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Magechat: A primer Magechat is the most loved, hated, and feared event that can happen in a WoD thread. Anytime there are suddenly eighty new posts here it’s because someone mentioned Beast, someone’s trolling about V5, or Magechat happened. At its core Magechat is basically getting high with your friends after philosophy 101 and talking about like, what the universe really is, man. But also with nerdy RPG hermeneutics. It’s the worst (best.) Magechat is all consuming for a few reasons. First off, Mages in game are nosey, arrogant assholes. Mage has a fairly consistent system where basically all phenomena, natural or supernatural, can be controlled by one of the arcana/spheres of magic. This usually means in game Mages just see the other splats as manifestations of their own game rules, even if that explains nothing at all. So part of Magechat is going “well Vampires are affected by the death arcana, so clearly they’re a death phenomena” and everyone else going “THAT DOESN’T MEAN ANYTHING.” Getting into Mage lore gives you a vocabulary to talk about like, the fundamental rules of the occult in the WoD. The vocabulary, and nothing else. Oh, and in oWoD the fundamental rules of the occult are consensual reality, except when they aren’t. Archmages can do some really, really weird stuff too, and so part of Magechat is kind of a secret history of the World of Darkness, but it's the kind of secret history which ends up in "Western Europe used to worship Mithras until someone cast a spell so powerful that it removed Mithrasism and the spellcaster from reality and anyway that's why Mithrasism and Christianity (which seeped into to replace it) have so much in common." It's nonsense. It rules. The second amazing reason why Magechat is the best (worst) is because nWoD’s Mage games have an explicitly political backdrop. Most PC mages are assumed to be on the side of the occult orders who ostensibly want more magic for more people, most antagonistic mages work for the living platonic symbols of oppression, so like they get their orders from a person who turned themselves into literally oppression via a persistent surveillance state. Unless that’s all propaganda to get the evil wizards something to work for? ANYWAY the basic tension in a nMage game is “Let’s work to liberate humanity!” vs “Hey what does this do? Oh gently caress, did I just accidently remove the souls of everyone in downtown Boston?” This means Magechat is political, with a decidedly leftist bent. And, well, if you’ve been around leftist online communities you know the knives can come out when people debate the better world they're striving for. So in summation you get people using complete but useless paradigms to discuss everything else in the world of darkness while arguing with each other about if magical vanguardism is a valid way to democratize magic, if alliances with counter-revolutionaries are permissible under existential threat, or what it would mean to punch the symbol of fascism in its face. It’s loving glorious. Digital Osmosis fucked around with this message at 05:20 on Sep 28, 2019 |
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Sep 28, 2019 03:30
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TheNamedSavior posted:this is something that reads out of an alt-right rulebook. IT HAS BEGUN I just finished Miéville's October and might be in a pessimistic bent. Great book, inspiring story, brutal epilogue.
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Sep 28, 2019 04:44
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I hadn't previously thought of that phrase as implying failure or as injunction to inaction and I didn't know that had become a nazi catchphrase. I've edited the sentence in my post. I hope below I can explain better what I was trying to get at - that Magechat ends up being used as metaphor for rehashing some old, sometimes vicious, intra-leftist debates. Up until pretty recently, rightest movements were generally unified by a goal to return to status quo ante, and I do think there's therefore some truth what I was (clumsily) trying to say. A leftist regime imagines a new future, which involves differing opinions. A rightest regime, both because they claim to only want to return to the past and because rightists are big on deference to authority, tends IMO to be more initially unified. Things have gotten bonkers lately with rightists also in "burn it all down and start again" mode but as far as I can tell you generally get more fundamental disagreements about what politics should look like among leftist thinkers than among rightists. Since apparently the specific wording I used has turned into some kind of "don't be a leftist" shibboleth than I'm very pleased to ditch it, but I really do think the leftist bent of nMage can lead Magechat to have some emotional positions and heated arguments. edit: but also, you know, if I was trying to say that intra-leftist fighting is an occasional feature of this thread, you calling me out for specific, non-offensive language use in a post about how cool it is to argue fantasy revolutionary politics kinda proves my point, no? Digital Osmosis fucked around with this message at 05:27 on Sep 28, 2019 |
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Sep 28, 2019 05:19
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Lord_Hambrose posted:I don't know what the gently caress they were thinking of when they decided on this. Wraith 20 is amazing because it manages to contain everything you need to play Wraith, but you just have to flip past nearly a whole source book worth of pages to even start looking at it. gently caress, I gotta pick up Wraith 20 now don't I? Fun fact: Wraith was both my first and last oWoD game. I got into the storyteller system, I poo poo you not, through the Street Fighter RPG (underrated!) I musta been... 9? I wanted more books that used that system to picked up Wraith, probably 2E. I couldn't make heads or tails of it and returned it to the book store a day or two later. Not sure what my next one was (Changeling?) but it worked, and I went through the cores until Wraith which I bought, read once, understood more-but-not-a-lot-of, and put it down. So if Wraith 20 is complete and goes out of the way to be like "this is what being a Wraith actually is like" then yeah, might have to pick it up.
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Sep 28, 2019 16:53
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Shrecknet posted:It still cant be worse than nWoD Mage corebook, which made the baffling decision to have gold text on silver pages so it is literally physically unreadable at any distance Huh, I always saw it as blue text on a black background
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Sep 28, 2019 17:39
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Shrecknet posted:Someone talk me out of starting a nwod reqiuem LARP in Durham because i want to tell better stories Here's my best attempt: the stories you tell here, about struggling to tell good stories, are very entertaining - at least to me. thespaceinvader posted:If people are still interested in the adventures of our little coterie, gimme a shout, depending on if it's better posted here or in the stories thread. hi i haven't played a wod game for over a decade please give me stories Bogart posted:My HRG just came in. This book is great and I have no idea what anything is beyond the vague “blood dolls is vampos.” I actually didn't read the Horror Recognition Guide until like four months ago when someone in the old thread suggested it to someone wanting to get into the nWoD. It loving rules. One of those amazing cases where doing nerdy hermeneutics to connect it to specific game-lines is as satisfying as just reading the drat thing as a series of creepy one-off x-files-y stories. In general a lot of WoD stuff is really good at this - nWoD more than oWoD, IMO, for being willing to avoid explicit answers - but it's a strength of both settings. I also really enjoyed Demon (the Descent)'s version of this, I think from the Demon Storytellers Guide. Might have been because the antagonist of DtD has fairly deep talons in places most splats would care about, but also might have just been a bunch of deeply creepy ideas, well told, that are tempting to drop into any campaign.
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Oct 2, 2019 07:52
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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? I think one of the best parts of the entire WoD, old and new, is that the feeling of being over your head and fighting monsters you barely understand is evoked in pretty much every splat regardless of how powerful they are. So yeah, the above Hunter advice is on point, but if you wanted to see how scared shitless the monsters are (and the monsters are always, always, fundamentally people) there are options. But I'd especially shout out nDemon and nChangling. nDemon is a bit different since you're a person but you were never a human, but playing a half-demon or a stigmatic (a mortal clued into demon poo poo) gets you there and the God-Machine and it's minions are incredible monsters you can barely understand. It's tone is a lot more "waging a cold war against" than outright fighting, but it's still a fight. nChangeling is cool because even having read all the deep storyteller lore about what True Fae (the main antagonists) are and how they work there's still something ineffable and impossible to understand about them -- and any individual True Fae is going to be a lot weirder than the general description of their uh, species?
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Oct 5, 2019 08:56
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Selkies are tough, because they fit your theme perfectly but don't fit your aesthetics at all. I think I'd lean towards including them because I honestly don't know any folkloric creatures whose stories hit the emotional beats you're going for that squarely in the bulls-eye, but it's a really tough call. On a similar topic -- anyone know any good Selkie movies? Neil Jordan's Ondine might be the only one I've seen.
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Oct 6, 2019 17:14
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Mulva posted:You know thinking back to the oWoD there's really no downside to being a vampire if you aren't a monster to begin with and are willing to do some occult research. There's powers that take care of all the flaws. Hell I know like 3 powers that let you walk in the sun, and it's not like they are all crazy 9 dot super powers or something. Want to be immortal but afraid you'll miss chocolate? There are powers for that. Too narcissistic to live a life were your downstairs don't work right? Also powers for that. Frenzy? You can mitigate it. Having to drink blood? It's not too hard to make animal blood as filling as human blood or even pure vitae. Any particular downside you care to name was dealt with somewhere, by someone, and most of them could be learned by practically any vampire. And the Thin-Bloods that can't learn some of them can still learn the rest, and the ones they lose are generally covered by the innate perks of being Thin-Blooded. my oWoD vampire lore has fallen off the deep edge, care to mention a couple of the specifics of those powers? Like what disciplines or books they're from? Really just a bit curious here so nbd if you don't know them off the top of your head. PHIZ KALIFA posted:Tremere: The House of Tin will melt when Mars draws ascendant. Are you Fortified? Shreknet's the only Setite in his game, right? He should just have one that says Setites: Everyone appreciates the hard work you're doing launching the princedom's finest news source
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Oct 10, 2019 18:23
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Dear Shreknet, My sire has been really good to me, she's been teaching me some of the harder points of our clan discipline (rhymes with dramaturgy) and she's been so, so patient. Honestly, I'm so glad to have her there for me - I can't imagine showing up to the local elysium without knowing she's there for me. My problem is that, well, she's kind of a messy eater. I know that mastery of the mystic arts takes a lot of concentration but she's always leaving half-drained kine and corpses lying about our chantry. I always clean up after her, it's the least I can do to repay all her kindness. Lately though I've been feeling, well, a little peeved that she only seems to pay attention to me when she's teaching me new rituals. I sometimes thinks she doesn't even know who cleans up all her corpses! How can I get over this resentment? Oh, and how can I explain to my coterie that my relationship with her is not codependent? They're all just jealous they don't have the same kind of relationship with their sires! - Sanguinely Tethered
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Oct 18, 2019 05:45
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It's gotta be Brujah, right? Scholarly nerd who ended up being the key player in an unimaginably huge social, intellectual, and eventually political revolution -- fits them to a T.
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Nov 22, 2019 06:43
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Ferrinus posted:The problem with offensive media isn't that I'm worried that it will turn my friends into bigots. okay ferrinus, but like, you see how this is on you, sorta, for not being friends with enough crypto-bigots? i'm just saying if you were really as tolerant as you claimed to be you'd be able to debate them in the marketplace of ideas. i'm really apolitical here, just asking questions about the inherit worth of invented categories of human beings
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Dec 20, 2019 07:22
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Nckdictator posted:Extremely dumb and subjective question here but which line of books tend to be more fun to just read and enjoy for the themes and worldbuilding, CoD or oWOD? I wanna shout out CoD's Demon: The Decent. You already read and loved Promethean so you clearly dig "oh, this is a really coherent and thematically tight original take on a monster type" and DtD is probably the most thematically coherent game other than Promethean in either WoD. It's books also tend to be extremely well written and full of cool ideas - hell the premise is "fallen angels, but angels are gnostic robots in service to the god-machine" so even the brute premise is a really cool idea. I'm currently in a re-read of it and enjoying the hell out of even stuff that sounds like it should be dry like the storyteller's guide's advice on the different moods of spy fiction. I feel like the thread consensus generally agrees but there hasn't been much new Demon stuff in a minute (probably something in the new Dark Ages book, yeah?) and I don't think anyone here is running a game, so it might not come up otherwise but yeah, don't sleep on Demon.
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Jan 30, 2020 05:13
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I ride bikes all day posted:Hadn't heard of that. Dream Theater put out an album on 9/11 that had the twin towers on fire on the cover. It's from The Coup, Boot's Riley (the writer/director of Sorry to Bother You) group. He's been an avowed communist his whole life and a huge chunk of The Coup's music is explicitly anti-capitalist, so the cover wasn't just for shock value.  Adding to weird coincidences, and one I think is pretty in line with this thread, the pilot episode of The Lone Gunmen, the x-files spin-off, was about a (US Government backed) plot to fly passenger planes into the WTC.
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Feb 5, 2020 22:52
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Everyone posted:I admit that at some point I'd like to run (or just play in) a mixed group/crossover thing with, say, a Beast, a Changeling, a Demon, a Sin-eater and a Werewolf. Each of those splats has access to an aspect of reality that's kind of difficult for other not of that splat to get into/deal with. No idea what could bring those five together, but it seems like it'd be a weird cross-cultural RP experience. An asymmetrical PVP game where everyone else just beats the poo poo out of the Beast edit: gently caress, beaten!
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Feb 12, 2020 19:35
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Everyone posted:Coming at last to my point, in RPG figure most people want to play "the good guys." Even in something like Vampire where one plays a being who preys on humans by assaulting them or subverting their free will to drink their blood. And, importantly, if you do somehow manage trick yourself into thinking you're doing heroic things, it's irredeemably reprehensible. Like, the stuff a beast does is so much worse than even a very murdery vampire that anyone - a player or the character - who thinks they're doing good by being a petty, sadistic, manipulative, psychological trauma elemental is morally beyond the pale.
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Feb 13, 2020 06:32
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CottonWolf posted:Also, the ethics goes in both directions. Consentialist is arguably more ethical for the people you're feeding from, but has a considerable risk of getting huge numbers of other vampires killed. Possibly getting a huge number of other vampires killed is supposed to be an ethical downside? Digital Osmosis fucked around with this message at 17:25 on Feb 14, 2020 |
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Feb 14, 2020 16:06
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Warthur posted:It's the Matrix, you play renegade programs, and you're fighting the Worldwide Communist Gangster Computer God. Yeah I was thinking about this, about what film/tv best gets at DtD, and I came to the same conclusion: The Matrix. If you're going to only watch one thing to get into the mindset I think it's that, even if it leans heavily away from the espionage and heavily into action (though it's not like DtD can't do that either.) Actually, now that I'm thinking about it, it even has double-agents and untrustworthy allies and all that other good stuff. Other things that came to mind have mostly been mentioned but my list is something like: Blade Runner Person of Interest, Dark City, Westworld, a lot of the Terminator franchise, maybe Memento, just about any John Le Carre adaptation (Tinker Tailor, The Night Manager, Little Drummer Girl), Ex Machina... The thing is, the classic fallen angel monotheistic mythology stuff is there in DtD but it's often more aesthetic than directly relevant to the themes. Some of, idk, Preacher sometimes come close? But the angel / demon war, cults, selling your soul, the monotheistic god all that is kind of window dressing on what's fundamentally a cyberpunk espionage story. I get why that's weird, given the name, and why it might be a hard sell to like pitch to someone (especially compared to Demon the Fallen, which is way closer to what people normally think of Demons) but the corebook and all the supplements do an incredibly good job of laying out what the game actually is, what the themes are, and what the gameplay is like.
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Feb 16, 2020 17:18
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Only tangentially related but it really bugs me that in Vampire the Requiem Theban Sorcery requires high Humanity and Cruac requires low Humanity. I know Humanity isn't exactly a morality meter but uh, it's pretty loving close to one. It's really easy, maybe even intended then, to read in that the Lancea et Sanctum is a "good" faction and the Circle of the Crone a "bad" faction. I guess I get why, fictionally, Cruac requires low humanity - it draws on The Beast - but I don't get why Theban Sorcery demands you stay softhearted. Both factions are generally presented as assholes, hell the Lancea's whole ideology is "be as terrifying a monster as you can because God" and yet advancing their special super secret blood magic makes that hard to do. I could see a strong case for ANY blood magic being limited by Humanity, but not one flavor over another. Maybe it's just aesthetics, that I'd rather not "Vampire Catholicism" be the "good guys" and vampire Paganism be the "bad guys." Maybe it's political, in that I find systemic evils way more threatening. Regardless it always left a bad taste in my mouth.
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Feb 17, 2020 18:50
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Archonex posted:This is because Theban Sorcery is really just pagan sorcery they stole from another culture on a severe downturn around the time when they were trying to get the power and justification to tear down the Camarilla. See this is neat, and makes sense, and furthers the theme of "pagan-ish or catholic-ish, all vampire religions are loving horrifying." Still it doesn't answer the question of Humanity - why would one branch of pagan blood sorcery fail if you tell a little white lie and another fail if you don't murder anyone who mildly inconveniences you?
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Feb 18, 2020 02:52
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I was being extremely hyperbolic, Archonex. I did remember that "most vampires stabilize at Humanity 5" would allow an average vampire to use the most powerful of either of the blood sorceries, and I think that does ameliorate some of my complaining in practice, but I guess I'm still bitching about things in theory. My fundamental issue is just that Humanity is pretty close to a "goodness meter," or like one of those lightside / darkside meters from the KoToR games, and that gives a weird tinge to the whole thing in a way that implies "THIS violent and terrifying vampire religion's secret blood magic is the good secret blood magic, but THAT violent and terrifying vampire religion's secret blood magic is the bad secret blood magic." Now that I think about it, it's probably coming from a fundamental confusion: that Humanity captures both something like "human morality" and "beastness." If say it ditched the morality elements entirely - if a Humanity 10 vampire could be just as monstrous as a Humanity 1 vampire, but in a DIFFERENT way (say Lawful Evil vs. Chaotic Evil, or a calculating sociopath instead of a violent berserker) than the two blood magics use of Humanity could work. So for example Theban Sorcerers keep a high humanity because their magic is about control and will, but that doesn't make the evil they use that will for less scary. Except we don't have that, because Humanity also has an element of morality in it, where "the beast" and "is evil" are co-identified, and the result is a weird suggestion of a moral hierarchy that flies in the face of how the covenants are written (which is, again, that they're both violent and terrifying vampire religions)
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Feb 18, 2020 06:14
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Top Hats Monthly posted:It has always seemed to me that at best Vampires are deeply deeply conflicted, and that's putting it at absolute best. Metapod's argument seems to draw the line that no vampire can harbor any good at all, which really isn't true but he is raising a point that I feel is valid that at absolute best vampires are predatory shitheads. Except he's not, he's arguing something like "at an absolute best, vampires are unpeople" and he's not doing it to raise a point, he's doing it to be an rear end in a top hat. And, tbh, I thought he was doing a bit better before this derail - for example his posts on various VtM podcasts I don't give the slightest gently caress about seem to be completely unobjectionable. But trolls gonna troll and no one's gonna argue metapod isn't annoyingly good at finding the smallest justification possible to be a horrendous shithead. Ferrinus posted:Well the thing is that, as usual, he is wrong. "At best" vampires aren't predatory. "On average" and even "by default" they certainly are, but that's owed to circumstances, not to nature. While salient and correct, this is coming dangerously close to responding instead of counter-trolling. I expect better from you, sensei.
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Feb 19, 2020 07:23
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Ferrinus posted:Trolling just means expressing sincere beliefs that people don’t want to hear. Yes, but in a way that drives people who don't hold those beliefs loving insane instead of in a way that continues further discussion with them. Like, don't get me wrong, it was definitely some gnosis++ poo poo when I realized that you meant (and I mostly agreed with) everything you were saying, I just think the knives could have come out a bit harder considering the transparent bad faith that the discussion started with. Although I suppose there's something to be said for forceful and provocative expression that furthers discussion regardless of the context, and trolling itself is operating in something like "ironically bad faith" so the line is a bit blurry... Whatever, not wanting to get too meta here. I'll instead turn back to blood magic: yup, I re-read VtR 2E's humanity break points and they did an admirable job of removing the "morality meter" elements and making it just "how detached from the human condition / how used to the vampiric condition are you?" That actually removes a ton of my bitching about it's use in limiting blood sorcery. There's perhaps small quibble I might still have with "less human means less rational" but it's pretty minor compared to how I remembered it going, and the Gothic Conception of Madness is pretty baked into the setting and somewhat inoffensive if everyone considers it a genre convention.
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Feb 19, 2020 07:40
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Fuzz posted:So would anyone be interested in either a WW2 Supernatural Humans or 1980s/90s Chop Socky nWoD game set in the Japanese underworld? (Basically PnP Ryu ga Gotoku using nWoD rules) I assume this is a play by post thing? I haven't had much luck with PbP before but uh, Yakuza 0 with nWoD rules sounds completely amazing. I like the Silver Ladder book both as Dave said because it explains how most Wizard laws work and also because it makes their ideology make sense. It's clearer in their 2E description but there's still a fairly vague sense of "they want to help normal people except their's also hierarchical assholes" which is kind of confusing. The book explains the ideology enough that you'd get how individual Ladder members might live up to the faith or fail it and descend into avarice while still using it to justify their own bullshit.
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Feb 21, 2020 19:24
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So Joe what I'm getting from that is that the Astral plane is a great way to make your WoD game anime as gently caress, is that right? I'm kidding, obviously, thanks for the write-up. But typing that out did actually spark a thought, which is another instance of the weird duplication of "story shaped magic" that happens between nMage and nChangeling. Like if I said "a realm connected both to human dreams and a font of terrifying power that is inhabited by beings usually patterned off of narrative archetypes" I could be describing the Hedge or the Temenos. Obviously there are differences, but that's still a weirdly strong connection IMO. I know it's complicated by the Arcadia (supernal) / Arcadia (fae) thing, which is intentionally unresolved, but it's interesting to see the same pattern appear on a lower level, one PCs will usually have more access to. I wonder if trying to differentiate the two led to CtL 2E's move away from talecrafting and the like, I seem to recall one of the design principles was basically "Fae magic just happens to be shaped in ways similar to fairy tale archetypes" instead of something like Fae magic being created by / powered by fariy tale archetypes. I was never too sure about that design goal - both in intent and execution - but maybe trying to avoid duplication was part of the reason behind that change? Kinda like how Demon pacts were part of the reason behind the limited pledge system in CtL 2E.
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Feb 24, 2020 01:59
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GimpInBlack posted:Also, generally speaking the "fabricating whole new human beings" type of thing only happens with a demon's initial Cover (or angel-jacked ones), the ones created with the full force of the God-Machine's infrastructure. Just raising your Cover with pacts or whatnot usually doesn't create whole new elements of reality. Couldn't a Demon also do this with a patch-job Cover they prepped sufficiently for? Like okay, this is a pretty hypothetical edge case, but if you'd been hoarding pacts such that you could buy a new cover straight at 5 dots or above wouldn't that more or less be the same as creating a new whole person ex nihilo?
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Feb 26, 2020 17:59
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Badactura posted:To kill or to gently caress, the roleplayers' dilemma In D&D, maybe. In the WoD? Porque no los dos?
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Mar 3, 2020 18:16
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So we've hashed out which nMage orders are Actually Correct and which oMage factions are Actually Correct Depending On Which Book You're Currently Reading, but have we had lovely mage-politics chat for the archmage ententes? Let's poo poo this thread up! Alienated - licking ancient, eldritch boots doesn't make you less of a bootlicker Aswadim - I actually gently caress with the Aswadim, they're not so bad. Want the right sort of thing - power to the people - it's just their version of power is power over form and logic and meaning. Still, their hearts are in the right place. Might come a time where it's our Ascension or theirs but until then I say we let the black and red alliance stand. Bodhisattvas - Their heart's in the right place but they're like people manning soup kitchens instead of demanding political action to end poverty. Plus some of them think a Seer awakening is a victory? Kinda the left-liberals of the setting. Exemplars - Kinda depends on the order. Guardians and Mystagogue can gently caress right off. More Arrows are probably itching for a fight than fighting for a good cause. Libertines are probably good folks. Silver Ladders are vanguardists and could be extremely useful, but should also be monitored at all times for reactionary tendencies. Siddhas - Kinda the libertarian "gently caress you, got mine" scum of the archmages. Sure there could be say, a Death Siddha who dedicates their Ascension to fixing the underworld but I feel like most would rather puzzle out pointless secrets and ascribe their names on the Arcana themselves than actually do anything to make the world a better place. Tetrarchs - though the power of gnosis both boot and bootlicker! come at me with your Objectivly Incorrect Takes Digital Osmosis fucked around with this message at 04:33 on Mar 19, 2020 |
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Mar 19, 2020 04:31
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I'm pumped to dive into Wraith20, probably sometime in the near future. I finally got around to buying Signs of Sorcery and am reading that right now, along with a nMage-but-the-Coens-Brothers-and-no-magic comic novel called "Masters of Atlantis." So after those probably. Wraith was the oWoD game I knew about the least. Part of it might have been the aforementioned thousand important source books thing but part of it was also bad timing. My like, second RPG ever was White Wolf's Street Fighter RPG. I picked up Wraith in some gaming store on a vacation because flipping through it it looked a lot like Street Fighter's system! Also though I was eight and not ready for any of that - thematically, mechanically, narrativly. I returned it and only way later picked it up again. But guess who just got a 600 page PDF for free and isn't still eight? This guy!
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Mar 21, 2020 01:57
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Tulip posted:I prefer COD2 to COD1 largely because i found COD2 vampires to have a better link between "stuff on character sheet" and "stuff that matters for fiction," but the two editions are similar enough that porting stuff between them shouldn't be too hard. Yeah, I think especially for an intimate political / psychological game having stuff like Touchstones and Ambitions would be very usefully.
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Mar 24, 2020 22:18
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I don't think occult matrices operate that broadly. An occult matrix might have say one particular school/classroom/child saying the pledge of allegiance at a particular time as a lynch-pin, though. Most really large scale occult matrices seem to an unfathomably complex series of smaller occult matrices that build to them - so like an occult matrix that requires the seventh son of a seventh son to commit suicide summons a hunter angle which takes out a drunk driver who would have otherwise caused a hit-and-run that would have killed a man who eventually founds a cult that develops political power and rigs a mayoral election so when the mayor is sworn into office on the 350th anniversary of a forgotten historical massacre where the town hall is now located, the whole town becomes a fractured timeline. It's relatively important that the bigger matrices be that convoluted because Demons need to pose a legitimate threat to the God-Machine for the whole game to work. The PCs are massively outgunned and some kind of total victory is probably impossible but if they're smart and stick religiously to the tradecraft they can seriously gently caress up the G-M's plans. A matrix whose lynch-pin is "the pledge of allegiance" isn't one a ring can reasonably disrupt. On the other hand it's absolutely proof of the lie and strengthens the Exarchs, even if it might not have been their idea. The Hegemonic Ministry is probably invested in keeping the pledge going, for example.
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Mar 25, 2020 06:28
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So Joe, your hypotheticals really point to how the WoD games, Chronicles especially, are really loving good at having distinct themes, stories, and gameplay loops. Like of course a group of Vampires and a group of Mages are going to get up to radically distinct poo poo, even if they're dealing with some similar occult fuckery. Most of the games hone this feeling really sharply, which is actually really neat. BUT, in my opinion it's... honestly a little strange compared to how literally every other kitchen-sink-urban-fantasy setting works. It's probably an artifact of Vampire being their first game, since Vampire-only or Vampire-mostly poo poo is kind of it's own genre... but the second you start adding in werethings and occultists and frankensteins basically all pop culture works move towards an ensemble cast of one main monster type reluctantly working with the others and dealing with their own supernatural politics/bullshit as B stories. I'm not saying the World/Chronicles of Darkness should work more like this - although it sounds like the Contagion Chronicles were a mostly failed attempt to do that - I'm just saying it's a little weird that the default assumption in a setting with playable faeries and mummies and frankensteins is that every player is a werewolf. It definitely has it's advantages, and Chronicles have really leaned into those advantages, but it still frankly strikes me as an aberration among other settings/games/fiction that work with similar creatures.
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Mar 27, 2020 07:48
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Joe Slowboat posted:Of course, that’s not to say crossovers and monster mashes can’t work well, but generally they require some kind of thematic unity - a friend of mine has plans for a Changeling and Acanthoi only crossover game about going into Arcadia to fight one of the Gentry on behalf of an Archmage, and she’s clearly been thinking about how the themes involved can line up much more closely than Contagion Chronicle ever has. If you know the details I'd love to hear her take on the Arcadia/Arcadia situation, especially since an Archmage, who could have physically entered Supernal Arcadia, is involved. That's always been kind of my Chronicles of Darkness white whale.
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Mar 27, 2020 17:19
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To be honest, I've never liked the Watchtowers and could totally see them being part of the lie. The idea that magic is a force for making your will manifest through a deeply personal expression and empowered by individual journey towards enlightenment but also shaman wizards go like this and all alchemists also talk to ghosts and whatever strikes me as antithetical to the larger themes of the game.
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Mar 27, 2020 20:57
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I Am Just a Box posted:a Contagion of obsession with mystery. devs finally confirm mages are a disease
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Mar 29, 2020 04:57
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Joe Slowboat posted:The God-Machine makes angels to do a job then abandons them or digests them or repurposes them. I do not think it can be said to love, cherish, or even treat with any degree of concern for their welfare, its biomechanical angels. Quibbling, but I think the G-M can be said to absolutely have a "degree of concern" for angels' welfare. Like, a small degree, but a degree nonetheless. It absolutely reacts to things happening to angels, especially on a large scale. I get the sense that if the G-M is conscious in any recognizable sense it realizes angels are needed to act on / understand the human level and if it's not it is a system set up to respond to a change in angel activity the way say a living human would react to a massive change in white blood cell activity. The problem of evil is pretty interesting but also strikes me as fundamentally western and Christian. But that's okay! Both WoDs (although unbearably especially the oWoD) are distinctly western and quasi-to-literally Christian. The thing is evil is a problem mostly from the assumptions of the Christian conception of God, as being both all-loving and all-powerful. You "solve" it through fun/tedious theology, depending on how you feel about theology, or by ditching one or the other qualifications of God. I've always enjoyed the take that the Manichean or Zoroastrian take on the problem of evil - that the creator is all-loving but not all-powerful, and that evil comes from an entirely separate and opposing force that hates creation - is "the most elegant solution to the problem of evil." Not sure where I picked up that phrasing, but it stuck with me. CoD seems to me, as a toolkit setting, to have "solutions" that tend towards rejecting the all-powerful premise, or tweak it. The Principle is all-loving and might be sort of all-powerful but also is kind of incompetent at acting directly on creations. The Oracles might be all-loving and close to all-powerful, but also choose because of their assumed great Wisdom, to act on the world as little as possible - and implicitly that's the most helpful thing they can do. This makes sense to me because it rejects the idea that the lovely way things are is correct (one possible way to "solve" evil) because that would uh, lead to some fairly boring characters. So something like "if there's good out there - and there might very well be because your PC might want a role model - it can't win this fight on it's own." Which may or may not have good theological grounds but IMO absolutely has good narrative grounds.
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Apr 3, 2020 08:18
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I'm not in or running a Mage game - or working in academia lol - but there's rarely a day that goes by without me thinking about the Mystery/Obsession/Arcane Experience/Wisdom/Gnosis loop and how goddamn beautiful that bit of game design is. It's so incredibly tight and any attempt to understand or engage with any point in it leads to the exact kind of stories Mage wants to tell. I feel like CtL 2E's Clarity got like... 2/3rds of the way there? I like the idea of Clarity damage a lot but, like a lot of Lost 2E's systems, I feel there might be a missing of the forest for the trees. Or, I guess to be a little clearer to be a lack of high level connection from that system to others important to the core CtL gameplay loop. Like, in practice the hedge systems DO NOT need to be more complicated but in theory if there was some concrete link between Clarity damage/Hedge travel (or spinning) / Glamour harvesting than I could see the loop working as well as Mage's. There's a ton I love about Lost and Lost 2E but I sometimes wish for feeling of the same kind of higher level vision that Mage or Demon have w/r/t their morality traits. And of course I don't want to slag either Vampire's pretty solidly constructed "you gotta eat people to do stupid vampire political bullshit, and you gotta do stupid vampire political bullshit to (easily) eat people, and engaging with either makes you more of a monster" loop just because it's well known and straightforward, it's pretty elegant too - at least until you get to stuff like oVampire's alternate morality paths.
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Apr 4, 2020 08:15
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Joe Slowboat posted:Awakening's mechanical strength is precisely in that being a chemical engineer OOC isn't the optimal path to magical combat power. Unless of course you're part of the Celestial Masters legacy.
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Apr 9, 2020 15:11
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DantetheK9 posted:I may or may not have squealed a little. The team on the game has me going from "Cautiously optimistic" to "Actually hyped." W:tA was my first tabletop game, since D&D was of the devil and it's got a special place in my heart Love the irony of a game where you have to go out of your way not to become warriors of goodness who literally descend hell and kill evil gods being thrown out in favor of a game where you play animist neopagan spirits of rage who smash the system on behalf of the primordial gods of the planet. I very clearly remember being sent to the principle's office in hebrew school for reading W:tA instead of paying attention to the inane classes. One of the Rabbis saw me reading it and asked about it and occasionally offered a halfhearted "well in one interpretation, Judaism is in agreement with that" about the eco-poo poo and otherwise didn't condemn anything, which was real cool of her.
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Apr 9, 2020 16:19
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| # ¿ May 15, 2024 09:39 |
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And anyway if it was his original cover and he's good with operational security (and, as an NPC, you can just say he is) there'd really never be a reason for the G-M to look into him. Most actors aren't secretly demons!
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Apr 28, 2020 07:07
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