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Last night I watched Behind the Mask: The Rise of Leslie Vernon, which is basically a slasher-film mockumentary about the planning that goes into being a slasher movie villain IRL. It's decent but never gets quite as funny as it feels like it should. I'm not sure if the movie is more inspirational for Beast or Slasher. On the one hand, the main character is literally a masked slasher. On the other hand, he hangs out with an older killer and they talk about how they try to make things fit the narrative, and create a 'Survivor Girl' and an 'Ahab', and that they're being Evil in order to encourage Good to step out and fight, and their overall smugness seems very Beast.
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Nov 21, 2016 22:59
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If he's anything, he's a occultist crafting himself into a Legend. Something already explicitly allowed in Slashers. He fashions himself into place as the vengeful spirit of a dead boy back to torment the small town that blah blah blah, and he methodically fills the roles around the act. And he plays his part perfectly, right til the end when he's seemingly brutally murdered in the exact manner he said he'd be. You could play the whole thing out as a group of Network Zero Hunters getting way, way over their head trying to document the inception of a supernatural force, not realizing they were the target in the first place. Beasts will never really fit that role because they constantly seek to avoid the denouement. You can try to post-modernize that bitch all you want, but it really doesn't loving matter: The monster dies in the end. Always, forever. If it didn't deserve to die, it wouldn't be a monster in the first place. Beasts want to be the monster *and* get to pretend they deserve to live. Slashers don't really do that. If the story is you die in the end, you die in the end. If the story is someone transgresses and you get to come back from death, then that's the story too. They are a lot more pure, and thus mythically powerful.
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Nov 22, 2016 10:40
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Reading NH: Immortal Sinners for the first time. I usually have a low tolerance for super-tough legendary NPCs, but I gotta admit, the writeup for the Unholy is pretty loving cool.
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Nov 23, 2016 09:12
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Finalizing the oChangeling file, and it strikes me yet again that Concordia is actually a horrifying setting in many ways. 95% of the fae either lived free or are the children of those who did, ruled over by a horde of brutal, backwards warlords who within living memory invaded from another reality, announced their return with the vicious murder (with cold iron, no less, to permanently destroy the souls of the slain) of prominent commoner leaders while under colour of truce and then more or less shattered their society and imposed a tyrannical feudal system backed by the rule of force and literal mind control that rigidly enforces their caste and rank hierarchies, who are so terrifying to look upon that you have to make a will save just to try and attack the least of their ilk. Forget all the talk about Changeling being light and fluffy, if you wanted to you could run it as an extremely dark game without changing a word of its backstory - though that as we all know was not the direction White Wolf went. And for bonus points, these brutal backwards warlords are also almost universally outlaws and criminals from Arcadia. Loomer fucked around with this message at 09:44 on Nov 23, 2016 |
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Nov 23, 2016 09:39
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Kellsterik posted:Reading NH: Immortal Sinners for the first time. I usually have a low tolerance for super-tough legendary NPCs, but I gotta admit, the writeup for the Unholy is pretty loving cool. The Unholy and Hunyadi Dorjan own. gently caress Zagreus forever.
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Nov 23, 2016 12:34
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Loomer posted:Finalizing the oChangeling file, and it strikes me yet again that Concordia is actually a horrifying setting in many ways. 95% of the fae either lived free or are the children of those who did, ruled over by a horde of brutal, backwards warlords who within living memory invaded from another reality, announced their return with the vicious murder (with cold iron, no less, to permanently destroy the souls of the slain) of prominent commoner leaders while under colour of truce and then more or less shattered their society and imposed a tyrannical feudal system backed by the rule of force and literal mind control that rigidly enforces their caste and rank hierarchies, who are so terrifying to look upon that you have to make a will save just to try and attack the least of their ilk. Forget all the talk about Changeling being light and fluffy, if you wanted to you could run it as an extremely dark game without changing a word of its backstory - though that as we all know was not the direction White Wolf went. That history makes it sound extremely dark and possibly terrifying. I'm amazed that they went in any other direction, because that sets you up for any number of Stories about resistance, escape, or defiance. It would have made for a great game. Which is what they ended up (mostly) doing in nChangeling, but suffered the stigmas from oChangeling. I read oChangeling once about forever ago, and it was very much not something I wanted to spend time playing. E: I would have played it if they'd gone the other route. That sounds like it could have been amazing as they did a great job of world building in oWoD.
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Nov 23, 2016 16:24
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oChangeling also rarely brings up the fact that the Sidhe are literally body snatchers - unlike the rest of the Changelings, they aren't otherkin. Their souls literally displaced the souls of existing humans when they came back to Earth. oChangeling has many interesting elements put together really badly.
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Nov 23, 2016 16:35
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oChangeling was a mess of conflicting notions between writers and editions, from which could be crafted a number of really interesting games. You could have everything from weird whimsical tales of childlings slaying dragons through Gaiman or Clive Barker-esque fantasy hidden just being the common sight to complicated and morally ambiguous politics and metaphysics. And if you tried to take the whole body of work altogether, especially in something like a LARP or persistent world chat with lots of people, you'd have a complete morass of differing expectations and a lurching narrative that can't make up its mind. I did quite enjoy oChangeling, but it really needed line developers and/or STs with a clear vision of what they wanted the game to be, and who conveyed that directly.
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Nov 23, 2016 16:48
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Also, less of the oWoD obsession with having one group that was The Sexy Group. Or two, if you count the mermaids.
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Nov 23, 2016 16:51
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Yeah, the intersection of "Childlike Whimsy and Wonder", "being older than 20 is literally death", and "The Sexy Group" always seemed to distill into some very creepy poo poo whenever I heard of something going down in a Changeling game.
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Nov 23, 2016 16:56
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Mors Rattus posted:oChangeling also rarely brings up the fact that the Sidhe are literally body snatchers - unlike the rest of the Changelings, they aren't otherkin. Their souls literally displaced the souls of existing humans when they came back to Earth. Admittedly, that's because the text presented even that inconsistently, because it's apparently implied that Childling sidhe don't do this, and at least one house is on the Changeling Way like the commoners.
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Nov 23, 2016 16:56
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The creepiest part of oChangeling was giving 'wise beyond their years' child characters seduction powers. In the meanwhile, have some rough Changeling stats. It comes out to about 2400 unique entries. I still need to divide them by era, etc, figure out countries (I always wind up annotating it just by locale and state, and wind up forgetting to do nation in the first pass) etc. As a side stat, ~350 of the entries are dead, so about 14% of all known unique changelings have died. For obvious reasons, the 12,000 known active Inanimae or the literal thousands of commoners who fought in the Battle of Denver have not been specially added yet. As a real quick rough figure, we know 95% of Concordia is meant to be commoners, so if we extrapolate that to globally, we should actually have 6500 commoner fae on here.  EDIT When C20 does come out I'm going to try and reskin it to embrace the legitimately horrifying elements of the setting. Loomer fucked around with this message at 17:07 on Nov 23, 2016 |
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Nov 23, 2016 17:03
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Loomer posted:The creepiest part of oChangeling was giving 'wise beyond their years' child characters seduction powers. 
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Nov 23, 2016 17:13
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Mors Rattus posted:The Unholy and Hunyadi Dorjan own. I don't even remember Zagreus, while I instantly know the other two. Edit: The best part of Immortal Sinners is how most of the NPC presented can't use the Devotions they created.
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Nov 23, 2016 17:23
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MonsieurChoc posted:I don't even remember Zagreus, while I instantly know the other two. Zagreus is basically Worst oWod Elder distilled down to its base components.
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Nov 23, 2016 17:24
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Mors Rattus posted:oChangeling also rarely brings up the fact that the Sidhe are literally body snatchers - unlike the rest of the Changelings, they aren't otherkin. Their souls literally displaced the souls of existing humans when they came back to Earth. One of the things about it being a lesser line is it only gets one real possibility in the Time of Judgement, and it's basically all extremely horrific poo poo. One of which is the souls of the people they pushed out coming back. Surprise! They didn't go to Arcadia, they've been in some freakish hell dimension this whole time! Ha ha ha, the Sidhe are monsters. It's hilarious that there is nothing in Changeling that can't be solved by just shanking all the Sidhe and Red Caps with Cold Iron. Sure some of them aren't terrible, but as a group they are so horrifically bent that the world would be a better place with them gone. I mean I guess you can keep Scathach, on account of them not being body stealing monsters looking to uphold a freakishly outdated system of government that humanity refuted centuries before. The rest can just get flat out dusted. Yeah, easily the biggest disappointment of a line [Or at least disappointment *as* a line, the biggest disappointment is that Wraith never got the love it deserved]. There's so much cool and horrific material that would fit in just fine with the rest of the oWoD that gets blotted out by fetishistic youth worship and fear of change and progress.
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Nov 23, 2016 17:25
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Personally, I like that David Ardry ap Gwydion was presented as a great, noble, progressive ruler. Who derives his authority because he found a magic sword, and who in his token of good will to the oppressed masses the brutal hordes he now commands have violently subjugated offers them - despite comprising 95% of his kingdom - 58% of government... But makes very sure that over half of that has to be Commoners who have been granted title and are thus completely bound into the outdated model of feudalism he makes no move to tear down, resulting in a real situation of 62% Noble control, which is for all purposes 100% Sidhe control even without the Sidhe literally being able to make any argument hypnotic and literally control peoples minds with a mere look. Truly, he is the greatest and noblest leader a man could ask for. There really should be a massive exodus of American commoners to Europe, where the Commoners fought harder and won bigger. As a side note, expect neat colourful maps done using Victoria 2 showing the evolution of and outcome of the Accordance War and its equivalents! Loomer fucked around with this message at 17:38 on Nov 23, 2016 |
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Nov 23, 2016 17:35
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Even with things like the redcaps (or more generally, the unseelie) the game was horribly inconsistent. Some books emphasized the idea that unseelie might stem from darker dreams, but weren't necessarily evil. The redcap kithbook spends a lot of time pointing out how they may not be the most likeable sorts, but most of the notions of them being S&M cannibals who murder any of their kind who go seelie are propoganda (some spread by the redcaps themselves) to boost their rep (and get more business as mercenaries, in many cases). On the other hand, you had books that treated unseelie and shadow court as interchangeable, and suggested that switching to the unseelie nature meant essentially becoming a mirror universe version of yourself. The game could never make up its mind on whether the unseelie were simply dreams of less pleasant things who were unfairly repressed, or demon worshiping baby eaters who totally justified the seelie court's monopoly on power.
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Nov 23, 2016 17:46
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The latter group of authors also tend to be the ones who saw nothing at all weird about handing the Sidhe literal divine right of kings, and only treated it as a bad thing if that particular Sidhe was evil. Whatsisname who did the Redcap book wrote a few bits and bobs elsewhere and as memory serves, his content was one of the only places you could find elements of that whole 'hey, we have literally been brutally conquered and subjugated by extradimensional beings who can forcibly control our minds and bodies' aspect. A lot of those other authors seemed a little too in love with the idea of the Happy Fun Fluffy Changeling, and the Noble Sidhe typified that - which is also why they make up 29% of the total unique changelings with known kiths.
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Nov 23, 2016 17:50
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MonsieurChoc posted:I don't even remember Zagreus, while I instantly know the other two. Maybe he could be the Imperial Mysteries heavyweight for vampires?
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Nov 23, 2016 17:53
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Loomer posted:Truly, he is the greatest and noblest leader a man could ask for. I love the idea that he is the best the Dreaming could manage as far as a noble ruler who does the best for all the people, and it doesn't matter because feudal nobility is still a flawed idea in the modern age and it was always going to end in tears. There's nothing the Dreaming can do to change that. Another thing the books don't touch on quite as much as they could is that Changelings aren't really natural. Like there was this massive, cataclysmic event that happened centuries ago and now they are an entirely new form of life....and yet they basically all just stick to variations of the same exact way of doing things. Maybe, maybe, they'll have democratic leaders instead of a commoner effectively acting like a noble. Otherwise, they still play at being normal fae beings when they so manifestly aren't. So they clearly found a way to reconcile mixing their fae nature with a human body, but after doing that they mostly just....stopped. Instead they just cry about Banality and wait for it to wipe them out, or look for some noble quest they can undertake to put back things the way they were......rather than, you know, wondering if there's another step they could take to just reconcile their fae self to the world as it is. They some pretty static and boring thinkers for people who claim to be creatures of dreams and creativity. But no, lets focus on how much it sucks how we have to get jobs when we grow up and how being in your 20s is basically a death sentence.
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Nov 23, 2016 18:00
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IIRC, isn't their Magical Asian equivalent not even the same thing even slightly?
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Nov 23, 2016 18:06
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Mulva posted:I love the idea that he is the best the Dreaming could manage as far as a noble ruler who does the best for all the people, and it doesn't matter because feudal nobility is still a flawed idea in the modern age and it was always going to end in tears. There's nothing the Dreaming can do to change that. Yeah.That's really how Changeling works as a whole - hey, a bunch of great ideas! Now let's not do anything at all with them now that we've got the barebones 'what if fairies, but real' idea on paper. Like you said, if they were using David Ardry as a means of commentary on aristocracy, you could do amazing things with that as a motif, but you have to actually go through with it. Not just stop at 'and isn't he just the best ever?' and scribble down an increasingly frantic 'yes!' whenever anyone asks the question again.
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Nov 23, 2016 18:06
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Mors Rattus posted:IIRC, isn't their Magical Asian equivalent not even the same thing even slightly? Yeah, Hsien have very little relation to Changelings, but are actually pretty dope in their own right. It was a badly written book and suffered from the usual 90s White Wolf Magic Asia gibberish, but as a concept their take on the hsien wasn't awful.
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Nov 23, 2016 18:07
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I'm still tempted to F&F the Apocalypse book because the "Tribe Falls" and "Weaver Ascendant" Scenarios are absolutely batshit (The former more than the latter, at least in the "I can't believe somebody wrote this" sense), but they'd also be almost incomprehensible for anyone without extensive knowledge of W:TA.
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Nov 23, 2016 18:29
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The incomprehensibility is why I don't do my teardowns of stuff like W20MET over there - my complaints tend to need people to be familiar with the setting already.
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Nov 23, 2016 18:46
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I tried doing the W20 core book but it's so information dense and dry that I was having trouble figuring out what i actually needed to cover vs information that everyone else should know and eventually lost interest. Tribebook CoG Revised was able to stand on it's own legs because of how patently egregious the writing in it was. I could probably get away with Breedbook Mokole since that was done by the same author and ends with a red talon lupus opining on how awesome being a human is.
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Nov 23, 2016 18:59
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Mors Rattus posted:Hunyadi Dorjan The first thing I ever wrote for White Wolf.
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Nov 23, 2016 19:18
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And good work on it. I love Dorjan and he's featured heavily any time I do something with vampires, at least in backstory. The fact that he and the Unholy are mere pages from Zagreus is ever-baffling.
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Nov 23, 2016 19:19
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Kurieg posted:I'm still tempted to F&F the Apocalypse book because the "Tribe Falls" and "Weaver Ascendant" Scenarios are absolutely batshit (The former more than the latter, at least in the "I can't believe somebody wrote this" sense), but they'd also be almost incomprehensible for anyone without extensive knowledge of W:TA.
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Nov 23, 2016 19:47
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Just got my physical copy of Dark Eras in the mail. Such a big, gorgeous book. I'm gonna feel bad when it falls apart.
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Nov 23, 2016 19:51
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Kurieg posted:I'm still tempted to F&F the Apocalypse book because the "Tribe Falls" and "Weaver Ascendant" Scenarios are absolutely batshit (The former more than the latter, at least in the "I can't believe somebody wrote this" sense), but they'd also be almost incomprehensible for anyone without extensive knowledge of W:TA. I dunno, "angry injun werewolves steal a sub and try to nuke America, then all decide to go join the ultimate evil of the setting when the rest of the werewolves don't back them up" is pretty straightforward. At least, it was straightforward enough that its about all I remember from that book, over a decade later. The rest yeah, probably incomprehensible to the casual audience.
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Nov 23, 2016 21:51
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The Children of Gaia fall because True Silverheels convinces the rest of the tribe that they can heal the wyrm's madness because they're the best healers in the Garou Nation. They sacrifice roughly a third of the tribe in a massive ritual to heal the Wyrm's madness. But the rite-leader botches the roll and it instead summons the Eater of Souls to the near Umbra and the entire tribe falls instantly. The Black Furies fall because the Wyld Plague starts changing them into different people, literally. But they can't turn to the Weaver because the Weaver is evil so why not throw our truck in with this incredibly ancient Wyrm spirit that obviously won't betray us.
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Nov 23, 2016 22:15
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So a friend recruited me to a nWoD Mage game and I'm thinking I'm going to make a character who's a classical witch -- curses, turning people into frogs, flying broomsticks, the lot. Most of this is pretty easy to model, but I'm stuck on "flying broomsticks." I don't want to go Forces 4 on an Acanthus (who have that as an inferior arcanum) just to get lovely levitation that doesn't even count as true flight, and throwing fireballs and lightning wouldn't be in-flavor for this character anyways. I'm thinking of dipping into Spirit and binding a spirit of the air, but are there any other workarounds I'm overlooking?
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Nov 23, 2016 23:28
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Kurieg posted:The Children of Gaia fall because True Silverheels convinces the rest of the tribe that they can heal the wyrm's madness because they're the best healers in the Garou Nation. They sacrifice roughly a third of the tribe in a massive ritual to heal the Wyrm's madness. This sounds absolutely in-character to me, I don't know what you're talking about.
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Nov 23, 2016 23:38
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Kurieg posted:I'm still tempted to F&F the Apocalypse book because the "Tribe Falls" and "Weaver Ascendant" Scenarios are absolutely batshit (The former more than the latter, at least in the "I can't believe somebody wrote this" sense), but they'd also be almost incomprehensible for anyone without extensive knowledge of W:TA. Didn't Weaver Ascendant end with some weird combo of EoE and FLCL's "smoothing it the wrinkles so you can't think" thing? I know the main Ascension ending was literally Human Instrumentality for solipsists. Bonus points for the backhanded insult to people who played the drat thing.
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Nov 23, 2016 23:57
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Kurieg posted:The Children of Gaia fall because True Silverheels convinces the rest of the tribe that they can heal the wyrm's madness because they're the best healers in the Garou Nation. They sacrifice roughly a third of the tribe in a massive ritual to heal the Wyrm's madness. Did I say "forgot" the rest? I meant "repressed"... I do remember my main takeaway on the Tribe Falls one was that it was clear the author had a couple of tribes they felt made sense to maybe fall, but felt obligated to find some way for all of them to do it.
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Nov 24, 2016 00:01
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Tuxedo Catfish posted:So a friend recruited me to a nWoD Mage game and I'm thinking I'm going to make a character who's a classical witch -- curses, turning people into frogs, flying broomsticks, the lot. If you specifically want a flying broomstick, get an Imbued Item or Artifact with Levitation. You'd probably want +1 Reach for instant casting, +1 for advanced duration, +1 for free flight. Maybe treat the primary factor as Potency rather than Duration since you're unlikely to be flying for longer than a scene at a time. You also might combine it with Forces 3 Velocity Control to raise your flight speed.
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Nov 24, 2016 00:15
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Tuxedo Catfish posted:So a friend recruited me to a nWoD Mage game and I'm thinking I'm going to make a character who's a classical witch -- curses, turning people into frogs, flying broomsticks, the lot. If you just want a flying broomstick an Imbued Item or Artefact might be the best bet? Sure you won't have the breadth of magic forces gives you but you'll be able to fly. e: F,B
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Nov 24, 2016 00:16
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Kellsterik posted:If you specifically want a flying broomstick, get an Imbued Item or Artifact with Levitation. You'd probably want +1 Reach for instant casting, +1 for advanced duration, +1 for free flight. Maybe treat the primary factor as Potency rather than Duration since you're unlikely to be flying for longer than a scene at a time. You also might combine it with Forces 3 Velocity Control to raise your flight speed. Flavivirus posted:If you just want a flying broomstick an Imbued Item or Artefact might be the best bet? Sure you won't have the breadth of magic forces gives you but you'll be able to fly. Wouldn't this have to come from a caster with Forces? It's narratively important that she make it herself, although I guess I could budge on that in a pinch.
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Nov 24, 2016 00:33
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