenal universe, that's completely outside normal experience. Focusing solely on magic as tool (and ignoring all the ways it's a limited tool for individual mages, like paradox, the Sleeping Curse, and simple mechanical limitations) makes for a really boring argument, especially when it's understand as a somehow fundamentally different tool without recognizing that the fundamental difference is in the knowledge and metaphysics of it, not the effects. Until you get to eschatoloogy.
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# ? May 1, 2019 00:57 |
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I don't really know many people saying Mages shouldn't exist except for memelords. I'm just a fan of the take that most Mages are walking disasters. They're just walking disasters with power and that makes telling stories about them fun.
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# ? May 1, 2019 01:05 |
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The Oracles are one of my favorite ideas in the setting, because of all the things Mages can see, of all they can chase and verify, there's no reason to believe they exist beyond the Pentacle needing them to. They're one of the articles taken less on snooty academic precedent and instead something taken on faith. They need an explanation for the Watchtowers and all other possible explanations are either too horrible to accept or too simple to believe in. They need someone benevolent or Wise to have given them the potential to Awaken, so the Oracles must exist.
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# ? May 1, 2019 01:09 |
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NikkolasKing posted:So the reason that poor schlub failed with the cross during The Mandarin's test is because he had no faith? I just figured being weak to holy objects was a myth in the setting like it is in Anne Rice or many other modern vampire stories. But I'm reading the Revised Toreador Clanbook and Katherine recalls during the Second Burning Time that "...those whose faith was strong... Those could turn even an elder vampire into a sniveling child with nothing but a crucifix and a paternoster." (that's the "Our Father"/Lord's Prayer BTW. I didn't know that was a term for it) Nessus posted:Those guys can Turn Undead. And I think that one guy with some kind of Jesus Shield had True Faith in this form. But it isn't quantifiable. I'm a little late here, but yes, crucifixes and stars of david and so forth don't do poo poo if you don't REALLY loving believe in the power of <insert here>. They aren't nearly as handy in WoD as they are in From Dusk Till Dawn, but I could totally see the "Bad <mumble mumble> Servant of God" character having True Faith and thus still pulling off his water blessing and cross-shotgun shenanigans fairly (haha) faithfully in a WoD game (though I can't recall exactly what nWoD's version of TF is). Also, Nessus is correct insofar as Grünfeld Bach totally having True Faith, which is why he can teleport around and has a Jesus Shield and so forth, while the other Society of Leopold hunters, while really committed and brave, don't quite reach that height of transcendent faith, as much as they might wish they could, so they're just normal (tough) humans.
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# ? May 1, 2019 01:32 |
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Ironslave posted:The Oracles are one of my favorite ideas in the setting, because of all the things Mages can see, of all they can chase and verify, there's no reason to believe they exist beyond the Pentacle needing them to. They're one of the articles taken less on snooty academic precedent and instead something taken on faith. They need an explanation for the Watchtowers and all other possible explanations are either too horrible to accept or too simple to believe in. They need someone benevolent or Wise to have given them the potential to Awaken, so the Oracles must exist. And that's how they fall into the trap.
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# ? May 1, 2019 01:32 |
nofather posted:And that's how they fall into the trap.
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# ? May 1, 2019 01:37 |
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I don't think that's ever going to be answered, and the line's never pretended like it would one day tell us. It's one of the inscrutable setting Mysteries, and I like it that way. I like the idea of the Watchtowers as creations of the Exarchs, as part of a need to create either the conflicts and miseries they represent or due to them needing Mages to exist for one reason or another (such, as, say, if they are in fact Ascended Mages, perhaps eliminating Mages from existence would diminish them). Part of why is because Mage pulls from Morrison's the Invisibles, and it fits that mold. But it's just as likely the Oracles--and all other Ascended and nearly all Supernal Entities--don't independently and directly screw with the world because the idea of doing so is inherently Exarchal, which is why they would've plopped down some towers and told the world to go nuts. Or that Ascending is itself kind of an eternal solipsistic state which removes people from the desire to act. Or they were removed or eradicated in the future-past and the Towers continue to exist. Or they're biding their time. Or they simply were non-Ascended Atlantean Mages who figured out how to create towers before the Fall and those persist into the new era, a transpontine echo bridging the glories of the past with the potential--good or ill--of the future. Lots of possibilities.
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# ? May 1, 2019 01:48 |
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Oberst posted:Mage sucks and is boring. When does Chicago by night come out? Scheduled for a November release, but may be sooner.
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# ? May 1, 2019 01:57 |
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It's why I like Werewolf. Maybe Luna did enslave you all. Maybe you are just host swarms of Urfarah. Maybe there was no Pangaea, and everything prefaced by 'This story is true' is just conditioning to encourage you to follow the leads of some distant spirit gods. But what matters right now is there's a swarm of rats living in the human skin of this cop and they're ousting my pack, there's a hole in the Gauntlet down the street and spirits are pouring through, and the other night I raged and killed the human packmate of our delightfully judgmental and religious neighbors. The focus is more on dealing with what's going on now, which has always been more of a relatable struggle to me than 'maybe the world is really a simulation,' which are good mind exercises but don't pay the bills. Unless you're the Wachowskis.
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# ? May 1, 2019 01:58 |
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EimiYoshikawa posted:I'm a little late here, but yes, crucifixes and stars of david and so forth don't do poo poo if you don't REALLY loving believe in the power of <insert here>. They aren't nearly as handy in WoD as they are in From Dusk Till Dawn, but I could totally see the "Bad <mumble mumble> Servant of God" character having True Faith and thus still pulling off his water blessing and cross-shotgun shenanigans fairly (haha) faithfully in a WoD game (though I can't recall exactly what nWoD's version of TF is). I forget if literally anything and any concept can technically qualify as an item of true faith if you believe in it enough. Was that ever a thing? Though if so i'm picturing some Channer type turbo-weeb of monumental proportions using his body pillow to ward off a horde of (probably extremely confused) blood sucking fiends. Or some militant atheist of the late nineties and early 00's bludgeoning some low humanity blood sucker to death with his copy of Dawkin's "The God Delusion". Just, real meta and absurd stuff. Archonex fucked around with this message at 03:17 on May 1, 2019 |
# ? May 1, 2019 03:06 |
Archonex posted:I forget if literally anything and any concept can technically qualify as an item of true faith if you believe in it enough. Was that ever a thing?
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# ? May 1, 2019 03:22 |
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Archonex posted:I forget if literally anything and any concept can technically qualify as an item of true faith if you believe in it enough. Was that ever a thing? There was a thing in an entirely different RPG, Castle Falkenstein, where one of the 19th Century robber barons is attacked by a vampire in his private train and wards it off by hitting it with his wallet while yelling "IN THE NAME OF THE ALMIGHTY DOLLAR, GET BACK, YOU WRETCH".
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# ? May 1, 2019 03:44 |
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True Faith came to be fairly permissive as time ticked on - one of the proposed options in MRev was a sincere and abiding general faith that things will turn out for the best, without belief in any specific deity. The restriction was more behavioral - True Faith is extraordinary, and even the lowest degree is supposed to take epic levels of dedication and work. It wasn't supposed to be really compatible with being a rear end in a top hat, but it cropped up on a lot of NPCs which, in typical WW fashion, were complete scumbags or zealots, so that was clearly a soft rule. So, yeah - if you love your fellow workers with the same ardor and devotion with which a saint reveres God, you can put vampires to flight in the name of the Revolution.
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# ? May 1, 2019 03:48 |
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Or just be a Carthian and Magic Vampire Laws will bend to your whims.
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# ? May 1, 2019 04:18 |
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Man, every time Mage Chat gets this fired up I am glad I get my wizarding kicks with Ars Magica. Even oMage seems way more comprehensible as a thing to do for fun than some of the things I see talked about here. People should just simmer down and play a nice game of Promethean.
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# ? May 1, 2019 04:53 |
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Lord_Hambrose posted:Man, every time Mage Chat gets this fired up I am glad I get my wizarding kicks with Ars Magica. Even oMage seems way more comprehensible as a thing to do for fun than some of the things I see talked about here. The arguments are most heated when the stakes are lowest. "What does Mass Ascension actually look like" and "what do you actually do, if you succeed at toppling the Exarchs" are questions that will not actually matter to 99% of all campaigns and even then will only really matter at the very end, which is why it's so hotly debated. This also extends to "but what influence does the supernal actually have". The fact that these questions generate in-setting discussions full of hot air is intentional. Spillover into real life is an unfortunate byproduct. Most Mage actual play involves doing things like fighting on top of a speeding train as you chase the renegade mage who stole your artifact, or convincing some Darkling-spirits (low level spirits of depression, gloom and generally feeling down) that they should shove off so your youth outreach centre can get some progress made.
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# ? May 1, 2019 05:20 |
Lord_Hambrose posted:Man, every time Mage Chat gets this fired up I am glad I get my wizarding kicks with Ars Magica. Even oMage seems way more comprehensible as a thing to do for fun than some of the things I see talked about here.
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# ? May 1, 2019 05:53 |
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Lord_Hambrose posted:Man, every time Mage Chat gets this fired up I am glad I get my wizarding kicks with Ars Magica. Even oMage seems way more comprehensible as a thing to do for fun than some of the things I see talked about here. I’ve never been able to grok the magic rules for Ars Magica. What edition do you play?
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# ? May 1, 2019 06:10 |
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Yeah but Ascension was a lot more fun. The Euthanatos kick the Moros' rear end every single day in terms of theme and cool factor. As always let us quietly ignore the 90's racism inherent in the WoD line. edit: The Euthanatos ALSO kick the Acanthus' rear end in terms of theme and cool factor. The Tradition so cool they copied it twice.
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# ? May 1, 2019 06:14 |
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# ? May 24, 2024 21:08 |
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Octavo posted:I’ve never been able to grok the magic rules for Ars Magica. What edition do you play? Mostly 5th Edition, but I played a lot of 4th too. The system is deceptively simple, the game just loves throwing in lots of tiny subsystems and bonuses. One of the big things is that magic is very difficult to get really strong at but against anything other than wizards and other powerful supernatural beings it can do anything. Like you may expect, the majority of your career is sitting at home reading. Adventuring? Sir, we have people for that.
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# ? May 1, 2019 06:18 |