AshenFox
Copy Control, we are a go.
- Location
- Sector 13
White Wolf's World of Darkness
Aaron Peori
Rest in Peace
My problem with Strike Force Zero was that it was basically what I imagine every non-Enlightened Technocracy cell to be like. Basically "Hey, let's leak some advanced shit to these linear sorcerers and see what explodes while pointing them at vampires and shit we don't like." shouldn't have needed a whole anime-themed subsplat.
Quantumboost
Now with 50% more dots in Dimensional Science
- Location
- Ensemble Space
Fuck yes Extraordinary Devices and psychic supersoldiers everywhere.
I liked Kuei-Jin way better than western vampires by that point. Hell I thought the Eastern WoD made a lot more sense and was more cohesive than most of the mainline games. IMO they only truly fucked up with the Great Leap Outward plotline, since it didn't make a whole lot of sense other than trying to make it so you could play a Kuei-Jin game in the west.
Me and my group didn't fully realize this until we've been thinking about actually running a Vampire Dark Ages game. Overall I enjoyed the whole of VtM. Unlike most of the other games that either got worse or stagnated, it actually improved. It's just that it's foundations were weak. When I look back at the older books, it's like I'm seeing an obvious "Let's make an Anne Rice RPG", which they expanded upon in some really cool ways, but didn't feel fully thought out unlike the following games. Vampires always felt oddly out of place when we approached the OWoD holistically; even more so than Changeling weirdly enough (not counting Hunter or Demon though).
That's my two cents since I've been thoroughly soaked in OWoD nostalgia.
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I'm sort of disappointed that they got rid of Cats. Vampire cats were a cool idea.
Geist also needs a better subtitle. Because sin-eaters are a very specific thing which the protagonist of Geist are completely unrelated to. And people probably don't want to play priests who absolve others by consuming their sins.
Actually, that's probably not a bad idea, you could probably get some mileage out of it in a more religiously themed setting like the Old World of Darkness. In a setting where God is explicitly an evil computer, that doesn't work very well.
Geist also needs a better subtitle. Because sin-eaters are a very specific thing which the protagonist of Geist are completely unrelated to. And people probably don't want to play priests who absolve others by consuming their sins.
Actually, that's probably not a bad idea, you could probably get some mileage out of it in a more religiously themed setting like the Old World of Darkness. In a setting where God is explicitly an evil computer, that doesn't work very well.
What is the deal with God being an evil computer? I haven't done anything with Demon so I don't really know the stuff behind that
They took the cool "just one story among many, this guy may just be crazy" story about the god machine in the WoD corebook which existed as a flavour piece, and then made an entire splat around it. And then intrusively forced it onto all the other lines.
Incidentally taking a lot of the things that Promethean had already done, and doing them worse. Because Promethean had already made possible connections between the idea of a god-machine and the Divine Fire, Promethean already had the "science" imagery, and Promethean already had weird mad angels (only the qashmalliam are better angels - and demons, with the other choir - than the Demon ones).
I could never consider Hunter or Demon part of the main OWoD. I always pretended Hunter existed in alternate TL/dimension or what have you. As for Demon, which I kind of liked, worked fine for me if I pretended it existed in it's own world; it contradicted too much with the rest of the OWoD fluff.
NonSequtur
a body
I never got into the NWoD. It either seemed really lacking or repetitive of the previous line. By the mid 00s I was largely bored with secret supernatural wars and conspiracies anyways.
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Hypothetical: Lets say a ship full of Klingons crashes in the Old World of Darkness. The survivors start a theater company in London and translate such classic Klingon plays as Khamlet, Son of the Emperor of Qo'noS. This attracts the attention of a Toradeor, who embraces Shakespeare and starts a unique bloodline of Klingon Vampires. What would their signature disciplines be?
Actually it's pretty much Deus Ex.
"God is a dream of good government. You will have your god and he will fail to meet your expectations because that tends to be a running theme here."
AshenFox
Copy Control, we are a go.
- Location
- Sector 13
Welcome to the City that the God Machine hid away where you can get cybernetics at a whim.
Basically, somehow nWoD earth got... infected is really the only word that can come close to describing the situation, with machinery by / of an incredibly powerful machine entity that is basically a living version of, "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." So now, there is a literally god like being just sort of everywhere and nowhere. What it does, is set up Infrastructure to manipulate things and create what's called an Occult Matrix, which is basically the supernatural equivalent of a Rube Goldberg Machine where if everything goes just right, you can pop in a quarter at one end and out the other end pops something that the God Machine wants. Mostly it just uses them to summon Angels, which it then unleashes upon the world to get something that it wants done, well done.
Of course, sometimes these Angels go rogue. Sometimes it's because the God Machine just let them run way to long (the sort of Star Wars Droid Sentience thing), sometimes it's because they fail the task the God Machine assigned them and 'run and hide' because they're scared and don't want God to be angry with them, sometimes it's because something gets in the way of their assigned task but they can't do anything about it so they go rogue to make sure that the obstacle is removed.... permanently. When that happens, the God Machine severs it's connection with the Angel and you get a Demon. A rogue robot spirit angel thing, that's now on the run because the God Machine don't take kindly to Rogue Elements or Saboteurs.
Of course, as Demon has progressed it's become increasingly clear that Onyx may have just lost their god damn minds. The latest Demon book (Demon: Storyteller's Guide), reveals that the God Machine has an angel literally the size of the Oort Cloud, that it can time travel casually, and that it can create simulated realities so real that the inhabitants don't know that they aren't real (which has the hilarious consequence that, since running such simulations takes up lots of resources, you can in fact cause more and more and more trouble in said simulations to make it take up more and more resources and basically get the God Machine to 'think itself to death').
That sounds really dumb. Like the third Matrix movie dumb.Welcome to the City that the God Machine hid away where you can get cybernetics at a whim.
Basically, somehow nWoD earth got... infected is really the only word that can come close to describing the situation, with machinery by / of an incredibly powerful machine entity that is basically a living version of, "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." So now, there is a literally god like being just sort of everywhere and nowhere. What it does, is set up Infrastructure to manipulate things and create what's called an Occult Matrix, which is basically the supernatural equivalent of a Rube Goldberg Machine where if everything goes just right, you can pop in a quarter at one end and out the other end pops something that the God Machine wants. Mostly it just uses them to summon Angels, which it then unleashes upon the world to get something that it wants done, well done.
Of course, sometimes these Angels go rogue. Sometimes it's because the God Machine just let them run way to long (the sort of Star Wars Droid Sentience thing), sometimes it's because they fail the task the God Machine assigned them and 'run and hide' because they're scared and don't want God to be angry with them, sometimes it's because something gets in the way of their assigned task but they can't do anything about it so they go rogue to make sure that the obstacle is removed.... permanently. When that happens, the God Machine severs it's connection with the Angel and you get a Demon. A rogue robot spirit angel thing, that's now on the run because the God Machine don't take kindly to Rogue Elements or Saboteurs.
Of course, as Demon has progressed it's become increasingly clear that Onyx may have just lost their god damn minds. The latest Demon book (Demon: Storyteller's Guide), reveals that the God Machine has an angel literally the size of the Oort Cloud, that it can time travel casually, and that it can create simulated realities so real that the inhabitants don't know that they aren't real (which has the hilarious consequence that, since running such simulations takes up lots of resources, you can in fact cause more and more and more trouble in said simulations to make it take up more and more resources and basically get the God Machine to 'think itself to death').
It's not a great description either of what's actually going on.
The God-Machine is something. It's a strongly superhuman intelligence and it's a player on the scale of Archmagi/the True Fae/etc that has designs for-and in a way, is dependent on-humanity. It's basically Old Testament God if we took "god is a dream of good government" literally. Its scale, incomprehensibility, and its tools emphasize the fact that it basically is The State in all its terrible glory. Of course, that makes Demons terrorists...
Well yes, those are the obvious ones. But then they'd just be a rehash of the Brujah. There's no sense if having Klingon vampires if they're just a rehash of the Brujah.
Potence, Fortitude, Celerity. The ultimate fite disciplines for the ultimate fite vampire.
- Location
- Denmark
- Pronouns
- She/Her
They may also learn a special form of Blood Magic that we'll call "Fite Sorcery"
Fite Sorcery has three Paths.
Path of "Ah! My eyes!"
This Path mimics Potence.
Path of "Damn! That's fast!"
This Path mimics Celerity.
Path of "Holy shit! No way!"
This Path mimics Fortitude.
They are permanent and can't stack with the physical Disciplines.
(I actually had a Tremere player who tried to do something like this because "it's not fair that the Tremere don't get physical Disciplines!" I acquiesced and allowed him to make his Paths without telling him that they had the disadvantage of constantly draining his Vitae because fuck you, Thaumaturgy is broken enough already! He ended up discarding the Paths as a lost cause and learnt the valuable "Path of hiding behind the Ventue with Fortitude" instead)
I prefer the path of Dominate random homeless people and give them guns.
I find the equation of 'Obfuscate+Explosives=Problem Solved' to be most effective for whatever life throws at you.
- Location
- Denmark
- Pronouns
- She/Her
That is also an effective strategy.
Tried that once. The target used Celerity to disarm the bomb while I was still holding it.
It probably would have been better to just let him take out-of-clan disciplines at in-clan cost. And then apply that house rule to everyone else, including NPCs. And then give a lot of enemies Thaumaturgy.
Doesn't really work with the setting, though...
And on a side note, oMage question: how do "gaps" in defenses from paradigms work?
Like, the most obvious examples come from Technodigm meeting the Purple Paradigm. Trivial example: I build a room out of Primium, but I leave a gaping hole in it; it seems silly that I can't shoot a rocket (or a fireball) through that hole, in which case I'm casting a Forces effect inside a Primium ward. (Or a forcefield, or a magic ward, or what have you.) (It's hard to tell because it's the trivial example, but this is basically the "duh paradigm" that is "objects don't coincide and bullets can pass through holes." I suppose it's technically Technodigm but I'd be surprised if you ever found someone who wasn't a Marauder - no, wait, actually technically you probably could find an enlightened Akashic monastery where not bypassing the illusion of reality was Paradoxical or something.)
But then, if we extend that - to, say, "I have a Primium braincase/ward on my mind" vs. "I'm reading your nerve impulses or your body language and am never going near your brain or your mind," or "I'm flipping coins to decide my next action" vs. "I can literally see the future in my dreams, there are no hyperstat forecasts to fool", then letting those sorts of paradigmatic holes work ends up leaving certain paradigms with giant gaps in their defenses.
And on a side note, oMage question: how do "gaps" in defenses from paradigms work?
Like, the most obvious examples come from Technodigm meeting the Purple Paradigm. Trivial example: I build a room out of Primium, but I leave a gaping hole in it; it seems silly that I can't shoot a rocket (or a fireball) through that hole, in which case I'm casting a Forces effect inside a Primium ward. (Or a forcefield, or a magic ward, or what have you.) (It's hard to tell because it's the trivial example, but this is basically the "duh paradigm" that is "objects don't coincide and bullets can pass through holes." I suppose it's technically Technodigm but I'd be surprised if you ever found someone who wasn't a Marauder - no, wait, actually technically you probably could find an enlightened Akashic monastery where not bypassing the illusion of reality was Paradoxical or something.)
But then, if we extend that - to, say, "I have a Primium braincase/ward on my mind" vs. "I'm reading your nerve impulses or your body language and am never going near your brain or your mind," or "I'm flipping coins to decide my next action" vs. "I can literally see the future in my dreams, there are no hyperstat forecasts to fool", then letting those sorts of paradigmatic holes work ends up leaving certain paradigms with giant gaps in their defenses.
