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Bloodlines is very much a product of the Revised-era oWoD, so outside of the Malkavians and Nosferatu the clan choice doesn't change as much story-wise as you might think. A Ventrue can be a raging anarchist, a Gangrel can play with politics, a Toreador can be a violent brute, and so on. Early VtM had a bad case of stereotypes, where if you knew a character's clan you pretty much knew what to expect from them, and later editions went out of their way to burn that to the ground, to the extent that the vast majority of example characters in 2nd Edition clanbooks were pretty much antithetical to the clan stereotypes. As for my vote, Female Gangrel. even though they technically left the Camarilla in '99
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Nov 11, 2013 13:54
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The thing about crossovers is absolutely every type of thing that goes bump in the night has their own metaplot that they consider all-encompassing, and they consider all the other critters to be sideshows to that metaplot. I'm talking about in-game views, but as you can see from MJ12 describing an Antediluvian as a 'powerful vampire god' without even saying which Antediluvian it is (Ravnos / Zapathasura) it does extend to players to a lesser extent. So when you cross things over, inevitably a lot of players end up with the impression that their own favourite brand of special snowflakes aren't center stage and you get a lot of neckbeard tears. Not that I'm completely innocent of this (Samuel Haight  ).And yes, the True Black Hand were terrible and there was much rejoicing with their passing. quote:ghost of the first nuclear bomb Possibly because it was written by people who grew up during the Cold War, the oWoD features nuclear weapons more than you'd think. For instance, the first great wereshark council, which was intended to debate whether or not they should begin to migrate onto land, took place at the Bikini Atoll. The nuclear tests answered that question for them 
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Nov 12, 2013 02:46
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Captain Oblivious posted:Is...is that ACTUALLY what happened to the Weresharks in OWoD? I had heard that they were MIA for kind of hazy reasons, but holy poo poo that's hilarious if so. Yep. Their 'holy mission' from Kun* is survival and continued existence, so they came together at Bikini Atoll to debate and finally answer the question once and for all whether that mission would be furthered or hindered if they went onto land. It's very heavily implied that Bikini Atoll was deliberately chosen by Wyrm agents as the test site, who managed to hide the hubbub from the Rokea until it was too late. I believe the Technocracy may have been involved, but my bailiwick is Vampire and Werewolf so don't quote me on that. The more militant members of the Rokea ('Brightwaters', those born on bright days or full moons) reacted to this by declaring land off-limits to all Rokea, and hunt down and kill any that breach this. This is complicated by the fact that the first human-born Rokea are starting to reach adulthood and hit werecritter puberty in the Final Nights, and some Rokea are living on land full-time and only go into the sea to recharge their version of magic at holy sites - which are still perfectly happy to accept land-going Rokea, so the Brightwater-imposed taboo is a purely secular matter instead of a judgement from Gaia. *Werecritter cosmology resolves around a chaos/order/destruction trinity, Wyld/Weaver/Wyrm. The Rokea know them as Kun/C'et/Qyrl, though whether those are different names for the same things or just the underwater avatars for them is debatable. On land, most Wyld-aligned werecritters and werewolves especially revere Gaia as the chief avatar of Wyld, but it's more likely that Gaia is the whole and the trinity are facets of her. Tehan fucked around with this message at 11:24 on Nov 12, 2013 |
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Nov 12, 2013 07:07
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Yeah, gunshots are bashing damage for vampires. Considering vampires are basically sentient, magical blood piloting a corpse like a mecha suit, anything that relies on organ trauma is barking up the wrong tree entirely.
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Nov 12, 2013 10:32
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gatz posted:The results are that we will be playing as a female Ventrue. I've heard that they have some unique dialogue based on Ventrue being top dog of the Camarilla, so I'll be looking forward to that, since I've never done a Ventrue playthrough.
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Nov 12, 2013 16:27
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Bobbin Threadbare posted:Gangrel abilities are pretty useful, but I don't think they get any unique dialog at all. Beckett and Bertram
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Nov 13, 2013 03:03
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GrimRevenant posted:If I recall correctly, the Tremere Regent mentions something about your sire having been an Anarch, but possibly this only applies if you, yourself, are a Tremere. This would make sense - in theory Tremere outside the clan power structure need to be crushed underfoot for the good of the Clan, but in practice Anarch Tremere were largely ignored unless they start rocking the boat in favour of going after Sabbat-aligned Tremere of House Goratrix. Even after House Goratrix were wiped out in '99 (long story), old habits die especially hard for vampires. That said, if the PC's blood pool is a canonical indication of generation instead of just a gameplay thing, there'd have to be a story as to what such a high-generation Tremere was doing outside of the Clan proper. If, on the other hand, the Sire is always Anarch, you've got some real political bullshit going on. If the Sire was Camarilla it's business as usual, but executing an Anarch in a still largely Anarch-ruled city for not following Camarilla laws? That's a slap across the face for the Anarchs, and it could be that the Prince recognized his making a point was being taken as a declaration of war and backpedaled furiously in allowing the PC to live.
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Nov 14, 2013 08:01
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DeusExMachinima posted:You can also share a vampire's blood between a few diablerists if you want to boost your chances of subduing them, but I believe they must be 2 generations above everyone for there to be a level gain. The Ritual of the Bitter Rose, which allows a group of vampires to all drain one vampire together and boost their generation, though they don't get the other perks of diablerie - memories, skills and disciplines, namely. Plus there's a long list of requirements, a number of times a single botched roll could gently caress it all up, and entire paragraphs of fluff that scream 'this is what the Storyteller will use to gently caress you if you abuse this'. The fluff says that there's probably no more than a half-dozen written copies of the ritual in the entire world, so for almost all intents and purposes it may as well not exist. (it pretty much only exists so White Wolf could sell a series of what are essentially dungeon crawl splatbooks with low-generation vampires that nobody would miss at the end) Since the Camarilla clutch the Tremere so very tightly to their bosom, it's considered impolite to point out that their entire clan was born of diablerie, which is against the rules of the Camarilla. There's also the unspoken tradition of looking the other way and whistling while the subject of a Blood Hunt (a declaration by a Prince that the subject of the Hunt may be freely killed by anyone) is diablerized by one of the hunters. Hypocrisy is the beating heart of the Camarilla.
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Nov 14, 2013 23:10
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Jack comes off real nice and friendly, but at this point he's given the PC more guidance than he has to the vast majority of his many, many, many childer. Y'see, one of Jack's favourite tricks for pissing off the Camarilla is to embrace a whole lot of random suckers and leave them clueless in his wake in the hope that their bumbling first nights will kick a few holes in the Masquerade. It's quite possible that Jack has fathered more childer than any other vampire in history.
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Nov 17, 2013 04:23
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Thing is, in the tabletop, the PC would be leaving a trail of full ERs and empty blood banks at best or corpses at worst in their wake. If memory serves, each regular healthy human has 10 blood points, and taking more than 3 would require medical attention and more than 7 would cause death. In the tabletop feeding is usually abstracted as a 'feeding roll' where the player rolls whatever skills they're using to feed (appearance + seduction for seducing people into a handy nook for a snack, for example) and the actual feeding goes on offscreen, and it's assumed (for Path of Humanity with middling to high humanity vampires) that they just take a few blood points from several people, depending how successful the roll was. Several things, such as having a herd (a group of enamoured mortals that are willing to be fed upon or help the vampire hunt) or being famous makes feeding easier. However, this isn't really possible in an action-RPG video game, or at least Troika didn't think so. So they make it possible to drain people beyond the point of death by exsanguination with the only effect on the victim being temporary dizziness, and for what I assume (hope?) is balance reasons made the easiest blood sources, hobos and prostitutes, less bountiful. As for Jack saying that blue-bloods taste better, he's been around for four hundred years, easily long enough to pick up some blood snobbishness. Or possibly he's trying to convince the fledgling to feed more on the upper classes as part of his constant crusade against The Man.
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Nov 17, 2013 12:12
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Considering how many different playable critters there are under the oWoD umbrella, ability bloat is better than the alternative, where, for instance, the same skill a Tzimisce vampire used to twist living people into hideous works of art would be the same skill a Child of Gaia werewolf uses to craft enchanted dream catchers.
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Nov 17, 2013 21:39
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Additionally, in Bloodlines, humanity is heavily simplified - it's just a score from one to ten and you get humanity for doing good things and lose it for doing bad things. In the tabletop, there's a 'hierarchy of sin' where someone on Humanity 10 would get dinged for something as petty as selfish thoughts, whereas someone on Humanity 2 would have to murder someone for no particular reason to get dinged. The average person hovers around 7 or so. Apart from being a buffer against the Beast and frenzying, humanity is also used to pass as, well, human. Vampires are normally pretty easy to pick out as such if you know what you're looking for (waxy skin, no body heat, not breathing, unable to eat, etc) but a vampire can spend blood points equal to 8 minus their humanity (so, IIRC, free for vampires at or above humanity 8) to temporarily simulate the usual bodily functions. Yes, this includes boners, though polite vampire society frowns upon that sort of thing.
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Nov 18, 2013 08:01
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There's an argument to be made about whether or not a vampire drinking someone's blood is actually theft or even selfish, considering that apart from the Giovanni and some of the minor clans it's a good time for whoever's being fed upon and there's no harm done. If someone on the pull goes home with a vampire and wakes up with vague memories of a good time but no solid details, are they any worse off? Since it's all about internal consistency instead of actual morality, as long as the vampire believes it it'd probably work for them, though your ST may vary.
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Nov 18, 2013 17:41
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Yeah, I think a big part of the popularity of the oWoD games is you're free to take or leave the morality sideshow. It's completely possible and can be quite fun to dump the angst entirely and just play soap opera with vampires or Captain Planet with werewolves, but for people who are in to that sort of thing some of the moral dilemmas baked in to the games can be quite juicy.
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Nov 18, 2013 18:19
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Re: Antediluvians, one thing I like about them is the original impression that new players get is that there's thirteen monolithic clans that have been around forever, each with their own original ancestor, then you find out that there's been a lot of schisms, coups and diablerie over the years. The modern Brujah are the descendants of Troile, childe and diablerist of the original Brujah, and there's True Brujah knocking around out there hopping into bed with the Tel'Mahe'Ra () and the Setites with none of the fiery passion so characteristic of the mainstream Brujah clan. Tremere were born of magic and Saulot, and Giovanni were a successful coup within the ranks of the now-mostly-extinct Cappadocian. The modern Nosferatu are descendants of an unknown Nosferatu (theorized to be Baba Yaga) who was the only one to escape when Absimiliard tried to hit undo on the whole 'having childer' thing, and are hunted by the Nictuku, blood-bound childer of Absimiliard. And those are just the ones that hijacked the position in the Main 13 - every clan has more rebels, schismatics and offshoots than you can shake a stick at. Vampires have been around since year dot and they're probably the ones that invented closets just to have somewhere to keep all their skeletons. We've already met a vampire of an offshoot bloodline this LP - the executioner of our PC's sire is most likely of the Nagloper Legacy, an African offshoot of Clan Tzimisce.
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Nov 18, 2013 19:31
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Yeah, I remember one of the splatbooks (probably in Revised) specifically spoke out against what it referred to as The Path Of What I Was Going To Do Anyway.
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Nov 19, 2013 06:49
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FM posted:I've only had limited experience with the tabletop game - an ex of mine wanted to play and passed me the book, but one of the things that stood out to me was this complete lack of irony or perspective on things like this. Most prominent in my mind: the book very much insists that 'your character is not a stereotype' and chides anyone who seeks to play a 'typical' member of a clan, that there is no typical member of a clan and these organizations are too diverse to be put in your boxes, man, but at the same time they provide nothing but stereotypes to work with and they go into excruciating detail about each clan's stereotypes! Including sterotypes for how to react to other clans and everything! You can't have your cake and eat it too, White Wolf. < I'd bet that you were looking at the 2nd Edition corebook, which bent over backwards to try to break the rock-hard stereotypes that had developed after 1st Edition and possibly went overboard in doing so - I remember the back-of-the-book example characters in the 2nd ed clanbooks were extremely diverse to the point of self-parody. Some of that hung around to the Revised Edition, which were the final versions of the books before WW pulled the plug on the oWoD. It's not entirely hypocritical to have clan stereotype sections following a lengthy diatribe against stereotypes, however. A huge theme of the game is the friction between the edgy new late 20th century vamps and the stodgy set-in-their-ways movers and shakers, and the stereotypes can be considered the 'lessons' they were taught on the other clans by a hidebound sire or something. Some of the stereotypes are just plain wrong, and deliberately so, to represent limited information - a good example is how most vampires clanbooks (except Gangrel) have a stereotype about werewolves and they all say something along the lines of 'they live in the wilderness between cities and will eat you if you venture out there', apparently completely ignorant of the fact that two entire Tribes, Bone Gnawers and Glass Walkers, live almost entirely within cities. Also, at least in the world of vampires, stereotypes exist for a reason. Jack's an anti-authoritarian, streetwise, brawling, backer-of-the-underdog and surprise surprise he's a Brujah. The Prince is a stuffy authoritarian business type with an aura of smugness and a very punchable face, doesn't take a genius to realize he's a Ventrue. But the thing is that they have a character beyond their Clan, which a lot of players circa 1st ed didn't. They'd treat a clan like a race/class combo in D&D and not engage in any character development beyond picking a name for their soulless husk and completely miss every point of the game.
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Nov 20, 2013 07:50
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Bobbin Threadbare posted:I seem to recall a story about a nosferatu who dripped some of his blood into the sewer water and got himself a horde of rat-ghouls. I'm not sure which edition it was from, though. It's not just a one-off mention, it's described as a fairly common practice for Nosferatu in the Clanbooks. Animalism plus a lack of prying eyes plus paranoia gives a lot of time and motivation to get creative with ghouls. Rats are just the start of it 
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Nov 23, 2013 05:31
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Keep in mind that the metaphor card is available to be played, and indeed must be played early, hard, and often if you're going to try to make the different games play nice together. Right off the bat there's no way to make the Deluge (Biblical great flood, caused by Caine in VtM lore) work as a literal worldwide flood without completely disregarding the Werewolf version of history, and werecritter biology for that matter, both of which are outright incompatible with a Noah's Ark extinction event.citybeatnik posted:This is only a thing because White Wolf has no sense of scale and has multiple 6th Generation or lower Vampires sitting on the Board of Directors for Pentex. Wasn't that just first edition? I think 2nd ed reshuffled the Board, and there's just a Malkavian antitribu and his childe left. I'll have to dig all the splatbooks out of storage again.
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Nov 23, 2013 08:47
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At one point Tessmage was charging a $20 'donation' for the Megamod, which included, among other things, commercial MP3s that I assume they didn't have the rights for.quote:As for the legality, I happen to be untouchable. I know that sounds like the sort of crappola that one usually hears from teenagers with delusions of godhood... but in my case, it is actually a fact. I can't be sued, because all of my money is in the hands of other people... and for a damned good reason.  The Tessmage forums also include such gems as a 4000 word essay on why the 'True Patch' is a patch and why the Wesp's patch is a mod and why this matters, a sticky labelled 'There is NOTHING Wrong With The True Patch' that reiterates that point five or six times in as many words, accusations that Wesp does not only steal bugfixes but also 'the true Bloodlines experience away from the entire VTMB community' and is 'holding an entire gaming community hostage with his crappy mods', and a diatribe about Wesp labelled 'Some Friendly Advice To Bloodlines Modders'.
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Nov 27, 2013 02:15
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Speedball posted:This looks a lot better than that. Interesting style, comic books for cutscenes. Not sure whether you mean the game or the LP, but the comic style is something gatz has whipped up, not something in the original game.
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Nov 27, 2013 04:04
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Regarding Thinbloods as an ill omen, let's talk a little about that. 13th generation is the 'default' for VtM characters - to be 12th or 11th takes purchasing a merit, and 14th or 15th is a flaw that gives points. 14th generation have an 8 blood point capacity (compared to 10 for 13th) and 15th a paltry 7. They are very likely to be clanless Caitiff. Most damning of all, 15th generation cannot embrace, though rumour has it they can reproduce sexually. However. In Vampire: Dark Ages, there was a generation that was seen as thin-blooded, hunted as harbingers of the apocalypse, were likely to be Caitiff, and was unable to embrace. This was the 13th generation. Let's crunch some numbers. You can't really pin a date on the Deluge that destroyed Enoch, from which only the 3rd generation survived (or so common knowledge says). Some pin it to the end of the ice age and the flooding of the Mediterranean, about 15000 BC, or more recently the Black Sea deluge hypothesis, about 5600 BC. Others conflate it with a historical city, such as Çatalhöyük (5700 BC) or Jericho (pre-6800 BC). Let's lowball it and say 5000 BC. That means there's been 7000 years in which 12 generations (4th to 15th) have emerged, or an average of one every 580ish years. Without some artificial constraint on generation, this is straight-up bullshit. Not only can you not seriously expect the average vampire to wait a dozen or more lifetimes to have a childe of their own, but someone with a single drop of curiousity and nothing to do on a rainy afternoon could get a childe to embrace, and that childe to embrace, and so on within a few days and reach the 'bottom' of the generations easily. So there's three real possibilities. Either 13th has always been the cap until now and thinbloods really are the harbingers of the apocalypse (supported by the apocalypse actually happening), or the cap has been slowly expanding as time marches on and each 'new' generation gets to be the latest scapegoat for all of vampire society's troubles (supported by the continued existence of the franchise, thanks to CCP, and by how the 13th generation's thinbloodedness seems to have vanished). The third is that there's always been generations up to 15th and possibly beyond, but they've had their numbers kept far down by their being hunted by polite vampire society and their comparative lack of awesome cool powerz to keep the outside forces that hunt vampires at bay. The third is interesting, and has an interesting theory revolving around it - there is a phenomenon known as Revenants, those who have been or who's family have been ghouls so long they are born or reborn with vampiric vitae naturally (unnaturally?) produced by their bodies. They age slowly, have access to Disciplines, can reproduce, have the Beast, and can drink vampiric vitae to fuel their Disciplines, but aren't reliant on it to remain ghouls. They are said to be produced by the Tzimisce's selective breeding of ghoul families for generations, but if you look at the thinbloods progression another possibility arises - that they are the children of Thinbloods, no longer vampire or man but something between. And the Tzimisce are the perfect candidates for those that would be most curious to see what would happen if you bottomed out the generation.
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Dec 2, 2013 04:57
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OAquinas posted:The second generation was betrayed and destroyed by their childer. Should have mentioned this earlier, but there's a lot of disagreement as to whether the 0th or 1st generation is Caine, even in the official materials. I subscribe to the 1st = Caine definition, which do you mean OAquinas? Re: ghouls, if the ghoul doesn't spill the beans to anyone then most Princes won't care, unless they're specifically looking for a reason to put someone down. You do get a Masquerade breach if you tell Heather you're a vampire while you're ghouling her, but not later on once she's hooked. Re: Feinne's mention of diablerie, the advantage most seem to focus on is lowered generation, but even if the protagonist is 13th generation and the higher blood pool is just a video game thing, diablerie can get the diablerist the skills, disciplines, knowledge and memories of the victim, so there's a definite advantage even if they're a lower level. Being able to add a non-clan Discipline to your repertoire is worth having to lie low for a few years until the evidence vanishes from your aura, especially since your enemies (and Vampires always have plenty) won't expect it. Plus, politically, the Prince would be discredited if the one he showed mercy to and thus took responsibility for is caught breaching the Masquerade, so any political enemies he has would be happy to point to Heather as a Masquerade breach.
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Dec 2, 2013 07:34
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OAquinas posted:Ah, thinbloods. Yeah, I had forgotten the term for it. The theory was that 'revenants' were just a name given to dhampir families to prevent others from knowing they were the ultimate in thinbloodedness and thus that the Tzimisce had deliberately bred the harbingers of the apocalypse... which really discredits the omens, just like the treadmill of thinbloodedness Ephemeron just highlighted. A common undertone among all the games is that the Apocalypse has always been nigh, and it's just this time it really is by more or less pure coincidence. H-bombs? End is nigh. Destruction of Enoch? End is nigh. Destruction of Carthage? End is nigh. Diablerie of Saulot? End is nigh. Rise of the Technocracy? End is nigh. Fall of the White Howler werewolf tribe to the Wyrm? End is nigh. Death of Zapathasura? End is- holy poo poo that time it really happened  Vampire society is dominated by people that have been screaming for those darn kids to get off their lawn for thousands of years, their default reaction to everything is shaking their cane at it and denouncing it as the downfall of civilization. Werewolf society is largely dominated by the type that look back at the days when they kept humans as cattle and breeding stock longingly and see human advancement as to their detriment. Mages, of course, have the Technocracy, which is doing a lot better than most Traditions at adapting to the change of the modern world. It's showing the punk roots of the oWoD - the stodgy old farts are out of touch with the modern world and it's time for the new generation to seize destiny by the balls.
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Dec 2, 2013 11:57
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Feinne posted: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). You can do okay with some of the Werewolf clans too. If you stay away from the dickhole tribes (YMMV as to which ones qualify as dickholes) you can play it as Captain Planet or Scooby Doo with werewolves.
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Dec 3, 2013 04:37
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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, 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. e: Feinne posted: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. That's true, but it's a bit of a fine hair to split compared to saintly Saulot and the vast majority of the Salubri being wiped out at the hands of the Tremere, which can be seen as very different to the internal coups of the Cappadocians and the Brujah. Though Saulot ultimately possessing Tremere makes the distinction clear, the general bloodsucking public wouldn't be aware of that. If the world had ended soon after 1133, the diablerie of Saulot would seem as compelling a portent as the death of Zapathasura does for the canonical apocalypse. And while the death of Zapathasura is indeed a genuine portent in hindsight, it could be very easily dismissed before poo poo well and truly hit the fan - especially for those within the Camarilla, which didn't even officially recognize the existence of the Antediluvians. Tehan fucked around with this message at 20:31 on Dec 3, 2013 |
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Dec 3, 2013 19:42
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Feinne posted: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). Malkavians on the Setites, from one of the older Clanbooks: "I can't understand them. Aren't they mad yet? Don't they understand what they've seen? Goddamn. Goddamn..." I really like Malkavians when they're playing up the Cassandraic seer thing instead of the usual Fishmalk nonsense. Which is why the Bloodlines PC version is so bloody fantastic. Pretty much everything that's not a pun is cryptic foreshadowing and it's great. A possible explanation - particularly powerful or insane Malkavians can, upon death, find a form of immortality by uploading themselves onto the Malkavian Madness Network and from there have access to about as many secrets as you could expect a clan with Obfuscate, Auspex and a gift of prophecy to discover. Considering the PC's blood pool, the PC's sire would certainly count as powerful. So it's very likely that the number of secrets the Malkavian PC blurts out are whispered in their ear by their late sire - in tabletop terms, the Disembodied Mentor merit. While we're talking Antediluvians, it's quite possible that the entire Malkavian Clan is Malkav's fractured psyche taken physical form. More likely, he is the insanity in every Malkavian and the Network that links them all. According to legend he was attacked and rent asunder shortly after the fall of the Second City, and his childer took his blood within themselves to protect it from the sun. The Malkavians relentlessly hunt down anyone outside the clan with access to the Network, whether they be Malkavian-sired Caitiff or diablerists, so they're definitely protecting something. Did Malkav play any part in the End Times? It's been ages since I read up on it and my memories are hazy.
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Dec 4, 2013 10:13
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gatz posted:And there it is, the only thing in the cabinet. LaCroix told us to drop it off inside of our mailbox. Who would know that we put it in there, though? I'm sure some in the thread would immediately say, "it's the Nosferatu! it's the Nosferatu! They know everything."    More likely he just gave some ghoul lackey a key and told them to check the mailbox every morning. Though the game doesn't represent it in gameplay, it does take place over a number of days. Strange to have vampires mucking about in keeping the werewolves swept under the rug. If LaCroix hadn't intervened it probably would have been a coin-flip to see whether it would be Pentex (Captain Planet villains in service to the primal spirit of corruption and destruction, and also one of the world's largest megacorporations) or the Glass Walkers (urban, tech-savvy werewolf tribe) who stepped in to keep the secret under wraps. Or maybe this is the Glass Walkers stepping in - they are known to dabble in wafer-thin non-aggression treaties with the Ventrue and Giovanni from time to time, which could very well extend to working together to preserve the Masquerade as well as the Veil (the werewolf equivalent). Or it could just as easily be Pentex working through LaCroix.
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Dec 4, 2013 21:55
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Added Space posted:Did they ever fix the glitch where the phone headset decides it doesn't like you and drags itself back to the wall? Nope, I remember reading somewhere that it was baked into the engine and couldn't be fixed using the modding tools.
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Dec 4, 2013 22:18
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Tiggum posted:
Once upon a time, we got to the bottom of something. It was the True Black Hand. The backlash was so bad that White Wolf ended up obliterating them from existence using the ghosts of nuclear bombs. And don't worry, lost guys. I spent way too much of my misspend youth sperging out over vampires and werewolves, and I'm just as lost when magechat comes up as you are. Apart from a few rare polymaths, everyone's got their own favourite bit they've delved deeply into and only fragmentary knowledge of the majority of the oWoD. So it may seem daunting but it doesn't take much learning to catch up with what most enthusiasts know about any given thing.
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Dec 6, 2013 22:49
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Cooked Auto posted:Oh yeah, Samuel Haight, I've almost forgotten about him and surprised none has actually brought him up in the thread earlier. (Or I just missed it.) Oooooh boy. Samuel Haight was a kinfolk of the Children of Gaia werewolf tribe. 'Kinfolk' are humans or wolves descended from werewolves, and the child of a werewolf and a kinfolk is much more likely to be a werewolf than the child of werewolf and a regular person, so most werewolf tribes consider Kinfolk to be property at worst and second-class citizens at best. Werewolves are dicks. Even though Children of Gaia (as you may guess, hippy-dippy types, or as close as werewolves get) are better than most tribes at how they treat their kinfolk, Samuel Haight still had a huge chip on his shoulder and decided he was gonna be oWoD's answer to Pun-Pun. First, he became a ghoul by hunting vampires and stealing their blood. Then he dabbled in sorcery (which is petty magic, distinct from Mage magic) and managed to whip up a ritual to turn himself into a werewolf using the skins of five murdered werewolves. He starts working for Pentex and the Wyrm, founds an entire sub-tribe of 'Skindancers' with his ritual, collects a whole bunch of major-league artifacts, and one ends up imparting on him Mage abilities. He has many adventures that basically involve him showing up out of the blue, making GBS threads on everybody, and going on his merry way. So he ended up a kinfolk-ghoul-sorcerer-werewolf-mage. That's when, if we're taking the theory of him being a cautionary tale about powergaming as true, the GM got pissed. Samuel tried to take a run at the Baali antediluvian with diablerie on his mind, and 'only' ended up finding a Baali Methuselah. He still got his poo poo kicked in and had his soul turned into an ashtray. Samuel Haight was probably a joke. The True Black Hand wasn't. The True Black Hand... okay, look, this is stupid. Really stupid. If you're already getting fed up with how stupid the oWoD could get, just walk away now, or at least keep in mind that all of this was retconned into a smoking crater, and then ghost-nuked into a more literal smoking crater. The True Black Hand fought aliens  Apparently Vicissitude (the discipline, not the forums poster) was really an alien infection from another dimension that would infect anyone that Vicissitude was used on and eat them and turn them into 'Souleaters' and the True Black Hand were dedicated to fighting off this alien invasion and keeping it a secret from the world. It was the very nadir of the vampires-as-angsty-superheroes phenomenon. Say what you like about Edward loving Cullen but at least he never fought aliens. Tehan fucked around with this message at 05:13 on Dec 7, 2013 |
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Dec 7, 2013 05:11
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If memory serves Unknown Armies (which is basically Mage if all the mages were insane hobos) alternates gender every chapter.insanityv2 posted:WoD needs, nay deserves, a Neverwinter Nights. I really believe it would produce some amazing stuff. CCP, the guys that make Eve Online, bought out White Wolf and are making a oWoD MMO, with the initial focus to be on VtM. I'm cautiously optimistic about it. citybeatnik posted:Because modern people are idiots, if you roll up in a car with the entire back-seat converted in to something with lots of flashing lights and dials people are going to believe that it can shoot death beams. What I'm hearing here is that Ghostbusters is a plausible MtA campaign.
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Dec 9, 2013 08:42
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From purely anecdotal evidence, VtM and especially VtM LARPing had a much more balanced gender ratio than regular tabletop roleplaying. I entered the VtM scene from the tabletop side of things, so this is just spitballing on my part, but maybe it was due to VtM recruiting from the goth scene?
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Dec 10, 2013 07:46
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I'm late to the vampire vs werewolf party, but it's deliberately unbalanced and it doesn't matter because the two very rarely intercept. The werewolf view on vampires is almost entirely dismissing them as a type of zombie possessed by a bane, basically a spirit of corruption, mostly because low-humanity werewolves stink of the Wyrm. And while werewolves are in theory opposed to such things, in practice they have so, so much larger fish to fry. Unless a vampire walks into a werewolf holy site, or through the territory of a particularly militant werewolf tribe, or hurts kinfolk, the werewolves just don't give a poo poo, because unlike actual banes vampires don't act like Captain Planet villains. Of course, there are exceptions in both directions. Bone Gnawers (hobo werewolves) have been known to get along with the Nosferatu, and ditto Glass Walkers (corporate/cyberpunk werewolves) with the Ventrue and Shadow Lords (sneaky political bastard werewolves) with anyone realpolitik demands. On the other side of the spectrum, Children of Gaia (hippy werewolves), Black Furies (feminist werewolves) and Fianna (Celtic werewolves) give more shits about kinfolk and humanity in general so can clash with vampires more often. From the other direction, vampires know that one-on-one they bite the curb when it comes to werewolf encounters, so they stick to cities and don't go out of their way to antagonize werewolves, apart from some particularly crazy Sabbat who signed on with Pentex. One advantage that the werewolves have over vampires that gets overlooked a lot is that while both have to keep their secret under wraps, werewolves drive any human that see them in their huge murder wolfman form temporarily insane thanks to humanity's racial memories of The Impergium*, so they can throw down at a moment's notice without worrying about witnesses. *A three-thousand year period after humanity developed agriculture where werewolves would place population limits on each human settlement - without telling those humans what it was, mind you - and break open a big ol' can of indiscriminate murder whenever a settlement went over that limit. Werewolves are dicks.
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Dec 14, 2013 00:22
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Angry Lobster posted:Yeah, the Impergium, those were the days! But you need to remember that transforming in front of normal humans is a breach of the Veil, and as the Litany says: "The Veil shall not be lifted" even if the delirium covers your rear end. One of my favourite bits about WtA is that every tribebook had a bit on that tribe's interpretation of the Litany and it always involves them justifying ignoring their least favourite parts of it - broadly, the more militant ones tend to piss all over Respect Those Beneath You while the less militant ones look askance at Submission To Those Of Higher Station and The First Share Of The Kill For The Greatest In Station. The Glass Walkers in particular are drat near anarcho-communist after their leadership crisis. And in these modern times of birth control and same-sex relations Garou Shall Not Mate With Garou can have a lot of wriggle room. So while in theory the Veil Shall Not Be Lifted, in practice the you gotta do what you gotta do and the Veil can always be nailed down again afterwards. Some Red Talons want the Veil to be lifted to drag the other tribes into a wolves-vs-humans war. So the Veil is like the Masquerade - you're not supposed to breach it, but it happens all the goddamn time and unless it shows up on CNN or some poo poo nobody really cares unless they're looking for reasons to gently caress you over.
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Dec 14, 2013 12:56
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citybeatnik posted:Bone Gnawers tend to take the "gently caress it, we'll put up with this poo poo but still be awesome" approach to the Litany. About the only part that they take completely 100% seriously are the parts about not eating humans (because they're sick and tired of being the ones blamed for it when it happens) and "Don't you be doin' nothin' that harms no Caern!" Because the last time they did Set took over Egypt. Bone Gnawers are hardcore. They're the ultimate masters of doing a lot with a little. Other tribes tell stories of the time when they ruined the Wyrm's poo poo with giant silver swords and ancient mystical treasures, but the Bone Gnawers do it every day with Molotov cocktails and two-by-fours.
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Dec 14, 2013 14:16
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MJ12 posted:killer cyborgs which can beat rear end in ways Werewolves would give their left nut to possess Actually, this happened. The Cyber Dogs were a faction within the Glass Walkers that came to prominence when they demonstrated in 1998 that cyborg werewolves wrecked poo poo about as thoroughly as you'd expect. They were on the verge of taking leadership when they fell from grace and were quickly and violently purged a year later when it was revealed that the huge strides in cybernetics came not just from being able to negotiate with the spirits of cybernetic implants, but also through extensive non-voluntary experimentation on lupus (wolf-born) Garou, which the Glass Walkers tend to venerate because they've got so drat few of them. There's still a few remnants kicking around - those that avoided the purges long enough to prove their ignorance of the experiments and rejoin the Glass Walkers proper, and those that quickly went into hiding. Also re: Hunters, about half the tribebooks outright scoff at the very possibility of their existence, which I find hilarious.
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Dec 14, 2013 19:28
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mortons stork posted:What does 'paradox' mean in the context of mages? The for-dummies explanation that I've been told is that reality works on consensus, so if you're a Mage and do obvious magic in front of people that don't believe in magic, their first reaction is calling bullshit, and then reality takes notice and agrees it is bullshit and smacks you upside the head for your bullshit. I know even less about the Changelings and the Fae but I think if you've seen or read Midsummer Night's Dream you're halfway there.
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Dec 15, 2013 09:49
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Video games about tabletop games tend to have deep, deep wells to draw from.
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Dec 16, 2013 07:58
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GrimRevenant posted:revamped Heh. UrbicaMortis posted:It's interesting that the Changeling line and the Dead line basically switched tones between oWoD and nWoD. So oWod changeling is fairly positive, especially compared to Wraith: The Oblivion which was some of the bleakest poo poo ever. Yeah, as time went on WW got better and better at putting a nice selection of tone into the games. Due to the whole upcoming apocalypse thing the default was fairly depressing in oWoD, but you didn't have to breach canon to have a more uplifting or upbeat story, they just needed to pick the right subject matter. Werewolves could be Captain Planet, Vampires could be soap operas, Hunters could be Buffy and Mages could be whatever they drat well pleased. Bloodlines is a great example of this - it could easily have immersed itself in horror and alienation and inevitable doom, but while it does dip into those it's more of a character-driven drama than anything else, despite the Vampire metaplot of the time being closer to OH gently caress WE'RE ALL GONNA DIE 
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Dec 16, 2013 12:28
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