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TheKingslayer posted:I need to go back and read the old Reckoning books. I remember them being a lot of fun because of how weird they were and how deranged some of the imbued were in the forum posts excerpts. Yeah, some of them are among the best books just to read. The Walking Dead (no relation) is great, Creed Book: Wayward, Hunter's Survival Guide, some others I'm forgetting. They even started throwing curveballs at what supernatural critters were what which felt like proto-nWoD which could be a lot looser towards that thing.
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Oct 14, 2021 23:04
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Anyone in this thread who can tolerate long monologues should watch Midnight Mass. I cannot elaborate without spoilers to like... episode 2 onwards. WoD/CofD-compliant Catholic vampire!
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Oct 14, 2021 23:32
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bewilderment posted:Anyone in this thread who can tolerate long monologues should watch Midnight Mass.
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Oct 14, 2021 23:33
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And you know what? Anyone who can't tolerate long monologues should work on themselves and then watch Midnight Mass.
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Oct 15, 2021 00:19
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Ferrinus posted:And you know what? Anyone who can't tolerate long monologues should work on themselves and then watch Midnight Mass. sometimes i really hate how much i agree with most Ferrinus posts. this is not one of those times. Loved the creepy, slow, melancholy character development of the first half of Midnight Mass. Loved the petal-to-the-metal insanity and grand guignol spectacle of the second half of Midnight Mass. Can see how they might be stuck together awkwardly enough to bother some people who are a fan of one but not the other but I loved the ride and the audacity of it all. Also, recently binged "Lodge 49" and it had a shocking amount of nMage vibes. Also, like, a genuinely great weird entertaining little show, but it took the western occult tradition seriously, grappled with what belief in a symbolic truth would look like, and captured the drama over some petty bullshit in a way that kept making me think of Mage.
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Oct 15, 2021 07:36
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Oh, yeah, if any of you haven't seen Lodge 49 you should go fix that like, now. Like drop what you're doing and do it now, now. It's easily in my top 5 shows of all time. EDIT: You should also watch Strange Angel. It was a powerful couple of TV seasons for Mystic Order television. The two are very different tonally but if anyone's on the fence, Strange Angel is a heavily fictionalized and stylistically gorgeous account of Actual Sex Wizard Rocket Scientist Anarchist Jack Parsons (the closest man to an actual worthy successor to the Great Beast there ever was), his discovery of Thelema, and how it overlapped with and was closely interwoven with his involvement in the US rocketry industry and war effort of WW2. Loomer fucked around with this message at 09:54 on Oct 15, 2021 |
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Oct 15, 2021 09:49
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Loomer posted:Oh, yeah, if any of you haven't seen Lodge 49 you should go fix that like, now. Like drop what you're doing and do it now, now. It's easily in my top 5 shows of all time. Does it involve the part where good Ole LRH stole his wife? Not to poo poo on Parsons, but it's pretty hilarious.
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Oct 15, 2021 14:55
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No, it was unfortunately cancelled before it got that far. He and Jack's magical operations would've been part of Season 3, and boy, that would've been interesting because it involved Jack jerking off while ol' Ronnie watched and took notes (sex magic is rarely as sexy as it sounds) to conjure an elemental bride, who... kind of actually appeared, and was a brilliant and tortured artist who went on to found a cult of drugged-out lunatics who were planning to breed a race of moon-children to reign over mankind during the Aeon of Horus. So, y'know. The whole thing with ol El Ron was swings and roundabouts on the whole.
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Oct 15, 2021 15:00
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Honestly, I’m just kinda amazed at your damning with faint praise. Worthy successor to the Great Beast, like, why would you do that to poor Jack. (Yes I know Crowley had a better head on his shoulders about Hubbard, but still, I’m not really ever gonna sympathize with a dude whose only reason for turning against Hitler was the Nazis banning his favorite occult society.)
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Oct 15, 2021 15:02
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Oh, Crowley was a garbage person and a terrible leader. I just mean a worthy successor esoterically, since on that level Crowley was actually quite talented. It's the same way I routinely have to write approvingly of Carl Schmitt's work (and sadly, academic convention prohibits me from ending every footnote citing him with 'Nazi Bastard!')
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Oct 15, 2021 15:18
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Mors Rattus posted:Honestly, I’m just kinda amazed at your damning with faint praise. Worthy successor to the Great Beast, like, why would you do that to poor Jack. RIP W.B. Yeats, who once kicked Crowley down a flight of stairs for being a creep.
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Oct 15, 2021 15:21
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Loomer posted:Oh, Crowley was a garbage person and a terrible leader. I just mean a worthy successor esoterically, since on that level Crowley was actually quite talented. It's the same way I routinely have to write approvingly of Carl Schmitt's work (and sadly, academic convention prohibits me from ending every footnote citing him with 'Nazi Bastard!') As my teacher told me, there's a reason most actual occultists tend to react to anyone seriously quoting Crowley with 'lol Crowley', while quietly absorbing some of the more usable ideas he put out there. Back on-topic for the thread, I had an idea while running a one-shot recently for handling combat that isn't against an actually meaningful NPC: I just set an arbitrary threshold for successes (ie., 'you need at least one success to win this fight'), and then have them roll a relevant combat skill - basically, just treat it like any other skill roll. Obviously, when they're dealing with an important enemy or group of enemies, then you bust out the full combat rules, but the players decided that since this was a one-shot, gently caress the Masquerade and gently caress trying to be stealthy getting into an enemy's stronghold when said enemy knows they're coming, and it would have been a lot smoother if I'd just implemented this at the table for stuff like dealing with the doorway guards, who were basically no actual threat. Basically, the Blades in the Dark resolution system seems like it would work REALLY well (specifically, the parts about effect and position), I just thought I'd see what anyone else thought before bolting it on the next time I'm asked to run a CoD game. And to forestall the inevitable 'Why not just run Blades, then?', the players aren't interested in the setting/system at all.
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Oct 15, 2021 15:28
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GimpInBlack posted:RIP W.B. Yeats, who once kicked Crowley down a flight of stairs for being a creep.
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Oct 15, 2021 15:38
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HoboTech posted:To clarify, these guys also refer to DnD derisively as a "beer and pretzels" game and don't seem think it's possible to actually roleplay while playing it. Again, maybe I misunderstood them, but I don't think so. They sound dumb, why bother listening to them?
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Oct 15, 2021 15:47
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GimpInBlack posted:RIP W.B. Yeats, who once kicked Crowley down a flight of stairs for being a creep. FrozenGoldfishGod posted:As my teacher told me, there's a reason most actual occultists tend to react to anyone seriously quoting Crowley with 'lol Crowley', while quietly absorbing some of the more usable ideas he put out there. Well, barring a lot of the ones in the OTO and A.:A.:., yes. Crowley is honestly tricky to cut out like that - his influence on modern Western esotericism is so significant that no matter what you're doing, someone you're reading or working with has picked up his ideas and run with them to at least some extent (I use Skinner's revision of Liber 777 constantly, which itself was a revision of Westcott's version, and so on down the line). At the same time, a lot of his best ideas have to be really harshly treated because he was, in addition to knowing his stuff, an inveterate liar, heroin addict, terrible poet, and self-hating Christian desperate to justify his desire to gently caress other dudes. Despite that, even Thelema has a great deal of good in it for those prepared to do the work (though, and I suppose this backs up your teacher, the best way to do that is to stay the gently caress away from the OTO unless you're blessed with an actually decent local bunch.) That's actually part of why I think Jack was the best possible successor to him. He would've been an antidote to a lot of Crowley's bullshit had he had a chance to take the reins. Unfortunately Germer and Grant wound up being the rulers instead and we got the modern OTO that's still struggling with the legacy of Crowley's poo poo. Anyone curious about this and just how the modern Western esoteric landscape evolved should grab a copy of Drury's Stealing Fire from Heaven. It's got some issues but it's a solid introduction and overview, especially since it doesn't neglect Rosaleen Norton's role.
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Oct 15, 2021 15:57
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FrozenGoldfishGod posted:
Sure, it is a good idea. CofD and WoD have a lot of legacy bullshit, but treating combat encounters like other skill tests is a piece of contemporary design that fits in smoothly and spares you from slowing down the game with the downright miserable combat in the system.
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Oct 15, 2021 16:14
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GimpInBlack posted:RIP W.B. Yeats, who once kicked Crowley down a flight of stairs for being a creep. The Midnight Society's take on Crowley is hilarious. A loud and dumb alpha jock bro who is terrified of Yeats. quote:Crowley: anyway let's just some motherfuckin magyyyyick going!
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Oct 15, 2021 16:29
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GimpInBlack posted:RIP W.B. Yeats, who once kicked Crowley down a flight of stairs for being a creep. lmao hell yeah, also how am i just hearing about this for the first time
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Oct 15, 2021 16:41
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What rough beast catches these hands, loser
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Oct 15, 2021 16:55
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GimpInBlack posted:RIP W.B. Yeats, who once kicked Crowley down a flight of stairs for being a creep. Hahahahahahaha loving owned. Seems Crowley's center (of gravity) couldn't hold.
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Oct 15, 2021 16:56
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CaptainRat posted:What rough beast catches these hands, loser lol
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Oct 15, 2021 17:06
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Page 213: MageChat, but not the mages you were expecting
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Oct 15, 2021 17:40
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Our 'actual' magicians just having weird slap fights and being knocked down stairs instead of resorting to the ARTS ARCANE feels very Unknown Armies because control of entropy is nice and all but so is knowing how to box.
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Oct 15, 2021 18:02
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FrozenGoldfishGod posted:
This is down and dirty combat in CoD
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Oct 15, 2021 20:55
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Loomer posted:No, it was unfortunately cancelled before it got that far. He and Jack's magical operations would've been part of Season 3, and boy, that would've been interesting because it involved Jack jerking off while ol' Ronnie watched and took notes (sex magic is rarely as sexy as it sounds) to conjure an elemental bride, who... kind of actually appeared, and was a brilliant and tortured artist who went on to found a cult of drugged-out lunatics who were planning to breed a race of moon-children to reign over mankind during the Aeon of Horus. If I remember the Last Podcast on the Left series on Hubbard correctly wasn't there also a boat theft somewhere in there
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Oct 15, 2021 22:54
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GimpInBlack posted:RIP W.B. Yeats, who once kicked Crowley down a flight of stairs for being a creep. W.B. YEET /leave stage
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Oct 15, 2021 23:11
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Blockhouse posted:If I remember the Last Podcast on the Left series on Hubbard correctly wasn't there also a boat theft somewhere in there Probably? It's been a minute since I listened to that series but it might have been in Going Clear. Dawgstar posted:Our 'actual' magicians just having weird slap fights and being knocked down stairs instead of resorting to the ARTS ARCANE feels very Unknown Armies because control of entropy is nice and all but so is knowing how to box. It's because most "magicians" are fat/bone thin nerds. Yawgmoth posted:/tap microphone 
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Oct 15, 2021 23:39
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L. Ronnie did bilk Parsons out of $20K with some yacht resale scam and also stole his girlfriend (while married at the time) when they then fled to Florida.
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Oct 16, 2021 00:49
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…where the pair then tried to flee the country on a boat. Jack Parsons decided to stop them by per of ring a furious masturbation ritual to command his goddess to smite them. Hubbard was forced to return to port by a storm at approximately the same time this was happening.
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Oct 16, 2021 01:20
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joylessdivision posted:It's because most "magicians" are fat/bone thin nerds. It's true. We aren't a particularly well-adjusted, gym-going bunch on the whole. Mors Rattus posted:…where the pair then tried to flee the country on a boat. Jack Parsons decided to stop them by per of ring a furious masturbation ritual to command his goddess to smite them. Yeah, the timing of it was great. His last few years were full of a lot of coincidences involving him doing a ritual, and more or less what he wanted then happening. The big one was Cameron turning up, though. That's his mad elemental wife, who he, again for everyone keeping track at home, he conjured by basically jerking off a ton in front of L Ron Hubbard (after he stole his girlfriend, before they stole his money and fled to the sea) while chanting and while America's premiere nutjob religion founder took detailed notes. The idea there was to birth a spirit of unbridled sexual liberation (and thereby end the other bigotries and pains afflicting society), and up popped Cameron a few weeks later. A few weeks after that she was pregnant, though she had a miscarriage. Cameron is the one who later went to on to found a multi-racial cult in the Mexican desert that wanted to breed a race of moon-children to rule the bold new aeon, and while initially she was quite convinced Jack's magic was silly nonsense she turned into quite a practitioner of her own form of it later in life and eventually accepted that she was the incarnation of Babalon. And again, an astonishing artist in a sort of deranged style that's a bit like Goya after doing a lot of Mescaline. We might as well finish our Parsons story with the mystery of his death, for anyone who doesn't know it. In 1952, Parsons died in a rather nasty explosion in his home workshop as he was preparing (ostensibly) to move to Mexico for a business trip. The official story is that he dropped a large tin of fulminating mercury he was using to prime a new batch of explosives for a film, it detonated on impact, caused a second explosion that blew his arm clean off and wounded him so badly he died within forty-five minutes. He had a closed casket funeral and his body was never officially identified. Naturally, this spawns plenty of conspiracy theories. Parsons was a maverick chemist with a simultaneous tendency towards unsafe working practices (large barrels of gunpowder just lying about in his lab, etc) and a meticulous and safety-conscious attitude towards the actual chemical operations (despite mixing all his chemicals by hand from a young age, he still had all his fingers! Until, y'know. He didn't.), so plenty of people struggle with the idea he died of an accident. The leading alternative theories are Suicide (but if that was the case, he'd probably have tried to set the mercury off where it'd take his head, not his arm) or murder. And who killed him? Well, that depends on who you ask, because at the time he died he was involved in a little light treason. He wasn't moving to Mexico. He was moving to Israel, where he was going to teach them his rocket scientist skills and possibly find a new sponsor for his work after being driven into exile from the JPL as a security risk (he was, in addition to a sex wizard, also the host of a large bunch of artists, anarchists, and other dissidents in his mansion (gimme a time machine and I'd pay it a visit, that's for sure), who was boot-legging nitroglycerin on the side and associated with communists. Also, he may or may not have held an orgy at JPL. The McCarthy Era wasn't a great time to be doing any of those things.) and from Hughes Aerospace for similar reasons, but this time involving sending classified documents (which he'd authored himself, in fairness) out to be transcribed privately and sent to the Israelis. He did all this quite openly, so he wasn't exactly a spy, but it brought the hammer down hard. So, who killed him if it wasn't an accident or suicide? Well, he had a few enemies - a corrupt policeman he'd helped send to jail for killing a man with a car bomb and who'd literally just gotten out of jail, Howard Hughes (that whole corporate espionage deal), the FBI, and maybe the American government more generally (again, that whole 'espionage' deal...) Take your pick. You can spin a good theory out of any of them. Maybe Jack was killed to keep the father of modern rocketry from lending his services to Israel, at that time untested and unproven, and without the CIA-Mossad alliance of 54 to make it a palatable prospect. Maybe it was petty and personal revenge. The third leading theory is he blew himself up trying to create a homonculus, though why he'd be using explosives for that process is unclear. But I guess when you're a rocket scientist maybe every problem can be solved with more rockets?
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Oct 16, 2021 03:27
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Loomer posted:The third leading theory is he blew himself up trying to create a homonculus, though why he'd be using explosives for that process is unclear. But I guess when you're a rocket scientist maybe every problem can be solved with more rockets?
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Oct 16, 2021 04:10
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Loomer posted:maybe every problem can be solved with more rockets?
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Oct 16, 2021 04:48
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Loomer posted:It's true. We aren't a particularly well-adjusted, gym-going bunch on the whole. And I say it with affection because I too am a skinny nerd who has read books by weirdos who wanted to get laid and be wizards. And I'm not talking about fantasy novels 
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Oct 16, 2021 05:24
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My favorite Jack Parsons story is the time he and Hubbard went into the desert to And it worked
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Oct 16, 2021 15:06
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Froghammer posted:My favorite Jack Parsons story is the time he and Hubbard went into the desert to To be fair, it was the early 60s and strange women willing to bang weirdos (who had drugs) was the style at the time.
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Oct 16, 2021 15:44
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Marjorie Cameron's life itself is worth a bit of a read on if you haven't. She had quite the ride herself, though one with an enormous amount of tragedy both before and after Jack died. If she was the vessel of Babalon, then no wonder the new age of liberation has come with such terrible companions. Also Dud from Lodge 49 is clearly what happens when a Hollow One (no they don't all have to be goths some can be surfer dudes) joins the Order of Hermes
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Oct 16, 2021 15:59
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The guy who could literally wear a shirt saying 'Yes, I Am A Rocket Wizard'
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Oct 16, 2021 17:48
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so, a thought, or series of thoughts, invaded my head recently and the dread specter of magechat took grip of me, so here is my rambling bit of non-sense cosmological speculation for nMage: When the exarchs ascended, they did not merely take control of existing symbols, they broke the ability for any other symbols to exist. Not on purpose, but bit suited them just fine that it happened. This created a stagnant world locked in pseudo-stasis, ensuring that the only rulebook in play was the one they already won with; whose rules allowed a winner to remain such perpetually. The options to get up and go play a different game or to even houserule the existing one were removed. Quasi-relatedly, the way mages view symbols, supernal or otherwise, is flawed. Symbols lack meaning without a context in which to exist, they are void of meaning until actively observed; like a quantum state being resolved. There is no "supernal truth" because the supernal is still just symbols, granted meaning by the context in which they exist, truth cannot exist in the symbols alone. The symbols are part of a larger system that truly comprises what might be viewed as "truth". Following from this, the notion of supernal truth is itself a trap created by a broken reality and/or devised by the exarchs, because it fundamentally reinforces the context in which they were already the winners and will always remain the winners. In conclusion: the Free Council is right but not for the reasons most of them likely think, the Fallen World is incredibly important because it is the context in which the symbols are existing; it is not a shadow cast on the wall, it is the symbols and the space between the symbols, and the interpretation of the symbols (and all the things that don't seem to fit neatly into supernal categorization are because they derive from non-supernal symbols and/or are so transformed by context that trying to view them through only a lens of supernal symbology falls apart). The problem is not that it fell, because that is a fundamental misunderstanding of how it changed state, it is that it became largely static. You could even tie this into the God Machine and say that it was once the process by which reality as we know it integrated new symbols and broke incredibly badly when that stopped being possible. This is entirely me bullshitting and there's not really anything in the text to support it, but also nothing that really shuts down the notions either.
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Oct 22, 2021 16:43
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Developed a homebrew Predator Type that wasn't covered for V5: Culler You feed only from the elderly and infirm, "culling the herd," as it were. Due to their frail nature, your victims rarely survive the feeding process, and the quality of their blood is such that even when you drink your fill it's rarely satiating. These mortals don't have long to live, after all, so what's the loss of a few meager weeks, or months, or years with poor quality of life? - Add a specialty: Awareness (Illness) or Medicine (Diagnosis) - Gain one dot of Auspex or Oblivion - Lose one dot of Humanity - Gain the Feeding Merit: (o) Bloodhound - Gain the Feeding Flaw: (o) Methuselah's Thirst - Spend three dots in a medical Ally Fuzz fucked around with this message at 02:11 on Oct 23, 2021 |
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Oct 22, 2021 20:44
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Obligatum VII posted:Quasi-relatedly, the way mages view symbols, supernal or otherwise, is flawed. Symbols lack meaning without a context in which to exist, they are void of meaning until actively observed; like a quantum state being resolved. There is no "supernal truth" because the supernal is still just symbols, granted meaning by the context in which they exist, truth cannot exist in the symbols alone. The symbols are part of a larger system that truly comprises what might be viewed as "truth". Following from this, the notion of supernal truth is itself a trap created by a broken reality and/or devised by the exarchs, because it fundamentally reinforces the context in which they were already the winners and will always remain the winners. In conclusion: the Free Council is right but not for the reasons most of them likely think, the Fallen World is incredibly important because it is the context in which the symbols are existing; it is not a shadow cast on the wall, it is the symbols and the space between the symbols, and the interpretation of the symbols (and all the things that don't seem to fit neatly into supernal categorization are because they derive from non-supernal symbols and/or are so transformed by context that trying to view them through only a lens of supernal symbology falls apart). The problem is not that it fell, because that is a fundamental misunderstanding of how it changed state, it is that it became largely static. You could even tie this into the God Machine and say that it was once the process by which reality as we know it integrated new symbols and broke incredibly badly when that stopped being possible. It's caves all the way up!
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Oct 23, 2021 01:48
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