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Peztopiary posted:Part of the mission for the Abbey can be a twisted noblesse obligee. Your responsibility to the proles means you and Muffy (and your lackeys) are going to go after the things that go bump in the night. I think that a group of rich jerks adds to the Hunt. I also had that the parties they can throw are effectively supernatural, in that people (and other things) are compelled to show up. Maybe it costs you five dots in resources, but the subject of your Hunt shows up at your rave even if they aren't really sure why. What, like. "By God, my grandfather didn't kill Huns at Ypres for a bunch of blood-sucking vampires to eat the working class alive! he did it so the Tories could instead! Jeeves, get my gun!"
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Dec 31, 2015 09:54
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Loomer posted:What, like. "By God, my grandfather didn't kill Huns at Ypres for a bunch of blood-sucking vampires to eat the working class alive! he did it so the Tories could instead! Jeeves, get my gun!" In a sense, that's almost the Barrett Commission's angle. "God damnit, we're the ones who get to exploit the masses, not Dracula! Supernatural powers are cheating!"
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Dec 31, 2015 10:03
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Loomer posted:What, like. "By God, my grandfather didn't kill Huns at Ypres for a bunch of blood-sucking vampires to eat the working class alive! he did it so the Tories could instead! Jeeves, get my gun!" That and Skull and Bones. "Look Tommy, we took a chance letting you in, your money hasn't even been around long enough to get the oil off. You're from Texas, surely you can handle a rifle."
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Dec 31, 2015 10:13
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Peztopiary posted:Part of the mission for the Abbey can be a twisted noblesse obligee. Your responsibility to the proles means you and Muffy (and your lackeys) are going to go after the things that go bump in the night. I think that a group of rich jerks adds to the Hunt. I also had that the parties they can throw are effectively supernatural, in that people (and other things) are compelled to show up. Maybe it costs you five dots in resources, but the subject of your Hunt shows up at your rave even if they aren't really sure why. I don't think they need to be gotten rid of entirely, I just think that even a less overtly skeezy Ashwood Abbey works better as an example of an NPC compact rather than something pitched to GMs as a group they can build a campaign around. They could make for great contacts, rivals, benefactors, and supporting cast, I just don't think there's enough meat on the bones to merit being one of the signature "your PCs can be a part of this" faction the way that other compacts and conspiracies deserve.
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Dec 31, 2015 11:25
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"What other faction embraces how fun the Hunt is? All the other factions are so serious and grim about something that should be joyous. Some of them even turn it into work, darling." -- A twenty year old old-money scion who has no idea what she's getting into I think there's room for one Compact/Conspiracy that doesn't deny how fun Hunting is. You're not doing it for the government, for God, for your sins, or for a paycheck. You're doing it because this is your world and the people in it your property/friends/toys.
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Dec 31, 2015 12:59
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I once came up with a compact inspired by how the Akhud are described in the VII book - suicidal thrill killers. A Compact entirely made up of people who have a terminal disease or a death wish or a powerful and profound urge to kill or any combination of the above. They hunt because the danger and the kill are the only things that keep them alive, and if the werewolf tears their throat out as they ram the silver knife home, so much the better. As it turns out, death cult hunters are frighteningly dangerous once they sniff your trail out. The first time a vampire goes out feeding and picks out a target who turns out to be a suicide bomber, that's either the last time they feed or the last time they spend a night in that particular city. Hunters who set themselves on fire rather than get bitten. Hunters who open portals to the Underworld and drag ghosts down with them. Hunters who don't give a poo poo, and just want to kill you and everyone you like.
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Dec 31, 2015 16:34
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Managed to snag really cheap copies of Horror Recognition Guide and Witch Finders. Just happy is all.
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Dec 31, 2015 21:27
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I don't have my copy of the book to hand so thought I'd ask, and obviously this would vary based on the game, but how omniscient is the God Machine? And how does it actually get its information? Like, it needs three senile widowers with type O blood to die on a certain bridge on a certain night, how does it find them? Do cats tell it? Does it listen to phone calls? Psychic angels constantly gliding over cities remembering everything they hear? Does it just Know? If it just Knows then it seems like any mortal learning about it would be pretty hosed. And it obviously makes the effort to act in secret, but does that mean humanity could kill it if they knew? Or would they just be an immense inconvenience, and the plans flow smoother if they are in the dark? I realise there's no set answer to this stuff but am interested in peoples take on it.
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Dec 31, 2015 22:43
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My general take is that the God-Machine takes the route of least resistance. It's tapped into pretty much any mortal information network, so if it can get information that way, it does. It isn't omniscient - in fact, it loses track of things fairly often. Data that isn't frequently accessed gets lost or corrupted - and Demons Falling corrupts data further, so it loses track of them a lot, too. It could use magic to learn things and does when it has to, but doing that means setting up a project to get the information, which is extra work. Of course, if magic is already in place, that's fine. The God-Machine is nothing if not frugal. It acts in secret for the same reason - open action draws attention and resistance, which massively delays goals or renders them impossible. It would be exceptionally difficult to eradicate the Machine - not kill, because it isn't alive or intelligent - and it could probably destroy humanity in the process. But that wouldn't accomplish goals and would render most goals impssible.
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Dec 31, 2015 22:57
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Vitamin P posted:I don't have my copy of the book to hand so thought I'd ask, and obviously this would vary based on the game, but how omniscient is the God Machine? And how does it actually get its information? It's not omniscient, it merely has the most terrifyingly comprehensive intelligence-gathering system that could ever exist. It sets up Infrastructure for a number of reasons, but one of the biggest is to get what it needs to where it needs it. You knock out the right bits of Infrastructure, and if it's not flying blind in an area, it might at least be flying without hands. Though, even without Infrastructure, angels are constantly gathering intelligence in the field, and cultists can report if sufficiently informed on what's needed. Hell, all it might have to do is tell the cultists "Go find me three senile widowers with type O blood" and let them go handle it. It's not the most efficient or guaranteed method of doing it, but it might not have the resources required to do it the right way. That's an important thing to remember - the God-Machine is not omnipotent. It is working off a set of resources and opportunities, and in any given area, it might end up being stretched too thin to do everything it wants at 100% efficiency. This is especially possible if a plucky ring of demons starts smashing important things with sledgehammers, requiring it to divert resources from neighboring sectors to send some hunter-killer angels in, which weaken those sectors, which give those demons opportunities, and so on. It's a gargantuan mechanistic process with staggering amounts of redundancies to cover for moments like this, but it's quite possible that a sneak attack at something particularly vulnerable can send an entire region's timetable off a cliff. This is part of why the God-Machine likes to stay hidden, in my book. A statistically insignificant chunk of humanity screwing with its plans is an annoyance. Seven billion people smashing anything that the people who can see the gears point at is a considerably larger problem, and while it could be solved with temporal manipulation or just sending in the archangels, that, again, costs a shitload of resources. Far, far simpler to just stay quiet and keep its manipulations so secret and bizarre nobody can really stop it. That, and it's mentioned a few times as being more or less completely okay with the status quo, to the point where it cleans up other supernatural messes on occasion.
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Dec 31, 2015 22:57
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The God-Machine is a terrifying combination of terrifyingly omniscient and terrifyingly dumb.
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Dec 31, 2015 23:10
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I kinda wanna do a Mage game where the God Machine is a rank ~8 abyssal thing and all of its weird idiot machinations are part of an insane ultraplot to manifest itself.
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Jan 1, 2016 03:48
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Vitamin P posted:I don't have my copy of the book to hand so thought I'd ask, and obviously this would vary based on the game, but how omniscient is the God Machine? And how does it actually get its information? A thousand mages could argue themselves to death over whether the God-Machine actually "knows" anything at all, whether it can be said to have thoughts and wants etc. quote:Like, it needs three senile widowers with type O blood to die on a certain bridge on a certain night, how does it find them? Do cats tell it? Biomechanical fleas that ride the backs of cats, sure. quote:Does it listen to phone calls? Yes. quote:Psychic angels constantly gliding over cities remembering everything they hear? Probably not. Angels are apparently expensive and difficult to produce. quote:Does it just Know? No. That's the one constant, imo- the God-Machine is an extremely physical entity. It exists in *things*, even if those things are in the Shadow or a pocket universe between floors in a hospital elevator. Any action it takes or any senses it possesses all have gears and wires and living agents and Rube Goldberg whatsits that at least in theory can be perceived and interfered with by other people, or even other parts of the God-Machine. quote:And it obviously makes the effort to act in secret, but does that mean humanity could kill it if they knew? Or would they just be an immense inconvenience, and the plans flow smoother if they are in the dark? I realise there's no set answer to this stuff but am interested in peoples take on it. If humanity made a concerted effort to destroy the God-Machine, it would probably reconfigure itself such that the Anti-God-Machine Organization became a part of its processes.
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Jan 1, 2016 04:02
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The God-Machine https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5v5eBf2KwF8
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Jan 1, 2016 04:03
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Vitamin P posted:Do cats tell it? If you know what to look for, tucked away in an alley you can find a maneki-neko statue. Pushing down its outstretched paw will cause an internal ratchet to click ahead one notch. The city's cats have learned to use this device to report things: one click for "an unseasonable migration of birds", two clicks for "ritual murder", three for "a malfunctioning angel", and so on. Once their secret is correctly reported, the statue will whisper its thanks and dispense a delicious-smelling (to cats) meat slurry made from small birds and rodents captured by reaper daemons and pulped at the city's water treatment plant, then pumped at high pressure to similar maneki-neko statues across the city. The God-Machine's assessor functions do not assign a high degree of credibility to these statues. Observant as cats are, they know how to lie.
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Jan 1, 2016 05:38
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Dammit Who? posted:If you know what to look for, tucked away in an alley you can find a maneki-neko statue. Pushing down its outstretched paw will cause an internal ratchet to click ahead one notch. The city's cats have learned to use this device to report things: one click for "an unseasonable migration of birds", two clicks for "ritual murder", three for "a malfunctioning angel", and so on. Once their secret is correctly reported, the statue will whisper its thanks and dispense a delicious-smelling (to cats) meat slurry made from small birds and rodents captured by reaper daemons and pulped at the city's water treatment plant, then pumped at high pressure to similar maneki-neko statues across the city. Fffffffff That was great.
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Jan 1, 2016 06:20
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It's nice that Mage works pretty well with God-Machine stuff because if you want to use it you can just say "yeah the Exarchs put that there as a tool of stagnation and control, it works with the Seers sometimes." Unrelated (mostly) to God-Machines, a friend of mine wanted to run a game of Vampire and I took at look at the start of the Vampire 2e (formerly Blood and Smoke) and uh... was the semi-in-character writing well-received? Both clan and covenant writeups seem like they're trying to be evocative in a really forced way. It's been ages since I looked at it but I remember Requiem 1e doing better with a more 'objective' voice.
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Jan 4, 2016 06:28
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bewilderment posted:It's nice that Mage works pretty well with God-Machine stuff because if you want to use it you can just say "yeah the Exarchs put that there as a tool of stagnation and control, it works with the Seers sometimes." You're not: I thought the stuff from the first edition was much better.
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Jan 4, 2016 06:38
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bewilderment posted:It's nice that Mage works pretty well with God-Machine stuff because if you want to use it you can just say "yeah the Exarchs put that there as a tool of stagnation and control, it works with the Seers sometimes." I liked it quite a lot but I can definitely understand it being divisive.
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Jan 4, 2016 19:26
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I thought the clan writeups in 2nd Ed were the most convincing "this is why you should play X type of character" spreads that I've seen in any game ever.
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Jan 4, 2016 19:49
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I really liked the tone of the lore in 2E-- some of it reminded me a lot of the Buzzing from the Secret World, actually-- although I'm not sure what it'd be like if that was your first exposure to the Requiem setting. I found it evocative, but I already knew most of what it was trying to evoke, you know?
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Jan 4, 2016 20:06
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Speaking of Vampire, do they ever talk about what happens to dead ones that aren't ashed by sun or fire? Like if you manage to actually fill a vampire with enough bullets that they die, do they say if they ash or just become a particularly heavily bullet-riddled corpse?
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Jan 4, 2016 20:20
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I don't know if they reiterate this in 2E and I don't know what page to point you to in 1E, but I'm near-positive that a vampire that gets its head cut off or is otherwise physically destroyed rapidly ages towards what the age of its body actually should be. So, a neonate might become a days or years-old corpse, an elder might skeletonize or collapse into dust.
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Jan 4, 2016 20:41
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Dammit Who? posted:The God-Machine The lynchpin in this video is whatever enables the lateral movement of the table the metronomes are resting on.
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Jan 4, 2016 23:41
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Ferrinus posted:I don't know if they reiterate this in 2E and I don't know what page to point you to in 1E, but I'm near-positive that a vampire that gets its head cut off or is otherwise physically destroyed rapidly ages towards what the age of its body actually should be. So, a neonate might become a days or years-old corpse, an elder might skeletonize or collapse into dust. This is a detail discussed in The Blood that also has other semi-apocryphal details that may not apply anymore unless you want them to, like the fact that Final Death tends to move all Kindred to tears nearly uncontrollably. Which is a detail I absolutely love, but may not be for every game. Even in a brutal jungle politics game I like the idea that is just a step too far, and torpor is the name of the game.
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Jan 4, 2016 23:55
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Tricky Dick Nixon posted:This is a detail discussed in The Blood that also has other semi-apocryphal details that may not apply anymore unless you want them to, like the fact that Final Death tends to move all Kindred to tears nearly uncontrollably. Which is a detail I absolutely love, but may not be for every game. I like this detail too. I like it when the average Requiem court closely resembles a big family. A big family that at its worst really hates one another, but still has a complex, surprising relationship.
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Jan 5, 2016 00:05
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Tricky Dick Nixon posted:This is a detail discussed in The Blood that also has other semi-apocryphal details that may not apply anymore unless you want them to, like the fact that Final Death tends to move all Kindred to tears nearly uncontrollably. Which is a detail I absolutely love, but may not be for every game. It's a very good way to grok vampire politics: you can destroy their social connections, arrange "unfortunate accidents" for their retainers, convince the Prince to give you their fiefdom, poison their blood supply, spread the right rumors to ruin their reputation for the next century, steal their occult secrets, turn their childer against them, and make them afraid to so much as sleep anywhere but a concrete bunker... ...but something so common as murder is just bad form.
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Jan 5, 2016 00:24
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So I'm reading Pickering Lythe right now and, whatever one may think of By Night Studios, they've certainly captured some of the old charm of 'we have no loving idea what we're talking about.' A great, and early, example? Apparently William the Conqueror was trying to prevent the Harrying of the North when he built Pickering Castle. Now, for those not in the know, in reality the Harrying was actually a systematic campaign of murder, destruction, and brutality to bring the North - which was waging a war against him at the time - to heel by starvation, exhaustion, and decimation. It was William's idea, in fact, and when he was done 3/4ths of the population there had been killed, fled, or died of starvation and disease in the chaos. While Pickering Castle was built at the time, it was built to enforce control at the end of the Harrying, not to prevent it.
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Jan 5, 2016 02:51
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I like the first-person narration in V2e. It's a good mix of "this is why my group is the most feared (even though I'm wrong)" and "I'm so very scared you will see beyond this fragile persona."
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Jan 5, 2016 03:18
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I really like the cover for the Demon Story Teller guide. Terminator with wings.
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Jan 5, 2016 18:11
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jim truds posted:I really like the cover for the Demon Story Teller guide. Terminator with wings. Hell yeah, biblical demon setting! 
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Jan 6, 2016 22:40
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Luminous Obscurity posted:Hell yeah, biblical demon setting! Giants Upon The Earth is an amazing alt-setting, at that. Nephilim are terrifying.
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Jan 7, 2016 01:34
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Mors Rattus posted:Giants Upon The Earth is an amazing alt-setting, at that. Nephilim are terrifying. Not that it has to do with anything, but what do you guys think of Rei and Kaworu from Evangelion?
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Jan 7, 2016 01:40
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Got my link to Dreams of Avarice. So far, it looks to be one of the better books for Mummy.
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Jan 7, 2016 01:46
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Mors Rattus posted:Giants Upon The Earth is an amazing alt-setting, at that. Nephilim are terrifying. Vampire Babylon vs The City of Heaven vs Robot Satan and his Nephilim army vs proto-Holy Engineers going off the rails is a setting made for those with refined taste.
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Jan 7, 2016 01:56
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Daeren posted:Vampire Babylon vs The City of Heaven vs Robot Satan and his Nephilim army vs proto-Holy Engineers going off the rails is a setting made for those with refined taste. You mean "the best taste."
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Jan 7, 2016 01:57
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Rubix Squid posted:You mean "the best taste." Did I stutter?
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Jan 7, 2016 01:57
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Yue posted:Not that it has to do with anything, but what do you guys think of Rei and Kaworu from Evangelion? No opinion, I never saw Evangelion.
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Jan 7, 2016 02:09
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Robot Satan and his Nephilim Army would be a great metal band name. A little long, but awesome.
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Jan 7, 2016 03:13
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Y'all have no idea how hard I want to play in a Giants Upon The Earth game now. It is equal to my hunger for VASCU.
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Jan 7, 2016 03:29
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