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 Despite it's many flaws at least the WoD doesn't have rapist poo poo demons. Do not tell me there are rapist poo poo demons in some WoD book, I don't need that terrible knowledge in my head until I actually encounter it, at which point I either set the book (or my likely my computer) on fire or see how long it takes to attempt to burn that knowledge out of my brain via mountains of weed.
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Jun 30, 2023 20:14
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No, but they have the Fomori, and that's close enough as I recall. Spoiled because of the second clause that I overlooked.
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Jun 30, 2023 20:41
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Cooked Auto posted:No, but they have the Fomori, and that's close enough as I recall. Well, so far those guys are mostly just "Cronenbergian horrors" and less "Literal rapist poo poo demons". But knowing 90's WW I would not be surprised.
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Jun 30, 2023 20:52
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I guess there's no need to rank awful things, but the ludicrous racism in K:DL is more bothersome to me than the sewer demon.
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Jun 30, 2023 20:55
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joylessdivision posted:Well, so far those guys are mostly just "Cronenbergian horrors" and less "Literal rapist poo poo demons". But knowing 90's WW I would not be surprised. Probably something that shows up later then, because I have memories of hearing some questionable stuff about them in the past.
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Jun 30, 2023 20:58
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Cooked Auto posted:Probably something that shows up later then, because I have memories of hearing some questionable stuff about them in the past. Most likely in Freak Legions. I would like to think most of that was yeeted with revised, but with WW who knows.
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Jun 30, 2023 21:19
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sasha_d3ath posted:Purple saying Mors just copies and pastes to make reviews is absolutely rich when Purple openly lies about the contents of books in order to make a sick slam dunk that'll make the whole thread cheer. oh? PurpleXVI posted:If this is about Kult: Divinity Lost(other people seem to think it is and I seem to remember you were upset that I was very mean to it in the past?), then you're free to point out what I lied about. Was it the heroin poop demon that fucks you in your sleep until you can't think of anything other than the heroin poop demon? Or, you know, if you feel like I preseented it unfairly, you could make your own review where you correct my many mistakes. oh
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Jun 30, 2023 21:28
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Pakxos posted:Most likely in Freak Legions. I would like to think most of that was yeeted with revised, but with WW who knows. Yeah, that's probably what I was thinking of in this case. For a moment I thought it was Exalted. But the fomori aren't in that. And it has its own truckload of issues. 
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Jun 30, 2023 21:30
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PurpleXVI posted:Well, if you could tell me what I lie about then I'd love to see it. I won't pretend I might not have missed a paragraph here and there, or perhaps have misunderstood a mechanic at times, but I've never intentionally told a lie about something I've reviewed. The bit from the VERY beginning of the review where you say that an Academic having a military Contact gets free nukes at character creation is such a gross exaggeration that I haven't read the rest of the review because I imagine it's exactly as even-handed as that flagrant violation of the spirit and intent of the game. Why would I write any review that has to pass the muster of someone so willfully bad faith? EDIT: I am not going to go down as The Kult Defender, it's a poo poo game with a bunch of trash in it, but when I was a fan, reading your review of it and knowing exactly how wrong and intentionally inflammatory it was made me distrust anything else you've written, including your opinions of people like mors. EDIT AGAIN: Also I love the way you immediately jumped to the literal worst stuff in the game and implied that's what I was defending, your ability to make everything all about you and how clever and intelligent you are is as staggering as your willingness to throw people under the bus so you can win the Writes RPG Reviews Popularity Contest. sasha_d3ath fucked around with this message at 21:40 on Jun 30, 2023 |
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Jun 30, 2023 21:37
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sasha_d3ath posted:The bit from the VERY beginning of the review where you say that an Academic having a military Contact gets free nukes at character creation is such a gross exaggeration that I haven't read the rest of the review because I imagine it's exactly as even-handed as that flagrant violation of the spirit and intent of the game. I mean so A) you're not remembering it right and B) it was exaggerating what you could do with a literal reading of the rules without any sanity checks, for the sake of comedy. Also I have no idea why you're a fan of this game, so I think you really should write your own review, unironically, and explain to us what it is about Kult: Divinity Lost, that you like and think is criminally underrated and badly maligned.
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Jun 30, 2023 22:34
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I'm not doing that for you, it's not even the point. The point is you accuse people of having contentless posts when your posts are frequently wrong behind a shield of "is just joek". You don't have a leg to stand on.
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Jun 30, 2023 22:52
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I thought we were going to move on and let people post reviews however they want. What are you trying to accomplish here
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Jun 30, 2023 23:00
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Please stop this, I honestly prefer to reread the heroin rape poo poo demon again than more drama.
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Jun 30, 2023 23:01
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I agree. Purple, sasha, this bickering is unproductive and reflects poorly on both of you.
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Jun 30, 2023 23:23
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Mokole rule. Just needed to express that. got drat Werecrocodiles 
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Jul 1, 2023 00:20
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sasha_d3ath posted:I'm not doing that for you, it's not even the point. The point is you accuse people of having contentless posts when your posts are frequently wrong behind a shield of "is just joek". You don't have a leg to stand on. I like you, but please don’t start poo poo.
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Jul 1, 2023 00:38
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joylessdivision posted:Mokole rule. Just needed to express that. got drat Werecrocodiles Mokole do indeed rule - but on my end of things, with the novels and the grand census, present a curious and infuriating problem. Early-to-mid VtM and WtA novels can be divided into three categories. First, the absolutely awful Harper-Collins ones - which often have so little relationship to the setting as a whole they make themselves non-canon (most notably the utterly execrable 'Blood on the Sun'*). Second, regular White Wolf imprint novels like the MotRD trilogy. But third - the Rage/Jyhad novels. These are basically 'here is what a game of rage/jyhad looks like with a narrative applied', and are mostly pretty bad and have the same loose connection to the setting issue (and are also the site of that one novel I mention that has the most racist thing in all White Wolf history.) But, one of them (and one of the better ones) is our only real source of information on the Snow Plague, which the Mokole clanbook later references, so we can't neatly split them off as their own thing. (*: How do you gently caress up a book about a vampire with the tagline 'She was America's secret weapon in WW2'? You hire Brian Herbert and let him assure you through a haze of cocaine that of course he's read the brief and setting precis, its fine, and then never follow up to make sure he has.)
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Jul 1, 2023 01:01
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Loomer posted:But, one of them (and one of the better ones) is our only real source of information on the Snow Plague, which the Mokole clanbook later references, so we can't neatly split them off as their own thing. Is there a quick way of describing what this was? I love the random-rear end tidbits in the clanbooks. Although the best at it were the historical ones. Pakxos fucked around with this message at 01:12 on Jul 1, 2023 |
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Jul 1, 2023 01:09
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Loomer posted:But third - the Rage/Jyhad novels. These are basically 'here is what a game of rage/jyhad looks like with a narrative applied', and are mostly pretty bad and have the same loose connection to the setting issue (and are also the site of that one novel I mention that has the most racist thing in all White Wolf history.) But, one of them (and one of the better ones) is our only real source of information on the Snow Plague, which the Mokole clanbook later references, so we can't neatly split them off as their own thing. That's what the POV character goes to Australia to search for because he suddenly got Mnesis, right? I didn't know it was a whole novel previously, it just felt like a random white dude got access to Mokole ancestral memory for reasons. (And there's a few white Mokole but it's rare enough to feel weird.)
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Jul 1, 2023 01:21
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Loomer posted:Mokole do indeed rule - but on my end of things, with the novels and the grand census, present a curious and infuriating problem. Early-to-mid VtM and WtA novels can be divided into three categories. First, the absolutely awful Harper-Collins ones - which often have so little relationship to the setting as a whole they make themselves non-canon (most notably the utterly execrable 'Blood on the Sun'*). Second, regular White Wolf imprint novels like the MotRD trilogy. Will Brian Herbert's crimes never end? 
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Jul 1, 2023 01:31
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Pakxos posted:Is there a quick way of describing what this was? I love the random-rear end tidbits in the clanbooks. Although the best at it were the historical ones. Dawgstar posted:That's what the POV character goes to Australia to search for because he suddenly got Mnesis, right? I didn't know it was a whole novel previously, it just felt like a random white dude got access to Mokole ancestral memory for reasons. (And there's a few white Mokole but it's rare enough to feel weird.) Yeah, that's the dude. He got access to it as part of a whole big thing to... as memory serves, locate the original blossoms being used to make the spiritually tainted drug in a memory of... Pangaea?? Its been a couple of years.
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Jul 1, 2023 01:34
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Let's get our Haight on but not our Internet Slapfight Hate on.
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Jul 1, 2023 03:38
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Halloween Jack posted:The designers at White Wolf would actually post on forums to say people criticizing their system math are "just running numbers." They weren't total douchebags about it but they were kinda open about not giving a poo poo about their bad rules.
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Jul 1, 2023 03:50
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Loomer posted:Yeah, that's the dude. He got access to it as part of a whole big thing to... as memory serves, locate the original blossoms being used to make the spiritually tainted drug in a memory of... Pangaea?? Its been a couple of years. He's the POV character for the Mokole breedbook which famously has one of australia's most notorious red talons assuming homid form for the first time and going "Wow I don't know Why we hate humans so much we should make peace with them instead."
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Jul 1, 2023 03:55
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Everyone posted:Let's get our Haight on but not our Internet Slapfight Hate on.  I'm happy to say that Sam is much more of an active presence in "Rage Across the Amazon" and he gets a bit more back story.Also Molkolé!
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Jul 1, 2023 04:40
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Zereth posted:Maybe they shouldn't have made their game rules use numbers then. Kurieg posted:breedbook Halloween Jack fucked around with this message at 05:51 on Jul 1, 2023 |
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Jul 1, 2023 05:46
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I mostly just loved that Mokole war forms were roll your own, and yes, you could take "enhanced size" several times and achieve every gamer's great dream: To be Godzilla.
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Jul 1, 2023 07:30
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Infinity RPG: PanOceania Data Overload PanOceania's public is more reliant on their geists than pretty much anyone else. There's so much information available to them and so many things are automated that they couldn't be any other way. Geists are especially relied on to answer informational questions, which can lead them to developing weird quirks as their psuedo-AI gets hung up on specific topics or chase down leads into potentially illegal areas. They also tend to interact with each other to spread the load, with many geists ending up interdependent on the geists of people their owners have never met, who specialize in information they don't. This has even ended up as potentially dangerous to PanO national interests, as troop movements or base locations leak along geist information networks, and as a result, PanO military personnel are now legally required to limit their geists to using only military datasphere networks. The spread of information and the rise in wetware app availability the lets you layer simulations over the real world has also lead to legal restrictions. See, it's not that hard to get a program that will tell you how to do something by overlaying the actions on your eyeballs or brain directly, allowing you to mimic them more easily. Legal efforts to stop video sharing on lockpicking, hacking, explosives making and piloting have not gone well or really prevented this in any way. It's especially easy to get in PanO because all education is based in Mayaspheres. The government provides funding for online schools, most of which have only one teacher plus a lot of adaptive psuedo-AI algorithms that allow that teacher to provide education to hundreds of students at once, all without anyone involved needing to go outside. Students do not have set schooling time, but rather log a required number of hours in their classes and a required amount of time on peer interaction in Maya chats connected to the school. There's a minor plague of students gaming the system by using their geist to log their hours for them, which has local governments trying to figure out ways to physically match students with their Mayasphere activities, but that's an idea that bothers child safety lobbies because these systems are still hackable and would provide much greater ability for bad people to track children. Personally, I mostly picture this as Megaman Battle Network schools but with fewer classrooms. Schools also provide online play areas for students, which are protected by moderately secure firewalls, because the government recognizes that social interaction is a good and necessary thing for kids. They're intended to provide a wide array of entertainment for a wide array of different kinds of kid, all of which are able to be multiplayer or otherwise involve multiple students so that they can encourage social behavior. Physical schools do exist, but they cater almost exclusively to the rich and powerful unless they're in small settlements and outposts too far from the rest of PanO for easy Maya access. These are usually private schools, often very expensive ones, and while GPAs are typically higher at them, the real reason the rich use them is the networking and contacts that the kids make there. Naturally, Maya also provides for adult education, whether you want to change jobs, get continuing training or just learn something new. The government's Maya school network provides approvals to thousands of online adult education courses yearly in many different subjects, and most of these are free or only have a nominal fee to attend, so a lot of PanOceanian citizens hold multiple degrees or certifications regardless of social class or occupation. They also tend to have very weird concepts of privacy, thanks to the widespread use of Maya and quantronic devices attached to it, particularly mentally controlled wetware. Generally speaking, PanOceanians are very open people, to a degree that outsiders often find alarming. Casual nudity, open relationships and fluid gender roles are all exceptionally common and seen as perfectly acceptable to discuss with complete strangers. The main area in which PanOceanian concepts of privacy exist is in recording. Sensors are extremely advanced now, able to record most kinda of emission in extreme detail, and they're often attached to very small remotes able to physically go just about anywhere. Therefore, there's been a boom in interference devices, which generate quantronic white noise that prevent sensors from detecting anything useful in their area of effect. Privacy, for the PanOceanian, is about knowing your won't be recorded. Public events are automatically recorded for quantronic broadcast, and PanOceanians of rank are trained to cover their mouths and throats when speaking privately to people at them to prevent their physical movements from being used to interpret what they are saying. Most important or private discussions are heald quantronically in firewalled Maya chats rather than using any kind of physical communication, so anything said publicly at an event is probably PR for whoever's saying it. Particularly private people, or those whose work requires privacy and secrecy, like spies (or many PCs) operating in PanO cities, make extensive use of facial scrubber programs, video manipulation, disguises and even hired body doubles, both to avoid their real activities being seen and to ensure that they leave a normal trackable trail in social media that doesn't look like a spy or a shut-in. One of the unique traits of PanOceanian life is the way that large public works are handled. These projects are not quite fully public, but also not trusted to private enterprise, and they're called empresas. Empresas are usually extremely largescale and quire large numbers of specialists and advanced technology to complete. Money comes from the government for them, along with donations from corporations interested in the results. Empresas are typically selected via governmental decision, but these decisions are heavily influenced by lobbies and corporate support to ensure the funding gets achieved. Once parliament votes to adopt a proposed empresa, they then select a project management team and build the facilities necessary to achieve it. Many empresas last for multiple generations, handed off over the decades from team to team. The existence of empresas are not necessarily publicized; while many are well known and celebrated, no one actually knows how many empresas are running, or what the exact proportion of public money to corporate money to lobby-donated money is funding them. So what are some empresas? We get some examples. The Arkvaults are currently being built as an empresa - two facilities, one in the Tencendur system, one in a classified star system that has been left unnamed. Each is built inside a gigantic asteroid, and each is a functional, operating facilitiy that contains seeds, fertilised eggs and genetic blueprints for every single living species that humanity has ever encountered. (Or, at least, that PanO could get their hands on.) This includes humans. They are protected by massive amounts of radiation shielding, and the asteroids also contain large Cube Banks and organic 3d printers. Each asteroid is loaded with jump-capable engines and huge CPU arrays operated by splinters of ALPEH. Their purpose is simple: they are there in case of an extinction event, intended to allow humanity to survive in the event that they lose the war with the Combined Army. The Hand of the Lord is an empresa that's gone much, much less well - a military program originally intended to reduce how long it took to train elite soldiers and reduce the impact of combat shock on green troops. The idea was fairly simple - take some memories and implant them into the soldier's Cube in an experiment based on Resurrections. Ideally, this should create a trained and experienced soldier in mere minutes. It has gone absolutely terribly despite the best efforts of everyone involved. Cube corruption plagues the subjects of the experiment, and they frequently suffer from dysmorphic disorders and issues with muscle reflexes falling out of sync with their own thoughts and mental reactions. The costs have been immense, far more than intended, and it's really just a big embarrassment. There have been positive results - primarily, the Hand of the Lord has succeeded at teaching languages and academic subjects. It is cost-effective at neither, given the cheap and effective use of translator programs and analytical Maya support of actual study and education. The team running the empresa has actually attempted to downplay the success they've had with language and academic training because it might draw attention to the project as a whole and get their funding cut. The Dyson Swarm is a new empresa, recently started to massive PR celebration in Tencendur system. It is, well, a dyson swarm, single-ring, around the star Tencendur. Or it will be. Right now it's just a small number of satellites that gather energy from the star's radiation and beam it back to Neoterra's collection stations by laser. A large group of engineers has been assigned to work on prototypes for self-replicating robots which are intended to eventually take over the construction of the satellite ring. If it is completed, it is projected to produce all of the energy Neoterra needs - and could ever need, and a few other planets besides. I've mentioned lobbies a few times, and they need to be explained. PanOceania doesn't have political parties for people or politicians to belong to. Instead, it has hundreds of interlocking lobbies, groups of people that work together to pool financial power behind a political cause. In theory, the goal of this is to prevent wealth from entirely controlling politics by placing money from everyone interested in a cause into the hands of an independent political entity that represents this cause while amplifying the voices of its membership on Maya. A lobby can be large or small, but all of them serve as the guiding sources of policy (in aggregate) for PanOceania, presenting ideas and causes to the parliament. We get four example lobbies. Falco are a military-focused lobby with extensive backing from weapons manufacturers, particularly Moto.tronica, and a wide membership base across the nation. They are popular among military personnel and veterans, and their primary political goal is to secure funding for the military and expand military capabilities, though they're also neoconservative economically (by PanO standards) and generally fairly insular and xenophobic (against actual aliens). They are particularly powerful since the Paradiso war began. Nirukta are a lobby that has relatively low membership but large cash reserves, and their goal is to push for social programs and policies that support the Hindu population and businesses run by Hindus. They've generally been successful in their efforts related to culture and cultural integration programs so far. Superbia are conservative and moderately right-wing isolationists who are tied to various business, academic and religious backers. Their main goal right now is to get PanO to stop funding O-12 on a series of technicalities, because they don't like the Space UN. Zeitgeist are a technophile lobby funded by cybernetics companies, with broad popular membership. In the past they were focused on modifying privacy law regulations on implanted tech, and now want to get an empresa started to create an open source OS for direct human-to-Maya integration, which...well, has a number of weird implications for corporate ownership laws, but would also make it easier for more different kinds of program to operate on different platforms through using the user themself as a bridge. Next time: The Military-Industrial complex Mors Rattus fucked around with this message at 15:27 on Jul 1, 2023 |
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Jul 1, 2023 15:12
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Glad to have you back Mors.
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Jul 1, 2023 15:21
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Agreed
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Jul 1, 2023 16:18
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joylessdivision posted:
Will one of the scenarios be about how 16th century pirate captain vampire who is missing a hand is hunting the Molkolé?
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Jul 1, 2023 16:41
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Everyone posted:Will one of the scenarios be about how 16th century pirate captain vampire who is missing a hand is hunting the Molkolé? Unfortunately no and now I'm mad we didn't get that
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Jul 1, 2023 17:08
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Mors Rattus posted:Next time: The Military-Industrial complex Looking forward to it!
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Jul 1, 2023 17:15
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If there seems to be an oddly high number of Spanish language influences in a nation that got started in Asia-Pacific, remember that the company that makes Infinity is based in Spain.
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Jul 1, 2023 20:50
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Did anyone ever cover the original Aeon Trinity game? The new edition got me nostalgic for the late-90s version. And I only see abandoned Aberrant and Adventure! attempts on the website.
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Jul 1, 2023 21:27
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The Masquerade of the Red Death - Book 1: Blood War - Part Eight, Chapters 27 to 30 Part One Part Two Part Three Part Four Part Five Part Six Part Seven We’re back, with Part 3 of Book 1 of the Masquerade of the Red Death trilogy. As with each prior Part, we begin with a Poe quote:  Chapter 27 We’re with McCann again. He and Flavia have arrived in DC and settled into a hotel room by the night of the 20th – two to three nights after the last chapter. To recap, they’re there to track down information on the Red Death – McCann because Lameth is interested, Flavia for revenge, and both, ostensibly, on behalf of the Prince of St. Louis. The Blood War has begun, but what does that look like?   As an aside, we get another update on how Flavia’s dressed. Its perfectly ordinary and acceptable, which is a nice change. She’s been trying to blend in while looking for their contact, Thompson – Makish’s first vampire kill in the book, so no luck there. She also can’t find Peter Dorfman, the Tremere regent, or Prince Vitel. They’ve both gone into hiding for the duration, which is a nice touch. Most of the novels that follow would place them front and centre in this kind of situation, but I like that they’ve got the sense to slip away in the opening volleys – something that recurs to a degree in the Clan Novel Saga. Weinberg also slips in, with uncommon subtlety for him, a hint at the Red Death’s tactics without shouting them. The sheer number of furious vampires in DC render McCann’s telepathy useless – and Varney’s too. Instigating the blood war as a cover isn’t just to produce a state of crisis, its to give him an edge over Lameth and Anis if he needs it. But then we’re right back into the usual with a horny scene about how much Flavia likes decapitating people with swords:  This is prompted by a rumour of an assassin in the city using thermite, which Weinberg again thinks is a high explosive. Flavia recognizes the tell-tale signature of Makish and the stage is set for a Flavia-Makish confrontation… At which point a bunch of Sabbat burst into their hotel room with the rousing war cry of ‘Kill the buggers! Sabbat forever!’ Dumb as gently caress but I love it. Sabbat forever! Weinberg’s still showing a modicum of self-awareness about it, too, via McCann’s internal monologue:  But, charmingly dumb poo poo aside – this scene irritates the hell out of me. Not only does Bob constantly call the Sabbat shovelheads anarchs (and say they’re all bloodbound), but he doesn’t write action well. Its five or six pages of tedium; spraying bullets with the Mac-10 (at least it comes in handy this time – 1:2 on the count), some mage powers (explosive bullets); Flavia decapitating people. The only interesting part is their escape, where Flavia scuttles down the building like a crab with McCann clinging on like a koala. They split up with a plan to meet again at the Lincoln Memorial the next night, and offscreen, Flavia goes on a killing spree. To close out the chapter, there’s one last fight scene – McCann against two Sabbat who… have the power to jam his gun. I really don’t know where Weinberg got the idea this is a fairly common vampire power, but it comes up constantly whenever he needs a reason not to have a trap fire, a gun work, a sensor function. It’d be one thing if it was just Madeleine Giovanni or the Three, but random mooks are capable of it now. Gun out of the way (1:3, now), is it a thrilling fight scene? No. McCann is the most special boy, so his body is made of stone when they try to stab him to death while talking about how drinking blood is better than sex, and in a single swoop he breaks both their necks, then decapitates them with razor wire. There’s a weird aspect to this chapter. McCann kills three vampires in it, and for some reason they’re all women. The others he fights aren’t noted as fatalities, only the women. The two in question here are dressed in ‘silky white butterfly lace’, talk about being turned on, lick their lips, etc. We end the chapter with him slicing off their heads and I don’t think I’m reaching to say there’s an uncomfortable sexual overtone, and not in a good way. Chapter 28 We stay in DC, but swap to Varney. She’s just felt McCann’s presence courtesy of him using his magic, which is… interesting, to say the least. To cast his explosive bullet spell, he spoke a word capable of ‘sen[ding] disturbing ripples through the umbra’, which she can feel. Only Lameth and Anis know the word, so she’s now aware he’s in the city, at least via proxy. A little awkward given she and Jackson are driving to meet Justine Bern at the time. This is again where I’d like to remind you that Varney is the wealthiest woman in the world and the CEO of one of its largest corporations, and that Bern has no idea how powerful she actually is. I may just be being overconservative but I personally would not place what I think is a pawn of that value in the middle of an active war zone, especially since Bern has lost complete control over her forces and they’re running berserk. Bob dips out of the present to repeat what we already know about Lameth and Anis, in case we’ve forgotten the interludes in Part 2. They’re lovers who obtained Golconda via a potion, which didn’t give them peace of mind and just made them more powerful and no less ambitious. Everyone talks about their mysterious existences (where’s Poochy), legends talk of them controlling the Jyhad, etc. Anis is the most beautiful woman ever to live, Lameth the greatest sorcerer, though we do now get to learn he’s from… Drumroll… Atlantis. Just when I think I’m out, Bob pulls me back in! He’s an infernalist (maybe) who (maybe) got himself embraced to cheat ‘the Lords of Hell’ six thousand years ago, which places Atlantis as having been out there in ~4000BCE. They masterminded the murder of Brujah and the desire for Lameth’s potion destroyed the Second City. Basically – if it’d appear in a thirteen year old’s epic secret backstory for their first vampire character, its in here. Then, another action scene. The road is barricaded and Varney orders Jackson to ram it. He warns it could be a trap, she says do it anyway, and shock: it’s a trap. At which point Varney just casually fires off Temporis, confirming that Weinberg got some thorough collaboration or really did his research. But this is one I find interesting. Dirty Secrets of the Black Hand is the debut of Temporis and the True Brujah and came out all of five months before Blood War was published. Publishing isn’t that quick a business, so either Weinberg got told about the True Brujah early or they made fairly late stage revision while he would’ve been busy writing Books 2 and 3. Either one seems to me to be more evidence that Bob wasn’t totally off on some rogue dumb poo poo and that instead, White Wolf knew precisely what they were getting with the trilogy. That brief aside over, Varney freezes the world around them and crumbles the barricades into chalk, presumably with the same thaumaturgic power Bern used in the club. This is a pretty heavy duty power – 4 dots, I believe – and actually kind of a neat use. But then we get another odd tidbit: Using Temporis has alerted every other Methuselah in the city. How? Why? We never learn that. With the barricade destroyed they make it to Bern’s easily, and Bob introduces Bern’s bodyguard:  Naturally, they’re all instinctively terrified of the power radiating off Varney, though usually they treat her without respect. We’ll meet them again later. For now, it’s a meeting with Bern, Wade, and Portiglio. Wade can pick up the power too and recognizes Varney is Anis’s avatar, though for once Bob doesn’t spell it out immediately which is nice. The invasion has stalled. All the important Camarilla have escaped DC to safety and the fighting is now between mortal authority and Sabbat shocktroops, threatening mass masquerade breaches and a war of attrition. Again, we’re foreshadowing the Clan Novels here – a lot of these brushed-over aspects are picked up again in the CNS, right down to the Camarilla strategy. Bern is motivated to resolve the situation not out of any real worry about that, but because her failure guarantees the other Archbishops will turn on her and try to eat her – and, well, fair enough. And then we dip into the Jyhad again. Bern thinks this because Varney has manipulated her to think this. Great, cool. We also get a refresh on the concept in case we’ve forgotten from the prologue – not so cool. Bob ends the chapter with another of his not-so-subtle hints:  This is one of the nicer elements, on the whole. Our Very Special Characters are still just pawns in the Jyhad, controlled by the Antediluvians. It isn’t Bob’s invention, but I appreciate it all the same. Chapter 29 Still in DC, we now swap to Makish. Makish is out doing what he loves most: violence to racists. We stan, etc, etc. He murders an ‘anarch’ (Bob’s confusion is in full swing these chapters. Are the anarchs gullible shocktroops? Yes. Are all the Sabbat shovelheads also called anarchs? Yes. Helpful.) for calling him a ‘little Jap bastard’, gluing a thermite bomb between his eyes. Bob gives him some dialogue that, for a change, actually has a nice feel:  Now, its clunky, but a little tweak – ‘You have one minute before this goes off. Please, feel free to contemplate the mysteries of the great beyond while you wait.’ – and it’d work just fine. He follows up with his actual final remark being ‘Goodbye. Thank you for your contribution to my art.’ Again – actually a pretty nice one-liner, if it were a one-liner. Bob spends three paragraphs on it instead, which summarizes so much of my frustration with these books. Cool stuff is just completely let down by the execution.  This is a character that, fashy though it is, has actually developed motives, ideals, wants, and needs. That’s unheard of in Bob’s stuff. He’s killed sixteen vampires over the prior three nights. Why? Because he can, more or less. He doesn’t even think the Red Death’s being served by it – he’s doing it for art’s sake. Makish isn’t paper-thin (though he could still use some more fleshing out and some buffing out of the unfortunate Mad Arab aspects), but he’s so tragically misused that I want to scoop him out and put him in a better story, or at least a better version of the trilogy. Even the symmetry between the Red Death’s techniques and the thermite are a nice touch. On that note, its at this point that the Red Death reappears and they walk and talk. Makish doesn’t trust or like his employer in the slightest, and we immediately walk back the idea that he doesn’t know or care if the way he’s killing helps TRD’s plans. He’s alternated Camarilla-Sabbat kills as instructed, varied up his methods, etc, all on orders. We were so close to an independent character for a second that Bob got spooked. TRD fills Makish in that McCann and Flavia have arrived, and naturally, Makish has heard of Flavia. Bob not so subtly slips in the weakness of TRD’s Body of Fire – he can only hold it for fifteen minutes. This chapter is a real mixed bag. It has Makish being an actually interesting character, followed by TRD ruining it and infodumping. Varney’s in the city too, TRD informs Makish, and Makish needs to go kill her. This, as we’ll later see, is… an interesting decision. Then TRD has to go but not before Bob gets a chance to jerk off to his extra-special twins again:  The chapter closes on two notes. A cryptic pronouncement that in two nights the trap will be complete, so Makish needs to prepare himself for McCann and Varney. Then, a fairly standard but relatively effective paragraph about how Makish hasn’t survived centuries without distrusting everyone around him, and how he intends to survive his employment with or without TRD’s approval. Great, splendid: but also, thanks to Bob’s attempt at mirror structuring, redundant with the Unholy Three’s own approach. Its also another good example of the weirdly stilted style:  A lot of these full stops should be commas or emdashes or even ellipses, and the full stops sabotage what little good there is in the prose. The last three sentences are workmanlike but serviceable except for the loving full stops. Recast them this way and they scan vastly better: “Distrust was how he had survived hundreds of years as an assassin, and how he intended to survive for many hundreds more... with or without the approval of the Red Death." Chapter 30 This time, we break the DC streak. We’re popping to Lexington, Kentucky, with new POV characters: three teenage car thieves, named Pablo, Junior, and Sam. The car in question: a big-rig truck painted silver, black, and red, and blazoned with ‘MG Enterprises’ on the side. Real subtle, ain’t it? This is also another of Bob’s ‘world is a gently caress’ interludes:   The urchins break in anyway to try their luck. Its another unexceptional sneak-and-peek style scene, but to Bob’s credit he gets down to brass tacks in two pages. The door to the truck is unlocked and opens before they can touch them – while the kids discover they’ve become paralyzed and await their fates. Inside, Madeleine Giovanni, though she’s introduced as ‘a beautiful woman’ in ‘a tight-fitting black shift’. Bob was doing well with Flavia’s outfit but he’s back in horny form, I guess. The truck is a fairly neat mobile command center, outfitted with communications equipment, a large closet of Madeleine’s clothes, and, uh, a coffin – Madeleine sleeps in it for some reason. It all feels like something out of a Vampire Action Hero cartoon, which kinda owns. She uses presence to get their stories out, which are standard ‘old man writes troubled teen’ stuff, with the exception of a slightly unfortunately worded story about Pablo and Junior murdering two racist cops. Its all layered with a heavy dose of ‘world is a gently caress’, naturally. Then things take a turn. They know she’s a vampire, and she confirms it and introduces herself fully. She needs some hired help because she’s spent the last few nights, off-screen, fighting a ‘band of rogue vampires’. Again, this feels like a Saturday morning cartoon in the best way. Unfortunately she already handled them off screen but she still needs help – people who can guard her during the day. People outside the Family because she suspects a rat. So naturally, who better than cop-killing teenagers? They agree once they hash out a price: a million dollars each. In cash, payment on delivery. The chapter closes out with a rare piece of acceptable dialogue:  Again – in better hands, some of Bob’s ideas could be neat stories! Even the cop-killing aspect could work. Its another piece of world is a gently caress, but one that would be effective if it weren’t for Bob’s dialogue:  Alter a few things. Fix the dialogue. Make Pablo’s condition not just cash, but revenge for his family. Make it so the rogue vampires are still a threat. You have a compelling story in its own right right there, complete with the themes of a chosen and found family that Bob really and earnestly (but badly) tries to connect with through Madeleine’s arc. But because Madeleine’s arc is in service to the Red Death storyline, we get the flat and tepid version. Next time: The Mafia, more confusion on whether the Sabbat and the Anarchs are the same, Kabbalah discourse that’ll make Mors mad as hell, a hole in Phantomas’s encyclopedia, and Etrius being a dumbfuck.
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Jul 2, 2023 13:56
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Maybe Weinberg’s running off 'the Sabbat stir up anarchs before a Crusade' and is kinda (very) misinterpreting it? Also do we know Vitel's secret or does that just come up in DC By Night?
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Jul 2, 2023 14:52
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Vitel's secret comes out in DC by Night, which came out the same month as Blood War. He never actually appears in the MotRD trilogy in person, so its not clear they filled Bob in on all the details. That said - I don't think he appeared prior to either DCbN or MotRD, so it might be another of those examples where Bob either got a pretty good level of collaboration or handed copies of upcoming products.
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Jul 2, 2023 15:22
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Mors Rattus posted:Thanks to the folks reaching out that got me to come check this thread again. I appreciate all the support here, and will continue my work in that light. Welcome back, please stick around! The thread would be poorer without you. Mors Rattus posted:Infinity RPG: PanOceania Something I don't think I've seen too much about, is there much discussion at all about conflicts between different ethnic or religious groups, like between Hindus and Catholics (Doyleishly I think the Indian element was supposed to be more important lorewise, but those Space Knight models are apparently very popular)? I was never sure how the open cosmopolitan nature of Panoceania was to be squared with them having a literal army of religious crusaders... PoontifexMacksimus fucked around with this message at 23:50 on Jul 2, 2023 |
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Jul 2, 2023 23:28
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Dawgstar posted:Maybe Weinberg’s running off 'the Sabbat stir up anarchs before a Crusade' and is kinda (very) misinterpreting it? Or, at risk of giving out maybe more credit than is due, could someone have given him a drive-by Sabbat history, since the faction which became the Sabbat were termed 'The Anarchs' when they revolted against the Princes in the Dark Ages era and he just assumes they have a close working relationship? Pakxos fucked around with this message at 01:27 on Jul 3, 2023 |
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Jul 3, 2023 01:19
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