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joylessdivision posted:Not to totally spoil "Valkenburg" but they literally hand the players a Thaum ritual to become a Garou. Fun to look at through the editions, too, since 1e didn’t really think the logistics all the way through, 2e slammed down the hammer on “you are BAD and EVIL and WYRMISH and won’t LIVE A WEEK, anyway here’s a whole Tribe worth of Gifts”, Revised implied the Rite no longer worked*, and 20th reversed that into “naw it works, but actually Kin come out the other side realizing it was their own fault and they deserved their treatment” which tracks with the  treatment W20 got in the initial push for W5As far as the Hunter line can be believed, anyway - multiple obscure splats got their last Revised write up in a Hunter book, which was then ignored come Time of Judgement/20th
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Jun 7, 2023 05:02
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Relevant Tangent posted:making saulot responsible for the baali was the best choice ww could've made “Unrepentant after siring the Baali in a tantrum after getting kicked out of China for being an uncouth dork by its native vampires (who he then cargo-cult remodeled his Clan after to try and get senpai to notice him)” The Baali are the World of Darkness’s printer being carried by its first and biggest Weeb [Edit:]Kindred of the East really is oWoD in microcosm; the original Core is almost irredeemably racist and awful and full of the worst excesses of Dirty Secrets of the Black Hand era WW, but the line also has some of the best books of that era and was really turning around before they blew it all up. Their Time of Judgement chapter was insultingly awful, though, easily the worst section of the book. AmiYumi fucked around with this message at 05:24 on Jun 7, 2023 |
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Jun 7, 2023 05:17
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LatwPIAT posted:How many episodes did they do where he falls asleep and imagines himself in a western, again? Two? Three? At least 2 Wild West. The Arthur 2-part gets credit for at least revealing that his first name is Angus. I liked Macgyver quite a bit when I was younger.
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Jun 7, 2023 05:42
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TGG posted:To be fair MacGyver was at least magical, he proved himself to be a better wizard than Merlin when he was Connecticut Yankee'd back to Arthurian times. Also this actually happened in Macgyver. *The writers were bored.
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Jun 7, 2023 10:58
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Payndz posted:an RPG where you play 80s TV heroes who for some reason* find themselves dealing with the fantastical  YOU ALREADY GOT THE NAME
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Jun 7, 2023 11:33
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Payndz posted:There needs to be an RPG where you play 80s TV heroes who for some reason* find themselves dealing with the fantastical and treat it like it's Tuesday. Like the episode of Bergerac (long-running cosy BBC crime drama set on one of the Channel Islands where most of the bad guys of the week are wealthy tax-dodgers) where Bergerac was attacked by a Viking ghost. That's kind of the premise of Fate's Shadow of the Century. You're 80s TV heroes and occasionally things just kind of drift away from what we might call "consensus reality" thanks to a phenomenon called Variable Hyperdimensional Simultaneity. You may even have powers that can't be real unless you're operating at a certain level of VHS.
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Jun 7, 2023 13:26
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And I wasn't supposed to buy more books, my acquired to played ratio is similar to the chance of winning in lottery.
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Jun 7, 2023 14:04
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By popular demand posted:
Designed for play sessions/'episodes' of 44 minutes (1 hour including breaks). Equipment needed: a six-sided die, pencils and paper, three pennies. Each character has three Abilities: Punch, Skill and Brain, rated from 1 to 5. They also have a Gimmick - anything the player can imagine - that can help them fight crime, such as a talking car that can do 300mph, a supersonic attack helicopter, a watch that turns them invisible, a pickup truck that can ramp-jump over obstacles, bionic limbs, a motorbike with machine guns, the ability to turn into one of three particular animals, the power to breathe underwater and swim as fast as a fish, etc. However, the Gimmick must also have a weakness. The watch has a strict time limit which if exceeded will cause the hero to collapse unconscious; the CIA are trying to get their attack helicopter back and will arrive in force if it is used too publicly; the animals are rubbish; and so on. In each episode, the heroes arrive in a small town where they quickly discover wrongdoing, usually by a corrupt sheriff in league with an evil millionaire who is trying to force a family of salt-of-the-earth farmers/an orphanage of spunky kids run by an attractive young woman/a heroic junior DA (who is also an attractive young woman)/a heroic photojournalist (who is also an attractive young woman) with incriminating negatives/etc to give up their fight against their plans to build a casino/fell the local forest to create a giant cattle ranch/dump toxic waste in the caves connected to the town's water supply/whatever. Each player starts with 7 points to allocate between their Abilities as they like (all must be at least 1). To see if a task is within their Ability, they roll a d6. If the result is equal to or less than the relevant Ability score, they succeed. If not, Things Go Wrong. The players and the GM decide on the most entertaining failed outcome - what will keep viewers watching after the next break? If the players fail three Ability rolls in a row, marked by the GM turning one of the pennies to 'tails' with each failure, they are knocked out (the GM decides how) and end up in the town's jail, from where they must escape before time runs out. A successful roll resets all the pennies to 'heads'. Punch is used for feats of strength and violence. Skill is used for feats of agility and precision. Brain is used for feats of intelligence and recall. A character can use their Gimmick to automatically succeed at a task - as long as they can describe how. For example, the character with the ramp-jumping pickup truck would need to devise an especially ingenious way to use it to rescue a child trapped down a well. However, after the first time a Gimmick is used, any further use must not only make an Ability roll to succeed, but if the roll fails its Weakness comes into play, complicating the story. Any number of mooks, henchmen and comic-relief irritants can confront the characters as they try to foil the villains' plan, but the villains themselves cannot be defeated until the last five minutes of the episode. If faced earlier, the GM must come up with a way for them to slip through the heroes' fingers - for now.
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Jun 7, 2023 14:33
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TGG posted:At least 2 Wild West. The Arthur 2-part gets credit for at least revealing that his first name is Angus. I used to watch it religiously. Sadly it always felt like the writers kind of ran out of steam on the central conceit: MacGyver actually MacGyvering goes from creative uses multiple times an episode to one tepid invention at most in the later seasons. Payndz posted:There needs to be an RPG where you play 80s TV heroes who for some reason* find themselves dealing with the fantastical and treat it like it's Tuesday. Like the episode of Bergerac (long-running cosy BBC crime drama set on one of the Channel Islands where most of the bad guys of the week are wealthy tax-dodgers) where Bergerac was attacked by a Viking ghost. In addition to the episode where the Holy Grail is hidden behind a door that could be opened with a medieval laser and the one where he maybe-dreams-maybe-time travels to Arthurian times, one episode of MacGyver ends with the stinger that maybe Bigfoot is real!? There was also an episode about a rogue AI, and one where a virus from space makes people age decades in minutes... Weirdly though, I always felt like the episode that broke my suspension of disbelief was the one that revealed that in addition to literally everything else he'd done in the past, he'd also been an F1 racecar driver.
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Jun 7, 2023 14:34
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Everyone posted:So, really, who cares if the players use the tools that the game gives them to make powerful, effective characters? I haven't gone back and done the required number-crunching on VtM player options, but I feel like at some point it comes down to who wins initiative. There are a lot of high-level Discipline powers that are the equivalent of area-effect save-or-lose spells, and the old Storyteller system, from WoD to Trinity/Aberrant, favoured offense over defense to the point of making everyone a glass cannon. Celerity will take out everyone in the room before they can react, and so can elder-level Obtenebration and Chimerstry (just off the top of my head), and if I remember right, Celerity doesn't actually help you win initiative.
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Jun 7, 2023 14:58
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Payndz posted:80S TV HEROES: THE RPG When's the Kickstarter?
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Jun 7, 2023 15:06
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The init thing made me think: if you Embrace someone with cyber ware what happens? I believe by Mage rules cyberware is a “magic item” in essence but just in general. You would think it would come up in some fan splat.
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Jun 7, 2023 15:25
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Nessus posted:The init thing made me think: if you Embrace someone with cyber ware what happens? There's literally a CP2020/oWod cross over article from the early to mid-90s called "World of Future Darkness" but it's been ages since I read it but it's floating around the internet
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Jun 7, 2023 15:31
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joylessdivision posted:There's literally a CP2020/oWod cross over article from the early to mid-90s called "World of Future Darkness" but it's been ages since I read it but it's floating around the internet
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Jun 7, 2023 15:41
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PurpleXVI posted:When's the Kickstarter? Yeah mang, I gotta have some overpriced plastic tchotchkes along with my print-to-order rulebook. and you better not forget custom dice and adventures made by some nerd celebs! DON'T FORGET, I'LL KILL YOU.
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Jun 7, 2023 15:43
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I mean, Primetime Adventures is right there. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Primetime_Adventures)
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Jun 7, 2023 15:43
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You guys are waging war on my bank account. wait, how come Primetime Adventures is not available on any big RPG site? did Matt Wilson milkshake duck himself?
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Jun 7, 2023 15:58
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AmiYumi posted:Not just “responsible for the Baali”, tbf I suppose I should also point out that Ye Orient being considered some fantastical mist-shrouded mystery zone doesn't make a lot of sense when ancient "Western" vampires built their Second City in Egypt.
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Jun 7, 2023 17:18
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Saulot was an enlightenment tourist but I assume he was too arrogant to meditate.
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Jun 7, 2023 17:35
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It kind of fits with the Vampire Jesus semi-joking thing that Saulot sometimes gets. There's an obviously very apocryphal claim that Jesus traveled east during the "missing" years of his early adulthood and came back with knowledge of Buddhism, which formed the foundation of his ministry. Plus just the general idea of someone going looking for wisdom elsewhere.
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Jun 7, 2023 17:53
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Nessus posted:Saulot was an enlightenment tourist but I assume he was too arrogant to meditate. Eat (humans) Pray Love
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Jun 7, 2023 18:05
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Halloween Jack posted:Saulot's Adventures are one of the most confusing parts of the VtM lore to me. I'm not sure why he even went to the East. Of course, we probably know more about Saulot as a character than we do about any of the other Antediluvians, who AFAIK don't have any clear-cut reasons for why they do anything. Nessus posted:Saulot was an enlightenment tourist but I assume he was too arrogant to meditate. 100% this. Also those weird self help guys who say they're going to or have reached perfection by emulating something it's impossible for them to emulate. I believe Saulot's attraction to the "EAST" was that Kuei-jin who are Yang imbalanced from what I remember can pass as human much easier than a vampire and can be out in the sun for longer than a vampire. Thy still can die from exposure to the sun but they rot instead of combusting. Kuei-jin also have a thing called dharma, which is their power level and similar to arete in Mage but it determines what they can feed on. Lower dharma Kuei-jin have to subsist on human flesh and blood to replenish chi and high level ones can just absorb it from the air, like a lot of the splats do with glamour, gnosis, and quintessence. So he heard about these guys thinking he could do what they do and realized they weren't the same, they're closer to Risen in that they're pretty much Wraiths who came back but different. The Kuei-jin look down on Cainite vampires because they're the same as lower dharma Kuei-jin, which is seen as bad by most, and as related as a Mummy is to a Cainite, not at all. The only similarity they share is that at a lower level Kuei-jin also drink blood but they move past that. He based his concept of Golconda on the highest dharma Kuei-jin. The Kuei-jin are very dumb and as mentioned, very racist and Orientalist from the start but they were working on making them better before it all got blown up. They're an interesting concept but it's all tainted by the whole, "Asian people go here when they die, everyone else goes here." Which is explained, Stygia is an ever expanding, oppressive empire that emulates European colonialism and East Asia was separate because it was never colonized at the scale of Africa and the Americas. African vampires also have their own morality system that is pretty racism based on how traditionally African they are, whatever that is because lol, it's an incredibly diverse continent, and it's just weird and most definitely racist most the time. EDIT: It should be noted that they had the Ashirra, the vampires of the Islamic world, and they were really well done. They were just all the regular clans with Arabic names and similar ways of operating. I think it was helped by being a Dark Ages tie-in since those books were generally better written than a lot of the regular ones. RocknRollaAyatollah fucked around with this message at 18:28 on Jun 7, 2023 |
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Jun 7, 2023 18:23
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By popular demand posted:You guys are waging war on my bank account. You can get it off Indie Press Revolution. I think I'd just use Spirit of '77 and add ten years to it.
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Jun 7, 2023 20:16
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Or the Hengeyokai, who insist that they're fundamentally better than the Sunset People for Reasons but cannot provide evidence of those reasons at all. Also the Kitsune are literally only found in Asia despite foxes being goddamn everywhere.
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Jun 7, 2023 20:35
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RocknRollaAyatollah posted:"Asian people go here when they die, everyone else goes here."  Those few newly-born vamps with the willpower to regain themselves either live solitary lives, or get picked up as Caitiff, told about Humanity & The Beast and think “yeah makes sense”, and any weirdness on their part is just that Thin-Blood Alchemy we heard about that one time, the Curse expresses itself in strange ways  Kurieg posted:Or the Hengeyokai, who insist that they're fundamentally better than the Sunset People for Reasons but cannot provide evidence of those reasons at all. Polite, yes. Decorously so.
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Jun 7, 2023 21:00
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The idea of having a regional difference of "in this area, the shifters actually share Septs and stuff" makes sense. As would acting like it made you hot poo poo. But I recall there was a Glass Walker camp that was just "Glass Walkers, but from China"? Given the wolf population in Mongolia, this one actually kinda makes sense.
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Jun 7, 2023 21:09
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Someone could write a doctoral dissertation about all the Orientalism and weird appropriation of marginalized cultures in the original WoD. It's a huge can of worms.
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Jun 7, 2023 21:10
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Yeah, lol, though I do think one really huge factor is: These guys literally did not have access to much of the information we do now. Most of the White Wolf oWoD books were written while that poo poo was becoming mainstream, and nowadays it is piss easy to obtain broadly accurate information about things like "how does the school system work in Indonesia" or whatever from Wikipedia and similar sources. They just did not have that.disposablewords posted:It kind of fits with the Vampire Jesus semi-joking thing that Saulot sometimes gets. There's an obviously very apocryphal claim that Jesus traveled east during the "missing" years of his early adulthood and came back with knowledge of Buddhism, which formed the foundation of his ministry. Plus just the general idea of someone going looking for wisdom elsewhere.
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Jun 7, 2023 21:14
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Lack of information is a huge factor, and a lot of companies were (or still are) guilty of the same mistakes. Still, I'm not letting anyone off the hook for that "here be dragons" approach to entire continents. Even in the 90s, it was incredibly lazy when companies were like "In the year 3535, China is ruled by an Emperor and they're all really into Confucianism."
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Jun 7, 2023 21:21
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KUEI: “I don’t know, guys - you talk about The Embrace like it’s some romantic thing, but I just remember dying violently followed by visions of hell that seemed to stretch days or years but were only seconds of real time” MALKAVIAN, NOSFERATU, TZIMISCE: “Same” KUEI: “And when I came to, I had to dig myself out of the dump site I’d been hastily buried in” SABBAT, CAITIFF: *nods along* KUEI: “Plus, you all talk about The Beast like it’s some abstract heightening of your natural urges, but mine speaks to me and tells me to do evil things” MALKAVIAN, RAVNOS: “Hey, mine too!” KUEI: “And you say our flesh is supposed to be dead and unchanging, but I can reshape mine in grotesque unnatural ways…” GANGREL, TZIMISCE: 
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Jun 7, 2023 21:23
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Kurieg posted:Or the Hengeyokai, who insist that they're fundamentally better than the Sunset People for Reasons but cannot provide evidence of those reasons at all. Also the Kitsune are literally only found in Asia despite foxes being goddamn everywhere. I think the Hengeyokai being elitist assholes was to mirror how the Garou, werewolves, are elitist assholes. While they claim to be better, they still end up like the werewolves with all their politicking and infighting while not really dealing with the problems they have. It's some Star Trek TOS level social commentary type writing but it usually gets lost in them having cool gifts and the possibility for a super team of every changer. If they're better, why did the Stargazer caern get razed to the ground by an army of banes and fomori who had taken over a vast swath of the PLA. Doesn't really sound like they're doing things much better than their western counterparts. Werebats were only found in South America. Kitsune were very broken, the last created, and also special so I assume Gaia put them there so her dumbass children, the werewolves, didn't accidentally genocide them. They're also kind of supposed to be the Asian version of the Werecoyotes, which aren't represented in the courts and are also special/overpowered.
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Jun 7, 2023 21:30
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Nessus posted:When was Saulot supposed to have done this? It’s also extremely unclear if Saulot knew what the Baali would become (either in their prehistory/Dark Ages “keeping the Neverborn dreaming” version or their “purposeless diabolists” modern incarnation), but the far more likely scenario IIRC is that after getting laughed at and kicked out of “India*” by Xue and stumbling on some mortal demon-worshippers, he went “oh I’ll show YOU evil” and went all Anakin vs the sand people on them, then dripped some angewey bwood into the pit and hosed off. *also vague, in that the sources disagree if this meant modern India or just “somewhere East of Rome”
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Jun 7, 2023 21:38
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Saulot wouldn't have even needed to go that far east of Persia to hit some Buddhists then. The Greeks were relatively aware of it, Alexander's guys have recorded debates/conversations with local wise men who were clearly Buddhists. But it's Kueijin poo poo so I expect he explicitly met a Bodhisattva on a misty moor in That Part of China with all Them Big Limestone Hills.
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Jun 7, 2023 21:46
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Sorry, there seems to have been some unintended ambiguity in what I said. It wasn't that Saulot went and found specifically Buddhists, but rather that he went east and found the Kuei-Jin or whatever. There he found the knowledge that he based Golconda on. This is similar to some very apocryphal claims that Actual Jesus went east into India and maybe Tibet in his teens and 20s, and came home with off-brand ~Eastern Mysticism~ that he fiddled around with or that got bastardized by his followers real quick.
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Jun 7, 2023 21:54
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Sorry to do this, but I ran a Kitsune-centric game once:RocknRollaAyatollah posted:Kitsune were very broken RocknRollaAyatollah posted:the last created, and also special so I assume Gaia put them there so her dumbass children, the werewolves, didn't accidentally genocide them. RocknRollaAyatollah posted:They're also kind of supposed to be the Asian version of the Werecoyotes, which aren't represented in the courts and are also special/overpowered.
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Jun 7, 2023 22:09
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Yeah, them being able to learn Sorcerer spells is treated like some big huge deal but Sorcerer spells kind of suck? They aren't actually very special or powerful beyond having access to some fairly decent gifts once you get to higher levels of renown.
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Jun 7, 2023 22:34
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Nessus posted:The idea of having a regional difference of "in this area, the shifters actually share Septs and stuff" makes sense. As would acting like it made you hot poo poo. But I recall there was a Glass Walker camp that was just "Glass Walkers, but from China"? Given the wolf population in Mongolia, this one actually kinda makes sense. oddly, the main Hengeyokai wolf group was "Shadow Lords, but from Japan".
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Jun 7, 2023 23:09
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Kurieg posted:Yeah, them being able to learn Sorcerer spells is treated like some big huge deal but Sorcerer spells kind of suck? They aren't actually very special or powerful beyond having access to some fairly decent gifts once you get to higher levels of renown. Sorcerer spells are supposed to kind of suck. They're the tools of the humans adjacent to "real" supernaturals. There's Mages who can warp/control reality but have to watch out for Paradox. Sorcerers don't have to worry about Paradox, but they're much less potent than Mages. Ghouls can use Kindred disciplines while being immune to sunlight, but they're still overall going to be much less powerful than actual Kindred in most cases. At the highest levels Kinfolk can maybe use Garou Fetishes or walk in the Umbra, but they can't turn into bad-rear end furry killing machines.
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Jun 7, 2023 23:24
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Everyone posted:Sorcerer spells are supposed to kind of suck. They're the tools of the humans adjacent to "real" supernaturals. There's Mages who can warp/control reality but have to watch out for Paradox. Sorcerers don't have to worry about Paradox, but they're much less potent than Mages. Ghouls can use Kindred disciplines while being immune to sunlight, but they're still overall going to be much less powerful than actual Kindred in most cases. At the highest levels Kinfolk can maybe use Garou Fetishes or walk in the Umbra, but they can’t turn into bad-rear end furry killing machines. *Laughs Samuel Haight-ishly*
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Jun 7, 2023 23:27
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disposablewords posted:Sorry, there seems to have been some unintended ambiguity in what I said. It wasn't that Saulot went and found specifically Buddhists, but rather that he went east and found the Kuei-Jin or whatever. There he found the knowledge that he based Golconda on. This is similar to some very apocryphal claims that Actual Jesus went east into India and maybe Tibet in his teens and 20s, and came home with off-brand ~Eastern Mysticism~ that he fiddled around with or that got bastardized by his followers real quick. I guess that's what Fortitude 10 does for you.
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Jun 7, 2023 23:32
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