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Liquid Communism posted:Worse than Samuel Haight? Haight was a perfectly fine antagonist in his first appearance, where he was just a dude who got screwed over by the Garou's obsession with racial purity and went to extreme ends in pursuit of revenge. Of course, everything after that was representative of the worst excesses of constantly escalating mid-90s metaplot.
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Aug 28, 2016 03:33
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The Demon endgame in the Time of Judgment book is actually less hosed than the end times setup as presented in Days of Fire, the Book of Nod analogue for DtF. First, in a literal nod to VtM's "Last Daughter of Eve" eschatology, the entire human race spontaneously stops conceiving baby girls, which would already be apocalyptic on its own merits. And second, scientists realize that the speed of light is actually slightly faster than previously measured, and then remeasure it to make sure and find that it's actually even faster than that - as it turns out, the speed of light is actually accelerating, and is doing so at a rate that would result in every subatomic particle in the universe exploding in about six months' time. This isn't presented in DoF as prophecy of things that might happen, but as the current state of events in the lead-up to the Time of Judgment endgame.
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Sep 2, 2016 03:09
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Gehenna, more than any of the other Time of Judgment sourcebooks, underlines the structural problem that those books had: if you've got multiple incompatible scenarios in one book, and by their nature you can only ever use one of them in your chronicle, you really really need to make sure that those scenarios are tangibly distinct from each other. Three of the four Gehenna scenarios boil down to "the Antediluvians return and your characters follow some NPCs around watching poo poo happen", and there's a lot of overlap between them in terms of what actually happens; you could run all three of them more or less simultaneously with only a little tweaking, and the only meaningful contradictions would come in the endings. I get that, on paper, "Nightshade" is mainly about the fall of the Camarilla and "Crucible of God" is just a straight-up apocalypse, but in practice both of them are telling the same story with a marginally different emphasis on the details. For what it's worth, the Gehenna novel seems to take place during "Nightshade", since it references a few events that were specific to that scenario, like the new sect that came out of the Camarilla.
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Sep 4, 2016 01:40
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Cabbit posted:I enjoyed the cover to the OWoD Vegas book, which perfectly captured the popular notion at the time that Vegas began and ended with the Strip. "at the time"
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Dec 10, 2016 23:56
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Night10194 posted:I cannot for the life of me figure out why. Because the people who bought out White Wolf bought it first and foremost for their LARPs and not for the tabletop game that people actually bought and played.
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Dec 23, 2016 21:00
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Joe Slowboat posted:This is great, and I'm surprised it would show up in Masquerade - I always got the sense that high-level vampires in M got things done with magic more than mundane resources, while Requiem was more inclined towards entrenched power through owning a city. That assumption was more or less true in 1e/2e VtM, where vampires controlled entire institutions through Disciplines and the blood bond, but in Revised there was a conscious push away from Kindred being such absolute puppetmasters towards a more VtR-like means of exercising subtler influence through proxies and catspaws. One of the better VtM sourcebooks from that period is The Gilded Cage, which is all about mortal-society background traits and what they actually mean in practice, so that the context of a character having sway among the police or the media is more immediately tangible for both the player and the Storyteller than having to figure out on the spot just exactly what you can do with two dots of Influence.
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Dec 29, 2016 19:56
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bewilderment posted:Are spirits at all influenced by real-world people's thoughts and if so, is there a reason given? Or is it that the "what people think" is because cultural myths are meant to be based on when people and spirits coexisted? Usually, it's both. From the spirit chapter of Predators: quote:Many of humanity’s folkloric beliefs about the "personalities" of animals have their root in the ways of the Shadow, or perhaps the nature of certain animal-spirits is rooted in the beliefs of humanity. Whatever the actual origin, some nature-spirits have much in common with conceptuals or other spirits outside the nature choirs. A raven-spirit may gather in a brood with death-spirits, or even take on aspects of a death-spirit itself without becoming magath or falling too far from the concept of what it is to be the spirit of “raven.” Such is the nature of the Shadow. The same principle applies to other spirits, too. A wrecking ball-spirit would presumably have aspects of physical power, force, and destruction, but it could have other aspects depending on circumstances; one could imagine the spirits of the tools of a unionized workforce would have aspects related to solidarity and pride. That said, artificial spirits aren't especially common, except in cases where the object in question has acquired something of a personality from a human perspective. A car straight off the assembly line likely wouldn't have an awakened spirit, but one that's racked up a hundred thousand miles probably has a spirit that reflects not only the car's actual nature but also the personality that its driver has projected onto it (and, possibly, something of the driver's own personality as well - or, at least, those elements of the driver's personality that would come to the forefront while behind the wheel or working under the hood). gtrmp fucked around with this message at 09:11 on Jan 31, 2017 |
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Jan 31, 2017 09:08
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Archonex posted:Got a link? The thread in question Reddit user "SAppelcline", who is definitely not Zak S using a sockpuppet to a) puff himself up and b) impersonate someone who's wronged him
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Feb 17, 2017 05:29
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Archonex posted:Either he's got other puppet accounts backing his statements up and acting like he's dropping some truthbombs or people are getting suckered into believing the impostor's poo poo on Reddit. Zak isn't a talented enough writer or dissembler to fake someone else's writing style. People are getting suckered because they want to believe that the 2edgy4u writer guy is being unjustly maligned (and the people who could most authoritatively condemn and rebut him aren't self-destructive enough to publicly do so).
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Feb 17, 2017 06:20
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Brainiac Five posted:So Hunters have more willpower than any normal human being. Okay. So we can describe that as a supernatural power in the same way Batman's ability to fight a dozen people at once is effectively supernatural, or we could insist that it's normal. All player characters, even the standard nWoD 1.0 blue-book-only PCs, are already mechanically exceptional by mortal standards at chargen. That doesn't mean that there's something inherently supernatural about blue-book mortal characters.
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Feb 19, 2017 09:19
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Onyx Path and Nocturnal Media (the publisher that WW co-founder Stewart Wieck started up after CCP bought WW) also co-own Sword and Sorcery, the IP that White Wolf used for its d20 publishing ventures, though Nocturnal seems to be handling the lion's share of the new work being done there. Nocturnal also owns some of the older IPs that found their way to White Wolf at some point, like King Arthur Pendragon; it looks like they more or less picked up all of WW's other IPs, aside from WoD/CofD and Exalted.
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Apr 2, 2017 18:34
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Basic Chunnel posted:F&F writeups tend to be overlong but all you need to do is scan over the art to understand that Beast is explicitly an otherkin game otherkin by way of Witch Girl Adventures
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Apr 24, 2017 21:55
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Night10194 posted:Well I mean they were originally meant to be returning Solar Exalted. HtR was developed and published first, so if anything the Solars were (originally) meant to be the Imbued, not vice versa.
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Jul 11, 2017 01:51
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BENGHAZI 2 posted:So pluses for the VtM 1e core intro: The 2e core book is almost exactly the same text as the 1e core, but with better formatting and editing and a much more stylish trade dress, and minus the illustrated story that runs through half the book. VtM 1e looks and feels like a Palladium book in comparison to 2e.
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Nov 8, 2017 06:28
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food court bailiff posted:Also - someone toss me some creepy Mage-related ideas that use those weird "elsagate" finger family children's Youtube spam videos, they're so insidious and weird that I really want to use them in a game but am still relearning the system too hard to know what really fits. Leakage from the timeline of the Prince of 100,000 Leaves. Sometimes, when a video on that timeline's Youtube would be removed for inappropriate levels of graphic violence and disturbing themes, the wires get crossed and it gets shunted into our timeline's Youtube instead. ("Inappropriate" by the standards of that world might mean that they're took extreme, or alternately, that they're not extreme enough.) "Elsa" and the other characters in those videos are changelings who are being tormented by an overstimulated, childlike Keeper who wants to be entertained by the same stories over and over but who doesn't want them to actually be the same story every time. The other players in the videos are forced to resort to more and more extreme variations on the same stock tales in order to keep their captor from getting bored and punishing them, and they've all been beaten down to the point that they'll inflict almost any imagined torment on "Elsa" if they think it'll stave off the Keeper's wrath. "Elsa" is a ghost in the machine, who was horribly murdered on camera and, in the process, somehow bound into a realm of digital media where she has total control over her virtual world. The trauma of her death left her spirit unaware of how she died, and each video is her trying to recreate the circumstances of her death in a different way - but playing out the actual act of her own murder over and over again would drive anyone mad, so she creates allegorical scenarios involving normally harmless children's characters. She's hoping that one of her videos will be close enough to the actual event that it'll jog her memory, and once that happens she can create a final video where she plays out her own murder and gets closure on her murder - but that only works if someone can bring themselves to watch that one last video and do whatever is ultimately needed to lay her ghost to rest.
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Nov 20, 2017 05:32
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Joe Slowboat posted:I'll be honest I'm always surprised by how often Banishers get given a 'yeah they're probably right' response on this forum? Well, the frailties of human nature do make every mage a potential threat to everyone and everything around them, and on top of that, the very nature of Paradox makes every mage a persistent threat to reality itself. The Abyss is an utterly existential threat, arguably beyond even the Exarchs, and that's especially true from the perspective of mages who've experienced Abyssal intrusions but never (knowingly) crossed paths with the Seers. Banishers might be totally wrong on several fundamental levels, but they're often wrong for the right reasons. Banishers would be more textually sympathetic if not for the fact that so much of the word count that's been given to them over the years has focused on the most oWoD-y Banisher stereotypes: wannabe Inquisitors, delusional self-denying skeptics, and the like.
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Nov 26, 2017 19:37
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Joe Slowboat posted:So I'm still running my Mage chronicle about a cabal hunting down Tremere infiltrators in the Pentacle in a mid-sized American city, and in doing so plumbing the local Mysteries (and pursuing their own Obsessions, of course). 
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Dec 14, 2017 07:15
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Pope Guilty posted:So Jalan-Aajav and Karsh- the same dude? In Revised Edition, it's an implicit yes., and IIRC the developers have explicitly confirmed it elsewhere. There's some more support in that direction in the Revised Dark Ages line, especially in the Dark Ages Clan Novels: Qarakh, the Gangrel/Road of the Beast signature character, is clearly meant to be Karsh, but also has a backstory that kind of suggests how he might have come to adopt the Aajav identity. But in the book where Karsh and Jalan-Aajav were introduced (Children of the Inquisition), there's no reason to assume that they're the same guy and plenty of out-of-character textual evidence that they're not. So the canonical answer is "yes" but, like pretty much everything to do with VtM backstory, it's needlessly vague and contradictory.
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Dec 27, 2017 15:53
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Slimnoid posted:I'd rather drop the turbofuck M80 onto something that deserves it. Like wherever the gently caress KotE came from. Problem: The Demon Emperor Qin Shihuangdi has marshalled an endless army of the hungry dead, with the intent of conquering the Underworld and thus enslaving and/or devouring the souls of all who have ever died Solution: Drop a spirit nuke on his capital with the intent of obliterating him and decapitating his imperial bureaucracy Result: The Demon Emperor Qin Shihuangdi now has a spirit nuke, and is hellbent on striking back at the idiot mortal mages who deployed it
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Feb 10, 2018 09:40
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Terrorforge posted:I have some vague memories from a previous discussion about this idea of an underwater vampire "civilization". Don't need to breathe and are barely affected by pressure and all that, plus some implication that there's something in the abyss calling to them. It may have been an oWoD thing or something that didn't make it into the nWoD book it was conceived for, but my memory is real hazy. All I remember is that it came up in regards to a possible Dark Eras vampirate writeup and that it sounded dope, so if anyone has the faintest clue what I'm rambling about feel free to explain what that was all about. The VtM clanbooks give the Lasombra a kind of compulsion towards the sea that's thought to originate with the clan founder, but the only underwater vampires that I recall in oWoD are the goofy-rear end Mariner Gangrel. Alan Moore's Swamp Thing is the first instance that I recall of an community of vampires who'd adapted to an underwater existence, though that's not WoD.
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Mar 4, 2018 15:34
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Tollymain posted:was there ever a point to having lower-generation characters in owod or was it just the most obvious character generation trap in theory, if you're going after other vampires specifically for the purpose of lowering your generation via diablerie, a 13th gen vampire isn't even in your sights but of course a vampire who's already set on murdering their kindred is going to find some other excuse to kill your character if it'd be expedient for them to do so so in practice, yes, it's 100% a newbie/roleplayer trap
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Apr 29, 2018 23:47
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PHIZ KALIFA posted:Didn't one of the Gehenna sourcebooks have rules for unique Caitiff disciplines? I think 14th & 15th gens also got some perks for being nearly human? getting to make up a unique discipline (provided that the storyteller allows it) doesn't make up for the fact that thin-bloods, especially at 15th gen, are barely more powerful than ghouls
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Apr 30, 2018 01:39
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Loomer posted:While I'm here, I'll just mention the citation for Triglav's line being the proper place to put Rustovitch and thus, the entire Tremere clan. Page 67 of DA:E establishes Rustovitch as Shaagra's grandchilde. The complication we find is that Kosczecsyku is variously described as Yorak's childe and Shaagra's, with Rites of the Blood having him introduce himself as a childe of Yorak. The tension is then which wins out. [snip] It's plausible, in a case where a vampire is stated to have two different sires, that both could be true from a certain angle. There's precedent in VtM canon for a vampire to be formally recognized as another's adoptive sire even if there's no direct connection by blood; this was the case with Anatole and Zoe in the Dark Ages Clan Novels, and IIRC the reaction to that state of affairs was nonchalant enough to imply that the idea of adopting a childe wasn't entirely unheard of.
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May 28, 2018 04:02
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Loomer posted:The Holocaust, mostly. Yep, Hitler canonically had the merit that gives you immunity to mind control and the blood bond.
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Nov 15, 2018 14:37
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xanthan posted:Were they in that order? From the little I know, that actually matches up pretty well. Vampires in denial of their monstrous nature and isolation from enemy, werewolf rage is obvious, mages bargaining that is or isn't allowed, wraith being incredibly depressing, and changeling being thur most hopeful is something. Faerie was slated to come out before Ghost in some of the early in-house promo material. Also, the game that became Wraith ended up repurposing some ideas from an earlier prototype game called Inferno, which was never completed because it shared the same curse that hit Wraith over the course of its production.
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Dec 30, 2018 01:02
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They lost the trademark as it relates to wrestling and related media; as far as I know, their trademarks as they relate to RPGs are unaffected.
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Mar 5, 2019 04:12
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Nessus posted:I forget where I read it, but weren't they at first basically just "immortal guys who eat blood and who still have some wizard magic," until Tremere put the bite on Saulot, at which point they became Cainites properly. They were definitely Cainites from the beginning, though they didn't really know what that actually entailed when their leadership first turned themselves undead. The ritual that turned them into vampires was supposed to give them true immortality rather than an artificially-induced Embrace, although some sources imply that Tremere himself, and maybe his lackey Etrius, knew or at least suspected that the ritual would in fact turn them into vampires and quietly chose to keep that fact from the rest. They just weren't an actual clan until they usurped the Salubri. Prior to that, they were still technically a Tzimisce bloodline, although their relationship with the Tzimisce in particular and other Cainites in general was mostly characterized by the other clans (mostly Tzimisce) attacking the Tremere in retaliation for abducting and experimenting on other vampires.
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Apr 9, 2019 00:31
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