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Warthur posted:I get lots of Changeling vibes off Twin Peaks and I suspect I'm not alone from this. Twin Peaks, and The Return even moreso than the original two seasons, is dripping with Changeling. I spent like 20 minutes telling some friends of mine about this a couple of years ago, listing things, but...yeah. Maybe I'll try and remember them all and post something more thorough here, later. For now, though: The Black Lodge: Arcadia The White Lodge: Arguably also Arcadia, just with a more seemingly benevolent Gentry ruling it Dopplegangers: Fetches The residents of the Black Lodge (and arguably The Giant/his Lady): True Fae, who seem to enjoy walking the Earth in human form, using Changelings to host their true forms (which tend more toward the ephemeral than the Elfy) Garmonbozia: Glamour (generally taken through cruel damaging means Glastonbury Grove: An extension of the Hedge leading to the Black Lodge Leland Palmer: Loyalist (with some contract to allow BOB to take control of him directly, without his even consciously knowing it or remembering what happened later) Laura Palmer: Long-term Changeling allowed to live a mortal life while BOB was always nearby, possibly having her Fate played with even before her birth by The Giant/Fireman for some inscrutable reason Phillip Jeffries: FBI agent who got in too deep and wound up being abducted, returning as a Changeling just long enough to try and make contact with his compatriots, but somehow disconnected from Causality or something, some Contract shenanigans, that had him eventually disappear and wind up becoming so connected to the Wyrd that he turned into a teapot (only partly joking here) Dale Cooper: The FBI agent we all wish all FBI agents could be, pursuing the murderer of Laura Palmer, knowing they were almost certainly connected to Phillip Jeffries as well, and Blue Rose stuff in general. Eventually abducted while pretty much storming the Black Lodge, spending 25 years in a Durance inside there, while a perfect Fetch was made to replace him, Mr. C, driven by all of Dale's darkest impulses but ultimately who was being occasionally 'piloted' by BOB like Leland was, but this time knowingly and willingly. When he came back as a Changeling, even while he was in a super Low Clarity state due to a screwup in his Escape, he has some serious Fate manipulation Contracts, which, when set loose in a Casino...as well as an ability to perceive the connections of Fate and Truth subconsciously. Mr. C: Has spent 25 years being a walking source of misery upon the world, while also working toward and carrying out a plan to befuddle the other Black Lodge members and keep BOB out of the Black Lodge, with him, using a crappy Fetch version of Cooper as a decoy target for said plan Blue Rose: A tiny faction in the FBI investigating True Fae crimes, eventually planning to arrest all the Gentry and toss them into the cell next to the Dark Mother, who's being held on child abuse charges Major Briggs: The head of the US Military's investigation into Fae shenanigans, who spent so long poking around The Hedge and Arcadia that he eventually became a Changeling by sheer osmosis, who could freely come and go, more or less, not having an actual Keeper. Eventually achieved such a high Wyrd rating that he managed to transcend his body when he was murdered by Mr. C, hanging out as a disembodied head in the White Lodge. Fears that Love may not be Enough. The Jade Ring: Some sort of Super Token that, when placed upon a person's finger, immediately transports them into the Black Lodge, or something adjacent to it, causing them to vanish from the real world on the spot. Can apparently also work on True Fae when they're 'riding' a Changeling, making it pretty darn potent. The Woodsmen: Something between Gentry and Hobgoblins that navigate The Hedge with little effort, making them a very dangerous entity for non-Changeling folks getting involved in Fae business, as they can reach out and...touch...fairly easily. Man, I could probably keep going, but I'll restrain my dumb theories here, but literally all of this is just stuff that occurred to me as I was rewatching the original and watching The Return a couple of years back, not something I had to spend time cooking up after the fact. So...yeah, you're not the only one.
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# ? Feb 15, 2020 04:55 |
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# ? May 29, 2024 06:44 |
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EimiYoshikawa posted:Glastonbury Grove: An extension of the Hedge leading to the Black Lodge I think that some of these are definitely touching on strongly resonant Changeling vibes, but others are a bit of a stretch. But to address this specific one, I would suggest that the form of the Black Lodge we see at the end of the original series, with the red curtain and two-tone zig-zagging floors, is itself the Hedge in this context. Glastonbury Grove is one of many Hedgeways between the red room and the material world. Cooper even finds himself wandering into the red room through the Dreaming Roads. In the context of the original series, the final Black Lodge episode shows us Cooper in the role of changeling being captured and BOB in the role of Keeper. As you suggest, we then see in The Return Cooper's Durance and eventual escape from Faerie, represented by the purple world where Diane is also held in Durance as the eyeless woman Still, it works better if you don't try to force the entire series into a one-for-one allegory, but accept that elements of the show in one episode might be inspiration for different aspects of Changeling than they are in another episode. BOB is a Keeper in the finale of the original series, but in other parts of the show he might be a charlatan or a Huntsman or even a Hedge ghost.
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# ? Feb 15, 2020 06:37 |
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I mean, obviously Twin Peaks has nothing to do with Changeling The Lost. Nothing! It's just not hard, as a Changeling the Lost fan, to see some extremely striking similarities/'man this totally would work in the game' examples. That's all. edit: Also, like I said in the post, all of that was just off the top of my head, on the spot, some of it a little more stretchy than others, of course. I used to have a whole bit about how BOB was actually a sort of voluntary Charlatan, whom the other Black Lodge members (particularly The Arm), rather than casting out into exile, wanted him to return, and everything, so seeing you mention that in your post tickled me pink, just now. Aoi fucked around with this message at 09:10 on Feb 15, 2020 |
# ? Feb 15, 2020 09:02 |
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Nessus posted:I think people don't think of Demon like that because Demon is deeply embedded (har!) in its specific thing, and if you haven't unlocked (har!) that particular set of analogies and resonances in your own heart, it's difficult to really get your head around. Like Demon is definitely the nWoD game that makes me think I just didn't watch the same movie as people, while I "get" the gist of most of the other concepts OK just fine. Demon (much like Promethean) is a perfect example of how to tell a story that's relatable to an identity without being a clumsy, offensive metaphor for that identity. Like, the day-to-day experience of a Demon is basically autistic masking, but supported by superpowers and with existential consequences, even though Demons very obviously aren't developmentally disabled people or anything like them. It's a fantasy that takes the texture of my life (not the essence, not the identity itself, but the way it feels) and makes it the stuff of legends. Tuxedo Catfish fucked around with this message at 10:47 on Feb 15, 2020 |
# ? Feb 15, 2020 10:31 |
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I don't think there necessarily is a good answer to "but why are they lowercase-d demons?" but that goes back to an observation someone made the last time this exact conversation came up: nWoD game lines aren't really about starting with a supernatural concept and working out why that concept is cool or what it's traditionally about. If it were, at least half the game lines would be completely unrecognizable. It's about recreating a specific experience in horror-fantasy terms. This is why, for example, Mage is good despite (maybe even because of ) its endlessly debatable internal contradictions. Mage takes the curiosity, the nitpicking, the stubbornness, the territoriality of academia and asks "what if people like that couldn't help themselves from picking at reality until it breaks?" It's also why nothing you can do will ever save Beast. Beast is a game about taking the experience of being an abuser and asking "what if this were at once inevitable, not your fault, and ultimately for the good of the world?" Tuxedo Catfish fucked around with this message at 10:47 on Feb 15, 2020 |
# ? Feb 15, 2020 10:44 |
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EimiYoshikawa posted:I mean, obviously Twin Peaks has nothing to do with Changeling The Lost. Nothing! When we were planning the campaign I an currently playing in I decided to be a jazz musician (because 1920s) which immediately made me think "got taught to play in Durance to provide creepy background music for his Keeper's bit of Arcadia", and then the other big Twin Peaks fan among the players decided that during their characters' Durance the character was turned into a raven, so we've declared it canon that where our Keeper comes from the birds sing a pretty song and there's always music in the air. Usually this sort of media shout out would be massively tonally inappropriate but so far it seems to be Changeling working as intended.
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# ? Feb 15, 2020 14:18 |
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EimiYoshikawa posted:I mean, obviously Twin Peaks has nothing to do with Changeling The Lost. Nothing! I hadn't thought of TP in the context of Changeling because I've barely read 1e but I was making mental notes of stuff from The Return for weird poo poo to throw at my Vampire players. Twin Peaks in general is a pretty solid place to pull WoD/CoD ideas from for "Here's some weird poo poo that's going on"
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# ? Feb 15, 2020 16:46 |
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Nessus posted:Sure. Nessus posted:Mummy is about RETURNING THE SLAB.
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# ? Feb 15, 2020 18:24 |
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Person of Interest remains the ultimate style guide for Demon. Also the Panic! at the Disco music video for Say Amen (Saturday Night).
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# ? Feb 15, 2020 18:31 |
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The God-Machine predates Demon and it’s pretty clear Demon was written to expand on a popular but vague idea that also became the 2e banner antagonist for Mortals books. Techgnosticism is pretty cool.
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# ? Feb 15, 2020 18:37 |
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Vavrek posted:I mostly meant movie recs about nWoD Demon, as I have something of a handle on most of the others. (Not so much Geist, admittedly.) "Minimally familiar" meant something like "I know it's not oWoD Demon and I think it's where the whole God Machine thing started." Thanks, though. It's got: - Person who can see ghosts helping them with their business while they help him with his - A mixed party of ghosts, people who can see them, and people who can't - Mortal antagonists that, bless their hearts, they're trying - Ghost antagonists that are equally threatening to the living and dead - Killing yourself briefly to go into a ghost world trance (though this is more a 1e thing) And then if you want to come at it from a more horror, MUCH LESS COMEDY I CANNOT STRESS THIS ENOUGH angle, the horror movie "Mama" (which they even call out as a recommendation in the 2e book, a "watch this if you watch nothing else") is fantastic for Geist inspiration. For the "Geists are ideas more than people" angle, the really lovely hangover-lazy-Sunday-quality Thirteen Ghosts from 2001 is good for that, but god, it's so bad.
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# ? Feb 15, 2020 18:44 |
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Chernobyl Peace Prize posted:Geist is the Peter Jackson horror comedy "The Frighteners" full stop, virtually top to bottom. The only way that movie could be more Geist is if there was an interlude where they actually went into the Underworld for ghost adventures. How dare you besmirch the idiot glory that is Thir13een Ghosts?! It's really god drat stupid but I kinda love that movie. Same with the House on Haunted Hill remake but that at least has Geoffrey Rush doing a take on Vincent Price and Jeff Combs being....well Jeff Combs.
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# ? Feb 15, 2020 19:40 |
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Vavrek posted:I'm afraid I'm too old/young or hip/unhip to have any idea what this means.
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# ? Feb 15, 2020 20:40 |
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On "why aren't Demons very much like pop cultural demons?" question, I think it'd be really hard to do that in Chronicles of Darkness. I mean, like it or not, pop cultural demons require a setting where pop cultural Christianity is, if not true/the whole truth, at least contains enough of the truth that there's a place called Hell and it stinks of brimstone and its inhabitants look like metal album cover monsters and want to get your soul. If they aren't rebels against something resembling pop cultural Christianity's God, they at the very least represent some form of ideological opposition to whatever your setting has in God's place as the source of benevolence. The problem is that the Chronicles setup doesn't really support this brilliantly. Oh, there's things out there that are superficially similar to that, but the full blown Paradise Lost schtick most people would think of in terms of a demons-as-PCs game just isn't quite there, and to get it you would need to tread on the toes of a bunch of other splats - and the Chronicles have been developed with an eye to do that less than OWoD did. (Remember in OWoD something resembling pop cultural Christianity was broadly true for Demon and, to a lesser extent, Vampire, was basically impossible to reconcile with the metaphysic and ethos of Werewolf, and in Mage its truth fluctuated depending on how well the Celestial Chorus were doing at influencing consensus reality.) Bear in mind also that D:tD came out after the revival of the OWoD with the 20th Anniversary lines, meaning that - at least at the time - the prospect of a Demon: the Fallen 20th line was not out of the question, so there was good reason to make a clear and distinctive difference between D:tD and D:tF. So there's all sorts of good reasons to deliberately steer away from pop-culture demons for the purpose of D:tD, even if this means they don't feel very "demony". (Particularly since if you want pop cultural demons, the Demon Translation Guide does a pretty good job of letting you play D:tF with fixed game mechanics from D:tD.)
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# ? Feb 15, 2020 21:34 |
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Vavrek posted:I mostly meant movie recs about nWoD Demon, as I have something of a handle on most of the others. (Not so much Geist, admittedly.) "Minimally familiar" meant something like "I know it's not oWoD Demon and I think it's where the whole God Machine thing started." Thanks, though.
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# ? Feb 15, 2020 21:36 |
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In the 1e era new world of darkness there was also a blue book supplement, Inferno. That already dealt with the demons and Faustian pacts and things like that. It was only an okay book and while I don’t remember if you could actually play the demons, I do remember it not being a good fit for the rest of the world at the time. I do think it’s a good thing they went a different direction with Demon. It fits so much better into the themes of the rest of the game lines and doesn’t handcuff itself by being rooted in religion and religious mythology. It does narrow down the number of people who might be interested in it a lot. (Just like mummy does, but for similar reasons.)
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# ? Feb 15, 2020 23:01 |
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Jhet posted:In the 1e era new world of darkness there was also a blue book supplement, Inferno. That already dealt with the demons and Faustian pacts and things like that. It was only an okay book and while I don’t remember if you could actually play the demons, I do remember it not being a good fit for the rest of the world at the time. One thing I do somewhat miss from the 1E era was the briefer, slimmer blue books like that and the psychics supplement and the like, which seemed to be good testbeds for what would and wouldn't work in the framework of NWoD/CoD. I mean, a better testbed would be a fully supported workshopping and playtesting process, but not even Wizards of the Coast do that for their RPGs any more (if they ever did).
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# ? Feb 15, 2020 23:52 |
Warthur posted:On "why aren't Demons very much like pop cultural demons?" question, I think it'd be really hard to do that in Chronicles of Darkness. "Hell" vs. "Heaven" is ultimately a matter of aesthetics in the subsidiary world connected to this splat-type. At most, the prevalence of the "angels" means that feathers/sky/sunny day = good, fire/horns/underground = bad, but this is not some fundamental truth of reality. In addition to the general "adventures, mysteries and character work" that most WoD games can hold, your characters' arc would be to create and perhaps expand identity in the face of this other hegemony, which would probably be very strong but have significant gaps in their capacity in which you could hide, either out of despair or because your campaign focuses on something else. Presumably the power-up sequence of fighting the power would go something like street fights -> streetfights +1 -> the angels try to buy you out -> the Bayonetta poo poo starts showing up. I would avoid the direct presence of God or would go for a gnostic thing. You might vaguely suggest that there was an order in the heavens preceding the angels and that the angels may not have been wrong to get rid of it, but that would be more a historical thing - "lifetimes" might not apply. So as you can see from this sketch I invented in the shower, it's not THAT different from D:tD but there's less of the paranoia element and the techno-gnosticism, at least in the guts. I have no idea how close this parallels DTF cuz I never read DTF due to not caring about any demons not on a psychobilly album cover!
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# ? Feb 16, 2020 00:40 |
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They also literally already made that game when they made Demon: The Fallen (which loving rules) and they didn't want to just make the same game again
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# ? Feb 16, 2020 00:42 |
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Warthur posted:One thing I do somewhat miss from the 1E era was the briefer, slimmer blue books like that and the psychics supplement and the like, which seemed to be good testbeds for what would and wouldn't work in the framework of NWoD/CoD. No joke. I miss the shorter supplements too. Some of them were really a lot of fun, or just generally good for mining for other ideas. Immortals was one that came up a few times in games that ended up being fun. Equinox Road was a little longer, but was a good CtL book. The Blood from Requiem, and Secrets of the Ruined Temple from Awakening. No, they weren’t all perfect, and they probably didn’t make a ton of money. But I enjoyed them and the depth they added to games.
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# ? Feb 16, 2020 00:53 |
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I went back to reread some of the Vigil 1e corebook recently, and it's pretty interesting to go over the material on demons in that book and try to piece together what Rose Bailey was toying with seeding for her ideas that eventually turned into Descent. What you appear to have in Vigil's greater demon scenario is that there was a War in Heaven in the sense of the ancient aliens vibe of the original Voice of the Angel piece from the 1e nWoD rulebook: somewhere around Earth or in its orbit there was once an advanced and mysterious utopia attended by wonderful beings, the wonderful beings fought a terrible war against one another, and the war destroyed the utopia. The leader of the splinter faction, Lucifer, is either cast out or retreats into a perfect, clean void, and reshapes it into Hell, an attempt at approximating the infrastructure and shape of the lost utopia, but the act of doing so redefines him, and he becomes synonymous with Hell itself, unable to leave his own city-self. The other greater beings, for whatever reason, now alternate being time spent in Hell and on Earth as what Vigil calls greater demons. During their time on Earth, they anchor themselves by tempting sinners to feed their character flaws and weaknesses, which the demons find themselves instinctively fascinated by, whether excited or repulsed. It's ambiguous whether this proto-Demon would have had angels as an antagonist or followed after Fallen and focused on other, worse demons (the elder demons of Vigil certainly look like another take on the Earthbound). I think Descent definitely improved on some of these ideas, like replacing pacting for acts of Vice with pacting for elements of Cover, but there's some charm to the old ideas that fell by the wayside, and I like my ancient aliens in Chronicles of Darkness when they're not just being used as an excuse to devalue the achievements of human cultures.
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# ? Feb 16, 2020 01:06 |
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Edit: Didn't read quoted post properly; answer was already there.
dingo with a joint fucked around with this message at 05:33 on Feb 16, 2020 |
# ? Feb 16, 2020 05:08 |
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I still love that the Lucifuge know about the Qashmallim. I want more Qashmal stuff.
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# ? Feb 16, 2020 05:59 |
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Unrelated but someone in my group just spent a Willpower to play Wonderwall on the guitar at a beach party and failed. ...he elected to turn that to a Dramatic Failure and we learned that the party was a funeral.
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# ? Feb 16, 2020 07:53 |
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Inzombiac posted:Unrelated but someone in my group just spent a Willpower to play Wonderwall on the guitar at a beach party and failed. That's awesome. That person deserves an extra XP for that. Jhet posted:In the 1e era new world of darkness there was also a blue book supplement, Inferno. That already dealt with the demons and Faustian pacts and things like that. It was only an okay book and while I dont remember if you could actually play the demons, I do remember it not being a good fit for the rest of the world at the time. You couldn't play demons, but you could play people who are possessed by demons.
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# ? Feb 16, 2020 10:21 |
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Nessus posted:Probably the easiest way to lean into this without it being all about how YOU KNOW JESUS? WELL HE SUCKED! would be to cast the PC demons as being part of a disinherited component of some kind of invisible/hidden society of entities - perhaps even ones who had hid amongst mortals or otherwise dwelt among them. There had been a war and the current hegemony is some angel-looking motherfuckers, supported by other groups to some extent, whose members or portions of whose communities chose to join the colonizers' side.
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# ? Feb 16, 2020 11:41 |
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Warthur posted:As well as pretty much being D:tF, I think the issue with this in Chronicles is that cooking up yet another hidden secondary world linked to a splat type would risk cluttering up the setting to an absurd extent. One of the few things Beast did right is connect its splat to the supernal (IIRC) rather than further complicating the cosmology. The Astral, not the Supernal, but yes.
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# ? Feb 16, 2020 12:12 |
Warthur posted:As well as pretty much being D:tF, I think the issue with this in Chronicles is that cooking up yet another hidden secondary world linked to a splat type would risk cluttering up the setting to an absurd extent. One of the few things Beast did right is connect its splat to the supernal (IIRC) rather than further complicating the cosmology.
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# ? Feb 16, 2020 12:33 |
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Nessus posted:It seems like a demons/angels game would be a place where you could include a teeny but explicit link to the Supernal, if I understand the cosmology right.
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# ? Feb 16, 2020 13:40 |
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Warthur posted:The issue is that the powers-that-be in the Supernal who have quasi-angel thingies at their command already have an opposing faction in the form of Mages... Well, that, and also the fact that despite resembling hermetic conceptions of Angels and Demons, the denizens of the Aether and Pandemonium don't really exist in the same kind of antagonistic relationship you get between angels and demons in either Descent or Fallen.
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# ? Feb 16, 2020 13:52 |
Warthur posted:The issue is that the powers-that-be in the Supernal who have quasi-angel thingies at their command already have an opposing faction in the form of Mages...
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# ? Feb 16, 2020 13:56 |
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Warthur posted:It's the Matrix, you play renegade programs, and you're fighting the Worldwide Communist Gangster Computer God. Yeah I was thinking about this, about what film/tv best gets at DtD, and I came to the same conclusion: The Matrix. If you're going to only watch one thing to get into the mindset I think it's that, even if it leans heavily away from the espionage and heavily into action (though it's not like DtD can't do that either.) Actually, now that I'm thinking about it, it even has double-agents and untrustworthy allies and all that other good stuff. Other things that came to mind have mostly been mentioned but my list is something like: Blade Runner Person of Interest, Dark City, Westworld, a lot of the Terminator franchise, maybe Memento, just about any John Le Carre adaptation (Tinker Tailor, The Night Manager, Little Drummer Girl), Ex Machina... The thing is, the classic fallen angel monotheistic mythology stuff is there in DtD but it's often more aesthetic than directly relevant to the themes. Some of, idk, Preacher sometimes come close? But the angel / demon war, cults, selling your soul, the monotheistic god all that is kind of window dressing on what's fundamentally a cyberpunk espionage story. I get why that's weird, given the name, and why it might be a hard sell to like pitch to someone (especially compared to Demon the Fallen, which is way closer to what people normally think of Demons) but the corebook and all the supplements do an incredibly good job of laying out what the game actually is, what the themes are, and what the gameplay is like.
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# ? Feb 16, 2020 17:18 |
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Metapod posted:Slaves are just one big herd. It has nothing to do with predator type Lmao yeah I love this dumb idea of eating humans ever being ethical compared to eating a rat Theres ~consent~ u see
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# ? Feb 16, 2020 18:53 |
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Oberst posted:Lmao yeah I love this dumb idea of eating humans ever being ethical compared to eating a rat Consent to drink blood is never given only manipulation, abuse, or trickery at best
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# ? Feb 17, 2020 04:49 |
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Except, of course, among blood fetishists.
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# ? Feb 17, 2020 05:21 |
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I mean I feel like that ignores an entire niche of the population that would be down with letting vampires drink their blood
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# ? Feb 17, 2020 05:21 |
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Or, you know, friends or relatives who are willing to put up with a little suffering to help keep their now undead mate alive. Seriously you guys need to stop quashing all discussion that doesn't align with The One True Way To Play Vampire That Also Happens To Be The Way We Play.
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# ? Feb 17, 2020 06:04 |
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I really liked WoD: Inferno for the way it made "demon" a sort of cosmic archetype with certain broadly consistent traits (nefarious or at least rebellious, knows all languages, can lie undetectably, makes pacts) that almost every kind of immaterial entity had the potential of becoming. Also, it is obviously not unethical to request or receive blood donations. I have no idea what the person is on about. Ferrinus fucked around with this message at 07:13 on Feb 17, 2020 |
# ? Feb 17, 2020 07:09 |
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The problem vampires have isn't so much consent as it is informed consent. Withhold the information about what you need it for, and the consent is instantly questionable at best when it's given and much more likely to be withheld. Lie, and you've obtained consent under false pretences, and once you're on that slippery slope suddenly it's much easier to violate consent in more fundamental ways and eventually, when you've made a habit of doing so, stop caring about consent altogether. Tell the truth, and you've broken the Masquerade. Which I would argue would be necessary for vampires to have any sort of life or freedom, because even if they are behaving perfectly ethically and are not creepy predators at all... their blood makes you immortal. Their. Blood. Makes. You. Immortal. That makes Vitae the most valuable resource on Earth, and you can bet that even in a hypothetical world where vampires treated humans perfectly decently, you could not say the same about human responses to vampires once that little bit of information is on the playing field.
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# ? Feb 17, 2020 10:03 |
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# ? May 29, 2024 06:44 |
Yeah you don't even have to do much fancy reasoning to figure out how to write a despair-porn story about how all the bad people become literally immortal, lightly invincible and super-strong through an organized system of sacrificing a few hundred human lives per month, based on the rules as outlined in Masquerade. It would even be pretty easy to get around the built-in Irony Outcome of The Insiders getting blood-bound to some idiot Toreador the feds captured.
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# ? Feb 17, 2020 11:47 |