|
TheDiceMustRoll posted:I remember seeing the Hunter the Vigil board game on a shelf but I never heard if it was worth a look. Clearly I missed the sticker. I'm impressed White Wolf managed to get a crossover deal with Atlus for the SMT name. Bit of an odd choice, but I guess whatever gets them more brand recognition in the west.
|
#
?
Sep 16, 2023 16:47
|
|
|
|
| # ? May 26, 2024 18:26 |
|
|
Don't worry, they replaced him with Raidou Kuzunoha in the reprint
|
|
#
?
Sep 16, 2023 17:27
|
|
|
joylessdivision posted:It's not just the blatant Dante from DMC either, there's a very obvious image of Lil Wayne in that same book. Yeah?
|
|
#
?
Sep 16, 2023 22:54
|
|
|
Admiral Joeslop posted:Yeah? Yeah 
|
|
#
?
Sep 17, 2023 00:02
|
|
|
lmao
|
|
#
?
Sep 17, 2023 00:40
|
|
|
Okay
|
|
#
?
Sep 17, 2023 00:41
|
|
|
Owns
|
|
#
?
Sep 17, 2023 02:01
|
|
|
this is the best possible art
|
|
#
?
Sep 17, 2023 02:21
|
|
|
Honestly, Lil Wayne the mage is better art than whatever is going on with the Swole Jawa and other old mages in Mage the Awakening 2e. They nailed the Path art which clearly had strong editorial oversight and then the Order art is uhhhh 'tangentially connected' is how I would put it. Also lacking in women other than whatever is going on with the Silver Ladder nuns. Also I gotta say, Tome of the Pentacle's cover art and chapter art is actively worse than no art at all, being literally people with the 'cartoon' photoshop filter laid onto them and wands and staves edited into their hands.
|
|
#
?
Sep 17, 2023 05:04
|
|
|
bewilderment posted:Honestly, Lil Wayne the mage is better art than whatever is going on with the Swole Jawa and other old mages in Mage the Awakening 2e. He's not a Mage, he's a Hunter. The Ascending Ones specifically.
|
|
#
?
Sep 17, 2023 05:16
|
|
|
Dave Brookshaw posted:The original printing of Hunter: The Vigil first edition, yes. Artist got caught tracing. Hunter: The V[er]gil What?
|
|
#
?
Sep 17, 2023 05:20
|
|
|
Wait, do you goons think Lil Wayne is Lil Jon because goddamn would that be on brand
|
|
#
?
Sep 17, 2023 05:29
|
|
|
Bottom Liner posted:Wait, do you goons think Lil Wayne is Lil Jon because goddamn would that be on brand Yes, I mixed them up. I'm not going to claim Joeslop did.
|
|
#
?
Sep 17, 2023 05:35
|
|
|
Humbug Scoolbus posted:I'm supposed to get a free copy due to the Alas Vegas KS...I am not holding my breath. It has happened, in case anyone else used an infrequently checked email backing Alas Vegas.
|
|
#
?
Sep 17, 2023 11:26
|
|
|
DalaranJ posted:Yes, I mixed them up. If I were capable of shame then it would be embarrassing to admit such a thing so I won't
|
|
#
?
Sep 17, 2023 11:26
|
|
|
What?
|
|
#
?
Sep 17, 2023 12:51
|
|
|
bewilderment posted:Also I gotta say, Tome of the Pentacle's cover art and chapter art is actively worse than no art at all, being literally people with the 'cartoon' photoshop filter laid onto them and wands and staves edited into their hands. I think we can drill down into this cover art a bit further. You see, part of the problem is that Chronicles/New World of Darkness has had a very consistent style. The cover is a desaturated mono-color piece that looks like the title sequence of an X-Files ripoff, and the internal art is the kind of "regular person, but we made it a bit weird" art of varying quality that we've been discussing. With that in mind, let's look at the Tome of the Pentacle.  The layman's going to call it a bad cover because it's a bad piece of art. Fans are going to call it a bad cover because it's obviously a piece of interior art that's been put on the front cover with no effort made to make it fit with the rest of the line. And yes, Onyx Path is a lot more budget than it used to be, but it implies a drop in project planning/oversight that's kind of disheartening. (And if anyone here happens to be planning any new additions to established RPGs, here's a lesson for you: plan your art comms in advance, or you're going to get stuck making some random art like this your cover.)
|
|
#
?
Sep 17, 2023 16:41
|
|
|
Sometimes your dead game line has to just push one last time thing out the door due to various obligations.
|
|
#
?
Sep 17, 2023 19:40
|
|
|
Lord_Hambrose posted:Sometimes your dead game line has to just push one last time thing out the door due to various obligations. Definitely reminiscent of the Imperial Mysteries cover that graced the final (2nd to last?) book of the 1e line.
|
|
#
?
Sep 17, 2023 20:12
|
|
|
As someone who's done some professional art direction,* my basic guidance would be that every picture should communicate something to the reader — ideally, it should tell a story. (There's a reason everybody remembers the Chompy art from Exalted.) If the only thing your picture conveys is that this book has wizards, but modern wizards, and they do magic while posing, you might as well have just used the space to give people a good recipe for crème brulée.
|
|
#
?
Sep 17, 2023 20:24
|
|
|
I agree with most of the criticisms being leveled here, but at this point it's almost not even worth it to make fun of the art direction of the nWoD/CofD gamelines since the art has been consistently LOL for so long that it's almost a staple of the lines at this point. I love Hunter: The Vigil (1e), but it has an absolutely terrible cover, and the art inside ranges from hilarious traces of real people/video game characters, to mid-tier hand drawings with the perspective issues I see when I'm viewing the stuff made by my daughter's elementary school gifted art classes. As someone that has had friends that take art commissions for RPGs it always surprises me that White Wolf so consistently found BAD artists when there are plenty of good artists that will still work for dirt cheap. Fake edit: Okay, I'm being over-mean here. There's plenty of good art in HtV, it's just that the bad stuff is so bad it knocks you right out of the book for a few minutes.
|
|
#
?
Sep 17, 2023 20:56
|
|
|
I'll be honest, a big part of why I'm harsh on Tome of the Pentacle is because of Onyx Path's general downward spiral and mismanagement. Their art quality's always been spotty at best, that's why I focused on the cover clearly being bad interior art instead of their normal bad cover art. It's just a highly visible sign of how mismanaged these lines are in general.
|
|
#
?
Sep 17, 2023 21:10
|
|
|
Rand Brittain posted:As someone who's done some professional art direction,* my basic guidance would be that every picture should communicate something to the reader — ideally, it should tell a story. (There's a reason everybody remembers the Chompy art from Exalted.) The funny thing is that, basic as it is, the cover art for Tome of the Pentacle could have told an appropriate story by just posing and organizing some variously-equipped wizards... if there were five of them.
|
|
#
?
Sep 17, 2023 21:28
|
|
|
Ferrinus posted:The funny thing is that, basic as it is, the cover art for Tome of the Pentacle could have told an appropriate story by just posing and organizing some variously-equipped wizards... if there were five of them. You, the reader, are the fifth wizard. The ritual and the game are incomplete without you.
|
|
#
?
Sep 18, 2023 03:44
|
|
|
Ferrinus posted:The funny thing is that, basic as it is, the cover art for Tome of the Pentacle could have told an appropriate story by just posing and organizing some variously-equipped wizards... if there were five of them. I mean, it takes more than "this is five wizards" to qualify as a story. You need to be able to infer something about the relationships of the people on the cover, like a conflict or something about one of the book's themes.
|
|
#
?
Sep 18, 2023 04:04
|
|
|
Lurks With Wolves posted:I'll be honest, a big part of why I'm harsh on Tome of the Pentacle is because of Onyx Path's general downward spiral and mismanagement. Their art quality's always been spotty at best, that's why I focused on the cover clearly being bad interior art instead of their normal bad cover art. It's just a highly visible sign of how mismanaged these lines are in general. Can you tell me more about this? I only started paying attention to OP when H:tV 2e came out, after years of not owning my old nWoD books, and I could immediately tell something was up with that book when I bought it. Everything seems like a clusterfuck, but I've only gotten scattered stories about what happened with that company.
|
|
#
?
Sep 18, 2023 07:58
|
|
|
Anonymous Zebra posted:Can you tell me more about this? I only started paying attention to OP when H:tV 2e came out, after years of not owning my old nWoD books, and I could immediately tell something was up with that book when I bought it. Everything seems like a clusterfuck, but I've only gotten scattered stories about what happened with that company. There's no real big mystery or anything. Paradox owns White Wolf as a brand and corporate entity and they chose to focus on the WoD and not CofD; and are generally slow to approve anything further. The CofD fanbase isn't really growing and so the gameline is pretty much wrapping up, and that means that the last books are basically put together as time and budget permits. I only called out TotP just because it's cover is actively worse than something like just having the plain blue Awakening generic cover with the title overlaid in yellow text. That said there's other interior art by that artist/style and it's uniformly bad and a waste of art budget. Signs of Sorcery uses the same for its chapter-leading illustrations. It's a poo poo style, the artist should feel bad and the art director should feel bad for using them a second (or more???) time. bewilderment fucked around with this message at 10:43 on Sep 18, 2023 |
|
#
?
Sep 18, 2023 10:39
|
|
|
"A sourcebook for Mage The Awakening Second Edition" in a lovely papyrus-alike font with an incredibly weak outer glow that makes it blend into the runes they have overlaying the black background is also a choice. Apparently that's the standard for allt he 2nd edition gamelines rather than just having the Logo on there like they did with first edition.
|
|
#
?
Sep 18, 2023 14:57
|
|
|
Anonymous Zebra posted:Can you tell me more about this? I only started paying attention to OP when H:tV 2e came out, after years of not owning my old nWoD books, and I could immediately tell something was up with that book when I bought it. Everything seems like a clusterfuck, but I've only gotten scattered stories about what happened with that company. There isn't much to say, honestly. It's the slow decline of a company trying to diversify away from their main game lines which they have to license from another company and getting stuck in the "make a kickstarter so we have enough money to keep going until the next kickstarter" cycle while they slowly lose all of their experienced writers to a combination of poor editorial oversight and people being horrible. There's been some posts in the WoD thread from Dave Brookshaw about working for them that broke my heart, but there aren't specific break points unless you really want to go into detail. Otherwise it's just Onyx Path slowly deflating.
|
|
#
?
Sep 18, 2023 17:04
|
|
|
I have to wonder how much of the Onyx Path downward curve can be directly or indirectly attributed to the whole thing with Exalted 3e getting a ton of hype and then instead of riding that wave, taking an extra 2 1/2 years beyond what was promised to release anything.
|
|
#
?
Sep 18, 2023 20:22
|
|
|
I don't think there's much overlap between Exalted and WoD people, either on the production or playing side.
|
|
#
?
Sep 18, 2023 20:48
|
|
|
Roadie posted:I have to wonder how much of the Onyx Path downward curve can be directly or indirectly attributed to the whole thing with Exalted 3e getting a ton of hype and then instead of riding that wave, taking an extra 2 1/2 years beyond what was promised to release anything. I'd say that's backwards: in retrospect, the third edition of Exalted came out faster than anything Onyx Path has done since. (Most of their corebooks take at least three years from the point they get started to being published, including a lot of games that are way simpler than Exalted.) They just never had the infrastructure to produce an ongoing gameline at a sustainable rate, and the stuff they inherited has been collapsing as the old hands left, such that the company's history has basically been an extended death rattle.
|
|
#
?
Sep 18, 2023 20:59
|
|
|
The reputational damage of Beast doesn't help matters, either.
|
|
#
?
Sep 19, 2023 00:45
|
|
|
I don't think enough people know Beast exists, let alone the backstory behind its development, for it to have much of an effect. For that matter it's a minor miracle when I meet someone in general TTRPG spaces who even knows the difference between the oWoD and the nWod/ChroD.
|
|
#
?
Sep 19, 2023 02:02
|
|
|
They have also likely been affected by Swedracula causing that international incident so hard Paradox said "well you had some autonomy, hope you enjoyed it while it lasted" and hollowed out White Wolf and turned it into a glove. Beast was definitely a black eye to OPP but then they kind of just didn't do a great job of differentiating itself with its original content and the ChronDark stuff that went out wasn't super attention grabbing.
|
|
#
?
Sep 19, 2023 02:02
|
|
|
The one thing I find myself regretting to this day is that Paradox canning everything meant canning the really massive effort they were putting into getting decent PDFs made of absolutely everything in the WoD.
|
|
#
?
Sep 19, 2023 03:21
|
|
|
Splicer posted:Ashriel Lockheart Bottom Liner posted:OC do not steal
|
|
#
?
Sep 19, 2023 05:20
|
|
|
Hostile V posted:They have also likely been affected by Swedracula causing that international incident so hard Paradox said "well you had some autonomy, hope you enjoyed it while it lasted" and hollowed out White Wolf and turned it into a glove. Beast was definitely a black eye to OPP but then they kind of just didn't do a great job of differentiating itself with its original content and the ChronDark stuff that went out wasn't super attention grabbing. It's this. Beast was Bad but everything that's come out since hasn't really done numbers either. Pretty much the only book I've heard good things about is Deviant. I know contagion chronicles was just actively bad since it basically exists as an excuse to have Beasts in a crossover party.
|
|
#
?
Sep 19, 2023 05:39
|
|
|
I wonder how well the storypath stuff is doing? I quite enjoy some of the Trinity settings, and the kickstarters/backerkits don't seem to have any problems (aside taking a few years to produce a physical book, but that's expected), but I wonder if it's enough to keep onyx path running? I've seen a few physical books in stores for Scion and Trinity, but I assumed that was backer stuff rather than full publishing runs.
|
|
#
?
Sep 19, 2023 08:32
|
|
|
|
| # ? May 26, 2024 18:26 |
|
|
There's still a Hunter 20th sized hole on my shelf, but it somehow got a shiny 5th edition.
|
|
#
?
Sep 19, 2023 09:59
|
|