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I Am Just a Box posted:There is a semi-popular noncanonical idea that when Divis Mal and his buddies eventually depart the universe to play at creators themselves, their evolution mutates them to the point that they became Exalted's Primordials. I like to think I came up with that theory due to the bad pun of Divis Malfeas, but since this is the internet there's no way to know who came up with it first.
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Aug 28, 2016 00:33
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Divis Mal is somehow the actual lamest character WW ever wrote. And that's a high, high bar.
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Aug 28, 2016 01:16
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Mors Rattus posted:Scion 2e Kickstarter announced for the end of August or beginning of September. Is the system actually going to be any good this time, or will it just be "Exalted except generally shittier" again?
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Aug 28, 2016 01:23
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I Am Just a Box posted:I don't find the appeal in linking the Worlds of Darkness to be much specific about the worlds beyond their basic thematic mirroring as dark urban fantasy/horror games about classic monsters reinterpreted. Particular sets of mirrors can be interesting to play with, though. The Demon Translation Guide, the one translation guide I consider to be a solid product (if short), makes the idea of playing the two types of fallen angel off each other appealing to me, for all the rich comparisons and contrasts they offer each other in terms of characterization. I imagine it's because they thought FASA's whole deal with Earthdawn and Shadowrun was cool but decided against it because it was dumb and an inside thing nobody really got or cared too much about. For those who don't know, tl;dr Earthdawn is the fourth world and Shadowrun is the sixth world in the cycle of the Earth. It just led to lovely and unpopular NPC's like the Harlequin, who is an immortal elf mage who wears French-style clown makeup and has been running around and influencing things since before recorded history.
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Aug 28, 2016 01:25
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Night10194 posted:Divis Mal is somehow the actual lamest character WW ever wrote. And that's a high, high bar. Worse than Samuel Haight?
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Aug 28, 2016 01:32
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Liquid Communism posted:Worse than Samuel Haight? Was Samuel Haight the Actual Main Character Of His Line?
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Aug 28, 2016 01:35
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Night10194 posted:Was Samuel Haight the Actual Main Character Of His Line? No, he was a primary antagonist in all of the OWoD games except Changeling and Wraith. He was a : Ex-Kinfolk Ex-Ghoul Hedge Mage member of the Valkenberg Foundation and Pentex who found a rite to turn himself (via five pelts he'd taken) into a Garou, founded his own tribe (the Skindancers), and eventually ended up an ashtray in Stygia after rolling a Baali Methusula. He hunted all of the supernaturals for fun. That's the short version. The long version is a whole lot more involved.
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Aug 28, 2016 01:45
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Roadie posted:Is the system actually going to be any good this time, or will it just be "Exalted except generally shittier" again? This and the Trinity Continuum will be using a new proprietary system, Storypath or something like that, which has absolutely nothing to do with Exalted. We haven't gotten a ton of details on it but they have acknowledged all the mechanical and cultural issues with Scion 1e and apologized, so...
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Aug 28, 2016 01:49
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I meant that as in 'Being the actual main character and making your PCs completely irrelevant to the line's story and setting' is a major reason Mal is the worst.
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Aug 28, 2016 01:49
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Liquid Communism posted:No, he was a primary antagonist in all of the OWoD games except Changeling and Wraith. 
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Aug 28, 2016 01:50
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If you dub your villain "the ultimate bad rear end" it is guaranteed that (a) the PCs will make him look like a chump in short order and (b) you need better writers.
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Aug 28, 2016 01:55
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The Technocracy could still nuke him eight ways from Sunday across several planes of existence. 
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Aug 28, 2016 02:39
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The ending of Samuel Haight (as a soulforged ashtray on the desk of a minor Hierarchy bureaucrat) kind of justifies the whole thing, I feel.
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Aug 28, 2016 02:44
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MonsieurChoc posted:The ending of Samuel Haight (as a soulforged ashtray on the desk of a minor Hierarchy bureaucrat) kind of justifies the whole thing, I feel. I have to assume the ashtray was inscribed with the phrase "The Aristocrats!"
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Aug 28, 2016 02:47
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Chaos Factor is probably up there with the most racist White Wolf books as it paints Mexico City as the evilest place on Earth. At its epicenter is a time share between the Black Spiral Dancers and Nephandi of a joint hive/caul. It's essentially pure evil incarnate. Mexico City is also the capital of the Sabbat to round things off too.
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Aug 28, 2016 02:50
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MonsieurChoc posted:The ending of Samuel Haight (as a soulforged ashtray on the desk of a minor Hierarchy bureaucrat) kind of justifies the whole thing, I feel. He got out of it after Stygia got nuked, IIRC, and came back as a Garou in one of the W20A adventures.
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Aug 28, 2016 02:51
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Liquid Communism posted:He got out of it after Stygia got nuked, IIRC, and came back as a Garou in one of the W20A adventures. Welp.
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Aug 28, 2016 02:52
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Liquid Communism posted:He got out of it after Stygia got nuked, IIRC, and came back as a Garou in one of the W20A adventures. Oh. Right.
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Aug 28, 2016 02:56
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Liquid Communism posted:He got out of it after Stygia got nuked, IIRC, and came back as a Garou in one of the W20A adventures. Oh for gently caress's sake, really? I don't think even the groglords the 20th Anniversary stuff is meant to appeal to have fond memories of him. Does he at least die again?
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Aug 28, 2016 03:15
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Kavak posted:Oh for gently caress's sake, really? I don't think even the groglords the 20th Anniversary stuff is meant to appeal to have fond memories of him. Does he at least die again? He comes back as a normal werewolf so he's pretty easy to kill. EDIT: With the L5R stuff in FATAL and Friends I can't help but think that White Wolf wanted Werewolf to be their L5R. There are so many parallels it has to have some roots in reality. RocknRollaAyatollah fucked around with this message at 03:28 on Aug 28, 2016 |
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Aug 28, 2016 03:24
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Liquid Communism posted:Worse than Samuel Haight? Haight was a perfectly fine antagonist in his first appearance, where he was just a dude who got screwed over by the Garou's obsession with racial purity and went to extreme ends in pursuit of revenge. Of course, everything after that was representative of the worst excesses of constantly escalating mid-90s metaplot.
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Aug 28, 2016 03:33
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I love the fact that he's also a CoG kinfolk. It's a good stain to have on their record.
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Aug 28, 2016 03:37
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Kavak posted:Oh for gently caress's sake, really? I don't think even the groglords the 20th Anniversary stuff is meant to appeal to have fond memories of him. Does he at least die again? If I recall this one correctly, there's a crazy skin walker colluding with a conniving spirit in a ritual designed to build up the legend of the Skinner as if he had returned, and as the ritual progresses, the new guy begins to become the returned Skinner they've built up. The ashtray's still dead, it's more like new guy is trying to remold himself in the ashtray's former image. It's one of those things where "okay, if you're going to do this I guess this is a pretty reasonable and thought out execution, but I'm still not sure why you set out to do this."
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Aug 28, 2016 08:22
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Returning to the Grandmaw for a minute. While Orpheus is usually disconnected from the greater oWoD canon, if we approach it as linked in we get two very interesting possibilities based on Grandmaw's origins predating the universe. First, we know that by one model of canon the universe is in fact not the first one - from the rather awful Masquerade of the Red Death Trilogy, we got the Sheddim. Borrowing from the Zohar in a very vague sense, the Sheddim were inhabitants of one of the worlds created before the 'current' existence - broken to make another world, then another, culminating in the current world (until it also is destroyed in the process of perfection) - trying to break through into 'our' reality. For simplicity I'll use 'our' reality even though the WoD is fictional. So, that's a quasi-kabbalistic take that affirms a pre-existing universe. Second, we have the Book of Lilith's genesis fragment - LGen, in my terminology, which I've broken up into section and verse rather than the solid-block presentation of the text in the published book. LGen 1:1 - 1:3 read '[1] Once, all was silence and stillness. This was the time of nothing, when the Ancient One rested Its eyes and moved not. Every 55,555 years, the Ancient One breaks Its rest and opens Its eyes, to see what was not there before. Each 55,555 years, It closes Its eyes and all becomes silence and stillness again. [2] Then the Ancient One opened its eyes for the 333rd time, and a bolt of Light split the darkness. Thence came [Jehovah] and the other Shining Ones. To delight the eyes of the Ancient One, they spoke great Words and sang great Songs, And thence wove the world into being. [3] Upon the shells of the 332 Old Worlds did they tread, and the creatures of those worlds did howl and loose themselves upon the wilderness.' So, the book of lilith also speaks of pre-existing reality. That makes three conceptions of the same basic truth of the setting - this is not the first world of darkness. 55,555 years is presumably not literal, but being used simply to indicate a very large/infinite number, much as the Crimson Slenderness of Taoism speaks of 55,555 rooms with 55,555 ministers. So, the two possibilities that arise to my mind are the following: 1. Grandmaw is the Ancient One, and while presented as malevolent, is in fact the Ayin itself. For the non-Kabbalist, the Ayin is the state of raw undifferentiated potential that gave birth to the Ein Sof ('Limitless Nothing') and the Ein Sof Ur ('Infinite Light') and fits nicely with Grandmaw being essentially Oblivion itself. The 55,555 year span has ended and she is shutting her eyes again, returning all to silence and stillness. Far from waking her up, Xerxes Jones has accidentally told her to go back to bed. 2. The Sheddim were in fact Neverborn Malfeans, using one of Saulot's line as a puppet. If Grandmaw is the shell of a prior universe, or rather the foundation on which all 333 worlds were built, then the Sheddim as her children would be either spectres or - given their power - Neverborn, and like the other Malfeans, are the 'creatures of those worlds' referred to in LGen 1:3. The Sheddim did not want oblivion or the breaking of the world, as that would cramp their style - neither do the Neverborn. That goal is Grandmaw's. This is the sort of thing I'm hoping to do with the Project, beyond just being able to provide the most definitive listings written. When you look at every single source as part of a broader whole, you get some interesting options like this or the earlier post about Saulot, Golconda, and the Earthbound Vassago. Setting variants, basically, built on more-or-less crossover pollination.
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Aug 28, 2016 12:29
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Please keep talking about Kabbalism, it'S loving great.
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Aug 28, 2016 12:44
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I keep seeing Grandmaw and thinking of this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TJH0eBtnbcs LET ME HELP YOU OUT OF YOUR SLEEP, G-G-GRANDMAWWWWWWW!
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Aug 28, 2016 19:04
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Night10194 posted:I meant that as in 'Being the actual main character and making your PCs completely irrelevant to the line's story and setting' is a major reason Mal is the worst. To be "fair" to Divis Mal, he was far from the only NPC in aberrant who made the PCs completely irrelevant, just the most powerful of them. That game had a real problem with even b-listers getting absurdly buff relative to where most PCs were likely to be.
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Aug 28, 2016 20:02
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Man, Trinity and Adventure! were so much better than Aberrant.
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Aug 29, 2016 00:06
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Wow, that's a lot of info about Spirits. Thanks all for the help with this chargen. I took some time this weekend to learn more about Spirits, so I feel like I'm pretty strongly leaning towards 3 Life, 2 Spirits, 1 Fates. I could use some more help with rotes and praxes - they seem to be sort of sidegrades to each other, though rotes seem somewhat more powerful. When would you choose to use a praxis and not a rote, and vice versa? Like from what I can tell, Know Spirit looks like a great candidate for Praxis, am I wrong in thinking this? Should I take Knit as a praxis or a rote, for example? Mors Rattus posted:The other main issue with dealing with spirits as that your Pokemon aren't human and don't think like humans do. Every spirit has some burning obsession built into their nature, because that's what they feed on and that's what they are. And, well, yeah, it's real useful to have a violence spirit on hand when you need to fight some rear end in a top hat. Mors Rattus posted:Spirit is incredibly potent - just, you have to play Pokemon. You are finding, threatening and appeasing spirits useful to you with it, and that means tolerating their obsessions. Hm yeah. I think this campaign is going to be a little low on the bloodshed, so a violence spirit will probably be more a liability than an advantage. Daeren posted:It should also be noted that Spirit dots give you effective dots in spiritual Rank, which is a measure of how much respect you're owed - and what you owe respect to. A Spirit mage can very quickly get to the point where spirits read their position in the hierarchy of spirit politics as roughly analogous to a state senator or governor, and can thus browbeat them without even using magic. OK, that is some cool stuff to know. I should pass this post on to my ST. I Am Just a Box posted:The rules behind spirits, in a nutshell: Spirits bleed Essence over time when they poke out of the Shadow and into the material realm (whether physically manifest or in Twilight) without being in the proximity of some person, place or thing that thematically resonates with the spirit. So a fire spirit in winter is going to beeline for the nearest boiler room, or at the very least a lit cigarette. They get Essence back by basking in displays of their resonance, and they fall dormant if they run out of Essence. Physically manifesting in the material realm, or taking up residence in something or someone to shield themselves from bleeding Essence, requires them to hang around a source of resonance and pull it Open, making that source of resonance sufficiently spooky and empowered to sustain a spirit. That fire spirit example is really helpful. And yeah, looking more closely rotes are a huge advantage on spells that you want to be Instant and big. kaynorr posted:Fate is a good choice for someone who is (or wants to look) reckless, as it enables you to take risks that you really, Really shouldn't and usually come out OK. Also good if the athlete-scholar wants to branch out into team sports where it's astonishingly easy to mask the ability to nudge a ball into a goal. This is good, and I like Fate anyway, I'll definitely spend my last dot on it. Benagain posted:I remember one time in PBP game I actually created a murder spirit out of a mote in order to gain more information about a murder and pretty much let it run free after that, the main antagonist NPC took the time to call me out for how stupid that was. lol Tulip fucked around with this message at 04:17 on Aug 29, 2016 |
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Aug 29, 2016 01:39
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RocknRollaAyatollah posted:With the L5R stuff in FATAL and Friends I can't help but think that White Wolf wanted Werewolf to be their L5R. There are so many parallels it has to have some roots in reality. L5R 1st edition came out like 5 years after Apocalypse, so I think it's the other way around. I'm not familiar with Apocalypse's metaplot, though. Is it because they both had card games?
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Aug 29, 2016 01:43
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Kavak posted:L5R 1st edition came out like 5 years after Apocalypse, so I think it's the other way around. I'm not familiar with Apocalypse's metaplot, though. Is it because they both had card games? The way the tribes and the clans are set up is very similar. They all fill similar niches, the Shadowlords and Scorpion and the Crane and Silver Fangs just to name two. The themes of spiritual corruption destroying people with the Wyrm and the Shadowlands/Fu Leng. Tribes and clans being favored by devs and getting overpowered stuff in their own books. Maybe it's just 90's game design but it seems like the two have a number of parallels.
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Aug 29, 2016 03:23
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RocknRollaAyatollah posted:The way the tribes and the clans are set up is very similar. They all fill similar niches, the Shadowlords and Scorpion and the Crane and Silver Fangs just to name two. The themes of spiritual corruption destroying people with the Wyrm and the Shadowlands/Fu Leng. Tribes and clans being favored by devs and getting overpowered stuff in their own books. Yeah there is a "doomed highborn manchildren" aspect to both of them, though the corruption angle is way more prevalent in Apocalypse. What were the dev favorite tribes in Werewolf?
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Aug 29, 2016 03:51
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Hey Loomer all that stuff was amazing, thanks for the interesting reads on the long drive out of South Dakota! Out of curiousity, how much stuff in the Midwest sees attention in the books? I know there's a book for Chicago and some information on Detroit.
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Aug 29, 2016 04:00
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I'm Australian so my definition of the Midwest might not fit with the usual yankee definition (e.g. I include Colorado), but here's what I have in my memory and from a quick check in the files. On the whole, the Midwest gets patchy coverage but more than anywhere non-American. There's the obvious love for Chicago - VtM 1E's core is set there, as are two city books and three scenario books, and a V20 book dedicated to its conflict with Gary. Beyond that, there's not a tremendous amount other than Milwaukee by Night. St. Louis got treatment in the Masquerade of the Red Death series, but also (and mostly contradicting MotRD) in Hunter's Survival Guide + the Demon novel trilogy. Alien Hunger was set in Denver, though it's a very weird one as it's before any kind of consistent tone was set for the oWoD. Madison, Wisconsin is an anarch free state according to the old A World of Darkness sourcebooks but Camarilla controlled by Archons and Templars - and then returns to being a free state in 2014's Anarchs Unbound. Michigan had an invented city, Iron Rapids, which played a major role in the six-book Hunter series (some of which are good, others are loving abysmal) and is another of those decaying industrial ruins. The anarchs of Minneapolis-St. Paul were wiped out in 1998 though more have moved in, and there's a surprisingly robust Setite presence in Minnesota. Wraith had a fair few necropoli in the midwest, the Year of the Scarab trilogy took place largely in the Midwest when it wasn't in Chicago, and Mage did a fair bit there if memory serves.
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Aug 29, 2016 04:33
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Kavak posted:Yeah there is a "doomed highborn manchildren" aspect to both of them, though the corruption angle is way more prevalent in Apocalypse. What were the dev favorite tribes in Werewolf? Shadowlords stand out the most to me the most in terms of gifts and had Scorpion levels of internal bullshit like shadow renown. Stargazers stood out as well with kailindo and generally decent gifts. It comes down to some of the tribes were generally given filler while some tribes were given gold in Revised. I'm not as brushed up on everything as I was 5 years ago or so when I was actively playing but you could tell from the Tribebooks who was liked more than others. Loomer posted:The anarchs of Minneapolis-St. Paul were wiped out in 1998 though more have moved in, and there's a surprisingly robust Setite presence in Minnesota. Minneapolis has a large Somali community but that's kind of the wrong demographic for Setites.  There was also Prince.
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Aug 29, 2016 04:51
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It's the strong Scandinavian ancestry of the Minnesotan, if I recall.
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Aug 29, 2016 05:26
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In the 'unintended consequences' side of doomsday, one of the Changeling scenarios has all mundane humans and non-fae prodigals pass out for a solid week. The immediate and obvious problem to this is that most human beings will pass out wherever they are, and for a large portion, that means they'll be exposed to the elements. But that's not the real kicker. The real kicker is dehydration. The human being can last anywhere from a few hours to two weeks without replenishing its water supply, depending on its surroundings. 40% of the human population lives in the tropics, where water needs are high year round. Of the remaining population, 50% will be in summer, so that's 70% of the human race in the 'fairly high water needs' category. 7 days is a long time without water in hot weather, fatally so, especially in humid conditions that cause sweating. Those not in perfect conditions - humid but cool, but not too cold, sheltered from direct light and wind - will be the only ones coming out of this weak but not permanently injured as that long a time period for a lot of people is going to cause severe kidney damage and subsequent systemic damage. If we're conservative and say through some miracle only a third - the weakest, those in the hottest regions, those who pass out in the sun in the middle of the Mojave - of those people die, then that's still nearly 25% of the entire human population of planet earth. And that's without what happens when everyone but changelings falls asleep, for which you can consult Life After People and similar programs. But here's a highlight reel: Mass industrial accidents in the first 72 hours, near total power grid shutdowns within that same timeframe (including cascading failures, so even areas with less reliance on fossil fuels aren't safe - and for anywhere in summer that was reliant on air conditioning, like many modern buildings, that's a rising deathtoll when coupled with 7 days without water), vast oil spills and fires, and a myriad of other horrific disasters as automated systems fail. Now add that only humans and Prodigals without a fae spark go to sleep. Pets are not included in that list, nor are other animals, so a disturbing number of people are going to be killed and eaten by their dogs and cats or severely bitten by rats, roaches, and other opportunistic scavengers. Garou go down too, except some of the Fianna - so no one is around to fight the banes unleashed by the chaos. This is the glamour-heavy option for Changeling, meant to be the heroic struggle of the fae against the fomorians in a climactic, fantastic war where dragons sweep through the skies above new york and great trolls run screaming down the Washington Mall to batter mauls and axes against the dire Fomorians. What they don't account for in that scenario is that while that may happen, it's happening with the backdrop of a civilization-shattering event that (when the chimerical world splits back off again after the climactic showdown of myth and legend) is going to more or less destroy industrialized society as we know it, and disproportionately slaughter the population of a hemisphere and the tropics. In its own right, that makes it a fitting ending for a WoD game, but it definitely wasn't what the writers had in mind. Edit: if humanity is lucky, The Sleep comes in the middle of spring and autumn. That gives the best chance of survival to the most people. For a real kick in the teeth, seven days may be long enough for nuclear power plants spent fuel storage to explode, causing mass fallout plumes. Loomer fucked around with this message at 19:51 on Aug 29, 2016 |
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Aug 29, 2016 19:35
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That's a lot more terrifying than most of the monstrous horrors that come forth to literally eat the world in the other lines, good lord.
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Aug 29, 2016 20:52
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Do they specify that things wake up and basically go back to normal? Because "Yay! All that awful and banal modern civilization and its people are dead!" seems like a great end to a Changeling game.
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Aug 29, 2016 20:53
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It'd be a hell of an opening cutscene though. Players are making their way through the city when all of a sudden everything goes completely quiet, no traffic noise or horns or sound of thousands speaking and walking. The players come across a gruesome car wreck surrounded by peacefully sleeping bodies, maybe someone is even still sitting uncannily on a bench or a nearby sill, then planes start falling out of the sky, a dragon rips apart a skyscraper and roars and poo poo gets real. Pan out to show exploding oil rigs juxtaposed to war zones gone peaceful, etc etc
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Aug 29, 2016 20:59
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