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Mors Rattus posted:Faction 1: Two different sets of Communists unite to form a dual monarchy of...checks notes...the people they or their predecessors dethroned in the first place, aided by the scientific prowess of...checks notes again...a lifelong volcel who loved pigeons and was terrified by human hair. It was so crazy that you omitted Trotsky of all people from faction 1. This feels like something generated by machine learning.
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Sep 10, 2019 15:19
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Nessus posted:Are we talking the original Trotsky or the clone the Posadists made? I didn't see any dolphins so probably an immortal version of the original. There could be a giant Dune style tank full of dolphins reading progress reports from nega-Tesla.
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Sep 10, 2019 21:30
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Flail Snail posted:5e? I think? I last played 4e so I'm not sure but I did catch this tidbit from our Shadowrun thread. Yeah, it happened during the switch over to 5e. It's really dumb.
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Oct 7, 2019 23:36
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Mors Rattus posted:I am officially declaring my abandonment of the 1e Mage Night Horrors book, because it is tedious as hell and interconnected in really dumb ways that make it hard to present - everything is all callbacks to each other in a way that makes it very hard to write self-contained posts about any single thing in it, without actually being cool enough to interest me. Really annoying. Night Horrors: Nameless and Accursed!
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Mar 12, 2020 16:15
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The thing about Hermits and Waywards is, from what I remember from their books, that they are failed projects by the Messengers and not really meant to be PC's. In typical White Wolf fashion, every character type gets a full write up and ability to be played despite how they are in no way meant to be a PC option. From what I remember the Waywards were meant to originally be the commanders of the Imbued but because they were too rabid and crazy, they were discontinued. Their symbol means warlord or general in the Hunter hobo code. Hermits are just meant to be the Messenger's megaphone and to show up, letting the PC's know what's going on since they have a direct line to the Messengers. They're really just NPC types to have in your game that aren't necessarily enemies, although the Wayward is pretty much an antagonist/frenemy. RocknRollaAyatollah fucked around with this message at 16:33 on Apr 10, 2020 |
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Apr 10, 2020 16:28
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Leraika posted:Not an expert, but I'm pretty sure it was already starting to be considered inappropriate in the 1970s. Yeah, the term itself is largely prejudicial because it just means "easterner" and includes everyone from the Middle East to the far Pacific. Edward Said's Orientalism (1978) seemed to have been the big tipping point in terms of retiring the term academically and I believe there had been campaigns in the 60's to do away with it. You can still call items from Asia as Oriental and that large swath as the Orient but it's such a broad area, it's hard to accurately describe anything other than, "Not Europe, Africa, and the Americas."
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Sep 2, 2020 03:39
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JcDent posted:oh gently caress yeah, this I just realized the CLASSIFIED one is modern Genestealer Cults.
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Nov 12, 2020 18:42
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Young Freud posted:Wait, seriously? I thought they were just some Syndicate looking dudes. I don't know if it's me reaching or now but shady bald dudes infiltrating the IG is their whole MO.  The biophagus also kind of looks similar.
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Nov 13, 2020 04:12
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No one is going to suspect you're immune unless you're covered in bite marks, actively being bit by a casualty and not going 28 Days Later, or telling people you are. Announcing you're immune is kind of like advertising you have a lot of money or valuables to criminals in a place with few to no laws. Raider types will also jump on harvesting an immune person, some cultists too like Crusaders and Holy Communion, because an intact immune person is a big chunk of the down payment to get to the Recession.
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Jan 6, 2021 17:34
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I might be misremembering but Centrum was presented as one of the main big bads, if not THE main one, of the setting and they're the remnants of an Anglo-French Empire that destroyed their world.Wikipedia posted:Centrum is detailed in Alternate Earths II in greater detail than before in the GURPS line. Its point of divergence is the successful crossing of the White Ship, meaning that William Adelin, the sole male heir of King Henry I of England, was never drowned. This not only prevented the succession struggle between his sister Matilda and Stephen of Blois (and the Anarchy which followed Stephen's accession to the throne), but also led to Eleanor of Aquitaine becoming even more important to Centrum's history than she was to ours. Married not to Henry II of England but to William Adelin's son Robert the Crusader, Eleanor ruled in her husband's absence and during their son's infancy, establishing an incredibly powerful Anglo-French Empire by her death in 1204. When Mongol invasions prevented expansion into central Europe, the Anglo-French explored the Atlantic Ocean and discovered the New World. Chinese technology imported by the Mongols and royal patronage of Roger Bacon's scientific inquiries meant that, although scientific progress in Centrum was slower than in our history, it maintained a head start of around a century.
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Jun 10, 2021 18:13
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I forget the name of the book but a historian laid out that if WWI didn't happen, most of the nations in Europe were on a collision course to what domestically happened to them during and after the war anyways. Germany was on the road to a socialist/communist uprising, Russia was on the road to collapse despite its economic and industrial growth, France was France and would have had some type of revolution due to Revanchist movements and the extreme right and left, and the UK was on the verge of a civil war over the Irish Question. It's a strong theory and it kind of builds on the sentiment that the governments pushed for war because they thought it would be a quick, nationalistic diversion or give them what they needed to overcome their shortcomings by taking colonies or territories. It was all coming to a head, it all just went off at once and things like the Irish Question were answered due to the inability of the UK to fully deal with it at that time due to the war. I think the biggest winners of WWI not happening are probably Portugal, it was a disaster, and Spain, their economy won't collapse under wartime speculation, and the biggest loser is the US, who doesn't get to profit off of the war. Either way, something would have happened sooner or later, whether localized or on a larger scale. RocknRollaAyatollah fucked around with this message at 19:00 on Jun 11, 2021 |
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Jun 11, 2021 18:55
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I wonder what parts of Infinite Worlds Ken Hite wrote?  I'm pretty sure he wrote Centrum for better or worse.
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Jun 11, 2021 20:42
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It's kind of funny that I've read so many RPG books, I can pick up some of the hang ups and "grudges" of the authors. If Henry A. Wallace, a former US Vice President, comes up and he's an evil communist or communist sympathizer, Ken Hite most definitely wrote it.
RocknRollaAyatollah fucked around with this message at 21:08 on Jun 11, 2021 |
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Jun 11, 2021 21:01
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It's a really weird mission in that there isn't a way to counter Marsh, which is pretty odd for Delta Green missions because they usually have a way to "stop" it. The game does have a bad history of having unknown and unsaid things unceremonious kill PC's in scenarios, like Convergence. Per the history of Delta Green, the agents should be given the tools to beat or contain Marsh because Deep Ones got wiped out over the years by the US and later the allies since the Deep Ones were friendly with the Nazis. It got to a point where Deep Ones will not answer summon spells in modern times because Delta Green was just summoning them to machine gun them. EDIT: In the original Delta Green, the Deep Ones and Karotechia, the Nazi occultists, are presented as down and out former adversaries who got close to wiped out by the fall of Delta Green and the rise of MAJESTIC. There's some groups around but Karotechia is presented as a group to finally wipe out at the beginning of a campaign and the Deep Ones are just down and out. RocknRollaAyatollah fucked around with this message at 19:33 on Sep 28, 2021 |
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Sep 28, 2021 19:30
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God's Teeth, the RPPR campaign that's being made into an official campaign, http://actualplay.roleplayingpublicradio.com/gods-teeth-a-delta-green-campaign/ is pretty much Qanon as an antagonist. There's a cellphone app that warps reality by replacing someone with their counterpart in another universe. It's also ultimately Carcosa shenanigans before Impossible Landscapes was out.
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Oct 8, 2021 16:23
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Falconier111 posted:No, Egypt was not the last great power before Rome, it hadn't been a great power for centuries, and I have no idea what the thing with installing Serapis is about; that runs against standard Roman policy in multiple ways that would get any governor sacked. I'm not seeing any mention of Alexander or the Diadochi, especially weird since they're the reason the New Testament was written in Koine Greek. Nothing about Hellenization and the shockwaves it caused in Jewish society, Sheba definitely wasn't a thing in this period (though I can't blame them for including it given how prominent in the biblical narrative)... I dunno, as a historian I'm seeing of things I'd expect to find missing or presented weird. Serapis was created by the Ptolemaic Dynasty to strengthen their claim to being rulers of Egypt. It was a product of Hellenization and all of that Egypt stuff was pretty much established and in decline in terms of effectiveness by the period of the game.
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Sep 17, 2022 00:48
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The reasoning behind the Lasombra being pirates is that due to their ties to the Abyss and darkness, they're drawn to the absolute darkness of the deep ocean. They just don't go full mariner Gangrel because there's already a thing like that, the mariner Gangrel. It's dumb and it's a good example of them striving to find something for the Lasombra outside, they're bondage clergy and caricatures out of the Black Legend.
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May 1, 2023 20:04
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The Tremere definitely got special treatment but I think it's because in a lot of ways they're internal Camarilla antagonists, even for members of the clan. They were a house in Ars Magica, that Tremere, and they eventually got changed into a house within the Order of Hermes, a Mage group that uses Hermetic magic as its focus. When the founder of the house, Tremere, decided real magic wasn't going to cut it keeping him immortal, the group not only pissed off the Order of Hermes but multiple vampire clans by loving them over to become a vampire at the Antediluvian level, the 3rd generation clan founders who are essentially gods. They set up shop in the territory of Tzimisce, Central Europe, and diablerized Saulot, the Salubri founder, and then turned a bunch of local vampires into gargoyle shaped slaves, the Gargoyle bloodline, to guard their chantries. A bunch of vampires are still pissed about that because they were around when it happened. When the Camarilla was founded, they helped out the founders for a place at the table and put a curse on the Banu Haqim (Assamites) to pay their way in. So nobody trusts them and also dislikes them for the poo poo they pulled. They're 100% working in the best interests of their clan, not the Camarilla, and the individual ones are almost always 100% working against you, like most vampires, but they're this mini faction that says gently caress you to everyone else in a way individual clans in the Camarilla don't. The Tremere as mentioned have a super rigid structure, a pyramid, within their clan and there's a lot of backstabbing and maneuvering against each other despite being a pretty totalitarian cult of personality. There are Tremere outside it but they get killed on sight and there was/is a Sabbat bloodline loyal to the former number 2, Goratrix, but in a complicated and convoluted plot they all got killed. V5 has changed all this but Thaumaturgy is not as powerful as it was in Revised/V20, mainly due to a lightning path of magic that was pretty ridiculous and just the amount of paths available. Now you can play a non-Camarilla Tremere but that's because the pyramid is shattered and there are now smaller, probably also pyramid or funnel shaped, organizations of the clan you can belong to. RocknRollaAyatollah fucked around with this message at 23:18 on Jun 1, 2023 |
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Jun 1, 2023 23:15
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SirPhoebos posted:Why. Are there rules. For howitzers and and anti-tank weapons. In Vampire: The Masquerade? Do you have a better way to kill a werewolf, a giant monster made from several dozen people, and/or a group of vampires that combine together into a giant horror? It should be noted that guns usually only do bashing to vampires and vampiric powers, potence, celerity, and protean, usually make things like swords and claws more appealing.
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Jun 3, 2023 04:13
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Halloween Jack posted:Saulot's Adventures are one of the most confusing parts of the VtM lore to me. I'm not sure why he even went to the East. Of course, we probably know more about Saulot as a character than we do about any of the other Antediluvians, who AFAIK don't have any clear-cut reasons for why they do anything. Nessus posted:Saulot was an enlightenment tourist but I assume he was too arrogant to meditate. 100% this. Also those weird self help guys who say they're going to or have reached perfection by emulating something it's impossible for them to emulate. I believe Saulot's attraction to the "EAST" was that Kuei-jin who are Yang imbalanced from what I remember can pass as human much easier than a vampire and can be out in the sun for longer than a vampire. Thy still can die from exposure to the sun but they rot instead of combusting. Kuei-jin also have a thing called dharma, which is their power level and similar to arete in Mage but it determines what they can feed on. Lower dharma Kuei-jin have to subsist on human flesh and blood to replenish chi and high level ones can just absorb it from the air, like a lot of the splats do with glamour, gnosis, and quintessence. So he heard about these guys thinking he could do what they do and realized they weren't the same, they're closer to Risen in that they're pretty much Wraiths who came back but different. The Kuei-jin look down on Cainite vampires because they're the same as lower dharma Kuei-jin, which is seen as bad by most, and as related as a Mummy is to a Cainite, not at all. The only similarity they share is that at a lower level Kuei-jin also drink blood but they move past that. He based his concept of Golconda on the highest dharma Kuei-jin. The Kuei-jin are very dumb and as mentioned, very racist and Orientalist from the start but they were working on making them better before it all got blown up. They're an interesting concept but it's all tainted by the whole, "Asian people go here when they die, everyone else goes here." Which is explained, Stygia is an ever expanding, oppressive empire that emulates European colonialism and East Asia was separate because it was never colonized at the scale of Africa and the Americas. African vampires also have their own morality system that is pretty racism based on how traditionally African they are, whatever that is because lol, it's an incredibly diverse continent, and it's just weird and most definitely racist most the time. EDIT: It should be noted that they had the Ashirra, the vampires of the Islamic world, and they were really well done. They were just all the regular clans with Arabic names and similar ways of operating. I think it was helped by being a Dark Ages tie-in since those books were generally better written than a lot of the regular ones. RocknRollaAyatollah fucked around with this message at 18:28 on Jun 7, 2023 |
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Jun 7, 2023 18:23
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Kurieg posted:Or the Hengeyokai, who insist that they're fundamentally better than the Sunset People for Reasons but cannot provide evidence of those reasons at all. Also the Kitsune are literally only found in Asia despite foxes being goddamn everywhere. I think the Hengeyokai being elitist assholes was to mirror how the Garou, werewolves, are elitist assholes. While they claim to be better, they still end up like the werewolves with all their politicking and infighting while not really dealing with the problems they have. It's some Star Trek TOS level social commentary type writing but it usually gets lost in them having cool gifts and the possibility for a super team of every changer. If they're better, why did the Stargazer caern get razed to the ground by an army of banes and fomori who had taken over a vast swath of the PLA. Doesn't really sound like they're doing things much better than their western counterparts. Werebats were only found in South America. Kitsune were very broken, the last created, and also special so I assume Gaia put them there so her dumbass children, the werewolves, didn't accidentally genocide them. They're also kind of supposed to be the Asian version of the Werecoyotes, which aren't represented in the courts and are also special/overpowered.
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Jun 7, 2023 21:30
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Kurieg posted:Yeah, them being able to learn Sorcerer spells is treated like some big huge deal but Sorcerer spells kind of suck? They aren't actually very special or powerful beyond having access to some fairly decent gifts once you get to higher levels of renown. Kitsune can learn the gifts of any changing breed with a teacher, this includes spirits. Which is convenient because they live in the place where changing breeds cohabitate and work together. This is not something other changing breeds can do. EDIT: Nuwisha can also do something similar in that they can learn equivalent breed and ragabash gifts for Garou. RocknRollaAyatollah fucked around with this message at 06:07 on Jun 8, 2023 |
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Jun 8, 2023 06:03
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Pakxos posted:Since we are going deep into the nonsense, is DSotBH putting forth the idea that the [Tzimisce] antediluvian caught the disease and became the Ultimate Souleater? Or is this a 'Classic Coke' and 'New Coke' situation? I think Tzimisce being still around didn't get confirmed until Revised and was revealed in the fiction around the events that occurred right before New York by Night. I'm sure the Vicissitude is a trap created by the Eldest to take over all animal life on Earth was influenced by it in some way but it was always, this is something new like Dementation and the implications are not good up until that point in Gehenna. It's been a while since I read Children of the Inquisition but from what I remember it's mainly Lambach is just a sad guy who is pretty sure the clan founder is still around and not all the stuff about how he's the Eldest's chosen or whatever.
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Aug 10, 2023 20:24
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I've always felt it's a testament to how poorly baked some concepts were in Ascension because Jhor seems to get passed over a lot with talk about Marauders and Nephandi but high Jhor kind of makes a Mage a combination of the two. Voormas is honestly the main bad guy of Ascension, I know the actual Ascension book gives other scenarios, but that's mainly due to no other strong singular candidates. He's also a Marauder but for one who wants to snuff out reality. While the Technocrats are bad, they have no singular leader or actual leaders that you can point out as the main adversary. They're a faceless monolith that doesn't realize they're ruled by that concept. The Marauders are just whatever and poorly thought out too, not really good or evil, just chaos. The Nephandi are all evil and represent descension, obviously the reverse of ascension and fundamentally wrong but not for the good reasons you get in Awakening for fallen mages for instance. The Nephandi are bad because they worship not-Cthulhu or whatever and it's honestly boring compared to what Awakening does with the stuff from dead or parallel hell universes. Jhor though represents the entropy and destruction of reality. Entropy is itself lowkey a corrupted sphere, mainly due to Voormas from what I remember, but that all should have been given more page time than it got. It didn't even really get what the Weaver as a big bad got from Werewolf and that was not much outside a book.
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Aug 12, 2023 06:10
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joylessdivision posted:Considering how he's presented in at least Valkenburg and Amazon, I'd say he was less a joke and comes across more like a crossover villain in the way comic books will do events with a new villain. The "Making fun of the munchkin gamers" thing seems like it might be a revisionist view of what was ultimately a failed idea. Yeah, he felt like an attempt to get players of one of the game lines invested in the others to increase sales. There are a number of two game line OWoD crossover books but I think Haight is the first and last overt attempt to get people to buy books for another game line to continue what they were doing in another. At least the other crossover books are advertised as such and usually standalone. The idea that he's just a joke character seems odd as mentioned because he's in relatively notable game books and not some side segment of a random, throwaway book. He's also so stupidly powerful that while he could be considered a meta commentary on the players, he works as a character and is untouchable so what's the joke? "Hey, you know that thing that's super unfun and ruins games, we're going to give it to you in the source material for a year. It's a joke, we don't want to encourage this type of player at all. No, Haight dunking on everyone shows that it's not something to emulate."
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Aug 14, 2023 01:30
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Chaos Factor is kind of a good example of the excesses of bad scenario design back during that time period. Ridiculously overpowered NPC's for the sake of having untouchable storyteller pieces, dangers upon dangers that spell instant death or worse for the vast majority of PC's, and a railroad-like structure with a red herring path that completely throws the PC's off the path, and rails, for no good reason. If you're playing this with a completely vampire party, running off to Jordan is about a full day of air travel, today, so the whole thing is going to take probably 3+ days of game time to fly to Jordan, get lost in the desert, attacked by golems, and then flying back to Mexico. By then most of the stuff has already blown up and is probably over due to the time table. I don't entirely remember the end of the scenario, such as who is dead and who isn't by the end, but Haight's artifact staff that absorbs paradox gets broken and goes off like a Staff of the Magi times 1,000 because he's an idiot who was constantly casting vulgar magic. I couldn't remember if Huitzilopochtli ate it too, they're vague on the wiki about it and some later stuff in V20 contradicts it. I know Melinda Galbraith eats it later on in Revised and a Tzimisce neonate has been trapped impersonating her because they found her remains and didn't want to be accused of murder since she became the Regent, dictatorial leader, of the Sabbat. They're stuck pretending to be her because she's constantly surrounded by guards and other high ranking Sabbat, preventing them from slipping away.
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Sep 11, 2023 20:02
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By popular demand posted:SUITS sitting around a table in a purposely darkly lit room.  "Mud slide?":Technocrats nod at each other approvingly. Younger technocrat brings up a drink cart.:  "Did somebody say mud slides!":They all clink glasses and laugh. Video feed shows last remaining structure in the city collapsing while they're not paying attention.: MonsieurChoc posted:I think Saulot is his sire, called Ashur here. Yeah, Saulot is around and is loving with Tremere and in turn Goratrix and Etrius not too long after this. Saulot also doesn't have a physical body because Tremere ate him and it wasn't a fake out like with the Eldest [Tzmisce]. The general implication in the text is that Saulot created the Baali when he was all pissy coming back from Asia because the Asian vampires didn't respect him and/or teach him what he wanted. They're either an accident or all part of his master plan, which again is all up in the air and can go either way depending on the ST.
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Sep 12, 2023 19:35
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"So, earthquake?"
"Yeah... I'm thinking earthquake"
" I was about to suggest tornado, but earthquake is a much easier sell"
"I'm just glad we're not on the Mexico City team"
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The Baali have a level 7 discipline power in V20 Lore of the Bloodlines that makes a vampire a Baali and I'm fine with that as the end all in terms of origins and how this all happened up to modern times. All the demon stuff in the WoD is kind of vague, even after Demon the Fallen, but I can totally see some Earthbound* making that happen. *After the Biblical fall from grace that the angels who rebelled against heaven went through, Lucifer got confined to Earth and all his subordinates got imprisoned in the Abyss. The Abyss is like it sounds, a hellish darkness and shadow dimension. Lucifer and some enterprising sorcerers got some of the former angels, now demons, out during antiquity and later but he found that they were insane and incredibly corrupted by the Abyss. Lucifer essentially fostered modern Christianity to curtail them from getting too powerful because he realized he hosed up and humanity was more important. This is an over simplification but Lucifer, for better or worse, in the WoD had humanity's back. Demon the Fallen is pretty big on all organized religion being a long con and not the true thing despite the fact that the WoD is surprisingly Christian in its worldbuilding.
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Sep 13, 2023 03:29
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By popular demand posted:I'm sure the idea of a TSR biopic limited series was floated around but quite a lot of fragments are missing and making something people would actually find time to watch from the epic of nerds failing at business is no easy task. I think the biggest hurdle is depicting Gygax's activities in Hollywood, where he was mainly focused on cocaine and sex workers and not building the Dungeons & Dragons transmedia empire. I think his family is still trying to claim that wasn't the case but more and more about his lovely behavior is coming out, even from them, so who knows.
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Nov 13, 2023 16:44
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