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I knew that was gonna be Leif Jones before I clicked the link. I'm convinced that dude has photos of Mark Rein-Hagen performing in a donkey show or something. There's really no reason why he should've gotten as much work as he did.
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Feb 16, 2014 04:39
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I'd also argue that the first thing you want to do when reading about/running Mage is to pretend that all the metaplot bullshit in third edition never happened, but I'm aware that's not a widely held opinion.
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Feb 18, 2014 21:50
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Man, I love Mage, but the moment Phil Brucato wasn't running the show anymore, things got crazy and never recovered. Masters of the Art should never have seen print. I much preferred the second edition, which made it both implicitly and explicitly clear that most of what was going on was a cold war for a reason. Nobody wanted it to go hot because of mutually-assured destruction, so you get lots of politicking and behind-the-scenes manipulation. Anyone who made a big move would get a lot of on-the-spot alliances to try to stop them from doing it, i.e. the Nephandi summoning at the end of World War II or that one camp of Marauders whose answer to the "problem" of consensus reality was to kill as many people as possible. It should also be noted, though, that getting a new rank of a Sphere in Mage has always been one of the most ludicrously expensive things in the game line. It was something like 9 XP per current rank, or 7 if you were trying to improve your character's faction's signature Sphere (a Virtual Adept learning Correspondence, etc.). XP was pretty slow in coming in most of the games I ever played, and it was supposed to take years of game time to learn a Sphere at four or five, which is also the point where it becomes very difficult to challenge an intelligent player at all. Forces in particular just gets goofy at rank 4, because that's when you can start loving with stuff like gravity, hard radiation, and high-end electromagnetism.
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Mar 6, 2014 00:23
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ulmont posted:I think Mage itself pretty blatantly contradicted the whole reason the Tremere went Vampire, to be perfectly honest, if my memory of what a Mage could accomplish with Life 5 is right... You could theoretically start extending your lifespan as early as Life 3, but being a vampire isn't subject to Paradox, which is what holds/held the attraction. You can only age suspiciously well for so long before you start running some risks, particularly if your particular style of immortality requires a constant running effect rather than periodic rejuvenations. Hell, there are a fair few Traditions for whom immortality is a pointless endeavor, at least for its own sake. Mage as a setting is firmly rooted in reincarnation being real and provable.
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Mar 10, 2014 06:12
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A Curvy Goonette posted:So what're the paradox rules for mages fighting vampires? I assume the vampires know enough about the real workings of the world to not induce paradox if a mage throws a fireball but who knows. There are three inherent difficulty modifiers on magick: coincidental, vulgar without witnesses, and vulgar with witnesses. Vampires are not considered a "witness" for purposes of magick use. If you toast one with a fireball, you still automatically get Paradox, but it isn't as difficult as it would be if there was a totally normal dude in the room. They may have messed with it in later versions, but a vampire going head-to-head against a mage who knows any combat magick whatsoever is hosed unless that vampire wins initiative.
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Mar 12, 2014 01:29
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Zeroisanumber posted:That guy had five dots in Dex, Strength, and Stamina along with five dots in Potence, Fortitude, and Celerity. Guy could straight-out demolish most mid-level coteries in a brawl. If your mid-level coterie does anything but get their photos taken with him and go along their merry way, they deserve to get wrestled into oblivion.
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Mar 14, 2014 02:10
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Angry Lobster posted:I'm not sure about that, I don't know much of Mage, but I think it's not correct, at least the point about the werewolves. Garou are children of Gaia and spiritual beings, and like the spirits of Gaia, they have always been and will always be there as long as Gaia lives (at leat until they all die horribly on the Apocalypse), their existence do not change based on shifts of belief, like spirits of Paradox do. It's kind of a gray area. It's well worth noting that in the WoD, both vampires and werewolves have a pretty powerful entity that A) verifiably exists and B) is backing them up directly. It also doesn't hurt that neither of them ever quite left the popular zeitgeist after the dawn of the modern era, so a normal human who sees a dude with fangs is going to immediately say "...holy poo poo, vampire," which gives them a spot in the Consensus by default. The idea that Bram Stoker has more to do with keeping vampires alive and a going concern than any single vampire ever did is amusing to me on several levels.
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Mar 19, 2014 06:10
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citybeatnik posted:* Abilities (Linguistics is out, Technology is in) That reminds me of something fun about the original 1st/2nd-edition Vampire rules. There used to be a column in some RPG newsletter or another about "Murphy's Laws": rules quirks in various systems that indicated something weird about the world as portrayed by the game. One of the examples they used was how Linguistics used to work in Vampire, where each dot on a five-point scale meant the character spoke another language. Since humans by those rules had a hard cap of 5 on any ability, that meant that anyone in the world who spoke more than six languages was a 7th-generation vampire or lower, which meant that in the World of Darkness, the translation department at the United Nations (among other places) was populated entirely by low-generation vampires. White Wolf changed Linguistics pretty shortly thereafter so each dot was worth double the additional languages. citybeatnik posted:http://satyrosphilbrucato.wordpress.com/2014/03/23/mage-20-qa-part-i-what-is-mage-anyway/ I'm willing to give him a pass on having gotten a little eccentric since Brucato and Kathleen Ryan are responsible for pretty much everything I like about Mage. If you want to see another example of post-White Wolf writers going a little goofy, Mark Rein*Hagen's been through something like eight careers after he left.
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Apr 17, 2014 23:22
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JackNapier posted:Alright, I've seen a lot of posts and LP's like that and I didn't want to get probated my like first week here. Alan Turing was one of the mages that founded the Virtual Adepts.
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Jul 6, 2014 20:57
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JT Jag posted:Actually I think it's White Wolf canon that Hitler was a mundane rear end in a top hat. One manipulated by other powers, but none of the supernatural forces claim he was one of theirs. Yeah, there are a shitload of occurrences that surround Hitler and World War II, but the books always make it very clear that Hitler himself wasn't anyone's puppet or anything. Off the top of my head, there were Get of Fenris werewolf packs who wholly bought into the SS ideology and fought on the Nazis' side, the Nephandi demon mages took advantage of the whole thing to power some massive ritual that was barely stopped by a one-time-only Traditions/Technocracy team-up, and a couple of different books have mentioned the rules for the Umbra surrounding the sites of the concentration camps are "Do not ever loving go there." The war itself, however, is all humans, all the time. Bobbin Threadbare posted:Hitler was the combination of all the White Wolf staff saying "Let's stay as far the gently caress away from the Holocaust as we can." Not exactly. Wraith has Charnel Houses of Europe. The book has a foreword from the late Janet Berliner about the intent of the project, and if you can chase down a copy, it's worth reading. It's definitely a product of that latter-day White Wolf tendency towards pretension, but they were trying to use a tabletop RPG to teach about the Holocaust. Like everything that has to do with Wraith, it's impressively written but basically unplayable; I can't imagine any gaming group that would voluntarily sit down for an evening of that kind of constant unrelenting depression.
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Jul 7, 2014 02:10
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DeusExMachinima posted:Wait, what will happen if you do go there? Is the Umbra basically just the Warp? The Umbra in oWoD is a complicated subject, but it's basically the spirit world. There are several layers to it that encompass the afterlife, several higher and lower realms, the Dreamtime, and even outer space, which is a fun as hell setting. On Earth, a couple of different supernaturals have a method to "step sideways," which lets them enter the Penumbra, which is a reflection of the real world where all the spirits hang out. The better or worse the area in the real world, the better or worse the area is in the Penumbra. If you step sideways around someplace like a concentration camp, you're playing Russian roulette with a loaded crossbow. (That said, it turns out I was actually thinking of the revised Silent Striders tribebook, where the narrator mentions that somebody he knew stepped sideways at Ground Zero and came back in a catatonic stupor. It wasn't because it was the Worst Thing To Ever Happen, but because it was the site of three thousand violent deaths and that wreaks havoc on the Umbra.) There was also this huge metaplot in Mage involving a group of crazy death mages called the Consanguinity of Eternal Joy. They weren't corrupt in the traditional sense, but had gotten way too into necromancy and death magic. Their leader had begun to perceive himself as an avatar of Shiva the Destroyer, sent to eliminate the current world so it could be replaced. One of the signs that they'd gone completely around the twist was that they were using energy drawn from the site of one of the concentration camps to fuel their spells. Zeroisanumber posted:Never liked the addition of the Holocaust to the WoD. There are some things that just aren't meant to be a part of an RPG, even if they're handled respectfully. I like that they took the beast by the horns on that one. You can't really trust tabletop nerds to leave a subject alone.
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Jul 7, 2014 05:13
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citybeatnik posted:William Bloodsong in the WtA book The Book of Auspices, who narrates the Ahroun section of the book, is presented as one of the Get who DIDN'T do that and who proceeded to curbstomp most of the Get who did. Yeah, they also used that as the introductory comic for the Get of Fenris tribebook in second edition, which is one of the most  things in a line that ran on :
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Jul 7, 2014 20:50
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Tehan posted:A lot of vampires don't believe in mages, most werewolves think vampires are just some minor evil spirit, and so on. And these are the narrators for the splatbooks, who you'd assume are moderately clued in. A lot depends on the individual splat, though. The Silent Striders have been fighting vampires since ancient Egypt, but for one thing, it's mostly been the Setites, and for another, they haven't bothered to learn much about vampires aside from how best to kill them. Likewise, the magical tradition that the Tremere came from is still around in the modern WoD and is notoriously averse to change, so the Tremere still know chapter and verse about them.
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Jul 9, 2014 22:39
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xanthan posted:So if I read this right everyone is a mage, just not in conscious control of what they do and thus not a capital M Mage. Because they can't control it it just defaults to reinforcing what they believe, hence paradox where their magic bitch slaps someone trying to use magic to go against what they believe. Not exactly. Whether or not everyone has the potential to be a mage is an ongoing philosophical argument in-game. As a rule, being a mage means one day, you had some kind of epiphany about the world and how it works. It might have been violent, mystical, metaphysical, drug-induced, you name it. At the end of it, you got introduced to a fragment of your soul that's typically called your Avatar, which is a spirit guide/Jiminy Cricket/guardian angel/you name it, and now you're capable of changing reality through force of will. It's also important to note here that the basic mechanics of the game and how magick (the first two editions use the -k spelling) works don't always play ball. Out of game, magick is the act of changing reality; in-game, it's whatever your character's individual tradition and style make it. For example, a Catholic priest who works miracles with the aid of saints and angels does not ascribe any particular power to himself and as such would reject the "reality deviant" label. Paradox is what happens when what you do violates the rules of local reality. If I am standing in the middle of a busy street in New York City and I throw a fireball at a dude from my hand, most if not all of the people around me are going to recognize that as an impossible act and Paradox kicks in. If I describe to the guy running the game how that dude was just in the center of a really unfortunate gas main explosion, that is all too possible and Paradox leaves me alone. Playing Mage is, in many ways, about using the stats on your sheet to bullshit a favorable outcome ("the bullet struck my lucky cigarette case! I'm fine!"), and doing something explicitly "magical" is often not your best option. (Also, local activities and beliefs play a strong role. You don't want to gently caress with a Christian mystic in the heart of Vatican City, for example. If you do something "impossible" in a local climate that supports that specific impossibility--like faith-healing someone when you're surrounded by fervent believers--then it's not impossible anymore and reality has to play along with that.) Mechanically, it's a 20-point stat on your character sheet that represents how far you're pushing your luck. The higher it goes, the more likely it is that Something Bad is going to happen, whether it's a painful backlash, a permanent inconvenience, a long coma, spirits coming after you, or in extreme cases, part of reality being torn off and isolated so as to serve as your prison. The latter event is called a Paradox Realm, where consensus reality decides the best thing it can do is toss you into a cell for a while so you can think about what you did. (There's an example of a Paradox Realm in the Book of Worlds. Some dude tried to use magick to artificially induce the Big One, the earthquake that will tear California off the rest of the North American continent, because he'd preemptively acquired a great deal of land that would suddenly be oceanfront property. It didn't work and now his prison is, if you manage to visit it somehow, a flat plain that's constantly and violently shaking. He's in there somewhere, but nobody's sure where. (There's another one that's just big enough to contain one guy, who was apparently a blood mage in a Viking tradition. Nobody knows what he did to get tossed into the Realm, who he is, or if they could get him out. In the Realm, he constantly ages to death, then gets reborn to infancy to repeat the cycle. He's been in there for at least a few hundred years.) The basic idea is that the standard human paradigm in Western civilization is heavily influenced by the Technocracy, so what we know as technology is accessible to everybody. The downside to this is that it is, in fact, a technocracy; people treat themselves more like machines than people, imagination and wonder get stamped on, etc. The Technocracy actually does a lot to keep normal humans safe in the larger World of Darkness, but the cost's pretty high.
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Jul 11, 2014 09:43
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JT Jag posted:If vampires smell of the Wyrm, and they smell more of it the lower their humanity, wouldn't it be more reasonable to assume that the Beast specifically is a reflection of/fueled by the Wyrm rather than that vampires are Wyrmspawn as a whole? One of the big things about the World of Darkness is that the various supernatural critters don't make a habit of explaining themselves to each other. Werewolves as a rule don't know about "the Beast" and a lot of them kill first and ask questions never the moment they smell Wyrm taint on something. Vampires are also, even at high humanity, walking dead things and don't interact well with the natural world. There are actually some thaumaturgical paths that let a vampire summon spirits or go into the Umbra, but they make it clear that the only spirits that will voluntarily interact with them are specifically aligned with the Wyrm. There's an entire cosmology that vampires have to work very hard to interact with, and when they do, it reminds you that even the fluffiest bunny of a vampire is still a reanimated corpse powered by stolen blood. Further, both the Tzimisce and the Setites have had old, bad blood with the werewolves for centuries. The old-blood European Tzimisce have been feuding with the Shadow Lords in Europe for a long time, and the Setite Antediluvian is actually responsible for cursing the Silent Striders so they lost their tribal homeland of Egypt. As a result, the common theory on vampires among werewolves is that the best-case scenario, when dealing with a vampire, is that they're trying to manipulate you.
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Jul 11, 2014 19:01
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JackNapier posted:gently caress it, tell me about Black Furies, good Goon Sir They're an all-female tribe that started in Greece, very into the concept of "female mysteries" and they hold onto a lot of ancient lore and treasure. If a male kid is born into the tribe, they tend to give him away to somebody else, usually the Children of Gaia. The exception is with male metis, who are often allowed to remain in the tribe, and one has actually risen to a pretty high rank. They clash a lot with the Get of Fenris, which was really male-dominated until relatively recently, and do a lot of behind-the-scenes work to help human women in trouble: hotlines, shelters, clinics, etc. The stereotype other tribes have of the Furies is that they're all manic nine-foot-tall rage-fueled lesbian feminazis, and there are a few of the younger ones who buy into that stereotype, but they run the gamut. Various books hint rather strongly that the legends of the Bacchantes, in the World of Darkness, were actually inspired by ancient Furies. There's a Fury camp that interests me a bit, that mixes Gaia worship with Catholicism, called the Order of the Merciful Mother. It's a bit like an all-female Knights Templar.
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Jul 11, 2014 22:22
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One of the things that's useful to remember when dealing with the whole werewolf thing is that it's a very American game. The tribes all have a particular national and cultural background, because they grew alongside that culture and kept that area clean, but in a modern game they all come together in the melting pot. The Uktena are a lot about that, in fact; they unofficially adopted a lot of people in America like immigrants and runaway slaves, so in a modern game, an Uktena could be drat near any ethnicity under the sun. A lot of werewolves also have access to things like ancestor-spirits, reincarnation and oral histories, so they're very tradition-bound, which excuses/explains a lot of the individual quirks of a tribe. It's difficult to completely lose track of where you came from when a lot of your predecessors are still around in one way or another.
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Jul 11, 2014 22:34
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JackNapier posted:I second this, Tehan, my wonderful Werewolf friend, know anything about Shadow Lords? Ruthlessly pragmatic werewolves from eastern Europe with a well-deserved reputation for being power-hungry. They're tight with a powerful spirit called Grandfather Thunder and have a lot of powers to do with spying and information gathering. They're still on the right side of things and are just as opposed to the Wyrm as anybody else, but every Shadow Lord might as well have "the ends justify the means" tattooed on his or her forehead.
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Jul 11, 2014 23:17
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Stroop There It Is posted:I forget if we talked about it in detail before, but could one of the Werewolf aficionados talk a bit more about the hilarious Captain Planet villain known as Pentex Corporation? (Maybe about the BSD too?) Pentex has one of the best sourcebooks. If you ever get a chance to flip through it, it's pretty great, all the moreso because it ends with a chapter that's just White Wolf satirizing itself. (The line developer is in there as "Ethan Skump," horrifically inbred Black Spiral Kinfolk.) The original company that started Pentex was an oil company in the late 1800s. Sometimes the Uktena tribe of werewolves will seal up a spirit or monster that's too big or powerful to destroy, and dedicate a crew to keeping it under wraps for basically the rest of time. The oil company in question drilled into one of those prisons by mistake, and when its owner went down to the drilling site to find out what was going on, he ended up making a bargain with the monster. In exchange for being allowed to walk away, he got to do its bidding. As the years went on, the company became Pentex and diversified its holdings, many of which do the Wyrm's work in one way or another, subtle or not. A lot of Brand-X versions of real-world companies and corporations are owned wholly or partially by Pentex in the World of Darkness. O'Tolley's is a McDonald's clone; there's a big American brewery called King that makes cheap beer, cheaper vodka, and really fizzy club soda; there's a video game developer, the oil company's still going, they've got a pharmaceutical firm, you name it. For the most part, the idea behind Pentex isn't that all their stuff is seething with evil at all times, but that some of it could be, or that it's just engaging in social engineering. They've got a line of toys, for example, where a square-jawed hero does manly battle with evil werewolves, and a lot of the video game company's games portray a universe where nature itself is inherently hostile. The oil company's safety record is horrible but they've bribed all the inspectors, and the King brewery poisons the river it's on in a way that normal real-world breweries aren't allowed to do. The modern-day board of directors on Pentex includes a really old, low-generation Malkavian antitribu named Harold Zettler, but most of the guys are normal humans, albeit they're Wyrm-tainted in one way or another. The Black Spirals often get "day jobs" as Pentex employees. Sleep of Bronze posted:So I'm assuming septs are formed mostly geographically based on the caerns, drawing in at least a selection of the most local packs, because that's the most sensible way to do this when you have something to defend. But what's the process for a pack coming together? Why are you in this one and not that one? How common are multi-tribe packs with varying levels of friction, vs clannish single-tribe ones? Anything from the elders specifically assigning a bunch of dudes to be a pack and go investigate a thing, or just a bunch of werewolves who like each other enough to go out on adventures. The multi-tribal pack thing is a lot more common in America or in major metropolitan areas elsewhere. In tribal homelands, most packs are going to be tribal, with maybe an occasional guest star.
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Jul 12, 2014 00:13
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xanthan posted:No, no some of us don't. Please Lobster of Anger, tell us what happens when a metis is born without defects. It's a sign of the Apocalypse. The Perfect Metis is basically an avatar of the Wyrm itself.
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Jul 12, 2014 00:22
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PFlats posted:Or any marine were-creatures, for that matter? I wouldn't be surprised if there was an Atlantis somewhere. Just the were-sharks.
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Jul 12, 2014 00:28
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JackNapier posted:I agree! Wonderful WoD Goon Sirs, tell us about the Technocracy Back in the day, there was a quasi-magical tradition called the Order of Reason, which used high-end mechanical "sorcery"; you had members of it running around with miniguns during the Renaissance. In the same period, members of more mystical traditions were, to put it charitably, out of control. The world was a frightening, dark place, with vampires ruling big parts of Europe with an iron fist, werewolves killing people left and right, and the mystics were no strangers to human sacrifice and death magic. If you were a normal person, you were emphatically screwed from birth, one way or another. Now, remember that magick in the WoD works on a matter of consensus reality: if a lot of people believe something to be true, it is now true. The Order of Reason exploited this to raise the general level of technology available to an ordinary human being, which also increased their ability to defend themselves. The technological bell curve goes up from there, slowly but surely, until their paradigm began to supplant that of the mystics. The Order of Reason slowly became the modern Technocracy, which sees its role in the world as protective; they're the secretive organization out to protect normal workaday humanity from the multiple supernatural threats that are coming from all sides. Vampire, werewolf, mage (a.k.a. "reality deviant"), spirit, zombie, whatever: they'll throw heavily-armed Men in Black and cyborgs and death satellites and whatever else you want at it until it stops moving. In the original version of Mage, the modern Technocracy is a faceless, often cruel bureaucracy that ruthlessly stamps out opposition wherever it's found, for no other reason than that it's a threat to their paradigm. The goal of the Technocracy is complete dominance over humanity: no religion, no mysticism or imagination at all, just pure mechanical perfection. It's not until second edition that the writers on Mage began to slowly admit that the Technocracy, in its way, has a point. Most of the supernatural creatures in the World of Darkness view humans as, at best, a prey species; vampires drink blood, changelings siphon off artistic inspiration, wraiths drain Passion, and werewolves run the gamut from mass murder to cannibalism to abducting unsuspecting humans who happen to bear the werewolf gene in order to turn them into brood stock. This culminated in the Player's Guide to the Technocracy, which detailed how to run a complete campaign with players as Technocrats. There are five Technocratic "traditions," which represent the major schools of thought within the larger whole: * Iteration X, an organization of transhumanists that specialize in cybernetic augmentation, big gently caress-off robots, and giant guns. As a trade-off, they are completely unable to recognize the existence of spirits or the spirit realm at all. * The New World Order, the "cops" of the Technocracy and the ones that a mystic are most likely to run into. They're all about information control and have a theoretically infinite number of "Men in Black"--cloned soldiers--to throw at a problem. * Progenitors, which specialize in biological manipulation: clones, mutants, new species, new diseases, you name it. Better living through aggressive bioengineering. * The Syndicate. You know the plutomancers from Unknown Armies? Those guys. The Syndicate specializes in societal engineering through control of high finance and currency. They bankroll the Technocracy. If a Technocratic organization can't overcome a bunch of mages through force of arms, they'll slash their credit rating and get their house condemned. * The Void Engineers, which are the Technocracy's first and only line of defense between Earth and the various unpleasant things that are not on Earth. They explore the universe, tend to run into a lot of Things That Should Not Be Named, and are typically the least hostile towards other supernaturals of any Technocratic faction. A Void Engineer's usually just happy you're human. Two Traditions also defected from the Technocracy: the Sons of Ether, the mad scientists of the line, had an ideological split from the Technocracy over the existence of ether/phlogiston (it was eliminated from consensus reality as sort of a gently caress-you to the Sons, who were bad about toeing the party line, and that was the last straw), and the Virtual Adepts began as an organization called the Difference Engineers, but left the Technocracy in the '50s. Long story short on that: information wants to be free. (Fun Mage cosmology fact: when you get beyond the orbit of Mars or so, you're effectively in a new Umbra where the typical rules don't apply. There's no paradigm so there's no Paradox and things get crazy. One facet of this is that, since the Technocrats decided to outlaw the existence of Ether two hundred years ago, they believe that space is largely made up of hard vacuum. Traditionalist mages are not subject to the issue and can breathe ether without too much of a problem. If you get on a Technocrat spaceship and throw a Technocrat out an airlock without a space suit, anyone who survives isn't a Technocrat any longer.) The idea behind the Technocracy in second edition Mage is that they're one half of a magickal cold war. Each of the nine main Traditions, in their way, represent a major school of mystical thought in the human condition: the exploration of the mind, altered states, religion, imagination, sex, death, you name it. Eliminating them would, in a very real way, require that you eliminate the concepts that power them from the human race; if you want to get rid of the Celestial Chorus, for example, you better figure out a way to turn the entire human race into die-hard atheists. Every Tradition has its own little ideological foxhole that isn't going anywhere anytime soon, and at the same time, they wouldn't want to eliminate a base level of technology from the human race even if they could. (Even the most die-hard Order of Hermes mage, who would turn the clock back to 1400 in a loving heartbeat if it meant he got to have his own feudal-system castle with serfs and everything, probably enjoys having access to indoor plumbing.) It's a stalemate. (This is something they completely missed the loving boat on in Mage Revised, when the Technocracy "won," by the way, and it's one of the reasons why I can't loving stand Mage Revised.) While this erupts into violence from time to time, the Ascension War is basically a cold war, fought over individual beliefs. The Technocracy, however, spends an amazing amount of its effort on quashing the supernatural because part of its mission statement has always been that the Sleepers, the vast mass of ordinary humans, must be protected. The Traditions will gently caress up a demon or a corrupt mage if they find one, but for the most part, it's a neutral organization. As such, they're one of the single largest and most powerful "good" factions in the World of Darkness; they give humans the tools they need to stay alive and healthy, and in an indirect way, the tools to defend themselves against supernatural threats. It's simply that the rest of the game line is about playing one of those threats. This isn't to say that the Technocracy is wholly good, however. You may have spotted some of the problems already, but in short: * The Technocracy's name is the first sign of the biggest problem. In a technocratic society, humans begin to act more like machines. You don't sleep; you drink caffeine until you collapse. You don't give yourself time to heal; you just push through it or "fix" yourself with drugs. You don't pursue hobbies, you don't have beliefs, and at the higher end of the scale, you don't even have emotions. In a theoretical future where the Technocracy won everything, Earth would look like the inside of a gray Swiss watch forever. * They are basically infested with the Weaver. The Wyrm/Weaver/Wyld triat is still very much a part of the Mage cosmology and Technocrats could not be more suited to the Weaver's goals if they tried. This would not be a problem if the Weaver was not bugfuck insane and/or the Wyrm was not imprisoned and also insane. As such, the Technocrats may not be on the wrong side spiritually, but they sure as hell aren't on the right one. If they win, it's just as much an endgame for local reality as if the Wyrm wins, because it would irrevocably upset the balance. * The Technocratic paradigm in general has a real hard time with anything that doesn't fit into its philosophy. * The Void Engineers have a really, really bad habit of coming back from space Wrong. There are a lot of terrible things in deep space, beyond the Technocracy's effective reach, and the leading cause of death among Void Engineers is running into some Lovecraftian nightmare while they're off the edge of the map. * Iteration X in general is hosed. The heart of their power is a pocket dimension called Autocthonia, where their leader hangs out. That leader is an autonomous AI called the Computer that gives them their marching orders, because it represents the endgoal of their particular paradigm: perfect emotionless intellect. Because Iteration X as a whole doesn't know Spirit magick at all, even the hosed-up variant that Technocrats practice (I think they call it Dimensional Science), they aren't able to tell that the Computer isn't an AI at all. It's some massive spirit of intellect with a goal of its own, and the higher-up you get in the Iteration X philosophy, the less able you are to resist its influence. This is not something anybody knows, because if you had the wherewithal to spot the Computer as a fraud, you'd be of a sufficiently different frame of mind that you wouldn't be able to use magick in Autocthonia. This means that a bunch of partial to full-conversion magickal cyborgs with guns the size of God are taking orders from a completely inhuman machine intelligence and are incapable of discovering the deceit on their own. The Technocracy has problems, but in the World of Darkness, it is maybe the only major supernatural organization that is specifically dedicated to the protection of humanity. It may do this through the abject control of humanity, but it's still trying, goddammit.
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Jul 13, 2014 01:44
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One of the things about the old WoD that was kind of fun to watch in the second and third editions was how they realized crossovers weren't a great idea, if for no other reason than game balance. As such, it's usually not a great idea to assume that anything from one line is causing problems in another unless it's explicitly stated to be doing so, i.e. the Technocracy's involvement in the death of the Ravnos antediluvian. The Tremere's sorcery fading out is easy enough to attribute to Gehenna. Dante Logos posted:I take it this is where they got their inspiration for the God-Machine in NWoD? It's not like this is the only place you can go to find an example of people being guided by a massive machine intelligence. The moment I typed that about Iteration X, I was expecting about a thousand jokes about Paranoia.
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Jul 13, 2014 18:43
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Zeroisanumber posted:That said, it is quite possible for a Mage to develop disciplines by drinking vampire blood. It's also possible (by using some hosed-up dark magic) to become a werewolf. There was a character in 2nd Edition who managed to pull all of that off and became the most absolutely ridiculous character that WW ever published. Eventually, sanity took over in the writing room and a group of heavies from the Mage and Werewolf game systems got together to wipe him out. That was in first edition. They systematically corrected all those loopholes as they went through rules changes in second edition and Revised. Off the top of my head, drinking vampire blood as a mage now inhibits your magick to some significant extent and makes it impossible for you to improve with it. (You're mainlining static magick, after all.) The Skin Dancer rite that Haight used to become a werewolf is still in the game, but using it is a virtual death sentence (you end up at eight points on a ten-point scale of Wyrm corruption) and you don't get access to any of the benefits associated with being a member of Garou society, like having Gifts or the first clue what you're doing. They also made it increasingly punitive for abominations to exist, which are Garou who survived being Embraced by a vampire. Members of any other Changing Breed who get Embraced don't even get that; I don't recall what happens for each breed off the top of my head, but none of them lent themselves to being anything close to a playable character. IIRC, one just dies instantly with no roll; one lives until, at most, the next sunrise; and at least one goes instantly batshit insane and enters a killing frenzy that only ends when it dies. None of which addresses the real problem, which is that if a mage knows Forces, wins initiative, and can either justify a coincidental effect or is in a position where Paradox isn't that much of a concern, a freshly-created mage can murder virtually anything else in the oWoD in one round. You either ambush mages or you don't fight them at all. xanthan posted:Is he the guy who got turned into a ghost ash tray? Yeah, in an online FAQ. Somebody asked if he became a wraith when he died and the answer was basically "...oh, gently caress you. Yes, but..."
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Jul 13, 2014 20:54
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Okay, that was easier to find than I thought. What happens when a vampire tries to turn a werecreature into a vampire? Ananasi (werespiders): Complete immunity. A vampire can't get any nourishment from their blood or finish drinking from them. Bastet (werecats): They rapidly lose all their Gnosis and spiritual abilities, leaving them unable to enter the Umbra or activate Gifts. You "just" end up with an insane, heavily corrupt shapeshifting vampire. Corax (wereravens): Because one of their patron spirits is Helios, the spirit of the sun, they don't get to be vampires. They automatically die the next time the sun rises. Gurahl (werebears): They're known as Umfalla, or the soul-dead. They can kind of survive in the way Garou can, but it's entirely likely that nearby sleeping werebears will wake up for the specific purpose of coming to kill you. Mokole (werealligators): Like Corax, they're too closely tied to Helios for the Embrace to take. Unlike Helios, they instantly enter a killing frenzy and stay that way until they're dead or the next sunrise. The Mokole in Crinos can and often do resemble dinosaurs. Exit sire. Nuwisha (werecoyotes): They just die. They're way too close to their patron spirit for him to allow that to happen. Kitsune (werefoxes): Once they've been drained dry and their sire puts some blood on their tongue, they instantly burst into a brief but intense pillar of fire. Ratkin (wererats): They may be technically alive, but their bodies don't accept the change and rot just as if they'd died normally. Rokea (weresharks): No rules exist, apparently. It may never have been tried. (Incidentally, this is also a list of all the surviving werecreatures in the oWoD.) The main takeaway point is that the only spirits that want to voluntarily interact with vampires are ones aligned with the Wyrm, and even those aren't crazy about the idea. Getting Embraced is an immediate headfirst dive into hell for any shapeshifter, starting with being severed from the tangible proof of their connection to loving, present gods and just getting worse from there. You can't spend blood points in the same turn as Gnosis or Rage, so you can't stack Celerity and Rage together to get like eighteen actions in a turn; the vampires don't get you and the werecreatures want to kill you; and you're likely going to descend into a suicidal depression if you don't just off yourself immediately. bathroomrage posted:Oh and it's important to note that upon reading the Changing Breeds book and a few of the different breed books, nobody likes the Garou, especially not other Garou. One of the funny things that became obvious as they released additional Changing Breed sourcebooks was that the only reason the Garou were able to pull off the War of Rage in the first place is that they're the only shapeshifters who are pack predators. The rest are solitary and/or aren't fighters on their level. On an individual basis, most of the Changing Breeds will straight-up win against an individual Garou, but you don't typically get to fight one Garou at a time. Wanderer fucked around with this message at 21:14 on Jul 13, 2014 |
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Jul 13, 2014 21:08
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They're the youngest werecreatures, native to Japan (as one might expect), exclusive to China and Japan (as one might not expect), and compensate for not having the same level of rapid healing as the other shifters by having a greater facility with magic. If you're using the rules for it, Kitsune can actually use "hedge magic," which is a ritual-based kind of sorcery that's available to mortals. Failing that, they're heavily reliant upon their Gifts and a particular kind of sorcery all their own called Ju-Fu, or "paper magic." Their role is a lot like the Nuwisha's. They're tricksters, sages, and thieves. They have the same breeding rules as Garou do, but when a Kitsune is born, their parent(s) almost always die. Their metis aren't discriminated against but do go through life knowing that their existence probably meant the deaths of both parents, which also means they're very rare. This actually dovetails neatly with another thing: in Asia, the local shifters consider themselves members of the Beast Courts, an ancient interbreed compact to defend Asia against the Wyrm. Their level of cooperation is unheard of anywhere else in the world, even if it's a bit begrudging, and they have the additional issue that some of them think the current situation is just one step in a cycle. As such, there's a growing school of philosophical thought that they should just let the Wyrm win, all the better to get the next stage of the cycle over with as quickly as possible. They also practice a weird form of detente with the Asian vampires, which are very different from the usual variety, but I never read Kindred of the East so I couldn't tell you exactly how. The Beast Courts consist largely of: - The Zhong Lung, Mokole shifters whose war forms resemble Chinese dragons from folklore. - The Hakken, an Eastern offshoot of the Shadow Lords that do not resemble their Western cousins very much at all. They're based out of Japan and are so intertwined with that culture that there are barely any wolves among them at all, similar to the Glass Walkers. - There's also an offshoot tribe of the Glass Walkers, the name of which both escapes me and would be difficult to spell even if I remembered it. They're not much different from Western Glass Walkers. - The Tengu, eastern Corax. - The Kitsune. - The Ratkin. - The Khan, who represent a big chunk of India. They're weretigers. - The occasional Rokea wereshark. - The Stargazer tribe of Garou, as of Werewolf Revised, decided to focus on their home territory and essentially joined the Beast Courts. This both matters, because they essentially cut all ties with the western Garou Nation to do it, and doesn't matter, because at most there are six to nine hundred of them worldwide and not all of them made the move. The whole Beast Courts deal is part of the year-long drive to flesh out Asia in the World of Darkness, which was both just as bad as you'd think it would be for a bunch of Western nerds writing about Asian folklore in the late 1990s, and actually kind of cool in some ways.
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Jul 13, 2014 23:00
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Also, I just realized I lied earlier. There's one more race of shifters out there, and that's the Ajaba. They're werehyenas. Not even the other shapeshifters are at all sure what the Ajaba were supposed to do. They were native to Africa, never prolific, and never high-profile. In the mid-1990s, there was a werelion warlord in Africa called Black Tooth, who led a pride of Bastet and Kinfolk called the Endless Storm. Apparently Black Tooth's deal was that he was in the Umbra when the nukes were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and the ensuing spiritual shockwaves drove him crazy. He vowed to protect Africa from, well, everything that wasn't him. He was as dangerous to other Bastet as he was to the Wyrm, and one of his crowning achievements of assholery was nearly wiping out the Ajaba. That came back to haunt him, as one of the survivors was a young girl named Kisasi. She approached the other shifters that are native to Africa and was responsible for the foundation of the Ahadi, a nearly unprecedented coalition of allied shapeshifters: Red Talons, Silent Striders, werecheetahs, werehyenas, a few scattered Bastet, etc. Their first task was to take down Black Tooth and the Endless Storm. In so doing, they found out that while Black Tooth was insane and dangerous, he was also doing a pretty loving amazing job of keeping both Westerners and vampires out of Africa, and he'd managed to keep a massive monster in check underneath the Kalahari desert by making sure it stayed asleep. Sure, he was a textbook case of the cure being worse than the disease, but the Ahadi's got its hands full. Of course, it helps that the other leader of the Ahadi is a Silent Strider named Walks-With-Might, and giving him a situation where he's getting invaded on all sides by vampires is actually a pretty good plan as far as Silent Striders are concerned. Werewolves hate vampires, but the Silent Striders have vampire hunting down to a science by now.
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Jul 13, 2014 23:13
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ceaselessfuture posted:How, exactly? I burn three Quintessence, roll three dice for Arete, and spend Willpower. Forces adds one success for purposes of direct damage; the ten-sided dice are rolled at difficulty 3/4/5 and I get an automatic success because of the Willpower expenditure. Forces 3 is the ability to control and transmute "minor" forms of energy: fire, electricity, momentum, light, etc. I am not limited as to which of those I use. Four successes will inflict eight Health Levels of damage when most humanoid creatures have seven. If you're a vampire and I use fire, you don't get to soak that with anything other than Fortitude and you have to check for frenzy. If you're a werewolf, you'll probably soak some of that, unless the attack took the form of me magnetically accelerating my lucky silver dollar into your jugular vein. That's assuming that I don't do something indirect that you can't counter, like telekinetic chokeholds, flinging you straight up as hard and far as you'll go, or imprisoning you in a sphere of force. I could convert all of your body heat to cold or all your potential kinetic energy to light, so you're suddenly glowing but you can't move. If we're in the middle of the street and I can't go loud, it's not that big of a deal. Maybe a piano "coincidentally" falls on your head, somebody nearby happens to lose control of their SUV, or you trip and sail into a nearby open manhole. Maybe I use a weapon to cover the Forces effect; a .22 round inexplicably does eight Health Levels of lethal damage due to an explosive tip and a quirk of anatomy. (The bullet went in through your eye but didn't have enough punch to go through the back of your skull, so it caromed around inside your brain until its momentum bled off. Very sad.) There's a rule for specifically using magick rolls to lower the difficulty on standard actions. A sawn-off shotgun at point-blank range does eight dice of damage, extra successes on the hit roll add to the damage dice, I can almost guarantee I'll hit, and I can pretty much cancel out the penalty for a called shot to the neck. Maybe I don't know Forces. With Correspondence, I can touch you and teleport you anywhere in the world that I'm personally familiar with and I happen to regularly vacation on the beach in Australia, where it's sunny right now and there's no cover for half a mile. Maybe I just teleport you straight up as far as I can see, or into a bank vault I saw once that won't open again until next Tuesday. If I decide I don't want to fight, I just won't be there anymore. If I know Matter instead, I always have a silver weapon when I need one and you're always just as flammable as I need you to be. I don't know why that person was carrying half a pound of wet, raw sodium in his pocket, Officer. If we're in the Umbra or an isolated place and I can go loud, it is relatively trivial to turn the dead skin and hair on a Garou's head into pure silver, or a vampire's entire body into something less annoying, because his rear end is 100% pure dead tissue. Spirit? No big deal. If I know Spirit 3 I could have prepared any number of nasty surprises, assuming I don't just turn you into a living fetish for the nastiest thing I can find in the local Umbra. Mind? Okay, sure. I don't have to fight you if I don't want to. It'd be pretty easy to hit you with enough projected fear that you don't stop running until you cross the state line. You can also use knowledge of multiple Spheres of magick for combination effects. For example, you need Life and Correspondence to teleport something inside or out of someone, or Life and Matter to turn dead things into living things (e.g. a human to a statue). With Mind and Entropy, I could theoretically zero in on the one thing you do not want to hear right now, finding the weak point in your personal philosophy in order to talk you out of attacking me. A lot of these will cause Paradox, I could botch the roll, I might be out of Quintessence, or you could have one of several dozen fetishes, Gifts, Disciplines, rituals, or magical items that specifically deflects or brunts the force of a magickal attack. Stargazer werewolves go so far as to specifically traffic with Paradox spirits, and have bound a few into weapons, which would be devastating for any mage you wanted to go after. Still, the point's made; mages have the most flexible and theoretically powerful set of abilities in the entire World of Darkness and it is not hard to get access to some of the best toys right at character creation. There are a lot of very good reasons not to use those toys directly and the average munchkin will get eaten alive, but if you decide to abandon subtlety once in a very great while, you can make terrible things happen to somebody. JackNapier posted:alright wonderful Goon Sirs, You may want to be more specific.
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Jul 14, 2014 03:59
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the hell out of me about Mage's please?
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xanthan posted:Well someone mentioned the Celestial Chorus before, why not start there and see what sounds good? Like several of the modern Traditions, it's a big tent with a lot of different representative faiths in it. Their general point of unification is that they derive their belief system, and thus their magick, from a belief in a higher power. This is not necessarily a big mainstream monotheistic religion; the head of the Tradition, for example, is a 300-year-old African woman who maintains her childhood faith in a sun goddess; her second-in-command is an Orthodox rabbi. If you're playing as a Chorister, your magickal style will take a great deal from the various mystical schools of thought within religious tradition: the Qabbala, numerology, the thousand names of God, intercession via the saints, etc. Your various tools and practices bring you closer to the Divine, and thus to the ultimate goal of Ascension through reunion with the original divine principle. Music is a huge part of the Tradition's practices, and they have a habit of referring to themselves as Singers. Their signature magickal Sphere is Prime, which is about the detection, channeling, and use of Quintessence, the magickal energy that binds the universe together. Quintessence is the base stuff of the universe and absolutely everything is made out of it. When encountered in its raw, "free" form, a mage can use it to make his or her spells easier to perform, but as you get better at Prime, you gain the ability to manipulate the otherwise-untouchable Quintessence inside objects, including the ability to subtract it entirely, which disintegrates the object. Prime is initially of dubious use in dealing with anything other than magick itself, but any mage with half a brain wants to have at least two points of it; you need Prime 2 to transmute ambient Quintessence, which in conjunction with other Spheres, lets you create something from "nothing." (For example, Forces 2 lets me control electricity but I can't create it, so if I want to zap somebody, I need a power source in the immediate area. I'd need Forces 3/Prime 2 to fire a lightning bolt from my hand.) Prime is also very useful in moving around Quintessence, which is used as both a currency and valuable resource among mages.
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Jul 14, 2014 05:53
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Actually, let me back up. The initially playable faction in Mage is the Council of Nine Traditions, representing the nine largest schools of mystic thought in the World of Darkness. Unlike a lot of the other "splats," they're joined together loosely at best, membership in one is not predetermined, you can leave at any time, and each Tradition is more of an umbrella covering a wide variety of schools of thought than anything else. They were formed in the 1400s as the Order of Reason, which would become the Technocracy, began to pick up steam, and the various mystics decided that they were better off together than apart. As a general rule, the Traditions are mostly neutral in the greater cosmological scheme of things, with a slight bias towards the Wyld. There are nine Traditions, one for each of the as-traditionally-discussed nine Spheres of magickal thought. They do not consider this a coincidence. Each Tradition considers a particular Sphere to be their bread and butter, and if you play a member of that Tradition you pay less XP to learn new ranks of that Sphere. You can learn any Sphere as a member of any Tradition, but having access to your mentors' and teachers' knowledge base makes it easier to learn about their particular specialties. The present-day nine Traditions are the following: * The Akashic Brotherhood, which encompasses a variety of martial traditions. The stereotype is that they're all Shaolin monks, but the general idea is to use training of the body to perfect the mind. They practice a particular martial art called Do which contains and embodies all schools of thought. Their members include Buddhists, Taoists, and anybody who'd be interested in pushing the limits of their own body. They're also heavily invested in reincarnation. ** Their trademark Sphere is Mind, which encompasses empathy, telepathy, self-control, and astral projection. At the highest levels of the Sphere, a Mind mage can create sentience where it did not previously exist. * The Celestial Chorus; see above. Religious people who practice "magick" through proximity to and service to whatever they perceive as the Divine. ** They practice Prime. See above. * The Cultists of Ecstasy: they nominally started in India and still use a lot of terminology from there, but the Cult's for any mage who pursues altered states of being. Stereotypically they're hippies, junkies, and sex fiends, which is not helped by their nominal leader, the notoriously bisexual and polyamorous Marianna of Balador. In practice, an individual Cultist is as likely to be into music, dance, pain, adrenaline, or certain modes of behavior as they are drugs or sex, as long as it has the potential to offer an alternate state of perception. There's one guy in their revised splatbook that's into magick via immersion in video games. ** They practice the Sphere of Time, because time flies when you're having fun: precognition, postcognition, slowing or speeding up time in a local area, setting up contingencies or loops, and finally being able to jump forward or temporarily go "sideways" from time. Time travel into the past is possible but only for the greatest masters of the Sphere, which is another way of saying "you don't get to do this and still be a playable character." * The Dreamspeakers, which are the least organized of the lot and are basically only a Tradition at all because a lot of them are from various aboriginal cultures and it seemed like they'd be hosed by history if they did otherwise. As a Dreamspeaker, you're a member of a shamanic or animistic tradition, mostly concerned with the spirit world and regarding the "real world" as anything from a dream to a quaint illusion. A lot of their personal cosmology works in neatly with the werewolves' and if you had to pick a Tradition that would be all buddy-buddy with the Garou, it'd be these guys. Magickal tools include drumming, dance, smoke, the whole nine yards, and the trick when actually playing one is in not being creepy and appropriative of somebody else's actual culture. ** The Dreamspeakers basically couldn't get anything done without Spirit magick, which is all about interaction with the spirit world: seeing into it, talking with otherwise inaccessible spirits, allowing yourself to be possessed, making fetishes, traveling to distant realms. * The Euthanatos, a creepy collection of death mages from all over the world. They also began in India, where they had wars with the Akashic Brotherhood that lasted generations and didn't end when people died, but now they're from all over the world. Part of induction into the formal Tradition is being forced through a ritual where a mage becomes a wraith for a while, effectively dying and coming back. The stereotypical Euthanatos is functionally identical to a serial killer. Since they know for an absolute fact reincarnation is real and effective, they feel very little remorse about killing and will unhesitatingly murder someone who they perceive as serving no present use to the world. The central concept to their belief system is that of the Great Wheel; everything happens for a reason, and nothing lasts forever. They get along okay with like-minded vampires. ** Euthanatos are closely affiliated with the Sphere of Entropy, which is the study of chance, chaos, and destruction. You can use it to find the weak spots in objects, people, or ideals; cause objects to rot or people to decay; and destroy anything from objects to ideals. More happily, you can use it to influence the outcome of truly random events, like dice rolls or card games, and any spell or effect that specifically deals with chance or luck is going to have some Entropy mixed in. You know that thing Michael Carpenter does in The Dresden Files where he just shows up wherever God needs him? That would be an Entropy/Correspondence effect under these rules. * The Order of Hermes, the mage equivalent to the Ventrue and the closest thing to a D&D mage you can find in the system: wands, swords, staves, mystic geometry, summoning circles, big dusty books, you name it. Deliberately influenced by the tradition of the same name from Ars Magica and the Tradition that gave rise to the Tremere. Seemingly unable to do anything without being bastards about it; shackled to concepts that do not bother other mages at all, like having to safeguard their True Names. ** They study Forces, which is the magickal Sphere about blowing poo poo up. Rank one lets you perceive energy with the naked eye and see in the dark; ranks two and three are about the control and transmutation of minor forces like fire, cold, and light; and ranks four and five are about the control and transmutation of major forces, like gravity, electromagnetism, and nuclear radiation. If you achieve five dots in Forces, you are a one-person nuclear power. * The Sons of Ether, who left the Technocracy a hundred years ago and never looked back. They're pulp-fiction adventurer/scientists, who aren't necessarily shackled to the scientific method; where Technocratic science is slower and only gradually innovative, Sons of Ether tend to progress from "idea" to "theory" without stopping to think whether or not it'll work, and since they're mages, it'll work. It also means they're free to pursue lots of wacky poo poo that Technocrats would never think of, like space zeppelins, ray guns, and time machines. The archetypical Son of Ether from the original and second edition books acts like he came flying out of a penny dreadful. More problematically, while they aren't overtly sexist and they've got their share of lady scientists, the whole Tradition is stuck in the Victorian period and as a result it tends to be an old boys' club. ** Matter is the Etherites' Sphere. If it's non-living material, a mage with Matter can identify, change, or transmute it. At the highest levels of the Sphere, you can create complex machines out of nothing or make substances that have mixed properties: silk that protects like Kevlar, glass as durable as steel, etc. * The Verbena, which originally represented the "creepy Celtic witches" portion of today's programming, but which have expanded to encompass any mage with an eye towards the manipulation of primal forces via primal beliefs. Blood magick, sacrifices, runes, dancing naked, occasional lunatic devotion to Gaia (who is very real, as one might remember from the entire races of shapeshifters who she created): if Wiccans were super loving hardcore, they'd be the Verbena. ** The Verbena study the Sphere of Life, which lets a mage examine, heal, or change living things. It's easier to affect yourself than other people, but once you hit Life 3 or so, you can be anybody you want. You can also amp your personal physical stats, get rid of that tattoo you hate, turn people into frogs, etc. At Life 4, you can become self-sustaining and not have to eat anymore. * The Virtual Adepts are the newest members of the Traditions and are probably the oddest men out. They're very '90s in their way; the idea behind their magickal paradigm is that all reality is virtual (and remember, this game predates The Matrix by four years or so; it's not a new idea by any means but it's from before the idea was forced into the mainstream); a mage is thus somebody who has reality's cheat codes. (Another way of looking at it is espoused by Dante, one of the line's signature characters: if all reality is comprised of advanced mathematics, magick is a way of getting behind the scenes to tweak the numbers.) The Adepts' ultimate goal is to Ascend through the creation of Reality 2.0, a higher, "better" version of existence, co-created by humans as opposed to some distant and possibly crazed god-figure. ** The Adepts study Correspondence, which is the manipulation of three-dimensional space: personal radar sense, scrying, teleportation, portals, and eventually "co-location": literally being in more than one place at once. "Lost" traditions include the Solificati, an order of alchemists, which disbanded after its representative on the Council chose to betray it, and which is survived in modern days by a very small organization calling itself the Children of Knowledge; and the Ahl-i-Batin, Muslim mystics and past masters of the Sphere of Correspondence, which dropped the Traditions in the 1920s because the Traditions as a whole wasn't putting enough work into the Middle East for their tastes. The Ahl-i-Batin didn't actually go anywhere, but they were notoriously good at going unseen, so they're as gone as they want to be. A mage also doesn't have to have a Tradition at all, or may be a member of a smaller group of mages; the latter are often called Crafts. The largest "Craft" are the notorious representatives of the Goths in '90s White Wolf, the Hollow Ones, which are basically just a bunch of tradition-less mages who hang out together in San Francisco, like black clothes, and have strong opinions on industrial music. They've been around since the '20s (they took their name from Eliot's "The Waste Land") and have occasionally petitioned for Tradition membership, but have always been denied due to having the same organizational structure as the average college dorm. The typical term for a mage that eschews a Tradition at all in favor of going it alone is an "Orphan." Important safety tip for understanding Mage in general: Magick is, in the rules, considered the ability to affect change in reality itself through force of will. That is how the rules work. That is not necessarily how an individual mage works. A big part of Mage is that an individual's perspective and beliefs influence his or her ability to use magick, which is usually called his or her paradigm. Within your paradigm, the way in which you work magick is an absolute, unquestionable truth. All of these different mages under the Traditions' roof have very different ideas about what magick is and isn't, and due to the flexible nature of reality, they're all right. An individual mage may consider himself a mortal agent of God's will on Earth with no inherent power of his own, a shaman who couldn't do a thing without the intercession of various friendly and/or easily-bribed spirits, a traditional wizard who brings the forces of the universe to heel through discipline and study, or a "reality hacker," and they're all basically right because that's how they came to the party. Magick is one thing in the tabletop rules system and a whole lot of things in the game universe. Wanderer fucked around with this message at 11:08 on Jul 14, 2014 |
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Jul 14, 2014 07:41
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citybeatnik posted:I never really understood how Nuwashi fit in with the War of Rage and what not. Coyotes are an American species, and the majority of the garou didn't end up in the new world until European settlers did. Were they decimated by the Croatan/Uktena/Wendigo? Despite how anything Native American is treated as having been harmonious and what not in the setting? The War of Rage didn't really touch the Americas or Africa until the arrival of the European settlers to North and South America, which a couple of books refer to as the Second War of Rage. It never really struck me that the Indians were so much magical and harmonious as they just weren't terribly inclined to the kinds of behavior that a Garou wouldn't appreciate. A group of nomadic hunter-gatherers may make soup out of the neighboring tribe three times a year, but they aren't building cities, so go them. citybeatnik posted:Why on earth would you want to play anything else than one of those three? I get the feeling that the Cult exists in that gray zone between what White Wolf was hoping people would do with their games and what was actually done with their games. Particularly in Mage, there are a lot of templates provided in sourcebooks for characters that absolutely nobody would ever want to play, because they were wholly uninclined towards going out, getting into fights, and having adventures. The Cult falls into that territory to some extent. I always ran Mage and almost never got to actually play it, but the guys who gravitated towards the Cult were also the guys who were partiers in real life. JackNapier posted:Dear god, kind Goon Sir, tell me about Magical Shaolin Monks I kind of hate them because they could not have been more attractive to the munchkin combat-monger set if they'd been planned to be so. The rules on their martial art, Do, as written in the base Mage book are dumb as poo poo, with a practitioner able to do as much damage bare-handed as a shotgun blast without using magick in any way. They're pretty easy to summarize, though. Magick comes from abandoning unnecessary connections and attachments, achieving balance between body and mind, and taking perfect action through harmony with one's surroundings. The Akashics started in Asia, and have a lot of Buddhism and Taoism baked into their philosophy, along with a big spoonful of any other Asian philosophy you care to name; they're also the most combat-oriented of the Traditions with a few different camps that actively strive to do good in the world. Their dead members usually reincarnate into their future new disciples, so death is treated like a momentary unpleasantness. In play, being a stereotypical Akashic Brother means you are straight-up a character from a wuxia film. Foci involve martial-arts techniques, breathing exercises, meditation, yoga, calligraphy, purification rituals, etc. One of the ways in which they're still relevant in the modern day is with the spread of Buddhism and other teachings to the West; yeah, a lot of people treat it like a passing trend rather than a way of life, but enough people pick at least some of it up to keep the Brotherhood relevant. Every so often, that one rear end in a top hat in college who becomes a really fervent Buddhist for a week and a half will actually push through something that was holding him back and Awaken into a contributing member of the Tradition. They're actually harder to play than you'd think because their style is so inner-directed. There are a lot of things you might want to do with magick over the course of a game that are difficult to justify with an Akashic paradigm. It's not a flashy, utilitarian style.
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Jul 14, 2014 19:58
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JackNapier posted:I have been in the other threads, and I guess I am kind of hanging on this thread, but that's mainly because White Wolf interests the gently caress out of me, I don't know of anybody in like a forty mile radius of the little poo poo hole I live in that ever had any of the books, so I'm trying to get as much of the info on it that I can, I'm in love with this thread because honestly, every question I've asked, somebody has answered. If I seem a little try hardy, well, I guess I am, I'm a sucker for information, and I'm getting a poo poo ton of it here on stuff that I always wanted to do, and a lot of info on backstory in the game I was curious on the few times I played it, I've posted in a couple of the other forums, mainly because I had some stuff to contribute, but not much else. If it helps, bud, you can buy a lot of the old stuff here: http://rpg.drivethrustuff.com/browse.php?manufacturers_id=1
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Jul 18, 2014 03:36
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Was it Vicissitude in this thread who was talking about some Malkavian or another who rose to fame as a tactical planner for the Black Hand, because he was so obsessive-compulsive that he thought of everything?
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Jul 18, 2014 06:42
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Pierzak posted:Are we still talking about mages? If so, can anyone tell me about the Nephandi? Are they just generic mage-flavored demon worshipper bad guys, or is there something deeper to them like in the case of the Technocracy? What makes a Nephandi distinct from a summoner or necromancer or what-have-you--you can get into some pretty dark poo poo in Mage while still being a respected member of the Traditions--is that Nephandi are explicitly affiliated with the Big Scary Evil side of the oWoD. An individual Nephandi may serve a powerful demon, the Wyrm itself (or some of its really powerful lieutenants, the Maeljin), the vast slumbering never-born creatures in the Dark Umbra, or some of the unknown creatures from the depths of the Deep Umbra, but they're after a Descent when everyone else is arguing over Ascension. As a result, the Traditions and Technocracy both agree that the Nephandi are the greater of two evils, and will cooperate at the drop of a hat once they realize the Nephandi are on the scene. They've been around as long as there have been mages, because as long as there's a path to follow from point A to point B, there's going to be some rear end in a top hat who wants to take the express elevator. They're your demonic Goetians, your demon-worshippers, your witches who are actually doing the things that people accuse other witches of doing, etc. There are a few of them who see their role philosophically: if there's going to be good, then somebody's got to be evil, and that's us. (Alternatively, if the universe can survive what we want to do to it, it has earned the right thereof.) "Splats" for Nephandi include the typical White Wolf "dark reflection" option, which is a barabbi, a mage who held membership in an established Tradition or Convention until they opened the wrong book, listened to the wrong person, went to the wrong place, or whatever; or a "widderslainte," which is slang for a Nephandi who was bad when he or she Awakened and has just gotten worse. In the former case, they're mages who subscribe to a twisted version of their former philosophies. In the latter case, it usually means they're a reincarnation of a past Nephandi, with an "inverted" Avatar and thus no hope of or desire for redemption. A barabbi in one life isn't necessarily always going to reincarnate as a widderslainte, but given how long mages can live, there's a good chance that they're going to have a few leftover acquaintances watching them like hawks. Their factions include: - Infernalists, straight-up servants of the Demon Lords, operating on a very Judeo-Christian view of the world and out to capture the Earth on behalf of the Lords of the Pit. They're the ones who have the best success rate with tempting and corrupting people into their service. - Malfeans, who actually walk the Black Spiral as part of the recruitment bonus and work hand-in-hand with the forces of the Wyrm. They want what the Wyrm wants: the destruction of the Earth by any means necessary. Like everybody else in this particular boat, they tend to be at least a little nuts. - K'llashaa, your basic Lovecraft cultists. They claim Earth was once ruled by creatures they call the Lords of the Outer Dark, and their goal is to make the old place look good for when Mom and Dad get back. There aren't many of them and they actively strive towards inhumanity. White Wolf has traditionally been pretty cagey about Nephandic magickal styles and how many of them there actually are. At the tail end of World War II in the WoD, the Nephandi tried to tap into the power of the war to summon one of their dark masters home, but the Traditions and Technocracy teamed up for a fight that ended with a lot of the surviving Nephandi punted off of Earth entirely. Since then, the remaining Nephandic population of Earth has been working very quietly, allowing the Traditions and Technocrats to rip into each other and building a power base. One thing that's useful to remember is that the early editions of Mage were explicitly built as more of a storytelling game than anything else, about a player slowly building up a character's personal philosophy. There's a lot in the game's design that's taken from the old alchemical concept of the "invisible labyrinth," the idea that magic in general is a tool for the gradual perfection of the self, and with that in mind, the Nephandi's whole goal is to be the corruptive influence that tempts someone to stray from the path.
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Jul 19, 2014 22:07
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HaitianDivorce posted:Stuff like this makes me wonder... what's the overall cosmological scheme to the WoD? Is there any consistent one? No, and it's more or less on purpose. Ask (some of) the Garou and Gaia created everything (like how the Shadow Lords occasionally come close to acting as if their patron spirit is actually running the show and Gaia's more like a silent partner); ask the Nuwisha and Coyote created everything; ask the vampires and their entire existence is based on Christian apocrypha; ask the mages and get a million different answers because mages are not a unified bloc. Then Demon: The Fallen comes out, the entire line turns out to have strange ties to Exalted, and poo poo gets extra strange. If you absolutely had to do something with this, you could probably hemstitch it together out of the game line's cosmology and some flavor of early Christian mysticism, where the actual truth is one of the chunks of the Bible that they decided to quietly lose during the First Council of Nicaea. As far as White Wolf is concerned, they happily go on record as saying "This is what these people believe, so naturally they're going to say it like it's the truth." Bobbin Threadbare posted:So how about a word regarding the Marauder mages next? As far as other mages are concerned, Marauders come the gently caress out of nowhere, run up a huge Paradox tab by flinging around crazy spells, and stick somebody else with the bill. They're insane and they seem immune to the usual negative effects of vulgar magick; a Marauder can go bowling with fireballs down Broadway and Paradox will seemingly veer off and hit somebody else. Nobody is quite sure where they come from or why they exist. Eventually, they tend to get so crazy that reality doesn't support them anymore and they drift off into the Umbra somewhere, or somebody else gets sick of their poo poo and kills them. Cosmologically, things are more interesting. Marauders are what happens when a higher power decides a mage would be useful, but that mage's conscious mind is a potential impediment. If the Technocracy is in bed with the Weaver and the Nephandi often work for the Wyrm, the Marauders are pawns of the Wyld. They exist to gently caress up the Technocracy's day, slaughter the Nephandi wherever they're found, preserve what's left of the Mythic Age, and kick big holes in consensus reality at every opportunity. Marauders aren't just mages who happen to be insane. They suffer from a very specific kind of distorted perception, where their Avatar is complicit in wrapping them in their own personal reality bubble. Put another way, the mage is probably sane enough, but they're constantly stuck in an insane situation and are reacting as one might expect. That delusion is so strong that it's a kind of ablative shield against Paradox; when reality tries to fix whatever problem the Marauder's causing, it slides off the Marauder's insanity and hits somebody else instead. An individual Marauder might not even think he's a mage at all; his "magick," as far as he's concerned, may just be the circumstances of his insanity. What's changed in recent days, in the storyline, is that there are Marauders showing up who are sane enough to take care of the others, organize them, and get them all working towards a cohesive goal. The first example thereof is a guy named Robert Davenport, who got recruited by the Technocracy but got scared and bailed. They tried to kill him because he knew too much, but he Awakened in the middle of the staged car crash and went Marauder. Davenport has one very pervasive delusion: his wife and daughter, who both died in the crash, are still alive. Other than that, he knows exactly what's going on. His cabal, the Butcher Street Irregulars, has a lot of friends among the various shapeshifters and does a lot of work in the WoD against genuinely evil dudes. Davenport is capable of leading these other Marauders, playing along with their own individual delusions, and turning them into an efficient team: they ferry magical creatures off of Earth to various Umbral realms so they won't die, they blow up Pentex facilities, they kill all sorts of demons and vampires, etc. On the flip side of the coin, there's also a faction of Marauders called the Bai Dai that has decided the most efficient way to weaken consensus reality is to cut down the number of people believing in it by about ninety percent. They're relentless, persistent killing machines with no qualms about using the most destructive tactics possible, such as what they call "zooterrorism": teleport a living, magical creature into a Technocracy base in full view of God and everybody so the Paradox backlash goes off like a nuke. Fun Marauders from the setting include: - Clan 23, a bunch of kids who think they're playing a very absorbing team-based online shooter. They're thorough, murderous, violent, and utterly cheerful the entire time, because it's just a game. - The Men of Gotham, a small group of Marauders who operate in Manhattan and believe themselves to be an informal gathering of non-powered, film noir-ish superheroes. None of them are very powerful as mages go, but coincidental magick is really good for making dramatic entrances. - Barrister Martins, a lawyer who Awakened during his third heart attack. He's under the impression he's defending other sinners in Hell's own court system. - One of the guys in Davenport's cabal is an actor who believes that A) he's in Victorian England and B) he's in a particularly well-rehearsed stage play, with Davenport as the director. He's a master of disguise and infiltration. - Medea, who is apparently the same Medea from the story of Jason and the Argonauts. She's a two-thousand-year-old Oracle of Life (she has a 6 in a Sphere that usually only goes to 5, which makes her one of maybe four or five characters in the setting at this level of power) who never really left ancient Greece. Tehan posted:Also keep in mind that the other planets in the solar system are also places somewhere out in the Umbra, each with their own Penumbra, so if you went deep enough into the Umbra you could come out on Mars and high-five someone who went there in a spaceship. I understand that many Mages dream happy dreams of this moment, and work feverishly to bring it to fruition. Nah, mages have been doing that for years. Read The Book of Worlds sometime. Gort posted:And how the gently caress you make any of that into a roleplaying game people actually sit down and play is where White Wolf games lost me entirely. If you get bogged down in the cosmological bullshit, that wrecks the game very quickly. Where the old World of Darkness games really shine is in their flexibility. I always gravitated towards Mage and Werewolf because they both have a strong dose of old-fashioned pulp adventure in them, where you could go explore the universe in your space zeppelin or awaken the spirit in your car or smash zombies or go fight Nazis in the Hollow Earth. There's a lot of angst in the setting, as one might expect, but the further they went the more comfortable they were with craziness. Here, for example, is the story of some of the most fun I ever had running Mage.
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Jul 21, 2014 12:57
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GuyUpNorth posted:So if I got this right, Marauders are at best "point them at those guys" kind of deal if Mage/faction in question finds them at least beneficial in some way. No, at best they're "leave the area immediately" guys. Tradition mages are often in the least direct danger from the Marauders (since a lot of them are using an archaic enough magickal method that the Wyld isn't automatically pissed off at them), but since any Paradox the Marauder generates can backlash onto any other mage in the area, you're playing Russian roulette if you try to manipulate one.
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Jul 21, 2014 18:52
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HaitianDivorce posted:Wow. Thanks, this is all really cool. Can I be a pain and ask how everything came crashing down? I know we've talked about Caine returning and the Apocalypse destroying Gaia, but how do things shake out with the Umbra, the Mages, Lucifer and the Fae, etc? The smaller game lines' apocalypses were all covered in one book, Time of Judgment. I've only read it once and I didn't get a hell of a lot out of it. For Mage, the general idea behind the third edition is that the Technocracy flat-out won while nobody was looking, and everything players do from that point forward is just playing out the string. The old support networks are cut due to the Avatar Storm, a sudden phenomenon that makes it difficult and lethal for mages to leave Earth, so everyone left planetside is forced to rely on themselves. Ascension takes off from that for its scenarios, and like the other big fun books of ending the world, presents them as multiple-choice. One involves the reincarnation of a famous traitor from the early days of the Traditions, who inadvertently sets off the last open battles of the Ascension War; one is about an impending asteroid impact on Earth and the attempt to stop it; one is about the possible death of magick itself; and the last one, which was mentioned earlier, starts from the idea that most of mages' history and philosophy revolves around a very long game being run by one of the most powerful Nephandi to ever exist, who's coming back to turn Earth into a suburb of Hell. I have some very real problems with Mage's third edition and Ascension embodies a lot of them. Third edition just isn't very fun; it comes off like a deliberate attempt to remove some of the crazier aspects of the game (visiting weird spirit realms at the drop of a hat, space travel, crazy mages in centuries-old Horizon Realms, etc.) in favor of bringing it thematically closer to the "you're doomed; what now" mood set by Vampire and Werewolf. Even the books' color palette darkens dramatically; you go from the shiny foil covers of the first/second-edition Tradition books to murky CGI against a dark purple background. I agree with the general thrust of the "Time of Judgment" books; when you've built your entire game line on the concept of the imminent end of the world, you have to put up or shut up sooner or later. Mage in general doesn't lend itself to a single end, though, unless that end is the permanent and irrevocable extinction of the human race. Even if you ran a scenario where somebody or another disintegrates Earth, there are perfectly viable colonies scattered throughout the Umbra and the rest of the solar system thanks to mages. HaitianDivorce posted:Also a bunch of insane semi-benevolent(?) magical terrorists referencing the little kids who helped out Sherlock Holmes is delightful. The book that introduces the Irregulars has their story narrated by a Corax wereraven, who's under the impression that the Irregulars are sunshine and lollipops forever, and that's colored a lot of players' reaction to the Marauders as a faction. Davenport is sane enough to have a crew and a plan, and much of what we're told he does is laudable in the larger context, but Marauders in general do not go in for the surgical strike. Attacking a Technocrat stronghold sounds like a good plan on paper, but you're going to chop up a lot of Sleepers and non-powered operatives in the crossfire. They may be working for the greater good, but even the Irregulars, nice as they may be, have a body count like a small natural disaster. Wanderer fucked around with this message at 22:25 on Jul 21, 2014 |
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Jul 21, 2014 21:11
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Ghostwoods posted:The meta-plot reasoning behind all the various apocalypses was that total destruction and rebirth is just another stage on the cycle of creation. God turns away, the supernatural gets out of hand, Hell takes over for a while, everything is scoured away, then the rebuilding starts. So the Aether Storm, the Final Nights, the Apocalypse, Armageddon, Wraith turning into Orpheus, &c &c, it all happens at the same time because it's time. The world is Noah's Flood levels of boned. Out with the old, in with the new. ...if you want. There's at least one scenario in each of the books that is straight-up "the world is a cinder, game over, you lost."
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Jul 21, 2014 22:48
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My favorite moment in any of the Gehenna scenarios remains the bit in one of them where the Settites get together as a clan and put on the greatest show in their history, with sacrifices and rituals and all manner of pomp and circumstance to welcome Set back to the world... ...and they get a dial tone. No Ancestor Here, Please Try Again Later. Set's been dead as hell this entire time and they've been bastards for millennia for no reason whatsoever.
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Jul 21, 2014 23:15
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Kanthulhu posted:I find nWoD boring compared to oWoD. It may just be my nostalgia talking though since when I used to play oWoD I was a stupid teen. Tehan posted:The new game lines are clean and slick and gleaming and beautiful and I hate them for it. oWoD may have had some dark corners and rough edges but it's a world you can just keep exploring and never stop finding nooks and crannies to poke around in. It has, for lack of better term, soul. I never really gave nWoD a chance because I was, and apparently remain, heavily invested in the old WoD. People keep telling me it's a better system, but I've had a hard time finding stable tabletop groups since I There's still a lot about the original Storyteller system that I really appreciate, though, especially coming out of a AD&D background as I did. It's very fluid and easy to learn, and anything you want to do is just Attribute + Ability, done. You don't need to burn a feat on it or whatever-the-gently caress, you can just try it. When I was younger, that was goddamned mind-blowing. We used to make an informal game out of figuring out the weirdest possible attribute/ability combination that would still do something useful. (Charisma + Computer: seduce your internet girlfriend. Strength + Stealth: climb a sheer surface without anyone hearing you carving out handholds as you go with your claws. Stamina + Subterfuge: act like you're not quite as in shape as you actually are.) fspades posted:It was that and also there was the problem of all this metaplot poo poo we're talking about was frankly getting out of control. WoD had dozens of writers over the decade, each bringing their conflicting Grand Theory Of Everything to the table. Nobody knew the direction they were going and the revised editions badly floundered as a result. There was also the problem of the world not being in the 90's anymore. Many themes of the early editions that remained in the core of WoD sounded more and more silly over time. Seriously, take a look at 1st ed. Mage: the Ascension sometime. It's hilarious but it was also really cool when Vertigo comics were all the rage. Yeah, as has been pointed out a few times in the thread, the entire setting is very much a product of its times. Mage in particular has several books in first and third edition that are virtually unreadable (although one must give it credit; the fiction that opens the first edition core rulebook for Mage is about a kid with a trenchcoat and a katana meeting his new master and being told that his possession of those two things simultaneously makes him the world's biggest rear end in a top hat). Werewolf is very rough early on, there's a lot of thematic creep over the course of all three core games' main books, and the computer/technology obsession in both Mage and Werewolf flat-out would not exist without the mid-nineties and how it fell in love with cyberpunk for about ten minutes. I also think the entire World of Darkness was born out of Mark Rein*Hagen giving RPG fans and roleplaying in general way too much credit. He wanted people to get together and tell stories about dark, obsessive things, attempting to scare each other, and instead you end up with 8th-generation Caitiff who took Potence, Celerity, and Fortitude as their "clan disciplines." Still, there's more than enough good stuff in the game and its world that I can't hate it, even today. It's not like it's an accident that you can walk into any bookstore in the world today and find, at a guess, two hundred separate series about the seedy supernatural underbelly of urban living, each one complete with its own terminology. The Dresden Files in particular can be translated almost directly onto Mage with a thoroughness and ease that suggests some degree of deliberation. (I don't think that all the urban fantasy in the world goes straight back to the oWoD, but it'd be stupid to pretend there's no connection there. It's probably more like '90s pop culture "now you are the monster" trend -> WoD -> "Kindred: The Embraced" -> the Underworld movies -> Anita Blake/Dresden Files -> legion of imitators.) So yeah, I am really on board for Mage 20th.
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Jul 22, 2014 00:29
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