Tell the people making Genius that White Wolf isn't taking away your ability to play Virtual Adepts and Sons of Ether and pat them on the head.
White Wolf's World of Darkness
Tell the people making Genius that White Wolf isn't taking away your ability to play Virtual Adepts and Sons of Ether and pat them on the head.
I would strongly recommend that you not use mages in any non-Mage game. They really don't matter outside of their own gameline.
In a Changeling game, there are human wizards and they have powers which you can model using Contracts. Maybe they have a way of stealing Contracts from Changelings. Maybe they sell human children to the True Fae in return for their power. They certainly shouldn't exist in global orders - they should be city-scale things at most.
Carrnage
Human
- Location
- New Zealand
then take away their ability to Virtual Adepts and Sons of Ether?
Really, in most cases, giving the line your viewpoint characters are playing as the narrative dominance is probably the best idea. If you're playing vampire, 'magi' are people who have unlocked the power of blood sorceries and human sacrifice. In Changeling, wizards do things involving stealing Contracts or deal with the True Fae. In Demon, there are no magi, just paraphysicists who, with cutting-edge computer systems, can effectively exploit the same systems the God-Machine uses to control reality, or are granted their powers as Agents of the God-Machine that are less infrastructure-heavy than Angels.
- Pronouns
- They/Them
Won't be able to entirely do that, some things are a bit locked in by now, but that's probably good advice in general. At the very least Vampires function something like they do in their own gameline, based on what's happened in the Quest so far, but as some of the other splats haven't shown up, I can tweak those to my heart's content, and I probably will, though not entirely towards the end of narrative dominance, always, but at least towards a focus on what Changelings are and can do.
And luckily enough, I don't have to even touch Demon with a 50-foot pole, I have no idea how I would have even begun to have integrated them, so I didn't put it on the list when I gave the players a choice of which splats would actually exist and which wouldn't (yeah, yeah, I know it might not have been the greatest idea in hindsight, but it's sorta locked in now, and it has led to a few fun things in the Quest, at least.)
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- Location
- Canada
I regret nothing.
More seriously, the vampires are turning out to be really interesting so far, so it seems to be working all right.
AkatsukiL13
An Enlightened Mind
- Location
- New Copernicus Station
Doesn't surprise me. When they first revealed that M20 would have the Sons of Ether renamed to the Society of Ether (alongside several other Traditions which they didn't care about) there were some people that were annoyed by it, proclaiming that they would keep the Sons of Ether name anyway.
Some people are just weird like that. Hell I still remember the outcry there was when DC Comics decided to give Wonder Woman pants.
Yeah, I kind of echo this statement. A problems with both Worlds of Darkness is the whole multiple global conspiracies from different splats occupying the same space. I'm not too sure about NWoD but the OWoD does run into that problem several times with things like the Camarilla, Pentex and the Technocracy. They've tried to explain it away and while it works some times, others are just more headscratchers. Mostly with Pentex though because the Wyrm and just how goddamn evil the mega-corporation can be.
- Pronouns
- They/Them
I do know that Vampires and Changeling both have a primarily local vibe. Vampires grip on the mortal world has gotten weaker and weaker as time has gone on, and they've gone from running the Roman Empire and crowning Charlemagne to mostly dealing in local politics. Maybe there's some book somewhere that makes global world-controlling vampire conspiracies, but I don't see any of it in the main books when I went through for my vampire creation.
And Changelings don't, either. Prometheans don't, and since Geists don't even have a completed book, I'm pretty sure they don't have world-controlling conspiracies. Which just leaves Werewolves and Mages.
notanautomaton
I've got 99 quests, I've finished one
With Nwod the problem is less that there are too many conspiracies that control the world, and more that there are just too many supernatural splats to believe that the masquerade is still being upheld. Honsestly, everyone should have seen a vampire feeding, a werewolf chasing a Host down a street, and a ghost by the time they turn 12. And that's not even counting Splats that don't have a masquerade mechanic, like Beasts.
- Pronouns
- They/Them
No Beasts in my Quest. Changelings don't need big brothers, or whatever.
I'm just going to say that the Black Doge, Incarna of Bureaucratic Ennui, embodies itself in Pentex but is also the laziest corrupter ever, which is why it somehow hasn't been destroyed by Void Engineers. The Black Doge just gives you the power with no strings attached if you can summon it and beseech it for aid because power corrupts in its very nature, right? So if it just gives people power they'll do something corrupt and debased eventually?
It really doesn't understand why its compatriots think it's incompetent.
It's much less of a nWoD problem, because it's much more obvious that the splats are optional and the setting is a sandbox. There are also fewer global scale conspiracies, but that pales beside the fact that not only do mages not automatically exist in a Vampire game, even things like the vampire covenants are optional.
In mage, I customarily boot the Free Council back down to Nameless Order status, because I think it's poorly thought out and constructed, and too much relies on negative definition of the other Orders - ie, it forces the Diamond to be made into reactionaries so the Free Council has thematic space when it's nothing innate to them.
Eukie
Powered by furious Canadian redheads
This was revealed together with the shoddy SoE splashart, which as you can see is of a woman in a fetish-y posture-collar, leading me and ES to conclude tongue-in-cheek that the renaming was just the Sons of Ether boys club making token efforts and parading out their objectified female members to get the rest of the Traditions off their back about their massive sexism.
I really like how the table looks like it's some sort of sex toy given the angle and how the shaft(???) goes right between her legs. I think it's actually an Ecstatic trolling the Sons of Ether.
Carrnage
Human
- Location
- New Zealand
don't be too harsh, it looks more like just tossed in various victorian/steampunk things in without much though.
It's mentioned in the integrity section in GMC that most people have seen something supernatural but have either repressed it or chosen to ignore it for sanity reasons.
AkatsukiL13
An Enlightened Mind
- Location
- New Copernicus Station
Yeah I had forgotten about that image. Truly I hate the image just because of how over-the-top Steampunk it is but then I prefer my SoE more mad scientist than archaic Steampunk. One of my favorite images of the Rev Ed Rulebook is the one on page 173, with the SoE woman with a big Ghostbuster-style powerpack on connected to a pair of mechanical gauntlets levitating piece of rock and crystal while wearing a t-shirt with eureka written on it.
Honestly that image makes me think more of a Hollow One technomancer than a true Etherite.
notanautomaton
I've got 99 quests, I've finished one
I find the Integrity mechanism to be kind of ridiculous, honestly. I mean, seeing gears covered in blood is an integrity check. Honestly it seems like it would be easy to reduce some one to Integrity 0 with nothing more than some imagination, 3 dots in craft, a few thousand dollars, and a couple of friends. I'm not a psychologist, but I'm pretty sure that bloody gears would not be something that would cause me permanent mental harm.
Actually, that just gave me an idea for a mortals one-shot. The one member of the group is being gasslighted into thinking that a ghost is haunting her or whatever, and as the group investigates they keep taking integrity hits, only to eventually find out that their characters were driven insane over nothing.
Also, the Integrity mechanic tries to do too much, in that it is also used to determine goodness for the purpose of abjurations. So someone who wants to be an exorcist will quickly stop being able to, as they see ghosts and loose their minds.
Integrity has no bearing on "goodness" it's solely a measure of your mental stability. You can be a complete monster and still have decent abjuration rolls.
Eukie
Powered by furious Canadian redheads
I'd be less harsh if art of female characters in fetish clothing was an endemic problem in roleplaying game source material and cult entertainment in general. Look at it; the posing model pose, the corset, the posture-collar thing, the straps connecting the two... this is basically page 37 from the fetishwear catalogue with a steampunk twist, and I find it rather grating that this is what an RPG publisher decides is appropriate to use to illustrate the basic concept of the
notanautomaton
I've got 99 quests, I've finished one
It's called out as moral purity in Vampire the Requiem 2e, in the Strix section.
There's no reference to such in GMC. It's purely a battle of wills with a bonus/penalty depending on weather the action falls in line with your virtue/vice. Maybe it's one of those 'in universe ' assumptions about how it works?
Edit: Wait, are we talking about abjuration or integrity? I may have gotten confused.
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TheLastOne
Person of impeccable tastes (for destruction)
The basic idea of a Pentex makes sense in every gameline where spirits are important (well, except Wraith and Orpheus, because wrong kinds of spirits). It in fact makes sense at both a Doylist and Watsonian level. On a Watsonian level, spirit want to fulfill their nature, to expand or realize what they are. It isn't on quite the same level as the nWoD spirits, but most spirits are primal things that have needs and wants free from the moral considerations of man.
That the spirits of pollution, of monopoly, of patronage and backdoor deals would influence the world through corporations and businesses is... pretty damn natural. They are born in such places, feed and grow there. It's the locus of their influence. But Pentex itself unifies what should be a dozen power-players into one mega-cult that doesn't work the moment you look at it too closely, and it's too tied to the werewolf interpretation of what the cosmos looks like, and to the Werewolf need for armies of disposable mooks.
On a Doylist level they show how fundmental and deep the rot goes, how not only is the world failing and falling, but that the fall is feeding itself. Corruption (of a human sort) begetting corruption (of a mystical sort) begetting corruption (of a human sort). So long as there is profit to be made humans will sell deadly tainted medicine for profit. It requires no supernatural intervention for first world companies to sell pesticides that are also deadly carcinogens to third world countries. The blood diamond trade.
And part of the heart of every World of Darkness game is... the Darkness. Things spiraling downwards, things getting worse, the symptom covered up while the causes fester. Fighting corruption and pollution by fighting Corruption spirits and Pollution spirits that have gotten into bed with corporate fat cats fits. Unfortunately, Pentex itself takes up that entire memespace so even though they're only one (rather bad) take on this premise, they're also the only game in town.
Though frankly the nWoD is just as bad when it introduces villainous corporations. We have new ones in Hunter, Mummy, and Demon, and while the boxing of the gamelines keeps them from growing as bad as Pentex, they still are single player rather then a class of players.
I think it's less seeing the bloody gears and more imagining how the gears got bloody, like someone getting caught in it and being ground up.
notanautomaton
I've got 99 quests, I've finished one
I'm pretty sure I could see some bloody gears without suffering permanent mental degradation. Just saying.