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How does it work for vampires that travel to always stay in night, and how large does a safe space have to be to protect them while they sleep because I feel like one of them must have some kinda fancy-rear end houseboat to make their rounds on or something
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Aug 5, 2021 06:04
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I mean, very broadly the answer is "ghouls." Vampires use mortals addicted to and empowered by vampire blood to act as their agents during the day, it's why ghouls are a fairly indispensable part of Kindred society and haven't been seriously re-examined even when either settings' vampire revolutionaries end up in charge. (Though Requiem does have a cool potential political group, the Sun-Walking Knights, where the ghouls ended up in charge.) VtM has global vampire conspiracies to help arrange travel and so it's pretty systematized if you have like, any political ties or favors to cash in. I haven't read any V5 but I've played three text-games in the timeline and it seems this is largely still true even after the Second Inquisition started hassling them. In Shadows of NY, one of those games, your entry-level job in the vampire government is basically customs agent, checking in with vampires who have been moved into the city. VtR posits this is actually a huge loving problem for vampires in general, what with the risks being so high, and it's why their political organizations tend towards autonomous groups that share ideologies and histories instead of formal organized conspiracies. In both the space can be as small as a vampire can fit into, as long as it's totally protected from sunlight. While they might dream, sort of, vampires aren't really unconscious during the day-- they're basically dead. So being comfortable during the day is basically a non-issue, you'd only have to deal with being cooped up in a coffin for like twenty seconds a night as the sun rises and then sets. No such thing as a vampire insomniac or a vampire tossing and turning in their sleep. edit: durr I totally misread your basic question, lol. You meant "Could a vampire travel such that it was always night and thus they never went to sleep," right? Yeah, they could! Requiem even has a clan that lived above the artic circle and had disciplines to like, better ration blood. Loomer, anyone try the "outrun the dawn" thing in the oWoD? Digital Osmosis fucked around with this message at 06:26 on Aug 5, 2021 |
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Aug 5, 2021 06:22
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Digital Osmosis posted:edit: durr I totally misread your basic question, lol. You meant "Could a vampire travel such that it was always night and thus they never went to sleep," right? Yeah, sorry for the poor phrasing, I could have made that a lot clearer.
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Aug 5, 2021 06:59
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Yeah, there were a few Ventrue who tried it on a jet IIRC, but I can't be hosed to check if I'm remembering it or making it up so... grain of salt on that one. new Promethean type just dropped
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Aug 5, 2021 08:19
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Traveling an entire time zone in the time it takes to escape sunrise in that zone is not a sustainable thing, is the big problem. A plane will eventually run out of fuel, and anything else is even less feasible.
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Aug 5, 2021 18:14
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What do the vampires at the bottom of the ocean do?
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Aug 5, 2021 18:16
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Rand Brittain posted:What do the vampires at the bottom of the ocean do?
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Aug 5, 2021 18:35
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Attack magic dolphins, if I recall Blood-Dimmed Tides correctly.
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Aug 5, 2021 18:41
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It’s probably a bit out of date since it was one of the very first supplements (the Cacophony would have changed things a fair bit for example) but VTR has an entire supplement about traveling vampires called Nomads. Also contains the first write up of a Strix (the Unholy).
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Aug 5, 2021 19:07
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The Unholy wasn't a strix, she was just a very old, very inhuman vampire with monstrous birdlike deformities. They hadn't come up with the idea of the strix yet. She gets revisited much later in Night Horrors: Immortal Sinners, where she is also established to have been consort to Vlad Tepes.
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Aug 5, 2021 19:55
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I ran a Vampire game once where one of the PCs played a reawoken-from-torpor elder who didn't remember her past and I decided her past was that she was the Unholy. She didn't consort with Dracula directly but she did consort with the Brides of Dracula (Anoushka, Mara, and Lisette) who were the ones who actually perfected and promulgated the Coils on the back of Vlad's reputation after he fell to revenancy during their development.
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Aug 6, 2021 06:20
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Rand Brittain posted:What do the vampires at the bottom of the ocean do? Wait
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Aug 6, 2021 06:54
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Okay, but I meant, like, do they fall asleep when it's "day" on top of the ocean even if they're miles away from seeing the sun? Meanwhile, all the V5 books on DTRPG just updated to remove Modiphius' name and replace it with Renegade Studios.
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Aug 6, 2021 07:22
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The impression I got from that is yes, they would. It has nothing to do with seeing the sun, its just "sun facing side of the planet? Time to nap it off." Even there they do eventually get a bit loopy from sleep deprivation since vampires don't a complete pass on enjoying the long polar nights.
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Aug 6, 2021 07:39
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Rand Brittain posted:Okay, but I meant, like, do they fall asleep when it's "day" on top of the ocean even if they're miles away from seeing the sun? I think Renegade announced they were rereleasing the 4 core V5 books with updates this year since they have the license, so I assume that means they rolled the various eratta updates and the Xmas update thing from last year into the corebook. Fingers crossed their Sabbat and SI guides are good because I've got both of those preordered.
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Aug 6, 2021 15:37
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joylessdivision posted:I think Renegade announced they were rereleasing the 4 core V5 books with updates this year since they have the license, so I assume that means they rolled the various eratta updates and the Xmas update thing from last year into the corebook. Fingers crossed their Sabbat and SI guides are good because I've got both of those preordered. At this point I have whiplash from the sheer number of companies who have worked on V5. It has to be a record for how many different companies have been the "first party" for a given edition of an RPG, holy hell. (I'm excluding Onyx Path, who did second party poo poo comparable to Paizo for 3e D&D.)
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Aug 6, 2021 21:51
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Rand Brittain posted:What do the vampires at the bottom of the ocean do? Wait for the great return.
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Aug 7, 2021 08:40
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I love reading through the old WoD books and coming across gems like this:
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Aug 7, 2021 20:05
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I've said before, but Changeling: The Lost really reads differently in a post-Epstein world.
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Aug 17, 2021 06:12
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Ghost Leviathan posted:I've said before, but Changeling: The Lost really reads differently in a post-Epstein world. None of the Gentry were ever President, though.
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Aug 17, 2021 07:50
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Ghost Leviathan posted:I've said before, but Changeling: The Lost really reads differently in a post-Epstein world. I mean, it has always been pretty directly a game about abused children.
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Aug 17, 2021 12:41
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Wasn't there also a CCG? I don't remember that explicitly being about abused kids.
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Aug 17, 2021 13:27
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I think folks are conflating the two Changelings a little bit. Changeling: The Dreaming (aka the World of Darkness one, from the 90s) is very much about kids (not specifically abused people). That game had a CCG, called Arcadia. Changeling: The Lost (aka the Chronicles of Darkness one, with its second edition from a few years ago) is very much about abuse survivors (not specifically kids), and did not have a CCG.
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Aug 17, 2021 13:40
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GimpInBlack posted:I think folks are conflating the two Changelings a little bit. Yeah, it's Arcadia I'm remembering. It was fairly neat but I could never find anyone to play it with. Thanks for the clarification!
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Aug 17, 2021 16:45
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Rubix Squid posted:The impression I got from that is yes, they would. It has nothing to do with seeing the sun, its just "sun facing side of the planet? Time to nap it off." Even there they do eventually get a bit loopy from sleep deprivation since vampires don't a complete pass on enjoying the long polar nights. * - Vlad III of Wallachia, recorded by F. Saberhagen
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Aug 17, 2021 17:23
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Alright, starting my Fae in the Iron Mask chronicle in two weeks! Got five characters, 3 of which gave me very elaborate backgrounds full of characters I can fit into my existing framework. Hopefully everyone has fun. I gave it the punny name (in french) of "De Cape et D'Épines". (The swashbuckling genr ein french is known as "De Cape et d'Épée", meaning cape and swords, and I replaced sword with thorn)
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Aug 19, 2021 02:48
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MonsieurChoc posted:Alright, starting my Fae in the Iron Mask chronicle in two weeks! Got five characters, 3 of which gave me very elaborate backgrounds full of characters I can fit into my existing framework. Hopefully everyone has fun. My two years of high school French failed me so I had to translate the title and it owns.
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Aug 19, 2021 15:31
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FirstAidKite posted:How does it work for vampires that travel to always stay in night, and how large does a safe space have to be to protect them while they sleep because I feel like one of them must have some kinda fancy-rear end houseboat to make their rounds on or something They stay awake the entire time until the sun rises because they're not dead people they're a meat-puppet to the Blood who think they're dead people. If they go hide out in the bathyal zone of the ocean they can exist, awake the entire time, until they decide to come to the surface. They'll need less blood because they won't need to spend a point to rise every sundown. They'll also go completely insane from the lack of contact. A safe space that doesn't let the light in can be as small as you can contort yourself into. A house boat is fine until someone learns where you lay your head (vampires who think they sleep when they die for the day are lying to themselves) and lights it on fire.
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Aug 19, 2021 16:20
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Rubix Squid posted:The impression I got from that is yes, they would. It has nothing to do with seeing the sun, its just "sun facing side of the planet? Time to nap it off." Even there they do eventually get a bit loopy from sleep deprivation since vampires don't a complete pass on enjoying the long polar nights. Vampires don't have sleep deprivation. They don't get fatigued outside of magical edge cases. They're dead or they're at 100%. The real problem is that embracing that further removes them from Humanity.
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Aug 19, 2021 16:26
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MonsieurChoc posted:Alright, starting my Fae in the Iron Mask chronicle in two weeks! Got five characters, 3 of which gave me very elaborate backgrounds full of characters I can fit into my existing framework. Hopefully everyone has fun. This is such a wonderful game concept. Please post game stories if you have the time!
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Aug 19, 2021 16:39
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Strange Cares posted:This is such a wonderful game concept. Please post game stories if you have the time! Is emptyquoting still prob-able? edit: thought of something of substance to ask! MonsieurChoc, what courts are your PCs with? Because that will be their assumed initial take on the Fae in the Cold Iron Mask, right?
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Aug 19, 2021 18:20
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RIght now, I've got 1 Winter, 3 Autumn and 1 Summer. Since the whole thing is gonna be a four-way fight between the Summer King, the Autumn Cardinal, loyalists/privateers and the Malleus Maleficarum, this should be interesting to see. They gave me pretty elaborate backgrounds, with a bunch of new NPCs I'm glad to use, including a mushroom themed Autmn Spymistress and a bunch of loyalists/privateers to fight. One of the players made their characters a Bourbon, a distant cousin of the King, which could be pretty interesting, especially since the Summer King (claims that he) is one of the many bastards of Henri IV.
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Aug 19, 2021 20:40
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I've got a friend who might wanna run a game, is into sci-fi a bit more than fantasy but doesn't want to alienate his wife who loves magic stuff. Do you think I could successfully pitch Mage to him? If so, what version and edition? I know very little other than it's WoD and it's like fighting over consensus reality.
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Aug 23, 2021 01:21
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Nehru the Damaja posted:I've got a friend who might wanna run a game, is into sci-fi a bit more than fantasy but doesn't want to alienate his wife who loves magic stuff. Do you think I could successfully pitch Mage to him? If so, what version and edition? I know very little other than it's WoD and it's like fighting over consensus reality. It might be easier to sell Awakening mage (2e) if you want to blend in science fiction easily. No need to mess around with consensus reality or even really argue about casting spells at all. Just science fiction + easy enough to use magic system that will easily cover what you’d need. We mixed in a fair amount of science fiction themed stuff in my game and it worked without issue. Can’t even imagine playing Ascension smoothly while also dealing with rockets and advanced technology. If they were already familiar with it, then sure, but it’s not an easy game to just pick up these days and spellcasting is not as easy to deal with.
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Aug 23, 2021 02:41
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Nehru the Damaja posted:I've got a friend who might wanna run a game, is into sci-fi a bit more than fantasy but doesn't want to alienate his wife who loves magic stuff. Do you think I could successfully pitch Mage to him? If so, what version and edition? I know very little other than it's WoD and it's like fighting over consensus reality. You're talking about Mage: the Ascension, the one that originally started in the 90's. If you do go with it, definitely grab the 2nd edition or Revised (3rd) edition. The 20th Anniversary edition, on top of being a 700-page monster and costing $100 new at the cheapest, is just generally kind of bad. There's a lot of Deep Internet Opinions, but despite any opinions to the contrary, the basic premise is that human belief can be guided to shape reality to some pretty great degree. So, a millennium ago, magic worked because everyone thought it did. Nowadays, magic is sort-of dying out, but it's still around, and those who come to understand magic's truth through the old Traditions (many of which are portrayed somewhat racist-ly), are fighting against the authoritarian control of the Technocracy who practice the more widely-acceptable science-style magic. (There are some science-y factions of good guy mages, too.) Overt magic meets resistance from the reality that has been bent towards oppressive normie-ism, and it meets even greater resistance when actual normies witness it, possibly unleashing hellish side-effects known as Paradox. The hyper-tech of the evil scientists is also not wholly immune, since they are also fundamentally a form of magic and super science isn't totally believed in either. Most of the stuff involving the Traditions is along the lines of enclaves of Gandalfs and goths preserving/exploiting faerie glens and dragons that have survived thus far, though again there are some good-guy tech-wizards. All the more down-to-earth occultists who get super hosed up in Neil Gaiman's stuff? Them, mostly. The Technocracy's main faces are MIB and Gordon Gecko, but their less foreground-y compatriots include mad bio-scientists, roboticists who worship the floating world-corpse of the biggest robot that ever existed, and space adventurers who use their Terminators and Star Destroyers to fight the Real True Threat (Cthulhu) around the rings of Saturn. If this sounds like a huge mess that might be impossible to get a handle on without spending 10 years arguing about it on the internet: It is! But at its best it's also exactly as fun as van-art wizard fighting Johnny Mnemonic might sound, which is probably why so many of us still argue about it on the internet well after 10 years. Even at its best, the system's kind of poo poo, but as long as you and your players don't really care about balance and mechanical cohesion, the broad and combinatory way magic is handled is great fun. Mage: the Awakening is the newer total reboot of the franchise that replaced Ascension for a time starting in 2004 (now they both sort of run concurrently, but both lines have glacial development time lines). Its magic system is 1000% an improvement, but it ties in very closely with its setting premise, which can include techno-wizards but is much more focused on a sort of John Constantine/Invisibles vibe. Unlike the various iterations of Ascension, the 2nd edition is manifestly superior to its 1st edition, at least as far as magic is concerned. If the setting material in the book is easily ignored by you and your friend, you might as well go with Awakening, since in either case Everything is Magic, Just Some of It Looks Like Ray-Guns. That Old Tree fucked around with this message at 02:50 on Aug 23, 2021 |
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Aug 23, 2021 02:47
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joylessdivision posted:Yeah in 1e book Mithras gets talked about and statted out (pretty sure he's broken as gently caress) but they say he's either in torpor in one of his hidden havens since the blitz or he's awake and just keeping it on the dl because Vampires. Nah, as one of the first 4th gen methuselahs to be stated out he ends up being woefully underpowered compared to the rest because of power creep.
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Aug 23, 2021 03:10
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If I had to pick, I'd probably advise people to start with Mage: the Ascension 2e, since you can now get that in a high-quality PDF as of last year. It has less controversial metaplot poo poo and is also a better overall introduction to the setting, since Revised is missing the Technocracy writeups in the core. Also, yes, M20 is just completely terrible in all the ways Ascension was ever bad while also inventing some impressive new ways to be terrible without really improving on anything the way all the other 20s did, at least a bit.
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Aug 23, 2021 06:22
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Rand Brittain posted:If I had to pick, I'd probably advise people to start with Mage: the Ascension 2e, since you can now get that in a high-quality PDF as of last year. I only ever read M20 and really enjoyed it, though admittedly I've never played it. What makes 2nd Edition better?
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Aug 23, 2021 11:32
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Charlz Guybon posted:What makes 2nd Edition better? The General Life-Cycle of TTRPGs, by Me: 1st edition: Cool new setting, cool new concept, something about it is pretty neat. The rules are a bit bare bones. There are glaring issues that the writers/playtesters didn't notice, because they're playing the game 'as intended' as opposed to 'as written.' There are glaring missing things; your fantasy world has a class for noble and holy paladins, but not just a mounted knight, for example. The world building is minimum. 1st edition supplements: This is where stuff that didn't make it into the core rules comes out. Glaring deficiencies are identified and filled in. Missing systems are written as 'optional' rules. Player options are expanded; new races/classes/power sets/whatever. The world starts to get fleshed out a little bit. 2nd edition: Oh yeah. Everything that was learned in first edition gets thrown in. Stupid stuff is cut out. The world is more fleshed out and 'natural' based on play and feedback. The core system is fully playable, covers all the basics, and is a nice, self-contained system. At most, you'll need three books to play this version entirely happily; player's guide, master's guide, and maybe a separate monster manual. The system is built to be extensible, open-ended, and give you all sorts of options for playstyles. 2nd edition supplements: Oh yeah. poo poo gets wild. Every little corner of the world gets it's own splat. Every race gets a splat. Every class gets a splat. Every individual rules system gets it's own deep-dive splat. Sure, you can play a fighter, but buy the Complete Fighter's Handbook, and now you've got so many options for playing all sorts of different fighters. Hell, philosophical concepts in the game get their own splats. Want to center your campaign around down-and-dirty street urchins? There's a splat for that. Want to play reality-bending arch-mages? There's a splat for that. Want to play as 'the bad guys?' There's probably an entire line of splats for that. Want to play in a completely different world? Take your pick, we have box sets aplenty. Want to logically extend in game ideas? Hey, maybe the guys who jack into their cars via rigger decks could jack into any sort of mechanical machine, and now you have security riggers who 'inhabit' the buildings they're guarding. Maybe these splats are all basically compatible, maybe you're playing RIFTS and every splat overpowers the previous one. But it's a glorious time for the line! 3rd edition: Man, there's a lot of cruft built up. There's two roads games here usually take. If the original designers are still around, 3rd edition is 2nd edition plus all the stuff that was majorly in a splat. Shadowrun, I'm looking at you. If the property has changed creative hands, you get a hard reboot. AD&D, I'm looking at you. You probably have a brand-new system, a brand-new world-state, and a weird combination of 'back to basics' stripping down of stuff, right along side a 'you can do anything' rules bloat. 3rd edition supplements: There usually aren't all that many. The 2nd edition stuff covered most of it, can can either be easily converted, or there will be a conversion system. 4th edition: This is one of two things. If 3rd edition was an extension of the existing systems, 4th edition is the 'cleanup' edition. Again, see Shadowrun. If there was a reboot, well, this is probably a corrective re-reboot. Hello, D&D. 4th edition supplements: These tend to be few and far between. 5th edition, or, the timeskip: The game has been around long enough now that people who played 2nd edition as kids are now designing the game. The 'feel' of the game is more old-school, but the design is often very new-school; rules light, ease of play, dice get out of the way of story telling. Gone are the days of doing algebra to figure out a target number, twenty pages of lookup tables, and corner case rules aplenty. The game will take one of two approaches: one is 'reboot, but classic feel,' AKA D&D5e. The other is the 20th Anniversary Edition style door-stopper that tries to encompass the entire prior gameline. Now, that all said, any given person's 'favorite' version will probably be the version they grew up playing. But objectively speaking, for a lot of games, the 2nd edition core rules are, indeed, often the 'best' to just sit down and start playing with.
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Aug 23, 2021 14:52
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Honestly, I'm struggling to think of games that really works for. Like, for Shadowrun, I wouldn't ever recommend 2nd over 3rd or 4th. I know more people like 2nd Ed Ascension for the fluff, but I felt Revised was just a smoother game overall.
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Aug 23, 2021 17:41
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