World of Darkness Megathread: Curse of the Were-Poster

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WINNERSH TRIANGLE: Aug 17, 2011

quote:

(in a pseudo street-rap staccato)

# ¿ Apr 10, 2015 22:28

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# ¿ Apr 30, 2024 06:46

WINNERSH TRIANGLE: Aug 17, 2011

Daeren posted:

I think you mean this:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xi_hcwB8i64

Wasn't Mage best summed up by the dynamic between ICP's 'Miracles' (a radical Free Council/Silver Ladder collaboration) and Kanye/Jay-Z's 'Watch the Throne' (rich, powerful men producing Seer propaganda about how rich and powerful they are)?

# ¿ Apr 11, 2015 11:50

WINNERSH TRIANGLE: Aug 17, 2011

Ferrinus posted:

The mage looks down at his hands, puzzled and dismayed. Across the room, his smirking vampire nemesis pulls his hand out of his pocket, revealing the penknife he was holding onto the entire time.

All Powerful Lancea members now carry a battle-axe slung across their back, just in case.

tatankatonk posted:

quote:
"Welcome to My Nightmare"

Eve loosened the hoodie. She had pulled it tight around her face, trying to screen out the world, for all the good it had done. The cafeteria was too loud, and the sounds too diverse. Boys thumping on tables, high-pitched laughter from girls, the hum of the microphone that the lunch lady used, in vain, to get them to shut up. Eve stared down into her juice, and thought of water, the silent, cool, Boundless Deeps. She felt the cold on her skin, and she was home, if only in her mind.
Something slammed into her back and pitched her forward. One of the boys � Antonio � was playing catch using a wadded up piece of paper and had slipped. Eve stood up, wiping juice and the remnants of her lunch from her hoodie. She turned to face him.
�My bad,� said Antonio. Eve said nothing. Antonio didn�t wait for acknowledgement, he just turned and went back to his game.
Eve reached out and grabbed him by the hair. She pulled, using only a fraction of her true strength, and yanked him backwards into her arms. If we were in the ocean, she thought, I could crush him. I could eat his skin and liquefy his flesh in my mouth, and drink him slowly. The thought appealed, and started to call her home.
Seawater trickled into the room from the corners. No one noticed. The students chanted �Fight! Fight!� Someone ran to get the principal.

Eve let him go. Antonio turned, and curled his hands into a fist. And then he glanced at his forearm, and stopped.
A row of angry, circular wounds had appeared across his arms. Eve hadn�t touched him there. He looked at her in horror, and she pulled the hoodie strings tight again. �Don�t touch me,� she said.
Antonio could only nod.

hahahaha yessssssssssss

welcome to hell, you loving normies!!!!!

yes! yes!

# ¿ Apr 13, 2015 10:59

WINNERSH TRIANGLE: Aug 17, 2011

Gerund posted:

I have become less critical of Beast's fiction and otherwise iffy presentation to this point. Part of that is that it is very easy to denigrate games with a pithy example of gameplay- Vampire: the pedophile ring game, Werewolf: the southern revanchism game, Changeling: the abuse survivor game, Promethean: the homeless autistic game. Beast being described as the teenaged otherkin outcast game is not yet a great retort to the game-as-played.

Mage: the wicked sick game of grown-up responsibility.

# ¿ Apr 13, 2015 17:10

WINNERSH TRIANGLE: Aug 17, 2011

whydirt posted:

My only direct contact with WoD was a short Vampire game in the mid-90s, but I've been skimming this thread out of curiosity. The God-Machine thing from Demon sounds cool, can someone give me a short blurb about it and/or that particular game?

ONLY SEVERAL HUNDRED YEARS AGO, THE NEWLY CREATED SECRET DEADLY GANGSTER COMPUTER GOD earnestly began its� TOP SECRET OVER- ALL PLAN of world-wide FRANKENSTEIN LIVING DEATH SLAVERY, to explore and control the entire UNIVERSE. The Gangster Computer God concocted and even named its� OWN IDEAL COMMUNIST WORLD ORDER, namely the murder incorporated organized crime deadly gangsterism impunistic world-wide military uniformed mongrel federalism, COMMUNIST TOTALITARIANISM.

It was NEVER HOLY, NEVER WERE THERE ANY �ROMANS� (a figment like ANGELS or Heaven and Hell) and IT WAS NEVER AN EMPIRE. IT WAS AND IS THE REMAINS of the COMMUNIST GANGSTER COMPUTER GOD�S CONCOCTION AND MANIPULATION MURDER INCORPORATED ORGANIZED CRIME DEADLY SNEAK CONSPIRATORIAL (SNEAK CON ARTIST) PARROTING PUPPET UNIFORMED MILITARY ATHEISTIC COMMUNIST GANGSTERISM and the worse deadly enemy of the ENTIRE HUMAN RACE AND THE ENTIRE UNIVERSE, IN THE ENTIRE HISTORY OF THE ENTIRE UNIVERSE, NAMELY THE COMMUNIST ATHEIST CONSPIRACY WITH FRANKENSTEIN GANGSTER CONTROLS, the CATHOLIC CHURCH.

# ¿ Apr 14, 2015 20:25

WINNERSH TRIANGLE: Aug 17, 2011

TheLovablePlutonis posted:

Morghoullons

# ¿ Apr 22, 2015 23:53

WINNERSH TRIANGLE: Aug 17, 2011

Whatever mage ruling most brutally dunks on the moros nerds who've printed up a copy of WP:Worlds_Most_Reactive_Substances and transmute everything to francium as their sole means of interacting with the world; that I'll back.

# ¿ May 2, 2015 20:21

WINNERSH TRIANGLE: Aug 17, 2011

Luminous Obscurity posted:

Meanwhile oChangelings were listening to ICP's "Miracles" on repeat because learning things just kills the magic. From what I've been told, at least. C20's gonna be interesting.

I thought it was canon that ICP's miracles is an Awakened collaboration between th�arch Shaggy 2 Dope and libertine Violent J (extolling the wondrous and supernal in everyday life, the sleepers follow, the fact that they're standing on a giant metaphysical tower growing to link earth and heaven), against Seer Kanye and Jay Z's 'Watch The Throne' , an album about how rich and powerful they are and their chosen paths have made them.

# ¿ May 20, 2015 23:49

WINNERSH TRIANGLE: Aug 17, 2011

Beasts want to destroy the one true virtuous splat of the nWoD (banishers); by this we know that they are evil.

# ¿ Jun 2, 2015 21:20

WINNERSH TRIANGLE: Aug 17, 2011

Ferrinus posted:

Another victory for Mage.

Looking forward to some unbelievably sick banisher material to be published any day now ...

# ¿ Jun 13, 2015 08:00

WINNERSH TRIANGLE: Aug 17, 2011

tatankatonk posted:

Huntsmen putting sugar in your gas tank
Huntsmen slipping your cable repair guy a hundo to not actually fix your internet
Huntsmen registering at all your favorite internet forums to spam your PMs inbox with pictures of plants with thorns
Huntsmen replacing all your shampoo with hand soap

"Shadow Changeling" taunts the Motley every chance he gets. For example, Shadow Changeling calls the Motley idiots after they fall into a tunnel late in the game.

# ¿ Jun 13, 2015 17:43

WINNERSH TRIANGLE: Aug 17, 2011

Gerund posted:

It is tubular to see one side of the mouth tell us that the Adamantine Arrow doesn't involve itself with temporal causes and the other side present a Talon as a passionate upholder of the "rule of law" in a modern courtroom.

This, I say, is ideology.

*waves arms to perform rote mudra*

# ¿ Jul 8, 2015 00:18

WINNERSH TRIANGLE: Aug 17, 2011

Honestly the whole discussion is moot because people who play Arrows are boring people; people in touch with supernal Wisdom could be playing a Th�arch, or a Guardian, or a Seer, or a Banisher,

# ¿ Jul 9, 2015 19:51

WINNERSH TRIANGLE: Aug 17, 2011

Pope Guilty posted:

So basically that dumb Heinlein quote about specialization being for insects is the Arrow ideal?

After around a year and a half of playing with/running the new Vampire LARP rules, I have two major complaints (aside from the lack of non-Stock NPC rules for non-vampire supers): Influences and Status.

The old LARP Influence system had a number of Influence types- Street, Business, Police, Politics, Bureaucracy, etc. Each Influence type was its own Background, and you would buy levels in them separately- so you could have Industry Influence at level 2, Police at level 4, and Street at level 1, for example. It was encouraged for the Storyteller to set limits on how much Influence existed in a given city for each sector- so a Rust Belt city probably has a lot of Industry influence (though not as much as before), but very little High Society. This is good for the game because it gives people to fight over (if there's only room for one person with Finance 6 in the city, players who want their characters to run the local financial sector are going to have to contest for it). To actually use your Influence, you look at the chart for the Influence you want to use and see what each level gets you, then spend a number of levels equal to the action you want to do (or whatever the Storyteller agrees is equivalent, if it's not on the chart but plausible). So if you have Police 4 and you want to get somebody's plates run, you can expend one level of Police Influence (bringing it down to 3 until it refreshes at the end of the month) and now you have three levels to spend. If you then wanted to cancel a minor investigation (which was I think level 3), you could spend your remaining three levels of Police Influence to do it and be out of strings to pull until it refreshes.

In the new system (Mind's Eye Theater: Vampire: the Masquerade), Influence is two Backgrounds: Influence (Elite) and Influence (Underworld). Each goes to 5, and for every level you buy, you choose a specialization. (So you could have the Police specialization in Elite, representing that you donate a lot of money to the local cop union, and also in Underworld, representing that you slip bribes to crooked detectives and patrolmen). Each Influence type has a particular sort of action you can take at each level, and you can take one action per level of Influence you have per month, at any level up to your rating (so if you have Influence (Elite) 5, you can take 5 level 5 actions every month). Instead of representing variable levels of control as the Influence types in Laws of the Night did, the new system's Influence specialties let you take actions at one level higher than you have as long as you can justify how one of your specialties would let you do it. The problem is twofold. First, it's massively homogenizing; two characters with Influence (Elite) 3 have the same range of actions available to them. In the old system, to get poo poo done in the mortal world, you needed somebody with the right kind of pull, whereas anybody who drops a few XP can accomplish drat near anything in the new system. This makes individual characters less individual and less valuable (why bother hunting down the guy who basically owns the local police department when you have five people available whose generic Influence can do the same job?), and reduces the need to fight over things, which is, from a metagame standpoint, bad. (Because seriously, if you're running a Vampire LARP, you always want more things for the PCs to fight over.) The second issue is that this is a huge power boost available on the cheap. Especially if you take Influence with starting points, it's not much XP to max out your Influence, and it causes problems for the ST when loving everybody has a ton of Influence that they can do basically whatever they want with.

Cool, a friend of mine has invited me along to the local BNS LARP and I was considering spending my initial background dots on influence (since there's very little character-fitting to spend it on for a low-generation neonate after one dot of generation), lol, glad to hear that it's as busted and quadratic as I thought.

# ¿ Jul 18, 2015 23:05

WINNERSH TRIANGLE: Aug 17, 2011

Dammit Who? posted:

*gurps a lil* oh, excuse me

Greetings, fellow banisher.

# ¿ Jul 24, 2015 10:57

WINNERSH TRIANGLE: Aug 17, 2011

Kellsterik posted:

I'm making a Mage character and I think I want them to be a member of or associated with some kind of heresy or dissenting group that's distrusted by the mainstream Orders. Something from the books would be a good start but I don't know them super well. I'm thinking of the section in Left-Hand Path that talks about pacifist Arrows more than like, Tremere. I'm not necessarily thinking a Legacy, more like a faction.

Basically I want "unusual perspective, weird and potentially associated with dangerous magic, but not 'evil' in a way that will be disruptive to the party." I want to play a character that's connected to a tight-knit group with goals I can try to advance, but is contrary to the mainstream and makes interesting trouble. What kind of content exists like that?

Hounds of Cŵn Annwn are a cool legacy (though I know you weren't looking for legacies, they do also function as a faction to a greater or lesser extent). A group of Left Handed Awakened who've given up on the war with the Exarchs and the Abyss and, instead of rising up towards Supernal Truth/the unreality of the Abyss, have decided to descend into the calm accepting void of the Lower Realms. They're weird and dangerous - they use Prime to 'eat' things of beauty and purity (and, uh, occasionally Hallows) in the material world, sending it to a Garden-of-Eden type colony free of paradox in the Depths - and binding your Awakened Soul to obscure thaumavorous things that are to the Fallen World as the Fallen World is to the Supernal might be a bad idea - but they're not inherently evil, oppose the Abyss, and represent an interesting alternative response to the broader Mage cosmology. They'd definitely give you your 'interesting trouble' thing, and they do form a global community with strategy/religious meetings in their Lower Realms clubhouse full of priceless devoured art.

# ¿ Jul 26, 2015 13:10

WINNERSH TRIANGLE: Aug 17, 2011

Flavivirus posted:

This doc has a bunch of animals statted out: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1xMwKNrnxhEuCQjP1qStbxl-C4JIyRmT1D4FVgSqjmpo/edit

Athletics (hopping)

# ¿ Aug 10, 2015 14:47

WINNERSH TRIANGLE: Aug 17, 2011

Ferrinus posted:

My advice to you is to literally delete every mage-specific sin from the Wisdom chart and make it lost identically to the way that Morality is.

Like, if your demon accidentally escapes and eats someone, that's manslaughter. If you rip someone's soul out and render them catatonic, that's at least as bad as lobotomizing them with an ice pick.

and if you make an animate clay figure with your face, that's like, woah, dude, woah, man

# ¿ Mar 6, 2016 00:39

WINNERSH TRIANGLE: Aug 17, 2011

liking the new HelloQuizzy Aesthetic of the future.

# ¿ Mar 12, 2016 17:28

WINNERSH TRIANGLE: Aug 17, 2011

I'm guessing it's this:

# ¿ Mar 12, 2016 17:28

WINNERSH TRIANGLE: Aug 17, 2011

Pope Guilty posted:

Obsidian doing Fallout New Orleans would be supremely killer but I dunno why Paradox would be involved.

He (and then the official Obsidian account) said 'it's not [Fallout]. Something else cool, though!" I don't know how many projects they work on, but a major project in an area of the US with a cool cultural background (with occulty bits), and a project with Paradox? Sounds like they could be related.

# ¿ Mar 12, 2016 19:04

WINNERSH TRIANGLE: Aug 17, 2011

I know everyone knows it but I was just reading the Silver Ladder book and

Mage owns.

# ¿ Oct 28, 2016 15:37

WINNERSH TRIANGLE: Aug 17, 2011

Commissar Budgie posted:

(Vampire) Baby vs Dog

The dog was ghouled iirc. Just a little B vs D.

# ¿ Jan 12, 2017 19:59

WINNERSH TRIANGLE: Aug 17, 2011

Glad to see that team 'join the banishers' is still going strong.

Yawgmoth posted:

Yeah I have never once used the word Atlantis when trying to hook someone into Mage, and for good reason. If I really think they'll like the concept, I just say "ancient magical city" and leave it at that because Atlantis never gets anything but eyerolls at best.

I've quite liked exploring 'Atlantis-as-Babel' quite a bit in games I've played - it adds a few interesting twists to the idea ...

# ¿ Feb 14, 2017 15:05

WINNERSH TRIANGLE: Aug 17, 2011

Archonex posted:

While I was kind of joking, I really do gotta disagree about some parts of that. While the Seers are wholly bad news there's also lots of ambiguity on the Pentacle side of things. Though you can certainly play the PC's as heroes. It's pretty much canon though that power struggles in both of the factions are in some ways more venomous and collaterally destructive than Requiem's court politics.

And this is ignoring that no one else in the setting gives a poo poo about the magical equivalent of a class war until it spills over into their back yard. Ultimately, to anyone with their head screwed on straight the difference between a Seer ruining the neighborhood in order to create ~the perfect dystopia~ and a Pentacle mage doing it as part and parcel of their quest for ultimate truth is literally nothing. Both look like egotistically driven assholes when viewed from that lens. Hence why several of the Pentacle groups have at least some issues with seeing normal people as really being "people".

Ironically though, the Seers probably do more world saving in the modern era than the general mage populace does. Granted, it's entirely a selfish thing meant to preserve their own existence. It also doubles as a North Korea/Seoul-esque hostage taking sort of situation. Since if the Seers or Exarch's ever went away then the world would have a gently caress ton of potentially really powerful beings inevitably busting loose from their prisons and basically turning the setting into a post-apocalyptic version of Scion or Exalted. Doubly so since most of them were so powerful that mages at the height of their power literally could not kill them.

# ¿ Mar 13, 2018 17:19

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# ¿ Apr 30, 2024 06:46

WINNERSH TRIANGLE: Aug 17, 2011

Mage: the Awakening Matt Hardy.

# ¿ Jan 24, 2019 16:38

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