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Speaking as someone who literally just announced his retirement as Mage Developer ten minutes ago... You will never be rich. You will never get the recognition you deserve. The opportunities you get have more to do with who you drink with at conventions than the quality of your work, but you're only as good as your last delivery on those opportunities. You would make more money being the drummer in a pub band, and sell more books if you wrote porn. But it really is the best feeling in the world when people talk about game worlds you shaped, or you see an Actual Play or a FATAL & Friends of your material. Do it. Enjoy it.
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# ¿ Oct 5, 2019 00:24 |
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# ¿ May 16, 2024 16:51 |
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Loomer posted:I’m contemplating putting together a proper PDF of the timeline with appropriate kit and public domain art, layout, and editors notes to put on the Vault alongside a basic version for free. The vault itself actually seems like the most straightforward method of disseminating the project files as a freebie or pay what you like thing, too. Central problem is that it only covers up to revised, but I suppose if there’s enough downloads I could justify V20, though V5 is probably going to stay off the table with the boycott and all. If you're good at something, don't do it for free. Donate the money if you must.
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# ¿ Oct 13, 2019 17:45 |
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I want to say it was something to do with the... Uh... The extra-spoooky more unseelie than the unseelie guys from one of the later supplements.
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# ¿ Oct 28, 2019 15:59 |
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That Old Tree posted:Nah this stuff is just Rose providing her guidance after stepping down from being dev. There's no official plan behind it. Where do you think I got the text of all those Awakening 2e dev blogs from? They were almost all lifted and adapted from Awakening's bible. I have considered putting it up. Putting Deviant's up would be gauche, as it's basically my outline for the book.
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# ¿ Oct 31, 2019 15:51 |
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Rand Brittain posted:I mean, how many top Mage people are there? If the other two devs were busy there might be nobody else, especially since a lot of them would probably want to seriously alter the setting. It's not like Satyros hasn't seriously altered the setting. (mid to late revised edition forever!!!). But Bill has his own stuff going on, and Jesse has a real job in pc games.
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# ¿ Oct 31, 2019 17:44 |
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FirstAidKite posted:Thanks for the answers! No, it’s the big change for 2e.
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# ¿ Nov 7, 2019 20:06 |
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Arivia posted:Is Onyx Path not doing any more VtR stuff? That sucks. The next Requiem book is all the way up to the “looking at the pdf proof for obvious goofs” stage, just before being released.
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# ¿ Dec 19, 2019 08:07 |
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Tuxedo Catfish posted:Honestly my best guess re: the nature of the Underworld, based on the following points: There are several contenders for "where are all the humanity spirits", ranging from Secret Peoples living in quiet places of the worlds like Rmohals, to (I kid ye not) the Strix. quote:- The Underworld is in most respects a reflection of our world. Only in the uppermost "nearest" reaches, and largely because everything that's ever destroyed but remembered leaves a ghost, even if only temporarily, and all that trash has to go somewhere. quote:- The Cthonic Gods don't really correspond to anything else in the World of Darkness that I can think of. They quite possibly don't exist. quote:- In Geist 1E, Geists were pretty heavily implied to be Spirit-Ghost hybrids. I can't remember if 2E rolled this back or doubled down on it, though. Rolled it back; it was because ghosts in 1e didn't have Rank. quote:- In the Sundered World dark era, the Underworld exists, but it's hard to say whether it was always there or got retconned into existence along with god knows what else when the Ladder broke. It's also rapidly changing; it used to be a single, unbroken ocean, then suddenly there were islands and the water seems to be slowly draining away. Geist 2e includes the notion that a Krewe can, through an endgame process called Catabasis, reshape the Underworld. I knew this was coming when I wrote the two/three lines in Sundered World about the Underworld's appearance thanks to long discussions with gimpinblack about his plans for the game; the Neolithic version of it is different because it's several such reshapings ago. quote:... is that the Underworld is a damaged or severed portion of the Shadow that went haywire when humanity started messing with its own place / significance in the cosmos. It's certainly being affected by humanity, simply because humanity make so many, many more ghosts than would exist without them. The Underworld's sorry state may just be the cost of Sapience. Lots of Death-interested mages believe it to be the most "damaged" Fallen World, though whether the nature of that is it being riddled with Irises to Lower Depths in its deeper parts, or if it's an affect of the Fall, or if it's an affect of humanity, is up for Convocation debate. Truthfully, though, the Underworld resembles the Astral more than it resembles the Shadow. In a bizarro-world inverted sense of "resemble". Compare the Sea of Fragments and the Ocean Oroborous. quote:e: This also would mean that when woofs "mistake" Sin-Eaters for some weird flavor of Ridden, they're basically right.
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# ¿ Dec 23, 2019 18:49 |
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PHIZ KALIFA posted:Yowza! Sounds exactly like what I was looking for. I think I'm going to just keep their clan identities a secret to be revealed later, but it'll be good to get an idea how to run a game at that level. So my own Requiem character isn't a revenant any more (he got second-embraced by a Gangrel) but he's still got the social stigma of being some rear end in a top hat's ghoul who survived exsanguination, and the messy, gory feeding habits of someone who's spent years waking up feral and starving every night, in a pit dug beneath the foundations of his former home. It's really hosed him up, and given him a redwood-sized chip on his shoulder.
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# ¿ Jan 9, 2020 15:23 |
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I Am Just a Box posted:. I'm not sure I recall what Geist's "chronicle" premise was, but it kind of fits the pattern anyway, with lesser antagonists that are much more prevalent and some stranger, more fearful antagonists to throw a spotlight on. Gimpinblack should correct me if I misremember, but ISTR it was “The Dead”. Deviant is “The Web of Pain” Mage was the last one that we started working on thinking it was going to be a supplement, that the core rules were then added to converting it into a corebook as a third draft. Much as vampire was published for a year as “Blood & Smoke, the Strix Chronicle”, Mage was “Mystery Play, the Fallen World Chronicle” right up until the last minute.
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# ¿ Jan 31, 2020 08:08 |
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Soonmot posted:https://twitter.com/wwpublishing/status/1222883237745217539?s=20 Also no “why did you stop playing world of darkness” option for “play chronicles instead”
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# ¿ Jan 31, 2020 18:29 |
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Warthur posted:As well as pretty much being D:tF, I think the issue with this in Chronicles is that cooking up yet another hidden secondary world linked to a splat type would risk cluttering up the setting to an absurd extent. One of the few things Beast did right is connect its splat to the supernal (IIRC) rather than further complicating the cosmology. The Astral, not the Supernal, but yes.
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# ¿ Feb 16, 2020 12:12 |
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pseudosavior posted:Metapod just wants " 30 straight pages of Magechat" back. I was born ready.
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# ¿ Feb 19, 2020 00:20 |
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The Mysterium and Guardian books are useful if you have a player who's really into the way those two Orders are actually religions. A lay Guardian or a Mystagogue who would have been in the Free Council but fell in with a different crowd as an apprentice? Not so much, but a true-believing Labyrinth-tending sin-eating martyr-complexing Guardian or a high-initiation Mystagogue who took the Corpus to heart? The Order books give way more detail about their practices than we could fit into the 2e splat spreads. A Guardian player interested in Masques will get mileage from the pages about it, the discussions of how they're used, and the semi-heretical Guardians who go way too far in it as opposed to the corebooks one- paragraph of flavour text on the Merit. That sort of thing. Silver Ladder is useful as the best explanation of the Pentacle's legal system and what happens at Convocations. Also a better book about how to guide Sleeper society than Free Council is (Free Council has some limitations as a book - it was an experimental format, while the other five Orders stuck to the one adapted from Vampire's covenant books).
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# ¿ Feb 21, 2020 18:04 |
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Ahem. The Vinca era was not hinted at before Dark Eras. The era came about because Rose had the idea that mages are so city-dependent in her view of them, so focused on society and academia, that it would be interesting to see them before any of that - what does the Greek and Indian philosophy splat look like pre-Greece and India? I chose the Vinca thanks to a tenuous association with my own academic past, plus their physical location and temporal place at the dawn of agriculture. Rose and Rich were suggesting Stonehenge on the skype call when they asked me to do it. We went pre-Sundering because we knew it was a different thing to the Fall, because werewolf had plenty of info spread around about what pangaea was like, and because Stew was up for it as werewolf developer. We rejected doing an era pre-Fall out of hand, as it's deliberately mysterious and contradictory as to what the pre-Fall Time Before looked like. Sundered World isn't a Primordial War analogue. It's a Dreams of the First Age analogue. A "during Atlantis" era would be like a Primordial War one, which is why we didn't do it. (and the spheres cataclysm maps to the Fall, too, thinking about it)
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# ¿ Feb 27, 2020 10:28 |
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Tuxedo Catfish posted:It's complicated because there was an ancient "original" state of magic before wizards ruined everything, but it retroactively changed history so that things had always been the way they are now, with the only survivors being various weirdos who weren't affected by causality for one reason or another. This. Mages sometimes find ruins, temples, and other less-classifiable structures from the Time Before. They sometimes find human or almost-human inhabitants in pocket dimensions that seem descended from it. The thing is, though, they all appear to be from different Time Befores. Atlantis wasn't an island, it's an easy name for a cascade failure of reality. Magic in the current timeline goes back to the hunter/gatherers, and probably the nearest pre-homo sapiens humans.
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# ¿ Mar 2, 2020 19:27 |
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The Tremere genuinely have insights and powers other mages lack, at the cost of being soul-eating monsters. Abyssal magic is like Awakened drugs, with the various forms of Scelesti ranging from users to addicts to dealers. The Rapt and Harrowed are failure states. So... Kinda? Only the Tremere really do the “our robes are better” thing.
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# ¿ Mar 10, 2020 07:33 |
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Loomer posted:No one hire Eric Griffin. I’ve just found another section of him copy-pasting part of his work into a different chapter and book to avoid doing actual work. Who *is* Eric Griffin? EDIT: Never mind. Figured it out. The Bygone Bestiary guy, yeah? Dave Brookshaw fucked around with this message at 19:09 on Mar 15, 2020 |
# ¿ Mar 15, 2020 19:05 |
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So, that plagiarism in Danse Macabre has sad circumstances swirling around it which are not my stories to tell, but suffice to say that the freelancer responsible never worked again.
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# ¿ Mar 17, 2020 12:15 |
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Joe Slowboat posted:Finally reading Signs of Sorcery, and it's a blast. I already registered my mild complaints in the F&F thread, and generally the book's great - but what I'm curious is, does anyone have an idea for the Peirasmon Ministry? It's unique to The Ruin, Exarch of Fate, and I couldn't find any further canonical details. The Kyrian Ministry which is shared by the Prophet and the Ruin is the Ministry of Inescapable Lack of Social Mobility, which is awful, but that means the Peirasmon Ministry needs an approach that doesn't overlap with that. They specialise in taking people Sleepers regard as role-models and tempting them to self-destruction. The Ruin's the Exarch of Inevitable Shittiness Leading to Apathy, so they help people who seem to be resisting that along as examples. They're one of the Minor Ministries who I figured would have Servitors other than the four Majors, too - probably some kind of succubus/incubus. Made out of people, like all Servitors. Dave Brookshaw fucked around with this message at 01:37 on Mar 29, 2020 |
# ¿ Mar 29, 2020 01:32 |
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hangedman1984 posted:Speaking of Supernal Arcadia/Changeling Arcadia: Also, the Hedge is a layer of the Astral. Albeit one that mages breeze past (it's the Astral Barrier). While future writers and developers are, of course, liable to make their own choices, a lot of care and attention over the last 15 years has gone into making sure the nWoD's cosmology doesn't line up neatly like this. Because we're monsters.
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# ¿ Apr 1, 2020 14:11 |
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Yes, but also Mind, often more importantly than Time. Messing with the Hedge is usually Mind and Fate, for example.
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# ¿ Apr 1, 2020 14:28 |
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Yeah, so your choices with Forces 3 are "a direct Fraying spell to gently caress up the forces in their Pattern" which will do Bashing, or "I make the electricity in the power line arc to them", which will do... Whatever the damage for the electricity is. You might find it easier to use Forces to just set a motherfucker on fire and let the fire rules sort out the rest than skin your Forces 4 Lethal attack as a D&D spell. The only problem is that setting people up for environmental damage is inherently less controllable than a direct assault on their Pattern - fire spreads, electricity sparks, and those are just the two common ones. You could use Forces to irradiate the house they're in, but that is decidedly Unwise.
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# ¿ Apr 9, 2020 08:43 |
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Yeah, so there was a deep-dive on Practices in 1e in Tome of the Mysteries, but it's now wholly outdated, as 1e was full of cases where spells would be promoted or demoted dots based on perceived game balance, while 2e went for sticking to hard "this practice is at this dot level no matter what" and relied on the new Paradox system to make certain effects harder. Even when it required certain tortured methods, like the way "Portal" type Space effects are now built as a Reach effect on Colocation, just so that we could keep them at Space 3 and Teleportation at Space 4. Due to it also having the equally-detailed and now equally-not-useful discussions of Wisdom, crafting, archmasters, antimonian spells, TotM is probably the second least useful 1e book. Almost everything in it has now been covered in 2e, which is to be expected given that it was 1e's Player's Guide equivalent and we've had a Player's Guide equivalent in Signs of Sorcery and a Monster Manual in Nameless and Accursed.
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# ¿ Apr 23, 2020 08:23 |
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You know what the real difference is? The Technocracy is portrayed as having goals, which it cannot be portrayed as achieving. The Seers are portrayed as following the designs of the Exarchs, who are quite satisfied with the nWoD as it is, thank you. They will always seem less competent. The Seers are on the winning side, and the Technocracy are all idiots who don't even understand that they're mages half the time (edition permitting).
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# ¿ Apr 25, 2020 20:07 |
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Yes, in 2e Mage and Changeling, (which now have the same line Developer, so she should have a much easier time getting writers to obey it than I did) the two Arcadias are entirely different, and the Hedge is the Astral Barrier, the Gauntlet-equivalent between dreams and the Oneiros. Imperial Mysteries predates the big overhaul to the Supernal as a setting element in second edition. And I invented the Gods of Thistle. But kill your darlings.
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# ¿ Apr 29, 2020 09:35 |
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Jhet posted:Per the book you just replace it with something like you do Aspirations, but the most they've done in our game in three years is reframe them from time to time. So for the steal lightning example (which is a cool idea), I'd just make it a deeper mystery or push the story in a way where they're having to still deal with something related to that conceptual framework. So for steal lightning, I'd guide the story in a way where a good replacement is something like "Survive with the stolen lightning" or "Figure out how to use the stolen lightning", or something to that effect. Maybe it turns out that a couple of the regular antagonists are in a mystery cult devoted to Thor and they change tactics entirely in the next encounter with them. Maybe the thing posing as Thor gets really cranky and they start destroying the power supply chain while the group is doing something else and it becomes more difficult because they're having to fight on two fronts. Yeah, so - My group, the group that created the Obsession mechanics, had; "Attempting to coax the worthy into Awakening" - the Acanthus Guardian Strategos, whose job it was to look after two prospects "The Supernal nature of groups as an expression of shared humanity" - the Obrimos Arrow Perfected Adept who'd Awakened as a soldier in Iraq after realising the Lie of nation and creed. This guy would habitually infilitrate sleeper criminal orgs the cabal dealt with as a member, and once joined a werewolf pack by mistake. "Why do the Seers want my son" - the Thyrsus thearch who'd slept with the Tetrarch of Mammon before her Awakening "What's going on with my timeline" - the Moros Eleventh Question Libertine, who "should" have been a Harrowed Banisher only someone came back in time to fix him, but his alternate self kept trying to reassert itself. "How High Speech relates to human language" - the Mastigos Mystagogue, who was a giant nerd. None of them changed over the course of the game, though the way they went about chasing them frequently did. Every time Ibn went through another brutal initiation ceremony, every time Cowl decided someone wasn't worthy and would get stuck back into the Labyrinth or set up something to hopefully shock a Prospect into confronting the Lie, every time Herophilus was temporarily dead for the last six years, they got Arcane beats.
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# ¿ May 30, 2020 20:41 |
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Dawgstar posted:I'm guessing Chicago's probably not a good reference book either? Admittedly I do own that one already because it looks like a good book on Chicago as a city and the Requiem stuff slaps. WoD: Chicago was, if I remember correctly, partly written before Mage 1e was finished. It came out four months later, so knowing how production timescales match up that's either true or it was written before Mage came out and anyone played it. It's... Um... Yeah. Props for having local (to me) boy former pop-idol Robbie Williams on the cover. (Tim Bradstreet was in his photo-reference era, and this one's particularly obvious)
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# ¿ Jun 1, 2020 15:47 |
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If not Robbie as photo reference, someone who looks incredibly like him. As for the Baseball cabal, Malcolm Sheppard brought them back in the 2nd ed fiction anthology, and had Khonsu beat them up. EDIT: The Game of Geometric Perfection. That's what they're called. Also, the Cubs are apparently the werewolves' team. Dave Brookshaw fucked around with this message at 13:43 on Jun 2, 2020 |
# ¿ Jun 2, 2020 12:43 |
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thegoatgod_pan posted:I think the real answer to this problem is that Guardians canonically revere the institution of the cabal and would A. never ask a Guardian to turn on their own cabal and B. wouldn't let a Guardian do it, short of accidentally discovering they are baby-eating Nephandi (which is not to say another Guardian couldn't do it--but no one rats on their cabal, because if they did, no one would let Guardians in their cabal in the first place). No, that's from the Guardian book. Which as noted was, like, the fourth book ever released for M:tAw. "Obviously, a neophyte cannot form any sort of positive relationship with a mage he has spent time intimidating on the order's behalf. Telling someone that you know where he was last night is not a good way to begin a friendship. If a neophyte seeks guidance on the matter, she is told to earn some friends first and spread the Guardians' bad name second. Once she has companions whom she can trust and who can trust her, a neophyte can begin the work of making other mages nervous. Most importantly, a neophyte is <i>never</i> asked to betray her cabalmates. The cabal is a source of stability for the neophyte, and of safety. Even a magister, inscrutable and imperious in his ways, will find another way to learn what he needs to know, rather than requesting an action that will potentially shatter a neophyte's cabal. This rule, detailed in several parables and koans hailing from ancient time, extends all the way up through the ranks: one does not betray one's cabal or allow another to do so." And in the 2e core, put more simply: "No Guardian will ever be asked to investigate or act against members of their own cabal" So, in 2e, where we're emphasising that single-order cabals are a rarity in the Diamond (though not the Free Council) it's phrased as a concession the Guardians make to other orders. In their 1e Order book, which is all about their internal view, it's about safeguarding the mental health of their members. Both justifications are valid, I think. Dave Brookshaw fucked around with this message at 08:16 on Jun 5, 2020 |
# ¿ Jun 5, 2020 08:13 |
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Arivia posted:This is pretty cool, thank you! I wasn’t trying to diminish or dismiss what you’ve done with the line since, just discuss how I felt back when Awakening was much younger. Hey, s'cool. I wish more people kept the difference in mind - I sometimes come across people arguing points of dubious canon with "but in Soul Cage..." None of my games used the setting - or system - exactly RAW. I don't think I've ever run a game without adjusting it for the group.
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# ¿ Jun 6, 2020 09:37 |
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cptn_dr posted:Signs of Sorcery (I think?) Has rules for playing newly Awakened mages. It does. The core Mage template assumes characters have had about a year of basic training, joined an Order and passed the point where they're allowed out to join a cabal on their own, bought a couple of Arcana dots and lost a Wisdom dot. Signs has rules for Awakening an existing mortal character in it, so makes the distinction between what you get at the instant of Awakening and what's training.
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# ¿ Jun 13, 2020 13:50 |
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Tuxedo Catfish posted:Forsaken being actively hostile to Apocalypse is good, actually. Depends on how recently I’ve encountered Ascension fans.
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# ¿ Jun 19, 2020 22:17 |
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Yeah. It has been a pleasure, folks. If this is the end, I'll miss these threads.
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# ¿ Jun 25, 2020 00:18 |
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Ironslave’s Mage discord is the best place for Magechat, but it’s so active it’s like a firehose.
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# ¿ Jun 25, 2020 11:50 |
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Kurieg posted:"Please right our floundering, poo poo smeared ship." If anyone can do it, Justin can.
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# ¿ Jun 30, 2020 15:22 |
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You don't need Death as long as the ghost is in a state you can perceive - e.g. being Materialized. If he's in sensory range, you can target him. He has a mind, so Mind works.
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# ¿ Jul 5, 2020 01:17 |
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Nessus posted:It seems like Prime in general just... is kind of the "cool thing" tax, it's not that it's got bad effects but across Awakening and Ascension it seems to be more "Do you want to do a surprisingly large number of common ideas for a magician? Welp, hope you bought When Awakening 1e was being designed, Prime was very nearly not an Arcanum at all, and instead just metamagic powers you got with Gnosis.
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# ¿ Jul 5, 2020 01:43 |
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Tuxedo Catfish posted:i could have sworn there were already rules for that but a ctrl+f in the core rulebook for "ritual", collaborative or cooperative casting, or multiple casters turned up nothing Yeah, it goes: If more than one person has the Arcana needed for the spell, they can use the proper CofD teamwork rules (effectively, one leads, the others roll their dice pools and provide a bonus to the leader). If a mage has a little bit of the Arcana but not enough to cast it, they can add a smaller bonus. Everyone else is a ritual cheerleader, and can be used as a yantra. What Mage doesn't allow under any circumstances (I was rather strict on this as line developer and nuked at least three attempts by freelancers to sneak it in as a Merit or generic crossover power that even looked like it might work) is allow, for example, a Mage with Death 3 and Fate 1 and a mage with Fate 3 and Death 1 to collaborate to cast a Death 3 Fate 3 spell. someone has to be able to cast the spell on their own. For the game design reason that allowing it makes mages as omni-competent as certain corners of the internet think they are. And the setting justification that collaborating like that makes no sense whatsoever with the fiction of what a mage does when casting a spell. You could do it with a Merit in Tome of Mysteries in 1e. It was called out by name in what not to do when designing 2e. EDIT: Should note that two of the Orders have benefits when group-casting as long as the mages involved all have their Order Merit: Free Councillors using the same focus of Techne get 8-again for the main roll, and can treat Sleepers who happen to be acting appropriately nearby as "ritualists" (say, a cabal who all have Techne: Programming in a hackerthon). Mystagogues add more dice bonus than other mages when they have a bit of the Arcana needed, and if they're a full participant they add an auto successes to the bonus they provide the leader. Dave Brookshaw fucked around with this message at 02:19 on Jul 5, 2020 |
# ¿ Jul 5, 2020 02:06 |
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# ¿ May 16, 2024 16:51 |
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Dawgstar posted:Which makes a complete lack of sense. Prometheans aren't even a race, they're a constructed beings roughly divided in groups. There's no link to the OOO DARK MOTHER. Second place is their oddly trollish attitude to Demons with "Ha I'll rip that mask off you and we'll see what happens then, huh?" when the answer is 'that the creature who looks like a mecha angel built mostly out of bladed whips will kill the stupid Beast because you just forced it to Go Loud and it's really mad at you.' The Dark Mother is an astral entity. Beats themselves are the Goetic equivalents of Bound with delusions of grandeur. It doesn't *matter* that there's no actual casual lineage between Beasts and Prometheans. Beasts are powered by humanity's reaction to monsters. All monsters. On the Promethean front, I find it harder to read than Beast itself nowadays - Matt had as much or more influence over it for much, much longer and used to say it was the game that felt closest to him, personally, the same way that I'm mostly known for Mage but find more of me, author-wise, reflected in Deviant. So yeah. Game about broken disgusting monsters who make everyone around them supernaturally revolted when their true faces are revealed, and who are trying to figure out what being a person means and building their way toward normalcy. If you're looking for a game that looks terrifying once you know about its Dev's past, Promethean is right there. It doesn't get brought up, though, because it's a good game. Zombiejack posted:if their's anything you can justify slotting without considering it in Cod its the Beasts, gently caress em. on hindisight having a sexual predator write the book with an rage addled idiot as co-author wasnt the way to go. Who's the Rage-addled idiot? quote:Then again they don't really bring anything to the table as pc's anyway, they should have just made Heroes-the whatever and kept the beasts as an edgelord option. Never an option. Beast was pitched as a Dragon game, where the splats were the different sorts of "horde", and expanded in weird ways between that and writing. Dave Brookshaw fucked around with this message at 15:37 on Jul 20, 2020 |
# ¿ Jul 20, 2020 15:30 |