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Tuxedo Catfish posted:... 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? Short answer, yes, from a Hunter perspective. It’s mostly framed, well, block by bloody block - you have territories with particular supernatural groups controlling them and as you clean them out or otherwise take back the night, you get mechanical bonuses based on the territory. It’s not highly elaborate but it could be fleshed out further into a more extensive system pretty easily.
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Feb 22, 2020 20:38
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Incidentally, was gonna use Block by Bloody Block as my inspiration for framing a Yakuza gang nWoD game, ha.
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Feb 23, 2020 03:39
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Sorry to doublepost, but I've been compiling the whole Astral side of the chronicle I just finished up. I may have missed a few smaller jaunts into soulspace, but these are the main ones. Some key Mage: The Awakening concepts: The Oneiros is the individual soul, which contains the unconscious of a given individual, including memory, Vice, Virtue, and their higher self/drive to self-improvement, the Daimon. The Temenos is the shared soul of humanity, where all ideas shared by multiple people are found, which can be a weird and dangerous place. The Anima Mundi, the collective soul of the natural world, which ultimately ends in the Ocean Ouroboros, the Astral representation of the Abyss. More on that later. Goetia are the 'demons' of the mind, representatives of a concept or drive as people-shaped ephemeral entities. As a general rule, I played individuals' goetia as the manifestation of their memories and drives, but also to some extent the mental actors standing in for those roles - in extreme situations they would admit to knowing that they're just mind-constructs, though that wouldn't stop a Virtue from arguing for their virtue, or a Vice from tempting people to that vice. This led to some very fun interactions. (The daimon in particular is a goetic demon with immense power to shape the unconscious, and often uses that to teach lessons or shape dreams to push the person as a whole towards self-development). Travel and interaction in the Astral are often dreamlike, especially in Oneiroi where an individual person's worldview is the basis of everything present. Travel between astral realms/spaces involves making a mental connection between the two and pursuing it into the next realm, such as walking into a grave in an astral graveyard and ending up in Hell (or another afterlife represented in the Astral). Without further ado, the Melanie sessions. As you may have already guessed, Melanie is my take on the Melanie from Beast, 'Sleeping Beauty,' which gameline I otherwise completely eschewed. As an important note, these happened months apart, as there were a variety of storylines in the air in this game, so the cabal's situation and resources changed considerably from one to the next (generally getting more potent). 1. The cabal ventures into the Temenos for the first time as a group, pursuing Melanie - a 17-year-old who was assaulted by a Tremere lich using a coma-inflicting imbued dagger two years ago. However, her soul was not captured, but instead escaped into the Astral as her latent ability as an astral medium was activated by the stress and soul-wounding. This was the prototypical 'astral mystery' session for the chronicle; the cabal show up into a mindscape where goetia and possibly an individual's aquastor (mental ego-representation, what you use to project into the Astral) are caught up in some kind of confusing dream-logic that must be untangled in order to fix things. Often some invading entity was at the bottom of this, but not always - for example, in this case, the primary antagonist(s) were Melanie herself and her daimon. See, Melanie didn't understand the Astral and had more or less accidentally made her way from the astral representation of the place she got ambushed walking home from soccer practice, to the Wood of the Golden Bough, a representation of monomythic quest narratives. Melanie reads a lot of YA fantasy and when stranded in a weird place where things don't make a lot of sense, she imposed YA fantasy logic on her surroundings and ended up stumbling through astral cityscape to astral Horror Transylvania and haunted woods to the Golden Bough, because she started off terrified and confused, began to have some success protecting herself, and ended up on a quest. Due to dream logic, she got the necessary clothes and sword, and due to the weird circumstances of her entrance, her Vice and Virtue and Daimon all manifested as copies of her. The Vice and Virtue traveled with her as quest companions, and the Daimon manifested as the Black Knight, a fully armored and axe-wielding nightmare trying to kill her to wake her up. The cabal traced her path through the Astral Realms using the sympathy of her body and the epiphanies she reached on the way, which meant a series of simple scenes in the Temenos as they travel idea by idea to the Wood. Melanie had been fighting through nightmares and astral challenges seeking... something, she wasn't sure what, in the depths of the Wood of the Golden Bough, fighting off nightmare-wolves and meeting temenotic goetia of questing knights and things, for about two years while she slowly wasted away in a coma in the waking world. Ultimately, the cabal figured out what was going on after helping fight off the Black Knight and some blood-nightmare-monsters (oh, as a side note, all Sleepwalkers in the city of Cheston had strong nightmares of six-fingered hands and bloodthirsty beasts, and the streams of holy blood in the Wood would occasionally disgorge these nightmares due to Melanie's connection. So she'd been learning a lot of Dream Swordfighting). Putting together the situation after research in the waking world, they returned to speak with Melanie and her goetia and convince her that this whole thing was a dream and she needed to let the Black Knight kill her, which was a pretty fraught conversation, especially as both the Vice and the Virtue (Stubborn and Brave, respectively) were convinced she ought to continue fighting towards the distant tower in the Wood. Ultimately, she agreed to let the Black Knight execute her, and she awoke with a start in her hospital bed. 2. Having discovered rumors of the Cup (or the Grail or the Temenotic Grail), the cabal has decided to ask Melanie for help. One of the artifacts of the collective human unconscious is the Cup, the symbolic representation of restoration, healing, and purity in the form of a holy grail. The Wood of the Golden Bough, which is what they were researching due to various obsessions with Sacrificial Symbolism, Mystery Plays, and the Structure of the Soul, is a known but difficult Temenotic route to the Grail - and one thing the Grail can do is restore a lost soul, once. In order to convince a hunter of witches, vampires, and suchlike that they were the good mages and trying to get the Tremere themselves, the cabal wanted to get the Grail and restore her sister's lost soul (said soul loss and a related coma being why the hunter showed up in Cheston). So, they asked Melanie (who had already completed many challenges and made considerably more progress towards the Grail in the Wood than any of the cabal could anytime soon) to return to the Temenos and pursue the Grail once more. This session worked similarly to the first, except this time there were a specific set of three challenges on the path to the Grail, each of which was in the style of a classic knightly test: An old woman who would ask the querent to wait at a crossroads for her and then leave for a long, long time (subjectively in the dream-world), an immense and terrifying dragon that would be struck down by anyone brave enough to charge it, and a wounded knight (wounded in the thigh, of course) at the base of the Tower of the Grail whom the querent would have to help climb the long stairs. The fun part of this was that the cabal were not completing the challenges; with Mage Sight and knowledge of the Astral, they could pretty easily figure out the conditions and situation in each challenge, but they also needed Melanie to continue to believe in the quest and not suspect the story-shape too much, or else the Grail might recede. So they played the role of four moderately competent Merlins trying to guide this erstwhile highschool knight errant to the Grail, trying to influence her without breaking the scene. At the top of the tower, Melanie strode into the chamber of the Grail with the wounded knight, who dragged himself over to a dusty throne behind a table with an empty cup on it, and sat there, and congratulated Melanie on finding the Grail. However, he would have to fill it, for it to be the true Grail - so he asked her to cut his throat, and fill the cup. This was, again, a test for the cabal via Melanie - if she accepted his actions, she would attain the Grail, but... not Awaken. See, Melanie had been bumping up against higher truth for a little while now, and questioning everything, and this was a chance to push behind the symbolism to something higher (after all, the Cup/Grail is one of the more magical things in the Temenos, and thus more connected to the Supernal). Depending on the poking and prodding of the cabal, she would either: Accept the cup (Grail, no Awakening), refuse to believe in the scene and point out the story-shapes behind it (Acanthus Awakening will eventually occur, but the Grail recedes), take his place and spill her Astral blood into the cup (Obrimos, but no Grail, usurping the symbolic space of divinity and trusts in herself as a font of power), declare herself unworthy of the Grail (potentially the start of Mastigos Awakening, no Grail as well), or various other options. The cabal ended up encouraging her to seize the day, and she used her own blood to fill the Grail - so lightning struck the tower and everyone was pitched from it, in the first but not the last enactment of the Tower tarot card in the game. The Temenotic Grail would remain a goal of the cabal's, but take significantly longer and deeper paths to claim. 3. As Melanie approached Awakening, the cabal watched with interest... as did one of the Seers of the Throne. A servant of the Father (which Exarch one of my cabal had a familial vendetta against, specifically) in the Epuiad Legacy intended to invade her mind and cloak himself in her soul, so that when she arrived at the Watchtower of the Golden Key he could attempt to conquer it in the name of his god. Naturally, the cabal had to make their way into her Oneiros to confront him, which was a two-part challenge. By this time Melanie had more or less become friends with the cabal, especially the youngest member (a 19-year-old Obrimos and the particular enemy of the Father through her family). Her Awakening itself involved losing faith in the stories and heroism she so loved, but needing to believe there was some way forward, and ended in her tearing pages out of The Golden Compass and setting them on fire to light the way as she walked across the water of a lake towards the Watchtower, leaving a trail of flame on the water. The first assault against Father Peristeri of the Epuiad was straightforward, they ran into him almost as soon as they entered her oneiros... but it ended just as quickly, as he used a Legacy Attainment of the Epuiad to eject everything foreign from her oneiros - except him, because he wore vestments woven from castoff parts of her soul, memories and emotions and mind, to camouflage himself as part of her. Thus, he could use a deluge to sweep the oneiros clean of 'invaders' like the cabal as long as that robe was untorn and unsoiled. The Epuiad are mentioned in, I think, the Left Hand Path book or maybe the 2e Core, but have no further information I could find, so I built them up out of whole cloth. Literally, in that the closest I could find to an etymology involved weaving or garments, so I decided to run with that. The cabal then had to break in when he sealed off her oneiros with Mind (using an antinomian trick, actually, so that they could bypass his spell without him realizing), and make their way stealthily through various memories and idea-spaces while the 'immune system' of the soul attempted to chase them out. This meant all of Melanie's goetia were trying to persuade or force them to leave, in preparation for the approaching Awakening, while the sky above the memories was replaced with the cosmic fury of the Aether - or at least a representation of it. This made for, again, another series of short challenges that helped them understand where Melanie was coming from, followed by a completely straightforward magical duel with a powerful mage at the edge of the lake in the Oneiros, as Melanie's daimon tried to stop them and was unable to perceive the Seer. They managed to tear and burn his vestment in an ambush and then shortly thereafter bring down his aquastor, and with his power broken the daimon shoved them all out so Melanie could Awaken. The cabal then used his momentarily stunned aquastor, before it vanished, to hit him with some extremely nasty curses for a month since they couldn't actually kill him directly from there. And that's the Melanie sessions! She went on to study with and have a vague romantic connection to the 19-year-old cabal member, and joined in the final assault against the Tremere. Currently she has Gnosis 1, Forces 2, and Prime 1, and her Obsession is with Truth As Fuel, so she's very interested in breaking down artifacts and grimoires for deeper secrets/mana, stuff like that. She's not unlikely to join either the Arrow or the Free Council, both of whom have connections to the cabal (she's also only just considering joining an Order now because the cabal kept her away from the local consilium until it was nearly Tremere-free). And there's the 'Melanie' sequence of astral sessions! Again, months apart, so the context for each one was pretty different. Other Astral sessions: I don't think it's entirely worth detailing the solo Astral scenes including a cabal mage being put on trial by her daimon as she increases in Gnosis, the Obrimos reflecting on memories of her family as she makes a soulstone, or the sword-tarot mage getting in a fight with her Vice (twice). They're fun but they're not really session-shaped, being downtime scenes with individual players to flesh out parts of their character. One of them did have the Vice of "Moe" though (being inspired by an anime character and having the Vice 'softhearted' so her Vice Goetia appeared as a moe version of herself, to her immense embarrassment.) On the other hand, the one time the cabal went to the depths of the Anima Mundi to finally get that goddamn Temenotic Grail by bartering with Dahhak, the evil dragon who represents the Space and Mind arcana, was a fun time. Not the most elaborate session, but fun. There was also a jaunt to the sword-mage's Legacy Realm in the Temenos, which turned out to be a four-hundred-year-old trap built by a single Reaper mage, who had become a bloated, twisted Morphean. One of the most Dark Souls characters in the chronicle. (The sword-mage only discovered the Pentacle after being an apprentice mage for a while... to a Reaper in the Kings of Limbo legacy, who planned to devour her soul when it was well prepared, in order to eject himself into the Astral as a Morphean. Had he succeeded, the (True) King of Limbo would have torn his knowledge from him and left him to rot, like all the other Kings of Limbo who made it to that point.) There were also three more Oneiros sessions: One was entering a Libertine's oneiros, this being a mage the cabal helped pull of a very stupid and impressive ritual to make anime real (by taking a Supernal Angel she thought was a dick and replacing/subsuming it into the archetype of the Magical Girl, using the series Madoka as the booster rocket and fuel). She succeeded but both erased the memory of Madoka from the timeline and gave herself a nasty case of the Lethean, an acamoth abyssal intruder from the Intruders book. The cabal entered her mind to try to save her, and the entire session was played out as an episode of the magical girl show they all got flung into in her mind, as they pierced layers of genre and style to reach the grim abyssal core. Yes, I and my players are huge nerds and we all liked that show, but in my defense this session was explicitly set inside the soul of a really dedicated weeb (inspired by Allison from K6BD, so, extra nerd layers for me). One was entering the oneiros of a Mystagogue the cabal had gotten to know who started behaving strangely, and whose soul showed strange marks. This is how they found out about the powers of the most potent Tremere in Cheston, who had more or less suborned the entire Mystagogue Caucus through his attainments as a Yajnaraja, a King of Sacrifice: By being the officiant of a ritual, he could mark and grasp your soul. He'd used the Mysterium Initiations and Egregore to make himself more or less politically and personally untouchable in Cheston for decades, and was much much MUCH older than that. The final boss of the chronicle, really. So this session was a trip through the nightmares of a cabal-member's rival to find out that her academic advisor had been manipulating her. And the last one was an epilogue session, which really can't be explained in brief without sounding even wilder than the above: One of the cabal members had used Mind Patterning to partition and cultivate a secondary personality based on her Vice in order to more effectively manipulate loathsome people into trusting her, but said second personality became infected with an acamoth that gave it a negative-image daimon so she (the Vice-mind) could only grow worse, not better. This was exacerbated by a series of disastrous relationships and murders, which culminated in the secondary personality taking over the character immediately after the above final boss was defeated and more or less ruining the Consilium's efforts to pull itself back together in the week after the events. The session itself was an astral intervention/triage after the character collapsed unconscious in the cabal living room, and involved traveling with Bleeding Heart, the character's Virtue, to the mind-palace of Hieraconis (the Ladder paradise-eschatology) where the Vice had imprisoned the character's aquastor using her own denial and workaholism. Passing through the various memories of the past week the cabal came to understand what had been going on and then helped the character's aquastor dispel the Vice-mind, freeing the acamoth to be fought - only for the Libertine from earlier, who they had brought along due to some complicated emotional connections, to use her connection to the Supernal-Astral Magical Girl Madoka-Ophaniel and nuke the Acamoth with pink lasers. And that's all the Astral content I can specifically remember, though I can go in depth into how I built each of the sessions mentioned above to fit my vision of what an Astral session/puzzle/adventure should look like, if anyone's interested. E; oh gently caress it's huge
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Feb 23, 2020 04:13
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Oh and I completely forgot that the actual final confrontation ended with a repetition of Tremere mythology - the blood goddess the Tremere were trying to use to mantle their dark god into the Supernal was cut free by the death of the Yajnaraja named Chrysostom, except that a tendril of Hollowness was still caught around her wrist, so everyone got sucked into a quasiastral region: The Path of Hollowing, the pseudo-Watchtower the chronicle villain had built using his Tremere House and ritual practice for a thousand or so years, meant to use the goddess and her connection to Yggdrasil to create a direct connection from Abyss to Supernal (which is topologically ... special, because the Abyss is between us and the Supernal, but this was from the Ocean Oroboros into the Waking World to the Emanation Realm Yggdrasil and through there to the Supernal. A huge higher-dimensional tangle). This was defeated by the cabal using their own, actual Paths and their connections to the Watchtowers to tear down his tower and send it plummeting back into the Abyss, but it still... sort of? Took place in the Astral Realms. It's more fair to say that it took place between everything, where a path might go.
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Feb 23, 2020 04:39
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Tuxedo Catfish posted:... 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? Damnation City has mechanical systems for most of that, though it's set up with focus towards controlling people-nodes in the human territory - and that sometimes extends to the physical territory, rather than treating the physical territory as the goal and battlefield unto itself.
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Feb 23, 2020 14:43
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Joe Slowboat posted:E; oh gently caress it's huge Cool! Thanks for posting that. Did you have the players throw dice a lot to guide where this stuff went, or was it mostly planed or improvised narrative without so much randomness guiding it?
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Feb 23, 2020 15:52
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That Old Tree posted:Cool! Thanks for posting that. Did you have the players throw dice a lot to guide where this stuff went, or was it mostly planed or improvised narrative without so much randomness guiding it? It depends! Astral stuff tends to operate on dream-logic so most of the dice-throwing was spellcasting or figuring out what was going on; In a more planned session or sequence I’d have at least one roll to complete a challenge or pass through a section of the mind or memory, but failure on that would mean continuing in a disadvantageous or inconvenient way (or having to resort to a backup plan of some kind). As a general rule I find Mage works well when players can always reach their destination, they just have to make hard choices and sacrifices, or take hard risks, to do so. Hubris and the price thereof rather than just slapping them down (I had a rough session early on where they hit a wall and I wasn’t prepared to either convince them to bail or work around it, and a player ended up leaving the game for two or three months before returning. There were other concerns there but it taught me some things about handling my group’s frustration levels. I should note that most of these sessions were composed in response to player plans; I would often make sure as I worked on the session that I knew what cabal’s goals were so that the pre-planned route led to that goal. This doesn’t remove improvising or randomness but it let me have the main route well detailed, and then if they turned aside or went in an unexpected direction, I still knew their OOC/narrative goal and could find ways to make sure they progressed that way - or knew that they were going off-road in a new direction. So, yeah overall things mostly operated on planned or improvised narrative, with spellcasting being the majority of dice rolls in the game as a whole. Spellcasting can form the planned narrative pretty hard, though, so some of these situations I could just throw at players and have faith they’d think of some kind of way to handle it (when the forces in motion were within their magical capacity to manipulate or overrule).
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Feb 23, 2020 18:37
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So Joe what I'm getting from that is that the Astral plane is a great way to make your WoD game anime as gently caress, is that right? I'm kidding, obviously, thanks for the write-up. But typing that out did actually spark a thought, which is another instance of the weird duplication of "story shaped magic" that happens between nMage and nChangeling. Like if I said "a realm connected both to human dreams and a font of terrifying power that is inhabited by beings usually patterned off of narrative archetypes" I could be describing the Hedge or the Temenos. Obviously there are differences, but that's still a weirdly strong connection IMO. I know it's complicated by the Arcadia (supernal) / Arcadia (fae) thing, which is intentionally unresolved, but it's interesting to see the same pattern appear on a lower level, one PCs will usually have more access to. I wonder if trying to differentiate the two led to CtL 2E's move away from talecrafting and the like, I seem to recall one of the design principles was basically "Fae magic just happens to be shaped in ways similar to fairy tale archetypes" instead of something like Fae magic being created by / powered by fariy tale archetypes. I was never too sure about that design goal - both in intent and execution - but maybe trying to avoid duplication was part of the reason behind that change? Kinda like how Demon pacts were part of the reason behind the limited pledge system in CtL 2E.
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Feb 24, 2020 01:59
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I think the idea in the case of Changelings is that the True Fae work a certain way and fairy tales are based on human interactions with the Fae. The Temenos is directly shaped by human belief and ideas, so it has a certain quality of narrative.
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Feb 24, 2020 04:26
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Speaking of nChangeling stepping on toes, for a while now I've been mulling on the opposite idea: that the Fae and Spirits are the same kind of ephemeral entity, existing in dichotomy to each other. While Spirits are formed out of human memory and belief, Fae would be formed out of human imagination and creativity. Essence and Glamour could be the same thing, as both are tied to human emotional investments. And it makes sense to me that the "embodiments of natural forces" that Contracts were supposedly bargained with were actually just Spirits (this would also provide a narrative framework for Changelings to create their own Contracts - travel into the Shadow and find the right patron Spirit to bargain with).
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Feb 24, 2020 13:50
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Spirits aren’t formed from human memory and belief. Without humans, rocks would still generate rock spirits. Humans are needed to produce more abstract and rarefied Essence, but without humans you’d still get spirits.
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Feb 24, 2020 20:02
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I've settled on a framing device for the compiled narrative history. An Arcanum scholar with a Herodotean viewpoint: 'They say <x>, and it's probably bullshit, but I've put it in anyway because what if?'
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Feb 25, 2020 02:42
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Loomer posted:I've settled on a framing device for the compiled narrative history. An Arcanum scholar with a Herodotean viewpoint: 'They say <x>, and it's probably bullshit, but I've put it in anyway because what if?' Who am I to judge?
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Feb 25, 2020 03:24
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Mors Rattus posted:Spirits aren’t formed from human memory and belief. Without humans, rocks would still generate rock spirits. Humans are needed to produce more abstract and rarefied Essence, but without humans you’d still get spirits. ...Huh. I guess I don't understand how Spirits work, then. I was under the impression that they operated on a post-modern, Small Gods-type paradigm, where they were wholly dependent on human attention for power. Which is why so many Spirits are interested in influencing human thoughts to produce more Essence. While beings like the Idigam are so interesting because they're weird outliers, who don't need humans to think about them about in order to continue existing.
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Feb 25, 2020 13:26
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Boron_the_Moron posted:...Huh. I guess I don't understand how Spirits work, then. I was under the impression that they operated on a post-modern, Small Gods-type paradigm, where they were wholly dependent on human attention for power. Which is why so many Spirits are interested in influencing human thoughts to produce more Essence. While beings like the Idigam are so interesting because they're weird outliers, who don't need humans to think about them about in order to continue existing. Nope. Spirits exist objectively, irrespective of human belief or attention. Even spirits of things that are intrinsically generated by human activity, like car spirits or existential-angst spirits, don't care about human attention. They only care that humans keep generating the sources of the Essence they eat. A car-spirit doesn't care what people think about cars, they don't care whether people worship them or cars in general, they just care that people keep making cars. (And all the attendant kinds of Essence that car-spirits can feed on, like road rage and traffic accidents and gasoline.) Likewise, existential-angst spirits only care that people keep experiencing as much existential angst as possible, they don't care if that comes from the Dread Cult of the Endless Soul-Grind worshipping them as bleak gods or just, you know, capitalism. And loads of spirits not only don't care about humans, but never meaningfully interact with them in any way. Whether that's sand- or scorpion-spirits in the middle of the Rub al-Khali or void spirits in the asteroid belt, their spirit ecologies roll on just fine without humans at all. Now all that said, spirits who can influence humans often do, because humans are, generally, the most effective vector for effecting the kind of change in the world that ends up creating more of the Essence they feed on. Usually that's pretty direct--spirits aren't generally all that subtle, and the lower-Rank ones are basically animalistic. Murder-spirits try to push people to do more murders, because more murders means more Murder-flavored Essence for them, for example. Some are clever enough to be circumspect--a particularly powerful and clever bison-spirit might try to influence people into creating more national parks and wildlife sanctuaries where bison can thrive. Sometimes that takes the form of spirits presenting themselves as gods to be worshipped, but that's a tool, not a need. Idigam are weird because they're spirits that aren't spirits of something--they're from the formless time before the world properly existed.
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Feb 25, 2020 13:57
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Boron_the_Moron posted:...Huh. I guess I don't understand how Spirits work, then. I was under the impression that they operated on a post-modern, Small Gods-type paradigm, where they were wholly dependent on human attention for power. Which is why so many Spirits are interested in influencing human thoughts to produce more Essence. While beings like the Idigam are so interesting because they're weird outliers, who don't need humans to think about them about in order to continue existing. Nah, spirits are interested in humans because human activity generates Essence for them to eat - and in some cases it's the only thing that does. Rock spirits will be fine without humans, but a shopping mall spirit? Nah. And a murder spirit? Absolutely not. Animals can generate fear Essence, but it'd be real hard for them generate murder Essence. It's close, but it's not exclusive.
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Feb 25, 2020 13:57
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Boron_the_Moron posted:...Huh. I guess I don't understand how Spirits work, then. I was under the impression that they operated on a post-modern, Small Gods-type paradigm, where they were wholly dependent on human attention for power. Which is why so many Spirits are interested in influencing human thoughts to produce more Essence. While beings like the Idigam are so interesting because they're weird outliers, who don't need humans to think about them about in order to continue existing. Nah, per ~canon~ they're just animistic phenomena. Their interest in humanity is pretty clearly because of how much power humans have over the nature and content, and thus also resonance, of their environment.
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Feb 25, 2020 14:00
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Mors Rattus posted:Nah, spirits are interested in humans because human activity generates Essence for them to eat - and in some cases it's the only thing that does. Rock spirits will be fine without humans, but a shopping mall spirit? Nah. And a murder spirit? Absolutely not. Animals can generate fear Essence, but it'd be real hard for them generate murder Essence. It's close, but it's not exclusive. (skeksis voice) Eeeeeesssence?!? Hmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm
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Feb 25, 2020 15:53
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I always treated humans as having essence generation turned to 11 compared to anything else, and that's before we're really doing anything or having societies. Get humans resonating with something and then it gets even more absurd. That's part of how I explain the whole humans-don't-have spirits thing: it's like trying to fill a balloon with a fire hose.
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Feb 25, 2020 16:05
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Along this path, is there a mage or werewolf book that goes into ways to generate essence and cultivate or change resonance?
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Feb 25, 2020 23:24
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Soonmot posted:Along this path, is there a mage or werewolf book that goes into ways to generate essence and cultivate or change resonance? For 2e the Forsaken core has the most crunch about spirits and resonance, including specific mechanics about how loci form and strengthen. Night Horrors: Shunned by the Moon has a big old list of resonances and places/themes to help you come up with stuff. Even so, it's just a bit sparse. I haven't read it, but 1e had a Book of Spirits so that might have something interesting in there.
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Feb 26, 2020 00:15
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If one of a Demon’s covers gets addicted to vitae/put under the vinculum (am I spelling that right?), are all his covers similarly affected? What about for mundane drug addiction? edit: never mind, found the answer. covers function like alternate shapeshifter forms and physical conditions like injuries, poisoning, addiction etc carry over between them, unless it’s like, buying some dudes cancer as part of a pact. afatwhiteloaf fucked around with this message at 00:42 on Feb 26, 2020 |
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Feb 26, 2020 00:32
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The Demon Storyteller's Guide has a section of crossover rules with each gameline, but the passage on the blood bond is ambiguous as to whether it's talking about the Vinculum (you're slavishly loyal to the vampire you drank from) or Vitae addiction (you just really need a fix of vampire blood and it doesn't matter whose):quote:Vampire blood is highly addictive. Mortals and other vampires who drink Kindred blood become loyal to and obsessed with the donor through a process called blood bond. Demons are immune to this effect in demonic form, but their Covers can develop Vitae addiction (copy-and-paste of the normal rules for resisting Vitae addiction here) The Storyteller's Guide makes a couple odd calls on what "sticks" to a given Cover and what carries over across Covers. Specifically, Disquiet sticks; a demon who suffers Disquiet can switch to another Cover and the other Cover is wholly unaffected (though, of course, can contract its own case of Disquiet).
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Feb 26, 2020 01:02
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Hmm. Do Demon’s have an Oneiros
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Feb 26, 2020 01:23
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I would say their covers do, since if they didn't that would be a very obvious sign something isn't right. The Demon themself though, that's... if they do it's not conventional in the slightest.I Am Just a Box posted:The Demon Storyteller's Guide has a section of crossover rules with each gameline, but the passage on the blood bond is ambiguous as to whether it's talking about the Vinculum (you're slavishly loyal to the vampire you drank from) or Vitae addiction (you just really need a fix of vampire blood and it doesn't matter whose):
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Feb 26, 2020 01:31
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Imagining a Goetic Mage summoning their Demon to do battle with a Demon’s Daimon. Apparently Demon’s (the Deecending kind, to avoid any confusion) can enter the Astral physically with an Exploit, but it doesn’t really say if they start at the Temenos or really give any details on how that works.
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Feb 26, 2020 01:39
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afatwhiteloaf posted:Hmm. Nope. The Oneiros is the interior of the individual human soul. Demons do not have souls. They can dream, and presumably if you're the sort of being who walks between dreams you can go into a demon's dreams. But you can't get there the mage way through the Oneiros, because there's no Oneiros connected to it. The Primum is something different. Personally, I really dislike the conceit where various effects don't compel the Cover but do impose compromise risks. It implies a subjectivity to the nature of compromise. Compromises resulting from acting grossly out of character don't happen because there are God-Machine cameras peeking out of the woods watching you do suspicious things. They're internal; they're you stretching your Cover's protective integrity past its breaking point by contradicting the identity that shields you from discovery. Being Disquieted is not core to your Cover's identity; you probably don't even realize you're "supposed" to be Disquieted! I'd prefer if demons were simply vulnerable or not vulnerable to the Vinculum, subject or not subject to Disquiet.
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Feb 26, 2020 01:49
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I Am Just a Box posted:Nope. The Oneiros is the interior of the individual human soul. Demons do not have souls. but see, Demon's can roll Cover to Spoof any supernatural attempt to detect if they are the being (since Demons can pretend to be spirits or ghosts) their cover is supposed to be or not, even if they're not aware of it, even just by implication (the example the core book gives is a Mage casting a spell to detect human minds near him can be Spoofed so the Demon reads as human). Every human being has Oneiros unless they're missing their soul (right? not actually sure on this point), and Demon's don't display the symptom of Soul Loss, so either A.) you roll to Spoof every time a Mage tries to enter a Demon player's Oneiro's and if it works the Mage enters a totally 100% convincing illusion of an Oneiro's realm B.) Demon's in Cover have Oneiro's by default C.) you stop trying to run crossover games.
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Feb 26, 2020 02:16
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Cross over games seem pretty lame and just like everyone trying to be their own unique otherkin
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Feb 26, 2020 02:18
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they're more fun if every players the same kind of supernatural but events conspire to bring them in conflict with the other societies of the night, imo. like the hypothetical that got me thinking about Demon's and the Astral: a Demon pretending to a Sleepwalker so he can infiltrate the Consilum and find out what they know about the local Infrastructure.
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Feb 26, 2020 02:29
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Certain antagonist groups and creature types that come from specific game lines work great as general Chronicles of Darkness Supernatural Evil. Slashers, the Ridden, and Cryptids have, for my games, all worked great as characters to throw at the players that were not of the same splat that we were playing at the time.
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Feb 26, 2020 02:40
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afatwhiteloaf posted:but see, Demon's can roll Cover to Spoof any supernatural attempt to detect if they are the being (since Demons can pretend to be spirits or ghosts) their cover is supposed to be or not, even if they're not aware of it, even just by implication (the example the core book gives is a Mage casting a spell to detect human minds near him can be Spoofed so the Demon reads as human). Spoofing makes sensory effects show you as human (or whatever, if you're using Ephemeral Cover or Deep Cover). Climbing inside somebody's soul is not a sensory effect. Say you've got some real jerk Moros walking around. He puts up Death Sight and goes looking for people with souls. You spoof this and look like you have a soul. Then he casts Sever Soul on you because he's an rear end in a top hat. You can't spoof this. He might think the spell just failed initially, but if he keeps casting Sever Soul on you, he is going to notice that there's no soul landing in his Soul Jar. You're playing a spy game. The spy game makes you very good at keeping your spy cover. It doesn't make keeping your spy cover effortless. If it did, there wouldn't be a game.
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Feb 26, 2020 03:29
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Oberst posted:Cross over games seem pretty lame and just like everyone trying to be their own unique otherkin every chronD game i've encountered, except vampire, has had much too much fiddly bits for non-experts to be indoctrinating each other into the system. picking supernatural powers always always ALWAYS feels like trying to be a sorcerer or wizard in dnd3.5 where there's a very short list of "correct" things to do for any particular build to be effective, and it's always done after you build your base character. better hope you guessed at what a useful niche might be, because if there aren't any supernatural effects to reinforce that you're SOL! edit- discovering someone is a Demon is basically handing them a stick and asking them to beat you. PHIZ KALIFA fucked around with this message at 03:41 on Feb 26, 2020 |
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Feb 26, 2020 03:39
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Eh, that makes it entirely too easy for a mage to find demons and mages don't need anything easier. They need to be hit with the stick every chance you get.
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Feb 26, 2020 03:40
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I Am Just a Box posted:Spoofing makes sensory effects show you as human (or whatever, if you're using Ephemeral Cover or Deep Cover). Climbing inside somebody's soul is not a sensory effect. Correct. From the second paragraph of the Spoof rules: Demon: The Descent p. 112 posted:Spoofing doesn’t affect any power or effect that doesn’t explicitly detect whether a target is human or supernatural, nor does it inhibit any effects other than that detection. Entering someones oneiros is not a power that explicitly detects whether someone is supernatural. It is a clue that something is weird about that person--but barring further investigation all it proves is that the demon is soulless--which is a thing that can happen to normal humans. quote:Say you've got some real jerk Moros walking around. He puts up Death Sight and goes looking for people with souls. You spoof this and look like you have a soul. Then he casts Sever Soul on you because he's an rear end in a top hat. You can't spoof this. He might think the spell just failed initially, but if he keeps casting Sever Soul on you, he is going to notice that there's no soul landing in his Soul Jar. Nah, like I said, being soulless is not an inherent indicator that the subject isn't human, humans can lose their souls for all kinds of reasons. It does absolutely mark the subject as a person of interest and a potential Mystery, but it's not an automatic disqualifier for being human.
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Feb 26, 2020 09:28
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Are the mystical consequences of a degrading Cover visible to Mage Sight? Obviously that would be covered by Spoofing, but that definitely sounds like something that would leave a mark, especially in Fate / Time.
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Feb 26, 2020 09:58
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GimpInBlack posted:Nah, like I said, being soulless is not an inherent indicator that the subject isn't human, humans can lose their souls for all kinds of reasons. It does absolutely mark the subject as a person of interest and a potential Mystery, but it's not an automatic disqualifier for being human. Hah, yeah, I should have thought of that part. The reaper walking around in the example is the reason there are sleepers walking around soulless, after all. Cover and compromise is probably much too fine for peripheral or active mage sight to pick up. This is a case for focused mage sight and Revelation, if you can get the demon to sit still for the scrutiny, anyway.
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Feb 26, 2020 10:09
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I Am Just a Box posted:Cover and compromise is probably much too fine for peripheral or active mage sight to pick up. This is a case for focused mage sight and Revelation, if you can get the demon to sit still for the scrutiny, anyway. The thing is that Cover can literally rewrite reality, up to and including (per the Demon core book) fabricating entire human beings out of thin air or vice-versa. This isn't necessarily the same (or as mystically significant) as creating souls ex nihilo since it's pretty strongly implied to involve timeline fuckery, but it's something that extends way past the Demon in their person and outward in both space and time.
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Feb 26, 2020 10:13
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Tuxedo Catfish posted:The thing is that Cover can literally rewrite reality, up to and including (per the Demon core book) fabricating entire human beings out of thin air or vice-versa. This isn't necessarily the same (or as mystically significant) as creating souls ex nihilo since it's pretty strongly implied to involve timeline fuckery, but it's something that extends way past the Demon in their person and outward in both space and time. I'd say you could observe it on the subject(s) affected by the compromise, but not the demon themselves--so if a demon burns a Cover that includes a human boyfriend, a mage could sense/see something weird happening around the boyfriend, and yeah, would probably see some really weird expressions of Fate and Mind as the cover lets go of him. Also, generally speaking the "fabricating whole new human beings" type of thing only happens with a demon's initial Cover (or angel-jacked ones), the ones created with the full force of the God-Machine's infrastructure. Just raising your Cover with pacts or whatnot usually doesn't create whole new elements of reality.
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Feb 26, 2020 14:12
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Demon was undoubtedly my favorite but also I'm very glad that we didn't really do that much with non demon problems
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Feb 26, 2020 14:55
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