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Kurieg posted:Like, the only thing that the old world of darkness has going for it over CofD is the metaplot, if you're cleaving that away as irrelevant or unimportant why the hell are you playing V5 instead of literally anything else? because i want to role play as a vampire and use a good system
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Jan 31, 2020 21:29
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V5 also has terrible art and layout.
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Jan 31, 2020 21:46
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I mean every World / Chronicles of Darkness source book Ive read is laid out terribly. Stuff like the Predatory Aura in VtR or Dream Harvesting in CtL or Mage's whole spellcasting system get put in strange places, surrounded by lore. I recently switched from running a 8 month V5 chronicle to a Lancer campaign and boy do I not miss having rules scattered pell-mell around the book.
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Jan 31, 2020 21:52
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WoD art has always been terrible, however I prefer the crudely drawn art in the old books rather than what they decided to do in V5.
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Jan 31, 2020 21:57
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While I don’t love the order of chapters, I feel like the magic chapter in Awakening 2e is pretty user-friendly.
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Jan 31, 2020 22:00
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I will say, the Awakening 2e and Signs of Sorcery are both better laid out for playing reference than it is for creation. We recently added a new player and I’d forgotten how much flipping around is required at that stage. Actual order of information aside, it’s still better than 1e Awakening was at information layout. Regular play though the book gets opened and the chapters in the middle of the book get the heavy traffic, which is nice because it’s happy to lay open without the binding getting destroyed. Even finding the necessary rules is easy enough as they’re in basically one of three sections. Except conditions and tilts. Those are in the most unfortunate location, so I’m glad I bought the cards.
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Jan 31, 2020 22:01
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A Renaissance Nerd posted:I mean every World / Chronicles of Darkness source book Ive read is laid out terribly. Stuff like the Predatory Aura in VtR or Dream Harvesting in CtL or Mage's whole spellcasting system get put in strange places, surrounded by lore. I recently switched from running a 8 month V5 chronicle to a Lancer campaign and boy do I not miss having rules scattered pell-mell around the book. The manuscripts for the Contagion Chronicle and Mummy Second Edition are particularly egregious. The Contagion Chronicle takes until chapter three to begin explaining what the titular Contagion is and does, and Mummy is all the hell over the place, with a full explanation of a type of ephemeral entity preceding the separate rules that tell you what ephemeral entities are and how they work, another type of ephemeral entity and its rules tucked away in the storytelling advice chapter, and three separate types of supporting cast, one of which has several subdivisions. And then, of course, there's the constant Condition bloat, where powers whose effects don't benefit from being Conditions in the first place send you bouncing to the Condition Appendix to find out what they do. I like the original conceit of Conditions, but the vast majority of 2e CofD books don't understand how they should be used.
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Jan 31, 2020 22:03
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I really wish people would stop using "layout" when they mean "the order in which concepts are presented." That's not what layout is.
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Jan 31, 2020 22:07
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Oh right the contagion chronicle is out I guess? I’m very curious how that ended up, last time it was being discussed it wasn’t out yet, but the previews seemed bad in the fun dumb way.
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Jan 31, 2020 22:09
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Rand Brittain posted:I really wish people would stop using "layout" when they mean "the order in which concepts are presented." That's not what layout is. Huh, so what's the correct phrase for it?
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Jan 31, 2020 22:16
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Joe Slowboat posted:While I don’t love the order of chapters, I feel like the magic chapter in Awakening 2e is pretty user-friendly. I may be unfair to Mage 2E here, but my memory of learning the spellcasting rules involved lots and lots of potential modifiers which I did like because it felt very thematic to do stuff like cast powerful spells in places of power with lots of casting implements. My issue was keeping the names of all that stuff straight, but I imagine you pick it up fast enough when actually playing. Although my real issue with Mage is that of all the CofD books I've read, it's the only one to make me depressed when I read it? I'm not entirely sure why, but I think it's the idea that the world and all the beautiful stuff in it is actually just a Lie bummed me out. Suppose that means I'd make a good Free Council member, then.
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Jan 31, 2020 22:17
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I mean, the Lie is the system of power that restricts and controls and oppresses; the beauty in the world is explicitly something the Seers who enforce the lie seek to quash. The world’s beauty is pretty intensely marred by the powers that rule it and keep that beauty away from so many; even the Free Council declares “destroy the servants of the lie!”
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Jan 31, 2020 22:22
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A Renaissance Nerd posted:My issue was keeping the names of all that stuff straight, but I imagine you pick it up fast enough when actually playing. Mage spellcasting is a lot of fun, and once you get a hang of the names for things it’s very easy. Bonus points for all of that being in about 6 or 7 pages total. I’ve only had one person that wasn’t a mage newbie in my game and everyone else is pretty decent with those mechanics after 2-3 sessions.
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Jan 31, 2020 22:34
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The layout and art of V5 is absolutely horrible but its a fun system imo
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Jan 31, 2020 22:35
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Hoo boy look at all those ignored posts.
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Jan 31, 2020 23:08
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PHIZ KALIFA posted:Huh, so what's the correct phrase for it? "Organization," probably. Like, "layout" isn't literally wrong but there's a specific job involved in making a book that's called layout, and that's the guy who actually applies the text to pages and makes it look nice. (That said their layout also drives me crazy because they insist on indenting after headings, which is just degenerate.)
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Jan 31, 2020 23:19
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Angry Lobster posted:WoD art has always been terrible, however I prefer the crudely drawn art in the old books rather than what they decided to do in V5.
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Jan 31, 2020 23:42
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I'm praying for the posters who cant read about v5 without getting mad 🙏🙏🙏 hope you get better (USER WAS PUT ON PROBATION FOR THIS POST)
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Jan 31, 2020 23:59
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I meant layout as in the way the text is arranged on the page. It's almost as bad as Invisible Sun.
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Jan 31, 2020 23:59
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I don't think I've ever had an rpg experience as nightmarish as trying to find what I need in the CtL2 book.
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Feb 1, 2020 00:24
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Metapod posted:I'm praying for the posters who cant read about v5 without getting mad 🙏🙏🙏 hope you get better I find it hilarious that you think we're mad about V5 but disingenuous shitposting like this does more to harm the thread's perception of V5 than anyone's honest critique ever could.
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Feb 1, 2020 00:57
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It's okay kurieg I wont give up on you 🙏🙏🙏
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Feb 1, 2020 01:28
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So... rather than more interminable V5 “””conversation””” anyone got the dirt on the Contagion Chronicles? Are they as Beast-heavy as they seemed at the outset?
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Feb 1, 2020 01:31
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Joe Slowboat posted:So... rather than more interminable V5 “””conversation””” anyone got the dirt on the Contagion Chronicles? Are they as Beast-heavy as they seemed at the outset? It's the first and only thing on Kickstarter I've ever backed where I dropped tiers with each new release, eventually settling on a pity dollar when it was clear they had enough to still hit goals. If you want the conspiracy angle of it handled 10x better, play Deviant. If you want to just run a cross-splat game, do so. Or, hell, use Deviant rules to build up splat-lite versions. And use Dark Eras if you need ideas for cross-pollinating gameline themes.
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Feb 1, 2020 01:47
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Kurieg posted:V5's issues are more than just mechanical, Oberst. You need to stop dismissing peoples concerns about it by claiming they aren't real gamers or that they haven't actually played V5. I played the game, and while I'll agree that it does make some mechanical improvements it also backslides in a lot of ways that hamper actual gameplay, and our ST had to cut out large parts of the sample adventure to avoid the whole pedophilia subplot, which was extremely gross. Honestly, I was a bit skeptical of NWoD because it lacked a metaplot, but I came to kind of love that a little. Any given setting book was "Here's the history of this place. Here's how things stand right now between the various factions." And that's it until your coterie/pack/cabal/etc comes into the area and starts doing poo poo.
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Feb 1, 2020 02:50
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Joe Slowboat posted:So... rather than more interminable V5 “””conversation””” anyone got the dirt on the Contagion Chronicles? Are they as Beast-heavy as they seemed at the outset? Some 2e chronicle books provide their chronicle focus as a spotlight feature which casts a shadow and adds flavor to the proceedings. A 2e Requiem game can be run without ever involving the strix; there are tons of things to do in 2e Forsaken without encountering any idigam; 2e Lost have lots of things to entangle themselves with without having to dodge a Huntsman. Other 2e chronicle books basically just put a name to the central thing you do with the book. You are not going to run a Geist game without falling under the umbrella of the Chronicle of the Dead; Deviant expects you to engage directly with the Web of Pain. The Contagion Chronicle is the latter type. It is all about the Contagion, all the time, and has no interest in talking about crossover gaming from any perspective that doesn't revolve around the Contagion or the factions that respond to it. It's actually very conspicuous how interchangeably the Contagion Chronicle treats characters of a given splat, despite the splat-specific benefits of the Vector powers. You really don't have a Sanctified vampire and a mummy of the Su-Menent in a Contagion Chronicle game, two different kinds of undead with different perspectives on their spiritual role in the universe and on the origin and nature of their sorcery. They're really just both Occultist Sorcerous Supernaturals. Little effort is even spent to justify the participation of all kinds of hunter compacts and conspiracies in these supernatural factions, despite many of them forming for the primary purpose of fighting this exact kind of supernatural influence. The Contagion swallows everything, and your response to it matters more than anything else could. Said Contagion is extremely ill-defined, with basically no guidelines on what a particular outbreak does except that new outbreaks stem from broken God-Machine infrastructure, each outbreak is contagious and spread between sufferers and carriers, and they warp causality and properties in a way that strongly steps on the toes of Mage's Abyssal manifestations. The Contagion Chronicle is really less of a corebook about responding to a particular type of antagonism and more of a travelogue of several individual outbreaks that have very little to do with one another. The factions have cheesy, pulpy names that feel drawn out of a Mage: the Ascension supplement, and are occasionally implied to have the kind of jet-setting world political influence CofD tends to shy from. Their Vectors elevate faction members above supernaturals without Vectors mechanically, and a few of them are pretty cool, but a few are conceptually lazy, heavily imbalanced, or just confused (Drain Energy). Mechanics throughout the rest of the book are a steep decline in quality, with many references to Difficulty and several powers that require multiple successes on a roll – not scaling with number of successes, just a flat "you need two successes or you fail." Individual setting chapters are scattershot in quality, but a lot of them commit the old World of Darkness sin of directly co-opting real world history and historical figures into the supernatural action in major ways. The only setting chapter I particularly like is Antarctica, which has the most unique and evocative take on Contagion, including a strange lost civilization of wooden doppelgangers somehow tied to the effects or origin of Contagion; and maybe Milton Keynes, which has become a gilded cage and a honey trap for demons and Prometheans as a malformed, Aether-mutated Unfleshed interferes with angelic activity and keeps the city on occult lockdown.
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Feb 1, 2020 03:05
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Well that all sounds like 'Dark Eras but Significantly Worse.' ...speaking of Dark Eras, what's up with the Golden Age of Piracy, but Wizards? I'm a bit behind on Awakening right now and eager to catch up on cool new toys.
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Feb 1, 2020 03:29
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Top Hats Monthly posted:The layout and art of V5 is absolutely horrible but its a fun system imo Whenever the bad art comes up I instantly think of the picture of two street punk vampires fighting with a chain and another just chilling on a motorcycle with a machine gun. Like, what the gently caress is even supposed to be happening here? It's like a scene from an Italian Mad Max ripoff.
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Feb 1, 2020 03:39
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TheKingslayer posted:Whenever the bad art comes up I instantly think of the picture of two street punk vampires fighting with a chain and another just chilling on a motorcycle with a machine gun. Like, what the gently caress is even supposed to be happening here? It's like a scene from an Italian Mad Max ripoff. Ooops! Some leftover Hunter: The Reckoning art made it through.
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Feb 1, 2020 03:52
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As illustrations of things that happen in the World of Darkness the art in Vampire V5 makes absolutely no goddamn sense, but, as fashion photography in some kind of vampire lifestyle magazine, I think they work, and I think it makes sense to play up the glamorous aspect of the vampire fantasy as a counterpoint to the line's ongoing metaplot where it is absolutely the worst time to be a vampire since the first Inquisition. All together it sells a fantasy of "You're gonna be miserable, but also really really hot" that makes for a pretty good selling pitch.
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Feb 1, 2020 04:06
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ElNarez posted:As illustrations of things that happen in the World of Darkness the art in Vampire V5 makes absolutely no goddamn sense, but, as fashion photography in some kind of vampire lifestyle magazine, I think they work, and I think it makes sense to play up the glamorous aspect of the vampire fantasy as a counterpoint to the line's ongoing metaplot where it is absolutely the worst time to be a vampire since the first Inquisition. All together it sells a fantasy of "You're gonna be miserable, but also really really hot" that makes for a pretty good selling pitch. 
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Feb 1, 2020 04:23
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Mendrian posted:Hoo boy look at all those ignored posts. Shitposter Recognition Guide
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Feb 1, 2020 04:25
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Honestly if you sold me V5 as What We Do in the Shadows: The RPG, I'd get it. But I don't think anyone can sell me on that. I remember trying to follow the various "metaplots" back in the day and even picked the Gehenna/world-ending/apocalypse books for the various games. As far as I'm concerned, that particular World of Darkness got blown to hell by whatever the plural of apocalypse is and I have zero desire to revisit it. I Flove the NWoD - both the "old NWoD" and the Chronicles. Mortals can be actual characters instead of useless blood-squibs waiting to get snarfed. I like the two-process of first you make a person, then you afflict/infect/transform/etc that person into a supernatural.
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Feb 1, 2020 04:37
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That's what touchstones are for. You don't transform them but they absolutely can be inflicted by it
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Feb 1, 2020 04:42
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Metapod posted:why are you being overly aggressive to people who don't share the same game opinion as you gently caress off, and never stop loving off
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Feb 1, 2020 04:56
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Everyone posted:Honestly if you sold me V5 as What We Do in the Shadows: The RPG, I'd get it. But I don't think anyone can sell me on that. I remember trying to follow the various "metaplots" back in the day and even picked the Gehenna/world-ending/apocalypse books for the various games. As far as I'm concerned, that particular World of Darkness got blown to hell by whatever the plural of apocalypse is and I have zero desire to revisit it. That's because What We Do In The Shadows is literally Vampire: The Requiem.
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Feb 1, 2020 05:03
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It is I, the turbofan, and I won't buy V5 products because of the baggage. The mechanical improvements are nice from what I've checked out in other people's copies, and even some of the metaplot stuff isn't the worst idea, but even as a huge fan of even the dumb, problematic oWoD stuff V5 crossed the boundary of not just good taste but of dangerous irresponsibility in media. The first is often necessary in the production of gothic-punk horror, the latter never is.
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Feb 1, 2020 05:34
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Mendrian posted:Hoo boy look at all those ignored posts. Yeah, when I saw 70 new posts tonight I knew either Hunter 2e had somehow leaked or Metapod/Oberst was shitposting up a storm again. Why haven't they been threadbanned yet? Loomer posted:It is I, the turbofan, and I won't buy V5 products because of the baggage. The mechanical improvements are nice from what I've checked out in other people's copies, and even some of the metaplot stuff isn't the worst idea, but even as a huge fan of even the dumb, problematic oWoD stuff V5 crossed the boundary of not just good taste but of dangerous irresponsibility in media. The first is often necessary in the production of gothic-punk horror, the latter never is. Yeah this. I'm not going to pretend some of the poo poo I like doesn't have capital P Problems (I just got home from a Cthulhu game for gently caress's sake) so I'm used to having to wince my way through bad and ugly stuff that goes along with things I like (I'm a Gundam fan, ask me how that franchise treats its female characters), but my first exposure to V5 was people explaining to me it caused a literal international incident and I'm not exactly eager to dip my toes in that well when Requiem 1 and 2 are RIGHT THERE.
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Feb 1, 2020 05:57
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Rand Brittain is 100% correct about the flaws of M20. By attempting to position the Technocracy and Traditions as moral equals (while putting forward some kind of shiny new traditions-without-the-bad-parts Mary Sue faction) it completely jettisons the basic conflict that made Mage: the Ascension interesting at all. The point is this: it is imperative that the Traditions, with all their flaws and foibles and historical mistakes, destroy the Technocracy, as that's the only way to create a just world. Octavo is correct that the consensus is properly read as the effect of ideology on social systems. It stands for the belief that someone who commits a crime has to go to jail, that someone who doesn't work hard enough has to live a life of misery, etc. It's not about aesthetics or the gravitational constant. Of all the wrong posts about this I've decided to respond to this one because I have a pithy way to do it: LatwPIAT posted:If people are going to make declarations about what the Technocracy is, I really strongly recommend adopting the following practices: https://twitter.com/nickconfessore/status/1222164928146087938
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Feb 1, 2020 06:17
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Loomer posted:It is I, the turbofan, and I won't buy V5 products because of the baggage. The mechanical improvements are nice from what I've checked out in other people's copies, and even some of the metaplot stuff isn't the worst idea, but even as a huge fan of even the dumb, problematic oWoD stuff V5 crossed the boundary of not just good taste but of dangerous irresponsibility in media. The first is often necessary in the production of gothic-punk horror, the latter never is. Again, Swedracula hired a known sex pest to write a terrible text adventure full of lurid purple prose and fictionalized depictions of his enemies doing absolutely terrible poo poo, knowing that the controversy would give his game free attention. Then put up a blog post not only defending him, but saying that all evidence against him wasn't credible. That's the kind of rear end smear that doesn't wash away just because hunger dice are an interesting mechanic. Omnicrom posted:I'm a Gundam fan, ask me how that franchise treats its female characters HEY OMNICROM WANT TO TALK ABOUT WHAT HAPPENS TO USO EWIN'S MOM!?
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Feb 1, 2020 06:26
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