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True Faith and abilities like it in RPGs strike me as very, very Protestant. Not Christian, certainly not Judeo-Christian (which is often just a naive attempt at inclusivity), but specifically Protestant. It took someone like Martin Luther to come up with sola fide, salvation by faith alone, all the while papering over the Epistle of James.
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Sep 30, 2020 19:54
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NikkolasKing posted:So ever since I played Bloodlines I've been really interested in the idea of True Faith and how it works in oWoD. Well, there's also the fact that Devil's Due (2004) is a supplement for Dark Ages Vampire (2002) (as opposed to Vampire: the Dark Ages from 1996), while Path of Screams was a Sorcerers Crusade book (both 1998), set in the renaissance, and not for Dark Ages Mage (2002). What a sprawling mess of supplements we had in those heady quote:I know some people I've talked to on here or maybe elsewhere kinda criticize oWoD for ultimately being very "Judao-Christian." There are gods and the Triat and all the rest of it but at its heart, they think the World of Darkness adheres to the metaphysics or worldview of the "People of teh Book." Apparently New World of Darkness escapes this and some prefer that. I would say that nWoD/CoD1 definitely does a tremendous job of re-mystifying the world, but it's got a """Judeo-Christian""" (Christian) rock-solid core just because the Virtues and Vices are ripped straight out of pop-Christianity. nWoD2/CoD does some more work decoupling the game from Christian defaultism, but there's still a fair amount in there especially in Vampire.
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Sep 30, 2020 20:42
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joylessdivision posted:I think they officially made their return in Chicago by Night but I haven't read through it to find out why. According to the game, it feels like Chicago is kind of the 'base' for the Camarilla Lasombra sort of like how Birmingham, Alabama was for the Cam Banu Haqim in Beckett's Diary. How they got it is... certainly interesting, but I'll let you read how that goes. That Old Tree posted:I would say that nWoD/CoD1 definitely does a tremendous job of re-mystifying the world, but it's got a """Judeo-Christian""" (Christian) rock-solid core just because the Virtues and Vices are ripped straight out of pop-Christianity. nWoD2/CoD does some more work decoupling the game from Christian defaultism, but there's still a fair amount in there especially in Vampire. If I ever got energetic there would be worse things than re-doing the Sabbat by taking the Lancea and the Ordo Dracul and making them kiss.
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Sep 30, 2020 21:14
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Also the entirety of the Judeo-Christian world is ultimately a plot by Lucifer, so it's like....is it really a win for them? So sure, there is a good deal of truth in the religious works of the Jews, Christians, and Muslims. The flip side is their entire existence is championed by the loving Devil, so.....you know, not great on balance.
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Sep 30, 2020 21:32
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I maybe was a bit hasty when I said it was Judao-Christian, or at least it needs some qualification. Just the idea there is a God and Angels and a Garden and so-forth. Everybody seems to agree with that so it's canon for the World of Darkness. Of course, even then, now I think more on it, that might be too much of a simplification. The nature of God in oWoD is apparently quite y vague. Maybe the story in Revelations of the Dark Mother is correct and what they call God was just one of many beings created by the One. Maybe there is some Eternal Darkness that existed before "God." I got into a little argument with somebody about oWoD God the other day because he listed in his reasons why being a vampire sucks "you are damned by God." I dislike that view because it seems to rob the Kindred of all their potential. What of Golconda? Plus even in canon stuff like this Wraith book quote I found, vampire souls don't have some confirmed, fixed destination. So God is either dead or lazy or His power is not so absolute and all of these things would seem to suggest he's not the Triple O Abrahamic Creator.
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Sep 30, 2020 22:35
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The VtM setting isn’t Judeo-anything. It’s based very strongly in Christianity (and specifically Christianity, not Judaism or Islam at all) but then twisted heavily through the lens of the vampire mythos the writers set up.
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Sep 30, 2020 22:48
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Dawgstar posted:According to the game, it feels like Chicago is kind of the 'base' for the Camarilla Lasombra sort of like how Birmingham, Alabama was for the Cam Banu Haqim in Beckett's Diary. How they got it is... certainly interesting, but I'll let you read how that goes. Please post how it happens, I'm never going to read that book.
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Sep 30, 2020 23:25
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That Old Tree posted:I would say that nWoD/CoD1 definitely does a tremendous job of re-mystifying the world, but it's got a """Judeo-Christian""" (Christian) rock-solid core just because the Virtues and Vices are ripped straight out of pop-Christianity. nWoD2/CoD does some more work decoupling the game from Christian defaultism, but there's still a fair amount in there especially in Vampire. the Chronicles of Darkness is Neoplatonic, which isn't necessarily Christian but comes from the same cultural substrate that informed pretty much all of Christian theology
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Sep 30, 2020 23:34
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I'm ok with specificity, hell I even usually prefer it (Promethean is very, very narrowly wrapped up in the modernist/romantic debates from its main source material, and I love that). I think in the case of Vampire they're not as conscious of it as they should be. They were conscious enough to make "Catholic" a specific group but not conscious enough to refer to the 'default' as a particular Protestant, rather than universal, view.
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Oct 1, 2020 00:02
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vampire catholics are an easy archetype since catholic aesthetics have been a consistent feature of western vampire mythology since dracula. Also, real life catholic leadership are a sect of blood-obsessed pedophiles, so. not really much of a jump to that conclusion.
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Oct 1, 2020 00:18
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As far as baroque political intrigue and insane acts of excess go it's hard to beat the Catholic Church. Like the Cadaver Synod is a real, actual thing that happened, and the bare fact of "They put a corpse on trial" barely covers it. After Stephen found Formosus guilty he weighed the body down and threw it in the loving Tiber. He probably cut off the fingers the Formosis used to bless people too. After Formosus' body was found washed up and rumored to be performing miracles people said "gently caress it, lets go" and overthrew Pope Stephen. He got tossed in prison, where he was promptly strangled to death. The next pope had a synod where he overturned the Cadaver Synod. The pope after THAT had a synod where he upheld the overturning. But a later pope, who was a co-judge at the Cadaver Synod, had a synod where he reversed the overturning and upheld the Cadaver Synod. And shortly after that you have the Saeculum obscurum, a period with the alternate no poo poo historical title of the pornocracy [And it means exactly what you'd think it does], and that's a whole thing, and that is one slice of one part of an institution that has existed for nearly 2000 years. And has been crazy and corrupt for most of it. It's like a no-brainer it gets tied up with vampire stuff, actual blood sucking monsters are infinitely more grounded in comparison. A little Catholicism gives'em the spice to be interesting.
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Oct 1, 2020 00:56
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Soonmot posted:Please post how it happens, I'm never going to read that book. According to the game, and Julia who is the PC: The deal the Camarilla made was for every Lasombra that wanted in, another clan member had to be killed.
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Oct 1, 2020 01:19
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So I don't know how this happened exactly but my weekly D&D game has turned into a Werewolf: the Apocalypse game. I need some help. First, is the 20th anniversary edition any good? I know some of them (I am looking at you Mage) are less than stellar. Are there any resources for kind of modernizing the game? I don't want to run Forsaken because I think the setting is part of the appeal for my players, but I also want to avoid some of the worst 90s racist bits like the metis and whatever. Something that keeps the game the same but tweaks some of the details to not be embarrassing in 2020 would be nice.
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Oct 1, 2020 15:15
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All of the 20th anniversary editions are at worst "pretty okay", with the exception of, as you mentioned, Mage. I recall Woof 20 wasn't mind-blowing or anything but a respectable entry. Apart from the weird anti-trans and edition warring poo poo that ParaWW inserted in a couple of the supplements. I'm not sure you could do a meaningfully significant "fix" without completely rewriting the tribes and how preoccupied with breeding the game line is. They're kind of central themes even when a given author does their best to avoid them. It's a lot like the Ravnos where the fix is to get rid of them, but it applies to like half the PC splats.
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Oct 1, 2020 15:27
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That Old Tree posted:I'm not sure you could do a meaningfully significant "fix" without completely rewriting the tribes and how preoccupied with breeding the game line is. They're kind of central themes even when a given author does their best to avoid them. It's a lot like the Ravnos where the fix is to get rid of them, but it applies to like half the PC splats. That's the sole reason I haven't played a werewolf, seems like the whole splat is centered around making/having babies. Rokea and Corax are way more fun for this reason.
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Oct 1, 2020 15:35
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Dienes posted:That's the sole reason I haven't played a werewolf, seems like the whole splat is centered around making/having babies. While the books will still talk about it all the time, it's one of the easier problematic elements of Apocalypse you can totally change in play. There's very little mechanical stuff attached to breeding, and most of the social impact isn't as important as the books say it is because they didn't really think through the implications most of the time. So it's just sort of raised for a few paragraphs and then we get back to the Captain Planet and racism stuff.
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Oct 1, 2020 15:39
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Dienes posted:That's the sole reason I haven't played a werewolf, seems like the whole splat is centered around making/having babies. ...There is literally a mechanic that compels human form Rokea to want to gently caress at all times. But yeah it's pretty easy to ignore the breeding stuff when Parawuff isn't shoving it down your throat.
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Oct 1, 2020 15:50
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Kurieg posted:...There is literally a mechanic that compels human form Rokea to want to gently caress at all times. That doesn't make a ton of sense, given
I think we just ignored the paragraph of Mateo vaguely saying, "Oh yeah, we betweeners specifically totally wanna gently caress humans all the time when we're on land in human form" as Mateo projecting his own issues, since everything else in the splat contradicts it.
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Oct 1, 2020 16:02
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Dienes posted:That doesn't make a ton of sense, given It's in all the other books too, with the speculation that its' either Gaia telling them to stop warring against betweeners or the fact that they've suppressed their human sides so much that they can't differentiate between being mildly horny and all consuming lust. Particularly since it doesn't seem to be a problem for the Same bito.
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Oct 1, 2020 16:10
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I guess if nothing exists, I might have to write something myself. I was thinking something that rewrites the Uktena and Wendigo to be a little less noble savage and "generic Native American," maybe decouples the tribes from real-world cultures altogether. And a different name for Metis.
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Oct 1, 2020 17:19
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Enola Gay-For-Pay posted:I guess if nothing exists, I might have to write something myself. I was thinking something that rewrites the Uktena and Wendigo to be a little less noble savage and "generic Native American," maybe decouples the tribes from real-world cultures altogether. And a different name for Metis. 20th anniversary was never going to be the place for that, sadly. As it's basically an anthology of already published content. 5e might be the place for that but depending on how much of the specter of Swedracula still remains we might be in trouble.
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Oct 1, 2020 17:22
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Kurieg posted:20th anniversary was never going to be the place for that, sadly. As it's basically an anthology of already published content. The dev team seems okay, at least. I really hope they've been given leave to radically change things, like doing away with Metis entirely. Changing the name at the bare minimum.
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Oct 1, 2020 19:01
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There's almost nothing good to do with the "wrongly-bred grotesques" concept except totally remove it, and that'll be one of the things to look out for to see if the whole thing is worth reading more deeply.
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Oct 1, 2020 19:28
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The idea behind "born werewolves" Is neat though and I'd like to see them salvage it somehow. Give them some drawback other than horrible deformity though kthx.
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Oct 1, 2020 19:32
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Kurieg posted:The idea behind "born werewolves" Is neat though and I'd like to see them salvage it somehow. Give them some drawback other than horrible deformity though kthx. Absolutely! Hell, I'd say it's super easy to lay the foundations for that. Maybe some tribes do still consider them to be born grotesques, because they're weird racist/eugenicist fucks. And other tribes think they're holy children that need to be sequestered and coddled/brutalized. And some tribes just try to raise them like normal kids most of the time, but they still have to be kept away from society at large because it's easy for a tantruming 10-year old to jump into Crinos at the Baskin-Robbins. What's your childhood like if you grow up in an otherworldly caern in the Umbra? That's a lot more interesting than "you had the wrong parents so you smell bad forever."
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Oct 1, 2020 19:45
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I was reminded Metis make the worst tribe even worse, being Fianna. "Oh, we have an excuse to abuse them because they're not pretty and if they crack under the pressure then OH WELL but even if they don't screw 'em."
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Oct 1, 2020 20:49
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Not to derail wolf sex chat, but I need some help wrapping my brain around the God Machine. I think I'm struggling with the ineffable-unknowable-God-Machine thing. Generally I like to run antagonists with very understandable and basic goals: Put the player character in their place; get powerful or die trying; protect that dirty secret at all costs; make it through the day; etc... This is definitely not what Demon wants out of the God Machine's divine machinations. How do you run cosmic horror that isn't just making spooky ghost noises and muttering about plots within plots? I can cover a dartboard with different grand plots (e.g. turn the SF Salesforce Tower into a conduit for ripping a portal to hell; open a new bookstore in Pike's Place Market that sells only copies of the Necronomicon disguised a Dummies Guides) and toss darts to see what the GM could do in practice, that's easy enough. This method doesn't really lead to coherence in over-arching plot.
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Oct 1, 2020 21:35
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I think a key to using the God-Machine roughly "as is" winds up being very similar to how one should utilize the Exarchs: They are not an evil person, they are an evil system. There's no self-directed dude who has a philosophy that led them to a conclusion that led them to these terrible actions. These on-high villains are the philosophy itself. You can eventually grasp the motives of capitalism, but you can't, like, argue with it and change its mind. You have to enact major changes, or simply destroy it outright. EDIT: Put another way, the Exarchs and God-Machine aren't (usually) "an antagonist" but more like a self-perpetuating faction with no singular leader. They're cults with no origin point. You might be able to wipe it out if you wipe out every adherent, but there's not false savior for you to defeat and put the lie to. That Old Tree fucked around with this message at 21:50 on Oct 1, 2020 |
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Oct 1, 2020 21:48
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The God Machine as written lends itself really well to "here are four or five possibly connected things" and then, in practice, stealing whatever idea for their connective tissue sounds the best coming from your players when they try to fumble around in the dark and find the solution. When in doubt, you can always go with "this was all in order to bring you here so that the God Machine's angels can abduct you for even darker purposes, now fight them."
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Oct 1, 2020 21:56
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That tracks, but putting that philosophy in practice is not exactly simple? Take another game that bakes the concept directly into the mechanics: Red Markets. In RM, the MC plays the Market. You're literally capitalism. Your job is to beat down the players with casualties, LaLas, horrific corporate criminals, and having to pay rent. You enchant the players with fancy toys at best distract them from having to pay their kids insulin bill in the zombie apocalypse. In Demon, the MC plays the GM. You're a big... system? Your job is to... make Demons scared? (no) Your players have the coolest power set in the entire nwod franchise. Chernobyl Peace Prize posted:The God Machine as written lends itself really well to "here are four or five possibly connected things" and then, in practice, stealing whatever idea for their connective tissue sounds the best coming from your players when they try to fumble around in the dark and find the solution. Yeah, this is my usual model. I was hoping from something a little less improvised--improv high level plotting has been a crutch for me the last few campaigns.
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Oct 1, 2020 21:56
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tokenbrownguy posted:Not to derail wolf sex chat, but I need some help wrapping my brain around the God Machine. To build off what That Old Tree said, you can use Angels. They're exactly what you want, antagonists with very understandable and basic goals, literally programmed into them. They have a sliding scale of power letting you make low-level goons out of them or near-omniscient masterblaster masterminds. You even have an abundance of humans (and all their offshoots, from stigmatics to vampires) as antagonists, as the God-Machine and angels work through a lot of catspaws, and while one may form a very obviously weird cult, another might just make a a single one-shot deal with someone (I will make your wife love you again if you sabotage the landing mechanism). Angels are really easy to work with, I made a few setting up a makeshift underworld in Fort Wayne. There were reapers, who ostensibly looked like black-shrouded scythe-wielding soul harvesters but were really the lowest Rank, a Cerberus-like guardian of their base, and a Hades-alike. Reapers would go out, grab peoples souls as they died before they could run off anywhere with technognostic amphorae, bring them back to Hades to plug into the big machine that used them for energy. It wasn't a Demon game and a bit over the top, but an easy way to have something weird and off that leads back to the God-Machine (more obviously as the PCs followed it home, reapers had some mechanical aspects to them only visible when their shroud was damaged, Cerberus even moreso looking a bit like an animatronic, Hades just straight up mecha). nofather fucked around with this message at 22:09 on Oct 1, 2020 |
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Oct 1, 2020 22:03
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tokenbrownguy posted:Not to derail wolf sex chat, but I need some help wrapping my brain around the God Machine. The cosmic horror is why those things are happening. So why does the GM need to rip open portals to hell, is that one in SF a test run? What’s the point of how it uses it to control the world. Same with the Public Market book seller. Maybe it’s done the shop there because that’s where the tourists go, so they’re spreading a contagion (not the chronicles) of Necronomicons across Middle America to do...? I like to think about the meta-project, and then add the local machinations that build into the possibly iterative process the GM is working on. After you get through a couple entry points, there’s bound to be thoughts and connections that the players make that didn’t exist (free plot points), and you can build a more complex horror just by leaving questions unanswered.
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Oct 1, 2020 22:03
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tokenbrownguy posted:Yeah, this is my usual model. I was hoping from something a little less improvised--improv high level plotting has been a crutch for me the last few campaigns. In that case, you can try to think of the God Machine as a Rube Goldberg device whose terminal point may just be...being. And, most crucially (this is one that's harder to do in-play), but you can always have the characters uncover poo poo in research that they missed happening in practice. So let's say: - turn the SF Salesforce Tower into a conduit for ripping a portal to hell; [OBSERVED BY PLAYERS; ATTEMPTED TO STOP] - the resonance of this act (success or failure) is enough to slowly twist the minds of the people working on the lowest and highest floors to, respectively, advocate for YIMBYist policies that increase conflict and raise tension in their communities, and, fund the campaigns of local politicians advocating for such policies. [UNCOVERED VIA RESEARCH, SEEING PATTERNS IN EVENTS] - from this, there starts to be an increase in acts of what appear to be stochastic violence of neighbor-against-neighbor. [again, uncovered] - open a new bookstore in Pike's Place Market that sells only copies of the Necronomicon disguised a Dummies Guides [OBSERVED BY PLAYERS; ATTEMPTED TO STOP] - either way, some get out, and that determines the extent to which people start casting Necronomiconical workings in order to settle petty lovely grudges from two items up, or to ward their houses against intruders. [Either something the players engage with, or setup for...] - Entire neighborhoods are now converting themselves into Infrastructure and/creating areas that are warded against Demons, in the ultimate service of creating obedient slave-humans and also rooting out Demonic intruders in order to send Angels after them and tie up things neatly. You could probably do something way better than this and half of it is gonna involve climactic confrontations between the PCs and a series of Google Alerts, but, it does end up looking like a convoluted, weird, messy, sprawling plot. Which seems pretty God Machine.
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Oct 1, 2020 22:07
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To approach my suggestion another way, the God-Machine and Exarchs act principally as justifications for the actual singular antagonists in your game. The cosmic horror comes in when, unlike capitalism or fascism, these overarching systems appear to be built in parts of the universe that enact themselves to some degree.
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Oct 1, 2020 22:08
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So, first: you can decide what the goal of the Machine is. Maybe it wants to develop humanity into some specific form, insofar as "want" is the right word here. But it is, essentially, a machine attempting to accomplish...something, and it is doing things mechanically in order to do that. It is a giant computer built for a specific but unknown purpose, which it pursues without emotion. By default, what it appears to be pursuing involves maintaining the status quo of the Chronicles world - which is to say, a facade of normalcy and a lot of weird, creepy poo poo existing on the sides. It wants to keep the world intact. Your players will inform you of some other things it "wants" in the form of their backstories - what their demons used to be doing before they were demons. That may help you out. It also may work to consider the God-Machine as a broken computer. It has a theoretical end goal it is trying to achieve - creating the cosmic version of a database, maybe. But because of cascading failures (Demons falling, poo poo blowing up, etc) it is now glitching out and buggy. Imagine a buggy, virus-riddle computer attempting to perform its normal functions and use its normal programs, but its software and hardware are all extremely unreliable. Now overlay that on top of the world. Or maybe it's working efficiently, and you just need to decide what the eventual end goal is. Maybe it's trying to summon whatever made it into the world. The important thing is, it is doing this using occult physics, hidden machines and a deep but entirely statistic understanding of how humanity works. It's a machine, not a person, and its biggest blind spots are individual actions, because it literally cannot operate on the level of an individual. That's what angels are for.
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Oct 1, 2020 22:28
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The one good thing about Werewolf breeding is it allows me to say that Queen Elizabeth the Second has a canonical 0.000015% chance of actually being a Silver Fang.
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Oct 2, 2020 00:36
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If W5 manages to remove or curtail the doomed, highborn, or manchild parts of the Garou the entire Paradox buyout will have been justified.
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Oct 2, 2020 00:58
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I have played Apocalypse a few times, and Metis have appeared exactly zero times. Unless you are playing some sort of pre-written adventure they are not there unless you put them in. All my WoD gaming has always been set in a fictionalized version of my home town, and honestly it is my favorite part about playing games set in the "real world".
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Oct 2, 2020 12:51
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I imagine we'll get a taste of W5 with Heart of the Forest but I don't know how much input the W5 team had on it.
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Oct 2, 2020 14:59
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So I got a couple interconnected questions. In that Path of Screams book the author lists Merits and Flaws for various damned characters even though you're not supposed to play them, they are explicitly just ST characters or I guess "NPCs" to use video game terms. I've also heard you're not supposed to play Nephandi. Yet I 've got this book on playing Fomori who are super hosed up and evil and gross things. So why are some characters supposed to be playable and others not? It can't be because they do bad things. Secondly, in spite of these rules, I've definitely come across people who played Nephandi or Black Spiral Dancers. Have any of you ever played a character you're not supposed to or been part of a game taht did that?
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Oct 2, 2020 17:06
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