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Casting the net wide: Is there a good mechanism now for finding WoD groups? Specifically that difficult phase of finding people that don't make you cringe and preferably in an age group? Everything around here (Brisbane, Australia) seems to be D&D, and I'd like to see if I can't play again.
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Sep 12, 2018 10:15
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Gadgets really are the way to go, I think. A Demon, let's call him... Nyubey, decides that it'd be great to have a Stigmatic Agent that he can order around and use to blow up infrastructure (Nyubey is a Saboteur, you see). Since his cover is a sweaty NEET who spends all day watching Anime, Nyubey thinks it'd be a great idea to have his new agent be a Magical Girl (of Sorts). So Nyubey begins to Plan: This is going to be High Risk work, but he hopes that once he's got all the pieces in place, it'll be worth all the setup. Nyubey crafts, steals, or barters for three Gadgets: One with Just Bruised, one with Quick Change, and one with Incendiary. He then disassembles the three Gadgets and stuffs them all into a toy staff he bought, fusing them into a Lambda Gadget, one that has partial effects of all three of the originals: Whoever grasps the rod can take an Instant action to Transform, swapping their outfit for a frilly, pretty magical girl costume, lets them throw bolts of energy, and protects them with convenient 'I was just grazed' narrative powers. Then, all he needs to do is find Impressionable Youths to co-opt with a magnificent lie about how the magical realm of Tiktok has been usurped by the evil Tiktok King, who now has his sights set on our world, and oh won't you please help protect this world against their evil. Totally lies, but on the other hand, the God Machine rarely has NICE infrastructure and good things in store for the mortals around it, so it really does need a good thwarting. So he signs a Pact with them, hands off the Rod, and lets them go around blowing up Infrastructure and Angels. As a bonus, all that use of a Gadget is EXTREMELY likely to awaken them as a Stigmatic after only a short while, which lets them See the Gears and gives them Unseen Sense (God Machine), along with some free dots of a Supernatural merit (Gaining Telekinesis so they can levitate like a proper magical girl is optimal). And if they fail, die, draw too much attention, or don't want to be a magical girl anymore, Nyubey just has to end the pact, take the rod back, and find someone else to be his new champion. If he wants to go the extra mile, Nyubey could also see about Angel Jacking a cute animal or plush toy cover so that he looks the part when offering the job to new girls. Crasical fucked around with this message at 10:56 on Sep 12, 2018 |
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Sep 12, 2018 10:54
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Crasical posted:And if they fail, die, draw too much attention, or don't want to be a magical girl anymore, Nyubey just has to end the pact, take the rod back, and find someone else to be his new champion. Just gotta point out that this isn't a "just". Torching a single pact may be non-fatal, but it's at the very least severely unpleasant - which of course gives Nyubey incentive to be weirdly Bonus points if he maintains several such pacts, with the actual contracts either hidden as part of their magical girl paraphernalia or stored in thematically appropriate locations (such as inside scary monsters) and they eventually realize that not only is Nyubey a bad guy, the best way to get rid of him is to collect a handful of his magical girl contracts and torch them all at once. Bonus bonus points if some of the girls refuse to surrender theirs and start a magical girl civil war.
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Sep 12, 2018 11:19
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starting to sound like fun-house mirror atlantis
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Sep 12, 2018 11:32
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I was going to say you could probably just jack Werewolf's transformation mechanic and take out the fur but it seems like you've got poo poo fairly figured out. If you pull together a system doc, would you mind posting it?
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Sep 12, 2018 14:08
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werewolf is the furry magical girl series
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Sep 12, 2018 14:45
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i dont mean anything specifically but i cant imagine theres not at least one
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Sep 12, 2018 14:45
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Tollymain posted:werewolf is the furry magical girl series Well, they are going to punish you in the name of the moon.
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Sep 12, 2018 15:07
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More newbie questions: So in the NWoD, the God-Machine is an unknowable, unexplainable hypothetical otherdimensional "thing" that engages in operations impossible to understand using personified subroutines (angels) and sometimes those subroutines develop their own AI and go and hide from this omniscient, omnipotent, and omnipresent "thing?" How does anyone parse the God-Machine? I can't wrap my head around it.
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Sep 12, 2018 16:49
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Just wait for Deviant because it'll probably be well within what you're looking for. Magical Girl series as we know them take a lot of cues from Tokusatsu series, more from the Sentai side than the Kamen Rider or Kaiju sides, but not too far out to be inapplicable.
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Sep 12, 2018 16:57
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Beerdeer posted:More newbie questions: By watching The Matrix, mostly. The Matrix has a computer that's secretly running reality, the God-Machine has a weird clockwork computer built into the universe's metaphorical walls that's secretly running reality. Both of them operate in weird, inscrutable ways, but you don't need to understand why either of them are doing a specific thing to understand that an inhuman machine is running existence and that leads to bad things happening to people.
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Sep 12, 2018 17:14
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The Machine isn’t other-dimensional, it is relentlessly physical. It is made of literal gears.
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Sep 12, 2018 17:21
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Beerdeer posted:More newbie questions: For starters it's important to understand that the God-Machine is not otherdimensional. It is a wholly physical entity. Sure, it can squirrel things (including itself) away into dimensional pockets, but that's just applying currently unknown principles of physics. What it means for it to be "fully physical" is that the God-Machine isn't some abstract intellect that builds Infrastructure, it is Infrastructure. It also means that it has spies and sensors and data access all over the place, is privy to powers literally beyond human comprehension and is intertwined in the very fabric of human existence, but is not literally omni- anything. Think of it more as a ridiculous surveillance state á la 1984 or V for Vendetta rather than a non-corporeal God who is present literally everywhere. As for how to get your head around it, I like to use the metaphor of the human body. It's ostensibly a cohesive whole serving a central consciousness, but it's made of uncountable interconnected systems with varying degrees of communication between them. For example, the immune system is really good at detecting and combating invading microbes, but that activity is not in any way directed by the central consciousness, and in fact the fallout of it (swelling, pain, fever) often impact other parts of the system negatively. And while the immune system "knows" and "recognizes" certain pathogens, that's not knowledge that's transferred to the central consciousness, and in fact isn't even knowledge in the way that the brain understands it. The God-Machine needs angels for the same reason we need immune cells; we may be immeasurably vaster and more powerful than them, but just as a matter of scale we can't just manually pop every individual hostile microbe, and if we even tried it would take up every second of every day. e: to get a feeling for how terrifying this is, imagine what it would be like to experience a blood test - if you were a blood cell Terrorforge fucked around with this message at 17:34 on Sep 12, 2018 |
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Sep 12, 2018 17:26
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The thing to remember about the God-Machine is that it is equal parts terrifyingly omniscient and terrifyingly dumb.
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Sep 12, 2018 17:41
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Beerdeer posted:More newbie questions: The God-Machine Chronicle book does an excellent job of presenting a layman's way of approaching the God-Machine for use in your games. Sadly, it's pretty much redundant with the Chronicles of Darkness Rulebook, which reprints almost all of the GMC book, but not the very good Introduction that lays it out piece by piece. Anyway. The God-Machine is conspiracy gone wild. It's the deep state, late-stage capitalism run amok, men in black with shady and amoral agendas, systems and organizations grown beyond the actual interests of its constituent members. It's also a physical engine interconnected through the body of the Earth, with moving parts and workstaff that perform maintenance to make sure, for example, the lattice of gears whose turning is necessary to keep California from falling into the sea in an apocalyptic earthquake doesn't rust over or jam, and the traffic shipments of soulless human bodies used as catspaws and slave labor don't get rerouted off course because of highway disrepair. It's not omniscient, not omnipotent, and not omnipresent. It knows what its agents and terminals know and are able to communicate with one another, because it is the sum total of its agents and terminals, and has no independent existence. It often miscalculates and sets self-destructive plans into motion alongside its wiser plans. It's not present except where its infrastructure is built or where its workstaffs go. (To put it another way, the God-Machine knows what its servants and systems know in the same sense that McDonald's knows what its executives and customer research know, except Ronald McDonald and Grimace are leaning over the CEO's shoulders, and sometimes the Fry Guys fall and go rogue. You can't personally go talk to McDonald's; the closest you can do is talk to the company president or to Ronald. McDonald's isn't a person. It's a network.) The Machine's individual, smaller-scale objectives are many, varied, and basically exist to be plot hooks. It accidentally spilled the runoff in the water that mutated the fish into walking mutant predators. It bought your office and is gradually replacing your coworkers with hollow imitations. It's responsible for inducing ritual suicides in a pattern across the city in order to narrow its control over occult traffic flow. It did [insert urban legend here]. It has the creepy, shady agendas that only make sense at a complicated level you're not working on, but which, on the individual level, you need to do something about. Its large-scale overall objective is the status quo. It wants the world of the Chronicles of Darkness. It wants its tendrils everywhere, people moving predictably, afraid of the shadow moving through the dark, powerless to change the engines of society. It may have other large-scale overall objectives to which the status quo is a means to an end; this is ultimately not important unless you decide to make it important for your game. What matters about the God-Machine is that it's made up entirely of parts. The parts don't always communicate well with one another. Each part is vulnerable to sabotage. They're almost always physical, material parts, either machines you can break or servants you can kill. It's a Lovecraftian horror made up entirely of things you can, in fact, ram a boat into and destroy, dealing tangible damage. I Am Just a Box fucked around with this message at 17:54 on Sep 12, 2018 |
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Sep 12, 2018 17:48
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Sinteres posted:I liked the examples where a diablerist wasn't actually powerful enough to digest a particularly potent soul, and was gradually consumed from within by their ostensible victim. Mithras ain't got time for your bullshit.
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Sep 12, 2018 17:56
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citybeatnik posted:Mithras ain't got time for your bullshit. Mithras did have time for his bullshit; that's what made him and Coven so scary together!
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Sep 12, 2018 18:58
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Someone once posted this quote from Grapes of Wrath in this thread for understanding the God-Machine and I really liked it. Hopefully it helps you too.quote:Some of the owner men were kind because they hated what they had to do, and some of them were angry because they hated to be cruel, and some of them were cold because they had long ago found that one could not be an owner unless one were cold. And all of them were caught in something larger than themselves. Some of them hated the mathematics that drove them, and some were afraid, and some worshiped the mathematics because it provided a refuge from thought and from feeling. If a bank or a finance company owned the land, the owner man said, The Bank—or the Company—needs—wants—insists—must have—as though the Bank or the Company were a monster, with thought and feeling, which had ensnared them. These last would take no responsibility for the banks or the companies because they were men and slaves, while the banks were machines and masters all at the same time. Some of the owner men were a little proud to be slaves to such cold and powerful masters.
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Sep 12, 2018 21:08
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Mors Rattus posted:The Machine isn’t other-dimensional, it is relentlessly physical. It is made of literal gears. It does also use a lot of weird meta-physics though, so not every aspect of it is entirely physical persay, though there are always physical components involved.
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Sep 13, 2018 00:45
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My group brainstormed this a while back, but I realized I ought to share it here: Great Ministry Quadruple Imperial IPA The Unity: Human Perfection Lager The General: Silent Partner Double Red Ale The Father: Holy Confusion Three-Grain Abbey Barleywine The Eye: ICU IPA The Raptor: Piercing Screech Undomesticated Grain Beer, with Bret The Nemesis: Hole to Hell Hopped Altbier The Chancellor: Chancellor's Gold Standard Golden Ale The Psychopomp: Death By Imperial Chocolate Stout The Ruin: Entropic Corrections Brown Ale The Prophet: Napoleonic Code Imperial Wit The Gate: Parametric Equation Isopropyl Beers of the Throne. edit: I'm most proud of the General and the Prophet. Joe Slowboat fucked around with this message at 04:18 on Sep 13, 2018 |
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Sep 13, 2018 04:16
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Sorry for interrupting cool godmachine chat with a dumb Mage mechanics question, since it looks like I have a player that wants to go spirit-heavy: Spirit 2 spell 'Channel Essence' lets your basic Thyrsus get Essence from a nearby Resonant condition. But the Resonant condition is subjective; anything could be resonant to an appropriate spirit. Walk past a dog, it's resonant to dog spirits. Someone sad, they're resonant to a sadness or despair spirit. So any mage with Spirit 2 can get essence from their breakfast, because it's theoretically resonant to a toast spirit. Is this all correct? I suppose it does have the implication that this is harder to do if you're already in the shadow, as spirits aren't generally resonant to each other.
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Sep 13, 2018 04:22
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bewilderment posted:Sorry for interrupting cool godmachine chat with a dumb Mage mechanics question, since it looks like I have a player that wants to go spirit-heavy:
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Sep 13, 2018 05:02
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bewilderment posted:So any mage with Spirit 2 can get essence from their breakfast, because it's theoretically resonant to a toast spirit. It's Toast Resonant, it likely doesn't have a toast spirit, and probably doesn't have much Resonance to it. But yes. From there, the only problem is mages don't really use Essence for anything other than feeding spirits, and it takes up space in your Mana pool. Though it's more efficient to use Essence to feed familiars, since you lose 1 if you transmute it during a transfer. nofather fucked around with this message at 05:17 on Sep 13, 2018 |
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Sep 13, 2018 05:13
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nofather posted:It's Toast Resonant, it likely doesn't have a toast spirit, and probably doesn't have much Resonance to it. Now, if you made an incredibly excellent piece of toast then it'd probably be a good bit more resonant. Edit: And now you're plagued by breakfast spirits constantly hassling you to cook more. Making a frying pan show up mysteriously on your desk at work, etc. What I'm getting at is that you really shouldn't encourage them. Obligatum VII fucked around with this message at 05:37 on Sep 13, 2018 |
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Sep 13, 2018 05:31
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nofather posted:It's Toast Resonant, it likely doesn't have a toast spirit, and probably doesn't have much Resonance to it. Obligatum VII posted:Now, if you made an incredibly excellent piece of toast then it'd probably be a good bit more resonant. I've spent the past 5 minutes trying to make a toast machine chronicles joke but it's just not coming, sorry.
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Sep 13, 2018 05:39
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Zereth posted:I'd assume it'd only work on things a Spirit could actually get a whole game-mechanical point of essence from. Spirits can once a day suck up a load of essence from anything that matches their resonance. I suppose an interesting side effect could be that a mage could jump around to all the rarer but strong sources of essence (e.g. heading to well known nearby crime hotspots) and just sucking up all the essence (and maybe getting a familiar to then waste it) in order to starve or piss off spirits that normally need it since now it's been 'used up' for the day. That gives mages with Spirit 2 something interesting to do as a long term project, before they can get into all the fun things that spirit 3 allows.
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Sep 13, 2018 06:30
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Crasical posted:Gadgets really are the way to go, I think. I've always been a classical world of darkness guy, but I have a good enough understanding of NWoD to know that this sounds amazing. I would definitely play it.
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Sep 13, 2018 06:49
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PHIZ KALIFA posted:If you pull together a system doc, would you mind posting it? A what? Charlz Guybon posted:I've always been a classical world of darkness guy, but I have a good enough understanding of NWoD to know that this sounds amazing. I would definitely play it. Thank you!
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Sep 13, 2018 09:24
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Kurieg posted:I've spent the past 5 minutes trying to make a toast machine chronicles joke but it's just not coming, sorry. Give it a couple of minutes and it'll pop up.
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Sep 13, 2018 11:42
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Kurieg posted:I've spent the past 5 minutes trying to make a toast machine chronicles joke but it's just not coming, sorry. I can't think of anything either, but I did suddenly think of Brave Little Toaster, then I thought of a bunch of demons singing the song "Worthless" from that movie. So thanks for that.
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Sep 13, 2018 13:54
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Crasical posted:A what? A document basically outlining how this specific type of game is supposed to work, what you're changing or fudging in order to get stuff running.
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Sep 13, 2018 14:06
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DigitalRaven posted:Give it a couple of minutes and it'll pop up. Don't leave it too long or you'll burn it. Crasical posted:Magical Girl stuff Mage is the obvious answer, but this Demon line of reasoning has been much more interesting to see. However, might I suggest Geist as an alternative? 2e is only in kickstarter, but you'd literally have a 'demon' on your back the whole time and I'm pretty sure you could pull off some amazing stuff. Either way, I love when people try putting a square peg in a round hole, if only to see what you can really do with the system.
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Sep 13, 2018 14:42
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bewilderment posted:Is this all correct? Spirits can feed across the Gauntlet. While it's not definitive, that suggests a Resonant Condition exists regardless of which side you're on, and I'd personally allow a mage to use it in the Shadow, though penalized by the Gauntlet modifier as a spirit would be. Jhet posted:Mage is the obvious answer, but this Demon line of reasoning has been much more interesting to see. I dunno. Magical girls tend to have a small number of specific powers, a transformation gimmick and the ability to take repeated laser blasts to the face, which doesn't really fit with a mage's freeform powers, ordinary appearance and squishy human body. If anything, I'd say demons themselves are the closest full splat analogue. They've got custom but rigidly defined powers and secret identities they can shed in favor of superpowered forms with unique powers and appearances at the downside of being incredibly conspicuous. Plus looking back at Sailor Moon again, most of the bad guy schemes of the initial season were archetypally God-Machine-y plots that revolved around using trends and technology like cheap jewelry or a corrupted TV broadcast to lure people into becoming mindless servants who would then be drained of their life energy, to be used for nefarious purposes.
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Sep 13, 2018 17:46
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I suppose if you have a familiar, Spirit 2 and you have a friend with Prime 3 (or have it yourself) you're a mana battery for your whole team. There's nowhere near enough Hallows going by the setting for there to be anywhere near enough mana to support mages doing magic on a daily basis anyway; I'm pretty sure mages who aren't in a legacy get by on having a 'sick day' while they scour strength or dexterity, and mages who are in a legacy just do their oblation and solve a crossword puzzle to get their mana.
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Sep 14, 2018 00:30
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Terrorforge posted:Just gotta point out that this isn't a "just". Torching a single pact may be non-fatal, but it's at the very least severely unpleasant - which of course gives Nyubey incentive to be weirdly I actually can't find the rules for this? I mean, I LIKE it, but having a pact just seems to lose Nyubey whatever was on his end of the bargain; so as long as he's smart enough to ask for dots in cult or soforth instead of Cover or Soul pacts, then he won't unravel if he loses a pact or two here and there. Xelkelvos posted:Just wait for Deviant I'm impatient and Deviant is who-knows-how-many-months out. It also doesn't give me the same square peg, round hole sort of satisfaction that bludgeoning Demon into working for this does. Jhet posted:However, might I suggest Geist as an alternative? 2e is only in kickstarter, but you'd literally have a 'demon' on your back the whole time and I'm pretty sure you could pull off some amazing stuff. I kinda love Geist so I will look into it! I'm sure I have those backer documents around here somewhere...
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Sep 14, 2018 06:03
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Terrorforge posted:Just gotta point out that this isn't a "just". Torching a single pact may be non-fatal, but it's at the very least severely unpleasant - which of course gives Nyubey incentive to be weirdly Is he really the bad guy if he oppsoses the God Machine? 
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Sep 14, 2018 09:32
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Been a busy year so the project's been backburnered a bit. Chewing into Garou stuff again today though, and thought I'd share the latest figure from the timeline document. It has some 3080 footnoted entries now, and a couple of hundred unfooted from before 1997 or so. It skips a lot of the 'bullshit' entries from the wiki timeline (e.g. that Suchandsuch was born July 12th 1971) in favour of useful entries like - to pick out a random one - 1171's opening of a trod from GB to America. I'm quite pleased with it. It also includes speculative notes between events where a broader narrative can be woven in, but I think I've mentioned that before.
Loomer fucked around with this message at 10:33 on Sep 14, 2018 |
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Sep 14, 2018 10:31
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Crasical posted:I actually can't find the rules for this? I mean, I LIKE it, but having a pact just seems to lose Nyubey whatever was on his end of the bargain; so as long as he's smart enough to ask for dots in cult or soforth instead of Cover or Soul pacts, then he won't unravel if he loses a pact or two here and there. Core Demon book, p. 194: "Demon: the Descent posted:If a permanent pact is nullified by the destruction of its contract, there is a mystic backlash that resonates through a demon’s Primum. This inflicts a number of bashing damage equal to the demon’s Primum rating in a painful, head-splitting burst of pain. The destruction of many such contracts at once could even kill a demon, yet another reason they closely guard their sealed pacts. And afaik there's no way to nullify a Pact other than to destroy the contract.
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Sep 14, 2018 11:23
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Charlz Guybon posted:Is he really the bad guy if he oppsoses the God Machine? Oh course he is, citizen. The Machine loves its children. It protects you, and you must protect it. Pay no attention to the monster behind the curtain.
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Sep 14, 2018 12:55
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By the way, with regards to Magical Girls in classic WoD, I thought this was a good thread. http://forum.theonyxpath.com/forum/...e-the-ascension
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Sep 14, 2018 15:33
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