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Ferrinus posted:After that, if it's a priori impossible (or at least totally unheard of) for any existing level of supernal magic to manufacture a soul, then you're out of luck. It's funny, because you'd think that a combination of Prime 5, Fate 5, Mind 5, Spirit 5, and Death 5 could actually conjure a soul directly, since it's those five subtle Arcana that souls are made of, right? But presumably this doesn't work (even for mages who have the staggeringly high Gnosis required to be Masters of five Arcana), and you need some unavailable X-factor (the "Divine Fire", most likely) to actually get a human soul rather than some weird facsimile that maybe looks normal at first but turns out to be the seed for a horror movie after a while. There's a quote to this effect somewhere but I don't recall whether the original source is a published book (and if it is it's almost certainly 1E) or just some developer statement on the OPP forums or something.
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Apr 27, 2021 22:04
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In the actual Ascension book it was revealed that there is no actual Technocracy high command, just an empty room that the entire rest of the organization is desperately making their best guesses about; these collective imaginings are consolidated into what seem to be orders from on high that the organization then executes. No one's actually in charge; no one actually knows what they're doing; everyone's just blindly following along some combination of their own personal psychoses and material incentives and yet this results in an inescapable, totalizing system of crushing exploitation. So, yeah, a clown like Musk is absolutely an apt face for the Technocracy at large; we like to imagine that somewhere behind him is some sort of serious, ruthless, and coolly competent illuminatus, but nope! It's just guys like that all the way up.
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Apr 27, 2021 22:07
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Ferrinus posted:I mean, I think it's perfectly fine to make playable Order of Reason characters. You can play as a Seer in Mage: the Awakening, and more to the point you're allowed to make a regular old World of Darkness character who's a cop or a soldier (and you're allowed to make a D&D character who's a, you know, adventurer), so what's the big deal? And a stance that the OoR is morally equivalent to the Nephandi wouldn't really make sense, either; it's not that they're not as bad (What's "bad"? Are we talking about total reduction of lifespan summed across all affected human beings, level of personal depravity, number of seconds removed from the lifespan of the universe...) they're just different, and certainly more palatable and comprehensible on a character-to-character level. Oh, I agree with this. It's perfectly fine to have an interest in the history of science and the desire to explore it in a fantasy roleplaying game. Likewise, while the Dreamspeakers tradition is historically problematic, I think the material written about them has become more interested in diversity over time, such that it has personally inspired me to become more interested in anthropology. The intersection is how Victorian Mage presents a canonically and ideologically "correct" interpretation for each of them. It would be more interesting to just present them in all of their contradictions and uncomfortably problematic framework and let the reader and player draw their own conclusions. I do think that's sort of what they're going for, but these more explicit passages are kind of a safety net. Ascension is a messy, contradictory gameline and that's its appeal, you don't really need to hedge the text. pospysyl fucked around with this message at 22:18 on Apr 27, 2021 |
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Apr 27, 2021 22:09
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hot mess incoming https://twitter.com/TashaRobinson/status/1387153888818696192?s=20
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Apr 27, 2021 22:20
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Tuxedo Catfish posted:There's a quote to this effect somewhere but I don't recall whether the original source is a published book (and if it is it's almost certainly 1E) or just some developer statement on the OPP forums or something. It's not in any of the books as far as I know. I think that, given the Tremere's deal and the general weirdness of souls, it wouldn't be unfair to say that a multi-degreed Master of the Five Subtle Arcana still can't perfectly replicate a human soul. They would probably have the best position to delve into that Mystery, however! Also, if you're an Archmaster (presumably of Life?) and amoral, you can always use Imperial Magic to change reality and acquire a human being created through your work, but I'm not sure that really serves much purpose - you still have to rip a soul out of a human if you want one. Maybe that should be the problem for standard Mages as well - if they want to create a human soul, they need to create a human for that soul to be in, and it doesn't avoid the moral issue at all. But does let you make a person! There is the trouble that by default, this person isn't Lasting, I think? Though I suppose if you just create a totally mundane object with magic, and get all the details right, it would be Lasting and get by fine.
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Apr 27, 2021 22:24
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Joe Slowboat posted:It's not in any of the books as far as I know. I think that, given the Tremere's deal and the general weirdness of souls, it wouldn't be unfair to say that a multi-degreed Master of the Five Subtle Arcana still can't perfectly replicate a human soul. They would probably have the best position to delve into that Mystery, however! Also, if you're an Archmaster (presumably of Life?) and amoral, you can always use Imperial Magic to change reality and acquire a human being created through your work, but I'm not sure that really serves much purpose - you still have to rip a soul out of a human if you want one. Maybe that should be the problem for standard Mages as well - if they want to create a human soul, they need to create a human for that soul to be in, and it doesn't avoid the moral issue at all. But does let you make a person! I had a Moros PC in my game that was very interested in the concept of the human soul, and while we threw together a legacy and I made sure it came up as part of play (so did the player), we never settled on answering those specifics. Partly because answering all the questions is lame, and partly because there just weren't good solid answers written down anywhere. And I kind of like it to be that way. The worst/best thing that happened is they accidentally duplicated a soul with time magic messing around. It was something that happened because they were trying to save someone in any way possible (and there may have been a very cranky ochemata involved that was trying to force them into doing something). But! No matter how they tried, they couldn't duplicate the circumstances or succeed in duplicating a soul again. And this character sure had a dark character arch where he tried. It was really a ton of fun, and answering all of the questions would have definitely made it less crazy. They did end up making androids near the end of the game. They were pretty cool, but functioned somewhat similarly to a familiar would with focuses and areas of expertise instead. I'm just happy we came up with something sufficiently entertaining along the way and if this game had happened 10 years ago I probably wouldn't have known better to say "yes, and" instead of just saying "no".
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Apr 27, 2021 23:06
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Vaguely on the topic of the creation of humanity, the secrets of life its reproduction, the "X factor" that catalyzes souls, etc, if you want a good series of films touching on the twin powers of Azoth and Flux, look no further than Ridley Scott's Prometheus and Alien: Covenant.
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Apr 27, 2021 23:10
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Joe Slowboat posted:Though this does raise a question I find very funny: Can an Archmaster turn a living human into a Promethean? Well, there's a pretty easy way to turn a living human into a Promethean: apply a hot lead pill first, then do whatever other Demiurges do. I did double check the PTC2e rulebook for the word "soul," and the interaction between Prometheans and "souls" is not straightforward. They aren't truly soulless, that's a kind of different condition and kind of a different question than what PTC is going for. There's references to Prometheans lacking a soul (e.g. " a Promethean’s nature is alchemical, and Azoth — the ultimate catalyst — burns where their soul should be"), but there's a fair few more references that Prometheans do have a soul, including stuff like the rules text for Azothic Object. My read is that Prometheans have a soul in the same way they have a body: it's there, but it's malformed and insufficient and not what the Promethean wants it to be. So while I think this is very cool and everything, I think it also means that even if a Mage (or a Demon, who are well positioned to move souls around) could shove a soul into a Promethean, you just have Promethean with two souls.
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Apr 28, 2021 00:33
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There's a section on "Matters of the Soul" in Awakening 2e with this sidebar: I'm generally in favor of stuff like this being "too huge for firm answers from the books, except for flatly denying that there's any such spell as Create Soul (Conjunctional Making)." I'm enthusiastically in favor of any books dealing with this spending like 1k words each for three or five pages of possibilities.
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Apr 28, 2021 00:38
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Mors Rattus posted:It should be noted, pretty much everything to do with qashmallim and creating Prometheans is outside the realm of things Mages can do, explicitly. The Divine Fire doesn’t cooperate much with mages. How do the qash and god machine generally interact with each other? I mean, yeah you can just say "they don't" and leave demon and promethean as separate things, which is fine, but I know there's that one promethean (I think their name was actaeon) who was made from some god machine infrastructure (but is specifically not a demon and not actually related back to the god machine in any way other than the source of their body), but I know the qash are specifically different from the angels that the god machine uses so I'm wondering if there are any notable crossovers between the two outside of that aforementioned drone promethean.
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Apr 28, 2021 03:34
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The Machine, iirc, can’t see them. Like, at all. The qashmallim sometimes help it, sometimes gently caress up its plans.
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Apr 28, 2021 03:51
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The sample adventure running through the Promethean 1e supplements infamously ends in Saturnine Night with a scenario explicitly involving a vast clockwork God-Machine beneath Detroit whose gears must be fed a sacrifice. Looking back after having redesigned the God-Machine mythos for Demon, Rose Bailey occasionally references the qashmal from this story as an angel of the God-Machine mistaken for a qashmal. My personal stock answer inside my head at home is that qashmallim and their constituent Divine Fire are a naturally occuring phenomenon which has been hijacked across space and time by the God-Machine as raw materials to mold into its own angels. After all, we know that the God-Machine prefers to reappropriate preexisting resources rather than expend effort creating them from scratch, both types of angel are numinous beings modelled by the same core system of Influences and Numina which are sent into the world single-mindedly and selflessly dedicated to a particular mission, and the potential for free will and personal evolution seems inextricably baked into the nature of the God-Machine's angels despite these things being deprecated by the general will of the Machine.
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Apr 28, 2021 05:14
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That Old Tree posted:There's a section on "Matters of the Soul" in Awakening 2e with this sidebar: Soul creation is an archmastery effect in Awakening, but even then it's something like Death 7, which is the power level needed for "invent new death-related supernatural beings," and might simply be the archmaster fulfilling the conditions that naturally create one in a newborn. There was a lot of discussion, back when Demon was first created, about how the Machine related to the Principle and how angels related to qashmallim, with various authors and developers having pet theories. It was never fully resolved because Promethean never fully resolved what the Principle is, with (again) various long-term authors writing to their own pet theories. If you're seeing a pattern, you're not imagining it - it's a hallmark of MacFarland's games, and reaches its fullest form in Beast. Although IIRC he himself was in the "The Machine and Principle were the body and mind of the same being before being split, and angels are captured and processed Qashmallim" camp early on. Wood Ingham, who wrote most qashmallim material in 1e, was of the opinion that qashmallim were literal angels. I, who wrote them in 2e, am of the "The Principle doesn't exist, and qashmallim are natural phenomena that *look* like independent beings, but are actually the same thing as Firestorms" persuasion. Fun! There's the barest hint of it left in the published corebook, but for a hot second Demon came with a "these things have *only just* started to appear" semi-metaplot before it got relegated to a "if you like" sidebar no one has ever followed up on. I tried to do something similar with Deviant, too (that Remade only existed for the last couple hundred years, having an origin in natural science, which would let us do the latecomer thing without being a metaplot) but the Dark Eras 2 team decided that they would make Deviant settings without telling me, so it got ripped out.
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Apr 28, 2021 08:34
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It seems wrong to pin soul creation at Death 7 since Death is the Arcanum with the most power over the soul (it is after all the only cosmic process which severe a soul from a body, so at the very least the puppet strings of the soul are within Death's remit) but that doesn't mean the substance of the soul itself is. It's like, Death magic can animate a corpse into a zombie but not conjure a causeless corpse. Forces can fly a rock around but not make a rock, etc.
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Apr 28, 2021 09:03
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Dave Brookshaw posted:I, who wrote them in 2e, am of the "The Principle doesn't exist, and qashmallim are natural phenomena that *look* like independent beings, but are actually the same thing as Firestorms" persuasion. Truly the best take of the lot.
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Apr 28, 2021 09:48
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Awakening requires you to be an archmaster before you can create souls? That seems needlessly limiting. In Ascension you can do that with Spirit 5.
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Apr 28, 2021 10:00
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Charlz Guybon posted:Awakening requires you to be an archmaster before you can create souls? It's so that mages who resurrect people are forced to acquire a new one.
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Apr 28, 2021 10:52
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Dave Brookshaw posted:It's so that mages who resurrect people are forced to acquire a new one. That doesn't sound like a resurrection if you're not putting the original soul in the body. Making new souls or acquiring a new one shouldn't come into it.
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Apr 28, 2021 13:18
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Charlz Guybon posted:That doesn't sound like a resurrection if you're not putting the original soul in the body. There's chances for like "resonance" or "psychic echoes" or whatever, but the soul in CoD is more like a vital organ that supports your ego rather than a piece of your personality itself. You're hosed up if you lose it, but you're still you (at least for a while).
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Apr 28, 2021 13:34
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Charlz Guybon posted:That doesn't sound like a resurrection if you're not putting the original soul in the body. This is a bit esoteric but in Awakening, the soul is not the seat of the self. The soul gives the identity structure (and an Oneiros) and the self can collapse without a soul in place. If you want a cool story about a Mage getting someone else's soul stuffed into him, read "The Unmurdered Man" by Malcolm Sheppard. https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/143174/The-Fallen-World-Chronicle-Anthology Edit: or watch that simpsons episode where bart sells his soul to Milhouse Octavo fucked around with this message at 15:57 on Apr 28, 2021 |
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Apr 28, 2021 15:54
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That Old Tree posted:There's a section on "Matters of the Soul" in Awakening 2e with this sidebar:
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Apr 28, 2021 16:15
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Froghammer posted:You make a soul by making a baby, hth Mages Oh no, loving, the greatest weakness of any Mage.
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Apr 28, 2021 16:24
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Octavo posted:Edit: or watch that simpsons episode where bart sells his soul to Milhouse Mind blown!
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Apr 28, 2021 16:25
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Froghammer posted:You make a soul by making a baby, hth Mages 
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Apr 28, 2021 16:28
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Anyone remember that episode of So Weird about the guy whose soul left him while he was cryogenically frozen and then he let the dying soul of an old cancer patient inhabit his own empty shell of a body? That kinda feels like it'd be good inspiration for some promethean-esque stuff though I know prometheans don't just take on other souls, but the idea of realizing that you are an empty shell and making yourself into a new human through soul transfer is neat. I guess that's what a mage would be capable of doing since it is only transferring and not creating souls, though it leaves me wondering what a promethean would feel if they had a soul transplanted into them that way since they'd still have the azoth too, if they'd feel like 2 beings living in and fighting for control over the same body or what.
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Apr 28, 2021 16:56
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Mors Rattus posted:It should be noted, pretty much everything to do with qashmallim and creating Prometheans is outside the realm of things Mages can do, explicitly. The Divine Fire doesn’t cooperate much with mages. Explicitly? Where does it say this?
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Apr 28, 2021 17:16
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A Mage could create a Promethean, but he'd be a Demiurge, not any normal Mage. Edit: Or whatever the correct term for someone who creates a Promethean is.
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Apr 29, 2021 01:13
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Mors Rattus posted:The Machine, iirc, can’t see them. Like, at all. The qashmallim sometimes help it, sometimes gently caress up its plans. I really love this in Promethean 2nd. The qashmallim being totally alien and mysterious is one of my favorite things. It leaves so much room for players to think about and search for answers in a campaign, while keeping something in the setting that isn't just something and Mage hasn't bothered to tell you about.
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Apr 29, 2021 01:23
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MonsieurChoc posted:A Mage could create a Promethean, but he'd be a Demiurge, not any normal Mage. It's Demiurge yeah (genitor if they're a Promethean). Promethean also has an aside about Mages as Alchemists (non-Prometheans who use Divine Fire tools). There's really nothing stopping a mage from also being an Alchemist, other than the fact that it's higher risk lower reward than doing similar effects through magic. Lord_Hambrose posted:I really love this in Promethean 2nd. The qashmallim being totally alien and mysterious is one of my favorite things. It leaves so much room for players to think about and search for answers in a campaign, while keeping something in the setting that isn't just something and Mage hasn't bothered to tell you about. Promethean rules, I'm really excited to start up my campaign again soon.
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Apr 29, 2021 01:56
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Attempts are being made: BoLS: 'Vampire: the Masquerade' & The World Of Darkness Is Coming To A TV Near You, Vampires And All. https://www.belloflostsouls.net/2021/04/vampire-the-masquerade-the-world-of-darkness-is-coming-to-a-tv-near-you-vampires-and-all.html All speculation and no deals made, but who will you cast for your on-screen Beckett?
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Apr 29, 2021 05:01
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Tetrabor posted:Attempts are being made: Billy Connolly if we was not old and retired. I will not explain this choice
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Apr 29, 2021 14:32
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Tetrabor posted:Attempts are being made: Richard Ayoade, obviously.
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Apr 30, 2021 17:58
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William H Macy is the Beckett we need.
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Apr 30, 2021 18:18
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Lord_Hambrose posted:William H Macy is the Beckett we need.
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May 1, 2021 01:29
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Lord_Hambrose posted:Taika Waititi is the Beckett we need.
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May 1, 2021 01:36
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Lord_Hambrose posted:Richard Roxborough doing a terrible accent is the Beckett we need.
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May 1, 2021 05:11
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Yes Also yes. Karl Urban as Beckett.
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May 1, 2021 17:51
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Beckett is played by a different actor every episode. No one ever comments on it.
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May 1, 2021 18:45
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I think it'd be cool to use that "A Scanner Darkly" effect for Obfuscate and related abilities (e.g. Nameless)
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May 1, 2021 19:10
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Cast Willem Dafoe as a nosferatu
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May 1, 2021 22:40
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