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Ghost Wolf Tyrants are cool, really all of the Ghost Wolf baddies being what happens when a werewolf fails to get properly spirit-vaccinated and ends up with like, space void measles, are a novel way of reinforcing the value of tribes for the setting at large.
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# ¿ Aug 25, 2019 03:03 |
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# ¿ May 22, 2024 07:20 |
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Joe Slowboat posted:I see why the Cull are winning in their regions, those powers are wild power creep.
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# ¿ Aug 25, 2019 19:08 |
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Mors Rattus posted:Hope y’all liked space alien void spirits bee tee dub, because they get a full writeup on top of the Reivers. - No totem? Cool you get to be a totem for a blasphemous non-pack of mortals - No ban? Cool you could fall in with a weird cult that gives you a belief system where it's cool to eat each other for stats - No real exposure to the greater spiritual ecosystem? Cool, you got space measles. Ghost Wolves being a mirror for the default state of being a Forsaken that makes you even weirder than the others (Bale Hounds are Hot Topic Evil but still use Harmony, The Pure may hate you but you still all care about spirit cop crap) is interesting. Good drat book.
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# ¿ Aug 26, 2019 04:09 |
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Mors Rattus posted:Yes, though idigam are a thing from prior books. Capsule summary: they are prehistoric spirits of constant change which Wolf defeated but was unable to kill, so he trapped most of them on the moon. Like, the physical moon. They came back to Earth with the astronauts and have a tendency to cause problems because they're both extremely powerful and unpredictable and have a tendency to latch onto and take shape from the first thing they run into, which makes researching their weaknesses extremely hard.
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# ¿ Aug 26, 2019 20:40 |
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Even though Geyn-Ur was an antagonist / ally of antagonists before she got all magath-weird I still feel bad for her because of the major Sif vibes of sad big murder wolf. Get well soon pupper
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# ¿ Aug 27, 2019 18:56 |
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Mors Rattus posted:I mean, she was pretty much only murdering random folks that went into the Wyoming wilderness before this. By the standards of the things in this book, she was pretty much a saint.
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# ¿ Aug 27, 2019 19:02 |
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Mors Rattus posted:Werewolf is actually on your side - being natural doesn’t make it good. You absolutely should fight the plague wolf! He’s bad to have around! It just doesn’t say he is a moral evil, because that’d be Soulshitter, the Spirit Who Demands Human Sacrifuce For It’s Own Amusement. Both are bad to have around and should be fought, it’s just one is a talking natural disaster that can’t comprehend morality and the other thinks hurting people is funny.
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# ¿ Aug 27, 2019 22:01 |
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JcDent posted:It seems that being a Werewolf is just dangerous. Vampires have each other, literally all of them, and also half of the day if they go outside they just die. Mages have going crazy, going regular banal evil, going super duper evil, opening a hole out of reality by using their powers, among other things. Prometheans have bad versions of each other, a couple different flavors of broken versions of each other, people who want to study them, and also people in general want to kill you or just make your life and theirs miserable if you hang out too long. Changelings start with both a mirror version of themselves out there who stole their lives, and a whole pseudo-spiritual ecosystem that exists to make you suffer in order to please something massively stronger than you that's still out there now. And associated parties. Geists (as of 2e) have about a bunch of different variations on "these are the bad ghosts" "no these are the REALLY bad ones that might not even be ghosts now" as well as conflict with other groups over ideology or territory being almost as central to the conceit as Werewolf. Hunters are...everything, god forbid anything you're tracking down finds out you exist in the first place. Basically everyone is gunning for you in everything all the time. But also, the toolbox approach of Chronicles of Darkness /nwod is that not necessarily any/all of the stuff in any book is assumed to be canon for your game, due to lack of metaplot or anything. So really stuff only sucks as much as the ST's home campaign wants it to, explicitly. e: That having been said werewolves ARE the only ones whose default power set regardless of any X-axis or Y-axis splat is "turn into giant murder machines" so Chernobyl Peace Prize fucked around with this message at 13:43 on Aug 28, 2019 |
# ¿ Aug 28, 2019 13:39 |
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Hot take I'm parking here before we get to the new Hosts: Hosts and Werewolves both just want the spiritual ecosystem to resemble their ideal state, and it's coincidental and convenient to humanity that the Werewolf ideal state for the Forsaken is also the one that doesn't get humans ultra-murdered or soul-dead (which is another strike against the Pure from the perspective of lay humanity, since the Fire-Touched and Predator Kings both love spirits-crazy-get-nuts times, and Ivory Claws just want to get Maximum Werewolf with it which has the additional impact of 'yeah but people don't count'). Basically all this is to say there's nothing wrong with feverishly stanning (spoiled til we get to them) Lamprey Hosts.
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# ¿ Aug 28, 2019 14:11 |
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potatocubed posted:This write-up of antagonists is doing a lot to sell me on nWoof.
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# ¿ Aug 28, 2019 14:41 |
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I like Rose's idea because then I can picture the Strix as the Humanity creatures from Dark Souls but slightly owly, and I'm good to go from there.
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# ¿ Aug 28, 2019 16:16 |
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I want to assume that the weirdness of void leviathans is because when you're the spirit of void-space-nothing, and there's so much of it out there, you can get relatively big pretty quick, and at that point chomping on smaller spirits that you pass by is easy and productive. Like even if one of them comes across a planetary angel, think about the scale of planets against everything-that's-not-a-planet-or-anything-else. Also, I really like the implication that, since Skybreaker's got some meat in it that it Claimed, at one point it ran into stuff out there that was made of meat.
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# ¿ Aug 28, 2019 20:06 |
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I like Walter and Surabel because I feel like the biggest conflict there is "do we fix up the opera house before or after we drop them off in the financial district and just let things sort themselves out for awhile."
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# ¿ Aug 29, 2019 13:40 |
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I love the Hosts. Give me ten thousand Hosts. May this comic echo in eternity.
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# ¿ Aug 29, 2019 18:20 |
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Pound for pound, a Lamprey Host taking on an older (not necessarily full capital-e Elder) vampire is pretty efficient. They can hold so much blood!
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# ¿ Aug 29, 2019 20:22 |
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I'm just picturing a group of Union hunters suiting up with army surplus hazmat gear to go fight a Host on its home turf. "Y'all got your PPE right? poo poo ain't for funnin' around." with duct-taped-up wrists and ankles and crowbars at the ready. These guys are ready to loving rock.
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# ¿ Aug 29, 2019 22:07 |
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JcDent posted:So, what were the original forms of lampreys and spiders, or do they not come from gods?
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# ¿ Aug 30, 2019 15:35 |
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RocknRollaAyatollah posted:Isn't it possible that they represent gods of obscure or forgotten concepts? I know the idigam represent concepts from before the world was fully formed, I wouldn't put it past some of the hosts being things from prehistoric/pre-fall times.
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# ¿ Aug 30, 2019 16:11 |
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A campaign around getting the student-wizard enough magic items for a promotion and wizard-tenure, while along the way everyone picks up like 3 different odd jobs and sees multiple viable careers that don't involve engaging with academia anymore, sounds like the experiences of most of my grad school cohort. But with elves.
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# ¿ Aug 30, 2019 16:16 |
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AmiYumi posted:Sounds right, who gets tenure right out the gate?
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# ¿ Aug 30, 2019 20:37 |
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Ithle01 posted:Even by World of Darkness standards this one seems a bit unsubtle. The thing about preying on divorce cases is pretty funny because you bet your rear end that if you're getting a divorce and your soon-to-be-ex goes missing under suspicious circumstances the police or a different set of lawyers are probably going to look into that. Seriously, how has no one noticed this one? I picture this Host living in the It Follows version of Detroit, where everybody's either dying, desperate, or gone already, and the buildings are the same.
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# ¿ Aug 31, 2019 20:47 |
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Ithle01 posted:At some point this just gets ridiculous. If the wasps hosts were preying upon people whose disappearance weren't unusual maybe I could buy it, but this is just straight up nonsense. I would expect agents of the God Machine or Seers of the Throne to take notice at this one if only because someone operating such out-in-open occult shenanigans fucks up their job to keep things hidden so people don't wake up. 2. CoD is a toolbox approach, which means there's no default assumption that the God Machine or Seers of the Throne exist in your home game unless (like the termites) it's explicit that they're there to function in the first place. This is to prevent the general oWoD feeling of every mortal being outnumbered by supernaturals like 8:1 overall, and so you can say "oh no one noticed this until the PCs because who else is going to, but the PCs" as a basic conceit of why the party is doing anything at all. Also as opposed to metaplot where they've written you out of having any plot hooks worth following (see also Aberrant 1e and Aberrant d20 recently in this very thread). quote:There's also a trend of many of these cults involving the wealthy and well-to-do which makes sense until you realize that almost all of the people involved in these are bat-poo poo crazy to a degree that you have to wonder how they're able to maintain the jobs that enable their wealth.
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# ¿ Aug 31, 2019 21:45 |
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Ithle01 posted:Chernobyl Peace Prize, good point on the current state of politics, but it should be noted that if these morons were actually involved in an occult conspiracy that poo poo would have been discovered because these idiots suck at keeping secrets. Even if they are monstrous in nature, they are not in fact, actual monsters wearing human flesh who exude an aura of brain-warping spirit magic.
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# ¿ Aug 31, 2019 22:58 |
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Night10194 posted:Detroit isn't that dangerous, it's mostly just too big and heavily class divided and has no public transit and a small population due to a ton of factors.
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# ¿ Sep 1, 2019 01:10 |
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In the last couple thousands there's been a couple SCPs I liked (Reagan Cut Up While Talking, the weird observation station that extends into a weird sun-realm that would be right at home in a Night Horrors book) but then there's also the whole stupid attempted-lore things like the Mr. whatever rando wacky series and a whole buncha bullshit. The Church seems like a neat adventure hook for exactly one session of "hey we gotta Sacred Hunt...that guy." "wait why?" "Listen we just do ok" and then digging into that e: Also I would argue SCP went to poo poo when they changed the classification from "degree of how bad this is to deal with" to "how hard is it to contain" because ??? who cares about that, gimme existential threats at the top weight class. Chernobyl Peace Prize fucked around with this message at 23:20 on Sep 1, 2019 |
# ¿ Sep 1, 2019 23:18 |
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Beast: We blast melodic hardcore in our Dark Mother's spirit basement because no one, even she, really understands us
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# ¿ Sep 2, 2019 02:11 |
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Jerik posted:You know, I know next to nothing about nWoD—my only experience with it has been as a player in a Prometheus one-shot—but if Night Horrors: Shunned by the Moon is at all representative, now I'm interested in finding out more about it. From Mors Rattus's posts, it seems, well, not flawless, but a lot more imaginative and evocative than I was expecting. The Hosts, in particular, strike as surprisingly good villains. "Surprisingly" because when I first read the brief description, I sort of expected that they were supposed to be villains just because, well, they were rats and bugs puppeting human bodies, and isn't that creepy and icky? And I didn't really expect them to come across as all that interesting. But no, it turns out that's not all there is to them at all; they're villains not just because the players are supposed to have a visceral reaction to creepy-crawlies in human suits, but because they're all legitimately doing terrible things, having a harmful effect on their surroundings, and making the world a worse place, and the PCs have good reason to oppose them. Like I said, I don't know much about nWoD, and I admit I've maybe been negatively disposed toward it because I'm enough of a traditionalist that I kind of had a knee-jerk reaction against completely rebooting and reimagining all the World of Darkness lines (even though I was never a huge fan of oWoD either), but if Night Horrors is typical of nWoD books I guess I ought to rethink that. If you want to learn more, I would recommend tracking down the Horror Recognition Guide. It's technically a Hunter in-universe fiction book (though presented as scans of articles, post-its, and case notes), but really it's just a great little short story collection with a unique format that really gets you in the right mindset for "cool but what the gently caress was that?"-type stuff.
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# ¿ Sep 2, 2019 03:46 |
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wiegieman posted:So a spirit could provide influence over, like, Commerce? Or is that too abstract for them and would probably be Greed instead?
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# ¿ Sep 2, 2019 21:44 |
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Night10194 posted:Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay 2e: Career Compendium
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# ¿ Sep 3, 2019 15:57 |
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Yeah, religion and faith in CoD especially is a weird one because depending on what your toolkit-utilization of the setting permits, you may have hideous biomechanical angels in the service of an unknowable but also deeply stupid God Machine, or spirits that give you powers for worship, or vampires that give you blood that give you power for worshiping them (this is just quiet-part-loud Catholicism, CMV), getting powers from faith in a couple different flavors (Hunter, vampire rituals, parsing Mage towers through a particularly specific lens, idk mummy poo poo?, werewolf religion, etc.), and then the big topper: Sin-Eaters and their Geists have concrete evidence of an afterlife you can directly go to, that sucks rear end. Basically you can have "creator or bestower deity" and "what happens when you die" be completely decoupled in the setting and have the answers to each be equally valid.
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# ¿ Sep 3, 2019 21:34 |
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Yeah, I've liked the idigam from word one, but the Geryo honestly feel like trying to make fetch happen for how often they come up as a tie-in to a character, potential failed state for one of the new groups/creatures introduced, etc. I may just have a sour taste in my mouth about crabwolves after backing Contagion Chronicle though.
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# ¿ Sep 4, 2019 17:59 |
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That Old Tree posted:I feel like Geryo would be a more impressive, "whoa wtf" if they were like a new/lost kind of idigam. Just a one-off couple of new gribblespirits instead of the apparently dozens+ implied by the book. They could even still have a similar backstory being the discarded prototypes of Wolf's servants explaining why they get to be from the Gauntlet and super double badass.
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# ¿ Sep 4, 2019 18:13 |
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I'm deeply nauseous at the prospect of the many-headed Insanity Wolf that is for haunting and seduction
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# ¿ Sep 4, 2019 18:57 |
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Mors Rattus posted:100% still mourning the death of deadjournal and has her own subreddit where her heads start fights with each other.
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# ¿ Sep 4, 2019 19:29 |
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Precambrian posted:The one idigam who can't disobey an order from anyone wearing a mission patch for the moon landing it hopped a ride on is my favorite ban. It's just so bizarrely specific that there's no way you'd ever know that (I guess there are spirits who would have some kind of ineffable knowledge? Maybe Luna would know?), but the image of a pack of werewolves furiously bidding on a NASA patch and trying to expedite shipping before the crazy gribbly monster devours Western Pennsylvania is just aces.
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# ¿ Sep 5, 2019 15:30 |
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Just try to play a round of Arkham Horror with Quattuor. Either you lock it in an eternal reset-cycle as you both realize over and over that you've not been playing one rule correctly and have to start over the game 'to keep it fair,' or you buy everyone else at least a day to come up with a solution while you play the only fully-rules-abiding session ever executed.
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# ¿ Sep 5, 2019 20:44 |
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Convince Quattuor that capitalism is a meritocratic system of wealth distribution where wealth comes through skill and that whoever has the most stuff when they die wins, and set it loose on Wall Street. Good guy Quattuor.
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# ¿ Sep 5, 2019 21:19 |
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Kaza42 posted:Wait, what if Quattor is the hider? Hide and Seek, entire world is the "in" zone, no base.
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# ¿ Sep 5, 2019 21:26 |
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# ¿ May 22, 2024 07:20 |
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Mors Rattus posted:A number of tables are provided giving examples of what kind of resonances, spirits and physical inhabitants can be found in various areas. These are super useful for a Werewolf GM, because it can be really hard to figure out what common stuff you're going to run into on the fly. These tables cover climate (which you'll run into even in human-controlled areas and which will influence entire regions excepting parts specifically designed to keep the local climate out), natural geographic features (which are more local and tend to be heavily based on nature and local flora and fauna, though not entirely, and ranging in size from 'a pond' to 'a cliff' to 'a swamp'), urban settings (similar to natural features in area of impact but typically more dynamic due to both the speed with which humans change things and the more potent emotional and symbolic resonances; these can range from 'an airport' to 'a park' to 'an office building' to 'a highway' so they vary wildly in size), and zoning regions (well, not quite zoning, but an area humans think of as commercial draws in different kinds of spirits than a gated community, a suburb, or an area everyone knows is rundown or crime-ridden). Human expectation and purpose have a shockingly strong influence on the Shadow. Good book, good writeup. Good times.
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# ¿ Sep 9, 2019 22:14 |