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That poo poo rules. I want to hear more about Stygia stuff, where is that stuff or is it one of those things that's all scattered throughout Onyx Path edited books and you have to put in the toilet time to read 'em all, nose to toes, to get the goods?
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Jul 14, 2023 19:48
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Hammersmith is an Adventure! reference, right?
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Jul 14, 2023 19:53
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Nessus posted:That poo poo rules. I want to hear more about Stygia stuff, where is that stuff or is it one of those things that's all scattered throughout Onyx Path edited books and you have to put in the toilet time to read 'em all, nose to toes, to get the goods? The Stygia stuff is going to be in the old Wraith books most likely. Short version is Stygia loving sucks because Charon was kind of a big dumb baby about running things and after he hosed off to fight a Malfean, poo poo only got worse because White Wolf loved it's bureaucracy.
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Jul 14, 2023 20:06
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Soonmot posted:Who had the write up on making Deviant more of an ongoing than a one shot? One of my players interested in running a game of it but is concerned about everyone blowing up. Chernobyl Peace Prize posted:in practice my group found the best way to handle the idea of "single character for the whole campaign, who doesn't tetsuo-up 4 sessions in on a bad roll or take up 100% of the spotlight" in a crossover game meant we changed variation/scar acquisition from the Instability spiral to just "4xp/dot, variations have to have corresponding scars." So far: Very fun! You can do a lot of wild, stupid poo poo in the system. The only other thing I'd maybe suggest, if someone's running a game of it, is look at beat acquisition rates---they're fine in a cross-splat group because everyone else has lots of ways to feed into it, but having just the 1 Aspiration + "have you updated your journal about your conspiracy today?" could make a pure-Deviant group rather slow going without beat-farming Conditions, especially if you move power acquisition towards dot-costs instead of "throw some xp at it once you get mutated enough for a new power slot."
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Jul 14, 2023 20:06
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joylessdivision posted:The Stygia stuff is going to be in the old Wraith books most likely. Short version is Stygia loving sucks because Charon was kind of a big dumb baby about running things and after he hosed off to fight a Malfean, poo poo only got worse because White Wolf loved it's bureaucracy.
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Jul 14, 2023 20:10
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Nessus posted:I thought this was the nWoD version of Stygia, which I had the impression was like the Elemental Plane of Death and Spooky poo poo rather than the necropolis of Europeans and European-descended civilizations. I assumed it would involve no named NPCs or anything, because nWoD seems to avoid those, other than Count Fuckin' Dracula. Pretty sure Loomer is running an oWoD game because he mentioned Celestial Chorus and the Giovanni in there. But I'll leave it to him to clarify. Also Stygia in the oWoD is the main Necropolis of Europe and "The Western Dead", but exists in "The Underworld" which is the broader realm of death and spoopy poo poo. Also Stygia is an island, in a sea, but god help me I read and reviewed the Wraith core and I still don't completely understand the geography of the Underworld. Other than "It looks like Hell from Fulci's The Beyond" which is the best way I was able to wrap my head around it.
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Jul 14, 2023 20:25
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joylessdivision posted:Also Stygia in the oWoD is the main Necropolis of Europe and "The Western Dead", but exists in "The Underworld" which is the broader realm of death and spoopy poo poo. Also Stygia is an island, in a sea, but god help me I read and reviewed the Wraith core and I still don't completely understand the geography of the Underworld. Other than "It looks like Hell from Fulci's The Beyond" which is the best way I was able to wrap my head around it. Honestly I don't think you're supposed to be able to get your head around it. Picture the Tempest as a stationary storm you could poke your head into (which you probably don't want to) and you have areas that are open and clear enough to put things in, which can be all the way big enough to hold Stygia. There's also trails through the Tempest, like the Styx and the tunnels the Midnight Express follows, that connect Stygia to the Shadowlands (which are the dead reflections of cities most wraiths hang out in). "Below" that - and not really below - is the Labyrinth where Specters also hang out when they're not in the Tempest and "above" - also not really - are the Shadowlands. That said it's much more concerned with metaphysics than actual physics. There's a cool map of Stygia in Wraith 20th. Looks like a scythe blade. 
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Jul 14, 2023 20:42
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joylessdivision posted:Pretty sure Loomer is running an oWoD game because he mentioned Celestial Chorus and the Giovanni in there. But I'll leave it to him to clarify.
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Jul 14, 2023 21:15
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Nessus posted:Loomer had also mentioned C:TL and that was the first reference I saw. Could well be a mash up, who knows -- I think Awakening's Sphere organization is more sensible myself even if I would probably go with Ascension's fluff if I were to run it. Yeah I saw that too and figured he might be doing a "Pull the best from both versions and use whichever system/metaplot you prefer" kinda deal. Dawgstar posted:Honestly I don't think you're supposed to be able to get your head around it. Picture the Tempest as a stationary storm you could poke your head into (which you probably don't want to) and you have areas that are open and clear enough to put things in, which can be all the way big enough to hold Stygia. There's also trails through the Tempest, like the Styx and the tunnels the Midnight Express follows, that connect Stygia to the Shadowlands (which are the dead reflections of cities most wraiths hang out in). "Below" that - and not really below - is the Labyrinth where Specters also hang out when they're not in the Tempest and "above" - also not really - are the Shadowlands. That said it's much more concerned with metaphysics than actual physics. Oh I forgot about the map in W20. I've been meaning to do more than skim my X20 books but I feel like I'll get more out of that once I've crammed the previous editions into my brain so I can do the "Leo points at the screen" meme when I recognize a reference. Hell the first chapter of "Apocalyptic Record" all about Ranch Apocalypse makes way more sense now that I've actually read the book it was referencing 
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Jul 14, 2023 21:37
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Speaking of 20th stuff, JD talking about Balam in the Rage Across the Amazon F&F got me reading up on them and sure enough, their description in the W20 Changing Breeds book actively works against you trying to make up a character set anywhere else but in Central and South America (which has been true of them since the beginning) except way towards the back of the book talking about the Beast Courts they just casually mention there's Balam in LA. That would have been nice to read about, book!
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Jul 14, 2023 23:51
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ty!!
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Jul 15, 2023 00:42
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Nessus posted:That poo poo rules. I want to hear more about Stygia stuff, where is that stuff or is it one of those things that's all scattered throughout Onyx Path edited books and you have to put in the toilet time to read 'em all, nose to toes, to get the goods? joylessdivision posted:Pretty sure Loomer is running an oWoD game because he mentioned Celestial Chorus and the Giovanni in there. But I'll leave it to him to clarify. I'm afraid I'm an oWoD Goober, yeah, though I'm a thief who freely steals cool poo poo from anywhere I see it so I'm also using some VtR bloodlines and more of a CtL than CtD take on the True Fae of Arcadia.* That said, I'll still ramble on about my take on Wraith's cosmology for a minute. It was always relatively ambiguous in the books because half the writers couldn't grasp it either, but I think thats a positive: it has no real geography, time and distance are subjective and contextual, and its as much about processing your lingering traumas and desires as hard, concrete geography. The sea opens smoothly for the wraith who fears nothing, but is an impossibly vast and storm-whipped barrier for the wraith who can't let go of the pain of their father's murder, with shadowy echoes of the object he was killed with battering them on the waves. The books that did nail it down as best they could were the Wraith novels, which were - the Atlanta one aside - among the best WoD Novels and ones I might reread for FNF (especially the Dark Kingdoms trilogy, which takes the same gonzo 'throw it all in, my man!' tack as Weinberg's Red Death trilogy but actually pulls it off!) The version I'm using fuses the Underworld, conceptually at least, with aspects of the Dreaming. The Dreaming is the place of fleeting whims and flights of fancy (but as every human can attest: passing flights of fancy can include the intrusive thought category all too readily, so it isn't just whimsy and joy, but also the echoes of those moments of sudden urges to cast yourself from the clifftop, the idle speculation on just how you'd go about murdering someone, etc), while the Underworld proper - which is to say, the the elemental plane of death and spoopy poo poo as opposed to the Shadowlands where its just ghosts hanging out and even Stygia proper, which is just one of a good number of Dark Kingdoms buried in the deep underworld - is where the traumatic memories go to be processed and digested. In that sense, its a duality with the High Umbra where Ideas live forever - just not in an even good/bad split. The specific approach here is to place 1816's Year Without Summer as the latest tint over areas of the Underworld, differing in inflection depending on where you enter it from. The memory (human, geological, and ecological) of the Tambora eruption and the freezing winter and famines that followed manifests differently in different areas, interlocking with other localized psychosphere trauma. The North Waters inspired Arctic Wastes version the PCs are going to slog through is where the memories of starvation, flood, and bitter dark cold meet with the death screams of thousands of whales - so as the PCs go through on their own harrowing journey to Stygia proper (we'll come back to that) they'll encounter ice formations that stop being purely geometric and start to resemble whaling boats and the skeletons of great, gargantuan beasts - all while their own food rations dwindle because geography is relative and not one of the PCs is a well-adjusted human being able to smooth the path out. By the time they reach the outskirts of the city of the dead, they'll be half-mad, snowblind, and will have eaten their sled dogs and perhaps a retainer or two - so they'll fit right in. Stygia itself still has its terrible emperor, Charon, but they won't be meeting him. They're going there for one of two purposes in the rough outline: 1. To speak to the last few wraiths left from Pompeii and Herculaneum. One of the two major plot throughlines of the game is set to involve (stop reading now if you're one of my players, dang) a Nephandi warren buried beneath Vesuvius and feasting off the violence and squalor of Naples to empower their dark and terrible god. Very pulpy stuff. 2. To pursue a plotline where one of the PCs is locked in a personal grudge over the love of a woman with a scion of the Dunsirn family - essentially, if it gets to this stage it'll be as part of a full-blown war with the Giovanni arising as a consequence of how they prosecute the earlier grudge I've moved the heart of Giovanni power to Naples - they aren't in league with the Nephandi there but find the same circumstances very helpful for their own ends. Likewise, rather than the Mafia, I'm centering the Camorra - via the Puttanesca family of the clan - as the clan's big criminal tie, specifically because of the Naples connection. Just similar enough that the players with experience will know to be careful about organized crime, but with enough of a divergence to throw them a curveball. The big complication in visiting Stygia at the moment is that its at war. Napoleon is busy carving out his own Dark Kingdom of Public Ordre by warring with Stygia, so Charon and the Deathlords are rather distracted dealing with a corsican who, though not personally powerful, has the loyalty of a great number of wraiths with very effective military relics at his disposal (a good number of which had time to join a Legion and a Guild and learn some useful tricks). All the PCs are English and Scottish, so to discover Napoleon back at his usual tricks will be a horrifying idea to them - and also open up, if they enjoy their time in the underworld, a plotline of getting involved in the Stygia-Napoleon war to put down the literal specter haunting europe once and for all. This, in turn, ties in with one of their allies. The louche and inexperienced orphan/cultist of ecstasy has a 3 dot ally - his father's coachman - who is retained by the family not because he's a good driver but because he's a rather dab hand at 'dealing with problems' for them. Said ally is, naturally, a Risen veteran of His Majesty's 95th Rifles, who can die over and over and come back again to keep fighting. What does he look like? Well, he's six feet tall with dark hair, blue eyes, with a nasty slash of a scar on his cheek that leaves him perpetually handsome in a coarse and brooding way. His tethers are his old 1796 Heavy Cavalry Sword and a French Eagle. I hope my players get it. (*: just like the Giovanni shift, part of this is to put my more experienced players onto less certain footing. They know oWoD but not nWoD content - so some of the stranger bloodlines of VtR surfacing from time to time will remind them that unless they take the time in-game to research the night folk closely, they shouldn't rest too comfortably on what they think they know. Not too often - the idea isn't to be a contrarian dick about it to them, but just to unsettle them and keep them from being too certain. I was able to use Juliet Parr in the Prologue to similar effect.) MonsieurChoc posted:Hammersmith is an Adventure! reference, right? Not knowingly! I just picked an area of what used to be outer london that's been steadily swallowed up but retains a lower population density and a less urbanized character in the 1840s. Loomer fucked around with this message at 01:19 on Jul 15, 2023 |
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Jul 15, 2023 01:13
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Oh yeah, that is some time before Gorool snacked on Charon. I really should read Ends of Empire one day and see if anything becomes of it.
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Jul 15, 2023 01:48
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Dawgstar posted:I really should read Ends of Empire one day and see if anything becomes of it. *I am still bummed by how hard every writer past the first one missed the ball on Dr. Douglas Netchurch
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Jul 15, 2023 02:29
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How so on ol' Dougie? I thought he was one of the stand-out metaplot characters.
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Jul 15, 2023 02:42
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Nessus posted:How so on ol' Dougie? I thought he was one of the stand-out metaplot characters. Netchurch even came up with the idea of blood points!
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Jul 15, 2023 02:52
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Nessus posted:How so on ol' Dougie? I thought he was one of the stand-out metaplot characters. For the audience: Dr. Netchurch is a Malkavian dedicated to codifying the vampiric condition - essentially, puzzling out in-character the game concepts like "Blood Points" and "Health Levels". He does this by conducting horrific experiments that bring to mind Unit 731 - experiments like having a vampire feed until fully sated, then starving them in an isolation chamber for days on end, or repeatedly exposing them to sunlight or traumatic injury and seeing how many times they can heal the wound before they are unable to do so. His notes take care to mention that he tells each subject of the importance of his experiments, and implores them to participate. Later asides often mention the subjects pleading for help or trying to escape, and in one of them he discusses the importance of keeping his experiments secret, and that the person in question killed themselves right after he left. Dr. Netchurch had no listed "derangement", and didn't believe in the Malkavian curse. He also had maxed-out Dominate. ...later books missed all of the implications, and used him as "vampire science man who doesn't believe in magic, also he has OCD about cleanliness or something, can't believe they forgot to give him a derangement" 
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Jul 15, 2023 02:59
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He also explicitly calls out how useful a ghoul assistant is, and how he relies on her too much to make her a vampire and they’ve come to an agreement on that …his next appearance is a short fiction showcasing the embrace of his assistant. 🤦🏻♀️ Less egregious than the first bit, but still comes to mind.
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Jul 15, 2023 03:06
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That sounds awesome and I love it.
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Jul 15, 2023 03:31
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AmiYumi posted:His notes take care to mention that he tells each subject of the importance of his experiments, and implores them to participate. Later asides often mention the subjects pleading for help or trying to escape, and in one of them he discusses the importance of keeping his experiments secret, and that the person in question killed themselves right after he left. Help me out, I'm having a slow-brain day: what's the particular implication here? Is it just that he's a psychopath who's kidnapping victims, brainwashing them to believe they've consented, and murdering them when he's done?
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Jul 15, 2023 03:56
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I Am Just a Box posted:Help me out, I'm having a slow-brain day: what's the particular implication here? Is it just that he's a psychopath who's kidnapping victims, brainwashing them to believe they've consented, and murdering them when he's done? He appears to be completely unaware he is doing anything untoward - whether this is a manifestation of his Malkavian madness or if he’s just an unreliable narrator is left up to the reader.
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Jul 15, 2023 04:11
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I totally get what you're describing I just thought that was kind of implicit. "Uses his Disciplines reflexively without thinking about it" is certainly scarier in some ways than "is very OCD."
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Jul 15, 2023 05:25
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Or he knows exactly what he's doing and is just writing his letters in ways to suggest that what he did was natural and normal, and his "derangement" is being a sociopath who feels nothing about destroying people for his own convenience. Which I wouldn't be surprised if after awhile some Vampire fans just stop clocking that as a personality disorder and start parsing it as just how most vampires in the World of Darkness start behaving.
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Jul 15, 2023 07:24
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In mediums like this, the subtlety of a sledgehammer usually goes over people's heads, including the writers. Nerds are very bad about taking things at face value.
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Jul 15, 2023 08:40
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Nessus posted:I totally get what you're describing I just thought that was kind of implicit. "Uses his Disciplines reflexively without thinking about it" is certainly scarier in some ways than "is very OCD." It reminds me of my favorite Derangement which is similar. I can't recall the name but basically the ST can also spend your blood points and doesn't necessarily tell you when.
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Jul 15, 2023 13:12
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Dawgstar posted:It reminds me of my favorite Derangement which is similar. I can't recall the name but basically the ST can also spend your blood points and doesn't necessarily tell you when. Dissociate Blood-Spending - sometimes during the day, sometimes in a situation where others seeing the tell-tale flush of raising Attributes makes them assume violence is on the way. The Vampire-specific ones can be fun in part because it's not something out of the diagnosis manual and in part because it's a reaction to the kindred condition.
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Jul 15, 2023 16:18
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I'd like to run a one-shot for VtM 20th but I can't seem to find much. Anyone have any good options? Ideally with pregens and the like, since it'll just be a pick-up game at my LGS. I suppose I could just use a Revised one too...?
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Jul 19, 2023 03:29
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There's always Dust to Dust.
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Jul 19, 2023 03:41
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3 Action Economist posted:I'd like to run a one-shot for VtM 20th but I can't seem to find much. Anyone have any good options? Ideally with pregens and the like, since it'll just be a pick-up game at my LGS. Just find something with little to no combat, otherwise your one-shot will become like 5 sessions.
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Jul 19, 2023 04:19
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Loomer posted:There's always Dust to Dust. Aha! It even has info for cutting things to make it run shorter!
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Jul 19, 2023 11:31
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Any word on when Woof 5E's PDF will be out?
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Jul 19, 2023 18:15
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Dawgstar posted:Any word on when Woof 5E's PDF will be out? August 2nd for those that pre-ordered the book Aka: The day I get nothing done at work including work on World of Dorkness reviews because I'm going to be reading this.
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Jul 19, 2023 18:18
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joylessdivision posted:August 2nd for those that pre-ordered the book It's tempting to try an F&F on it. (This is not me trying to encourage you. More me trying to encourage me.)
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Jul 19, 2023 18:35
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Dawgstar posted:It's tempting to try an F&F on it. (This is not me trying to encourage you. More me trying to encourage me.) Oh believe me, the thought has crossed my mind to F&F the 5e books I have (so I'll actually sit down and read the drat things) but I got about 14 years of other books to get through first. I however support you tackling them
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Jul 19, 2023 20:06
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What's F&F?
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Jul 19, 2023 20:07
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FATAL & Friends, the (usually deep-dive, long-form) RPG review thread. https://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3898332
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Jul 19, 2023 20:11
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3 Action Economist posted:What's F&F? disposablewords posted:FATAL & Friends, the (usually deep-dive, long-form) RPG review thread. Yup, and I've taken on the ludicrous task of reviewing the WoD from 1st edition through to the Time of Judgement for various reasons but mostly because I needed to justify the money I was spending on used classic WoD books. It's a good thread.
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Jul 19, 2023 20:18
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Ohhh. Right. Thank you.
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Jul 19, 2023 21:31
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joylessdivision posted:Yup, and I've taken on the ludicrous task of reviewing the WoD from 1st edition through to the Time of Judgement for various reasons but mostly because I needed to justify the money I was spending on used classic WoD books. I am oddly nostalgic for the Time of Judgement. Not for the books themselves, really, because only one I feel 100 percent understood the assignment (Apocalypse) but leading up to it they had 'news tickers' of events and it was great fun trying to figure out what it meant and what game it was referring to because it would be like somebody talking about something on Shreck.net or a report about a farm overrun by 'horrible misshapen creatures.'
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Jul 19, 2023 21:34
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joylessdivision posted:Yup, and I've taken on the ludicrous task of reviewing the WoD from 1st edition through to the Time of Judgement for various reasons but mostly because I needed to justify the money I was spending on used classic WoD books. Is there an existing list of the white wolf catalog out that you are working off of? Wikipedia has a couple but I didn't see any master lists come up on google.
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Jul 19, 2023 21:37
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