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Is the Boston book particularly well-regarded?
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Feb 21, 2020 13:51
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Dawgstar posted:Is the Boston book particularly well-regarded? More for some of the peripheral weirdness than the specifics of the Consilium, as I recall. Among other things, it introduced the Prince of 100,000 Leaves, an Abyssal entity that is a book which is also a horrible nightmare reality of cannibal-priests ruling a global empire of flesh pillars and skull ziggurauts and all manner of horrible things that can overwrite actual reality if the entire book is ever assembled. Gathering smaller numbers of pages together creates localized "outbreaks" of the Prince's anti-reality, and naturally there's a cult devoted to assembling the whole thing, on the assumption that they will be the ruling caste of cannibal-priests when the anti-reality becomes real reality.
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Feb 21, 2020 14:03
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Oberndorf posted:Long ago, a friend persuaded me that Werewolf was a game about a bunch of religious zealots, and the core conflict was how far you were willing to violate your morality to comply with the teachings of your religion. Your friend is not necessarily wrong re: zealots - I've referred to them multiple times as furry Republicans that magically aren't climate denialists - but yeah nah, Werewolf reeks of Native fetishization, and the best thing they did for the Wendigo was to make them 'sick of this poo poo' rez guys that just wanted the Coggies (and every other white idiot) to shut the gently caress up forever. The next best thing would be murdering Literally White Savior Evan and forgetting he ever existed. I would also greatly prefer that the Wendigo/Uktena be under lock and key until a player and GM can answer at least three essay questions about indigenous cultures without whiting all over it. Tho tbh even the non-native people who get it semi-right have a bad habit of being ultra-cringey about it. EDIT: additionally, as someone who plays a furry Klingon, I agree, the Fenrir are weirdly endearing after their rewrite, and their stance on kin is better than most. Old Boot fucked around with this message at 14:43 on Feb 21, 2020 |
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Feb 21, 2020 14:37
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Being in the process of running epilogue sessions to clean up after a three year game of Awakening, I can say that the 1e books I got the most mileage out of were, in order: Astral Realms, hands down. No contest. Get Astral Realms. Go into the Astral Realms. Have great sessions. In particular I have run three or four sessions that were specifically the cabal delving into an individual oneiros to deal with astral invaders or Abyssal intruders, which let me go really deep on a single character via surreal imagery and dream-challenges they had to untangle. If anyone’s curious I can lay out those sessions, as well as the other astral journey sessions into the Temenos and Anima Mundi (and once to the place the Tremere went when they first discovered their hollow god). Left Hand Path, for the expanded Tremere. Main antagonists of the game. Seers of the Throne, for the secondary antagonists and for the Fallen World’s hideous gods. The Mysterium, Ladder, and Guardians books in that order for fleshing out the local Consilium. Imperial Mysteries, less for any mechanics or even arch masters and more for a small amount of info on the Bound and, generally, the idea that there’s bigger things out there. I think the only thing I used without significant changes was the idea of an Astra. I’m sure I referenced other works, I know I drew on Legacies from elsewhere, but those were the primary ingredients from Awakening canon for the game. E: a friend of mine got given the Boston book by another friend, in hard copy, and it’s a weird mix. The Boston content itself is a lot of fun but a ton of it is taken up with a collection of NPCs who, when they aren’t ‘Boston stereotype with magical powers’ (friend-who-received is from Boston so we had a ton of fun sorting them into realistic vs unrealistic, like how she was 100% in agreement that the poly coven of witches was exactly what people in a particular suburb would do) are incredibly uninteresting. Almost all of them are just ‘person doing mundane thing, made more effective by magic’ but not even that much more effective, like an MIT cabal using Mind magic to be good at card counting in Vegas, which is both cliche and incredibly boring. There’s no magical obsessions or mysteries or even really recognition of the scope of magic. Oh and some of the NPCs are kinda racist or at least draw on really tired tropes about where they’re from? Joe Slowboat fucked around with this message at 16:14 on Feb 21, 2020 |
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Feb 21, 2020 16:07
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The Wendigo's hat is "Native American Cannibal Who Is Mad At The White Man". The Uktenna's hat used to be "Native american who scoffs at the ignorant white man" but it's expanded to "mostly non-whites who scoff at the ignorant white man and the occasional enlightened white man who realizes how awesome native cultures are, but are still perfectly willing to gently caress over non-american indigenous cultures if they refuse to give the Uktenna all their cool magic poo poo. You know, like White People do." Both of them are terrible and should be excised. The Get were able to shed much of their problematic background by leaning into the real world german diaspora that happened post WW2, where they shed a lot of their own native cultural trappings for those of their new homelands. Whereas even in revised the Fianna throughline was "WE'RE SO FECKIN OIRISH IT HURTS!"
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Feb 21, 2020 16:09
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If Werewolf 5 made the Get coffee- and recycling- obsessed advocates of heavy-socialized capitalism, whose main pagan rites involved leapfrog around a maypole...well, it wouldn't cleanse all the sins of v5, but it would go a long way. And if the other tribes asked about the militant warrior vibe of the past, the Get response would be "of course the historical Get were obsessed with war, and some loons who still advocate for it. Same is true for almost every other culture until like a hundred years ago."
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Feb 21, 2020 17:02
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I am excited to find out how excited about ethnic purity Werewolves are going to be. The bar is definitely pretty high, but this new edition just might top it
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Feb 21, 2020 17:02
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So would anyone be interested in either a WW2 Supernatural Humans or 1980s/90s Chop Socky nWoD game set in the Japanese underworld? (Basically PnP Ryu ga Gotoku using nWoD rules)
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Feb 21, 2020 17:31
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Joe Slowboat posted:The Mysterium, Ladder, and Guardians books in that order for fleshing out the local Consilium. Is this because they are uniquely suited to Consilium-building, or were those just the Orders of interest in your game? I've never heard a lot of good about the Order books except Seers (which I've read and liked), though I do hear that Free Council is bad.
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Feb 21, 2020 17:31
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That Old Tree posted:Is this because they are uniquely suited to Consilium-building, or were those just the Orders of interest in your game? I've never heard a lot of good about the Order books except Seers (which I've read and liked), though I do hear that Free Council is bad. Specific interests for this game; the 2e book had enough Free Council to go with for me to do my own thing, same with the Arrow. The Mysterium book has really good mystery cult and theology content, the Guardians has paranoia and cults, and the Ladder has their cults and ideology - the Diamond Precepts mattered a lot to one of my PCs. Basically I read those books for their development of the Orders’ symbolism and ideology more than anything else.
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Feb 21, 2020 17:38
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Cool thanks!
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Feb 21, 2020 17:41
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Kurieg posted:The Wendigo's hat is "Native American Cannibal Who Is Mad At The White Man". The Uktenna's hat used to be "Native american who scoffs at the ignorant white man" but it's expanded to "mostly non-whites who scoff at the ignorant white man and the occasional enlightened white man who realizes how awesome native cultures are, but are still perfectly willing to gently caress over non-american indigenous cultures if they refuse to give the Uktenna all their cool magic poo poo. You know, like White People do." In our games the Uktena's schtick tended to be rear end in a top hat Wizards.
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Feb 21, 2020 17:50
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Joe Slowboat posted:Being in the process of running epilogue sessions to clean up after a three year game of Awakening, I can say that the 1e books I got the most mileage out of were, in order: I'd be interested in hearing about all your groups Astral journeys. I've always found the book interesting, but have never felt creative enough to use it.
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Feb 21, 2020 17:58
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The Mysterium and Guardian books are useful if you have a player who's really into the way those two Orders are actually religions. A lay Guardian or a Mystagogue who would have been in the Free Council but fell in with a different crowd as an apprentice? Not so much, but a true-believing Labyrinth-tending sin-eating martyr-complexing Guardian or a high-initiation Mystagogue who took the Corpus to heart? The Order books give way more detail about their practices than we could fit into the 2e splat spreads. A Guardian player interested in Masques will get mileage from the pages about it, the discussions of how they're used, and the semi-heretical Guardians who go way too far in it as opposed to the corebooks one- paragraph of flavour text on the Merit. That sort of thing. Silver Ladder is useful as the best explanation of the Pentacle's legal system and what happens at Convocations. Also a better book about how to guide Sleeper society than Free Council is (Free Council has some limitations as a book - it was an experimental format, while the other five Orders stuck to the one adapted from Vampire's covenant books).
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Feb 21, 2020 18:04
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How are these books for adding $3 to my Hunter pledge? Mortal Remains [Hunter: The Vigil 1E] PDF Block by Block [Hunter: The Vigil 1E] PDF Tooth and Nail [Hunter: The Vigil 1E] PDF
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Feb 21, 2020 18:09
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Of the three Mortal Remains is the only one I would bother with personally. Block by Block I just, don't recall at all, and tooth and nail I think is the one for Beast?
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Feb 21, 2020 18:27
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Fuzz posted:So would anyone be interested in either a WW2 Supernatural Humans or 1980s/90s Chop Socky nWoD game set in the Japanese underworld? (Basically PnP Ryu ga Gotoku using nWoD rules) I assume this is a play by post thing? I haven't had much luck with PbP before but uh, Yakuza 0 with nWoD rules sounds completely amazing. I like the Silver Ladder book both as Dave said because it explains how most Wizard laws work and also because it makes their ideology make sense. It's clearer in their 2E description but there's still a fairly vague sense of "they want to help normal people except their's also hierarchical assholes" which is kind of confusing. The book explains the ideology enough that you'd get how individual Ladder members might live up to the faith or fail it and descend into avarice while still using it to justify their own bullshit.
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Feb 21, 2020 19:24
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Also, would anyone be interested in rundowns of the Astral sessions I’ve run? I’ve found them really fun and unique, and while I haven’t played Persona 5 they’ve been compared. Also I’m kind of itching to write them up now.
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Feb 21, 2020 20:17
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Joe Slowboat posted:Also, would anyone be interested in rundowns of the Astral sessions I’ve run? I’ve found them really fun and unique, and while I haven’t played Persona 5 they’ve been compared. Also I’m kind of itching to write them up now. Yes, please.
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Feb 21, 2020 20:22
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Joe Slowboat posted:Also, would anyone be interested in rundowns of the Astral sessions I’ve run? I’ve found them really fun and unique, and while I haven’t played Persona 5 they’ve been compared. Also I’m kind of itching to write them up now. 
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Feb 21, 2020 20:40
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Kurieg posted:The Wendigo's hat is "Native American Cannibal Who Is Mad At The White Man". The Uktenna's hat used to be "Native american who scoffs at the ignorant white man" but it's expanded to "mostly non-whites who scoff at the ignorant white man and the occasional enlightened white man who realizes how awesome native cultures are, but are still perfectly willing to gently caress over non-american indigenous cultures if they refuse to give the Uktenna all their cool magic poo poo. You know, like White People do." I honestly don't mind the Wendigo as a partial concept because gently caress it, I'd be mad as christ, too, if my entire culture was being overt-genocided, then slow-genocided right out in the open. Native history in the US is a wall-to-wall loving horror show of education camps and forced sterilizations. The cannibal thing is loving dumb, though, and even Revised is heavily in favor of 'it doesn't happen often, at all, shut up, gently caress you,' and whether or not it's being ~lol unreliable narrator~, I prefer to Storyteller Fiat and take them at their word. Every time I've incorporated Wendigo into a story or plot, it's almost entirely the 'rez guys that are sick of this poo poo' route. If you go with the full blown 'literal savages' poo poo, though, as the books often did, then yeah, that's a big Nope. I'm sure there's an argument to be made, besides, about the Uktena being commentary regarding how native tribes would often usurp and gently caress over one another, but White Wolf/OPP ain't the ones to make it, and they're basically just 'scary native guys with woo, THE ONES LOVECRAFT WARNED YOU ABOUT' as so often seen in lovely fiction incorporating spooky Native American anything. Plus also, yeah, them steamrolling folks that don't share their stuff. OTOOH, I was initially shown WtA on the basis of a native friend showing it off to me and being like 'I never see poo poo like this,' which sneaks into that representation conversation. This was decades ago, though, so IDK if he's yet changed his mind on that, but it says a lot about the abysmal state of Native representation at that point in time.
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Feb 21, 2020 21:03
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Old Boot posted:OTOOH, I was initially shown WtA on the basis of a native friend showing it off to me and being like 'I never see poo poo like this,' which sneaks into that representation conversation. This was decades ago, though, so IDK if he's yet changed his mind on that, but it says a lot about the abysmal state of Native representation at that point in time. Well yeah, that was kind of the situation with the LGBTQ community at the time as well. People would point at vampire and go "Hey look it's a The lesson that Swedracula failed to learn is that it has been thirty years since then and the industry has grown since then. And also that this growth as an industry is not something bad that must be beaten back so we can return to the good old days.
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Feb 21, 2020 21:11
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Kurieg posted:Well yeah, that was kind of the situation with the LGBTQ community at the time as well. People would point at vampire and go "Hey look it's a My (extremely tired and poorly articulated) thought was more that Native representation has stagnated pretty noticeably where other types haven't-- as much. There's still a lot of work to do, obvs, but for indigenous people, at least, like-- at the end of the day, it's still a hell of a lot more stereotype than substance.
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Feb 21, 2020 21:29
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Ah yes, that is also true. There've been a couple of really good RPGs about Mexico/Central/South American area indigenous peoples but I haven't heard much about other North American ones.
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Feb 21, 2020 21:34
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Oh poo poo!!! #vamily https://twitter.com/LAbyNight/status/1230861662736961536
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Feb 21, 2020 21:41
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Dave Brookshaw posted:Silver Ladder is useful as the best explanation of the Pentacle's legal system and what happens at Convocations. Also a better book about how to guide Sleeper society than Free Council is (Free Council has some limitations as a book - it was an experimental format, while the other five Orders stuck to the one adapted from Vampire's covenant books). Huh, so random reorganization for the sake of novelty doesn't compare well to studying the ways of the ancients? Who'd have thought.
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Feb 21, 2020 22:27
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Not that I think there was any particular cannibal streak in the native population, but aren’t the mythic Wendigo explicitly monsters created by cannibalism? It’s nasty business to associate them with Native Americans and then add the cannibalism, but I think you’d have to have man eating in there somewhere just as a nod to the old myths. Maybe something about their behavior during the Impergium?
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Feb 21, 2020 22:50
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Ferrinus posted:Huh, so random reorganization for the sake of novelty doesn't compare well to studying the ways of the ancients? Who'd have thought. It turns out there are much better ways to frame the progressive and militant side of things than that, so yeah, what a surprise. Also, fewer venture capitalists in the 2e free council as far as I can tell.
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Feb 21, 2020 22:54
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Oberndorf posted:Not that I think there was any particular cannibal streak in the native population, but aren’t the mythic Wendigo explicitly monsters created by cannibalism? It’s nasty business to associate them with Native Americans and then add the cannibalism, but I think you’d have to have man eating in there somewhere just as a nod to the old myths. Maybe something about their behavior during the Impergium? Yup! They had their feet burned off by friction from dragging across icy snow, too.
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Feb 21, 2020 22:56
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Oberndorf posted:Not that I think there was any particular cannibal streak in the native population, but aren’t the mythic Wendigo explicitly monsters created by cannibalism? It’s nasty business to associate them with Native Americans and then add the cannibalism, but I think you’d have to have man eating in there somewhere just as a nod to the old myths. Maybe something about their behavior during the Impergium? There is, yeah. IIRC, the Revised books talk about Wendigo as a tribal totem creating a balancing act for the tribe itself, so it's not as if it's entirely absent, but there are ways to manipulate that to make it less explicitly 'cannibal natives,' and more something-- else. Just nothing that I can think of after three hours of sleep. IDK that they'd care what outsiders believed about them if it had the added benefit of making them intimidating as gently caress/giving other tribes reason to give them a wide berth. If it makes other tribes more inclined to harass their kin, though, that's a problem. EDIT: As with the Metis, this yet again comes down to a short-sighted That Sounds Cool, Let's Do It and Not Think Too Hard About It theme that was endemic to 90s White Wolf.
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Feb 21, 2020 23:16
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A lot of Werewolf's problems come from having Bill Bridges involved for so long, who as a nice way of saying it has a lot of sympathy for the indigenous peoples but thought he had empathy. In one of the special thanks section somebody referred to him as 'the most Native American white man I know.' You'd also get things like in Rage Across New York taking great pains to show that if native tribes fought it was only for pure and honorable reasons. Still, like folks have said that and stuff like the NAN in Shadowrun was a lot more than they were getting elsewhere and was fine for nearly 30 years ago and not so much now.
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Feb 22, 2020 00:35
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Digital Osmosis posted:I assume this is a play by post thing? I haven't had much luck with PbP before but uh, Yakuza 0 with nWoD rules sounds completely amazing. Rolling PbP style on Discord with multiple channels. Probably 3-4 players in the "gang". Works better than a PbP since you can chat OOCly in real time, phone app is great, bot does the rolling in a dice channel, and yeah... it's just smoother.
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Feb 22, 2020 05:27
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...I'm realizing that, entirely without meaning to, all four of the 'delve into an Oneiros' sessions I did were set in female characters' minds? The cabal's mostly women and I think the NPCs they befriended/invested time in tended that way as well, but it's a bit weird to realize how much of a pattern was there. And I was consciously trying to keep the proportion of menace thrown at NPCs even between men and women. Then again they only got in a fight with Libertine bikers in an IHOP parking lot for a hapless academic dude, so... that's a kind of balance?
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Feb 22, 2020 07:53
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If I were able to travel back in time and control the direction of the oWoD from the scratch, one of the changes would have been to hire anyone but Bill Bridges to run Werewolf. There have been so many times that I foundnd myself going 'gently caress's sake, Bill' while reading his work because of his tendency to take a reasonable idea that, with the right hands and writers could've worked, and then immediately shove it up his own rear end.
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Feb 22, 2020 07:58
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I remember that Ethan Skemp did a lot of work to make Apocalypse better during Revised. Might be wrong but that's the memory I have of the opinion around the 2000s when I was on rpg.net.
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Feb 22, 2020 08:38
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MonsieurChoc posted:I remember that Ethan Skemp did a lot of work to make Apocalypse better during Revised. Skemp and Achilli together did a lot to reduce the over the top and simplistic (and, honestly, ultra-performative) hippy stuff in the lines.
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Feb 22, 2020 08:43
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Yeah. Ethan still let stuff through - he has apologized on RPG.net for the Children of Gaia Revised book - but I feel he was a net positive for the line.
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Feb 22, 2020 14:32
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Dawgstar posted:How are these books for adding $3 to my Hunter pledge? Mortal Remains is the enemy book that covers the stuff outside of the vampire/woof/mage enemy books. Block by Bloody Block is a campaign guide that introduced tiers IIRC and also sets you up for an almost wargame-style campaign to free a city of monsters. Tooth and Nail was some Beast poo poo, so I didn't care. If you're getting one, Block by Block is probably the best pick.
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Feb 22, 2020 20:09
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I should note that I got a lot of use out of Block by Bloody Block for my Mage game as well - mostly in terms of thinking about how to set up the various territories and powers in my city’s underworld. It didn’t end up looking at all like a Block set-up but having that inspiration was really useful.
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Feb 22, 2020 20:11
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Joe Slowboat posted:I should note that I got a lot of use out of Block by Bloody Block for my Mage game as well - mostly in terms of thinking about how to set up the various territories and powers in my city’s underworld. It didn’t end up looking at all like a Block set-up but having that inspiration was really useful. ... I was just the other day writing about how badly the nWoD needs a mechanical system for representing community power structures and competition for territory. Does Block by Bloody Block provide that?
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Feb 22, 2020 20:28
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