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Since it's a new thread, and it was briefly in the 3rd post, can I ask - what is BvD ?
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Apr 11, 2015 00:54
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Crion posted:"Mostly normal people in a desperately hosed up situation they have to band together to fight" says to me street-level people with day jobs who aren't looking for a fight, but who found one and now have to deal with it. That is the Union or it's a Mortals game. Hunters, by and large, are not "mostly normal" people, and I don't mean that in the sense that they lack superpowers. They are generally speaking NOT groups of friends/families/co-workers (excepting the Union) unless those friendships, families, or jobs are themselves outside the bounds of "mostly normal." And I don't care what size it is, no member of an Ashwood Abbey or Bear Large compact is a "mostly normal" person. I mean you could do the generally logical thing suggested in the Cell/Compact/Conspiracy description and have a Cell of Hunters lead into a Compact as they grow in size and organisation, or have them picked up into an existing Compact or Conspiracy, but the core of Hunter is "mostly mortals, fighting monsters, don't go crazy" > "which organisation do I belong to?" unless I misread it. If someone wants to play Hunter for the themes they like in it, then let them play Hunter without needing to categorise it as a specific Compact/Conspiracy, or insisting that they aren't really playing Hunter. That's veering towards No True Scotsman territory a bit.
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Apr 21, 2015 20:49
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Nah that's either a hugely successful success on a Forces ritual, or a spectacular failure on the same ritual. Mage - creating memetic sex-juggernaut plagues since 1993.
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May 5, 2015 11:01
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Doodmons posted:Gritty Noir <------> Superheroes spectrum. A group of 5 mages of disparate Traditions sent to New Orleans as part of an effort to clean it up and stem the tide of Entropy that's been sweeping northward over the last 2 years of metaplot-related games. This whole thing started when a coterie of Vampires deliberately brought back a Baali to the city, in order to get rid of a "Salubri" that was mind controlling the Prince. Bigger fish kinda thing. Needless to say, Mary the Black didn't leave, one of the party betrayed the rest and Blood Bound them to Mary (bad decisions meant they were having trouble feeding, so they bought/stole blood from a local blood bank), and Mary ended up summoning The Great Beast with the party's assistance, then escaped a pack of werewolves by throwing the PCs at them as bait - rough quote I believe is "They are coming here, and they are looking for the most evil thing in the city. After me, that'd be... you?", ordered the rest of the party to protect the traitor, and left as a pack of werewolves kicked in the door. End campaign. So that's why the Council of Las Vegas wanted something done about it, though at the time they were having their own problems with Sabbat incursions and the pseudo-peace with the Technocracy flaring up, so they sent us; a Virtual Adept information acquirer, a Euthanatos ex-mafia psychiatrist, an Akashic monk/cook, and an Etherite Temporal Scientist. We were later joined by a Verbena pagan priest from the Bayou, and a Hermetic Demonhunter after the Akashic was mobbed by a pack of cultists and died. Given that it's Mage, and oWoD, there is some ridiculousness like the Demonhunters ridiculous sword that kills anything, and I've gotten an incredible amount of use out of Correspondance for teleporting things and general Spatial-related bullshit. But mostly it's been pretty gritty, no massive organisations in the city to help us because they were wrecked by the Hurricane/Great Beast, everything is terrible and scary because there's still a Baali Methusulah in the city somewhere with all her minions, and a bunch of stuff seems to have snuck in when the Baali Shattered the Gates and has spent the last 2 years incubating. We've been playing everything pretty carefully, lots of elaborate plans which end up going off half-cocked, and trying not to do too much Vulgar magic. Actually I think I'm the only one that has really done any, as the Etherite, and that's just because it's so much fun to go "gently caress the rules, I have Unlimited Science!" and also keep forgetting that Vulgar magic exists just before pushing all of the water out of a building while right next to a pair of sleepers. I think it also helps that the GM doesn't really give much of a poo poo towards Established Lore beyond basic factions stuff, and loves to come up with weird poo poo, especially since everybody else has read much more WoD stuff than he has - even if it's not conscious metagaming it's often more fun to go in blind and guess/uncover things, since he is harsh but fair and doesn't really railroad or twist things around to spite the players. *Demon being first, the only real foray into that went off the rails very quickly because it didn't really have the same limiting factors that other lines have? No real organisation to adhere to or be afraid of, no big weaknesses, only really limited by how much Faith you could gather and some powers didn't even need it to wreck face.
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May 17, 2015 14:45
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Chernobyl Peace Prize posted:Add to this that your presence inspires actual good person heroes to start being more Galahad and less gaston (but who still feel a compulsion to track and murder the beast on the side) and you'd have a legitimately interesting narrative tension built in. You're the worst but you bring out the best. If you indulge your beast, feed a lot, make life miserable for other people, then it seems natural that some kind of reaction happens in the world. Someone gets Called to Heroism, genuine St George and the Dragon, or some of the destruction you wreak leaves room for new life. But also in opposition, if you abstain from feeding in order to save your own personal morality, then perhaps the kind of Heroes that the book talks about rise up, selfish dickheads who might even become the next "host" of your beast somehow. Or perhaps it's more subtle than that, and everything around you falls to poo poo - your friends and family suffer nasty accidents and cruel twists of fate, or you cause chaos similar to Promethean's disquiet. Make it so that your very existance is a cruelty on the world - either you can control it and choose who it is inflicted upon or have some beneficial side-effects, or you can attempt to deny it and watch terror that you could have prevented spring up around you. Similar to Vampire in that the most moral choice is "kill yourself", but could be made less so if that'd just cause another Beast to spring up in your place. This also means that Beasts who mindlessly/evilly indulge will cause Heroes to spring up and murder them, so there's a selfish angle of self-preservation in it too. Some kind of rule where the Morality/Integrity of "your" Heroes is the same as your Satiety; high feeding, Saintly Heroes; sparse feeding, gun-toting MRAs. Also means that teaming up with other Splats is a good move either way - either way they'll be accomplices of a sort, but if they know the score then a Good Beast can have allies to put down the Evil Heroes that spring up, and an Evil Beast can have allies/minions to protect them from the Good Heroes that spring up, with an Evil Beast I think being able to do more Buff-work through High Satiety stuff so providing more of a benefit to their allies? Maybe it steps on the toes of a few of the other gamelines, but Designated Villain is a pretty compelling role - look at Better Angels for Superheroes, and Beast could fulfil it in a Fantasy/WoD-style way. Apologies if I'm restating stuff that's already been said throughout the thread.
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Jun 4, 2015 04:04
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I only know stuff from oWoD, as one or two the Storyteller's Guides for VtM went into how Supernatural blood affects stuff, though I think nWoD kept both Werewolf and Mage effects roughly similar? Werewolf - double yield of blood drained, but take a penalty to rolls to resist frenzy. In oWoD it was +2 or +3 to difficulty as long as the blood remained in your system, which would probably translate to a dice pool penalty for nWoD, maybe check the corebook or ST's handbook for Requiem see if it says anything? Mage - visions/hallucinations, or potentially derangements I think? Again check the books for clarification, or alternatively interpret the visions as similar to temporary/uncontrolled Mage Sight of whatever Path of Mage it was? Changeling - oWoD had Changeling blood as a sortof happydrug for Vampires I think, like blood cocaine or just general Emotion-rich blood idk. nWoD Changelings are very different, so unlikely to still stand, but possibly still some emotion-related effect. None of the other lines really carried through or could be fed on, being either human, a human host, or dead/undead. Promethean blood is less nourishing because it's not real, I remember hearing but no idea if that's true or not.
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Jun 4, 2015 05:49
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Yawgmoth posted:Was anyone else kind of disappointed when they got rid of the whole "you can drink from other supers but it's also got these side effects" deal? Because I always thought that was a wonderful bit of flavor (and led to some great misadventures, like trying to kidnap a werewolf for their crazy efficient blood). In almost every Mage game I've been in, as soon as it is revealed that Vampire blood contains Quintessence/Tass/Mana, someone has tried to kidnap a vampire and keep them in their basement as a source of power. It never goes well, and is usually never tried again in that group of players, but in the next game... Hasn't happened yet in the current game, but while I was unable to play during heavy exam season, by mage character was held captive my vampires because magical LSD blood, so I guess the recurrent vampire related kidnapping happened the way you'd expect for once.
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Jun 4, 2015 15:28
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Cabbit posted:Seer or Technocrat: YOU make the call! Well, what splat is Sam Vimes?
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Jun 8, 2015 09:54
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I think perhaps the role, both story and mechanically is that Huntsmen are to serve as the hand of the Keepers? If keepers can't touch members of a court due to mantles, court structure, what have you, then it's the Huntsmen that are sent in to weaken you. They are the friends that get called to harry you, to seduce your lancelot, to threaten your boss until she fires you, ultimately to strip away the narrative protections against your Keeper on your own terms. Since mantles and courts are being expanded to act as a metaphysical restraining order against keepers, to give them more importance beyond "a friend to watch your back", Huntsmen seem like a necessary means for the Keepers to work around that, their way of showing their escaped charges that they are never safe?
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Jun 13, 2015 16:53
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Swags posted:Anyone have a list of some three dot Wonders from mage? I just joined a game and I'm attempting to figure out how wonders work. Book isn't very forthcoming. Here's a PDF of every published Wonder, complete with page references. I think the Revised MtAsc corebook has a chart that breaks down Wonder cost by strength etc, and Forged by Dragonfire is a book all about Wonders that might help. That said, if you backed Mage 20th Anniversary edition then the backers pdf should be out for that - your group might be using M20 rules, in which case you'd probably do best to ask them about it or if someone could send you the Wonder rules from it since I think they were one of the specific areas of attention when tightening up rules. I can't be more specific since I haven't had the chance to go through the pdf myself yet, sorry.
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Jun 16, 2015 02:54
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Mors Rattus posted:Those dudes got retconned, actually, they're the evil mutant reflection of the Void Engineers to go with all the other Negative Zone Technocrats. So they're humans mutated by being trapped in the Avatar Storm. Edit: Also minor thing, but it wasn't the avatar storm itself that did the warping, it's just something that happens in the oWoD Umbra, called acclimatisation iirc. The longer you spend in the umbra, the more spirit-like you become. It's possible to ward against it, and some paradigms/individuals seem more susceptible than others, but anyone spending more than 3 months in the umbra without protection becomes a spirit of themselves or whatever they believe. That's why the Technocracy rotated staff between "deep space" installations, and why Mages didn't spend all their time loving about there. Thinking of it, it was probably a Revised-era change, in order to cut down on the Wacky Umbral Adventures side of Mage, maybe? Sorry for swinging chat back to mage. Ambi fucked around with this message at 02:09 on Aug 25, 2015 |
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Aug 25, 2015 02:04
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Hell I'm pretty sure if they made the game moddable enough, it wouldn't matter whether it was oWoD or nWoD as people could mod it to their satisfaction. You know there'd be a Complete [edition] Overhaul pack up within like a month of release.
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Nov 3, 2015 07:46
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Alien Rope Burn posted:Got your placards ready: They cut and apologised for the IRA associations in Fianna corebook, and there's definitely a lot of rad Irish mythology to draw upon, with the different cycles and heroes. Plus with the prevalence of wolves in Irish history, various myths such as the Werewolves of Ossory, and apparently the first name Fáelad referring to werewolves of Tipperary, I'd have been kindof disappointed if there hadn't been some kind of Irish werewolf group if they were doing region-based groups. Similarly, I'm tentatively hoping that Changeling 20th will turn out to be a revised look, since from what I've read of dreaming it distorted a lot of Irish mythology for no good reason, and there's plenty of neat stuff to work with. Less faith and begorrah would be good.
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Nov 10, 2015 22:42
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Ocanthus posted:Yea, I had thought the reason the Avatar Storm didn't kill sleepers but shredded mages was because Sleeper had no Avatar to interact with and instead embedded themselves and forcibly Awakened people. That might just be in one of the specific Ascension endgame scenarios though. That, and all of the Avatars that became the Avatar Storm shards were just kind of floating around in the Umbra waiting to get delivered by psychopomps (back in the day) or just reincarnated into people which is by the Nephandi ones were so bad because they kept coming back. Might be mixing up my metaplots though. Iirc, the avatar storm got full of shards because a lot of mages hung out in the umbra, especially high-power or elder mages, because there's no paradox in the umbra so it's a magical safe space where you can chill in your demiplane, or have Gandalf style firework competitions, or be actually 600 years old without reality pitching a shitfit at you. So a sudden massive storm breaks through, and all these guys bite it and their avatars are shattered and become embedded in the boundaries of the umbra. Also mages tended to hold their big conclaves and things in the umbra, because it was easier to get to teleport to someone's personal demiplane than to have everyone (currently in a magical cold war) gather in one easily targeted place, so some mages fell afoul of it because of that, I think particularly in one of the Ascension endings. I think you might be mixing up the aftereffects, from Revised edition, where because of the storm shards embedded in the gauntlet you took aggravated damage for every failed dice when passing into the umbra, since the shards were effectively magnetised to your awakened avatar. Out-of-universe the reason was they wanted to have Revised be more grounded, less High Adventure, and making travel to the Umbra more punishing was part of that. I think it was kinda dumb, because the umbra was rad, and Werewolf wasn't doing much with a realm of concepts made manifest anyway, but trippy spirit adventures and stealing werewolf's spotlight were deemed a bad thing. Edit: Just realised, the avatar shards embedding into people is I think one of the other Ascension endings, the one that heavily involved Psychopomps (who I think were only ever mentioned in one other book)? Nephandi do have the thing where their worst aspect is the predatory reincarnation part, they'll either corrupt you now or kill you so they can corrupt you next time, and once they've got you, every reincarnation will either be Nephandi or have a strong pull to become one. Ambi fucked around with this message at 06:02 on Nov 13, 2015 |
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Nov 13, 2015 05:58
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Masquerade was massive, much more frequent publishing schedule, most larps are oWoD and see; D&D 3.5 vs 4e for grognard comparison. I'm supremely glad the chronicles books are now standalone, as the corebook+splatbook approach put me off nwod when it was coming out, especially since it didn't have the online databases/resources that made book-bouncing less painful, see again 3.5.
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Dec 13, 2015 14:52
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I remember Chulorviah having a writeup in Book of the Wyrm for W20, which basically amounted to "mind-controlling squid things, go full Cthulhu if you like, or Innsmouth, maybe they came from the Wyrm but who the gently caress cares, they are horrible sea monsters that want to absorb humanity". It's a good book. My favourite are the mockery breeds, artificial shapeshifters, and oh my god I haven't read this since the kickstarter draft, the Samsa "eight-foot tall bipedal cockroaches that are terrified of the dark" and rhino-men. I need to run a W20 game sometime, mostly for the saturday-morning-cartoon horror and pulp styling, and because god drat I just want to orchestrate a hunt for a Maeljin or some huge horror.
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Dec 14, 2015 16:00
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I think the scariest enemy we've faced in Mage is mortal police. Vampires? Lol we're mages and you don't count as Sleepers, eat sunlight and fireballs. Weird demons that feed off power and resist magical damage? Shoot it in the face and then run it over with a car. Police? Uh, poo poo, we can't just magic these guys away, and they have the power to seriously gently caress with our lives. I was the worst liar in the party, and was only saved from being arrested by judicious use of Jedi Mind Tricks and somebody doing their best to buff my bluffing skill while hiding in the rafters. There was also the concerned mother of a teen we failed to save from demonic possession, who got an interview on local TV and refused to stop associating Magic with Devilry (it did kill her son after all), and started up a rival orphanage. It also didn't help that one of the kids she was protecting was apparently destined to become a Nephandi/Banisher or some other dark fate, and thus was beheaded by a group of Voudoun fate-watchers when he tried to do his "look into your mind to make sure you're trustworthy" thing to them. I think we left her to her own devices after that, since we didn't want the police called on us again, and tried our best to work around her. We weren't as... scared of her, mostly because she was much more aggravating than anything else, so annoyance/anger balanced it out. To lighten the tone though, she also employed a grey-haired bodyguard, who "didn't want to get spelled" and squinted at us the whole time.
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Jan 16, 2016 20:00
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True but you generally don't get a manhunt called on you for killing demons. Demons tend to be at the top of, or in the service/thrall of a a large structure of people, rather than being compositional parts of said structure. I did get to redefine "up" as "down" for the demon to ground it though, after quantum entangling it with a staff and snapping that staff over my knee didn't work - it was much more resistant to physical magic than mental and narrative effects.
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Jan 16, 2016 23:25
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I thought from what brief text I read that Heroes were at least flat-out immune or ignore all beast powers, in order to enforce the anathema thing and give more justification for monster buddies, but then apparently not? I think they get a pass on mind affecting stuff but nothing to help with Dragonfire or hilarious physical stat boosting to just crush them flat.
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Feb 10, 2016 14:04
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If I remember right from the Syndicate revised convention book, didn't Pentex have an office or department within the Syndicate that mysteriously closed up shop when the avatar storm hit/2001? And all attempts to investigate it become (quite literal) dead ends. Before that they were quite happy with a profitable Special Projects department I think it was? It was only after the fact that it turned out everything was powered or contaminated by banes and had horrific side effects or just stopped working. They are currently trying to do a massive but subtle product recall, hoping that no other Convention will find out and use it as an excuse to purge them. Also one of the most rad things about nuclear power stations in oWoD is that a significant number of them, if not all, contain chained nuclear elementals - giant dragons of roaring nuclear fire. So 
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May 6, 2016 17:23
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Kibner posted:It's also a good way to have the players help expanding the world, too. If they are looking for a place to eat (and you don't already have somewhere in mind), ask them what kind of food they are looking for and yay, a place that serves it now exists! This is the origin of Bagelgrave, a recurring café in our games usually located next to a graveyard, each city/place of note has only one, and they are open 24/7 to serve lovely really overpriced coffee and stale bagels. They knowingly exist to cater to vampires (and sometimes other supernaturals) needing to meet at odd hours. Customers served =/= people served.
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May 19, 2016 18:35
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Alien Rope Burn posted:Actually, it's funny because "The New Inquisition" was the original working title of a certain occult horror RPG that was created as a direct response to the original World of Darkness. They are also a faction in Unknown Armies 1st & 2nd editions, 3rd is coming out soon but mentioned a lot of shakeup given the decade gap and needing to adjust to maintain postmodernity.
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Sep 6, 2016 18:35
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Kurieg posted:My one main desire for new demon was if they had some of old demon's powers. I had an oWoD Demon game that never got off the ground where one player was a demon who was so goddamn furious that the dinosaurs he had worked so hard on were just scrapped by loving upper management in favour of these pink non-feathered monkey things. Another player was the living embodiment of Eco-terrorism, and a third was The King of Sex (both political and pleasurable). I can't remember the other two, I think one was a maker of things and oh wait I remember. Player 4 was Nega-St Patrick, whose goal was to return the snakes to Ireland after some fucker with a staff had ruined Irish grass snakes for everyone. We were to be playing in Belfast, Northern Ireland, and I was looking forward to using the angry ghost of Ian Paisley Sr as an encounter, given how left wing the entire party was, and because they had plans to gently caress with Stormont (our parliament building) somehow.
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Dec 14, 2016 19:34
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Planning on running a Werewolf 20th game sometime soon, as I feel the itch for some Captain Planet / Anti-Pharma shenanigans. What's a good way to make character generation less gameable aka Lupus Stargazer Ahroun? Was planning on giving Metis freebie points for their Flaw, and Homid an extra 3-5 dots of abilities, and then splitting 10 points between Rage and Willpower regardless of tribe and auspice. Does that sound fair?
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Oct 22, 2018 18:05
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