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Does anyone have any good resources on running a post natural disaster vampire game? I had the idea for a VtR 2E game set right in the immediate aftermath of the Big One from the Cascadia Subduction Fault. There's some stuff on Hurricane Katrina and New Orleans, but it doesn't quite scratch the itch. Also boom, headshot.
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Feb 3, 2020 08:57
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The Unlife Aquatic posted:Does anyone have any good resources on running a post natural disaster vampire game? I had the idea for a VtR 2E game set right in the immediate aftermath of the Big One from the Cascadia Subduction Fault. There's some stuff on Hurricane Katrina and New Orleans, but it doesn't quite scratch the itch. I still get kind of a weird kick over the fact that City of the Damned: New Orleans basically posited the idea of Hurricane Katrina when it was released three months before Hurricane Katrina hit the city.
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Feb 3, 2020 15:36
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I know WoD Mirrors had a section on post-apocalyptic settings, but I can't vouch for how helpful or relevant it would be.
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Feb 3, 2020 15:53
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Spitballing some ideas: - Travel takes 2-3x times as long and there's a random chance you'll encounter an impassable area and have to take a side route. mapping and establishing inroads to the affected areas will be one of the top priorities for external agencies. - Aid groups rallying in visible public locations, but plagued by stress, infighting, and dwindling supplies. - Overall breakdown in communication. Locating isolated survivor groups and families becomes an issue of canvassing neighborhoods trying to convince folks you're not looters in disguise. - Loss of sanitary facilities, breakdown in public hygiene and health. - Traumatic stress can drive people into profound acts of violence and cruelty. Talk of "roving rape gangs" are vastly overstated, but isolated people prone to antisocial tendencies will turn their houses into Home Alone style deathtraps the minute they think the cops won't bust them. You could have some kind of "kick down the door" mechanic where players searching potentially empty houses either find nothing, a stash of emergency supplies, a terrified family, or a nutter with a shotgun and a Death Wish cosplay fantasy. - Fiction generally exacerbates the degree to which humans as a group become self-defeating in response to an emergency (climate change aside ha ha gently caress) communities are largely much more resilient when faced with adversity than people give them credit for. If otherwise idle, people in an emergency will find a role to play in the recovery and slot themselves into it just to have something to do. Occasionally you run into conflict where grassroots groups clash with the existing authority structure who will discourage that kind of self-driven recovery because it doesn't fit into the disaster response plans. These people are idiots, but they're the kind of petty idiot you encounter in public governance. People in an emergency need to be not idle, or the stress will drive them to horrors. - The difficulty of transporting in goods means that emergency supplies are slow to move out from staging areas. A helicopter might deliver a thousand prepackaged meals, but those are stuck in the city square until enough folks volunteer to walk them the seven miles over to the old folk's hospital. Even if there's somehow "enough" for everyone, people can still die for want of access. - People tend to naturally fall into affinity groups. These can be pre-existing, like school clubs or gangs, or they can arise extemporaneously from material conditions. People who want to cook will gather in the cooking areas and sort out a schedule for themselves. You run into conflict when existant groups from before the emergency attempt to assert misguided dominance or control over a naturally occuring response. For example, leaders of a conservative religious community objecting to having to answer to a female emergency manager.
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Feb 3, 2020 16:15
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I ride bikes all day posted:LA by Night is finally back. Guess the big delay was because they left G&S and are streaming on the World of Darkness channel on Twitch now. Yeah it's great I'm excited. It really draws in new viewers and gets folks interested in v5. Ericka ishii is able to keep the show flowing even without victor or jasper
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Feb 3, 2020 18:35
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ElNarez posted:They're basically going forward with the White Wolf edits for the first three books, with a couple of extra errata (the Profane Hiero Gamos power has been completely rewritten, some of the language has been tweaked). Yeah pretty much every issue has been dealt with. Anyone coming in fresh doesn't have to worry about the distasteful stuff now
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Feb 3, 2020 18:40
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Wiccan Wasteland posted:For context This is pretty yikes and I had no idea, but it seems she was presented as a villian. Regardless I'm glad they scrubbed that stuff and fired swedish dracula
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Feb 3, 2020 18:42
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So, one thing I heard about the oWod was that it was hypothetically possible to play a game with characters from different books/lines. Now, I know that it ended up being a total unbalanced mess, but it was technically a thing that could happen. Is this possible in CoD/do books crossover at all in CoD?
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Feb 3, 2020 18:55
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thetoughestbean posted:So, one thing I heard about the oWod was that it was hypothetically possible to play a game with characters from different books/lines. Now, I know that it ended up being a total unbalanced mess, but it was technically a thing that could happen. Is this possible in CoD/do books crossover at all in CoD? It is definitely possible, and because unlike oWoD everyone is operating on mostly the same mechanics outside of their special splat powers, it's much easier. (And even there, there's baseline crossover rules to cover things like 'okay, I don't have Primal Urge, what do I roll when this werewolf does things to me that would call for that stat,' primarily in the form of 'use your equivalent Power Stat dots instead.') Your main challenges with crossovers will be with the games that assume some form of group organization, which is mostly Werewolf packs and Sin-Eater cults.
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Feb 3, 2020 18:58
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Crossover in CoD is a lot easier because the system is just generally built better and more coherently. There's still pretty hefty differences between each game line that can make crossover a challenge. Mages, as usual, are playing a pretty different game from everybody else, and while their advantage in murderation isn't quite as pronounced as in oWoD werewolves are still beefdeath factories right out of the gate. Plus there's just stronger incentive to do a specific set of things with each game, which can be a barrier regardless of direct power comparison.
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Feb 3, 2020 19:28
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Off the top of my head: - Mages (and to a lesser extent Demons) have massive, splat-specific subsystems that the GM has to know inside and out - Mages, Demons, Werewolves, and Prometheans have specific drawbacks that can make cross-splat cooperation REALLY difficult - Werewolf and (sometimes) Demon are a lot more combat-heavy than other splats - Geist, Changeling, and Werewolf heavily involve other worlds/dimensions that are difficult for some other splats to survive in - Hunters and Vampires are going to struggle to keep up with other splats in terms of power, both in the sense of throwing down in a fight and in terms of sheer breadth of narrative control - Mummy barely makes sense as a party-based game even when you're not crossing over with other splats None of this is necessarily fatal to a crossover, but I would recommend starting with two games you've run before and feel confident managing.
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Feb 3, 2020 19:39
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Yeah, it's way easier to blend two games than a free for all multisplat adventure. That shouldn't stop you from introducing NPCs from non-player splats, though. Anything with vampires is always going to have the question of "what happens during the day".
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Feb 3, 2020 19:50
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Oberst posted:Yeah it's great I'm excited. It really draws in new viewers and gets folks interested in v5. Ericka ishii is able to keep the show flowing even without victor or jasper I have a strong personal dislike for Mika Burton, and she didn't exactly do a lot to reverse that this episode. Still, loved seeing Carver again, and Erika was great. I wonder how far down the "Time of Thin Blood" rabbit hole they're planning to go.
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Feb 3, 2020 19:54
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Oberst posted:This is pretty yikes and I had no idea, but it seems she was presented as a villian. She was one of the presented player characters for players to be in the playtest, though in total fairness, you are correct that the player characters were presented as bad people and not aspirational figures. thetoughestbean posted:So, one thing I heard about the oWod was that it was hypothetically possible to play a game with characters from different books/lines. Now, I know that it ended up being a total unbalanced mess, but it was technically a thing that could happen. Is this possible in CoD/do books crossover at all in CoD? Books do crossover in the sense that they occasionally mention wizards in non-Mage books, ghost-riddent revenants in non-Geist books, faceless liars in non-Demon books, etc., and unlike oWoD, they largely don't contradict the other game's setting premises when they do so (mages as name-stealing warlocks in oWerewolf, etc.). Mechnically, crossover play is easier in CofD because everything is based on the same mechanical skeleton. Characters all share the same list of Attributes and Skills. One gameline won't assume that everybody shares an entire category of traits that another gameline doesn't have (Virtues in oVampire and oDemon, the nonexistence of aggravated damage in oHunter). Just in general, dice pools won't call for traits that a character won't have unless the trait is unique to a character type, and analogous character traits are identified and provided for (Blood Potency, Primal Urge, Gnosis, Wyrd, etc. are all explicitly identified as Supernatural Tolerance traits that are evenly measured against one another when used in resistance dice pools). It's not necessarily completely viable because while everything is mechanically compatible, it's not mechanically balanced. A mage or a demon punches at a higher weight class than a changeling or a deviant, because Mage and Demon are games about higher-level metaphysical conflicts, whereas Changeling and Deviant are focused on more grounded, more local and personal conflicts. A character's strengths and weaknesses may also be very asymmetrical even when they overall balance out. A vampire and a Promethean aren't going to have a huge intrinsic gap between their ability to do what they do, but the vampire's inability to go out in the daylight stands out heavily when doing so is useful for the Promethean, whereas situations that require insinuating yourself long-term into a given social group massively favor the vampire over the Promethean (assuming the group meets after dark). I'll absolutely third crossover working a lot better if you don't treat it as a free mix-n-match, but deliberately choose two games whose themes and goals complement one another. Werewolf and Geist combine well because they're both about loyal camaraderie with a like-minded circle and occult problem-solving between worldly and otherworldly affairs. Deviant and Hunter can combine because they're lower-powered games about fighting back-to-back against inhuman predation and exploitation. Changeling and Demon can combine because their themes include blending into and bonding with human society while secretly being different and avoiding the notice of hidden enemies. And so on. Find shared points to focus on and make the game cohere.
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Feb 3, 2020 21:10
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I Am Just a Box posted:She was one of the presented player characters for players to be in the playtest, though in total fairness, you are correct that the player characters were presented as bad people and not aspirational figures. He loving knows that. We've been over all of this multiple times in the old thread, which is why I wanted those two threadbanned in this one, but we don't have a trad games mod anymore. Ignore them, nothing they say is in good faith and there are other, better posters here who enjoy V5 and will engage with you on the topic.
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Feb 3, 2020 22:13
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I ride bikes all day posted:I have a strong personal dislike for Mika Burton, and she didn't exactly do a lot to reverse that this episode. Still, loved seeing Carver again, and Erika was great. I wonder how far down the "Time of Thin Blood" rabbit hole they're planning to go. I have no idea how they could do this in the format of a stream, but it'd be great if they could do something that lets Alex Ward show off his physical acting more. He's fine as Jasper in terms of dialogue, but I saw a video recently of how he comes up with the movement of his creature character acting and dude has some amazing talent.
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Feb 3, 2020 22:56
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I ride bikes all day posted:I have a strong personal dislike for Mika Burton, and she didn't exactly do a lot to reverse that this episode. Still, loved seeing Carver again, and Erika was great. I wonder how far down the "Time of Thin Blood" rabbit hole they're planning to go. Shes definitely hit or miss, but carver was good and erika had some good erika Ishii existential angst Looking forward to the gehenna stuff and where the Nelli G as baron thread will go
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Feb 4, 2020 00:39
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I Am Just a Box posted:She was one of the presented player characters for players to be in the playtest, though in total fairness, you are correct that the player characters were presented as bad people and not aspirational figures. Jesus lmao I had no idea. They probably should have fired swedish Dracula for that. I'm glad they cut that poo poo out and got rid of him. Mathew dawkins and the other writers now who I've seen are dedicated to inclusiveness and excising that kind of brand damaging garbage Hopefully blood gods isnt that edgy
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Feb 4, 2020 00:44
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If you're going to post in the thread for the love of god at least stop tripleposting.
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Feb 4, 2020 00:57
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thetoughestbean posted:So, one thing I heard about the oWod was that it was hypothetically possible to play a game with characters from different books/lines. Now, I know that it ended up being a total unbalanced mess, but it was technically a thing that could happen. Is this possible in CoD/do books crossover at all in CoD? I remember that OWoD had an adventure/supplement called Midnight Circus set up with the idea of various supernaturals coming together to take it down. NWoD is much friendlier to that sort of thing. In fact one thing KickStarted was the Contagion Chronicle, which was specifically built around the idea of multiple supernatural (including mortals/Hunters, I think) coming together to fight the threat of the Contagion.
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Feb 4, 2020 03:00
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Having different splats in the same campaign is fine if everyone involved (ESPECIALLY the GM) has a higher-than-average level of system mastery across the board. Like, you're relying fairly heavily on the social contract in order to not have the entire thing be a shitshow, and in general games that rely on the social contract are bad games. That said, if you can get it to work, it's pretty loving great to be a World of Darkness Scooby Gang and having your band of special snowflakes run around solving mysteries or whatever.
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Feb 4, 2020 03:10
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One idea I had for a game I never ran was to steal the setting of Raidou Kuzunoha and have the various supernatural be part of a nationalist organization pledging loyalty to country over their secret societies.
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Feb 4, 2020 08:04
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Anyone watched that other Vampire stream that goes on after LA By Night? The Bloodlines promo tie-in? It's harder to get into because they're not actors and they're all Extremely Swedish or something. Just curious if it rewards you for sticking around.
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Feb 4, 2020 17:30
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Nehru the Damaja posted:Anyone watched that other Vampire stream that goes on after LA By Night? The Bloodlines promo tie-in? It's harder to get into because they're not actors and they're all Extremely Swedish or something. Just curious if it rewards you for sticking around. There's only been the one episode, but I like the setup and the little things they do to put context around what's happening, through illustrations and on-screen rule descriptions.
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Feb 4, 2020 17:53
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MonsieurChoc posted:One idea I had for a game I never ran was to steal the setting of Raidou Kuzunoha and have the various supernatural be part of a nationalist organization pledging loyalty to country over their secret societies. This is one of the long term goals of a few members of my player's pack. They were so into the idea that I ended up seeding a failed attempt at doing it a century ago by one of their mentors, the sire of one of their vampire allies, and a mage that they know, and worked the story of the group's failure and the reason they disbanded into the main plot.
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Feb 4, 2020 18:06
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Nehru the Damaja posted:Anyone watched that other Vampire stream that goes on after LA By Night? The Bloodlines promo tie-in? It's harder to get into because they're not actors and they're all Extremely Swedish or something. Just curious if it rewards you for sticking around. I tried but gave up about two thirds of the way through. It just felt a lot like a group of teenage D&D players trying Vampire for the first time. I guess I'd say that LA by Night is a "Let's be vampires" game and this was more of a "Let's play vampires" one. The lack of background music was pretty grating as well. If you don't like the melodrama of LA by Night, this could be a fit for you, though.
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Feb 4, 2020 18:09
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Everyone posted:I still get kind of a weird kick over the fact that City of the Damned: New Orleans basically posited the idea of Hurricane Katrina when it was released three months before Hurricane Katrina hit the city. Shiiiiiiiiiiiiit. I kind of stopped following NWOD (and most RPG stuff) just after it came out, for a while, which included most of Requiem's early books. So I read them just a few years ago... I 100% assumed that they came out after Katrina, and didn't check the dates closely enough.
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Feb 5, 2020 05:29
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I once played a campaign where we all started as mortals but over the time ended up each taking on different splats It was pretty fun just roleplaying Being Human where the vampire and werewolf are roommates and get into hijinks Real World: Salem
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Feb 5, 2020 07:01
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EimiYoshikawa posted:Shiiiiiiiiiiiiit. Well, it wasn't a huge part of the book. Essentially one of the suggested adventures ideas was for a storm/hurricane warning that freaks out all the Kindred, but there was a sidebar on the idea that a big hurricane actually hits and does a lot of damage to the city. And then three months after the book hit shelves...
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Feb 5, 2020 11:40
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Everyone posted:Well, it wasn't a huge part of the book. Essentially one of the suggested adventures ideas was for a storm/hurricane warning that freaks out all the Kindred, but there was a sidebar on the idea that a big hurricane actually hits and does a lot of damage to the city. And then three months after the book hit shelves... I blame the God-Machine, yikes.
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Feb 5, 2020 11:48
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Yeah, a ton of the fiction and character backgrounds and so forth in some of the splat books and supplements for Requiem tie in the aftermath of this huge hurricane hitting New Orleans, and how that helped uproot (or bury) all sorts of Kindred and their power structures, their unlives, those of their servants who still have to live their mortal lives, etc...I would imagine the later writing took on some measure of 'we should get this right, because it turned out to have actually happened and hurt a lot of real people', given what I recall.
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Feb 5, 2020 12:20
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EimiYoshikawa posted:Shiiiiiiiiiiiiit. Terratina posted:I blame the God-Machine, yikes. I mean, it's not exactly a wild coincidence--New Orleans has been devastated by hurricanes lots of times going back as far as the 18th century, and it was widely known even before the storm that a major hurricane hitting New Orleans would be a top-3 disaster for the USA. (Fun fact, in early 2001 FEMA released a report saying that the three worst potential disasters to hit the US would be a) a major hurricane hitting New Orleans, b) a terror attack on New York City, and c) a major earthquake in San Francisco.) Katrina was a disaster not because it was unexpected, but because of massive failures of civil engineering and planning leading up to it. EimiYoshikawa posted:Yeah, a ton of the fiction and character backgrounds and so forth in some of the splat books and supplements for Requiem tie in the aftermath of this huge hurricane hitting New Orleans, and how that helped uproot (or bury) all sorts of Kindred and their power structures, their unlives, those of their servants who still have to live their mortal lives, etc...I would imagine the later writing took on some measure of 'we should get this right, because it turned out to have actually happened and hurt a lot of real people', given what I recall. Assuming you're talking about the bits I think you are (i.e. some of the stories in the Clanbooks), that stuff was written after Katrina.
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Feb 5, 2020 13:10
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Not much info here, but the latest Wraith20 update included this: quote:And Here's Our Latest Kickstarter: Well that's something fun for tomorrow.
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Feb 5, 2020 16:51
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GimpInBlack posted:I mean, it's not exactly a wild coincidence--New Orleans has been devastated by hurricanes lots of times going back as far as the 18th century, and it was widely known even before the storm that a major hurricane hitting New Orleans would be a top-3 disaster for the USA. (Fun fact, in early 2001 FEMA released a report saying that the three worst potential disasters to hit the US would be a) a major hurricane hitting New Orleans, b) a terror attack on New York City, and c) a major earthquake in San Francisco.) Katrina was a disaster not because it was unexpected, but because of massive failures of civil engineering and planning leading up to it. It's just one of those times when reality puts a boot up pop-culture's rear end. It happens sometimes. I remember that Christopher Farnsworth's second book in the Nathaniel Cade series, The President's Vampire came out either shortly before or shortly after Seal Team 6 iced bin Laden (and had the death of bin Laden as a plot point). Probably the weirdest example that I recall involved some rap album that showed airplanes striking the World Trade Center. And the album dropped on September 11, 2001.
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Feb 5, 2020 19:17
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Everyone posted:It's just one of those times when reality puts a boot up pop-culture's rear end. It happens sometimes. I remember that Christopher Farnsworth's second book in the Nathaniel Cade series, The President's Vampire came out either shortly before or shortly after Seal Team 6 iced bin Laden (and had the death of bin Laden as a plot point). Or this: 
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Feb 5, 2020 19:40
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Yeah, there was also a Tom Clancy novel In the mid-90s that pretty much predicted " Terrorists use hijacked airplane as makeshift cruise missiles," Though in that case, they crashed the planes into the State of the Union Address. Unknown Armies also had the book One Shots, which came out in 1999 and featured a terrorist hijacking a plane and crashing it into a building as part of a Sinister occult ritual.
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Feb 5, 2020 20:26
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Everyone posted:Probably the weirdest example that I recall involved some rap album that showed airplanes striking the World Trade Center. And the album dropped on September 11, 2001. Hadn't heard of that. Dream Theater put out an album on 9/11 that had the twin towers on fire on the cover.  You got a picture of that rap album?
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Feb 5, 2020 21:21
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GimpInBlack posted:I mean, it's not exactly a wild coincidence--New Orleans has been devastated by hurricanes lots of times going back as far as the 18th century, and it was widely known even before the storm that a major hurricane hitting New Orleans would be a top-3 disaster for the USA. (Fun fact, in early 2001 FEMA released a report saying that the three worst potential disasters to hit the US would be a) a major hurricane hitting New Orleans, b) a terror attack on New York City, and c) a major earthquake in San Francisco.) Katrina was a disaster not because it was unexpected, but because of massive failures of civil engineering and planning leading up to it. Using hyperbole for the sake of a joke results in a detailed explaination of the whole scenario here, got it. Thanks. Not that text and tone are good friends, mind you. Everyone up here has the right of it. Truth is stranger than fiction after all.
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Feb 5, 2020 22:01
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I ride bikes all day posted:Hadn't heard of that. Dream Theater put out an album on 9/11 that had the twin towers on fire on the cover. It's from The Coup, Boot's Riley (the writer/director of Sorry to Bother You) group. He's been an avowed communist his whole life and a huge chunk of The Coup's music is explicitly anti-capitalist, so the cover wasn't just for shock value.  Adding to weird coincidences, and one I think is pretty in line with this thread, the pilot episode of The Lone Gunmen, the x-files spin-off, was about a (US Government backed) plot to fly passenger planes into the WTC.
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Feb 5, 2020 22:52
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VTES post incoming. Black Chantry announced last year that the fifth edition of the game was in development and it's expected to be released at some point in Q2-Q3 this year. This new editions is going to consist in a box with preconstructed decks and all the necessary items to play. The theme will be Camarilla vs Anarchs and will follow the V5 plotline and it will include new cards, especially for the Anarchs. Testing has been going on for a while and spoiler season will commence soon. Really looking forward for the new anarch cards, they need more love. In other news, Black Chantry has launched a new singles print-on-demand service with Drivethrucards. Basically they will slowly make old cards available on Drivethrucards, for now only Assamites are available, each single is 0,35$ and minimum 10 cards per order. This is pretty neat, letting you buy old cards on demand without going through the secondary market is huge, especially for new players. Not bad for a twenty-five year old dead game.
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Feb 5, 2020 23:22
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