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NikkolasKing posted:I was also just trying to find out about the afterlife. I know Wraith exists but what about vampires? Where do they go after they meet Final Death? I'm not aware of a definitive answer to this because my understanding of old WoD is Vampires don't have a soul anymore and thus can't go to Wraithland after final death. I suppose final death could literally means erasing the Vampire and the beast inside it from existence but I feel like it's one of those "Make it up yourself Storyteller" Kinda like Golconda (unless there are actual rules for Golconda somewhere)
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Nov 7, 2019 21:33
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I think one of the original ads for Wraith ran something like: “The Prince thought he destroyed you, but he was wrong.” Don’t know how much of the metaphysics you can draw from the ad copy, but after reading that I took it that vamps, who tend by nature to die by someone’s deliberate effort, were actually more unlikely than not to be Wraiths.
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Nov 7, 2019 21:57
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joylessdivision posted:I'm not aware of a definitive answer to this because my understanding of old WoD is Vampires don't have a soul anymore and thus can't go to Wraithland after final death. There's a loresheet for pursuing Golconda in V5. I'm not sure how I feel about that. It's nice that there's the shell of a system to lean on if I wanted to tell that story?
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Nov 7, 2019 22:49
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joylessdivision posted:I'm not aware of a definitive answer to this because my understanding of old WoD is Vampires don't have a soul anymore and thus can't go to Wraithland after final death. Vampires definitely have souls - Amaranth is specifically sucking the soul out of a vampire. I don't remember any examples of former vampires in Wraith, but I haven't read any of that fiction in 20 years.
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Nov 7, 2019 22:57
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Swedracula insisted for V5 that vampires don't have souls and can't become wraiths. It wasn't canon before that.
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Nov 7, 2019 23:02
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Yeah, what the gently caress was up with that? Buffy crossover ?
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Nov 7, 2019 23:18
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Some part of Cappadocious' soul was running around the underworld for a while, though whether you want to count an antideluvian necromancy specialist as a "wraith" in the traditional sense or not I dunno. Another thing compounding the mystery was that even if you had a soul, you might not become a wraith. I don't remember if they ever gave a rule of thumb on it, but it was supposed to be that the majority of people didn't. So from an in-game perspective, you weren't likely to run across wraiths that had been vampires, but whether that was because it was impossible or because vamps were a tiny population to begin with, and so you might only have a handful worldwide that became wraiths at any given time, was left ambiguous.
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Nov 7, 2019 23:22
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Japheth is running around as a Wraith even in V20.Nessus posted:Yeah, what the gently caress was up with that? Buffy crossover ? Pointless grim dark bullshit from an overwrought edgelord, like 99% of V5.
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Nov 7, 2019 23:31
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Book of the Fallen is... good? ...so far. Just all-in on being about evil without glamorizing it; not at all interested in being a book about generic gribbly monsters and boogeymen and laser-focused (in what I’ve read of it in the thirty minutes or so I’ve had it) on being about why and how much abuse and human evil sucks, how it works, and why it must be fought. The author’s note at the beginning makes a strong case using examples from Satyros Phil’s own life for why the normalization of discreet abuse in real life makes it essential to recognize and engage with abuse in art, without doing the 90s White Wolf pretentiousness thing. It also introduces, very early, the term “sociopathy chic” to describe behavior that “mocks and demolishes empathy,” and is clear that not everyone engaging in sociopathy chic suffer from clinical sociopathy and not every clinical sociopath engages in the chic. This feels like a term I’ve needed for a while. I mean maybe it’ll collapse later, I dunno. I haven’t read very far into it yet. But it starts strong. Stephenls fucked around with this message at 00:11 on Nov 8, 2019 |
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Nov 8, 2019 00:07
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Stephenls posted:Book of the Fallen is... good? ...so far. Just all-in on being about evil without glamorizing it; not at all interested in being a book about generic gribbly monsters and boogeymen and laser-focused (in what I’ve read of it in the thirty minutes or so I’ve had it) on being about why and how much abuse and human evil sucks, how it works, and why it must be fought. The author’s note at the beginning makes a strong case using examples from Satyros Phil’s own life for why the normalization of discreet abuse in real life makes it essential to recognize and engage with abuse in art, without doing the 90s White Wolf pretentiousness thing. What book is this?
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Nov 8, 2019 00:22
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Nessus posted:Yeah, what the gently caress was up with that? Buffy crossover ? I took it as the beast replacing the soul because the soul is a Thing in the WoD games. Speaking of the beast, are there any specific oWoD books that deal with that aspect of being a vampire? I'm curious is all. a messed up horse posted:There's a loresheet for pursuing Golconda in V5. I'm not sure how I feel about that. It's nice that there's the shell of a system to lean on if I wanted to tell that story? I skimmed that lore sheet (like most of the lore sheets) and I guess it just didn't really click as being of any real use to trying to do Golconda in game but that could be just me not reading it thoroughly enough.
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Nov 8, 2019 00:24
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Stephenls posted:Book of the Fallen is... good? ...so far. Just all-in on being about evil without glamorizing it; not at all interested in being a book about generic gribbly monsters and boogeymen and laser-focused (in what I’ve read of it in the thirty minutes or so I’ve had it) on being about why and how much abuse and human evil sucks, how it works, and why it must be fought. The author’s note at the beginning makes a strong case using examples from Satyros Phil’s own life for why the normalization of discreet abuse in real life makes it essential to recognize and engage with abuse in art, without doing the 90s White Wolf pretentiousness thing. Is it... useful for running games with Nephandi antagonists? Because the ubiquity and banality of callousness, evil, and abuse doesn't actually sound like a recipe for a game about plotting against self-debasing antinomian wizards on a spiritual mission to drag the whole world down with them, so much as a game about positive activism against systemic structures which can't be defeated individually but only holistically. I Am Just a Box fucked around with this message at 00:33 on Nov 8, 2019 |
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Nov 8, 2019 00:29
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Stephenls posted:Book of the Fallen is... good? ...so far. Just all-in on being about evil without glamorizing it; not at all interested in being a book about generic gribbly monsters and boogeymen and laser-focused (in what I’ve read of it in the thirty minutes or so I’ve had it) on being about why and how much abuse and human evil sucks, how it works, and why it must be fought. The author’s note at the beginning makes a strong case using examples from Satyros Phil’s own life for why the normalization of discreet abuse in real life makes it essential to recognize and engage with abuse in art, without doing the 90s White Wolf pretentiousness thing. Given that I'm not really up for a detailed exploration of the utter depths of human cruelty, I would have passed on the book if I hadn't backed the KS. I do like that he's distinguished despising empathy from actual mental illness and I'm also pretty pleased with how he trashes Ayn Rand as having Nephandic anti-morality. I haven't gotten too far into the nephandi mechanics since I skipped to the end and checked out the metaplot chapter. It really illustrates why I don't think Mage: the Ascension has a chance of becoming a good game under his tenure. He just doesn't believe in the premise (a scrappy bunch of subaltern groups fighting against progressive technofascism) anymore. Edit: images didn't load properly, so here's the quote The Book of the Fallen posted:
Octavo fucked around with this message at 00:43 on Nov 8, 2019 |
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Nov 8, 2019 00:37
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Desiden posted:Some part of Cappadocious' soul was running around the underworld for a while, though whether you want to count an antideluvian necromancy specialist as a "wraith" in the traditional sense or not I dunno. I'm almost positive that there was a vampire now wraith in Necropolis Atlanta (which also doubled as Atlanta By Night).
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Nov 8, 2019 00:48
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Yeah, that's kind of the problem with swedracula. He thought that he was the be all and end all of white wolf fanboys but there were canonically vampire wraiths before he made his proclamation from the mount. When confronted on this he said that vampires only get their souls back after undergoing golconda. Therefore Cappadocious underwent Golconda.
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Nov 8, 2019 01:14
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IIRC you need Will 5 to become a Wraith, less than that and you’re a repeater or go straight to Oblivion. That’s still a preposterous amount of people over human history. There’s a lot of ghosts. Edit: one of the books had rules for other supernaturals brcoming wraith. Can’t say which one right now though.
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Nov 8, 2019 02:32
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I can recall off the top of my head changeling, vampire, werewolf, and mage ghosts.
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Nov 8, 2019 02:53
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Loomer posted:I can recall off the top of my head changeling, vampire, werewolf, and mage ghosts. Yeah you can be a ghost in the shape of your crinos form even. It doesn't give any mechanical benefit, but it's rad.
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Nov 8, 2019 03:39
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I always liked that you could make the afterlife as populated as you needed it to be. Crowded enough they many cities can support a cool underground of Guilds, but sparce enough that you can also tell really small stories. Also, tons of ghosts become soulsteel or burn as torches at the edge of the Necropolis.
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Nov 8, 2019 03:58
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It's impossible to really account for the demographics of the underworld because there's so much stuff forged out of souls. Found that out the hard way.
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Nov 8, 2019 04:06
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Jonas Albrecht posted:It doesn't give any mechanical benefit, but it's rad.
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Nov 8, 2019 04:31
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Tuxedo Catfish posted:this sounds rad i- . . . oh my god, that's exactly it. I Am Just a Box posted:It sounds like MTC 2e is equipped to do this part fine, actually, assuming the Storytelling chapter actually has practical advice on how to structure passage through nonlinear time. Your fresh-from-chargen traits represent your first experienced Descent from your perspective as a mummy, which may be completely detached from where it falls in actual world chronology. Maybe the mummy acts as a megazord, the players are tasked with maintaining the support cult over the aeons and occasionally summoning the Mummy when situations grow dire. Game cycle focuses on maintaining your group sanctum, making sure you've got whatever ungents and sarganthums, occasionally mudhole-stomping some mystery-hungry Mages sniffing around the edges of your library. Then poo poo gets real, you overcome the challenge inherent in summoning the Mummy, the mummy is unleashed, poo poo gets resolved, you re-sleep the mummy, then it's a leap in time to the next epoch. I think a game like that would work chronologically, because you'd get to see the impacts your mortal characters had on the organization itself, because someone played an abacus-wielding bean counter the party was able to afford to keep its sanctum unchanged over the next hundred-odd years. Someone played a thief and stole a bunch of canoptic jars from a different mummy cult, so they collapsed in the interim years. I guess you could also have the role of Mummy rotate between players, from adventure to adventure.
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Nov 8, 2019 05:30
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c__dFYbErxg
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Nov 8, 2019 08:03
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Rand Brittain posted:Swedracula insisted for V5 that vampires don't have souls and can't become wraiths. It was specifically possible in w:to. They had ads in V:tM supplements being all 'they staked you, murdered your ghouls, and now the sun is burning the last life from you. You know this is the end for you - but you're wrong'.
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Nov 8, 2019 12:30
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Sometimes I think it is a shame that Mummy the Resurrection got so few books. It was an interesting and certainly unique idea for the time. Still not sure what you are supposed to do other than hang out in the middle east and fight evil in a very general way. By the second book you could tell they just dumped in some high level powers you would never get or use and just  Having a background that letbyou come back to life faster was good, but the countdown should have started was earlier than a year.
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Nov 8, 2019 12:34
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PHIZ KALIFA posted:Maybe the mummy acts as a megazord new thread title
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Nov 8, 2019 17:07
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Here's another idea: Instead of manifestations of the creative artistic drive, what if they're a metaphor for former colonial powers taking revenge on their colonizers? The mummies are the antagonists harassing areas around the museums holding them captive, stalking antiques dealers who stole their jewels, killing off the lineage of the men who owned the rail lines that burned mummies for fuel. PCs could be mummies who just recently recorporated after being burned in a train, devoid of memory or significant powers, but they are compelled to track down what remains of their finery through an internal Dragon Ball Sensor type power deal. Once their belongings are returned to them, only then can they slumber. I realize that's basically Promethian by way of Deviant, with a hint of Dragon horde, but it feels more accurate to how mummies are presented as antagonists in movies. It's also a chance to release a work which centers anticolonialism, which would make the CHUDs mad.
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Nov 8, 2019 17:15
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Hey Loomer, would you by chance have that BoN/RotDM corresponding lines thing actually written down somewhere because I finally got my copies last night and I'd love to give it a try. Just PM me if you do, I would super appreciate it.
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Nov 8, 2019 17:17
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PHIZ KALIFA posted:Here's another idea: Instead of manifestations of the creative artistic drive, what if they're a metaphor for former colonial powers taking revenge on their colonizers? The mummies are the antagonists harassing areas around the museums holding them captive, stalking antiques dealers who stole their jewels, killing off the lineage of the men who owned the rail lines that burned mummies for fuel. RETURN THE SLAB has always been core Mummy gameplay, so
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Nov 8, 2019 17:19
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Rich Thomas interview about being the art director in the early days of Werewolf. https://keepontheheathlands.podbean.com/e/interview-with-rich-thomas-of-onyx-path-publishing
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Nov 8, 2019 22:23
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Unfortunately, the new Mummy manuscript is a mess. I feel a little guilty for using this metaphor when I'm trying to give constructive criticism, but it's too good to avoid: it's like they heard that mummies in 2e experience their lives non-chronologically and decided to write the whole book that way. Concepts are constantly being discussed in detail before you have the necessary context for them to make any sense at all, and information is given to the reader in an apparently random order. I was honestly only able to make any sense of the book at all because I had read 1e. I feel like the conceptual changes they've made are good? But the manuscript needs to go back to the shop for a serious rearrangement on the technical end. It's completely useless to introduce anybody to the game as it is.
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Nov 9, 2019 00:16
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Rand Brittain posted:Concepts are constantly being discussed in detail before you have the necessary context for them to make any sense at all, and information is given to the reader in an apparently random order. I've recently been reading the CoD books for the first time, and I've been kind of feeling that way about the CoD books in general. There's some good stuff there, but the order it's presented can be... less than optimal. Both CoD Vampire and Werewolf, for example, describe in the clan/auspice entries how each clan/auspice fits into each covenant/tribe, before they've introduced the covenants/tribes. Yes, thank you, it's very illuminating to read a paragraph in the description of the Daeva about how Daeva fit into the Carthian Movement when the Carthian Movement has never been mentioned before in the book and I have no idea what it is. This would easily have been avoided by discussing the relations between the clans/auspices and the covenants/tribes after both have been introduced, but... that's not what they did. I haven't read the Mummy manuscript, and it's very possible that the problem is significantly worse there, but it's not an issue that the existing product lines are free of. It may be less noticeable if you're already familiar with the lines, but as I said I'm reading them for the first time, and it's frequently confusing because yeah, there's quite a bit of discussion of concepts that comes before the necessary context.
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Nov 9, 2019 00:46
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Jerik posted:I've recently been reading the CoD books for the first time, and I've been kind of feeling that way about the CoD books in general. There's some good stuff there, but the order it's presented can be... less than optimal. Both CoD Vampire and Werewolf, for example, describe in the clan/auspice entries how each clan/auspice fits into each covenant/tribe, before they've introduced the covenants/tribes. Yes, thank you, it's very illuminating to read a paragraph in the description of the Daeva about how Daeva fit into the Carthian Movement when the Carthian Movement has never been mentioned before in the book and I have no idea what it is. This would easily have been avoided by discussing the relations between the clans/auspices and the covenants/tribes after both have been introduced, but... that's not what they did. I think that the CofD 2e corebooks suffer doubly from having the precedent set by the Vampire 2e core. a) Vampire 2e was initially developed before CCP had approved referring to the Revised Storytelling System rules as a "second edition," so while unlike the GMC book it contained full standalone rules, there was some ambiguity as to whether it counted as a "corebook" or a "supplement" that might expect readers had already read the 1e corebook. I think Dave Brookshaw mentioned at one point that while Mage 2e was being developed as the Fallen World Chronicle, this influenced the Storytelling chapter's focus on issues newer to the 2e rules compared to general Mage storytelling advice. b) Vampire is one of the CofD's most archetypal games, alongside Hunter and now Deviant. It has its own setting details and unique wrinkles, but it's still invested in reflecting fairly closely what an unfamiliar reader imagines when they think of vampires in a vacuum. Vampire 2e is thus able to put the chapter with the playable character types at the forefront, because you know, more or less, what a vampire is, even if you haven't yet learned that the "Embrace" is their word for turning a mortal or that they maintain a specific named tradition of moving among the living while hiding their nature. You still have enough context to start dividing them into The Sexy Vampires, The Scary Vampires, The Christian Vampires, and The Elitist Vampires. This doesn't set a good precedent for the rest of the gamelines, which are not archetypal like this and need to present their general context before dividing. Doing this in Werewolf means talking about The Shadow Ritualist Werewolves and The Spirit-Hunting Werewolves before you have said much at all about what the Shadow is or what spirits have to do with werewolves. Mummy seems like it suffers from an additional detail, in that I'm not certain all of the writing team has the game they're writing about perfectly straight. Matthew Dawkins has responded to a question about the return of the Shuankhsen in Second Edition by saying "yes, the Shuankhsen are still the primary antagonists," when I never got the sense from Mummy 1e that they were the primary antagonists in the first place. (Of course, I can't really identify any primary antagonist in Mummy 1e, which I think is a flaw of the game to start with. It's pretty diffuse on that front.) The 2e manuscript preview also has a passage that appears to paraphrase a passage about the history of the Nameless Empire from the 1e corebook, which talks about their imperial conquests facing their first real challenge in Canaan from the professional army of the Ki-En-Gir. The 2e paraphrase refers to the Ki-En-Gir as the professional army of the Canaanites, whereas the 1e text subtly implies that the Ki-En-Gir are a foreign empire of which Canaan is a conquered tributary. This matters because Ki-En-Gir is, uh, just "Sumer" in the Sumerian language. I Am Just a Box fucked around with this message at 01:31 on Nov 9, 2019 |
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Nov 9, 2019 01:27
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Rand Brittain posted:Unfortunately, the new Mummy manuscript is a mess. I backed at the entry level out of curiosity at some of the talk and...yeah. The first thing that hit me starting to read it was that the first two chapters were out of order. Like, I actually thought there was some editing weirdness and when putting together the file they had reversed the order. The game just launches into all this babble about guilds and purposes and descents and risings before it even tells you what a mummy even is or where they come from. Then chapter 2 is more of the normal intro chapter, explaining Irem and how mummies got created and stuff. Its weird.
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Nov 9, 2019 01:54
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Please do not besmirch the beautiful, delicate and extremely purposeful layout, nay, architecture of 2E Werewolf core. We’ve been over this in the thread
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Nov 9, 2019 01:56
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I Am Just a Box posted:I think that the CofD 2e corebooks suffer doubly from having the precedent set by the Vampire 2e core. Yeah, it's bad, and it's been getting steadily worse. Requiem 2e started by detailing all the "types of vampire" splats, and it basically worked because Requiem is relatively close to the standard urban fantasy vampire lore, largely because Masquerade helped define that lore in the first place. You could fill in any gaps in your knowledge by just assuming it works like it does in Anne Rice. But then they did it again in Werewolf, where it didn't work nearly as well, because Forsaken don't really resemble traditional werewolf lore, um, at all. You wound up reading a book that describes in detail just how Forsaken are ruthless, unstoppable murderers long before you get any context on why they kill so many people and why they aren't just serial slashers. This tendency gets worse and worse the more high-concept a game line is, and Mummy is the most high-concept of all. They really, really, really, really need to quit it.
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Nov 9, 2019 01:59
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Desiden posted:I backed at the entry level out of curiosity at some of the talk and...yeah. The first thing that hit me starting to read it was that the first two chapters were out of order. Like, I actually thought there was some editing weirdness and when putting together the file they had reversed the order. The game just launches into all this babble about guilds and purposes and descents and risings before it even tells you what a mummy even is or where they come from. Then chapter 2 is more of the normal intro chapter, explaining Irem and how mummies got created and stuff. Its weird. Yeah, the thing is that every CoD book, since Requiem 2e, is exactly like this.
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Nov 9, 2019 02:03
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Rand Brittain posted:Yeah, the thing is that every CoD book, since Requiem 2e, is exactly like this. The worst one yet is the Contagion Chronicle book, which goes talking about the big organizations that form around different reactions to and attitudes about the Contagion, their thoughts on where the Contagion comes from and why it does what it does, how they have reacted to the Contagion in the past, the difference between Sworn and False approaches to handling the Contagion, and the mechanical powers these organizations gain from the special experiences they gain from interacting with the Contagion, which work by manipulating or interfacing with the world through the means employed by the Contagion... ...before finally getting to the chapters dedicated to telling you what the Contagion is and what it does. (Then those chapters do a very bad job of trying to explain that.)
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Nov 9, 2019 02:13
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it's zombies, right? isn't it just zombies?
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Nov 9, 2019 02:17
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PHIZ KALIFA posted:it's zombies, right? isn't it just zombies? I kind of got the impression it was "oh, the Contagion can be anything you want!".
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Nov 9, 2019 02:20
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