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That Old Tree posted:They're basically lots of little rules bits that would exist normally, but portioned out with an extra hook where you get Beats (XP) for dealing with them. So, like, if someone is entranced by a vampire they get Enchanted it whatever, and if they do something at that vampire's urging the Condition resolves (goes away) and you get a Beat. Some Conditions are Persistent meaning they stick around longer and give you Beats every time they trouble you. Thank you for the extensive response!
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May 4, 2020 18:12
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That Old Tree posted:Still a good game, you should look forward to it. But goddamn do I not like Conditions. They're particularly bad in Changeling 2E. See, the rules for Onieromancy are already kinda tough to follow, but I thought I had a handle on it. But then (I think it was here? ) I read that you could force people to do things through it, which wasn't in the rules I read. Turns out aggressive dream-weaving causes conditions in the dreamer that can cause things like post-hypnotic suggestions! This is mentioned exactly nowhere except if you look up what these Conditions do. Which also makes me wonder if I got the rules right for Onieromancy. If I read it right you bank excess successes on skill rolls and spend them on Standard Shifts, and excess successes on Exceptional Successes to spend of Paradigm Shifts. A Renaissance Nerd fucked around with this message at 18:24 on May 4, 2020 |
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May 4, 2020 18:19
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May 4, 2020 18:23
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PTC is an incredible game held back by a disastrous book layout. It's honestly a pretty good book layout for capturing the feel of studying alchemy, but it is outrageous as a layout for "learning an RPG." If you're running it, the priorities are different (notably, Ch7 becomes incredibly important to running and is useless for playing), but it's probably best to read the introduction and then skip all the way to like, page 167's "Promethean Traits," of which the most important is probably the "Pilgrimage" section but it's really worth it to read up on Disquiet and Wastelands. Ch2 covers a lot of this stuff, but based on what happened with me and my players, it's less confusing to read the version in Ch3 first, then read the section in Ch2 to gain clarity. That's assuming you're familiar with COD in general and can more or less skip chapter 4. So probably the least painful reading order for players is something like Intro, Ch4, Ch3, Ch2, Ch1, and then Appendix as needed. For STs it's probably Intro, Ch4, Ch3, Ch7, Ch5, Ch6, Ch2, Ch1.
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May 4, 2020 18:58
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NikkolasKing posted:Good preview of Technocracy Reloaded Have these gentlemen ever seen a revolution? A revolution is certainly the most authoritarian thing there is; it is the act whereby one part of the population imposes its will upon the other part by means of wands, prayer strips and summoned demons — authoritarian means, if such there be at all; and if the victorious party does not want to have fought in vain, it must maintain this rule by means of the terror which its arms inspire in the reactionists.
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May 4, 2020 19:59
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"Little did you know, the widening gyre towards authoritarian regimes assembled around the national myth is in fact the Traditions coming once again" is absolutely the strong play if you are going to go with market liberal superhero Technocracy. I shudder to think what rough beast of an acceptible Enemy slouches towards Berkley to be born!
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May 5, 2020 01:01
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Gerund posted:"Little did you know, the widening gyre towards authoritarian regimes assembled around the national myth is in fact the Traditions coming once again" is absolutely the strong play if you are going to go with market liberal superhero Technocracy. I shudder to think what rough beast of an acceptible Enemy slouches towards Berkley to be born!
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May 5, 2020 03:39
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Gerund posted:So are they going to keep all the different flavors of the Vaccines Are Cool Club and give them all the put-upon-market-liberal filter, and just hope that they can skate by without raising questions about the times when those groups were written to be Literal Nazis? But if you try to write them as Literal Nazis you have to attempt to skate by all those times they weren't written to be Literal Nazis. Mage: the Ascension is so convoluted and inconsistent that there's simply no way to satisfy everyone, to preserve every 'truth' of the setting. The only thing a book like Technocracy Reloaded can do is say what is considered the 'truth' going forwards, which inherently involves picking and choosing certain elements over others. (Every 20th Anniversary book has done this.)
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May 5, 2020 08:56
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The Technocracy has very consistent characterization, it just varies in how cartoonish or over the top it is in following that characterization. It doesn't exist in a quantum state of being good and bad depending on which elements of the line you're drawing on; what you do is read the material and synthesize it into a conclusion. That synthesis? The Technocracy is bad.
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May 5, 2020 23:10
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OPP is doing a game stream for the Technocracy 20 book, and one of the players is Satyros Phil Brucato himself. Forsooth and hey nonny nonny.
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May 5, 2020 23:25
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So obviously not every mage who goes evil is a Nephandi, what do the Traditions do about them? Are they kicked from their respective order? Do the Tradition books talk about members falling to the dark side but not the super dark side like Nephandi? NikkolasKing fucked around with this message at 06:24 on May 6, 2020 |
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May 6, 2020 06:20
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NikkolasKing posted:So obviously not every mage who goes evil is a Nephandi, what do the Traditions do about them? Are they kicked from their respective order? However, I mean, the Euthanatos kill people all the time. The Cult of Ecstasy do a LOT of drugs. Where do you define "evil"?
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May 6, 2020 06:34
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NikkolasKing posted:So obviously not every mage who goes evil is a Nephandi, what do the Traditions do about them? Are they kicked from their respective order? Each Tradition have their own code of conducts and policies, and big criminals can be brought before the Council of Nine for really grave judgments. This can lead to Gilgul (total Avatar destruction). Post-Avatar Storm things get a lot messier.
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May 6, 2020 07:15
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NikkolasKing posted:So obviously not every mage who goes evil is a Nephandi, what do the Traditions do about them? Are they kicked from their respective order? Well, as noted, you need to define 'evil'. An Etherite who goes evil by inventing giant terror robots probably gets a tongue in cheek award at tradition gatherings for Maddest Scientist 2020, while one that powers his jetpack by destroying human souls probably gets visited by Dr. Steelfist and his faithful companion, the Euthanatos Kid. A Verbena who does a human sacrifice is basically par for the course, and a Hermetic who tries to bind a demon mostly gets his chantrymates mad because now all the coffee tastes of sulfur.
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May 6, 2020 07:33
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Loomer posted:Well, as noted, you need to define 'evil'. An Etherite who goes evil by inventing giant terror robots probably gets a tongue in cheek award at tradition gatherings for Maddest Scientist 2020, while one that powers his jetpack by destroying human souls probably gets visited by Dr. Steelfist and his faithful companion, the Euthanatos Kid. A Verbena who does a human sacrifice is basically par for the course, and a Hermetic who tries to bind a demon mostly gets his chantrymates mad because now all the coffee tastes of sulfur. Is Infernalism more tolerated by Mages? I thought it was as taboo as in Vampire society where the one thing the Sabbat and Camarilla agreed upon was "don't worship demons." By evil I was indeed mainly thinking of dealing with demons.
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May 6, 2020 07:45
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NikkolasKing posted:Is Infernalism more tolerated by Mages? I thought it was as taboo as in Vampire society where the one thing the Sabbat and Camarilla agreed upon was "don't worship demons." So I guess it is kind of a question for the ST. I don't think anything in particular is broken if Satan is a powerful Incarna somewhere and you can absolutely summon his buddies and it's not particularly evil to do so, while the Nephandi worship like, Lovecraft poo poo.
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May 6, 2020 07:51
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The Hermetic party line is that commanding demons like Solomon did is good if dangerous, but selling your soul is veyr bad and will get you kicked out/executed.
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May 6, 2020 07:53
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NikkolasKing posted:Is Infernalism more tolerated by Mages? I thought it was as taboo as in Vampire society where the one thing the Sabbat and Camarilla agreed upon was "don't worship demons." Infernalism in the sense of 'actually making pacts with demons' is frowned on and/or tantamount to joining the Nephandi. Now, summoning a demon and forcing it to keep your coffee hot in a brass urn or you'll torture it? That's just classic Hermetic praxis. MonsieurChoc posted:The Hermetic party line is that commanding demons like Solomon did is good if dangerous, but selling your soul is veyr bad and will get you kicked out/executed. This is pretty much it. Most of the other traditions take a much clearer 'what the gently caress, no' line, but the Hermetics (and some Chorists) are constantly dabbling in borderline infernalism. One of the big weird parts is that, because of the setting overlaps, your average Infernalist might be dealing with wyrm spirits, 'demons' that are products of the umbra, Yama Kings, or actual game-line Demons. Or, in publications prior to 99, demons that aren't game-line demons but are still meant to be literal denizens of literal hell. Who you work with is part of what edges you over into 'what the gently caress, guy?' territory - doing deals with the Wyrm's servants or the Yama Kings is usually a bridge too far, while striking up a pact with an imp is more socially acceptable. After that you get into full Nephandi territory, where some of them are just really gross infernalists that needed a bump up in the evil scale, some are from before the infernalist|nephandi demarcation was made clear, some serve the Wyrm, some serve Malfeans, some serve weird poo poo from the farthest reaches of the Umbra where the laws of reality collapse completely, and the true Nephandi who worship only nothing and themselves are slithering between them using them as smokescreens and weapons against their rivals. I actually really recommend infusing some Infernalists into a Mage game to have smokescreens and even rivals for the Nephandi. Helps break things up a little and gives you some interesting options for political deals with the devil you know against the devil you don't, along with a much better low level seeping evil. Your average Infernalist is as likely to be a random hedge mage or even unenlightened mortal as an actual mage, which lets the cults creep and seep without having the easy head honcho to go after and decapitate and puts them below most Mage's immediate notice, allowing them to get established in unpredictable and troublesome ways while the PCs are distracted dealing with more immediately powerful and obvious threats. For a particularly fun angle, if the PCs have any minions that are frustrated mortal occultists who long for their master's power, an infernal bargain or DtF pact can give them a nice taste of it, and if the PCs are fighting the Nephandi then the infernal masters of the cult might even see fit to aid them on the way through both the newly empowered minion and a variety of helpful 'coincidences'. That way, by the time it becomes apparent that actually there's a festering infernal cult in their city and the rest of their organization takes notice, it both looks like they're part of it and brings in the betrayal and the emotional burden of knowing that ultimately, they helped bring it about by showing their minion what they dream of having but can never possess, priming the pump for the demon's offer.
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May 6, 2020 08:33
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NikkolasKing posted:So obviously not every mage who goes evil is a Nephandi, what do the Traditions do about them? Are they kicked from their respective order? The Euthanatos, thanks to the toll their delightful little tradition of the Good Death have on their souls, have their own special version of falling to the dark side called Jhor. It's when you decide that putting down people is in fact your first, best, and only option and you have essentially become a magickal spree killer.
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May 6, 2020 13:15
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NikkolasKing posted:Is Infernalism more tolerated by Mages? I thought it was as taboo as in Vampire society where the one thing the Sabbat and Camarilla agreed upon was "don't worship demons." The Revised-era Book of Madness has a section on garden-variety infernalism (as distinct from going Nephandi), which is generally prohibited, and details which part of the various Trads are in charge of policing it among their members. As noted, Infernalism is about making deals with or serving "malevolent entities" and not just contacting or binding them - as with the Hermetic rules, you can spend a fair amount of time summoning demons and still not be an infernalist.
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May 6, 2020 13:34
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Do I misremember or is what makes a Nephandus a Nephandus is going through the Cauls and having your Avatar tainted?
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May 6, 2020 13:42
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Dawgstar posted:Do I misremember or is what makes a Nephandus a Nephandus is going through the Cauls and having your Avatar tainted? Correct. Nephandi have inverted Avatars that focus on Descent instead of Ascension. The inverted Avatar can pass down through the rebirth cycle and there's some kind of weird social implications to being born with an inverted Avatar as opposed to willingly entering a Caul.
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May 6, 2020 13:54
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Though the Caul is the capstone of a process if someone is being drawn in from another faction - you probably have some amount of Awakened pawns who are on the hook but haven't graduated to the Cauls. (IIRC the uniformity of using the Cauls is somewhat recent - I think there's a plot seed from the SC era where the Nephandi are going around to various proscribed or infernal Crafts and Fellowships and giving them an ultimatum - the baddies closing ranks to defend themselves from the increasingly-organized Order and Council. Prior to that you I guess you could have a cult which matches up doctrine-wise to the modern Nephandi but doesn't use the Cauls.)
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May 6, 2020 14:00
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Yeah Nephandi come in degrees, with the worst ones having gone through the Caul and been in direct communion with the Outer Gods or whatever they're called. "Klaasha" or something like that. I played one in a "let's play all the evil splats" blender game and I was the only one who schemed against everyone else in the end, so after we all cheered in victory at finally finding the last macguffin I dropped my hanging 20 success "denature everyone's souls and bodies" effect. Then I got to tell the armies of Heaven and Hell to both leave and never come back, damning the universe to the death of magic and the inevitable real nothingness of mundane old Deep Time, because gently caress God but also gently caress Cthulhu. Very edgy stuff. (That was my third character for the game. My Baali planned to use Dominate and Presence to crash the world economy as a ritual sacrifice for whatever level of Daimonion summons an Outer God, but he had an unfortunate dispute with a werewolf in like session one. And then I played a BSD mountain shaman for a couple sessions but he was a little too one-note even for that game.) That Old Tree fucked around with this message at 15:36 on May 6, 2020 |
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May 6, 2020 15:31
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Baali are tragic because they're completely correct that whatever horrible things they're doing are less awful than what would happen if they stopped. The modern WoD being such poo poo is at least partly because all the Earthbound and Neverborn that the Baali were keeping asleep woke up hungry. They're hilarious because the way WW decided to show that was by opening with possibly the worst in-character fiction of any of the splat books.
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May 6, 2020 18:11
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Infernalism isn't really a serious thing for the Camarilla the way it is in the Sabbat, given that doing the kind of poo poo you need to do to make a demon happy is going to erode your Humanity super-fast, leaving you either degenerating into a Wight (and getting put down) or being strong enough and receiving the proper instruction to get on the path of Evil Revelations- and at that point the Camarilla's going to be asking some very pointed questions about your newfound inability to convincingly pretend to be a person and your possession of knowledge about Paths that's going to make you, somebody who absolutely cannot afford to be looked at closely in any serious way, look like a member of the Sabbat. In a sect where you can be openly inhuman without anybody assuming you're an actual traitor or threat to the sect, it's much easier for a Corrupter to get away with it, which is why the Sabbat has vampires specifically tasked with finding them and torturing them to death and the Camarilla might very, very occasionally need to throw an Archon or three at an isolated infestation of demonolators. e: Also thematically the Sabbat is very much about the lines between FREEDOM and POWER and the hypocrisy of elders who claim to offer freedom to younger vampires while still actually running the show and pulling the strings they insist aren't there. Infernalism is all about selling out control of your soul and freedom for power, and makes a nice addition to that by making it much more blatant and providing a competing authority that the Sabbat doesn't tolerate. Camarilla games generally don't lean on that tension as hard because the Camarilla is much, much more open about being a hierarchical institution whose rules you loving better obey (and ironically actually provides more night-to-night autonomy for vampires capable of not breaking those rules since there's no pack to regularly meet with, no ductus to give you orders, and no priest trying to tell you what to believe). Pope Guilty fucked around with this message at 18:52 on May 6, 2020 |
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May 6, 2020 18:46
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The Camarilla was secretly infested by an infernalist slave ring, too.
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May 6, 2020 19:14
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Loomer posted:The Camarilla was secretly infested by an infernalist slave ring, too. It would not surprise me one bit if the list of "Orgs Not Infested by Infernalists" was shorter than the "Is Infested" one. Free Gratis fucked around with this message at 19:21 on May 6, 2020 |
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May 6, 2020 19:18
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The Camarilla was part of the Epstein network.
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May 6, 2020 19:20
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Free Gratis posted:It would not surprise me one bit is the list of "Orgs Not Infested by Infernalists" was shorter than the "Is Infested" one. In a shocking twist, it turns out the Order of St. Germain is comprised exclusively of covert infernalists trying to bring down the society from within.
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May 6, 2020 19:21
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Pope Guilty posted:e: Also thematically the Sabbat is very much about the lines between FREEDOM and POWER and the hypocrisy of elders who claim to offer freedom to younger vampires while still actually running the show and pulling the strings they insist aren't there. Infernalism is all about selling out control of your soul and freedom for power, and makes a nice addition to that by making it much more blatant and providing a competing authority that the Sabbat doesn't tolerate. Camarilla games generally don't lean on that tension as hard because the Camarilla is much, much more open about being a hierarchical institution whose rules you loving better obey (and ironically actually provides more night-to-night autonomy for vampires capable of not breaking those rules since there's no pack to regularly meet with, no ductus to give you orders, and no priest trying to tell you what to believe). The Sabbat's view of Infernalism boils down to that line from Animal House. "They can't do that to our pledges, only WE can do that to our pledges!"
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May 6, 2020 20:38
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Free Gratis posted:It would not surprise me one bit if the list of "Orgs Not Infested by Infernalists" was shorter than the "Is Infested" one.
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May 6, 2020 20:44
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Dawgstar posted:The Sabbat's view of Infernalism boils down to that line from Animal House. "They can't do that to our pledges, only WE can do that to our pledges!" Sascha Vykos didn't spend 500 years molding the Sabbat into a weapon aimed at the hearts of the ancients for some dirtbag fallen angel to hijack it to their own ends.
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May 6, 2020 22:35
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GimpInBlack posted:In a shocking twist, it turns out the Order of St. Germain is comprised exclusively of covert infernalists trying to bring down the society from within. Man: The Thursdaying.
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May 7, 2020 01:06
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Relevant Tangent posted:Baali are tragic because they're completely correct that whatever horrible things they're doing are less awful than what would happen if they stopped. The modern WoD being such poo poo is at least partly because all the Earthbound and Neverborn that the Baali were keeping asleep woke up hungry. They're hilarious because the way WW decided to show that was by opening with possibly the worst in-character fiction of any of the splat books. That only holds water if you believe what they are selling though. Part of the undertones of being found 'wanting' by the Antediluvian who wiped out the original tribe the Baali came from was that nothing the Baali were doing was any worse then humanity's general capacity for atrocity, and in fact, may have been so repetitive it was boring. After all, once the ancient rituals stopped, a total of 0 Children awoke to devour all life.
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May 7, 2020 02:14
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Saulot lied, Baali died, Earthbound rose. Just took a while.
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May 7, 2020 03:52
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Frankly anyone who falls for the prettiest most perfect Antedeluvian, so good he achieved Golconda and certainly won't rise up in the Final Nights to eat us all deserves to get drank dry. Tremere did one thing wrong and that was not immediately walking into the sun after he drained Saulot "founder of three clans" dry.
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May 7, 2020 03:56
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Relevant Tangent posted:Saulot lied, Baali died, Earthbound rose. Just took a while. Was that the final word on what the Children were? That's a shame.
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May 7, 2020 04:27
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Free Gratis posted:It would not surprise me one bit if the list of "Orgs Not Infested by Infernalists" was shorter than the "Is Infested" one. I can't imagine they are any different from the Camarilla or Sabbat in this regard but how do the Anarchs feel about Infernalism? Is it a real problem there?
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May 7, 2020 04:57
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NikkolasKing posted:I can't imagine they are any different from the Camarilla or Sabbat in this regard but how do the Anarchs feel about Infernalism? Anarchs don't do much with it, from memory. I'm sure there's a few here or there in my files who did but most Anarchs are young, stupid, and lack the tutors for the preliminary magic it takes to summon a demon or are inducted into non-infernalist thaumaturgy instead. Anarchs are also the most likely to wind up dead real fast because if there's one thing that'll get you on the outs in a society based on independent will and loose power structures, swearing your soul to a hierarchy of literally infernal enslavement is probably it. It's not quite antithetical to the Anarch ethoi, but it's very close for the ones that go beyond 'I do what I want because VAMPIRE, BITCH!', and with the preponderance of Anarchs trying to cling to humanity, you wind up with a double-pronged opposition. First, you've got the actual Anarch Establishment insofar as one exists, which is scary old elders who're committed to a philosophical ideal, and then you've got the ordinary Anarchs who're split between 'woe is me I am vampyr' and 'I'm a vampire, awesome, but also, slavery is bad'. And then you go and sell your soul to gain power, and become a slave. Your ancients go 'hell no!' and purge you with extreme prejudice because you're getting a bit too Sabbat for their liking, your humanists go 'hell no!' and purge you because that's like, evil, dude, and your punks either purge you or sign up depending on how they feel about 'the slaves shall serve' morality.
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May 7, 2020 05:51
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