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The Melissadae were originally just a swarm of crabs with a taste for blood.
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Jul 28, 2019 16:24
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That Old Tree posted:It was tentatively linked to the sinking of a Ventrue yacht. Okay seriously, this submarine is my new favorite dumb thing from oWoD. It's like Sam Haight in every time I think it can't possibly get any more silly you whip a Venture Yacht in there. WHY do vampires need a Yacht?!
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Jul 28, 2019 16:29
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That Old Tree posted:Like most of the oWoD books that weren't entirely based around a racist stereotype (and even some of those), it had some goofy cool fun ideas, but it also had some real dogshit in it. Say what you will but the Technomancers who are exploring the depths of the ocean and keep running across inexplicably exploded corpses surrounded by the trappings of a lost merpeople civilization are hilarious.
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Jul 28, 2019 16:29
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joylessdivision posted:Okay seriously, this submarine is my new favorite dumb thing from oWoD. It's like Sam Haight in every time I think it can't possibly get any more silly you whip a Venture Yacht in there. Because if they couldn't afford a (mega)yacht and make sure everybody knew it, they'd look weak and poor in front of everybody else.  
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Jul 28, 2019 16:37
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Joe Slowboat posted:You're very wrong, did you know that? I like the pishtaco, a vampire-like creature that drinks fat. (There's a Supernatural episode where one is running a weight-loss spa and after killing her more murderous business associate they decide to just leave her alone since she's not really doing anything the people she's feeding on aren't asking her to do.)
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Jul 28, 2019 16:44
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joylessdivision posted:Okay seriously, this submarine is my new favorite dumb thing from oWoD. It's like Sam Haight in every time I think it can't possibly get any more silly you whip a Venture Yacht in there. Smuggling yourself out of Europe on a yacht is so much more civilized than in a shipping container.
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Jul 28, 2019 16:59
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EimiYoshikawa posted:Because if they couldn't afford a (mega)yacht and make sure everybody knew it, they'd look weak and poor in front of everybody else. This sounds right Relevant Tangent posted:Smuggling yourself out of Europe on a yacht is so much more civilized than in a shipping container. Also a logical explanation
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Jul 28, 2019 18:29
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Oberst posted:Ocean pressure would still crush vampires just like anything else. Underwater ocean vampires are a bad concept one of my first ideas for The Drowned was they would look all disgusting and puffy, because like the famous blobfish they were adapted for life under crushing ocean pressure i didnt go with that because there's no blood under the ocean, or more importantly no WoD storylines. edit: i'm wondering if The Drowned come off too much like a designated good guy bloodline. when was thinking of them I was kind of annoyed that despite the nosferatu and gangrel being meant to be the most sane of the vampire clans, all the nosferatu bloodlines were psycho bad guy ones. I also thought that it was dumb that a lot of vampire bloodline go out of their way to recruit crazy people. its like, no wonder your society is full of scheming and poo poo, all you recruit is degenerate nobles and wacko narcissists. So i wanted some guys who would only recruit people who had their same outlook and were trustworthy, cause sailors only want reliable and trustworthy people on their ships cause their life might depend on that person. Their appearance makes them unwelcome in human society, but their moral ethos also makes them outsiders in vampire society, because they are kind of rabble rousers. juggalo baby coffin fucked around with this message at 01:27 on Jul 29, 2019 |
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Jul 29, 2019 00:59
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Having a submarine full of vampires is also dumb because the weresharks will probably trash it if they realize a bunch of things they hate are in one nice package. Rokea are pretty ridiculous too and it wouldn't be the first time they took a submarine.
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Jul 29, 2019 05:45
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juggalo baby coffin posted:one of my first ideas for The Drowned was they would look all disgusting and puffy, because like the famous blobfish they were adapted for life under crushing ocean pressure Of course, this might just mean you have to draw a line to complete the diagram. For instance, in nWoD you could have some kind of God-Machine eruption deep under the sea that requires tending, and feeds vampires who attend to it. In oWoD you could have some kind of eerie Gaian Golconda thing going on, where vampires are far more in tune with the deep sea environment than with that of the surface.
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Jul 29, 2019 06:16
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Oberst posted:Also the Caine mythos is far superior to Lol all undead humans are vampires if you like whitewashing and unironic fu manchu rip offs in the 21st century, sure. myself, i would prefer having the non-white vampires actually be loving vampires. and yet even when Onyx Path tries to "fix" Chicago By Night's racism, they do it by making fun of the older editions for being racist and ripping off big trouble in little china...and then proceed by saying that all western vampires are to stay out of chinatown, because they will be brutally murdered. it's 2019 and chinese vampires are STILL the real racists who will murder all western vampires for literally no loving reason. OWOD was an mistake.
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Jul 29, 2019 06:31
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Chinese vampires aren't vampires in the oWoD, they are Risen [Ghosts piloting their own bodies, by and large]. They don't have to drink blood, or even have trouble with the sun. They can eat food, have children, they are in no sense comparable to vampires. They just get that tag because of branding. Vampire is a hot seller, we want to do some Asia poo poo, call them vampires. They have more thematic similarities to werewolf than vampire or the vampires of Asian myth.
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Jul 29, 2019 06:54
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Nessus posted:I feel like there's something of a narrative tension between "moral rabble-rousers" and "eerie deep-sea vampires." Presumably one does not migrate to spend eternity in the hadal depths, or even your standard abyssal plain, if one is fundamentally oriented towards generic working-class socialism. oh i abandoned the deep sea concept, I didn't think it would be a good fit for a player bloodline given how few campaigns take place in the marianas trench. they're more like sailor/pirate vampires now, descended from either Davy Jones or ancient nosferatu who clung to the underside of boats during the age of sail, then crept out at night to feed on the crew, depending on who you believe.
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Jul 29, 2019 07:03
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juggalo baby coffin posted:oh i abandoned the deep sea concept, I didn't think it would be a good fit for a player bloodline given how few campaigns take place in the marianas trench. they're more like sailor/pirate vampires now, descended from either Davy Jones or ancient nosferatu who clung to the underside of boats during the age of sail, then crept out at night to feed on the crew, depending on who you believe. e: Having them be able to control winds is one of those powers that might be kind of useless NOW but would have been borderline "the Royal Navy would have explicitly committed sailors to feeding them their blood" territory in the actual age of sail Nessus fucked around with this message at 07:14 on Jul 29, 2019 |
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Jul 29, 2019 07:08
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Nessus posted:They ought to have a Discipline about manipulating wind and fog (in particular) and potentially raising or suppressing storms (in general). Also the logical connection you probably want to make is that they dwelt in the bilge rather than hanging to the underside of boats. You could also dub them the Klabautermann -- and say that the good reputation they had in the Baltic was a mix of a few relatively moral individuals cunctating, and the nature of the Baltic meaning they could change ships easily... Huh that's a really good idea, I didn't know about the Klabautermann myth before. The concept of them being invisible helpers, and only people who don't have their blessing being able to see them, fits with them favouring good sailors and feeding from bad ones.
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Jul 29, 2019 07:35
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Mulva posted:Chinese vampires aren't vampires in the oWoD, they are Risen [Ghosts piloting their own bodies, by and large]. They don't have to drink blood, or even have trouble with the sun. They can eat food, have children, they are in no sense comparable to vampires. They just get that tag because of branding. Vampire is a hot seller, we want to do some Asia poo poo, call them vampires. They have more thematic similarities to werewolf than vampire or the vampires of Asian myth. The comprehensive and like mostly consistent for enough of it metaphysics and just interconnected things that fit (maybe as average or lower) makes Kindred of the East so weird and interesting - I've spent a couple hours today actually reading through documents for my Los Angeles game where Camarilla in America is balking, there is so much interesting things that result from the Kuei-jin but the actual, Kuei-jin, don't offer a lot and get cringy at times. The San Francisco book was really old and showed but did sort of make me realize that Cathayan/Kin-jin friction back when they knew nothing about each other does pull up the reverse colonialism theme they went for in places, which was different.
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Jul 29, 2019 11:09
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juggalo baby coffin posted:Huh that's a really good idea, I didn't know about the Klabautermann myth before. The concept of them being invisible helpers, and only people who don't have their blessing being able to see them, fits with them favouring good sailors and feeding from bad ones. One thing to keep in mind from a historical perspective is just how many dudes were on many of these old ships. There were often over a hundred, which makes it entirely possible to have a guy who takes a couple of bloodpoints out of the tars every night, because they can spread it out. This was also true for ancient triremes etc. The big question arises of "why do they live like this," though of course there is no reason you could not be dealing with the modern nights' version of some guys who had their hey day hundreds of years ago, but, being vampires, have refrained from dying.
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Jul 29, 2019 11:36
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i'm probably gonna do a second draft for The Drowned and maybe write one of those short intro fiction things they have for some bloodlines. It'd be nice to put together into a pdf so people outside the forums could use it if they want. is there an established protocol/style in the existing splatbooks for a bloodline that modifies an existing bloodline? I was thinking as per the suggestion ZearothK had, they would have a modified version of protean where they swap out one of the predatory aspect choices (probably the quadrupedal one, sea animals aren't fast on land), and maybe reflavouring some of the other stuff to be more oceanic (tentacle instead of tail, suckers for wall crawling, flying fish or ray fins for gliding etc). I think the rest of the protean powers fit well already. 'Unmarked Grave' fits with pirates burying stuff, all the sensory powers fit well with all the exotic senses ocean animals have (sharks detecting blood and electricity, echolocation, infrared vision in the deepest ocean). Primeval Miasma could be turning into a heavy sea fog instead of turning into smoke. Then there'd be a couple (or a few) devotions. One for protection from the sun while totally submerged (can be shallow but probably needs a volume requirement so people don't fill a zorb with water and roll through the town. I wrote up the flavour text for it quote:Much the same as a squid releases ink to escape its predators, a fully-submerged crewman can release his Vitae into the water around him, escaping the attention of the hated Sun for a time. The Drowned claim the sea runs through their veins, and provided they open those veins to the sea, the sun can no more consume them than it could consume the ocean itself. Though if they plan to sunbathe just under the surface, they should take care to do it away from mortal eyes; floating corpses tend to attract police attention. It's corny, but it's also about ocean vampires. I do wish there was a more consistent naming scheme for the daylight curse so I could use that, i've been looking back and forth over the sourcebook and there doesn't seem to be a convenient Noun for them. For the wind and/or waves control, I was thinking they'd have pretty high protean and vigor requirements to represent the vampire extending his strength and control outside of his own body, and also to represent how powerful those abilities would have been considered in the age of sail. If I was doing a PDF i'd probably have some kind of sidebar saying 'yeah this might look like high requirements for powers that can't either sink a boat on their own or throw people around with wind, but consider a war where one person could control the enemy side's tanks and planes movement, while making their own vehicles faster. that's what this was in the age of sail' plus it means you won't have people playing games in historical settings becoming wildly powerful from a 1 or 2 dot power. anyway, sorry for spamming the thread with this, I'm just having great fun creating these guys. I have some ideas for a freshwater clan based around leeches and swamps, maybe kind of a 'sinister swamp family' vibe. they'd most likely be less wholesome than The Drowned in their behaviour.
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Jul 29, 2019 11:41
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Nessus posted:One thing to keep in mind from a historical perspective is just how many dudes were on many of these old ships. There were often over a hundred, which makes it entirely possible to have a guy who takes a couple of bloodpoints out of the tars every night, because they can spread it out. This was also true for ancient triremes etc. it would be even more viable for triremes, because those put in to shore every night rather than sail through the dark, even if 'putting in' just meant hauling the thing up onto an undeveloped beach with ropes. a vampire can just sleep in a big amphora for oil or wine down in the hold during the day, and come out to feed on the veritable tent-village that springs up on the shore beside the beached ship each night.
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Jul 29, 2019 11:50
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Nessus posted:To be fair I only know about it from an anime, but it's a real thing. Well, real folklore anyway. my original concept for their non-davy jones origin is that nosferatu would have a much harder time travelling across the ocean than other clans, so took advantage of their not needing to breathe by hiding where people wouldn't look. But when they tried it, they realised that 'hey, i have a captive audience of hundreds of dudes to drink from and no competition', and made it into a lifestyle. Out at sea, living in the bilge or under the boat, it must be even harder to maintain Humanity, so they resort to helping out on the boat when they can to stop themselves going insane. A vampire succumbing to the beast on a boat full of armed men is hosed. But they'd be aware of shipboard activities, form favourites the same way we do with reality tv shows. Disaster strikes, the boat sinks, they embrace their favourite members of the crew to save them. Their culture gradually shifts towards the nautical, as a majority of members are now sailors. The age of sail is in full swing at this point, and it's Fat City for the Drowned. Then as their blood changed they developed powers that made them extremely useful in naval warfare, to the point of some mortal pirate ships taking them on, or more presentable kindred who own boats staffing and feeding them all the blood they wanted. A ventrue with a shipping empire who figures out he can ship faster than anyone else provided he deals with The Drowned is going to do it and make a fortune. Enough Drowned might get together to have an entire pirate ship to themselves, leading to stories of ghost ships that sail at night with no lanterns lit, that move with supernatural speed and bring the mist with them as they travel. They have their heyday, but then the Ironclads and steamships come along. Suddenly these particularly ugly sailors, who have a nasty habit of turning against and devouring authority figures who wrong them enough, no longer have their market value. Nobody wants to deal with their 'bullshit' (from an outsider elder's perspective). They go back to the lifestyle they had before. They lurk on boats, now modern fishing vessels, container ships, cruise ships. Their recruitment traditions stay the same: they save the best sailors aboard when the ship sinks. But ships sink less in modern nights, now that naval warfare isn't the be-all and end-all of war. Numbers get a boost in WW2, but return to base afterwards. They become rarer and rarer, but most port cities still host a crew or two of them. Any who try and adapt to a more metropolitan lifestyle finds it difficult, as their inability to create blood bonds leaves them at a disadvantage in traditional kindred politics and society. So they stick to their crews for the most part, but some find a place in the covenants. Their demographics have shifted from being primarily pirates and navy men to being mostly fishermen, and they've started welcoming existing Nosferatu into the bloodline (provided they prove themselves to be trustworthy, forthright, and dependable, which is easier said than done) instead of just relying solely on embracing the drowning for their numbers.
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Jul 29, 2019 12:06
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alaskan crab fishing vampire show: The Undeadliest Catch
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Jul 29, 2019 14:46
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thatbastardken posted:alaskan crab fishing vampire show: The Undeadliest Catch hahaha in the short bit of fiction i'm doing for them the guy who gets embraced is an alaskan crab fisherman On a less happy note I found this in A Thousand Years of Night, in the section about interaction with other gamelines: quote:Beasts feel a kindred spirit with all other supernatural even in the book about elder vampires, beasts are still THE TOP DAWGS
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Jul 29, 2019 14:55
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The Roman Reigns of monsters.
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Jul 29, 2019 15:23
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MonsieurChoc posted:The Roman Reigns of monsters. Sufferin' succotash indeed
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Jul 29, 2019 15:25
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I forget what the mechanic is called, but 1e nVamps had a thing where they recognized the beast within fellow kindred and had to swallow down their anger / revulsion fight or flight instinct. The idea that they'd welcome a Beast because they see something familiar in it is pretty laughable. Eveything about beast is poo poo and makes the setting worse by its existence.
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Jul 29, 2019 16:05
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MonsieurChoc posted:The Roman Reigns of monsters. "This is my yard now" *gets murked by angry vampires.*
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Jul 29, 2019 17:58
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Setite LARP dude- echoing the suggestion to talk to STs about using your hoodoo on the NPCs of other characters. Touchstones, contacts, anytime you see someone calling on an imaginary mortal, target that person for conversion. the players will have no idea how to respond because no one ever does that. i larped for like 5 years with Haunted and it never came up.
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Jul 29, 2019 21:12
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PHIZ KALIFA posted:Setite LARP dude- echoing the suggestion to talk to STs about using your hoodoo on the NPCs of other characters. Touchstones, contacts, anytime you see someone calling on an imaginary mortal, target that person for conversion. the players will have no idea how to respond because no one ever does that. i larped for like 5 years with Haunted and it never came up. Thanks, I emailed the STs and asked them how we can make sure that I'm not an irrelevant island in the game, I'll let ya'll know how it goes. I also ordered some snake-eye costume contacts, because I'm a corny-rear end motherfucker.
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Jul 29, 2019 21:47
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Hell, if you are already willing to LARP why do anything in half measures?
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Jul 30, 2019 01:23
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Thinking about loving around and writing a gangrel bloodine who specifically hunt Beasts. maybe their progenitor was a Hero who got embraced before he could kill his target. they're immune to whatever bullshit compulsion aura beasts have to make other supernaturals like them, and they can digest beast blood. maybe they take on some of the powers of the horrors they eat, and so they have like 'nightmare protean' or something where they manifest elements of horrors in combat
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Jul 30, 2019 01:47
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juggalo baby coffin posted:Thinking about loving around and writing a gangrel bloodine who specifically hunt Beasts. maybe their progenitor was a Hero who got embraced before he could kill his target. they're immune to whatever bullshit compulsion aura beasts have to make other supernaturals like them, and they can digest beast blood. You can have them just hunt the Beasts for being poseurs. Beasts talk a lot of noise and a big game, and at the end of the night, are taking a chunk out of the vampire's herd. It's reason enough for something that embraces the Beast and also protects their source of food to go to town on one.
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Jul 30, 2019 02:03
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Old Doggy Bastard posted:The comprehensive and like mostly consistent for enough of it metaphysics and just interconnected things that fit (maybe as average or lower) makes Kindred of the East so weird and interesting europe is literally the capital of colonialism but the chinese people are the real colonalizers, despite ALL of the kindred of the east being former humans who probably wouldn't have just, you know, forgotten literally all of the history classes about how britain hosed china into oblivion with their obsession for opium...or literally LIVED through that if they are old enough. but white wolf can't criticize colonialism when white people do that even though vampires are literally hundreds of years old and mostly white. clearly they should use the evil asians for that instead. because as we all know, modern asia is a weirder place than ancient britian was, even though ancient britian was a place that thought using leechs could cure hiccups, and prevented unwanted pregnancies by PUTTING SHOES ON THEIR DICKS when they didn't want to go through the effort of just killing the baby when it's born!
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Jul 30, 2019 02:46
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If you want cool metaphysics and interconnectedness you should probably be playing Exalted instead. The mechanics may be lovely, but it gives you all that with slightly less facepalm racism.
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Jul 30, 2019 03:09
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Tasoth posted:You can have them just hunt the Beasts for being poseurs. Beasts talk a lot of noise and a big game, and at the end of the night, are taking a chunk out of the vampire's herd. It's reason enough for something that embraces the Beast and also protects their source of food to go to town on one. true. beasts also talk a big game about being THE ULTIMATE APEX PREDATOR, whereas gangrel embody the 'vampire as predator' archetype. They probably don't like hearing beasts run their mouths. it might make more sense for werewolves to be hunting them, but i know jack poo poo about werewolves and I don't even know if they have a bloodline equivalent
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Jul 30, 2019 03:19
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holy gently caress v5 is good
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Jul 30, 2019 03:59
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juggalo baby coffin posted:true. beasts also talk a big game about being THE ULTIMATE APEX PREDATOR, whereas gangrel embody the 'vampire as predator' archetype. They probably don't like hearing beasts run their mouths. It's a Lodge, and frankly I'll bet one could have a whole slew of Lodges that would incidentally hunt down and murderize Beasts without ever realizing Beasts have a special template. e: Changeling...Summer Court sub-group? That goes after Beasts as mini-Gentry. Less because they think that's all that useful, and more because Beasts are enough like Gentry that hunting them down and annihilating them is just incredibly cathartic. Mage Legacy obsessed with the Astral which hunts Beasts both because they're horrifying Astral-shredding abuse monsters, and because dissecting a dead nightmare dragon is bound to get you some delicious Arcane Beats. Or they just look exactly like Abyssal Intrusions, because they embody a paradox where they 'teach lessons' but the majority of those lessons are fundamentally negative or else unusable by the person being fed on. Abyssal entities love anti-enlightenment and being dragged down into dissolution by hungering unreason, and Beasts are absolutely that kind of thing. These are the gamelines/interactions I feel confident in suggesting an option, but I'm pretty sure it's way more natural for the various splats to want to turn the metamonsters into faint radioactive silhouettes on the local dreamscape than to want to buddy up with them. Joe Slowboat fucked around with this message at 04:34 on Jul 30, 2019 |
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Jul 30, 2019 04:27
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The Lodge of the Screaming Moon, dedicated to brutalizing those that prey on people through fear and terror. They have magic powers that make them immune to such, and that deny creatures the ability to gain power off the death they cause. In *any* way that death might empower them. They also specialize in visions and divination, which ties into their totem. Speaking of, if everything related to the idea of a large group of werewolves that want to completely horrify and torture folks in a way that makes other werewolves nervous isn't enough to get you uncomfortable, there is this: Their Lodge Totem is a Lune. But wait you say, aren't werewolves told to never ever make a Lune a totem because the tie between the pack and the totem will drive you insane? Yes. Yes they are. And yes. Yes it does. By diluting the effect throughout an entire Lodge rather than a small pack, everyone just gets a tiny bit unhinged. Only slightly disturbed. So it's an entire Lodge with a Lune that is constantly telling everyone how much she loves them and giving them encouragement and advice, offering some prophecies of the future [To everyone. Hey wolf-blooded, you are not outsiders here, everyone is loved equally. Enjoy your insane visitation of enlightenment just like everyone else!], driving them towards one relatively simple goal: The total domination of all courts of fear. All of them, everywhere. She is, after all, Zakinsuzi. The Tyrant Over Fear. Fittingly the Influences members of the Lodge can pick up are Fear, Inspiration, and Moonlight. If you can't use that mandate and those powers to absolutely devastate a group of Beasts you don't deserve to be a werewolf. I mean I'm not entirely sure what Fear 4 could do to a Beast, but I doubt it's fun for them. Mulva fucked around with this message at 05:19 on Jul 30, 2019 |
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Jul 30, 2019 05:16
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Are there any cool hosed up werewolves? like the equivalents of nosferatu or the left hand paths from mage? Ive tried skimming some of the lodge books but all the character art just looks like the avatars of people who roleplay as biker gangs in second life
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Jul 30, 2019 05:16
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Joe Slowboat posted:It's a Lodge, and frankly I'll bet one could have a whole slew of Lodges that would incidentally hunt down and murderize Beasts without ever realizing Beasts have a special template. I usually GM Mage, so I just imagine that Beasts are a tiny subset of a larger phenomenon - Astral goetia replacing people's souls and re-enacting narrative arcs that ensnare local sleepers and supernaturals. Kind of like what is described in the Los Angeles section of Mage 2e.
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Jul 30, 2019 05:18
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juggalo baby coffin posted:Are there any cool hosed up werewolves? like the equivalents of nosferatu or the left hand paths from mage? Ive tried skimming some of the lodge books but all the character art just looks like the avatars of people who roleplay as biker gangs in second life
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