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How many people you know have a ghost story they swear happened to them? Now what if they were are real and way more dangerous than you thought and your friend/relative got lucky?
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Jul 1, 2021 05:13
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Obligatum VII posted:Please stop praying to Loomer, they're growing too powerful.  Chernobyl Peace Prize posted:I'm lighting the candles to summon Loomer here to go into a little more depth about just how overpopulated the oWoD, at least, was with supernaturals, given Loomer's status as the keeper of true knowledge of that setting's demographics. On a more serious note, there's quite a lot of supernaturals, but when you exclude wraith (which is a very big wild card in its interactions with the mortal world) it's not so bad. The project has temporarily stalled out as I chase up PhD positions and handle my father's estate, and after another hard drive crash I don't have the quick reference doc I made up (drat technocracy...), so I can't answer definitively right now, but we can do a couple of reasonably accurate case studies. The areas we know the most about are Chicago, Atlanta, New York City, and the Bay Area. When we exclude the population entries, which are inherently unreliable - for those who are new to my rants or don't recall, a population entry is an unidentified and unidentifiable population (e.g. '200 vampires in Columbus, Ohio') useful for general demography but not so useful for anything more specific like this. LA and NYC are both plagued by them, but for our present purpose we'll ignore NYC's: this is just using discreetly identifiable unique actors, even if their names etc are unknown. The reason to exclude at this stage is that the pop slots are so unreliable that while useful for the big picture, they complicate anything like this.) We're also not filtering by death date or era(s) of activity, because that's the part I'm in the middle of redoing for finer granularity, so half the sheets are in the old format and half in the new - but as these are New World cities, there's very little content for them prior to the 1700s, and most of that is a handful of entries - enough to skew it only slightly. We'll also use population figures from 2000 for the cities, just for convenience, but it's worth remembering that the lay of the land is canonically a little different in the oWoD - denser cities, more desolate countryside, at least when authors remember. NYC: ~1:9,500 Bay Area: ~1:7,000 Chicago area: ~1:15,500 Atlanta: ~1:17,500 There are outlyers that are much higher - there's a village in Appalachia where a Verbena coven skews it to 1:6 - but these are probably the closest to representative we have. All lumped together, including the dead etc, we still don't hit triple digits for most population centers - but of course, this doesn't include the amount of people impacted by supernatural entities. There's a pretty good chance your average human will, at some point, see a werewolf, encounter a changeling, be fed on by a vampire, etc, at these figures. They may not know what's happened, but they'll be aware of high strangeness going on around them. Since I'm Projecting right now, I'm not sure when I'll have the chance to finish it off properly. I've set a hard limit of the end of the year, and if it isn't settled by then the data is getting released as is for people to pick over. I'd planned on a 2020 release, but poo poo happened, and then when I resumed work on it towards the end of 2020, even more poo poo happened. Since there's a pretty good chance even more poo poo will happen, I have to be realistic and impose a final deadline so we don't wind up in a Far West situation. The timeline component won't be part of the release as that one is still slowly chugging along. The upside is that if it does pan out that way, most of what needs to be done is just settling location data properly and finishing off the new timeframe breakdown. Originally, I recorded it from a Vampire centric worldview - so there were five main eras of concern. Antiquity and prior, the Middle Ages from early to late, the Renaissance and Early Modern period, the Victorian era, and the Modern Nights. The consequence of this is that there are only 5 era toggles, which means there's not a lot of granularity, and if you don't remember to filter by birth/death/etc, you can wind up counting a werewolf who died in 1451 alongside one who was born in 1799 as part of the same population in Paris. The basic toggle system is still staying, since its triple state is very helpful for wraiths, mages, and vampires ('active' 'inactive' 'unknown' - a vampire might be known to be active in 1700 (with uncertain activity prior), inactive in 1800 due to torpor, and active in 1900. Likewise wraiths and mages for various reasons), but it's been expanded out to cover more helpful time frames. If I was doing this in a proper database there'd probably be a more elegant solution. Fortunately, it's not too complex to alter, just mindnumbingly tedious and difficult to automate.
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Jul 1, 2021 05:43
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Nessus posted:Hell yeah, literature. Spot on.
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Jul 1, 2021 06:43
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Wasn't one of the last NWoD 1e books... Reflections, I think? Basically a ton of ideas for blowing the doors off the various Masquerades and actually potentially answering some of the biggest potential setting questions? Comes to mind that a True Blood scenario could have some of the supernatural beings be publicly, openly known, but not all of them at once. And potentially what is publicly known doesn't match the true reality of the situation, and the Masquerade becomes less about hiding your existence and more about sticking to the script in front of the normals.
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Jul 1, 2021 11:31
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Ghost Leviathan posted:Wasn't one of the last NWoD 1e books... Reflections, I think? Basically a ton of ideas for blowing the doors off the various Masquerades and actually potentially answering some of the biggest potential setting questions? You're thinking of Mirrors, which was mostly a book on hacking the Storytelling system (and, IIRC, was a bit of a test bed for some ideas that would ultimately make it into the God-Machine Chronicle/nWoD 2e/CofD), but did have a chapter of alternate settings, one of which was "the supernatural is revealed openly to humanity at large," including brief sections on "what if only this splat was revealed?"
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Jul 1, 2021 12:11
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Also, a Requiem 2e book called Shattered Masque was iirc supposed to be entirely about that alternate scenario. It got announced, but hasn't even started being written as far as I can tell.
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Jul 1, 2021 12:33
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Ghost Leviathan posted:And potentially what is publicly known doesn't match the true reality of the situation, and the Masquerade becomes less about hiding your existence and more about sticking to the script in front of the normals. "Oh no, garlic, the number one weakness of vampires like me!" shouted the Revenant.
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Jul 2, 2021 01:30
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Relevant Tangent posted:"Oh no, garlic, the number one weakness of vampires like me!" shouted the Revenant. I wonder how many people actually used the rules about garlic-vulnerable vampires in Mythologies, I guess it got rolled into Banes in 2e.
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Jul 2, 2021 02:07
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GimpInBlack posted:You're thinking of Mirrors, which was mostly a book on hacking the Storytelling system (and, IIRC, was a bit of a test bed for some ideas that would ultimately make it into the God-Machine Chronicle/nWoD 2e/CofD), but did have a chapter of alternate settings, one of which was "the supernatural is revealed openly to humanity at large," including brief sections on "what if only this splat was revealed?" I need to get my hands on that sometime. Can I get a cliff's notes on the 'what if only this splat was revealed' ideas? I imagine Changelings would probably cause quite a freak-out when extradimensional aliens have been kidnapping, murdering and violating people with impunity.
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Jul 2, 2021 06:44
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Ghost Leviathan posted:I need to get my hands on that sometime. Can I get a cliff's notes on the 'what if only this splat was revealed' ideas? I imagine Changelings would probably cause quite a freak-out when extradimensional aliens have been kidnapping, murdering and violating people with impunity. Vampire: The info on one of the 1e NWoD Hunter splats says that they've infiltrated the US government pretty thoroughly, so expect a LOT of upset and hubbub there; otherwise, vampires are mostly regional in their organization. Basically, rioting and crackdowns in pretty much every major urban area. Outside the US, not a lot of info, so no idea. Werewolf: Oddly, I think Werewolves being revealed publicly would cause the least unrest on a broad scale, for the simple reason that in their human form, they're basically undetectable, and in their various other forms, they don't really have enough solid resemblance to their human forms to be traceable to them. There'd be a huge initial spike of unrest in areas where people didn't know, but of the Big Three, they're the ones who are most likely to have most of their close acquaintances/relatives/etc. already quietly in the know. Mage: This one would basically require either massive rewriting of the setting cosmology (specifically, the Abyss as-written would either: A. eat the Supernal, B. Eat the Fallen World, C. make doing magic basically impossible, or D. have to be rewritten so that a Sleeper seeing clearly visible magic doesn't immediately gently caress up the mage or their spell.) or just admitting that yep, you're playing a Mage post-wizard-apocalypse campaign from then on. Changeling: About on par with Vampire, though Changelings are generally presented as being somewhat rarer than vampires. The upset would mostly be over the extradimensional aliens you talked about being a thing, and the fact that everyone who comes back is incredibly hosed up (mentally AND physically). Hunter: Basically unchanged; they're pretty much humans as-is, though they'd probably be under a lot more official scrutiny if they're the only ones who got outed. I'll do a quick touch on each later, when I'm on break again.
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Jul 2, 2021 18:11
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I mean, can you meaningfully reveal "Hunters" as a whole? At all? They're a bunch of separate groups. And the consequences vary. A group of unaffiliated street-level ones getting "Revealed" just means they're up on arson charges. Like... can you expose VASCU? "The FBI has a secret division of psychics!!" And some of them you can't expose without also exposing what they're hunting. Like the one which has mosnter parts grafted on.
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Jul 3, 2021 10:43
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The Cheiron Group would love the opportunity to go public and spread their nightmarish biotech as widely as possible.
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Jul 3, 2021 13:04
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I think the issue for Hunters would less be "getting exposed" and more "getting doxxed and immediately murdered by monsters." Like Network Zero's whole thing is "here's 20 minutes of vampires mind-controlling people and shouting 'bat' before flying away, don't forget to like comment and subscribe" on accounts with an eye emoji for the profile picture that they post through a VPN they connected to off a public library's wifi 3 states from home. Broad exposure's their goal, personal exposure's their nightmare scenario. Exposing the Lucifuge would be funny though, since it either goes down like Satanic Panic in the 80s or like (and this is true of every single one of the actual-hidden-monster groups) "you're just being a crazy conspiracy theorist no way that any of that's true, now to take a biiiig drink of water and see what's happening with Jeffrey Epstein."
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Jul 3, 2021 16:21
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Task force valkyrie gets publicly exposed and within 3 years the senator from fucksville is on Fox News arguing that we need to increase their funding 40% to keep the vampires from turning the kids gay
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Jul 3, 2021 17:35
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Cheiron is exposed and within the hour CNN is calling for nationalization of biotech firms to keep the kids from being brainwashed.
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Jul 3, 2021 17:45
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Oberndorf posted:CNN is calling for nationalization This is a horror setting, not a fantasy one.
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Jul 3, 2021 18:04
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Babysitter Super Sleuth posted:Task force valkyrie gets publicly exposed and within 3 years the senator from fucksville is on Fox News arguing that we need to increase their funding 40% to keep the vampires from turning the kids gay I would love to see the complete about face Alex Jones would make regarding Lucifuge. "Folks, they have Lucifer in the name, but Lucifer was a light bringer, like me and we need you're support to continue the Info War, which is why we have triple patriot points and free shipping because these god drat Vampires aren't just going away and survival food is what you need!"
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Jul 3, 2021 18:38
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I mentioned this to my partner, and they proposed "the vampires are out in the open, and you're playing a vampire trying to convince the public of the existence of the secret government vampire-murdering task force"
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Jul 3, 2021 18:55
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Also: finally picked up geist 2e and oh boy, they decided to just lean right in to the JoJo/persona comparisons, huh
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Jul 4, 2021 02:01
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Five Eyes posted:I mentioned this to my partner, and they proposed "the vampires are out in the open, and you're playing a vampire trying to convince the public of the existence of the secret government vampire-murdering task force" The public: Why would they be a secret, vampires are all assholes everyone hates.
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Jul 4, 2021 05:10
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Babysitter Super Sleuth posted:Also: finally picked up geist 2e and oh boy, they decided to just lean right in to the JoJo/persona comparisons, huh As the developer of Geist 2e, I can honestly say that I have never played a Persona game nor watched an episode of JoJo's Bizarre Adventure. Other folks writing on the book might have drawn inspiration from them in their specific sections, of course, but if there are similarities in the overall high concept, they're coincidental.
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Jul 4, 2021 16:10
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https://twitter.com/TheOnyxPath/status/1411701334416531461?s=19
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Jul 4, 2021 16:18
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Five Eyes posted:I mentioned this to my partner, and they proposed "the vampires are out in the open, and you're playing a vampire trying to convince the public of the existence of the secret government vampire-murdering task force" Nice guy vampire: Guys, the U.S. government has a secret murder squad! Everyone: Yeah, we know about the CIA Nice guy vampire: No, but they're killing American citizens! Everyone: Again, Nice guy vampire: On U.S. soil!
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Jul 4, 2021 17:38
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"And instead of political targets they focus on murderous criminals? You expect us to believe that horseshit?"
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Jul 4, 2021 20:29
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Kavak posted:"And instead of political targets they focus on murderous criminals? You expect us to believe that horseshit?" VALKYRIE is totally targeting monsters on a political basis, though. Murder a few sex workers? That's a waste of good stormtroopers, don't bother with that guy. Better save 'em for the wealthy vampire lord who's a majority holder in offshore strategic interests.
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Jul 4, 2021 21:19
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i see you avoiding "stakeholder" and i'm judging you for it
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Jul 4, 2021 21:23
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FrozenGoldfishGod posted:Werewolf: Oddly, I think Werewolves being revealed publicly would cause the least unrest on a broad scale, for the simple reason that in their human form, they're basically undetectable, and in their various other forms, they don't really have enough solid resemblance to their human forms to be traceable to them. There'd be a huge initial spike of unrest in areas where people didn't know, but of the Big Three, they're the ones who are most likely to have most of their close acquaintances/relatives/etc. already quietly in the know. I think just introducing the spirit world as a sort of literal world of 'Your actions have consequences' would be enough to get humans to hate them. Granted it's not werewolves specifically but people aren't going to like to find this out.
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Jul 4, 2021 21:24
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FrozenGoldfishGod posted:Werewolf: Oddly, I think Werewolves being revealed publicly would cause the least unrest on a broad scale, for the simple reason that in their human form, they're basically undetectable, and in their various other forms, they don't really have enough solid resemblance to their human forms to be traceable to them. There'd be a huge initial spike of unrest in areas where people didn't know, but of the Big Three, they're the ones who are most likely to have most of their close acquaintances/relatives/etc. already quietly in the know.
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Jul 4, 2021 21:42
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Froghammer posted:The broader implication of Werewolves breaking the Masquerade is various powerful groups immediately going "Okay, these wolf-people are a loving problem and they need to get put down" Don’t help werewolves that most of their weaknesses are straight up Identical to the pop culture conception, unlike vampires, who (thanks, vlad!) had a bunch of pop culture stuff muddy the waters. GimpInBlack posted:As the developer of Geist 2e, I can honestly say that I have never played a Persona game nor watched an episode of JoJo's Bizarre Adventure. Other folks writing on the book might have drawn inspiration from them in their specific sections, of course, but if there are similarities in the overall high concept, they're coincidental. I believe you, but it’s extremely funny how geists are basically Stands/personas now, and the increased focus on krewes and social dynamics is very parallel to social links in the persona games. None of this is bad, mind, and for what it’s worth Geist 2e is easily my favorite of the CoD books by a wide, wide margin and you did a great job.
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Jul 4, 2021 23:25
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nofather posted:I think just introducing the spirit world as a sort of literal world of 'Your actions have consequences' would be enough to get humans to hate them. Granted it's not werewolves specifically but people aren't going to like to find this out. actually it just makes everyone even more powerful "Eating at McDonald's empowers a spirit that I can propitiate by burning down BKs" is frankly information that is going to lead to a lot of those nightmare fusion spirits the werewolves hate.
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Jul 5, 2021 01:10
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That's impossible. If it came out that long ago that would make MY age... oh. Oh, no. 
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Jul 5, 2021 15:16
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Does this confirm that there would have been a 30th anniversary edition were it not for V5?
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Jul 5, 2021 15:18
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moths posted:Does this confirm that there would have been a 30th anniversary edition were it not for V5? I doubt it. The V20 line covers the need for a Revised compendium with nice art, and it’s not out of print. The last substantial supplement was published in 2018.
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Jul 5, 2021 16:24
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moths posted:Does this confirm that there would have been a 30th anniversary edition were it not for V5? Nah, fiver says it's just a logo Ian created for fun.
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Jul 5, 2021 16:25
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Yeah, there are very few creative reasons for a V30. Better layout? Different art direction? Anything more than that and you're designing V6.
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Jul 5, 2021 17:59
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Relevant Tangent posted:actually it just makes everyone even more powerful Bada ba ba ba Magathin' it.
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Jul 5, 2021 18:00
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Got V20 Dark Ages recently, it's honestly really cool. I didn't get it when it was first released because I already had a pretty good Dark Ages collection, but caved in since I was feeling Dark Ages-y after playing a loy of Crusader Kings/Europa Universalis. I like what they did with the Ahrimanes, and there's a bunch of very different African bloodlines that I'm not sure how well they work with Kindred of the Ebony Kingdom.
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Jul 6, 2021 01:36
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Relevant Tangent posted:actually it just makes everyone even more powerful
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Jul 6, 2021 05:14
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I only just now found out about the game The Skeletons and now I'm thinking about how much it'd slap to have a World of Darkness attempt at it. Skeletal the Ossified or Skeletal the Gaunt or Skeletal the Ostracized or something.
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Jul 6, 2021 13:21
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Kurieg posted:Bada ba ba ba Magathin' it. 
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Jul 6, 2021 14:07
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