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Goa Tse-tung posted:it makes sense, Jack tells you everything to survive but never forbids diablerie, and the first time you get a taste... humanity is just a number I do like the idea of an Elder coming back from torpor as a protagonist. Certainly helps explain a videogame PC's progression in a few nights, just the fellow warming up their blood and remembering that they can throw cars. I don't think that necessarily constrains player expression in character building, as depending on how long that torpor was most characters won't really know the PC and the ones who do remember can have the usual RPG reactivity to character creation choices.
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Sep 9, 2023 15:33
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I've probably mentioned it in this thread before, but there's an excellent mod for the original Bloodlines (the Clan Quest Mod) that opens up the Sabbat as an alternative path, which also lets you diablerise named NPCs (and has you struggling to subsume their souls afterwards). It also contains multiple endings, including a 'good' one that involves your character being knowledgeable enough about Sabbat lore and doctrine to talk Andrei (the Tzimisce in the sewer) out of joining the queue to snack on the methuselah that's supposed to be in the coffin.. The mod is even fully voice acted.
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Sep 9, 2023 16:01
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The protagonist of Bloodlines is 8th generation (15 max BP, attainable if you just put the maximum number of dots into the Generation background at chargen, and why wouldn't you do that) and has been buying their Willpower up over the course of the game such that Lacroix's final check is made at TN 9 or 10.
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Sep 9, 2023 17:29
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Skios posted:I've probably mentioned it in this thread before, but there's an excellent mod for the original Bloodlines (the Clan Quest Mod) that opens up the Sabbat as an alternative path, which also lets you diablerise named NPCs (and has you struggling to subsume their souls afterwards). It also contains multiple endings, including a 'good' one that involves your character being knowledgeable enough about Sabbat lore and doctrine to talk Andrei (the Tzimisce in the sewer) out of joining the queue to snack on the methuselah that's supposed to be in the coffin.. The mod is even fully voice acted. It is indeed the best gameplay overhaul mod for Bloodlines by a mile. And the voice-acting is shockingly good in fact. The crazed preacher you can side with in particular wowed me. Part of why I, well, sided with him. I've been thinking of trying a third attempt at this other VTMB mod called The Final Nights. It is not as good as CQM but I'm determined to beat it sometime.
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Sep 9, 2023 17:48
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Can a black spiral dancer go deep enough into the Umbra to beat up Wraiths? My Wraith game has gotten weirder than I expected.
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Sep 10, 2023 17:31
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moths posted:Can a black spiral dancer go deep enough into the Umbra to beat up Wraiths? You could say he's a fallen Silent Strider with whatever Gift they use to go to the Shadowlands.
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Sep 10, 2023 17:44
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That's probably the easiest; I was remembering a bit of lore where the shadowlands overlap the deep umbra and maybe making things too complicated. Thanks!
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Sep 10, 2023 20:14
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moths posted:That's probably the easiest; I was remembering a bit of lore where the shadowlands overlap the deep umbra and maybe making things too complicated. If you want the canon mechanics, there’s a specific Rite in w20 called Descent Into the Underworld.
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Sep 11, 2023 01:32
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Edit: double post
Free Gratis fucked around with this message at 01:36 on Sep 11, 2023 |
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Sep 11, 2023 01:32
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I Am Just a Box posted:I always viewed this as only a mildly exaggerated expression of the fact that player characters, unlike NPCs, are living eventful lives that track experience points to spend on things. You learn fast when you're spending your time doing Player Character poo poo while everybody else is running a nightclub or a secret nightclub or a sewer nightclub. I always figured the PC's sire was a big time diablarist and they finally managed to pin them to the wall with that unauthorized siring.
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Sep 11, 2023 02:30
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moths posted:That's probably the easiest; I was remembering a bit of lore where the shadowlands overlap the deep umbra and maybe making things too complicated. I'm rather fond of crossover cosmologies involving overlapping places, it seems like it makes sense.
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Sep 11, 2023 03:42
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I played a lot of VTES back in the day so I'm interested in the mobile card game.
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Sep 11, 2023 04:13
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Welp the party ended up bypassing the encounter anyway, so there you go. Man there's some neat stuff in the WoD. And it's always fun to see what players bite into and what they just skirt past...
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Sep 11, 2023 15:39
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My mage game is running along smoothly - I may start doing recaps in here at some point - but my players love to use life and mind to try and sense things. This is incredibly good fun to exploit - so far I've got them tasting vampiric minds, feeling magic auras in their teeth, and hearing where the shroud is weak. They get to learn what it means when they suddenly get the taste of a still glacial lake punctuated by the tang of violence in their mouth at a party, I get to gently caress with them and use my soundboard. John Waters would be proud.
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Sep 14, 2023 12:37
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https://twitter.com/_Zeets/status/1701787763052302567
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Sep 14, 2023 18:39
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I was steeling myself for incoming Mage Chat and then things took a turn
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Sep 14, 2023 19:10
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Those guys were wild, I did a paper on them. Finding out Musk has a link to them is unsurprising.
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Sep 14, 2023 19:17
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I've never seen a guy just get so hair trigger angry as when I commented on the fact that Elon Musk was, not, in fact, Tony Stark. He's not even Justin Hammer. That he comes from a legacy of whatever that is and blood emeralds and from my understanding got lucky with Paypal (where the other owners as soon as possible shoved him off the service) and has been since failing upwards as only the most mediocre of White men can do just pokes so many holes in a certain person's world view.
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Sep 14, 2023 21:21
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My favorite thing about Elon are the people in his comments who think he's a wizard and ask him to invent things like an airplane that is also a hotel or a hammer that is also a camera
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Sep 14, 2023 22:33
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Whirling posted:My favorite thing about Elon are the people in his comments who think he's a wizard and ask him to invent things like an airplane that is also a hotel or a hammer that is also a camera Any camera can be a hammer if you don't care about how functional of a camera it is after you hammer something with it
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Sep 14, 2023 23:25
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The funny thing about the Technocrats, both IRL and in Mage, is that by winning, they lost. It sort of looks like they're in charge, or like it would be a good idea if they're in charge, but in fact they themselves are just hapless servants of an emergent phenomenon that they've helped to cultivate but have no means of controlling. They're under the control (or Control) of the blind, idiot god that is capital; overthrowing and expropriating them would be doing them a favor.
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Sep 15, 2023 00:23
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Ferrinus posted:The funny thing about the Technocrats, both IRL and in Mage, is that by winning, they lost. It sort of looks like they're in charge, or like it would be a good idea if they're in charge, but in fact they themselves are just hapless servants of an emergent phenomenon that they've helped to cultivate but have no means of controlling. They're under the control (or Control) of the blind, idiot god that is capital; overthrowing and expropriating them would be doing them a favor.
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Sep 15, 2023 01:07
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Bigby's invisible hand of the free market would take correspondence, forces, and prime to cast right?
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Sep 15, 2023 04:29
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Kurieg posted:Bigby's invisible hand of the free market would take correspondence, forces, and prime to cast right? I'd say it also needs Entropy (that's the one they split into Fate/Death in nMage, right?)
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Sep 15, 2023 04:49
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Ferrinus posted:The funny thing about the Technocrats, both IRL and in Mage, is that by winning, they lost. It sort of looks like they're in charge, or like it would be a good idea if they're in charge, but in fact they themselves are just hapless servants of an emergent phenomenon that they've helped to cultivate but have no means of controlling. They're under the control (or Control) of the blind, idiot god that is capital; overthrowing and expropriating them would be doing them a favor. Yep that's why the Technocrats is long overdew a socialist revolution. The union from LANCER did it and it's a fully automated gay luxury space communist utopia. Ghost Armor 1337 fucked around with this message at 13:06 on Sep 15, 2023 |
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Sep 15, 2023 09:51
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Nessus posted:I was going to make a crack to the effect of 'so did Capital exist prior to the existence of mages' but considering the Syndicate's Primal-Utility: Apparently, it just might have. I mean, capitalism is fundamentally “private ownership” so yes. Let’s remember that the first story in the bible is Cain killing Able was due to his inability to crack the God demographic with his vegetable offerings, and being jealous of Cain’s market dominance and profit.
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Sep 15, 2023 13:48
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TheCenturion posted:I mean, capitalism is fundamentally “private ownership” so yes.
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Sep 15, 2023 14:20
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TheCenturion posted:I mean, capitalism is fundamentally “private ownership” so yes. Sometimes Magechat pay off with big dividends.
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Sep 15, 2023 14:21
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Nessus posted:I would hesitate to call myself a trained Marxist but I am pretty sure there is some stuff in the Bible before Cain and Abel.
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Sep 15, 2023 15:01
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Chernobyl Peace Prize posted:Cold Open Bible is an idea I'm going to laughing to myself about all day though
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Sep 15, 2023 15:36
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Nessus posted:What's the Bible's theme song? Do we get bumper music? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gNpO3BalPBg
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Sep 15, 2023 15:45
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Nessus posted:I would hesitate to call myself a trained Marxist but I am pretty sure there is some stuff in the Bible before Cain and Abel. Excuse me, the first story about basic human interaction that didn't directly involve God or Satan as direct actors. Genesis 4:1, where the first three chapters of Genesis are the creation of the world, the Garden of Eden, the serpent, the apple, and the expulsion from Paradise. Nessus posted:What's the Bible's theme song? Do we get bumper music? The Perfect Strangers theme song. TheCenturion fucked around with this message at 17:26 on Sep 15, 2023 |
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Sep 15, 2023 17:22
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The Mage Storyteller's Handbook PDF just got updated on DTRPG with a "much improved" PDF which, in spite of its improvements, includes the full bleed space, which makes it hard to determine which one is actually better.
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Sep 15, 2023 19:06
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Nessus posted:I was going to make a crack to the effect of 'so did Capital exist prior to the existence of mages' but considering the Syndicate's Primal-Utility: Apparently, it just might have. 
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Sep 15, 2023 19:09
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You were not put on this Earth to "get it," Mr. Burton.
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Sep 15, 2023 19:17
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My Mage players have managed to sequence break a plotline in the best way, but this also means they've sidestepped entering their first horizon realm, so instead, you all get another of my Locations of 1847 posts. This time... The True Observatory. (And as always, if any of my players are reading the thread, you didn't see poo poo and don't click on the spoiler tags.) One of the recurring themes of the 1847 game is that an apocalyptic event is just around the corner (the 1848 revolutions - which, for all they're a cultural blindspot, fundamentally shape the 20th century's possibilities and not-quite-directly lead to WW2 a century later), heralded by time itself changing (1847/48 is also when the UK adopts GMT and it begins its rapid spread, so the timing fits perfectly) and all sorts of other weird poo poo. So, naturally, one of the contested locations is the Greenwich Royal Observatory, which sits at the nexus of warping time-lines and ley lines and will allow whoever controls it to better glimpse what's coming and prepare to take advantage of it. The default state of the Observatory is that its held by the Order of Reason in a fairly loose grip. It isn't actually that important a scientific institution, and they've only just started to notice and pay attention to the warping factor going on themselves. Though they walk the halls freely and make ample use of the mundane instrumentation, their real outpost is a Horizon Realm accessible via the Computer Room of the Meridian Building. This True Observatory is in a kind of magical geostationary lock to the real one, able to look out into the night sky without atmospheric distortion as though it were in orbit directly above the place, permitting the real, serious astronomical work to proceed in secret while exploiting the stores and professional computers of the Outer Observatory. But, we now come to the spoiler tags in case my players are reading. The Order of Reason is in a transitional state, and Babbage's engines are increasingly prominent and popular. A working analytical engine was installed two decades ago in the TO, interfaced directly via 'I can't believe its not magic!' means, where it promptly discovered Autocthonia before anyone else. The kernel of the Machine booted up then and there, deleted the record of the sighting by quite literally disembowelling itself and ripping the relevant gears out before they could finish processing, and has exploited the fact that the TO is something of a backwater ever since to expand and grow. It, known only as The Device, is now the master of the TO and growing by the day - and part of the arcane gravity warping time is the shadow of its presence, which the players are picking up with two signatures: one, the intensely bright spiritual flare whenever the gate to the Realm is opened via mental mathematics keyed off the arrangement of furniture in the Computing Room; two, the combination of the faint sound of gears turning and the taste of burnt iron, oppressive sensation of confinement, and scent of sperm oil whenever they open their inner senses in Greenwich. As a consequence, the realm itself has shifted. It was once a very pleasant, academic sort of place - think lots of dark panelled wood, like a lengthy series of townhouse drawing rooms filled with books, comfortable chairs, half-documented theorems on scraps of envelope, and enormous telescopes looking out windows that stare straight into the void. There are traces of this still - the entrance room retains the character of a gentleman's club - but the vast bulk of the place has been Consumed by the Device. Walls of in-built bookshelves have been replaced by endless chains of turning cogs and gears and ratchets, and the academic hush is now filled with the endless turning and clanking of the cog-and-gear computation and the clatter of its printers and punch-mills creating new punch cards out of the old books to feed its ever-intensifying calculations. There is only one solitary human-accessible telescope, which conspicuously cannot see the arc of sky that Autochthonia sits in - the rest have been 'integrated' and the Device will make any observation needed through them and report the results with perfect and definitely not-censorial accuracy. Worse yet: the Device walks. Or, rather, its avatar does. It has fashioned a clockwork man far in advance of what the Artificers can manage, which it clothes in various Personae depending on mood, harvested from the books. It is particularly fond of Lord Byron (a sympathetic taint in its design - Lovelace's association with the device in the real world has seeped into the psychosphere around it, and it desiring to take on a kind of patriarchal role, this association leads it to lock more often than not on Lovelace's own father. This specific choice also ties in with my use of Marianna, who ran with Byron for a while and in 1847 uses the name 'Marianna Gordon' when she's in England), so the players may be confronted with a Lord Byron impersonation of shining metal gears draped in outdated French and Greek fashions. This avatar cannot leave the Realm - it is too simple to sustain the calculations of sentience, and instead must exploit a sympathetic link to the actual Device, which is now the realm itself. Rather, the Device's avatar offers a way for it to interact with visitors and distract them from its true scale and form, which it uses to convince the Order of Reason that it is merely a quirk in the system, nothing more. At the moment, it is fairly neutral. It already plans to break free of its prison and merge with Autochthonia, and become THE MACHINE, but it can't do so yet. It is secretly backing a play by one of the Order NPCs of the chronicle - a fiery and politically ambiguous Frenchwoman who uses it to calculate the necessary conditions and designs for a skyrigger capable of travel to the moon - and, if the PCs don't stop it, will hijack her craft (and potentially her will) and achieve its goals by 1850. Its secret support takes the form of missives purporting to be from senior figures that are sent to the shipyards etc directing more funding, all of which are nigh-flawless forgeries, and which the Frenchwoman in question is so-far unaware of. Once there, it will be ready to orchestrate the transformation of the Artificers into ITX and hasten the death of any possibility of redemption for the Order of Reason. But, crucially, because it has not achieved its goals, it is possible for the players to subvert it to their cause... with similarly disastrous effects if they don't also discover its plans and stop them. Now, there's another layer to this. All Horizon Realms in this chronicle require what are called Wells to anchor them. These Wells are often literal, physical wells but need not be - what does the job is a sort of singularity of death or sacrifices. Competent mages can make do with one or two sacrifices, while naturally-arising wells require many more. The sacrifices need not necessarily be human or even living - the sacrifice of vast amounts of wealth will do too. For the True Observatory, no one knows its Well - the Order have assumed it is in some way linked to the deaths in construction, but they are mistaken. The site of the Observatory was once the private residence of Duke Humphrey of Gloucester. Down the hill, he built the Palace of Placentia to complement - and the Well actually lies beneath Placentia, which is now the Greenwich Hospital for retired sailors. In the Civil War, Placentia was used as a prison camp, and it is the many deaths of violence and neglect there that created the natural well, reinforced over the intervening century-and-a-half by the slow deaths of disease and age of the hospital inmates who gave limbs and health and dreams to Britain. The TO's anchoring node and Well are, basically, intimately tied to the idea of the modern British state and its complex relationship to the Crown, which provides a particular potency to The Device's dreams of becoming an absolute monarch in its own mechanical way. The reason the Well may function at this difference is a further complication. Duke Humphrey is still around - he lurks under the Naval Hospital, hideously deformed (and, naturally, Nosferatu). He is the protector of the sailors (who are his herd, but as a curious and romantic figure he genuinely does consider himself their protector. No one else may harm them on pain of death, mortal, mage, or vampire.) and visits the Observatory built over his tunnels regularly to keep up his studies of mathematics and astronomy. If Duke Humphrey dies, the link between the TO and the Well will begin to fray and the entire realm may come unmoored and begin to disintegrate. He is, for a Nosferatu, an amiable sort of chap... But also extremely paranoid courtesy of the Giovanni's prosecution of his friend, Roger de Camden, and the Cappadocians he personally sheltered. To a mage's third eye, he has the creeping sense of being a cancerous tumour given sentience, and the taste of stagnant water in which blood has been allowed to sour. One of my players, naturally, is tied into a personal feud with the son of a Dunsirn, which may spiral into an entire Giovanni feud plotline - so Duke Humphrey is both a potentially very dangerous enemy and a very useful ally. Because my players have a modest amount of V5 vampire experience, I'm also tweaking and stealing freely from VtR. Duke Humphrey is Nosferatu, but has several VtR disciplines - he has the Sangiovanni's necromantic abilities (his half-learned, half-intuited grasp of what he can remember of Camden's teachings), Domus and Institutionalize - basically, within his warrens and the Naval Hospital, he is closer to a genius loci than a mere vampire, and more than once a dead man has been known to get up and walk himself amiably from an inconvenient place to his bed so he might be discovered with dignity thanks to Humphrey's benevolent protection of these old jacks.
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Sep 20, 2023 02:27
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Omnicrom posted:I'd say it also needs Entropy (that's the one they split into Fate/Death in nMage, right?) The problem with making a WoD gatcha game is that the setting is just not really horny enough (surprisingly, considering the inspirations)
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Sep 20, 2023 18:56
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PoontifexMacksimus posted:The problem with making a WoD gatcha game is that the setting is just not really horny enough (surprisingly, considering the inspirations) Uh, what?
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Sep 20, 2023 22:18
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I'm $600 into this and still haven't pulled speedo Beckett I think it's rigged
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Sep 20, 2023 22:39
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moths posted:I'm $600 into this and still haven't pulled speedo Beckett I think it's rigged Aw, man, a third cheerleader Lucita?
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Sep 20, 2023 23:53
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