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Ferrinus posted:My theory is that you actually do like the fact that the oWoD is characterized by a baseline level of anti-semitism that the vigorous purging of some specific Swede can paper over but not actually correct, and it's slowly consuming you like the beating of some hideous heart. dude, what the gently caress
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Apr 8, 2022 21:39
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ZearothK posted:dude, what the gently caress It's like how David Icke emphatically insists that he's writing about LITERAL lizard-men and not using the reptoids as a stand-in for anything else. I believe the guy, but it doesn't matter.
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Apr 8, 2022 21:45
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Hey. You know why I think Fuzz is always too defensive of V5? Because this thread is firmly CofD territory because V5's launch was that bad, and anyone who keeps leaning into a thread that's against an edition by default to defend it is going to be at best kind of a defensive weirdo. Don't make this worse than it has to be, christ.
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Apr 8, 2022 21:49
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Defenestrategy posted:I had a player take this to mean that he could basically use level 1 spheres , perception, freely so long as the answer just popped into his head. He uses entropy 1 and can know what number a dice is gonna roll to, he uses matter 1 and can see what things are basically made up of because it just appears in front of their eyes and because an outside observer doesn't see these magical answers it should be coincidental. Does the logic seem to follow? I allowed it because I'm not about telling players no unless no makes more sense internally and is far more interesting a choice. Personal sensory effects are almost always coincidental - this is mentioned in the 2e and Revised Core, but it looks like the note ended up on Pg53 of HDYDT for M20. The exception is things which are obviously impossible (the example is usually clearly seeing through a wall - M2e does note that the mage may still slide by because the average person might just conclude that they're an "eccentric" person who made a lucky guess about what was in the other room.) This doesn't liberate them from the need to use what M20 calls their "focus", but mystic instruments can pass on this one as long as the outcome is one where an observer might rationalize the result away as luck, intuition, or some obscure clue or hint the observer didn't pick up on. "Steve consults his horoscope and then puts all his money on the winning horse, or says his spirit animal told him how to bet in a dream" is no more otherworldly than any other gambling superstition, after all. Obviously technomantic tools offer a greater buffer for specificity or effects which couldn't pass, such as knowing the precise age or chemical composition of an object (but we wouldn't consider it impossible for a cinematic detective or skilled craftsperson to handle a box for a few seconds and intuit that it's made mostly of a given material, or realize that it's not as old as it looks, etc.)
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Apr 8, 2022 22:24
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Ferrinus posted:It's like how David Icke emphatically insists that he's writing about LITERAL lizard-men and not using the reptoids as a stand-in for anything else. I believe the guy, but it doesn't matter. I wouldn't, he thinks the Protocols is real and the Jews did 9/11.
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Apr 8, 2022 22:27
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Kavak posted:I wouldn't, he thinks the Protocols is real and the Jews did 9/11. Yeah, but at the behest of higher-dimensional demon-parasites or something, right? He thinks the Protocols were effectively penned by the reptilians, who tragically and completely coincidentally rendered every single fascist delusion true. The point I want to make is that his output is deeply antisemitic completely regardless of how much hate he feels in his heart, because antisemitism itself isn't just hatred of Jewish people but a much more specific reaction to modernity involving the illicit rise and overpowering-yet-secret influence of foreign and ultimately undeserving elements (here's a nice, short writeup: https://www.myjewishlearning.com/article/where-the-word-anti-semitism-comes-from/). Even an innocent-as-a-babe Icke who genuinely doesn't understand why he keeps facing all these unkind accusations is completely deserving of all the criticism he gets.
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Apr 8, 2022 22:51
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Helical Nightmares posted:Hm. Well I would say the logic follows for the player to use all level 1 spheres coincidentally with a smart phone focus only if the mage can use technological foci. I recall a while back there was a Men In Black specific Procedure (spell) called "There is an App for that..." or something similar where one of the Men In Black specifically could carry out magic actions coincidentally as long as they could explain it away with their smart phone. Problem is I can't remember what book it was in. It's not in Technocracy reloaded (I checked but still could be wrong) so I think it was published in a Technocracy splatbook for New World order after M20 came out. Yeah old mage had magic tied to their tradition. New Mage can just will poo poo into being, but it's much harder and probably going to incur paradox.
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Apr 8, 2022 23:32
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Ferrinus posted:It's like how David Icke emphatically insists that he's writing about LITERAL lizard-men and not using the reptoids as a stand-in for anything else. I believe the guy, but it doesn't matter. No, it's not. It is beyond deranged to be calling people anti-semites because they dare to enjoy a different elf game edition to you. Get help.
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Apr 9, 2022 00:20
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ZearothK posted:No, it's not. It is beyond deranged to be calling people anti-semites because they dare to enjoy a different elf game edition to you. Get help. You're not an antisemite if you like the old World of Darkness any more than you're a racist if you like Dungeons and Dragons. It is weird, though, to constantly imagine that you're personally being persecuted for your game's political content. A page or so back, Fuzz claims that people don't like Hunger Dice because of the racism in early V5 products, all of which traces back to one unaccountable malefactor. Why? It seems to me that political criticisms of V5 loom much larger in its defenders' minds than they do in those of its attackers. Ferrinus fucked around with this message at 00:44 on Apr 9, 2022 |
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Apr 9, 2022 00:41
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ZearothK posted:dude, what the gently caress Right? And I'm the one being defensive over perceived criticism.  Or maybe I just spend a lot of time in the official WoD discord talking to outcast, Huddy, Matthew Dawkins, and Khaldoun Khalil specifically discussing the absolutely abysmal track record of White Wolf from the outset to the early stages of V5 and how representation and inclusivity is even more important in a be property specifically focused on what is essentially the real world now (since V5 drops the "our world, BUT DARKER" poo poo and even expressly says in the book "the real world is dark enough"), and brainstorming stuff like the safe play tools in Playing the Sabbat and stuff like it, and it's exceedingly clear that they genuinely care about this stuff and are actively trying really hard to listen and work with the community, but this thread is all, "lol Swedracula! oWoD is antisemitism!" When that dude is even banned from their Discord after apparently hopping on to angrily argue his stance on the fiction post firing. So yeah, seeing people working really hard to change impressions and actually improve but it all just be utterly discounted by a bunch of people that don't believe you can like BOTH CofD AND WoD since they offer different styles of game and different systems so just play what you like. It's like wandering into a Star Trek fandom community and mentioning something about the special effects or sound design of TIE fighters being better than recent Federation ships and people up and calling you a Nazi for loving the Empire. That's how loving stupid it is, and has been for years. Fuzz fucked around with this message at 01:22 on Apr 9, 2022 |
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Apr 9, 2022 01:14
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Okay, but they didn't, is the thing. They didn't call you a Nazi for liking the sound effects of TIE fighters. Nowhere in any of this thread's two or three discussions of the problems with the Hunger Dice mechanic and the dishonesty of the standard Hunger Dice ad copy was about the oWoD's ingrained right-wing politics. You brought that up. If you were being sincere, that's more worrying than if you were being disingenuous, because it would mean that "Hunger dice are just mana with extra steps" somehow transmuted itself into "if you like Hunger Dice, you must hate the Roma" in your mind, all on its own. That'd be weird, right? Now, I read posts like that and I think, well, V5's game mechanics have been raked over the coals already, so why not delve into the politics that you seem so concerned with? And the first point I'd make is this: you keep positioning the dreaded "Swedracula" as an aberration, some fiend who got his claws into Masquerade and made it all gross and icky but who's thankfully been replaced with good people instead. But why did Ericsson elect to return to VtM in the first place? What special appeal did it have for him? Why should we read him as a cause rather than a symptom?
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Apr 9, 2022 01:22
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Defenestrategy posted:I need a logic check from the greater consciousness, I'm playing a game of M20 and this is the first time I've actually DM'd that game. I've established that coincidental magic is defined as any magic a normal dude could look at and explain it away. Old Mage coincidental versus vulgar magic is "can the player talk enough bullshit that the Storyteller is willing to buy it as coincidental?" With enough random foci, for instance, a Son of Ether should be able to make anything work as a "Tesla prototype", and a Euthanatos should be able to make anything just appear to randomly break/fall/die.
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Apr 9, 2022 01:33
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Hey it's been a hot minute since I made a post asking dumb what-if questions and posting essays about promethean so pretend I just did some of that stuff.
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Apr 9, 2022 02:19
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Calling "the world is secretly controlled by blood drinkers cursed by God to wander the Earth forever" David Icke poo poo ain't exactly far off the mark.
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Apr 9, 2022 02:36
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FirstAidKite posted:Hey it's been a hot minute since I made a post asking dumb what-if questions and posting essays about promethean so pretend I just did some of that stuff. If there were two guys on the moon and one of them killed the other with a rock and that rock was a Pandoran would that be hosed up or what?
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Apr 9, 2022 03:38
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Kavak posted:If there were two guys on the moon and one of them killed the other with a rock and that rock was a Pandoran would that be hosed up or what? The moon itself is the result of a series of firestorms caused by an entity predating humanity so far back that it was essentially akin to azoth bringing life to a ring of orbiting stardust. The firestorms manifested by calling forth giant rocks to continuously collide, bombard, concuss, and break down the space debris until it eventually formed a solid structure, a singular orbiting satellite of rock. The ancient promethean still slumbers within the moon. The moon's wasteland continues to exist for as long as the azoth still burns. Humanity has often looked up and wondered in awe, in fear, and while the man in the moon remains far away, his disquiet is still strong enough to incite lunacy among many. As the moon carries the sun's rays and reflects them to give Earth a source of light in the dark, you could argue that the man in the moon is perhaps the true Prometheus. FirstAidKite fucked around with this message at 04:06 on Apr 9, 2022 |
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Apr 9, 2022 04:03
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ulmont posted:Old Mage coincidental versus vulgar magic is "can the player talk enough bullshit that the Storyteller is willing to buy it as coincidental?" With enough random foci, for instance, a Son of Ether should be able to make anything work as a "Tesla prototype", and a Euthanatos should be able to make anything just appear to randomly break/fall/die. The Etherites specifically have a rote that makes a Prime Bolt gatlin gun coincidental if and only if it's bulky enough to require being mounted in the back of a truck.
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Apr 9, 2022 04:43
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FirstAidKite posted:The moon itself is the result of a series of firestorms caused by an entity predating humanity so far back that it was essentially akin to azoth bringing life to a ring of orbiting stardust. The firestorms manifested by calling forth giant rocks to continuously collide, bombard, concuss, and break down the space debris until it eventually formed a solid structure, a singular orbiting satellite of rock. The ancient promethean still slumbers within the moon. The moon's wasteland continues to exist for as long as the azoth still burns. Humanity has often looked up and wondered in awe, in fear, and while the man in the moon remains far away, his disquiet is still strong enough to incite lunacy among many. Is Prometheus responsible for the moon's reflected sunlight losing its vampire-killing effect?
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Apr 9, 2022 04:48
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worm girl posted:Is Prometheus responsible for the moon's reflected sunlight losing its vampire-killing effect? Takes in sunlight, spits out 'dead' light and idigams.
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Apr 9, 2022 04:52
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worm girl posted:Is Prometheus responsible for the moon's reflected sunlight losing its vampire-killing effect? Nah, the reason moonlight doesn't hurt vampires is because all the vampire-killing-properties of the light were extracted by moon rabbits to use in their mochi. e: If you'd like to know more then you should seek out the documentary A Trip to the Moon by the reclusive thaumaturgist Georges Méliès. FirstAidKite fucked around with this message at 05:10 on Apr 9, 2022 |
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Apr 9, 2022 04:55
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Blade but it's about prometheans so instead of the insane blood flood nightclub it's just a concert with more building code violations for electricals than you can imagine I still laugh about "All Of Their Strengths" spending their entire section on prometheans just roasting the gently caress out of them for being nerds.
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Apr 9, 2022 06:13
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There is definitely a conversation to be had about how the narratives of the owod reflect anti-semitic bullshit as part of the legacy of conspiratorial thought's extensive overlaps with it - but not like this. When things settle from whatever the gently caress just happened (and on my end, from the whole 'cataclysmic floods and temporary homelessness' bit) it might be worth a few effort posts tracing the origins of some of the theories back and examining their content, but we also have to be prepared to ask and try to answer the big question: Can we use those themes responsibly, and if so, how? If we're not actually engaging with that central problem, then the discussion is meaningless. Fortunately, there's a huge body of work querying this exact issue.
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Apr 9, 2022 06:27
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Loomer posted:There is definitely a conversation to be had about how the narratives of the owod reflect anti-semitic bullshit as part of the legacy of conspiratorial thought's extensive overlaps with it - but not like this. Genuine question, is it just the OWoD? Does the "street level" focus of Requiem distance it from them?
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Apr 9, 2022 06:44
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Tulip posted:I still laugh about "All Of Their Strengths" spending their entire section on prometheans just roasting the gently caress out of them for being nerds. Prometheans are nerds???
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Apr 9, 2022 07:03
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Kavak posted:Genuine question, is it just the OWoD? Does the "street level" focus of Requiem distance it from them? It's assumed vampires have an outsized influence on society in NWoD but they're not doing so through a single multinational conspiracy, it's more like distinct pockets of influence and a variety of weird individual conspiracies wherever you look. In 2e, vampire influence is curbed even more by metaplots like the strix and the God-Machine. The former hunts vampires and gives them a very good reason to limit their influence, and the latter is actually manipulating everything but it's not a person so who cares. oWoD also specifically draws from Judeo-Christian mythology to describe the origins of the kindred, while in nWoD, vampires come from all corners of the world and most clans trace their mythological origins to various ancient cultures, though it's all speculation. Caine IS the Cain of the bible in oWoD, whereas the Lancaea's beliefs about vampiric origins in nWoD are directly contradicted by historical fact and the truth is lost to the fog of torpor. nWoD vampires can only stay awake for like a maximum of ~100 (200? i forget) years, then they have to go into torpor to cool off and they tend to forget huge amounts of stuff or even confabulate new memories entirely, so their machinations fall apart without them and they often return unable to properly pick up where they left off. Very high potency vampires in nWoD are also much less godlike, and that combined with their need to feed on other vampires rather than humans leads to a bigger focus on the here and now with less big-picture meddling. A BP 10 guy can lift a car over his head, start a riot, know where all the vampires within a couple square miles are, make everyone forget you ever existed, etc., but they're not unleashing the plagues of Moses on civilizations, and a small group of determined kindred or even mortals could take one down without much fuss. I think in oWoD some of the other lines also had a secret society that ran everything, which nWoD moved more broadly away from, for instance the Technocracy in Mage. There were also more controversial/outright bad people attached to oWoD over the years, and a lot of the worldbuilding attempts to tie supernatural stuff to real-world cultures and history in a way that can sometimes be cool but often just gets very uncomfortable. Gonna take Loomer's advice for now and not try to litigate what is and isn't anti-Semitic here, but that's the fundamental distinction between the two lines on this issue as I understand it. worm girl fucked around with this message at 08:48 on Apr 9, 2022 |
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Apr 9, 2022 08:32
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Kavak posted:Genuine question, is it just the OWoD? Does the "street level" focus of Requiem distance it from them? I honestly haven't looked at or read enough nWoD stuff to be able to comment fairly. When I did it was almost entirely to pillage dope rear end bloodlines retroactively for a game and not in a more critical mode.
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Apr 9, 2022 08:35
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worm girl posted:Good horror needs humor, and it's not like vampires wouldn't joke around or have dumb/embarrassing/wacky things happen to them like anyone else. What We Do in the Shadows is legit! this is why the big national orgs are, paradoxically, stifling to the best parts of vampire larp despite being the main ways to get into vampire larp. needing to maintain everything according to the national plot progress means most local games are pretty quiet and end up spinning their wheels on nothing plots between the conventions. having extremely long chronicles means that people get attached to their characters and invested in them, creating a hesitance to do fun things because you lose months of exp. the ideal vampire larp is about a year long, maybe 1 or 2 sessions a month, with anywhere from 15-30 people, one GM per 4-5 players. by setting definite start and end points, people don't get too attached, and everyone can just have the same amount of exp at all times based on where the overall game is in the plot. because your plot is pretty much limited to one city, and has a fairly accelerated pace for a campaign, the GMs can go wild with the high-level lore nonsense and the players are encouraged to drive their characters like a stolen car because the fun is in finding out what happens, not in winning the long game. with the national orgs, it takes a lot of bureaucracy and building trust in the system to play anything particularly weird, and you'll probably never be in a position to play your PC as a serious mover and shaker in the game's plot. with a limited-run, limited-scope larp, you can have people pitching to essentially play the bad guys or the causes of the plot, and it can work out so long as everyone is used to the idea that it's not about winning since there's not much at stake to win. Mister Olympus fucked around with this message at 09:10 on Apr 9, 2022 |
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Apr 9, 2022 09:03
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Loomer posted:There is definitely a conversation to be had about how the narratives of the owod reflect anti-semitic bullshit as part of the legacy of conspiratorial thought's extensive overlaps with it - but not like this. When things settle from whatever the gently caress just happened (and on my end, from the whole 'cataclysmic floods and temporary homelessness' bit) it might be worth a few effort posts tracing the origins of some of the theories back and examining their content, but we also have to be prepared to ask and try to answer the big question: Can we use those themes responsibly, and if so, how? If we're not actually engaging with that central problem, then the discussion is meaningless. Fortunately, there's a huge body of work querying this exact issue. Kavak posted:Genuine question, is it just the OWoD? Does the "street level" focus of Requiem distance it from them? This is one of the major reasons I like V5 and it brought me back to oWoD after taking a hiatus from it for almost 15 years. The Beckoning got rid of most if not all the important Elders and Methuselahs from the every night narrative and making room for the players to take control of the story, the SI has broken the "Illuminati" control of the vampires over its knee. The Camarilla is a doom cult freaking out about the end of days with Thinbloods running around as they scramble to maintain some semblance of order, the Sabbat is basically a terrorist organization with packs acting as cells and it overall being more of a bogeyman, the Anarchs are fighting each other and the Cam and trying to rebrand what night to night life as a vampire can mean, and everyone is walking on eggshells because the world governments have wised up to the existence of the supernatural and have entire battalions of weapons specifically designed to murder the poo poo out of them and clean house. It's a street level game in the modern setup, something a ton of old grognard fans are all super upset about but it's like the best part about all the changes, in my opinion.
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Apr 9, 2022 12:48
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Kavak posted:Genuine question, is it just the OWoD? Does the "street level" focus of Requiem distance it from them? It's also worth mentioning the differences between conspiratorial thinking and actual conspiracies. Conspiratorial thinking has organizations that are massive, with motives that are so broad they're impossible to understand, which no one ever talks about and is hidden if you don't know the secret truths. Actual conspiracies are focused, have an actual goal, and everyone involved will always talk about them somewhere. nWoD/CofD's general focus on having smaller, more local power blocs and plot hooks you can slot into and out of any given game (and their desire to get away from the extremely 90s plot hook of global conspiracies) means their conspiracies lean towards the latter. Yeah, there's vampires secretly influencing major government task forces and pharmaceutical companies doing shady things with werewolves to make new products. But that kind of conspiracy happens all the time IRL, they just replaced oil executives with horror movie monsters. It's nowhere near as much of a secret New World Order as something like the Camarilla. (Yeah, V5 is doing good work to make vampires less of a secret shadow government, but the bones are still there. They're making a new edition of a decades-old franchise, it happens.) Lurks With Wolves fucked around with this message at 14:35 on Apr 9, 2022 |
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Apr 9, 2022 14:33
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Kavak posted:Genuine question, is it just the OWoD? Does the "street level" focus of Requiem distance it from them? It's not just a matter of "street level". Lots of oWoD games went "street level" for their Revised editions and conversely lots of nWoD games scale up to the continental, global, or even cosmic level very smoothly. There are much more robust and comprehensive rules for becoming true fae and archmagi in the nWoD, for instance. The big difference is that in the nWoD history is shaped by structural forces rather than individual, named conspiracies, and monsters generally operate in parallel to or ride the wave of history. "The Beckoning" is actually a great example here. How does the oWoD explain why super-powerful ancient vampires don't simply control everything? Well, they did until just recently, when even more super-powerful and ancient vampires have started to secretly control those guys! Where are they all going and what's going on there? OooOoooo! In Requiem the idea that ancients would dominate everything by just existing is ridiculous on its face, so you don't need to contrive even deeper and more unfathomable conspiracies to get rid of them (for now...). It goes deeper than that, of course, in ways that have been preserved and even emphasized in V5. The oWoD is really concerned with reifying stereotypes in a top-to-bottom way such that the shape of society and history is an organic result of these various types of people bouncing off each other. I don't think there's been a previous edition of Masquerade in which the Nosferatu, on top of being gross, actually had an intrinsic compulsion to ferret out and hide secrets for the sake of secrets, for instance. Now, if all Nosferatu of 8th Generation and below are busy having Dragon Ball Z fights in the secret catacombs beneath Sumer, then the fact that certain people are just inherently sneaky and cryptic isn't going to be a decisive factor in world events. ...but it's still going to be a decisive factor in local events. All the same stuff plays out, just on a more comfy scale... and that was always true, because it's not like no one ever thought of running a more gritty, street-level game of Masquerade before V5 came out.
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Apr 9, 2022 15:55
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It's just really dumb and awkward to twist the oWoD into something it's not, especially when Requiem was already that. V5 should have doubled down on the dumb bullshit imho. Reworking the racist parts and making the game more inclusive though? That's good! Revised began that work and continuing it is a good idea. There were some pretty big stumbles from Swedracula, but he's gone now and hopefully the game is in better hands. The dumb rules are another subject entirely. Hunger dices suck imho, not a fan of how the disciplines were reworked (Necromancy shouldn't be merged into Oblivion!) and Loresheets are a cool idea but there's some balance issues that could be brought up.
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Apr 9, 2022 16:08
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Lurks With Wolves posted:It's also worth mentioning the differences between conspiratorial thinking and actual conspiracies. Conspiratorial thinking has organizations that are massive, with motives that are so broad they're impossible to understand, which no one ever talks about and is hidden if you don't know the secret truths. Actual conspiracies are focused, have an actual goal, and everyone involved will always talk about them somewhere. nWoD/CofD's general focus on having smaller, more local power blocs and plot hooks you can slot into and out of any given game (and their desire to get away from the extremely 90s plot hook of global conspiracies) means their conspiracies lean towards the latter. Yeah, there's vampires secretly influencing major government task forces and pharmaceutical companies doing shady things with werewolves to make new products. But that kind of conspiracy happens all the time IRL, they just replaced oil executives with horror movie monsters. It's nowhere near as much of a secret New World Order as something like the Camarilla. ... Of course, two and a half hours later I remember that Mage is kind of about how the global elite genuinely worship Mammon. The books are good at making the Seers not feel like a Q thing once they know what they're doing, but I guess there's more of it left than I thought.
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Apr 9, 2022 16:15
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The global elite don't genuinely worship Mammon in the nWoD. There's a Mammon cult which is waxing in influence because the outlooks and behaviors that their patron deity (which is not actually Mammon; other, non-Mammon cults, have previously been the predominant worshipers of this cosmic principle) (even "deity" is not quite apt here) are on the rise in the wider world. A particular sub-faction of the Seers didn't actually cause the neoliberal turn, they were just praying for it to happen because it would increase their power relative to other sub-factions of Seers. It's worth noting that there is literally a New World Order in the oWoD that uses pop culture to control you.
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Apr 9, 2022 16:22
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MonsieurChoc posted:It's just really dumb and awkward to twist the oWoD into something it's not, especially when Requiem was already that. V5 should have doubled down on the dumb bullshit imhfro Yeah that's my impression. It's VtR without the Mekhet, except it's still got the VtM grindhouse poo poo (government agencies with thermite bullets???) and everyone remembers how 20 years ago it had all the elders and kitchen sink supernaturals. I'm not sure why they ditched the Sabbat and Elders. Those things were good on paper, even if the execution was sometimes ridiculous.
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Apr 9, 2022 16:47
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Because, for the most part, anything the Sabbat could do the Anarchs could do just about as well. And the things that the Sabbat did that the Anarchs couldn't - such as The Black Hand - is better served by them being rogue terrorist cells wrecking havok. It's like the major historical metaplot stuff like The Trinity. Yeah it's A Thing but most characters aren't going to have anything to do with it, and if the player wants to do something with it they can signal that to the ST with the appropriate Loresheet. I'm still not sure what I think about Thinblood Alchemy.
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Apr 9, 2022 17:03
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I have no idea why the Second Inquisition is so ridiculously exaggerated. There aren't whole world governments hunting vampires. Its cells of the intelligence community in the know that can be very dangerous if you aren't careful. They have some special gear but it's not like a Technocratic Hitmark is gonna bust down the door. Elders are still around but you can't find one under every rock in a major city and there are havens left abandoned to be used as plot hooks. The Sabbat on the other hand aren't launching national crusades but they exist in the shadows of a city still scheming and recruiting (the current devs just didn't want sabbat to have official rules for players because they're kinda icky sometimes)
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Apr 9, 2022 17:07
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Ferrinus posted:The global elite don't genuinely worship Mammon in the nWoD. There's a Mammon cult which is waxing in influence because the outlooks and behaviors that their patron deity (which is not actually Mammon; other, non-Mammon cults, have previously been the predominant worshipers of this cosmic principle) (even "deity" is not quite apt here) are on the rise in the wider world. A particular sub-faction of the Seers didn't actually cause the neoliberal turn, they were just praying for it to happen because it would increase their power relative to other sub-factions of Seers. I wonder how much of the difference in outlook is based on the time things were written. Illuminati conspiracy theories post like, 2000 or 2005 feel just hokey and old-fashioned. Like vaudeville comedy or something. Just don't impress me much. Millennials and Zoomers much prefer their "no but what REALLY drives society" to be structures, incentives, modalities that lead to secretive but conflicting groups working toward similar end results but with different people on top, rather than "everybody who shares the ideology lines up in the same org"
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Apr 9, 2022 17:16
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Lurks With Wolves posted:... Of course, two and a half hours later I remember that Mage is kind of about how the global elite genuinely worship Mammon. The books are good at making the Seers not feel like a Q thing once they know what they're doing, but I guess there's more of it left than I thought. If you were looking for a good Mage plot for a campaign or a handful of adventures I'd recommend the comic series Black Monday Murders where the central story revolves around the revelation that the elites involved in high finance (Rothschilds and others) are literal Mammon worshipers and whenever the Market suffers a crash, human sacrifice of one of the practitioners is required to keep the Market afloat.  The practitioners manage this risk by creating a revolving seat of four where the seat of the person that gets killed for the sake of the Market is passed from practitioner to practitioner like a hot potato. Mammon? Well he lives under the Fed and he reads Forbes every day.  https://imagecomics.com/comics/series/the-black-monday-murders If you'd rather read a summary of the entire arc (with massive spoilers) it is here: https://www.cbr.com/black-monday-murders-explained/ I highly recommend the series. It's interesting, darkly humorous and the author created a symbolic language for the Dark Arts of finance. 
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Apr 9, 2022 17:18
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TheKingslayer posted:I have no idea why the Second Inquisition is so ridiculously exaggerated. There aren't whole world governments hunting vampires. Its cells of the intelligence community in the know that can be very dangerous if you aren't careful. They have some special gear but it's not like a Technocratic Hitmark is gonna bust down the door. Well that sounds a lot more reasonable than what I was reading. Requiem had the occasional savvy hunter cell, but they didn't need special tech because requiem vampires aren't that hard to kill. Why'd they restrict clans like that though? It kinda made sense in old-old WoD because the Tzimisce and Lasombra had powers you might not want players running around with, but splitting up the Anarch and Cammie clans is weirdly restrictive. Helical Nightmares posted:If you were looking for a good Mage plot for a campaign or a handful of adventures I'd recommend the comic series Black Monday Murders where the central story revolves around the revelation that the elites involved in high finance (Rothschilds and others) are literal Mammon worshipers and whenever the Market suffers a crash, human sacrifice of one of the practitioners is required to keep the Market afloat. See that's sort of more overtly and actively anti-semitic. Encyclopedia Brittanica has an article here on why. "As a Jewish family, the Rothschilds have been targeted by conspiracy theorists as a prime example of Jews allegedly using their money to control global financial institutions. These claims have been roundly condemned and proven false, but they continue to persist." It's also directly invoking the blood libel, which, I'm kind of unsure how that made it to print???? worm girl fucked around with this message at 17:23 on Apr 9, 2022 |
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Apr 9, 2022 17:19
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worm girl posted:Well that sounds a lot more reasonable than what I was reading. Requiem had the occasional savvy hunter cell, but they didn't need special tech because requiem vampires aren't that hard to kill. Considering one of the named practitioners is the Black Pope and his underlings I don't think so.
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Apr 9, 2022 17:22
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