Covok posted:

Is there any villains other than the Technocracy and anything Changeling that annoys people as much as these groups do in oWoD?

Loomer posted:

If you're going to use Nephandi you owe it to yourself and your players to read Thomas Ligotti's work.

Loomer posted:

Rustin Cohle is clearly a lone-operative Imbued with no connections or awareness of the greater Hunter world, duh.

(I am so thankful for True Detective it's not even funny. Hearing they dropped the occultism and southern gothic elements for season two hurt me in a way a tv show should not be able to do.)

Loomer posted:

See I don't object to that approach to things. I found it actually paid off in its own right, because the reality is that occultism is almost never a clear matter unless you dedicate a lot of time to unraveling the twisted thought processes involved, coming from someone who does a lot of study in that field. Cohle and Hart simply didn't have the eyes to see or the ears to hear anything more than the immediate surface, and the idea of being an ordinary (or, in Cohle's case, a close-to-ordinary) man thrust into the middle of something that could be mere madness or be something much worse is its own special breed of horror. It's being a blind man stumbling through a dark room filled with strange sounds and scents that you can't quite figure out.

quote:

I would have loved to have seen that with the initial pitch for season 2, where it was going to look at the secret occult history and patterns of the US transit system. There's a loving ton you could do there with that theme while still being, largely, a regular (if exceptionally well written) cop show. Season 2 now is looking like it'll be a good watch as a cop show but a disappointment as a follow-up to Cohle and Marty, and as a regular cop show it has to compete with The Bridge et al.

Pussy Cartel posted:

Don't forget the part where Brucato talks about how players shouldn't play Nephandi because the spiritual implications for them would end up leading them down a dark, left-hand path in real life.

Night10194 posted:

Has there ever been a setting where it's been a genuine net positive that wizards are about? It seems like at best the good wizards just put the kibosh on the No Sense Of Right And Wrong wizards.

Dammit Who? posted:

The Esoterrorists is quite cool- one of the things I like about it is how the titular conspiracies can actually summon monsters, but they're amorphous subjective things that take their shape from the will of the summoners, so any big esoterrorist group is going to have a lot of mad biologists and Disney imagineers alongside the occultists and what have you, in order to make sure that the form they want their monsters to collapse into actually works with the normal laws of biology as well as what little magic powers they can squeeze out of the current consensus.

MonsieurChoc posted:

I was listening to old John Carpenter soundtracks on youtube (cause they own) and when I got to the Christine Theme I got to thinking she'd be pretty easy to do in the nWoD. Hell, there's about a thousand ways to do her! She could be a ghost posessing a car, or a spirit possessing the car to spread it's influence. An Abyssal manifestation. A True Fae's Title. A really creepy artifact/miscellaneous magic item created by someone hosed up. A God-Machine project. Or my favourite: maybe a car came to life and went evil with no explanation because that kind of poo poo can just happen in the World of Darkness.

Night10194 posted:

This is definitely a good thing for a horror setting to have. There's something really satisfying about a group of supernatural shitkickers or whatnot running into something, scratching their heads, and being like 'Holy poo poo, what was that and how can we make sure we never see it again?'

Soonmot posted:

An organized crime one is so obvious that it's amazing there isn't one yet.

GimpInBlack posted:

IMHO the way to do an nWoD organized crime book would be more of a build-your-own toolbox than a gazetteer of crime syndicates. Like, "this is the kind of organization and structure you can expect an international smuggling cartel to have, that's what a local protection racket looks like, and here are some ways they might interact with the supernatural" rather than "Don Luigi Lucabrazzi is a 9th-generation Toreador with a fluffy white cat ghoul."

Loomer posted:

On that note of different reactions, the best crime group in the oWoD is Sapa Inca, a Colombian drug cartel operating in Detroit that's wiped the city clean of vampires and is setting up limbs in most major cities. Picture MS-13, the Medellins or the Sinaloa Cartel, only they use machetes and flamethrowers to kill vampires as well as journalists and rivals. Of course they revealed they were secretly masterminded by the anarchs originally but they've gone completely rogue and do their own thing. The hilarious part is that in a couple of years, a violent drug cartel did more to make the streets of Detroit safer than the Imbued managed in over a decade, all without the benefit of supernatural sight or healing gifts or magic powers to better kill monsters. All they had was a few tips and some narco cult rituals.

What's real scary is they also do a lot of outreach IIRC to other, even rival, gangs and cartels about the undead scourge behind the scenes. I can't think of anything more terrifying for vampires than a large, world-spanning, streets-up movement that wants them dead and has spent decades learning how to wage an asymmetrical war and which is largely out of reach of the Camarilla stand-bys of police and government manipulation. They're well armed, able to operate in the daylight, and loving fearless because they're all snorting cocaine and preying to Santa Muerte before a fight. It's oWoD as gently caress and I love.

moths posted:

Vampire: the Masked Raid

Kurieg posted:

Just sitting here thinking for a while.

Make it so that the beast soul is the bit that doesn't want *you*. You're an annoying bit of sentience that's attached to it's protrusion into our realm of reality. At some point you will die and it will take over, and you can sort of try and keep it at bay. It will slowly get more and more powerful, your goal, then, is to keep up. Because at some point you will fail. Your goal is at some point before then either figure out how to sever your connection, or turn the link back in on itself and take over the beast..

So like a backwards Promethean.

It would also give the beasts some justifcation to hate and avoid hunters beyond "Those damned normies just don't understand how hard I got it." in "If that gently caress actually manages to kill me for real then everyone's hosed."

Soonmot posted:

There's something to salvage in there, or at least having Beasts as weird hangerons that turn into antagonists for other splats when the awful poo poo they do comes to light.

Night10194 posted:

Look, dude just liked juice. He was willing to share!

Spiderfist Island posted:

#2 is pretty close to my idea on how to make Beast not lovely: a player isn't a Beast, but one day a Beast appears in the character's subconscious like a spiritual cancer. The game would then be an allegory about being in a cancer support group, self-loathing at perceived physical and mental weakness, and the hope of someday being in remission.

The Beast keeps giving a character strange destructive urges and commands that are unsettlingly suitable for the person, and gives them mental and astral powers to use for those purposes (the X splat). If you resist the urges and commands it gives you, then the effects of the Beast starts to spread to their surroundings or loved ones, and eventually the PC dies from their soul being consumed– call this failure state "Metastasis." If you accept the urges too readily, then you become a Monstrosity, where there's no distinction between the PC's mind and that of the Beast, and you become an amoral force that has a normal day job but subtly or blatantly ruins people's lives at the drop of a hat.

But– and this is a but– eventually, the Beast's presence leaves a Monstrosity, and they revert to normal with just a few vestigial powers, called Afterthoughts. You may be a barely functional human being, you may be #1 on the list for Slasher material, you may have done terrible things you never want to even remember, but the Beast is gone. Giving into the Beast may make you into more of a monster than you already are, but it's the quickest and most assured way to make the voices in your head stop hungering. Eventually.

The alternative is to fight the Good Fight, a Hail Mary method spread by word-of-mouth between groups of the afflicted. Feed the Beast inside, but only enough to keep you between Metastasis and Monstrosity. Let it consume enough of its desires to form an astral hellscape of a Lair. Let it define itself enough so that it forms weaknesses, strengths. And then you and your closest friends will go into the Lair and slay the matured monster. It's not easy, and it may just send the Beast into remission, but you can finally be free of its influence (save the Afterthoughts). It's extremely rare to succeed, but everyone suffering knows a guy who knows a guy who knows someone who has Slain their Beast.

And if you fail? Well, your group is there to protect others from you as much as they protected you from the World of Darkness. You all know the risks and know that some day you'd have to take down one of the few people who understood the monster living inside you. The protagonists are the victims of the Beast presence in their psyche. The antagonists are the Beast presence, Hunters, and victims that act like the actual Beast: the Primordial splat (Monstrosities).

paradoxGentleman posted:

You could twist even that in an interesting plot point: your Beasts hungers for pain, to spread misery all over the world, to spit fire and brimstone on crowds of helpless farmers, and all you are giving it is the costernation and worry of a rich guy dropped in a bad part of town. It sort of keeps it in check, but it also wets its appetite.

Kavak posted:

It's like joose for vampires. You drink a few drops of Changeling and suddenly you've been put on the Red List, spent all your money on a piano you don't know how to play, and it's not Monday anywhere.

CommissarMega posted:

Thanks for the replies guys. For some reason, it's been bugging me for a bit.


Who's that guy?

Ferrinus posted:

If Beasts were the hegemons of the world they wouldn't be so overwhelmjngly concerned with how their audience receives them and they would survive by doing actual harm rather than by posturing. That post is stupid.

tatankatonk posted:

This should be said really often: you are not doing LGBTQ people, or feminists, or whoever is standing in opposition to internet trolls/homophobes/MRAs or whatever, a favor by associating them with this.


good gravy


I'm not going to lie: if I didn't know anything about Heroes, I would be insanely confused at this point in the pdf. I would think: So they're the good guys, right? Because they want to stop these monsters, who have to kill, or kill but in really specific ways, or just kill, torture, and terrorize sometimes but not enough to drift to the extremes? Right?


Talk about insulting the dead.


Malkavia plays a big part in my game. It's sad to see it reduced to this

Oh poo poo it's Hero time

illrepute posted:

I'm just wondering, is there a contingency plan for justifying the Beast's behavior if they open the door and instead of a bunch of MRA-caricature heroes, there's instead a full division of TF:V guys with tanks?

tatankatonk posted:

NutritiousSnack posted:

Where's anyone have that fake political cartoon of the guy screaming at Hitler, while Hitler sits there calmly and goes "wow all I want to do is kill all the jews and you won't let me, looks like you need to do some growing up pal" because this entire thing is an unironic version of that.

Attorney at Funk posted:

I'm starting to suspect that Beast: the Primordial is bad. It's bad and not good.

CommissarMega posted:

I loved doing this in Exalted as an Infernal- any other games that do this? Better Angels is one that I know of, anything else?


Someone else in the thread said it beast best when they said that Beast should just own what it was, and be about playing one of the WoD's villains. I also like the idea that your Satiety would determine the Morality (not Integrity, mind you) of the Heroes you face. It would definitely up the power levels properly, while also presenting an interesting quandary to both rollplayers and roleplayers- the former would have to struggle with the dilemma of always knowing they'll face an enemy as powerful as they are, while the latter will have to face up to the fact that if they want real power, they will have to become real evil.

Kurieg posted:

an ability called "BEHOLD MY TRUE FORM" that requires you to make eye contact with your enemy and rant at them to deal purely psychological damage.

tatankatonk posted:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DV1fUwKMdAI


nuke this splat from orbit

CommissarMega posted:

Something else I've found. Look at this horrible no-goodnik of a Hero:


Who knew the most thing in a game about playing Cthulhu was a teenage girl in a coma? Seriously, THIS is a PC I want to play, even if she's supposed to be the bad guy.

EDIT: Proof that she's an evil bitchwhore who deserves all she gets:


RPG.net weighs in:
http://forum.rpg.net/showthread.php?757990-Beast-ish-Do-the-antagonists-need-to-be-less-sympathetic-than-the-PCs&p=19074975#post19074975
Someone else sum it up, I'm too busy being pumped about how Melanie is to get mad.

Nezumi-chan from RPG.net posted:

Even Sleeping Beauty, who you mention, although more sympathetic than most, blames Beasts for what was actually an unhappy accident that could have been avoided if she'd been less reckless, and chooses to help other Heroes hunt Beasts just because she thinks they might help her return to her body rather than out of any altruism or desire to make the world better.

CommissarMega posted:

Someone help me, because upon reading this for a second time:

I've noticed it doesn't actually mention what the Collector was going to take

Then again, it makes Melanie all the more heroic for doing what she did AND WHY CAN'T WE PLAY AS HEROES AGAIN?!

tatankatonk posted:

Description: Thaddeus is a tall, skinny man in his mid-30s, clean-shaven with pale skin and neatly cut hair. During office hours, Thaddeus wears business casual polo shirts and slacks, and is completely unremarkable. While out hunting monsters, he wears a poorly fitted trenchcoat and a black trilby hat. Thaddeus considers himself a modern gentleman and speaks with an unnecessarily verbose vocabulary, dotted with “chivalric” language he’s mostly picked up from fantasy movies and novels.