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Rites of the Dragon is my least favorite Requiem fiction, and I usually like everything Stolze writes. A better in-universe artifact - esp if you’ve been to bible school and can appreciate fictional textual criticism - is the incredibly nerdy Testament of Longinus. The clan splatbooks all had some amazing fiction. Daeva and Ventrue were probably my favorites with Mekhet a close third. I also loved the poo poo out of the Secrets of the Covenants fiction, which implausibly managed to make the Carthians cool by chronicling all their worst fuckups.
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Mar 25, 2019 05:45
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Anyone else on here back the Contagion Chronicle kickstarter? I can't really say the new splats are grabbing me yet, but I'm curious what y'all think.
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Mar 26, 2019 20:14
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The thing that weirds me out is that the contagion seems like it occupies the conceptual space of the Abyss - reality degrading or being degraded.
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Mar 26, 2019 22:12
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I've found Mummy to be really fun to play for three reasons: Themes: It's basically the horror of being middle management. You have a cult (which can even explicitly take the form of a corporation) that obeys you, but also sets your priority and ultimately follows priorities of the Judges of Duat, who you ultimately serve. The more you obey the Judges and follow the purpose of the cult, the more your memories and individuality get worn down. The more you try to assert yourself and be a decent person, the Judges strip away your ability to live until finally you sink down back into Duat into nightmares you won't remember until next time the cult summons you forth. Gameplay: It's reverse D&D. You start as a super-powerful lich with minions and a tomb/dungeon stocked with treasures that are precious to you. You often awaken not by being summoned by your cult but by having your tomb desecrated by modern (or ancient depending on the campaign timeframe) adventurers and looters. As you chase them down, your character level/power stat gets lower and lower until you're essentially a sickly human. Egypt Horror aesthetic: You're calling down curses, speaking with Anubis, remembering ancient glories, and fighting monstrous things that used to be people you knew before you were cursed. It's messy and weird. Bonus reason: My favorite way to play is to have one or two players be Mummies and the rest of the party play as loyal cultist minions. I've only played the game as a cultist, so I'm a fan of that play-style.
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Mar 27, 2019 19:05
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Enola Gay-For-Pay posted:Mummy as I experienced it was really weird because it seemed like there was exactly one modern day chronicle you could run, which had a time limit, and then you're done and it's period flashbacks or nothing. That isn't necessarily bad, but it was odd and I would really like to see the process of losing power and gaining memory drawn out a bit more so you could fit more stuff into a modern game with a single group of mummies. As I recall it felt like you'd get maybe a few months of actively doing stuff before you were too weak to function. I'd prefer the arc were more like Promethean, which also has a set end-point to aspire to but it's slower so there's a lot to do before you get there. That's going to be one of the things that is going to change in 2e. In 2e, Mummies will be fully unmoored in time, so instead of having a fixed modern time frame that you flashback to and from, you're experience is jumbled up. Your character might arise in the middle ages, but remember 1970s New York for instance.
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Mar 27, 2019 19:39
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Dave Brookshaw posted:On average, it's actually about two years. Can be much, much longer. That's confirmed in the Style Guide for Mummy that's on the Storyteller's Vault. "Mummies in First Edition are grim servants of the Judges who are eventually clued into the idea of breaking free; Second Edition Arisen have the entirety of their existences stretched out before them, experiencing time and the great flow of humanity in a non-linear fashion. Second edition is more explicit about what first edition kept implicit: purpose of the Arisen is to shepherd human civilization into patterns of rise, imperial phase, and fall, both so that no empire will overshadow the first and that the patterns of art conceived in Irem will continue to perpetuate. This in turn allows Sekhem, or cosmic creative energies, to flow into and empower relics, which are then sought out and sent down to feed the dark gods who created the mummies. Bereft of Memory, the mummies will continue this cycle for all eternity, unless they find a way to break it."
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Mar 27, 2019 19:41
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Dawgstar posted:I'm excited to see what they might do to make it so you'd have a group of the splat working together, which did not seem to be the case in 1E. In our game, we just had the two Arisen share the same cult even though they were from different guilds. Essentially, they were just two of many many sleeping corporate assets.
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Mar 27, 2019 20:45
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The X20 lines bother me because the nostalgia factor became an excuse to not do any game design on systems that desperately need an update. I'd like one version of Mage the Ascension with well designed spheres that are easy to adjudicate and a base system where I don't have three separate difficulty systems: floating target numbers, dice pool penalties/bonuses, and number of successes. Hell, I'd love a core Ascension book that reduced combat to one roll per turn. I can sort of hack this into nWoD 1e with the Mage Translation Guide, but there are a lot of complex subsystems (void ships, cyber augmentations, Talisman creation, bio-engineered templates) that I don't find super easy to convert over. Octavo fucked around with this message at 18:12 on Apr 1, 2019 |
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Apr 1, 2019 18:09
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Mendrian posted:Did they ever come up with a Paradox system for Ascension that wasn't just, 'here's a list of poo poo Paradox might do and some systems I guess, idk.' Not really, what's worse is that when MachineIV developed the quickstart guide, the guide included a fixed paradox chart so that the math worked. When M20 came out, the math was broken again.
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Apr 1, 2019 19:36
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Gyrotica posted:Yeah. When Mage20 came out my reaction was you had one job... I kinda think that Mage: the Ascension would be better as a powered by the apocalypse game with no common sphere system. Specific moves for rotes and general moves for improvisation based on splat specific domains like Primal Utility, Goetia, Alchemy, Dimensional Science, etc. Octavo fucked around with this message at 20:24 on Apr 1, 2019 |
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Apr 1, 2019 20:20
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Mendrian posted:I have a Mage question that hopefully won't devolve into Magechat. The pros: Creative Thaumaturgy / improvised spellcasting is much much easier than in 1e. It makes way more logical sense and has fewer steps, so once you cast a few spells, it gets easier to come up with and pull off cool ideas. The core also incorporates the very best of the 1e line. The orders are way more interesting, and the mystery generation system is fantastic. The cons: Every spell now uses the createthaum system and you can't just cast a pre-written spell and count successes to see how powerful it is without looking at charts to design the potency, scale, duration or the spell. It's a little intimidating for new players, but it's an awesome engine once you get it going.
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Apr 1, 2019 21:19
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LatwPIAT posted:M20 is somewhat astonishing of just how bad a job OPP did on it. For reasons that escape me, they decided to give the job of writing an updated version of Ascension to known madman and then publishing what he wrote unedited. That lack of ruthless editing - or at least partitioning materials away from a slim and playable core is what bothers me. IMO there are some really honest to goodness great ideas in M20. Focus/Paradigm being rewritten with an expanded look at core beliefs, magickal practices, and common tools/instruments? All of that was really amazing and is one thing I'd port to any other edition of Ascension. I also really liked the sidebars explaining how to take the core rules and apply them to different eras of the metaplot. Want the paradox system to look more like Revised? Add these tweaks. I think what the game needs now from Modiphius is an edition that 1. overhauls the sphere system to be easier to adjudicate. 2. runs on the slimmer ruleset of V5. and most importantly 3. has a developer like Malcolm Sheppard or Howard David Ingham who hasn't lost faith in the original protagonists like nearly every other Mage writer has. TL;DR I want 1st edition Mage, but mechanically functional and way less racist.
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Apr 2, 2019 15:37
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bewilderment posted:Mechanical magechat: Only Time spells can be cast using temporal sympathy and their spells do mention temporal sympathy, so no casting fireballs or mind control spells on subjects in their past. Citation Mage Errata: "Time 2: Temporal Sympathy: Only works on Time spells that call for it, or other spells Combined with a suitable Time spell." Note that Combined spells are not the same as Conjunctional spells. Example: Postcognition. A robbery has been committed in the local Lorehouse last night, and I want to look back in time to see whodunnit. So, I pull out all my yantras, build my dicepool and then get ready to cast the spell. Since the building hasn't changed much in the past day, the current status of the building has a strong temporal sympathy to its status last night. Therefore, I will need to raise my potency to at least 2 since strong connections are withstood at 1 per the chart on p 186. I'll also have to pump up the duration to cover the period when we think the robbery happened. Then, to save on time, I'll have to reach so I can scrub through the footage magically. Ah ha, it was that sneaky Reclaimer from the local Athenaeum! I was sure it was a Censor. Greedy SOB needs to learn to find their own Mysteries and leave our Lorehouses alone, goshdangit! Octavo fucked around with this message at 23:34 on Apr 4, 2019 |
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Apr 4, 2019 23:26
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bewilderment posted:Thanks for the example, but that's the easy kind. What's the other column in the Temporal Sympathy table for? The Withstand Connection side of the chart is when you're trying to change the levels of temporal sympathy that a subject has with itself in other times. "Just as Space magic that alters sympathetic links has consequences for the people or objects concerned, manipulating temporal sympathy can provoke subtle effects; increase a woman’s temporal sympathy with her youth and she’ll become highly nostalgic, perhaps trying to recapture it. Destroy a building’s temporal sympathy with its past and people will forget its history."
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Apr 5, 2019 01:13
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Warthur posted:Honestly, the main thing I actually dislike about M20 is how it goes out of its way to insist that you can't take a broad reading of what each sphere can do and be lenient like in 1st edition, that was Officially A Mistake And We Regret That. Not only does jumping through all the hoops to spellcast become a pain, but I find Ascension to be at its best when it's absolutely pants-on-head bizarre and everyone's rolling with that. Sure, you end up with PCs becoming disruptively hyperpowered very quickly, but you're the GM and you have all the NPCs in the world to mess with them with, and that GM screen artwork of the Ultimate Showdown of Ultimate Destiny In the Umbra is more or less the tone I want for Ascension. I liked that M20 had sidebars with a rundown of how spheres worked in 1e (call a cab with correspondence) and offered it as an alternate playstyle even if the rest of the text stuck to the process based determinism of 2nd edition forward. What I didn't like is that the new sphere descriptions and the supplement "How Do You Do That" managed to tighten the screws on sphere requirements to entirely unplayable levels. For instance, if your paradigm involved summoning spirits to do non-spiritual effects like fireballs or teleportation (which the fiction said that nearly all Hermetics did), then you had to add Spirit to all your effects for no additional benefit. A supplement that added that much specificity to what was originally a really loose magic system should have been playtested rigorously or even at all.
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Apr 9, 2019 16:04
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Tuxedo Catfish posted:Demons are explicitly immune to Beasts' Poochie aura. I loved that. If anything could make the impossibly cool robot/demon superspies even cooler, it would be how they're mutually repulsed by Beasts.
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Apr 9, 2019 19:54
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joylessdivision posted:Pretty much. The metaphor I keep going back to is that a Beast fucks up the ecosystem for the rest of the supernaturals in the area. By it's very existence it's thrown off whatever balance is running in a city on a mortal level, which will have repurcussions for whatever supernaturals are living there, on top of the whole Primordial Dream poo poo and lairs. Character concept: Mastigos Bounty Hunter who every Prince, Hierarch, and reigning Court has on speeddial because they are experts at putting astral horrors back where they belong.
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Apr 9, 2019 20:25
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If we might deviate from Beast-chat, has there been any word from Modiphius about the WoD properties they're managing? I heard rumors that they might be revising V5, but that's it.
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Apr 9, 2019 20:46
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Crasical posted:That reminds me. IIRC, Thinning the gauntlet is bad because more spirits will start reaching or coming across it to fiddle with the normal world to get their preferred form of essence (The spirits of deathmurder are gonna want deathmurder which is obviously bad, the spirits of Amusing Flatulence are going to be desperate for essence and have no conception that giving someone magical IBS is not cool), and so on and so forth. Also normal people might wander into the Shadow which is RIP them. Based on what DaveB was saying, it sounds like this is probably a leftover from Forsaken as sequel to Apocalypse since in WtA, the gauntlet is thickened in cities because of the Weaver.
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Apr 9, 2019 21:33
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The new Ascension supplement Gods and Monsters is out, and it really is grand to be reading another Mage book. As is usual for Mage: the Ascension supplements, there are tantalizing hints of forking metaplot paths, new material expanding concepts that haven't been explored since 1991, new story expansions and concepts to disagree thoroughly with, and some lovely art here and there.
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Apr 11, 2019 02:26
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Chernobyl Peace Prize posted:It's Mage except you want to cast the spell "not have to worry about grandma becoming a single eternally scream-blinking eye of the vast worm at the heart of the thousandth winding underspire" instead of shooting for tiny godhood. Wow, I'm suddenly really regretting not backing this one.
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Apr 18, 2019 15:32
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Nessus posted:They got me V20 as two books. They later recompiled it into one large tome. I picked up Mage the Awakening 2E as a POD tome. It's definitely shorter than M20 (thank goodness), but the spine and endpapers still peeled away from the cover after a while. DTRPG was very good about replacing it after I sent them photos, though. Customer service has always been really good there for me.
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Apr 19, 2019 16:21
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Ferrinus posted:What people don't realize is that a stark focus on personal horror and the material realities of day-to-day life as one of the damned makes tackling werewolves through concrete walls even cooler. This is an unironically great post that could apply to multiple WoD/CofD games.
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Apr 20, 2019 01:52
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The conversational authorial voice doesn't bother me too much and does come in handy when it comes to the big sidebars that talk about how to tweak the rules and the setting. It reminds me of how 13th age contains the duelling authorial voices of Jonathan Tweet and Rob Heinsoo in that it really gets across the reasons behind metaplot changes and rules changes across editions. Mage 20 is a giant weird tome, but it does have some genuinely good stuff in it. It clearly spells out how the different ways Effects can be used in combat and it overhauls the paradigm/focus system from earlier editions with surprising elegance. Prior to Mage 20, a lot of this stuff was found in obscure supplements or in Malcolm Sheppard posts (specifically related to paradox or how to handle aiming Effects.) I almost think it might be best to hand a prior edition (or the M20 quickstart) to new players to introduce the concepts and then just print out relevant rules text from M20 as handouts. Octavo fucked around with this message at 01:12 on Apr 22, 2019 |
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Apr 22, 2019 01:08
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Signs of Sorcery is out of layout and is in the proofing stage.
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Apr 23, 2019 02:30
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I'm just glad metaplot in M20 is considered multiple choice in every book, because I don't care for Nephandic infiltration of the Traditions or the Technocracy. The nephandi make a good setting element when used sparingly. Having them co-opt the leadership of the traditions and the technocracy means that it stops being a game about subaltern cultures fighting exploitative authoritarians. I like M20, but I'm really not looking forward to the Book of the Fallen, which I expect will be the big metaplot heavy book of the line. Rand Brittain posted:That too, but it was fairly specific about "we decided the Technocracy didn't kill the Crafts because that would be a pogrom and pogroms are obviously very bad." I don't think it's too crazy to worry about having a protagonist faction cross a moral event horizon. I'm suddenly hoping it's a long time before Paradox/White Wolf Entertainment turns its baleful eye on the technocracy. Octavo fucked around with this message at 19:50 on Apr 23, 2019 |
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Apr 23, 2019 19:31
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Rand Brittain posted:Anyway, has anybody developed an opinion on Contagion Chronicle yet? It's really not my thing. A couple of the settings seem interesting, like the one with the mummy that eats memory, but idk. Fighting or controlling an infinitely variable contagion that sickens the god machine just didn't seem like the greatest locus for crossover. I don't know if it's the concept I don't care for or the execution.
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Apr 23, 2019 20:58
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Chernobyl Peace Prize posted:This is probably the second Kickstarter I've dropped my pledge level a few tiers on after seeing the content, and the first was Exalted 3rd Edition, so uhhhh....yikes. This is the second Onyx Path KS I've dropped my pledge on after Changeling the Lost 2e. I'm going to have to carefully note the developer and lead designers involved before I buy anymore Chronicles of Darkness games, I think. Awakening is still gold, of course and by all accounts Deviant is going to be good too.
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Apr 23, 2019 21:53
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jakodee posted:Nah man carthians are a badly written and conceived faction. They had pretty great characterization in the Secrets of the Covenants fiction by Olivia Hill. A global look at their worst fuckups and what the NYC Carthians learned from those mistakes.
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Apr 27, 2019 19:16
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Archonex posted:What was even up with that? I mean, I know Phil Brucato (Or one of the big Ascension devs. I forget which offhand.) purportedly had odd ideas about the way the world worked. But was there ever an official explanation of how the devs went from the technocrats being oppressive bad guys to "well actually the technocracy is a good thing!". On a recent podcast, he said that he wanted to take a Rashomon approach to Mage since it was a game about competing realities, you'd always get an in-character perspective from each group that would contradict the others. I don't think the writers of Guide to the Technocracy (or the revised Convention Books) ever believed "the technocracy is right." They're openly works of propaganda and a lot of readers fell for it. On the other hand, the Brucato definitely turned against the Traditions entirely when he went from writing stories them with believable flaws with Aesops about power corrupting to saying (again on the mage podcast) that they were totally hosed wizard fascists. Octavo fucked around with this message at 03:39 on Apr 29, 2019 |
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Apr 29, 2019 03:34
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Archonex posted:That makes sense. Everything i've read about Brucato back then says he was a remarkably odd person. Not surprised that he'd do an about face into "Well actually the authoritarian fascists with a technological bent are the good guys!". Now i'm kinda curious if he ever explained the logic of how he decided that the Technocrats were the good guys. He doesn't think the technocrats are right or good. The protagonists he roots for are unsurprisingly the ones he created - the Crafts / Disparates.
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Apr 29, 2019 03:58
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Nessus posted:What exactly is the difference between a Tradition and a Craft, or is this like the distinction between a cult and a religion? The Traditions were the groups of mages who banded together when the Order of Reason started ramping up inquisitions and european colonialism. Their fight against the modern Technocracy is the Ascension War and the main conflict in oMage. The Crafts were written after the Traditions were created in Mage 1e and were intended to be mage groups that didn't take part in the Ascension War and focused on survival and cultural preservation. They were intended to be less cartoonish than the Traditions and more accurately reflect real world cultures (ymmv on how successful that was.) They got reorganized and given a new purpose in Mage 20 as the Disparate Alliance, a survival network that is investigating the Traditions and the Technocracy for Nephandic infiltration.
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Apr 29, 2019 04:14
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Rand Brittain posted:Guide to the Technocracy was deliberately written as parody, but unfortunately satire is opaque to a lot of people, especially if they were perfectly happy to believe what it's telling them. I think it might have been Malcolm Sheppard who said that the core Mage: the Ascension 1e theme of people being alienated by technology is one that's counter intuitive to a big portion of the audience. The point was never that flushing toilets and vaccines are bad and magic hippies are good. It's that small i technocracy - mechanized border security, racist facial recognition algorithms, always-on amazon echo mics, and telecoms ready to turn over all records to the cops - is hosed up and worth identifying and resisting.
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Apr 29, 2019 04:55
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Kurieg posted:So hey. If I can step away from mage chat... JFC
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Apr 29, 2019 14:27
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have a hot take from Martin.
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Dave Brookshaw posted:Forgetting that the Pentacle have flaws well-intentioned pcs must struggle against AND insisting that the out-and-out antagonists are right are both roads to the failure state that is Mage: The Ascension. drat, that's good. I wonder of that failure state could have been avoided if instead of the GttT, they had published "An Ex-Technocrat's Survival Guide", a book on deprogramming from the Technocracy's conditioning, figuring out how to construct a new paradigm that without the aspect of Control, and finally using all your cool spy gadgets to fight back. Hmm, I have an idea for a storyteller's vault product. Octavo fucked around with this message at 16:17 on Apr 29, 2019 |
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Apr 29, 2019 16:08
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Joe Slowboat posted:I just think that the 'actually the Pentacle can never win' side is misrepresenting the themes of the game and the space of play; also, again, I got called a rapist for saying 'maybe having a world without slavery is good.' I really love that about Mage. I think that particular one got statted up or at least described in detail in Imperial Mysteries. I had my group fight the Ochema of the Prophet aka the incarnation of "History is decided by Great Men." They ended up drop-kicking the rear end in a top hat into the Abyss via a crumbling Wending, thus causing Napoleon to get exiled to Saint Helena.
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Apr 30, 2019 16:38
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Lord_Hambrose posted:Man, every time Mage Chat gets this fired up I am glad I get my wizarding kicks with Ars Magica. Even oMage seems way more comprehensible as a thing to do for fun than some of the things I see talked about here. I’ve never been able to grok the magic rules for Ars Magica. What edition do you play?
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May 1, 2019 06:10
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Lord_Hambrose posted:Mostly 5th Edition, but I played a lot of 4th too. The system is deceptively simple, the game just loves throwing in lots of tiny subsystems and bonuses. One of the big things is that magic is very difficult to get really strong at but against anything other than wizards and other powerful supernatural beings it can do anything. Sounds fun. I’ve read a bunch of the 5th edition books since I wanted to see the path not taken relative to Mage the Ascension. I was a fan of how the Tremere were a mystery cult and not...vampire or soul stealers
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May 1, 2019 06:36
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Axelgear posted:I got the feeling, looking over M20, that Ascension is the Grant Morrison to Awakening's Neil Gaiman. All about the spiritual journey; very inwardly-focused. It's not about chasing mysteries and not really even about fighting the Technocracy. It's more like the sort of thing written on toilet paper at 3 AM in an Iowa bus station after swallowing an entire sheet of blotter acid; very revealing of the mental state of the author but not terribly much else. Ironically, Neil Gaiman was an Ascension fan and sent one of the writers (Kathleen Ryan, I think?) fanmail. Awakening’s Seers are pretty openly based on Morrison’s “Outer Church” from the Invisibles.
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May 1, 2019 14:49
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Captain Monkey posted:Yeah but Ascension was a lot more fun. The Euthanatos kick the Moros' rear end every single day in terms of theme and cool factor. The Euthanatos did get two homages in Awakening although neither were Path related. As mentioned above, they evolved into the Guardians of the Veil, but there was a more explicit homage in Legacies the Ancient - The Thread Cutters. https://whitewolf.fandom.com/wiki/Thread_Cutters They're even referred to as the "Euthanists."
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May 1, 2019 16:04
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edit: The Euthanatos ALSO kick the Acanthus' rear end in terms of theme and cool factor. The Tradition so cool they copied it twice.