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Right, wasn't the Week of Nightmares when a certain friendly fellow got himself nuked and took most of his clan with him?
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Nov 12, 2013 01:04
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Bobbin Threadbare posted:I think it also bears mentioning that since Ravnos also had a 10 in Fortitude (this is on a scale of 1-5), he had so little to fear from the (singular) sun that he could have gotten a tan if he wanted to. I imagine the monsoon was either for the sake of his progeny or else because he still wasn't very fond of daylight. Ravnos was literally The Rakshasa so I suspect even if he was tough enough to be chill standing in normal sunlight he didn't particularly WANT to be doing that.
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Nov 12, 2013 18:22
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DeusExMachinima posted:Too bad I missed the voting but no problem. This takes me back because my first (of many) playthroughs was male Venture. This should be fun. A gatz LP with lots of oWoD infodumps. The Sabbat tend not to leave any witnesses is the thing. Mounds of corpses yes, but nobody who can actually say 'gently caress, a vampire'.
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Nov 13, 2013 04:45
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Well, there is certainly a continuum of hosed-up elders. Low Humanity elders might not care much about things like how many people might get hurt by their plans but they just consider things like that collateral damage and might even pay lip service to how 'regrettable' it was that things had to go that way since, while they might not give a gently caress about it, they still understand at some level that hurting people is a bad thing. Followers of Paths of Enlightenment, on the other hand, are where you really get your nasty folk because for a lot of those hurting people isn't even a concern. For some of those NOT hurting people is a morally questionable act.
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Nov 16, 2013 04:59
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The best part about the fact that the Followers of Set are working so hard as a clan to try and bring old Set back is that I seem to recall every single Gehenna scenario where the Antediluvians are a thing has them getting extremely negative results from their efforts. I'm pretty sure one option is that he basically decides there's no real hope of actually coming back and he calls them all to mass suicide, and in another he shows up and is like 'yeah you all suck fyi' and again most of them die.
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Nov 18, 2013 08:21
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There are some clans that also definitely have the expectation that eventually all members will get over this whole 'humanity' thing and switch to the Path that they're notable for. EDIT: Saulot is the best Antediluvian, for what that's worth (maybe not much since while the Salubri were his clan so were the Baali). At that point you have the long fall to Tremere and the Giovanni founder whose name I can't recall off the top of my head, because they aren't so old as to be basically semi-lovecraftian vampire gods like everyone else. Oh, funny story on the Giovanni, I seem to recall he meets a rather amusing and well deserved end as a result of usurping his original clan. Feinne fucked around with this message at 18:41 on Nov 18, 2013 |
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Nov 18, 2013 18:35
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Yeah, even clans with a relatively high rate of membership in Paths have more people who are still on the path of Humanity than not. Moving to a Path is difficult enough that you don't expect the youngest members to be there even if they're capable, and there are always going to be people who don't manage to do it one way or the other (or just people who you keep around who you know will never really 'get' it but who are useful for other reasons).
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Nov 19, 2013 07:20
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TINA TURNER posted:So… could a vampire smuggle some of his blood into a real blood center to create ghouls en masse, or would that make the higher generations angry? I'm not sure anyone would end up with enough vitae in them to actually do much more than feel funny for a bit.
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Nov 22, 2013 22:42
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Lilith is also pretty important in at least one of the Gehenna scenarios, where I'm pretty sure she teams up with Lucifer against Caine and offers the PCs an out to the fact that vampires are doomed by becoming things like her instead. Because when you're Lilith and Lucifer suddenly Caine's character sheet no longer reads 'YOU LOSE' (does someone have that image, because it's pretty hilarious). For those who don't remember the story, there's actually a good reason why you lose no matter what. Part of Caine's curse punishes anyone who'd injure him, so if you try and kill him you'll die from God's own wrath long before you succeed. Feinne fucked around with this message at 07:03 on Nov 23, 2013 |
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Nov 23, 2013 07:00
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OAquinas posted:Yeah, I think that scenario is Caine and Lilith duking it out in an alley, and the players can help one or the other (or neither). Yeah, and I'm pretty sure Caine loses no matter what, at which point Abel's ghost shows up (I think the intent is that Abel is the first Wraith?) and basically tells Caine all he ever had to do was say he was sorry for what he did. At which point Caine basically tells him he can cram it straight up his ghost rear end and Abel just sort of facepalms and leaves. One unifying factor of every Gehenna in which he plays any role at all is that Caine is a COLOSSAL rear end in a top hat.
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Nov 23, 2013 07:05
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Yeah, the Demon sourcebook gives the impression that God and the proper angels are just straight up gone as far as they can tell. This is likely part of the rather elaborate punishment that was levied on Lucifer, namely that he was not sent to hell at all and instead has been forced to work tirelessly to keep his comrades in hell lest they destroy everything they fought so hard for in their madness.
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Nov 23, 2013 08:00
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TheMcD posted:Weakness: Horrible parenting skills? You just know some player tried specifically engineering a character that would somehow be able to take advantage of that weakness, just so they could be able to say they somehow "won" against Caine, at least as far as the rules will allow. Probably the only reasonable way given that everything you do to him is rebounded sevenfold against you.
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Nov 23, 2013 15:57
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Captain Oblivious posted:It's hard not to feel bad for WoD Lucifer because he is arguably totally benevolent to the bitter end. He's basically singlehandedly responsible for True Faith being nearly nonexistent which sounds like a bad thing if you look at it from a Vampire perspective, but then you realize that he did it to cut the rug out from under his former lieutenants turned Lovecraftian nightmare gods who are trying to kill him and destroy reality because they a) have decided Lucifer betrayed them because he was never in Hell and b) hate everything. And yes Earthbound can get an ability that does full stop reality breaking down summoning things from outside creation poo poo. The stronger Earthbound would be even worse than the Antediluvians if they could manage enough Faith to properly manifest, since they still have access to the very tools of Creation itself. Feinne fucked around with this message at 02:11 on Nov 24, 2013 |
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Nov 24, 2013 02:07
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I think Demon was set up in a way to reconcile the various things, because it explains that for most of the existence of Creation it was not only possible but necessary for several mutually exclusive explanations for things to be simultaneously true. If it's possible for life to have originated both by entirely natural scientific causes AND by angels literally making animals out of clay and breathing life into them at the same time it's possible for all sorts of poo poo to have been both true and not true all at once. In theory things don't work like this now because God broke Creation but that doesn't mean that all the actually mutually exclusive stuff wasn't done by that point (since it wasn't really that long ago in absolute terms). Also Caine and Lilith having it out is pretty much a giant epic battle where Lilith sends a loving army of monsters at Caine, who is defended by several Antediluvians all there for their own ends (and because if Caine dies his curse ends and every vampire will cease to be within moments).
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Nov 24, 2013 06:53
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gatz posted:You're right. I didn't even notice that. Fun vampire crossover trivia fact: Darling Violetta did the theme from Angel.
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Nov 25, 2013 16:52
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Yeah, you're mainly worried about breaking the Masquerade with your ghouls. You need to be really careful with anything that could potentially be construed as a Masquerade breach because (this may have been mentioned before but it bears mentioning again) there are always people watching for that poo poo. Not because they actually care, but because if you get a Blood Hunt declared against you nobody says boo if whoever catches you just happens to diablerize you.
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Dec 2, 2013 07:13
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Josef bugman posted:Aren't mummies the only good supernaturals in the OWoD? They're the only ones that actually exist for good purpose at least. Certainly there are pretty good supernaturals among any given group (even if they're incredibly rare) but mummies do work for Ma'at and such. If you want to play an oWoD game where you're good guys that and Demon are some of your better options (low Torment Demons basically being angels after all).
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Dec 3, 2013 00:24
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Gantolandon posted:Not really - the spread of Entropy (or Wyrm, or Oblivion) was noticeable. It was most glaring in the Low Umbra (also called Shadowlands, where the wraiths used to live), which was pretty much the universe's toilet that gets more and more clogged with time. It started as a pretty lovely place and ended as a delapidated sinkhole where even the space-time were falling apart, constantly besieged by spectres and wracked by cataclysmic events. Even their main force of stability and order became a corrupt, despotic empire whose leader went missing a long time ago. At least until destruction of Enoch wrecked it so completely that most of its inhabitants were simply torn apart or thrown into human bodies. Yeah, Demon suggests that God basically took a divine bat to reality and broke it before completely disappearing, and that because of that everything will just get worse and worse until it falls apart completely. In the same in-character section that talks about such events it's also suggested that God actually looks like a kind of overweight but not unattractive lady, so the reliability of information from demons should always be questioned slightly of course. Tehan posted:Yeah, I phrased that poorly. An expiry date has been baked into the setting right from the start and there was definitely foreshadowing of it in the metaphysics. But apart from the deep metaphysics that only a few of the PC subgroups have any sort of exposure to (in VtM, I think only the Giovanni had any sort of idea how deeply hosed the Shadowlands were), the only indication that most players would have that poo poo was hitting the fan were the same sort of things that were wrongly thought to be portents of the end times in the past. Doubly so for vampires (which most players concentrate on) who are largely insulated from the rest of the supernatural world. Zapathasura wasn't the first Antediluvian to bite it (heh), the 15th generation weren't the first thinbloods, and so on. So, the thing with Zapathasura wasn't that he was the first Antediluvian to die, it's that he was the first Antediluvian to die from something that wasn't someone usurping him. That's why he was a harbinger of the end of the world, because the line of his clan was forever severed when he died. Feinne fucked around with this message at 19:45 on Dec 3, 2013 |
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Dec 3, 2013 19:40
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twig1919 posted:How come the antediluvians' deaths wipe out all their childer but the death any other vampire's sire doesn't wipe out the childe? Because the Antediluvians who actually matter are basically not even vampires any more in all but the most technical sense. They're horrible things that shouldn't be and exert a terrible pressure on all those of their blood just by existing. To be quite honest the Giovanni and possibly the Tremere probably shouldn't suffer the negative impacts of their Antediluvian being destroyed. Also, if you want to be technical, Set was really the first Antediluvian to 'die' in that he's somewhere else and not coming back (and when the Setities finally realize this they pretty much all kill themselves and get the same results as if he'd died all over again).
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Dec 4, 2013 01:35
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Vicissitude posted:Lasombra was a giant Abyssal shadow-demon thing at the end. Tzimisce had literally infiltrated the earth's biosphere on the microbial level thanks to its mastery of Vicissitude. Ravnos had become one of the Rakshasa demons of legend. Ennoia (Gangrel) BECAME THE EARTH thanks to Protean. Nosferatu's Antediluvian had basically made Godzilla with Animalism 10, the whole thing was hilariously nuts. I actually appreciate how they went way the hell over the top.
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Dec 4, 2013 04:41
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Yeah, some of the Antediluvians in that story just sort of die suddenly with no real obvious explanation, and generally good riddance because they were really bad news. There's actually a reasonably cool one who doesn't actually have a clan who seems to be eaten by Ennoia, but who actually manages to survive and help you again if you were cool with them.
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Dec 4, 2013 15:38
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Captain Oblivious posted:Man you'd think the Nosferatu would be pragmatic enough to realize that a Nosferatu who doesn't look like a Nosferatu (and isn't revealed to be a Nosferatu bullshitting if somebody uses Auspex) is an ace in the hole for intelligence gathering. Never underestimate the bitterness of a bunch of fuckers so ugly they've had to live in a sewer for multiple human lifetimes.
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Dec 5, 2013 03:56
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Ironically the efforts of the Technocracy to boring up the world by replacing magic with sufficiently advanced technology are aided and abetted by none other than Lucifer, who has been working really hard to make the world a boring place where nobody believes in anything in particular because that's the only way to ensure his lieutenants never get enough faith together to destroy it. Basically to just nutshell it Lucifer broke them out of Hell without realizing what sort of place Hell was, and then realized they were crazy as outhouse rats and had come to the conclusion that he'd betrayed them all because he wasn't in Hell. This was rather a problem because if they can get enough people to worship them and power them up with faith there's pretty much nothing within their spheres of power they can't do. One of the signs of the End Times, for example, was several concurrent natural disasters they hit Los Angeles with when Lucifer briefly reveals himself to exorcise a demon from some poor woman. So, demonic miracles have their own wrinkle sort of like Paradox because of this. If enough people don't believe in what's going on within an area, it has a chance not to (though if it does it tends to be pretty bad for the people who didn't believe it was possible, because it shatters their sense of reality). This doesn't help much when Belial summons a loving earthquake under a major city because everybody believes there are earthquakes. Feinne fucked around with this message at 01:49 on Dec 9, 2013 |
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Dec 9, 2013 01:42
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Siegkrow posted:I'm glad my single question brought this thread back from non-updatey based torpor The Lasombra are creepy motherfuckers who control Darkness, with a capital D, which is distinct from regular darkness in that regular darkness is not the yawning, ever hungry maw of the eternal void. They are the Sabbat's equivalent of the Ventrue and if you don't want to be eaten by horrible living shadow monsters it's probably best to avoid them. Also I'm pretty sure just like the Tzimisce they think they've killed their Antediluvian but instead it's just become a horrible entity made out of living shadow and pure, pitch black evil. Also they're very melodramatic to the point of having a Path of Enlightenment that, depending on how you want to interpret it, is pure fuckin' melodrama.
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Dec 13, 2013 07:02
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Caustic Soda posted:Could you expand on that? It sounds absolutely magical If I remember right in principle if you are doing it right the Path of Night works by deciding that Vampires and the evil they do are actually part of the greater good ordained by God, and thus Vampires should embrace (no pun intended) their villainous role. In practice it seems rife for similar abuse as the Ravnos' Path of Paradox, where people don't bother to actually get the point and just take it as an excuse to be Literally Snidely Whiplash.
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Dec 13, 2013 19:42
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Yeah, the real answer to 'who would win this supernatural fight' is that most supernaturals don't really have much reason to fight random other supernaturals. They all have plenty of their own poo poo to deal with that keeps them busy and it's generally just not worth it to antagonize enemies that you are completely unused to fighting. To me Task Force: Valkyrie kind of sounds like Delta Green but not completely doomed from the word go, aided and abetted by the fact that nWoD has much less over the top power levels for its supernaturals. Well, most of them. There are still things that don't give a gently caress.
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Dec 14, 2013 06:42
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citybeatnik posted:Chaining the Beast talks about it as more along the lines of "you're cool to drive someone to kill themselves, because they were too weak to survive the test of faith". It also paints any neonate on the path as a blathering moron that tend to really play up the goofy satanist angle - it's the Elders on the path you have to actually worry about. Okay hold the phone. Aren't the Baali supposed to, like, worship demons? I mean, their name implies they're connected with Baal, and he's one of the Earthbound and therefore is a very unpleasant sort.
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Dec 14, 2013 16:36
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Well, the things Werewolves fight are definitely a significant problem. The werewolves may be a more obvious problem in their own right, but given spirits hate them most of all they don't really have a choice but to be constantly fighting dangerous spirits that would otherwise pretty much kill arbitrary numbers of people with very limited means to detect or stop them.
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Dec 14, 2013 17:21
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Cythereal posted:On the other hand, subtracting dice from firearms and melee attacks doesn't protect you at all from cars. Or ruptured gas lines. My guideline for Hunters is that the supernaturals they oppose tend to be very powerful in certain fields - overwhelmingly so in the case of mages and some exotic critters - but not only is their power not universal, few of them have any real respect for humanity beyond "oh, if they united they'd be a problem, so let's keep it on the down low." Much less the government, which as we all know is mostly controlled by vampires and mages and one or two actual humans who just landed their internships with the government. Amusingly the Predators book (which provides more detail than the werewolf book did on some of the things that tend to intentionally gently caress with werewolves) does suggest that some particularly intelligent Hosts have quite a bit of respect for how much difficulty calling the cops on werewolves can bring them.
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Dec 14, 2013 18:05
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Cythereal posted:Yeah, but supernaturals having a healthy respect for the Hunter PCs wouldn't rile up the PCs in question nearly as much. The difficulty with something like Hunter is making the game be fun while trying not to completely undermine the horror setting and that even with the more modest power of most supernaturals there are still things that humans should just avoid.
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Dec 14, 2013 19:03
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A few have given my PCs some real respect, like the promethean who in hindsight was committing suicide by cop and the deranged changeling who recognized that the threads of the story had brought forth The Law to oppose her as the narrative demanded they must, but I enjoy portraying Valkyrie as extremely effective, superbly competent, and completely dismissed by the supernatural world as a legitimate threat. They're just humans, after all, and we all know plain old humans aren't a threat, don't we?
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Cythereal posted:I never claimed every game uses those assumptions or has those blind spots. It's the sense I've gotten from most splats, though, and it's a vibe I've rolled with for my Hunter game. Valkyrie and its sister organizations VASCU (the FBI's supernatural division), the Barrett Commission (the state department's), and a compact I made up called Project Looking Glass (the NSA's) do a very good job of protecting the country from supernatural threats but are underfunded and get no respect. Generally your more horrific elements come out in the sorts of things that are intended as enemies in other lines, so if you're mostly focusing on the more mainstream supernaturals I could see things being more prosaic.
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Dec 14, 2013 20:09
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There's a decent chance a True Fae wouldn't even understand that the noises coming out of your holes were intended to have meaning, they're utterly inhuman things on a level that is difficult to even ponder. It's hard to say they're even alive, and while they can certainly be warded off it's hard to say what would actually kill them in the real world. It might be possible to kill them in Arcadia I guess, but at that point you're fighting in a place where things like logic and causality mean jack poo poo and the best you can hope for is a relatively painless death. True Faith is caused by the stronger than usual residue of the Divine in a human, so it probably doesn't actually matter what you might have Faith in. You're literally just a very slightly larger tiny fragment of God than everyone else.
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Dec 15, 2013 00:36
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Cythereal posted:What my players used was concentrated banal mundanity. To cripple the True Fae they had to confront, they covertly brought in the IRS, which severely hosed up the True Fae, existing as it did on passion and drama. Exposure to day-in, day-out paperwork with no human context or connection ate away at the very essence of its being. Hah, that would certainly be a good weapon against one. You could still probably only drive it back to Arcadia, but that's good enough.
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Dec 15, 2013 00:52
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Yeah, OWoD Demon was pretty well thought out so it's not a surprise they wanted to do something with the idea again. And they seem to have done something pretty cool and out there, I kind of want to get the book on them now.
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Dec 15, 2013 06:46
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OAquinas posted:As for True Fae, think of them as homicidal non-euclidean aliens. Yeah, True Fae are horrible formless monsters from another world that sometimes kidnap people from this one in order to create special purpose tools or servants. Where they come from the sorts of things we take for granted, like causality and logic, are completely meaningless. Generally they send purpose-built minions designed to exist in reality here, but if some portion of a True Fae were to intrude here it would be Very Bad. Most likely its presence would twist the physical laws in the area around it and just in general make life very exciting for anyone nearby, and even more worrying the sorts of exciting consequences it generates are also the sort of thing it draws energy from. Again though, most likely a True Fae can't really exist in its totality in reality because reality just can't withstand that.
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Dec 15, 2013 21:35
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It's very possible that the True Fae aren't so much warping our reality as surrounding themselves with a bubble of reality with physical laws more amenable to their presence. They are Things That Should Not Be, after all.
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Dec 16, 2013 02:00
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Vicissitude posted:I also love the concept of Catches when using Fae bargains. Basically, using fae magic costs Glamour, the changeling equivalent of blood points. But they're contracts with the element or ideal that you're invoking. Contracts have loopholes. If you find yourself in a circumstance that falls into the Catch of a bargain, you can use it for free instead of spending Glamour to charge it. I haven't picked up Demon yet, but I'd like to think demonic bargains would have something similar, though with a darker bent. One cool thing I've always liked about new Changelings is that they have basically grafted their whole society onto the seasons and any given Changeling identifies with a season, because attaching themselves to an ordered natural cycle confuses the hell out of the True Fae and makes them much harder to track down. Which also adds another element if anyone's still wondering what sort of thing a True Fae is: It's the sort of thing that looks at the fact that Spring always follows Winter at the same time every year and thinks that is deathly dull.
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Dec 16, 2013 06:55
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Cooked Auto posted:That's a caveat that fits pretty much all of the White Wolf games. Though you'd need much less work for, say, Aberrant than some of the more unfriendly to run stuff. Aberrant, for those not in the know, was a superhero game they did that wasn't part of the WoD but used similar game systems. It was part of three game series that were set in the same world at different times, Adventure! (which was pulp), Aberrant, and Trinity (which was sci-fi and you played as psychics). The idea of Aberrant was to pay more attention to the practicalities of having super powers. Since it used very similar game mechanics, I'm pretty sure some people did farcical crossover games where they beat the poo poo out of a bunch of angsty monsters with the sort of powers that make even oWoD stuff look modest. Feinne fucked around with this message at 17:11 on Dec 16, 2013 |
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Dec 16, 2013 17:06
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Elfface posted:I really should have been reading this thread sooner. Loving seeing the patched stuff and how it differs from my unpatched playthroughs. Breaking Aberrant is so comically easy that I suspect they didn't particularly care if players were clued into their favorite methods. We're talking about a system where you can take a point of Claws with the Aggravated add-on and then boom all your punches forever do aggravated damage at no cost to you beyond the build points/experience points. And that's a relatively PROSAIC thing to do.
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Dec 17, 2013 17:36
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Bobbin Threadbare posted:Just for reference, the transition from Aberrant to Trinity comes when certain Aberrants grow in power from "superhero" to "god-like" and cause a few minor apocalypse events (as in, only areas of a continent visible on a map of Earth explode instead of the whole globe). After that, the god-Aberrants still soft-hearted enough to pity us mere humans gather up the rest and blast off into space, never to be heard from again. Yeah, among other things the Midwest gets turned into a wasteland filled with mutant nightmares and the network infrastructure of the entire world is destroyed by a literal fight inside it. The problem was that most Aberrants became increasingly crazy as they got more powerful, and all of them became increasingly less human. The basic idea of all three of the games in the setting was that humanity was evolving into something else, though what that would be wasn't entirely fixed. They had some cool ideas and a minimum of really lovely stupid stuff.
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Dec 17, 2013 18:49
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