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White Wolf's World of Darkness

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Ok so for a diverging opiniion on Conquering Heroes

Yes the Blind Man is not done well and they really messed the Shub Niggurath angle they were going with. The biggest problem however is that his write-up promises in the introduction he's some sort of Nyarlathotep figure who acts as an omen of chaos and destruction but the rest do not follow on that.

Also for the reccord Matt did only the intro fiction.

The book is separated in three sections: Heroes, Beasts and the Insatiables.

The Heroes can easily be restatted as Slashers for an HTV game and include
  • A youtube star who uses her channel to direct other Heroes to Beasts (Internet based Slasher or Hunter anyone)
  • A Hunter turned Heroe with a good network and talismans
  • A bomb-maker and trapper who can be a good antagonist for other gamelines
  • A Proximus who is able to eat souls and regurgitate them to heal soul loss (She is definitevely appearing in my next Mage game, the concept is neatt)
  • Another star who masquerades her hunt as a reality tv show (could use as a Banisher)
  • A would be superhero prowling the night. (This one is at least an attempt to adress what modern heroes are)
  • A psychatrist seeking to understand the world of dreams (useful as an Hunter antagonist for Astral-focused Mages or Changelings)
  • A single-mother house-cleaner using what secrets she discovers to protect her housing block.
  • A sailor who hunt Beast on the sea because he perceives their presence as storm noises (Replace Beasts by Magees and you could have an interesting Banisher)
  • A serial killer who genuinely tries to do good.
  • A Hero working for the Cheiron Group
Most of these are sympathetic and it's suggested they could do good or are indeed doing good and just are a danger to the PC's. Which if you do like me and impose on the group not-crappy Hungers could be good.

Indeed the only outright evil one is the bomb-make. Also interesingly those bolded are gay or bisexual.

I'll say the section is worth it if only for the soul-eating, soul-healing Proximus (who still heals victims of soul-loss when she sees them) and the youtuber working as an indirect enemies

Next section are the Beasts, which can be used as antagonists for other lines, they are all eminently punchable

  • An incarnate CEO pushing the firms of Zurich to more and more predatory behaviour
  • A wood-haunting Rampant, nothing to write about
  • A secret hunting Rampant Squid hunting through the Realms Invisible (Who says nice enounter for Mages in the Astral)
  • A water based Incarnate prone to cause storms and sink ships
  • A spider Unfettered punishing those with "dark secrets"
  • A lobbyist tempting those who oppose him to self-destruction
  • A Rampant policing a campus as an urban legen
Then you have the Insatiables. As always there are some good ideas: The Insatiables are basically linked to the elements and their forms are not following human legends (which would be more interesting if most of the RMC had not Horrors not fitting with classic legends). Differences with Beasts include

  • No Astral Lair (although they can steal one from Beasts) but they can create Dens in the material world which they can control like Beasts control their Lairs
  • Elemental associations (Earth, Ice, Sea, Fire, Void)
  • Lovecraftian forms which, unlike Beasts, they can fully summon in the material realm
  • The Schism, some sort of Disquiet which warps the community around the Den in madness and nightmares
  • They must kill to eat and they are always hungry
If you use Beasts as Antagonists, Insatiables have several advantages. They are linked to the material realm and can become huge monsters without going into the Astral. They have this "Primordial Horror" thing primed and yet some are at least subtle to be difficult to find. The Insatiables in the book are

  • A burning mob boss who forces you to fight his cronies even before you get to the "giant lava monster" stage
  • The aforementioned Blind Man, which now I think is meant to emulate the guy from Storm of the Century too, but is the most useless of the bunch
  • An ice girl who devours those who try to help her (Nice but don't scream Primordial Horror to me, that's basically a Yuki-onna)
  • The internet Insatiable, who by the way did not create GG but just has a cult in the same circles (Frankly I fail to see what the problem is. The Scientology is a Banisher Cult in the COD and nobody complains). An interesting take on the "unseen predator"
  • A monster-clown. Well at least it doesn't target children. Nice link though between his sea-assocaition and his habit to drown his prey in a crowd of people.
  • A cannibal everyoung boy who go to school, picks prey and attracts them in an underground place before devouring them. Classic
So in my opinion it's a good Night Horrors books aka a source of antagonists. I cannot say how it compares to other Night Horrors books except it's not Grim Fears (but then Grim Fears was pretty much perfect), at it contains some "meh" monsters.
 
runeblue360 said:
Are they still going with "the Beast are totally good guys no really why are you laughing" idea?
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Not explored in this book. As I said most of the heroes are very sympathetic and presented in the text as sympathetic, the Beasts presented are obviously antagonists and the Insatiable are well the Insatiable.
 
GardenerBriareus said:
And how much of the original product's rancid guts had to be replaced with cybernetic homebrew prostheses for that to happen?
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No speaking for crawatford there but as the second Beast fan of the forum some of the changes I have made are

  • The Hunger of a character must be clearly defined. You do not thirst for Punishement, you are driven to hunt kinslayers. You do not Hoard everything, you hoard Forbidden Knowledge. In practice it's not too difficult to find sympathetic Hungers which enable me as GM to drive the plot forward.
  • Horrors must be either giant animals or creatures of legend. None of that "cutting shadow" crap.
  • Heroes and Beasts are the same type of creatures. Heroes have Horrors emulating well classical heroes or more recently superheroes or video game characters (in broad strokes)
  • Heroes and Beasts can become the other type. This is to emulate both Heracles succumbing to madness and slaughtering his family and the Naga or Giants marrying with the gods.
  • Heroes are more mechanically close to Beasts with anti-Nightmares giving their allies and themselves bonuses, and Atavisms involving heroic panoply.
 
GardenerBriareus said:
And how much of the original product's rancid guts had to be replaced with cybernetic homebrew prostheses for that to happen?
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None. I genuinely enjoy the game as written. The amount of vitriol that gets spewed at the game here and elsewhere confuses me. It's a good game, the editing could have been better but that's an unfortunate artifact of the hasty rewrite, which in my opinion was unnecessary but some good stuff did come out of it.
 
So me and some friends are running an oMage game soon, and I think I'm going to play as an Infernal Exalt (using oMage Rules not Exalted Rules). I've decided the character, being effectively an orphan, will invest pretty heavily into the Malfeas side of things before learning about paradox and having to tone down his effects. My questions for the forum are as Follows:

1. What are some good ways to represent backlash in paradigm for my character. Right now the ideas I'm bandying around are the ever popular "powers are hard to control" along with "The gods of the world continue to fight their old masters" and urges of villainy
2. What are some good ways for a primarily Malfean infernal to cast coincidentally or as Vulgar without witnesses? How do you do subtle with powers that are designed to be anything but?
 
Paradox effects
-Suffering from radiation poisoning. Because fuck you.
-Showing up as a huge beacon on Detect Wyrm, attracting approximately all of the nearby werewolves to murder your face
-Creating an anima banner. Note that being visible from a mile away due to your glowing green anima banner tends to be a minor problem when running away from all the HITMarks.

rogthnor said:
2. What are some good ways for a primarily Malfean infernal to cast coincidentally or as Vulgar without witnesses? How do you do subtle with powers that are designed to be anything but?
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Kill all the witnesses first.
 
rogthnor said:
What are some good ways for a primarily Malfean infernal to cast coincidentally or as Vulgar without witnesses? How do you do subtle with powers that are designed to be anything but?
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Intimidation and Strength Boosting powers, mostly? Like, make yourself a giant of a man who looks like he could fold the average thug in half, layer on strength Boosting enhancements, and make him look vaguely military in nature, and you got a guy who people aren't going to fuck with, who looks strong so of course he can break you with one punch. Have him carry around a cigarette lighter and an aerosol spray can for when he wants to douse someone in fire.
 
rogthnor said:
2. What are some good ways for a primarily Malfean infernal to cast coincidentally or as Vulgar without witnesses? How do you do subtle with powers that are designed to be anything but?
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Go as full Nihilist. Everybody loses, even God. Everybody dies, even God. All glory is fleeting. Failure is inevitable, and eternal. Everything you touch turns to ash. Everyone you love withers and dies. You watch helplessly as those who depend on you are slaughtered. They beg for salvation, but you are impotent.

Malfeas is dead. You can visit his corpse. You hate the world for its cruelty, but even more you hate yourself for your own weakness.

You represent Kingly Might in a world where Kingly Might is worthless, impotent and useless. People look at you and they see a joke. And you hate them for it because you know that they are right. You are a cruel joke told by a heartless universe. And you're the only one who isn't laughing.


Go heavy into entropy effects. Things around you decay and corrode. It's not big and it's not flashy, but it is inescapable.

And yeah, this interpretation is less Malfeas and more The Neverborn Formerly Known as Malfeas.
 
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Brother Mouse said:
My pulp Werewolf The Apocalypse game starts tomorrow. Good god do I hope i dont fuck this up.
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I have a minor world building question about your Pulp Game.

Brother Mouse said:
So. Camarilla motivation to aid the allies is "Hitler is hunting down vampires and capturing them to use their vitae as a conponent in a combat stimulant"
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Generalissimo said:
In the Old World of Darkness Soviet KBG used lab's worth of captured vampires to make a "super soldier" drug.
(in reality all they ended up making were independent ghouls)
To a lesser extent Pentex does it with Anagath F45.6!
Why should the Nazis have a harder time making successful vampire blood farms compared to Pentex or Soviets?
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What makes the Nazi's vitae combat stimulant more Camarilla's interest over Soviet's equivalent?
 
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Generalissimo said:
I have a minor world building question about your Pulp Game.

What makes the Nazi's vitae stimulant more Camarilla's interest over Soviet's equivalent?
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Well thats a future game for VTM, and to answrr your question; The Nazis super drug last longer, inhibits pain, increases cognitive function, and increases reflex speed. As well as the abikity to use disciplines. Also the KGB hasnt made it yet, when the Russians liberate auschwitz theyll get the formula and make theirs.

The Werewolf Game is set in victorian london
 
Brother Mouse said:
Well thats a future game for VTM, and to answrr your question; The Nazis super drug last longer, inhibits pain, increases cognitive function, and increases reflex speed. As well as the abikity to use disciplines. Also the KGB hasnt made it yet, when the Russians liberate auschwitz theyll get the formula and make theirs.
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A flawless explanation that neatly and perfectly wraps everything up!
Like any good WW2 alt-history various Nazi research get plundered by the allies.
 
Generalissimo said:
A flawless explanation that neatly and perfectly wraps everything up!
Like any good WW2 alt-history various Nazi research get plundered by the allies.
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Yup. Thing is the russians in this alt history were tsken over by the bolsheviks muh later, and Tsarina Anastasia still lives. Her people loved her however the bolsheviks managed to sway the impressionable to their cause. The Cold War would not happen, because rather then going to Vietnam, the US will aid in Anastasia's retaking of the throne alongside the loyalist resistance. After that Russia and The US will have a nigh unbreakable bond.
 
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