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What I'm taking away from all this is that Beast comes across like Otherkin: The Tumblring on actually reading how the Beasts and their Hunters are presented in the text itself. I guess nWoD had to do a spiritual sequel to CtD eventually...
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Apr 14, 2015 04:04
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Hugoon Chavez posted:I think the sky is an easy enough metaphor to "fear of the unknown". If there's a more primal fear, I don't know which. Religion itself is just a reaction to that fear. If "fear of the sky" were shorthand for fears relating to weather and to astronomical/astrological phenomena, that'd be perfect as one of the Beasts' splats: thunder and lightning, blizzards, hurricanes, flooding, drought, eclipses, and ill omens are all things that are both sensible as universal fears and could be easily applied to a reasonably broad swath of monstrous powers. "Fear of the sky" being "fear of open spaces" isn't especially inspiring and isn't quite so universally applicable, especially considering that most avian monsters from myth and legend are also associated with other aerial or astronomical phenomena (the Thunderbird beating its wings to create thunder, the Roc blotting out the sun with its immense wingspan, etc). That, and there are already plenty of animal-like supernatural splats in the WoD; giving the Beasts a splat that's explicitly "you are a bird" feels less than inspired, especially in comparison to the more overtly monstrous Families.
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Apr 17, 2015 01:04
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The only CtD book I ever read that didn't make me hate myself at least a little bit for reading it was, of all things, the Vampire/Changeling crossover novel Pomegranates Full and Fine, and that was mainly because the protagonist was a changeling whose utter loathing for changelings' twee pseudo-feudal renfaire society saturated every page where she was forced to interact with that culture. Of course the villain of the book wasn't even a villain from either game line; he was a Nephandus. And his master plan was delightfully banal considering the circumstances (which I guess almost made him accidentally appropriate as a CtD antagonist): Throughout the whole book he's been manipulating powerful mortals and vampires and changelings (and probably some random Black Spiral Dancers, for all I remember) into completing a ritual to summon his demonic masters to Earth, after which all the cultists will get supreme power in the new post-apocalyptic world. Except that he's not going to complete the ritual; he's going to keep leading on the cultists for as long as he possibly can, because he's got a good thing going as the leader of a vast and influential cult. Sure he's a Nephandus, but he's got power, money, and sex with hot vampire chicks; what could a demon possibly offer him that's better than what he's got now?
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May 19, 2015 06:22
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Effectronica posted:The conflict is between Western, and especially American, hegemony, as represented by the Technocratic Order, and all the alternatives to it, represented by the Traditions. The exalted subjects of hegemony, unable to comprehend it clearly, concluded that it was about everything that happened in the last five hundred years being defended by the noble forces of domination and control. The Traditions don't fare much better in that regard, considering that the individual Traditions themselves were explicitly created to insulate "legitimate" pre-existing European magickal traditions like the Order of Hermes by sidelining everyone else. Mages who didn't fit into the European ways - the supposedly primitive spiritualists and inscrutable orientals - got lumped together into massively simplistic artificial Traditions, purely on the basis of their European counterparts' myopia. The modern-day Traditions have made concerted efforts at including non-Western ideologies (magical and otherwise) into their various factions, especially from MtAs Revised onwards, but the fundamental structure of the Nine Traditions is still deeply rooted in Western exceptionalism and cultural imperialism.
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May 21, 2015 07:24
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Jun 8, 2015 02:13
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Dammit Who? posted:Yes, I agree. From what other people who've known him longer say it seems very unlikely that McFarland would intend for his work to come across this way. It's especially baffling because he also wrote the lion's share of World of Darkness: Innocents — most notably, the lengthy sidebar explicitly instructing Storytellers to leave real-world child abuse out of the game, to let the child characters' antagonists be imaginary monsters and not too-familiar real-world monsters.
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Jun 9, 2015 22:04
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Tezzor posted:I don't see how you could do the owod vampire post gehenna especially with a metaplot. The looming apocalypse is such a high stakes plot that nothing can top it. I guess you can shamble ahead with new enemies out of left field like every other scifi / fantasy franchise that for money went on beyond its natural coherent ending: death note, dbz, the star wars eu, terminator, Buffy, supernatural, etc I expect that "post-Gehenna" is going to mean "Gehenna is no longer the sword of Damocles hanging over the immediate future of the setting," not "the dumbest possible version of the apocalypse happened off-screen and forever changed the world, again."
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Aug 4, 2015 00:05
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Ferrinus posted:"There's nothing outside the Solar System except the weird Deep Umbra" is perfectly homologous with There's nothing outside the Solar System except the weird Outer Space." And there are a few MtAs sources that treat the two as virtually synonymous, like the grey aliens rode who their flying saucers to Earth from the Deep Umbra. MonsieurChoc posted:Except the Deep Umbra is shown to be just a place where all kind of weird stuff exist on the boundaires of the oWoD universe. It's not infinite, and is in fact quite (cosmoligcally) small. Werewolf's fixed Umbral realms (Malfeas, et al) aren't in the Deep Umbra, they're in the Middle Umbra. Werewolf doesn't really ever touch on the Deep Umbra because it's all but irrelevant to Werewolf's cosmology and conflicts, and Mage rarely references Werewolf's realms for essentially the same reason.
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Aug 25, 2015 01:03
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Trying to integrate different WoD game lines' backstories and metaplots is a fruitless (and tedious) exercise, considering how most of them fundamentally and sometimes deliberately contradict each other. I mean, right off the bat you have to pick and choose between the monotheistic Genesis-ish origin of the universe from VtM and DtF, the triatic WtA cosmology, and the various MtAs paradigms that are either completely agnostic or else work on the premise that all souls and such are fragments of God, who no longer exists as a singular and discrete being. Even the crossover elements in the metaplot are completely irrelevant outside of the whole Avatar Storm thing, and the exact origin of the storm doesn't really matter in practice outside of edge case chronicles that are specifically focused on that element of Gehenna or whatever.
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Oct 4, 2015 06:14
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unseenlibrarian posted:Looking at the very first post in that and ignoring the rest, all I can think is "So the Neverborn are Neverborn because they don't have parents, they were just raised by their GrandMaw." Amazingly, there are two different ancient cthonic demon-mothers known as Grand Maw/Grandmother in oWoD: the colossal Wyrm-serpent that lives under the Trinity test site and houses in the Black Spiral Dancers' preeminent caern inside her corpus, and the nigh-omnipotent "mother" of the Neverborn from Wraith/Orpheus. I'm sure there's a fan theory somewhere that finds some way to claim that the two of them are actually the same being, despite that being somehow more stupid than anything else in this post.
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Oct 4, 2015 06:34
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Loomer posted:I'm going through Dark Ages Europe at the moment and just hit the section on Vienna and I don't even know what the gently caress. It's talking about Matthias Corvinus's capture of Vienna as past-tense - but it's set in 1230, and that doesn't happen until 1485. I wouldn't be surprised if that was originally a part of a present-day VtM character's backstory in an earlier book (probably one of the German-language ones that touched on the area), and the Dark Ages Europe authors copy-pasted that backstory in without a second thought.
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Oct 14, 2015 17:29
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RocknRollaAyatollah posted:Most of the European and Dark Ages sourcebooks all suffer from this. Half the time they can't even get basic geography right and that's one of the things there's no excuse for. The VtDA book sourcebook Three Pillars described how medieval society historically functioned, with a focus on how it worked specifically for the Kindred, the titular three pillars of society being the peasantry, clergy, and nobility, plus a fourth chapter on Italy's burgeoning proto-capitalist class structure. The appendix to the book was a list of heads of state in the time period, and was directly copy-pasted over from the Ars Magica 3e sourcebook Mythic Europe with all of the flagrant errors intact, the most notable one being a table listing the Emperors of Rome that had all of the Western Roman Emperors under the Eastern Empire's heading and vice versa. gtrmp fucked around with this message at 02:46 on Oct 16, 2015 |
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Oct 16, 2015 02:43
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Kavak posted:MonsieurChoc's post reminded me: What is the disposition of White Wolf itself? Onyx Path basically has the rights or at least the licenses to everything from it but Mind's Eye, and with the MMO dead CCP doesn't seem to have much need of it. White Wolf hasn't existed since the CCP merger, and there hasn't been anyone at CCP working on tabletop games since they laid off Eddy Webb when they killed the WoD MMO last April.
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Oct 29, 2015 03:43
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fspades posted:OPP only exists because CCP were idiots and did not want to do anything with the publishing company they bought. Now that we have a company which is presumably interested in publishing, OPP loses its reason for existence and its employees can directly work under WW again. The only realistic downside that I could see coming from the Paradox buyout is that they force OPP to slow down or outright halt production on new nWoD material so that they can fully refocus on oWoD, specifically VtM. I can't imagine that they'll kill OPP's WoD/Exalted licenses altogether unless they plan on publishing themselves under the White Wolf name, and if they go that route, it seems more likely than not that we'd see the same writers working on the same product lines but under a different publisher.
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Nov 2, 2015 22:24
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Ferrinus posted:Picking Thor or Yahweh or something as your shadow name is the ultimate alpha move because you know nobody else had the nerve to. actually, this is at most half a step above a neonate calling themselves Lestat
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Nov 5, 2015 03:09
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Twibbit posted:They got dragged down with everyone else when the market fell apart. (which was mostly d20 license systems that caused it I believe) That, and they completely surrendered their position as second place in the market when they switched over from traditional publishing to PDF/POD-only. For all the arguments that traditional publishing is dead or dying or otherwise no longer viable, the fact remains that White Wolf's market share was second only to Wizards of the Coast's right up until WW/CCP dropped out of the market entirely.
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Dec 13, 2015 19:10
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Pope Guilty posted:The switch to nWoD also cost them a bunch of fans- there were a bunch of people who didn't want to buy Requiem and would've kept buying Masquerade but suddenly had nothing new to buy. And for all that RPG proponents like to go on about "all you need is the corebook for infinite adventures!" and so on, a game which isn't getting new books is going to bleed players. And of course when the corebook's no longer in print and prospective players have to hunt down used copies, your acquisition of new players is also headed down the shitter. My understanding is that sales picked up over time to where nWoD was at its peak selling about as well as oWoD was when it ended, but nWoD never had oWoD's reach outside of the dedicated TTRPG enthusiast crowd. And that non-enthusiast crowd are the ones who'd pick up the book on an impulse buy in a bookstore or borrow a copy from a friend; without brick-and-mortar mainstream bookstores carrying hardcopy WoD books, that market's more or less gone for good.
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Dec 13, 2015 21:20
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Kavak posted:The mod might be the "other" unofficial patch. The creator is incredibly juvenile (Porn everywhere and putting wesp's avatar or something in the game's toilets) and just plain nuts (He sealed the mod off behind a forum post wall and called wesp "Junior Hitler" in a rant just because he's German.) That's Tessmage, the modder who slams wesp over the slightest alteration to any game content outside of pure bugfixes, and meanwhile Tess meticulously repositions every NPC near a dance floor so that there's no chance of there being any issues of the player's model clipping into any NPCs and thus ruining the aesthetics of all his custom nude mods.
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Dec 15, 2015 07:14
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MonsieurChoc posted:Seriously, that video trailer for the "One World of Darkness" is a super good example of how dated the oWoD feels. It's going to take a ton of work to make it work for modern audiences that wouldn't be needed with the Better World of Darkness. Modern audiences? Doubtful. Paradox was pretty explicit in the original buyout announcement that the goal was to win back the old oWoD audience, all of whom are now well into their thirties at the youngest.
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Dec 15, 2015 08:39
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Loomer posted:Not that I recall off the top of my head, and a quick Find in the vamp file only showed a Nosferatu and an Assamite antitribu wrestler. The entirety of oWoD in all its excess is justified by the existence of El Diablo Verde.
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Dec 15, 2015 08:40
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edit: apparently the forums agreed enough to make the same post twice
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Dec 15, 2015 08:42
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Alien Rope Burn posted:Maybe it's already been asked, but how are the new investigation rules in Chronicles of Darkness? What's been changed? It's pretty directly derived from the investigation rules from GUMSHOE, though not quite as extensive and with tweaks to fit into the structure of the revised Storytelling System. Some of the new investigation-specific merits look like they'd intersect with the system in interesting ways, though I couldn't say how they actually play in practice.
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Jan 28, 2016 07:32
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Axelgear posted:There's definitely some interesting stuff in Beast, mechanically. The only problem is that anything worth saving could just be carved out and stuffed messily into Changeling 2e. The good parts would be a perfect fit for the new edition of Changeling: The Lost, and the bad parts would be a perfect fit for the new edition of Changeling: The Dreaming.
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Feb 9, 2016 20:48
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Kai Tave posted:Can't wait for Wraith: the Twin Towers. The Twin Towers were already in Orpheus way back in 2004.
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Feb 16, 2016 10:45
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Gerund posted:What I love about Elder Foot-in-Mouth of Clan Toreador's slam about the failures of White Wolf being the introduction of 'Fantasy' is that it pegs him as an arriviste to the fandom that really bought into the controversy of the day. Anyone who ignores the Ars Magica (87) and Dark Ages (96) inclusion into the Vampire game line to talk up Exalted (2001) and the absence of 9/11 is a late 90s fanger fanboy that never got over having to share attention with "that dirty anime game" younger brother. For that matter, anybody who complains about the injection of high fantasy into the oWoD is obviously unfamiliar with Mage as it was actually played.
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Feb 16, 2016 18:54
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 Never Forget
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Feb 16, 2016 18:56
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Doodmons posted:What in the name of loving christ is that the Mage 1e Storyteller's Screen, from the good old days when the Technocracy was literally The Matrix and your character sheet was airbrushed onto the side of a van
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Feb 16, 2016 23:06
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Loomer posted:Theo Bell was alright after a couple of authors had a crack at him. Victoria Ash apparently was beloved but loving annoyed me to no end except in the Victorian Age novels, which were probably the best Vampire-birthed novels period. I'm sure that Lucita had her fans, even though (or maybe specifically because) she was the blandest Mary Sue character in the entire setting, which is certainly saying something. Although the version of her in the Dark Ages books was at least bearable, in that she actually had personality traits other than "is a stone cold badass". Cabbit posted:Not strictly oWoD but Divis Mal sticks with me. Then again, Paradox is probably not interested in toy sales. Onyx Path bought the Aberrant/Trinity IP outright, so he isn't even a White Wolf character any more.
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Feb 17, 2016 04:25
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Lightning Lord posted:I like Saulot as this guy who wandered around trying to be cool but everyone was just determined to be a dick to him and interpret everything he did in the worst possible light. I actually liked the interpretation of him from (IIRC) the end of the Transylvania Chronicles, where he tried being good moral for millennia but failed to reach Golconda and regain his humanity, so he said "gently caress it" and figured that, if God wouldn't allow him to be a saint, then he'd become the wickedest devil to ever walk the earth, purely out of spite for God. (And even before that, he sired the Baali bloodline by burying a bunch of people in a hellmouth and then seeping his vitae into the pit, just to see what'd happen.) Of course, every book that came after that stuck with the dull "Saulot is a literal saint" characterization, right up until he martyred himself in Gehenna.
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Feb 17, 2016 22:46
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Gerund posted:Coercive power dynamics laced with the means for sexualized harassment is a real issue to be accounted for, if you aren't actually thrilled at the prospect of making your society predatory against the least able to voice themselves. Ending scenes and "Fading to Black" is not a catch-all solution when in a social hierarchy that doesn't self-police and celebrates people that choose to end the fun for the player that was the least uncomfortable. Tzimisce Elder, actually
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Feb 26, 2016 00:16
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I've never been a fan of the literal physical mechanical aesthetics of the God-Machine's mechanical trappings, like the angels made of creaky gears and so on; it just comes off as cartoonishly on-the-nose (and definitely too close to steampunk for my tastes). I'm sure I'm not the only one who was initially turned off by the cog-laden pneumatic gargoyles that visually define the GM's infrastructure in the GMC rulebook.
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Mar 31, 2016 03:02
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Pope Guilty posted:So V20 Black Hand is out. Was anyone, anywhere asking for another book about the True Black Hand?
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Apr 8, 2016 14:59
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"Elders are constitutionally incapable of learning how to use modern technology" is a Vampire trope that runs the risk of turning the setting into unintentional farce pretty quickly. Elders who've just awakened from a century-plus torpor, sure, but it's kind of silly to have someone who's been active for most of the last half-century treating a computer like a magic witching box, especially if that elder is personally running a network of contacts and catspaws that's even slightly enmeshed in mortal society. A modern-day elder likely won't know how computers work on a technical level, but that doesn't mean that they won't at least know how to use email or a cellphone, even if they personally choose not to use that technology themselves.
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Jun 18, 2016 19:19
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MonsieurChoc posted:It's actually all part vampires being static, sterile and uncreative beings. As they age they get stuck in repeating patterns instead of really changing, a few notable exceptions (like PCs) aside. Personally, I've never found the various takes on vampires that remove human psychological traits (like "vampires can't adapt" or "vampires can't feel love") to be all that compelling; if anything, they detract from the horror that should be essential both to being a vampire and to confronting one. The Beast and the Hunger are, by themselves, more than enough to make being a vampire viscerally horrifying. Anything that makes them mentally inhuman beyond that should be a natural consequence of both a) the character's choices and actions under the Beast's influence and b) the social isolation that would naturally follow over time from being an exclusively nocturnal immortal. Making vampires psychologically alien from the moment of Embrace, or as an intrinsic characteristic of Blood Potency advancing, or whatever - it makes the vampire less human and thus makes their actions (and their desires) less horrifying. And on the flip side, the more inhuman something is, the less horrifying it is for a hunter to have to actually hunt and hurt and kill it. There's a fuzzy distinction between "this thing used to be a person" and "this is a person" when it comes to vampires and similar monsters, and when they clearly and explicitly fall on the former side of that line, they just aren't as effective as protagonists or as antagonists.
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Jun 18, 2016 23:22
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Also: an immortal who's psychologically stuck in the past and is literally incapable of change is actually an incredibly pathetic figure. Which is great if that's what you're going for, but it completely undercuts their place in the narrative and the setting if they're meant to be an actual, rounded character who serves a role other than pathos or punchline.
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Jun 19, 2016 00:10
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ProfessorCirno posted:The idea that an inability to adapt to technology is somehow an inhuman one is absurd. Have you literally never met other human beings? If anything, making old-rear end vampires awful at using technology does the opposite - it makes them way more startlingly human. An enemy that can easily adapt to any changes thrown at them without worry is a frighteningly alien one. The point is that old-rear end vampires who are unable to adapt should be stuck in the past because they're old-rear end humans, not because vampires are by their very nature fundamentally incapable of adapting at all. And old-rear end mortals can get away with not adapting where old-rear end vampires can't, because old-rear end mortals don't have legions of desperately ambitious neonates and ancillae lurking in the shadows waiting for a moment of weakness to eat their souls.
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Jun 19, 2016 18:26
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Doodmons posted:Yeah there is. As of Requiem 2nd edition, torpor dreams don't just scramble all your old memories and give you Fog of Ages, they also give your weirdly prophetic visions of what the world is going to be like when you wake up that make it very easy to adapt to whatever time period you end up in. There's a fiction piece written by an ancilla whose job it is to help torpored elders adjust to the modern world once they've woken up and she's like "this job is easy as gently caress, the elders pop out of their coffins and within a day or two they already know more about the modern world than I do. I still don't get Twitter and they're happily tapping away on smartphones." There's also a bit in Ancient Mysteries that covers how an elder's mental malleability in coming out of long-term torpor actually makes them ripe for indoctrination and brainwashing by anyone less-than-scrupulous who just so happened to find them as they were awakening (assuming that one party didn't instead immediately try to eat the other, of course).
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Jun 20, 2016 19:33
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cptn_dr posted:A whole bunch of VTM books are part of the Humble Book Bundle this week, for the three people who don't have it and want to pick it up. It's all Revised Edition (so far), plus the Book of Nod and By Night Studios' new VtM Mind's Eye Theatre rulebook.
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Jul 27, 2016 21:53
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Pope Guilty posted:Wasn't the position of Sheriff originally just a guy called Sheriff who killed people for the Prince of Gary or something like that? The Sheriff, like the primogen, was something unique to Chicago that was almost immediately generalized to every other city. Chicago by Night was incredibly influential over Vampire as a whole, especially in the first few years of the game, if only because it gave you a better idea of what Kindred society was actually like in practice than the core rulebooks ever did.
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Aug 2, 2016 05:46
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Pope Guilty posted:Vassago also plays a prominent role in Hunter: Fall From Grace, as the patron and voice-in-the-head of Imbued serial killer Rigger111. That plot thread also gets tied up in the interstitial fiction in World of Darkness: Time of Judgment.
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Aug 26, 2016 16:12
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