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Tuxedo Catfish posted:what does distinguish the nWoD is the fact that it's consciously designed for play instead of being someone's sickass campaign log proudly displayed to the world with no regard for how anyone else is ever going to use it Which splat Bibles ended up going up for sale anyway, I remember seeing one and wanting to read it but it's been ages
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# ? Oct 28, 2019 08:25 |
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# ? Jun 5, 2024 03:29 |
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BENGHAZI 2 posted:Which splat Bibles ended up going up for sale anyway, I remember seeing one and wanting to read it but it's been ages Bite Me: How to Write Vampire, by Rose Bailey, is a spruced up look at the Vampire: the Requiem writer's bible by the time of second edition. The parts about the Kindred, anyway. The Strix get a bible of their own.
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# ? Oct 28, 2019 08:47 |
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Bogart posted:Elvis 👏 vampire 👏 An Elvis fanatic and impersonator who was embraced and now believes that the real Elvis, too, must have become an immortal vampire.
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# ? Oct 28, 2019 09:03 |
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Shrecknet posted:It seems impossible that Vegas isnt an independent state held by the Gios. There could be a Cam "Prince" who doesn't actually control anything; the story is the cam trying to change that, but "Gios run Vegas" is pretty ironclad in my mind Now I'm imagining a Vegas infested with resentful wraiths and risen.. #NotEvenMad
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# ? Oct 28, 2019 11:49 |
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The Unlife Aquatic posted:Expanding on this idea: his wounds aren't his Nosferatu tell - it's his breathing. His rattling breath continues, even in undeath, forever trapped in the last moments of terminal phosgene inhalation. Oh that's nice.
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# ? Oct 28, 2019 14:43 |
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I want to say it was something to do with the... Uh... The extra-spoooky more unseelie than the unseelie guys from one of the later supplements.
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# ? Oct 28, 2019 15:59 |
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Dave Brookshaw posted:I want to say it was something to do with the... Uh... The extra-spoooky more unseelie than the unseelie guys from one of the later supplements. There are horrifyingly two different groups for that, the ones from Denizens of the Dreaming who are basically all monstery and apparently showing up from Arcadia post the sidhe and the Thallain from Shadow court who are just -double Unseelie- and kinda dumb.
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# ? Oct 28, 2019 16:18 |
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I Am Just a Box posted:Bite Me: How to Write Vampire, by Rose Bailey, is a spruced up look at the Vampire: the Requiem writer's bible by the time of second edition. The parts about the Kindred, anyway. The Strix get a bible of their own. It's very good and should be read.
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# ? Oct 28, 2019 16:38 |
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My Vegas idea was a Tremere Revenant masquerading as a Giovanni Ghoul, who uses the blood they're fed as a sympathetic connection for subtle blood magic influences on the ruling Giovanni. I don't know off the top of my head but if there's no "Ritual for doing Presence on someone through a point of their captured blood" someone done hosed up.
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# ? Oct 28, 2019 19:16 |
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I Am Just a Box posted:Bite Me: How to Write Vampire, by Rose Bailey, is a spruced up look at the Vampire: the Requiem writer's bible by the time of second edition. The parts about the Kindred, anyway. The Strix get a bible of their own. She wrote a really great followup that shows just how her team managed to make the best Disciplines in Vampire. https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/280672/BLOODY-DOTS-The-Writers-Guide-to-Disciplines
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# ? Oct 28, 2019 19:16 |
Okay pals, I'm going to be running the players from last year's teens vs killer snowmen one shot through a mage campaign, since that have ended with them Awakening after destroying the abyssal entity that called itself Boreas, god of winter. How do I make challenges for even gnosis 1 mages? Ones that don't rely on "a more powerful mage did it"? It's traveling Chronicles as they follow visions of more of these "gods" trying to break into our reality. The first stop is going to be Boston, where MIT has been experiencing a rash of violence and suicides. The cult dedicated to bringing Ogma across into our world has killed or captured the mages that used to based there, using them as living batteries to power the arcane machinery that is draining the creativity and intelligence of the students. I want the first part of the investigation to actually challenge the characters instead of being "I cast a spell", without making "I cast a spell" useless.
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# ? Oct 28, 2019 20:45 |
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While I'm still not a big fan of how Mysteries work, they're much better with the extra widgets from Signs of Sorcery, particularly whatever the one is where delving a given Mystery is contingent on other Mysteries and actions instead of just "keep rolling."
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# ? Oct 28, 2019 20:54 |
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So, as I mentioned in a previous post, some F&F reviews piqued my interest in the nWoD, and I've been reading through the books. I'm currently reading The God-Machine Chronicle, and I ran across something there I wanted to ask about here: One of the Tales in The God-Machine Chronicle introduces a class of supernatural beings called Celebrants that believe in enlightenment through extreme sensations, both pleasurable and painful, and whose goals are kind of antithetical to the God-Machine's. I haven't found any reference to these beings anywhere else, and a quick Google search to see if they'd ever been mentioned elsewhere didn't bear any fruit. (There's a Geist Archetype called Celebrants, but I'm pretty sure they're entirely unrelated aside from the fact they happen to have the same name.) So I was just wondering, does anyone know whether anything else was ever done with these Celebrants, or whether they ever appeared again? Were they later identified with another established kind of supernatural? Or were they just a kind of one-off weirdo from The God-Machine Chronicle that has since been ignored and more or less retconned out of existence by omission?
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# ? Oct 28, 2019 21:28 |
Not that I can remember, but that's basically the cenobites from hellraiser
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# ? Oct 28, 2019 21:52 |
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Just because something is a one-off weirdness doesn't mean it was retconned. The setting is designed to accommodate one-off weirdness.
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# ? Oct 28, 2019 22:08 |
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One of my favorite things in WOD: Chicago is just a laundry list of Weird Things that could be moving through O'Hare International.
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# ? Oct 28, 2019 22:51 |
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Thanks for the Vegas ideas so far. Definitely gonna write up an Anarch who uses Hacktivist Thaumaturgy to spy on the LVPD for information and runs an underground night radio that's a mix of Art Bell conspiracy stuff and Red Question -like rabblerousing where he hells people to rise up and smash the state, no princes no masters. The gas mask wearing Nosferatu hitman is cool too, propably will try to work them in. And the Elvis impersonator. My plan is to have the players be ancillae, not too young to be treated like disposable idiots and not old enough to have someone younger go out and get things done. Feel free to throw out more ideas!
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# ? Oct 29, 2019 00:50 |
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So I'm taking a few days to watch and read some dumb poo poo now that my thesis is submitted, and one of the books is Blood on the Sun, one of the Vampire novels published by Harper-Collins. It is so bad at grasping the setting that it's ruining what should be a bit of fun pulp - I mean, its tag line is 'She was America's Secret Weapon in WW2!', which is fantastically stupid in a way that should be hella fun to read, right? But the vampires walk in the sun. They can all fly. There's a 2000-year old Tremere.
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# ? Oct 29, 2019 04:45 |
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HerraS posted:Thanks for the Vegas ideas so far. Definitely gonna write up an Anarch who uses Hacktivist Thaumaturgy to spy on the LVPD for information and runs an underground night radio that's a mix of Art Bell conspiracy stuff and Red Question -like rabblerousing where he hells people to rise up and smash the state, no princes no masters. I got a bunch more, mostly old ideas recycled, but I didnt want to overwhelm. The Gambler: A young, down-on-his-luck Malkavian. He'll tell you that he was embraced because he lost his soul in a poker game: the devil was his sire, and his soul was the Embrace. It might even be true. It's hard to tell how much of the stories he tells are lies. He's always got a scheme, or a sure bet, or some other way of getting out of the hell of debt and obligations he quickly got in. He's in way over his head. His game purpose is to serve as a plot starter: maybe he'll come to the PCs with a crazy scheme. Or maybe he gets in deep trouble and needs help quick. Or maybe he dies in mysterious circumstances and the PCs investigate. Whatever the case, he's poo poo out of luck.
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# ? Oct 29, 2019 04:54 |
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It has occured to me that we never got End Times scenarios for the fera.
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# ? Oct 29, 2019 05:12 |
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While gadding down the nostalgia lane, I do remember the Time of Judgement ticker had some really cool plot hooks in one or two sentences. (Hunter still has my favorite.) They really did well in setting up a frantic rush towards the end and some would have been cool to see in their respective books, especially the once again super bland Time of Judgement book.
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# ? Oct 29, 2019 06:15 |
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Loomer posted:It has occured to me that we never got End Times scenarios for the fera. They were given separate entries in the tribe falls scenarios, and play a pivotal role in weaver ascendant?
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# ? Oct 29, 2019 06:23 |
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Kurieg posted:They were given separate entries in the tribe falls scenarios, and play a pivotal role in weaver ascendant? Always as the second fiddle!
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# ? Oct 29, 2019 06:42 |
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Just tell the Nagah who to murk.
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# ? Oct 29, 2019 06:48 |
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I'll be honest I just entirely forgot.
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# ? Oct 29, 2019 07:35 |
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Loomer posted:It has occured to me that we never got End Times scenarios for the fera. titanic dread mokole battles winged avatar of the triatic wyrm in downtown tokyo
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# ? Oct 29, 2019 11:44 |
1994 Toyota Celica posted:titanic dread mokole battles winged avatar of the triatic wyrm in downtown tokyo Thirty stories high Breathing fire Their heads in the sky MOKOLE MOKOLE And Kitsune.
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# ? Oct 29, 2019 12:19 |
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A fun possible connection! Null-B formed early in the 1700s after Arcosia was destroyed, as a prototype factory for the Industrial Revolution the Technocracy hoped to usher in. In 1745, the White Tower of Languedoc (the headquarters and symbolic heart of the Order of Reason) was destroyed by infighting. Exactly who and why? Never stated. But this is only a century after the Craftmasons were betrayed, so there's a lot of members alive who still remember who they were and why they started this whole shebang. And then the Artificers and High Guild go and plant a big rear end temple of inhuman mechanistic tyranny right in the Land of Dreams. Give it twenty years of observing the effects - of witnessing the horrors of unchecked and rampant industrialization allowed to run free on the helpless proletariat - and those remnants, no doubt uneasy with the purges already, suddenly have one hell of a reason to plot a conspiracy at the very heart of the Order. The kind of conspiracy that requires a swift, violent, and hidden response - the kind you blame the Traditions for, so that no one realizes that it was the Order itself that blew up the White Tower after luring the insurrectionists there for a secret revolutionary symposium.
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# ? Oct 29, 2019 12:38 |
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That's a cool and good theory, although at first I thought you were talking about Threat Null and wondered how to work it back that far.
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# ? Oct 29, 2019 15:24 |
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Nessus posted:Up from the deeps Oh my god i love u
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# ? Oct 29, 2019 16:33 |
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Tuxedo Catfish posted:Just because something is a one-off weirdness doesn't mean it was retconned. The setting is designed to accommodate one-off weirdness. This is important, yeah. Just because no one writes more about or explains Snake and Bird or the weird fly-headed man in the hotel or whatever, it doesn't go away. That said, I have no real idea how you'd expand 'cenobites antithetical to the God-Machine' so that's probably part of why no one's gone back to it. It's not really an idea that can be expanded easily unless you really feel like writing up a full cenobite vs Machine thing for Demon, which isn't really the tone or aesthetic of Demon.
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# ? Oct 29, 2019 16:42 |
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Mors Rattus posted:That said, I have no real idea how you'd expand 'cenobites antithetical to the God-Machine' so that's probably part of why no one's gone back to it. It's not really an idea that can be expanded easily unless you really feel like writing up a full cenobite vs Machine thing for Demon, which isn't really the tone or aesthetic of Demon. Eh, I think the core idea has plenty of room for expansion, especially since there was so little about them in the original source (they weren't even given any stats), and it wouldn't even have to be tied to the God-Machine—just because the one Tale in which they appeared has them opposing a goal of the God-Machine doesn't mean that's all they do and that any appearance they make has to be centered around that. I don't know; I just thought the idea of these beings that are all about individualism and free will even at the expense of morality and about self-development through extreme sensations could have some interesting possibilities. I didn't make the connection to Cenobites, though; I don't know much about Hellraiser—are Cenobites really that similar conceptually? If so, maybe that explains why the Celebrants didn't appear again. (Well, that and maybe the fact that CoD didn't necessarily need yet another separate type of "demon".)
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# ? Oct 29, 2019 17:30 |
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Jerik posted:Eh, I think the core idea has plenty of room for expansion, especially since there was so little about them in the original source (they weren't even given any stats), and it wouldn't even have to be tied to the God-Machine—just because the one Tale in which they appeared has them opposing a goal of the God-Machine doesn't mean that's all they do and that any appearance they make has to be centered around that. I don't know; I just thought the idea of these beings that are all about individualism and free will even at the expense of morality and about self-development through extreme sensations could have some interesting possibilities. Going from your initial comments on them from the book I immediately thought "Oh Cenobites in CoD, neat". Going off the first two movies and ignoring sequels (but I'd say the comics and short stories tend to get it more right) Cenobites are weird demon things that rule a hell like dimension. Without going into all the weird Barker world building stuff, they could be put in CoD more or less as is, even the puzzle box that summons Pinhead could be tied into some bit of CoD weirdness or other. I suppose they could be a Mage antagonist pretty easily.
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# ? Oct 29, 2019 18:01 |
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Jerik posted:I didn't make the connection to Cenobites, though; I don't know much about Hellraiser—are Cenobites really that similar conceptually? If so, maybe that explains why the Celebrants didn't appear again. (Well, that and maybe the fact that CoD didn't necessarily need yet another separate type of "demon".) Cenobites are so similar that I can't read the Celebrants tale as being about anything else, and I haven't even watched Hellraiser. Having heard the pitch of Hellraiser actually makes the passage make more sense, such as the association of hedonistic pleasure with torture and the infliction of pain.
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# ? Oct 29, 2019 19:05 |
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Hm. Okay, I've now watched the first Hellraiser movie online, and a key plot element was that the Cenobites wanted to recapture someone who had escaped from them... which seems completely counter to the Celebrants' emphasis on freedom and letting people do whatever they want. I don't know; I'm not saying there aren't similarities, and I get now that the Celebrants were probably inspired by the Cenobites (heck, even the names are similar), but I think they could be taken in a different direction, maybe if the extreme sensations angle was downplayed and the focus on free will highlighted more... Or maybe there are good reasons they were never used again and they're not actually very interesting and I am dumb for thinking about them too much and trying to figure out if they can be salvaged.
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# ? Oct 29, 2019 19:44 |
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You could definitely just say they're angels positioned as opposed to the God Machine but are in fact Controlled Opposition to try to lure out particularly elusive-but-desperate demons, or just for that ol' G-M "fuckin around with people for its own sake" reason, and both would absolutely work.
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# ? Oct 29, 2019 19:50 |
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I was reading the Changeling the Dreaming core last night and I have an important question: what's the point of a game of changeling
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# ? Oct 29, 2019 21:15 |
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Pouting over the Banality of the late 90’s, maaaan
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# ? Oct 29, 2019 21:50 |
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BENGHAZI 2 posted:I was reading the Changeling the Dreaming core last night and I have an important question: what's the point of a game of changeling Being Special.
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# ? Oct 29, 2019 21:53 |
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# ? Jun 5, 2024 03:29 |
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Chernobyl Peace Prize posted:You could definitely just say they're angels positioned as opposed to the God Machine but are in fact Controlled Opposition to try to lure out particularly elusive-but-desperate demons, or just for that ol' G-M "fuckin around with people for its own sake" reason, and both would absolutely work. I mean, you could make entities that are either of those things, but they wouldn't be Celebrants as presented in The God-Machine Chronicles... the Tale in which they appeared was very much an apocalyptic endgame scenario which was pretty explicit about the fact that if the Celebrants won, the God-Machine was completely locked out of having any influence on Earth. That the Celebrants really were genuinely in opposition to the God-Machine wasn't left in question. (Which doesn't mean the Celebrants were the good guys... the Tale implied that the best ending might be if the PCs rejected both the God-Machine and the Celebrants and locked them both out—though it did also say that the God-Machine might "fulfill some purpose that the characters never really understood", so this might not really be a happy ending either.) I did say I don't think the Celebrants have to be used in a story where they're fighting against the God-Machine, and I stand by that—like joylessdivision said, maybe they could be used as Mage antagonists, for instance. But making them into agents of the God-Machine is fundamentally changing their nature. Which isn't necessarily a bad thing, but I was trying to think of how or if they could be used while remaining consistent with what (little) has already been established about them. But I guess I'm probably giving them more attention than is merited for some throwaway entities that were inspired by an 80s horror movie and were only briefly mentioned in a single sourcebook six years ago. Sorry. Mostly I was just wondering if they ever appeared again or anything else was ever said about them, but at this point it seems like the answer to that is a pretty definitive no.
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# ? Oct 29, 2019 21:59 |