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01011001 posted:Hunter has a special place in my heart for sure. What I remember of the 2e playtest looked solid too. Hunter is excellent, and probably the best candidate for an all-purpose "what gameline do I pitch my players who are totally unfamiliar with CofD on?" for its versatility and accessibility. I wouldn't call it the most underrated, not because it's not good enough, but because it's too well rated to be underrated. I see plenty of praise for Hunter when the games are discussed. It's got a good reputation, and it deserves it. I haven't been especially optimistic about what has been discussed and previewed for Hunter Second Edition, but well, worst case scenario, the 2e patch in Mortal Remains works just fine.
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Sep 30, 2019 05:37
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Inzombiac posted:Hello new thread! The name "Deviant" was apparently decided above the developers' heads, I guess in the very early concept stages. I agree it's not super fitting. Deviant: the Renegades as a game is goddamn amazing so far though. It doesn't topple Demon as my favorite CofD gameline, but it's a strong contender with Hunter for all-around tightly practically designed and versatile game, and anybody particularly interested in Hunter should definitely check it out, as it hits a lot of similar notes. It manages to make the drawbacks of your character almost as interesting and cool as your powers, which isn't a bad feat to pull off. Folks who've got cold feet from the last few CofD Kickstarters being the likes of Beast and the Contagion Chronicle should once-over Deviant. It's far more coherent and holistically designed.
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Oct 2, 2019 22:47
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Inzombiac posted:How many monsters could a regular person become? Hunters aren't monsters, mostly. A few tier-three conspiracies employ demi-monstrous hunters, like the tainted bloodline of the Lucifuge. But literally, a random sap who finds out rat hosts have hollowed out people in town, gets a wrench, and starts keeping an eye out for rat-walkers? That's a hunter. He didn't become anything, he just started hunting, and that's enough for the Hunter template. A human can be made into a vampire, a changeling, a bound (the protagonists of Geist), or a deviant, given the right supernatural intervention. (Vampires turn vampires, the True Fae kidnap people and they become changelings, geister find dying people and offer them a living death, all kinds of occult experiments have the potential to cause the divergence.) A human can become a werewolf, but if they weren't born with it in their blood waiting to emerge, then it's especially rare and requires the direct intervention of the spirit of the moon, who is crazy. A human can become an awakened mage through extreme insight and soul-searching struggle. The only reliable way for a patron to impose the Awakening from without leaves the new mage spiritually broken and dangerous to himself and others. Mummies were all once human, but the ritual that made them into mummies was a once-in-all-history rite that involved destroying an entire city and crippling an empire, so it's probably not going to happen again. Prometheans are often made from human bodies, but the human doesn't become a Promethean. The human stays dead and the Promethean is a newborn life made from somebody else's body parts. Demons were never human. They can buy the identity of a human to step into and live their life, but the actual human is destroyed when this happens. Nobody slides sideways from monster to monster, or at least, a vampire who becomes a mage becomes so under strange circumstances and becomes a unique and strange kind of vampire mage. The only real exception is that Prometheans can become regular humans, who can then become anything a regular human can become, and since hunters are also regular humans, they can too. There are various "lesser templates," miscellaneous minor supernaturals and offshoots of the power of the "major templates." Humans can be made into ghouls or stigmatics pretty reliably. Wolf-blooded and demon-blooded are usually born such, with a rather small number of exceptions. Proximi are also usually born such, I believe. Fae-touched occur as a twist of fate. I Am Just a Box fucked around with this message at 03:23 on Oct 3, 2019 |
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Oct 3, 2019 00:22
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joylessdivision posted:Excuse me sir but a certain Mr. Haight would like a word with you about that. Nobody slides sideways from monster to monster.
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Oct 3, 2019 01:04
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That Old Tree posted:Has anyone done the "buy the advance PDF, get a discount for the PoD later" thing? How long did it take for the discount coupon to be sent out? I've heard more than a few grumblings about the process. I assume, if it's taking an unacceptable amount of time/forgotten, I'd contact DTRPG first since they'll have the actual sales record? I didn't use the coupon I received, but I did back Changeling Second Edition and received the discount coupon on the same day the book was released for general non-backer purchase, January 16th. I would assume that you'd contact Onyx Path if you didn't receive the coupon promptly (I do believe they announce when they're generally going out), and Drivethru if you then use the coupon and it takes too long to arrive or there are printing errors or something. I Am Just a Box fucked around with this message at 06:35 on Oct 3, 2019 |
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Oct 3, 2019 06:32
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That Old Tree posted:I get the impression there's regular trouble getting coupons out for stuff like this as opposed to Kickstarter, for some reason. I've gotten the coupons promptly for all the Kickstarted books I've backed (and never used them since I was already backing for the tradprint), but this is Signs of Sorcery. I'll give it a couple days. Oh, duh, I didn't read your post correctly. I have bought advance PDFs from DrivethruRPG before too, and I received those coupons the same day of hardcover release as well. I would just give it a day or two, but not longer than that before tapping Drivethru asking about the coupon. One thing to check, too, is your email settings: you have to be set to receive emails from the publisher through DrivethruRPG on your Drivethru account (the ones OPP uses to constantly spam you about every single book they put out), under "select how I wish to be contacted by publishers." They send the coupon through there. I Am Just a Box fucked around with this message at 07:28 on Oct 3, 2019 |
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Oct 3, 2019 07:26
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Tuxedo Catfish posted:I had no interest in Deviant based on the premise and how closely it followed the Contagion Chronicle, but the positive word of mouth here is encouraging. It has absolutely nothing to do with the Contagion Chronicle, except in the sense that the CC book itself brings up Deviant like it brings up everything else. The Deviant book doesn't bring up the Contagion. Even from a design or style standpoint, the Deviant book doesn't read anything like the Contagion book. It's tightly designed, clear on what it's talking about, and lacks the Contagion Chronicle's tendency to go all over the place with superficial connections. I Am Just a Box fucked around with this message at 18:09 on Oct 4, 2019 |
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Oct 4, 2019 18:07
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Inzombiac posted:This probably isn't the right place but would you mind talking about writing for OPP? I don't write for OPP. I just keep track of what they're doing and like interjecting answers.
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Oct 4, 2019 20:45
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Mulva posted:Connected Lair (••) Find-replace Lair with a changeling's Hollow or a demon's Bolthole and you're good to go.
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Oct 4, 2019 23:24
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Omnicrom posted:Just another way to point out that it sucks that Beast is garbage peddled by an abusive bastard because it's bizarrely fascinating when it isn't being irredeemably hideous. A Beast's Poochie aura also applies to the drat game as a whole. I guess I'm a demonic exception, because I'm not fascinated with Beast in any respect other than one is fascinated by a trainwreck. The only good ideas in there, not counting tangential stuff in Tooth & Nail, are Lair giving you a personal dungeon to assume your true boss form in, Nightmares having little pithy second-person dream narration instead of conventional description, and Sleeping Beauty being unintentionally sympathetic and righteous. Beasts aren't even satisfying as pitch black villains to avenge yourself on.
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Oct 5, 2019 01:06
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Dave B., you did a fantastic job helming Mage and steering it smoothly through a turbulent edition transition. Mage is either tied with or beats Vampire for preexisting CofD gameline best served by its second edition redesign.
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Oct 5, 2019 01:46
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Mr. Humalong posted:As someone who has never touched this system but is very much enjoying reading through the Horror Recognition Guide, where should I go from here? I think I like the idea of being part of a group of people in over their heads fighting monsters they barely understand, so should I start reading through the Hunter stuff? Hunter is one of the most even gamelines in terms of writing quality and gameability. It's versatile, accessible to players unfamiliar with the setting, and friendly to being tailored to whatever kind of game you want to run, if a little fiddly at times. It's a very strong starting choice. There are two rules editions of the Chronicles of Darkness (and to further confuse things, the name changed shortly into the edition change, so first edition materials will actually say World of Darkness). First edition nWoD/CofD gamebooks require a central World of Darkness Rulebook in addition to whatever gameline corebook you're using, so to play first edition Hunter, you will need the World of Darkness Rulebook and the Hunter: the Vigil book. Options to play Hunter using the second edition ruleset are unfortunately kind of convoluted currently, though a Second Edition of Hunter: the Vigil is under development. There is a supplement called Mortal Remains which, in addition to a little travelogue of secondary CofD gameline monsters viewed from the perspective of hunters, contains an appendix to hot-patch Hunter rules for 2e. You would then still need either the free God-Machine Rules Update (paired with the World of Darkness Rulebook) or any other Second Edition gameline corebook (except Demon, why is it all so inconsistent) to provide the core ruleset of a 2e game. As noted above, 2e CofD gamebooks (except Demon) contain all the rules necessary to run the game in the titled corebook, rather than requiring a second rulebook. There is a Chronicles of Darkness Rulebook available for second edition, but it's purely optional and just provides expanded systems, extra Merits, and stuff to run games about less hunty mortals encountering the supernatural: think Twin Peaks to Hunter's Supernatural, say. So if you find yourself interested in any of the other gamelines that have been updated to second edition, those are one-book investments.
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Oct 5, 2019 04:44
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joylessdivision posted:Oh those are from Changeling 1e. I wanted to give a very subtle hint that there are Changelings in the world. I would have used Lost logos but I don't think there are many available on storyteller vault (or I missed them) They're not at all subtle, I would say. Just posting a bunch of symbols seemingly at random on top of illustrations catches attention immediately and makes the reader wonder what the heck they mean. If you want to be subtle about it I wouldn't go visual,* I'd sprinkle vague hints or odd details in the prose sections. *Visual would work fine if you had an artist to work them in cohesively, but it looks like you're limited to reusing artwork. That's no criticism, I certainly can't draw for beans myself.
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Oct 7, 2019 12:04
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Gangrel: Nobody guards the cat flap. Nosferatu: Guard the cat flap. I Am Just a Box fucked around with this message at 07:43 on Oct 9, 2019 |
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Oct 9, 2019 07:41
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That Old Tree posted:I was poking around for information on the Lower Depths and just skimmed nWoD: Inferno since that's all there really is beyond at most a paragraph-long blurb in a couple Mage books. Is this, uh, as sorta-crappy as it looks? It seems like it's literally just "yes, wicked demons of wickedness, 666 Satan is a gently caress." Which sure I'm glad anyone who wanted that specifically got their book, but it seems hard to stretch that out to 100+ pages without getting pretty thin. It also seems to have hardly anything to do with what the Lower Depths are suggested to be. Inferno has far more to do with Werewolf than Mage, being probably the source of the Maeljin and their Wounds. (Shunned by the Moon may step this back a bit, given its refocus of the servants of the Maeljin as acolytes of Anti-Renown.) The Lower Depths are a Mage-specific term and seems to have suffered from dueling writers syndrome, where the notion of Lower Depths as various worlds even further separated from the Supernal than the Fallen World is occasionally clashes with using "Lower Depths" primarily as a term for the Inferno. The former eventually won out over the latter, with the Inferno thrown a bone as what seems to be a particularly robust Lower Depth whose signature lack is probably "virtue" or "selflessness" or something. By spreading vice, they act as a vacuum for virtue. As for whether World of Darkness: Inferno is sorta crappy... Mother May I posted:It is a sickening thing, the succubus, a demon driven by Lust, yes, but often for a very damning purpose: to have a child. By stealing the semen of sleeping men, the succubus could impregnate herself with a child born of true sin. Here, the Possessed with this Vestment gains +3 Social rolls when dealing with children. They find the character very… parental. A dark irony, indeed. It's not even super good for being born to die world is a gently caress 鬼神 kill em all 1989, because the book vacillates between "Hell is real and there are real no foolin Satans down there" and "demons are just products of our own vice infecting ghosts and spirits and Hell is just the cosmic garbage dump where our worst natures go." Which feels like an attempt at an Unknown Armies style "you did this" but isn't committed to hard enough to do anything but deflate the impact. Loomer posted:Houdini is an 11th Generation Tremere living in Chicago, though he likely met his end in the Garou Nation-Camarilla Conflict of 1992. Loomer, at this point you could say drat near anything about the setting of the oWoD and I would believe it's in a book somewhere. I Am Just a Box fucked around with this message at 02:45 on Oct 13, 2019 |
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Oct 13, 2019 02:38
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Jerik posted:I ask because my current erratic work schedule prohibits me from currently participating in a regular face-to-face campaign, so I'm thinking of starting a PBP game of Demon: the Descent. (It wouldn't be any time soon, because I want to read through all the relevant books and really familiarize myself with the rules and the lore before starting the game.) I'm leaning toward setting it in Los Angeles just because that's where I live, so I figured I may as well make it easy on myself and use a city I'm very familiar with. But I just wanted to know if there's any canonical information on Los Angeles in the nWoD already. I know nothing requires me to stick with existing canon, but, I don't know, I always like to try to be consistent with canon if possible, even though I realize there's no real reason I have to do that. In addition to the Demon Seed Collection, Los Angeles is one of the highlighted example settings in the corebook for Mage: the Awakening Second Edition, where it is depicted as a place where the collective consciousness of humanity manifests physically, and goetia, thought-forms of the beliefs and impressions about particular people, things and ideas, occasionally possess certain residents. Re: canon, the Chronicles of Darkness are definitely a defined setting, but I think one of the main reasons its toolbox nature is exaggerated at times is that most of its books were written under a policy that the only other book a reader needs to own to make proper use of it is the respective corebook. A given Vampire supplement thus won't avoid mentioning anything that was established in the Vampire clanbooks, say, but it won't drop names from several other books unexplained and expect you to follow along, and it won't include a big writeup all about a domain dominated by a covenant of vampire Buddhists from the Ancient Bloodlines book that makes you go look up who they are and what they can do. Links between books thus either tend to be narrative sidelines that can be fleshed out through implication, or occasionally a new book will reintroduce and reprint enough about an old concept to bring it into direct play.
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Oct 17, 2019 06:23
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Dear Ann, I faint at the sight of a bleeding cut, which has made life very difficult since, you know, starting the night shift. How do I manage it without needing a fellow shift worker's assistance? Dear Ann, I have a body that needs to not be here anymore. I thought I'd try the acid thing they do on TV. This was a bad idea. I now have a bathroom that stinks to high hell, a very bad drain problem that I don't know how to explain to the plumber, and a very sticky, mostly intact skeleton. I already burned my last house down (long story!) and am loathe to pull the disappearing-arsonist trick a second time. How do I salvage this?
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Oct 18, 2019 03:41
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Loomer posted:Tremere: Mercury enters its retrograde turn on All Hallow's Eve. Samiel's Curse upon the Eldest rings loudest in your blood this month. If anybody else had killed the best Setite, I would be kind of jokey-mad. Since it's Loomer, I'm not even jokey-mad. I just want to know what occult design he was fulfilling through this imaginary sacrifice. You killed a vampire, Loomer. You can't let the spiritual significance of that go to waste.
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Oct 22, 2019 04:09
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Cuntellectual posted:I guess Vampire sort of would work for a similar idea (suddenly being thrust into the supernatural and being a nightmare monster battling with supernatural cravings), as imagined by someone who wasn't a manipulative rapist? Vampire is good for being able to tell the story of "I am a powerful monster, in a community of monsters, but my power inevitably comes at least some extent from the suffering of the innocent, and I now juggle my old and new lives while my fellow monsters jockey for position, some working hard to assemble moral justifications for their continued use of monstrous power, others revelling in it as a source of superiority." That was one of the many glaring problems with Beast observed from very early on, before we even knew the underlying backstage problems: "To the extent that there's a type of story in this game, isn't it the same story Vampire already tells, but with the metaphor made more explicit?"
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Oct 23, 2019 07:20
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xanthan posted:So beasts NEVER taught poo poo and instead it was just heroes trying to find meaning in tragedy? That honestly makes infinitely more sense. I mean, the thing about teaching lessons was also backfilled into the manuscript after a lot of people reacted to the Kickstarter preview text with shock and disgust and they did an emergency partial rewrite. The original draft of Beast shown to the public didn't have beasts attempt to morally justify their feeding at all. They have to feed, therefore it's not wrong to feed. Thus the lessons thing is just kind of loosely pasted on, and a lot of Beast material forgets it's even a thing, because originally, it wasn't.
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Oct 23, 2019 23:18
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Tias posted:So, our ST sprung a true fae on us, murdering one character and releasing the rogue fetch we finally had our hands on. I'm kinda disappointed, but that's more because of other bad approaches by one of the STs recently. A direct attack by one of the Others, when you're fresh out of chargen and just after you're done exhausting resources to capture a fetch? The answer, depending on which rules for True Fae are in use, vary from first edition corebook "I would not have done this" to second edition corebook "I really would not have done this."
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Oct 24, 2019 08:24
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Tias posted:The fetch we chased ran into the Hedge, and only one chase scene into the Hedge we met it. Is your ST under the impression that the Gentry are just commonly roaming the Hedge all the time? That's kind of like going down a secondary Frankish trade road and running straight into Charles Martel, except in this analogy Charles has supreme magical power, so let's say Charles Martel marching at the head of his royal army. They've got people (or, well, semi-people) to do things like this for them, though even a Huntsman would definitely be overkill in this scenario.
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Oct 24, 2019 14:30
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BENGHAZI 2 posted:Folks I'm reading the deviant backer stuff and it's good Deviant's really good. It's some of the most mechanically involved character generation, owing to how Variations and Scars are presented as customizable, reskinnable parts with optional keywords and ratings, but it's very receptive to making characters who feel cool and unique both for their abilities and their weaknesses. And it's got this Merit: Deviant: the Renegades posted:Armed and Extremely Dangerous (•••) (Overt) While it's been described as being closest in power level to Hunter, the power of an individual deviant is directly proportional to his Scars. A deviant can have one or two very effective powers – and suffer some really debilitating weaknesses in exchange, like needing to perform regular repair actions on their own body, or being so fragile that suffering any damage at all leaves them unable to walk on their own power.
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Oct 28, 2019 01:49
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BENGHAZI 2 posted:Which splat Bibles ended up going up for sale anyway, I remember seeing one and wanting to read it but it's been ages Bite Me: How to Write Vampire, by Rose Bailey, is a spruced up look at the Vampire: the Requiem writer's bible by the time of second edition. The parts about the Kindred, anyway. The Strix get a bible of their own.
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Oct 28, 2019 08:47
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Jerik posted:I didn't make the connection to Cenobites, though; I don't know much about Hellraiser—are Cenobites really that similar conceptually? If so, maybe that explains why the Celebrants didn't appear again. (Well, that and maybe the fact that CoD didn't necessarily need yet another separate type of "demon".) Cenobites are so similar that I can't read the Celebrants tale as being about anything else, and I haven't even watched Hellraiser. Having heard the pitch of Hellraiser actually makes the passage make more sense, such as the association of hedonistic pleasure with torture and the infliction of pain.
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Oct 29, 2019 19:05
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Mors Rattus posted:So how mad do y'all think vampires would get at a neonate who kept referring to the Masquerade as Vampire Kayfabe? Either WoD. Invictus: Divides into the old-fashioned survivors and the new money gangsters. New money's down. Old money uses Dominate to force you to give them your pants as penance for saying that stupid thing, then moves on with the meeting. Carthians: Ranges from being down to annoyed sneer. Sanctified: Professional wrestling is not technically a sin, but that doesn't make it okay to bring to church. Acolytes: Angriest response. You've been given a sacred gift and are comparing it to John Cena. You are not welcome back to the circle until you take your inner divinity more seriously. Dragons: Second angriest response. You labor under a curse from God. If you think fighting that is like backyard wrestling then you don't recognize the level of self-discipline the Mysteries are going to demand of you. IVWC (International Vampire Wrestling Covenant): Saying "kayfabe" is not kayfabe. Commit harder to the gimmick. I Am Just a Box fucked around with this message at 23:03 on Nov 2, 2019 |
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Nov 2, 2019 22:59
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Loomer posted:Wraith exists so DSotBH being the only good supplement is automatically false Not only that, this page isn't even in it! 
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Nov 3, 2019 03:14
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Nessus posted:There are a lot of American Catholics in my experience who are heavily protestant in like, cultural awareness terms, just from growing up in America. I had to be the one to teach my grandfather that the Catholic Church does not endorse the idea of the Rapture, which in fact is not in the Bible. There are a lot of old-time Catholics who were never educated in what their own church teaches, and just kind of absorbed what's around them.
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Nov 5, 2019 05:06
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Tuxedo Catfish posted:sounds like Mummy 2E's chances of being good just shot up massively He's not throwing a fit in the comments or anything. He posted twice, once for a literal "+1" in response to somebody going "I like Mummy," and the other time in response to somebody going "where's CA Suleiman, isn't this his game?" At most the latter comment is a little sulky, but no, it doesn't indicate any kind of revolution against the jerk with the smouldering eyes. I'm pretty underwhelmed by what I see from Mummy so far, or specifically, from Mummy's development and structure as a game. Much less is changed than I would prefer to see. It's still a big improvement on 1e just by virtue of telling you to your face what the game is about and what the setting is like, but well, damning with faint praise.
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Nov 7, 2019 03:21
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FirstAidKite posted:.....so yeah, is there anything in any of the books that really accomplishes that, seeing as Beast went in such an unfortunate direction? Changeling, be a Darkling, join the Scarecrow Ministry, that's exactly and explicitly what they do. They were doing it before Beast: The Primordial ever stole the name "beast" from the list of Changeling's Seemings. Use Contracts and you can even walk into people's dreams and be nightmare directly.
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Nov 7, 2019 13:51
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PHIZ KALIFA posted:What if the game progresses backwards from your most modern (and lowest powered) resurrection as you slowly remember who you are and what cabal created you for what purpose. It sounds like MTC 2e is equipped to do this part fine, actually, assuming the Storytelling chapter actually has practical advice on how to structure passage through nonlinear time. Your fresh-from-chargen traits represent your first experienced Descent from your perspective as a mummy, which may be completely detached from where it falls in actual world chronology. PHIZ KALIFA posted:What if everyone played mummies This is the part that MTC 2e seriously needs good Storytelling advice to be able to cover that MTC 1e didn't have. (It had a brief, in my opinion inadequate, attempt in the corebook's Storytelling chapter, which was barely ever brought up elsewhere.) That, or some mechanic to synchronize a mummy team's Descent and death-cycle together, which I'm honestly very surprised wasn't already core. If they do put something like that in 2e, well, that would help a lot. The problem with a team of mummies isn't that they're too powerful to run a gang of. Mage is right over there, after all. It's that the thematic oomph of being a mummy is about dying, lying dead, and then returning from death. You'd have the same problem in Vampire if there were a huge emphasis on falling into torpor: telling that story is a hassle when everybody's death clocks aren't on the same timer.
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Nov 7, 2019 17:56
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There are two separate but similar settings/tabletop games/cinematic universes/whatever that the original White Wolf Game Studios launched, as the new thread title implies: World of Darkness (or oWoD - Vampire: the Masquerade, Mage: the Ascension, etc.) and what has retroactively been renamed Chronicles of Darkness (or nWoD - Vampire: the Requiem, Mage: the Awakening, etc.) Mastigos is a character type from Mage: the Awakening. They're not from the oWoD at all.
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Nov 7, 2019 20:38
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NikkolasKing posted:Thanks for that and sorry. No need to apologize, the situation is unnecessarily confusing, especially with games like Vampire and Mage sharing some major jargon terms and concepts. (I think you could make a decent argument that the game named Ascension is all about Awakening, and the game named Awakening is about the paths to Ascension.) Re: the oWoD afterlife: I think there's some edition ambiguity as to whether destroyed vampires can linger as wraiths without some kind of Necromancy fuckery, but my assumption has generally been that the answer to "what happens to a vampire at Final Death?" is usually "annihilation and oblivion; you had your afterlife already and Final Death means final." As to whether that's oblivion with a capital or a lowercase O in Wraith terms, it's possible some vampires retained enough moral humanity to move on to the unknown fate of wraiths who achieve Transcendence, whether that be union with a creator, reincarnation, or whatever. Or maybe they just all go down the hole. Depends on how bleak you're shooting for, and where your characters are on the spectrum between The Crow and The Purge.
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Nov 7, 2019 21:09
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Stephenls posted:Book of the Fallen is... good? ...so far. Just all-in on being about evil without glamorizing it; not at all interested in being a book about generic gribbly monsters and boogeymen and laser-focused (in what I’ve read of it in the thirty minutes or so I’ve had it) on being about why and how much abuse and human evil sucks, how it works, and why it must be fought. The author’s note at the beginning makes a strong case using examples from Satyros Phil’s own life for why the normalization of discreet abuse in real life makes it essential to recognize and engage with abuse in art, without doing the 90s White Wolf pretentiousness thing. Is it... useful for running games with Nephandi antagonists? Because the ubiquity and banality of callousness, evil, and abuse doesn't actually sound like a recipe for a game about plotting against self-debasing antinomian wizards on a spiritual mission to drag the whole world down with them, so much as a game about positive activism against systemic structures which can't be defeated individually but only holistically. I Am Just a Box fucked around with this message at 00:33 on Nov 8, 2019 |
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Nov 8, 2019 00:29
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Jerik posted:I've recently been reading the CoD books for the first time, and I've been kind of feeling that way about the CoD books in general. There's some good stuff there, but the order it's presented can be... less than optimal. Both CoD Vampire and Werewolf, for example, describe in the clan/auspice entries how each clan/auspice fits into each covenant/tribe, before they've introduced the covenants/tribes. Yes, thank you, it's very illuminating to read a paragraph in the description of the Daeva about how Daeva fit into the Carthian Movement when the Carthian Movement has never been mentioned before in the book and I have no idea what it is. This would easily have been avoided by discussing the relations between the clans/auspices and the covenants/tribes after both have been introduced, but... that's not what they did. I think that the CofD 2e corebooks suffer doubly from having the precedent set by the Vampire 2e core. a) Vampire 2e was initially developed before CCP had approved referring to the Revised Storytelling System rules as a "second edition," so while unlike the GMC book it contained full standalone rules, there was some ambiguity as to whether it counted as a "corebook" or a "supplement" that might expect readers had already read the 1e corebook. I think Dave Brookshaw mentioned at one point that while Mage 2e was being developed as the Fallen World Chronicle, this influenced the Storytelling chapter's focus on issues newer to the 2e rules compared to general Mage storytelling advice. b) Vampire is one of the CofD's most archetypal games, alongside Hunter and now Deviant. It has its own setting details and unique wrinkles, but it's still invested in reflecting fairly closely what an unfamiliar reader imagines when they think of vampires in a vacuum. Vampire 2e is thus able to put the chapter with the playable character types at the forefront, because you know, more or less, what a vampire is, even if you haven't yet learned that the "Embrace" is their word for turning a mortal or that they maintain a specific named tradition of moving among the living while hiding their nature. You still have enough context to start dividing them into The Sexy Vampires, The Scary Vampires, The Christian Vampires, and The Elitist Vampires. This doesn't set a good precedent for the rest of the gamelines, which are not archetypal like this and need to present their general context before dividing. Doing this in Werewolf means talking about The Shadow Ritualist Werewolves and The Spirit-Hunting Werewolves before you have said much at all about what the Shadow is or what spirits have to do with werewolves. Mummy seems like it suffers from an additional detail, in that I'm not certain all of the writing team has the game they're writing about perfectly straight. Matthew Dawkins has responded to a question about the return of the Shuankhsen in Second Edition by saying "yes, the Shuankhsen are still the primary antagonists," when I never got the sense from Mummy 1e that they were the primary antagonists in the first place. (Of course, I can't really identify any primary antagonist in Mummy 1e, which I think is a flaw of the game to start with. It's pretty diffuse on that front.) The 2e manuscript preview also has a passage that appears to paraphrase a passage about the history of the Nameless Empire from the 1e corebook, which talks about their imperial conquests facing their first real challenge in Canaan from the professional army of the Ki-En-Gir. The 2e paraphrase refers to the Ki-En-Gir as the professional army of the Canaanites, whereas the 1e text subtly implies that the Ki-En-Gir are a foreign empire of which Canaan is a conquered tributary. This matters because Ki-En-Gir is, uh, just "Sumer" in the Sumerian language. I Am Just a Box fucked around with this message at 01:31 on Nov 9, 2019 |
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Nov 9, 2019 01:27
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Rand Brittain posted:Yeah, the thing is that every CoD book, since Requiem 2e, is exactly like this. The worst one yet is the Contagion Chronicle book, which goes talking about the big organizations that form around different reactions to and attitudes about the Contagion, their thoughts on where the Contagion comes from and why it does what it does, how they have reacted to the Contagion in the past, the difference between Sworn and False approaches to handling the Contagion, and the mechanical powers these organizations gain from the special experiences they gain from interacting with the Contagion, which work by manipulating or interfacing with the world through the means employed by the Contagion... ...before finally getting to the chapters dedicated to telling you what the Contagion is and what it does. (Then those chapters do a very bad job of trying to explain that.)
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Nov 9, 2019 02:13
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Rand Brittain posted:I kind of got the impression it was "oh, the Contagion can be anything you want!". As far as I can tell, it's: "God-Machine infrastructure glitching out or misfiring in a way that causes miscellaneous supernatural problems connected thematically only by the fact that they are Problems and they have some kind of Contagious Component." In practice this is basically anything that has some kind of little-C contagious component, because the writing appears not to really understand what God-Machine infrastructure is, and frequently just throws out the word "infrastructure" without any clear material embodiment or referent, as if the laws of physics themselves count as infrastructure, and Contagion outbreaks therefore just kind of spontaneously happen wherever out of nothing. Also note that some sample Contagion outbreaks have central foci that are not little-C contagious, like the appearance of a mummy from another dimension who is written up with Mummy: the Curse traits despite being nothing like a Mummy: the Curse mummy. The mummy has powers that can inflict little-C contagious conditions, but the mummy itself is a much more prominent manifestation of the outbreak. I Am Just a Box fucked around with this message at 03:12 on Nov 9, 2019 |
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Nov 9, 2019 03:10
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Joe Slowboat posted:You can un-pledge after reading the backer manuscript, can’t you? If it’s that technically garbled? You can change your pledge at any time until the campaign ends on December 5th, including withdrawing altogether. That's what I ended up doing when the Contagion Chronicle turned out to be a big disappointment for me. The latest Onyx Path Kickstarters release the backer manuscript in episodic chunks, a chapter or two a week, and if you drop below a $5 pledge you lose access to the manuscript updates. Kind of a turn towards less consumer trust from the days of the Demon Kickstarter, when they simply posted a link to the full manuscript on the Kickstarter page for anyone to view on day one. I Am Just a Box fucked around with this message at 20:06 on Nov 9, 2019 |
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Nov 9, 2019 20:03
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NikkolasKing posted:So it's pretty clear where Nosferatu and Toreador come from but what were the inspirations for the other Clans? Tzimisce are an odd fusion of Dracula and Brian Lumley's Necroscope series.
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Nov 10, 2019 08:12
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Mors Rattus posted:e: it has other layout flaws, i mean, but the only prehistory it goes into is the part that matters because it frames why you do what you do Forsaken books have historically suffered from the same problem as the Awakening 1e core, which is to say, in distant prehistory a bunch of things happened to set things up, then a lot of nothing, and now you're here to be motivated by those prehistory things rather than by anything more immediate or contemporary. But the 2e books do get away from that pretty well by focusing on the hunter's territorial instincts more than the ancestral duty to Father Wolf to drive the modern hunt. I'm good with Awakening history in a similar sense to how I'm good with Vampire history, because mages are a bunch of nosy assholes burying and uncovering secrets from each other, so the works of the Pelasgians or the Jnanashakti can still crop up in modern day adventures, or even the Omphalos stones from the time of the Vinca.
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Nov 21, 2019 06:26
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