Nightmare Inspector Reynolds would work a lot better for me if there was any particular indication he targeted small businesses. As it is I I can't help but imagine what happens when he goes after a chain. Probably not a fair assumption, but it does rather ruin the effect.
Well, to start with everyone working at that location loses their job, and when they go job hunting in the future, have a huge black mark against them. Company policy tends to be to blame everyone, rather then trying to find the guilty. It's not as bad as losing your business, but it's still wrecking peoples lives in a cold impersonal manner.
Part of the problem I think is that when Kafkaesque stories play obstructive bureaucracy for horror they've got all the elbow room of long-form prose to work with, to establish a protagonist who is entirely at the mercy of this incomprehensibly complex, bizarre and lunatic system, and to walk the reader through the protagonists perspective and emotional state throughout the experience.
Nightmare Inspector Reynolds gets, what, a couple hundred words? And most of all he's not a lunatic system, he's a malicious representative of an otherwise sane system. He lacks the omnipresence and, hmm, saturation that makes Kafka work.
When you're stuck in a Kafkaesque situation you're surrounded by a world gone mad, presented with the idea that literally everything is out to get you, that wherever you turn is just one more deadfall in an ever-more-improbable string of catastrophes. You are smothered in deranged malice.
Nightmare Inspector Reynolds is just one horrible little man inserting himself into your life from the outside. He may have a significant measure of power over you, but it's like being hosed down with a stream of water versus drowning in a lake.
Hell, didn't Neil Gaiman make this point way back in Doll's House?
"What have you wrought, Corinthian? NOTHING. Just something else for people to be scared of, that's all. You've told them that there are bad people out there. And they've known that all along."
Background: Heroes on the hunt have seen glimpses of a young warrior queen in their dreams, pointing the way to the Lair of their quarry. When they get to the creature's Lair, she's there, fighting beside them to vanquish the creature. She says she is sleeping somewhere in the real world and beseeches the Heroes she allies with to find her. To date, none of the Children or the Heroes who have encountered her can track her down.
If they did, they would be surprised at what they see: a sickly teenage girl named Melanie, trapped in a coma for the past two years. Doctors and nurses regularly check her bedside, as do worried family members. Her mother spends the entire window of visiting hours sitting with her daughter, either knitting or working on crosswords to pass the time. Her father drops in when he can. They have no idea what caused their presumably healthy daughter to fall so ill, and the doctors are equally stumped.
Melanie fell into the coma after an enterprising Collector sought her out to take God-knows-what from her in order to feed his own hoard. He never got what he wanted; instead of cowering, she gave chase, following him right back to his Lair where she killed him. When she tried to make it back to the real world, however, something went horribly wrong. Her body made it back, but her soul remains in the Primordial Dream, just out of reach. She learns a great deal from the other Heroes she encounters, though she has yet to chase a Beast back out of the Primordial Dream into the mortal world. Through their guidance and a heavily assisted kill, Melanie does not even need a physical presence to strike out at her enemies.
With each victory, Melanie grows stronger, and in her hospital bed, she twitches in her sleep, her hands clenching into fists and unclenching. Her body shows remarkably few signs of atrophying despite the coma, and it gives her parents and doctors hope that one day they may see Melanie, their darling daughter, walk and smile again. They have no idea what keeps Melanie preserved through her coma. When Melanie awakens, she will take everything away from the creatures who took away years of her life.
Description: In the physical world, Melanie is a gaunt, delicate slip of a girl with pale, dull, lifeless hair and glazed-over eyes. She rests in a hospital bed, wearing a thin hospital gown that does very little to protect against the elements. Then again, she doesn't need to worry about that.In the Primordial Dream, her hair is a lustrous blonde mane and her eyes are a clear ice blue. Her armor gleams with light reflected from some unknown source.
Storytelling Notes: Melanie does not fully understand what has happened to her, or how to free herself. She knows that her body is asleep somewhere, but doesn't know if she can get back to it or how. She is young and scared, and likely not aware of how long she has been separated from her body. Still, she's smart and determined, even if she assumes that any Hero she meets will help her get back to her body.
Melanie's Life is Comatose; since she is stuck in a coma, she can't do much else in the physical world. She's trapped between worlds and can't reach her body to fulfill her destiny as a Hero. If anyone who wishes to do her bodily harm finds her body, she has little to no recourse to defend herself.
Her Legend as a Dreamer stems from the way she can manifest her full potential and fight what she sees as the good fight. Dreams are where anyone can be who they want to be. In her mind, Beasts do the most damage in dreams; humanity's inner demons trouble dreams enough without the Begotten cultivating and preying on those fears. With her powers as a Hero, she can follow the Children from dreams back to their Lair, the place where they can be who they truly are, and show them how it feels to be the victim.
Killing monsters which literally make the world a worse place by existing and which feed off human misery and have a truly chuuni-like sense of "everything revolves around me, I'm the real star of the show" is what villains do. That's how you know they're villains. Because they kill monsters who do things like dragging people into their bubble of reality and keeping them there until they get Stockholm Syndrome.
Traumadungeons are a sign of a real hero, and that's why Heroes oppose them. Because they're the bad guys.
I think we've established that this is a book with serious thematic issues, that are non-trivial and non-dismissible.
As I said, I liked the bureaucrat monster, because it's thematic to me - I could use a being like that as a villain, though with my preference for oWoD I would more likely make it a Drone that moves from bureaucracy to bureaucracy, mercilessly crushing family business after family business, paving the way for a corporate monoculture. The characters could get involve when it start moving in on part of the community that they're guarding/involved with.
Fighting it would be hard - violence wouldn't work, as it's a interchangeable drone rather then some elite champion of Stasis. Kill it and another will be rewoven to take up the same identity. You couldn't appeal to some mercy or humanity in it - it has none. If you try and use magic to stop it, twist the bureaucratic process... well, it has enough special senses that anything you try it sees, anything it sees is vulgar, and it can probably fix anything you change.
To stop it, you have to convince the system to change, to move. You have to campaign against destroying local culture, get the city council involved, weaken the order it draws power from by inspiring people to dream and try new things, get new businesses to open, get people to withdraw support for the machine. You have to go around it, in other words, and make the system subject to people, rather then people subject to the system.
When people like their quirky neighborhoods, when people stand together and form bonds and community rather then interact through impersonal systems, it has no power. People have power, but they've given it away to the monster, and only collectively can they take it back.
There seams to be a trend in Beast, where the nominal protagonists are much much worse than the nominal villains of the series. I mean, Melanie in particular seems to be a clearcut hero. Not Hero, hero. She seems to be a reasonably good person, has a clear and justifiable reason for fighting monsters, is generally helpful, and only harms those that harm others. If this were D&D I'd put her as Good aligned.
If this is the sort of person that's the villain, then you're probably doing something wrong. Either that, of they need to drop the pretense that Beasts are just poor misunderstood outcasts.
As I said, I liked the bureaucrat monster, because it's thematic to me - I could use a being like that as a villain, though with my preference for oWoD I would more likely make it a Drone that moves from bureaucracy to bureaucracy, mercilessly crushing family business after family business, paving the way for a corporate monoculture.
Yes, that's the core problem. They've already done two games of dealing with soul-crushing bureaucracy and fighting it so you can actually do what you're meant to do.
They're called "Sidereals games" and "Technocracy games" [1].
[1] Technocracy games are quite adequate proof that the real enemy of the Technocracy isn't the Traditions, it's those bastards in Disbursements and Requisitions who refuse to give you funding. And those bastards in another amalgam who got more funding that you and managed to get their hands on a squad of brand new HITMarks, lucky fuckers. And that bastard heading up your local Convocation who doesn't like you and who simply won't hurry up and retire so your ally can get his position. Reality Deviants? Get in line. No Reality Deviant can block your average Technocracy party as much as Requisitions not giving them the gear they totally need honest.
It's how you can tell that mages and Enlightened Scientists are really the same class of being. The biggest enemy of the Traditions is the Technocracy. Likewise, the biggest enemy of the Technocracy is the Technocracy.
All joking aside the idea of a faceless bureaucrat having the power to come into your home or place of working and utterly destroy your life could easily become the idea for some legitimate nightmare fuel.
It could! But it isn't here. Like @Imrix pointed out Reynold isn't anything supernatural in practical application, not really. He's just a nasty little shitstain doing what any health inspector with sufficient incentive could do. He's banal. He's boring. He's not a monster he's just an asshole. And that's sort of the torpedo that's going to shatter this ship and send it down to the bottom of the sea, maybe resting on a shelf a little ways above Changing Breeds and Brucato.
Why should I root for Beasts?
Why should I?
They're all assholes which is worse than being monsters. Monsters are like...monsters are interesting. They're predators doing as they do. Hunting and eating or following their instincts because they basically have to. And that inherently sets this up for a really interesting conflict. Beasts are supposed to be people with human lives but monstrous souls. So they're a mix of normal, happy and unhappy human experiences joined to primal, primordial nightmares. They like movies or long walks on the beach or what the fuck ever. They have friends and lovers and people they just dislike. But their soul's just sitting in their ear like "hey remember that time we fucking ruined ancient Mesopotamia? That was pretty bitching. Let's do it again! I mean don't you like feeling strong? Don't you like feeling powerful? You don't want to starve either do you?"
There could be moral grey with that. Heroes have a good reason for existing, Beasts are just people trying to get by. There are people among both that are heroes lower case "h". There are people among both who are beasts lower case "b". There could be a whole thing about how the old stories are always black and white but the truth of the matter isn't so simple you know?
Instead it's just...it's like Tokyo Ghoul except the show is like "oh those poor oppressed ghouls being ruthlessly hunted by those horrible investigators".
And to top it off with a whipped cream of awful, like I said Beasts are just petty, vain, whiny assholes. Exerting whatever mundane power they have to make people's lives miserable.
They're
That's an entirely valid model of a Beast. Without bullshitting. That's who the book is suggesting that you play. Not the Outsider from Dishonored. The bad guy from every workplace comedy ever.
You're going to have to be more specific Havoc. There are so many wonderful examples of Beasts. There's the one who kidnaps people and takes them to her lair until they get Stockholm Syndrome and she drops them back. There's the one who kidnaps people and takes them to his house until their family starts falling apart. There's Father Landon aka Father "No seriously fuck the altar boys it's fiiiiiiiiiiiiine".
"Father Landon was a priest before the Homecoming. While he doesn't really believe anymore, the perks of being clergy were too great to pass up. He talks with other men of the cloth, tempting them to break their vows and sin, and then watching as they run to other priests to give confession. At times he exposes their crimes and watches as the church either protects its own or makes examples. Father Landon doesn't really care about the punishment (though his broodmate sometimes takes an interest)."
There are the Beasts who get off on getting promoted then making their new underlings polish their nameplate which I'm going to extend the benefit of doubt to White Wolf and assume is not a euphemism. There's the one who longs for the day when he can fungal nuke the city and LARP The Last of Us. There's whatever the fuck this is.
"A Namtaru Predator's Hunger might require her to taste the blood from a thousand separate tiny cuts from her victims, or burrow her tongue into every internal organ one by one."
Or the feminist caricature who argues with men until they become angry enough to punch her, then beats them up? I really wish I was making that one up...
"Jo doesn't tower over her prey — she's short, but she's all muscle. She enjoys letting other people challenge her, especially men. The challenge isn't always or even usually physical. Sometimes they try to test her knowledge on topics they think she shouldn't understand, or try to explain things to her that it's obvious she knows. She destroys them; she knows what they know and she pokes holes in their beliefs and their facts, showing them sides of the topic they never considered. Secretly, though, she relishes the rare times when a man gets so mad he tries to touch her, because then she can beat him in a way that leaves no room for argument."
Yes people. These are actual lines. From the book.
You know, now I'm actually interested in playing a sarcastic comedy using Beast rules. Neither the Beast or the Hero is taken seriously. Both are Large Hams, much scenery chewed, and the GM obligingly provides appropriate moments.
Maybe play as a literal dragon, who kidnaps a traveling princess in the hammiest and most over the top way possible. For that matter, maybe he's like Bowser in that he continually kidnaps the same princess every other month. Then the hero shows up, going on about the magic of friendship - or something like that - and they have a fight. The dragon is injured, and flees muttering curses about how he would have gotten away with it were it not for those meddling kids. Oh, he'll be back, and next time he'll get you, and your little dog too. At no point in the entire process is anything taken seriously, dodging most of the ethical issues.
Basically the only way I could see a game I'd be interested in coming out of this.
I think the part I'm most disappointed about is that in the one line they promised you could play as actual monsters the writers gave us a game where you play someone who pretends to be a monster and can only turn into one in a magical dream world in the fucking astral plane.
"Jo doesn't tower over her prey — she's short, but she's all muscle. She enjoys letting other people challenge her, especially men. The challenge isn't always or even usually physical. Sometimes they try to test her knowledge on topics they think she shouldn't understand, or try to explain things to her that it's obvious she knows. She destroys them; she knows what they know and she pokes holes in their beliefs and their facts, showing them sides of the topic they never considered. Secretly, though, she relishes the rare times when a man gets so mad he tries to touch her, because then she can beat him in a way that leaves no room for argument."
Jesus christ, ironically they've sort of stumbled backwards past something that might make an intriguing beast:
something that drifts towards areas of segregation, this segregation need not be racial or physical simply any split between two groups, the beast ingratiates itself into one group or another and begins to deepen the divide at the early stages it can be mocking whatever group is segregated from it's current group usually in a manner that both groups will hear of it, but as the divide deepens its actions escalate. it begins joining housing committees and advocate more stringent 'standards', creating groups defined solely by their opposition, even joining rallies solely to instigate violence.
Look, I know I'm not supposed to bring it up, it's bad to cross game lines in different settings using different rules, etc. Also I fled from that thread and all.
But honestly.
I've had some bad words about Exalted's TAW in the past.
But from everything I read TAW strikes me as a better exploration of the concept and nuances of "monsters" and their opposition to "heroes," questioning both the notion of what is a monster and what is a hero, than Beast has managed in a whole game manual dedicated to that concept written by supposed professionals.
That's just... shameful. You're paid professionals and they are a handful of forumites idling at their project in between two fanfictions, and they did it better than you did. What the hell, guys.
To be fair, EarthScorpion and Revlid are known to be good enough that the entire online Exalted community is surprised that they haven't been poached onto the actual Development team, and eagerly await that occurrence. But yeah, your point still stands.
All things told, it sounds like the base principles of Beast have a ton of potential, but that the actual handling of it is total garbage. That is disappointing to hear, because the initial pitch sounded really interesting.
All things told, it sounds like the base principles of Beast have a ton of potential, but that the actual handling of it is total garbage. That is disappointing to hear, because the initial pitch sounded really interesting.
I'm honestly not seeing what everyone is complaining about when it comes to Beast. Are people just reading to much into it? I've spent the past few days going over the text and have read everything but the storytelling chapter and I feel like the Beasts are suitably monstrous and the Heroes are acceptable antagonists. Sure the Heroes have some unfortunate subtext/implications but this is the 'World of Darkness' not 'World of Fluffy Bunnies'.
I'm honestly not seeing what everyone is complaining about when it comes to Beast. Are people just reading to much into it? I've spent the past few days going over the text and have read everything but the storytelling chapter and I feel like the Beasts are suitably monstrous and the Heroes are acceptable antagonists. Sure the Heroes have some unfortunate subtext/implications but this is the 'World of Darkness' not 'World of Fluffy Bunnies'.
That's a pretty shit thing to do to someone but it sound thematically appropriate for a namtaru. Hell I'd be suprised if there isn't a namtaru with a lair designed to do just this. And that idea doesn't bother me. If that bothers you then you should be upfront with your group that shit like that won't fly. It's not like you have to do the worst imaginable to sate your hunger. Unless you're trying to go from 1 to 10 in one sitting I guess.
I feel like people are blowing this way out of proportion. Yes, there is potential and incentive for you to do terrible things but you don't have to. Yes, Heroes get shit on hardcore but bad shit happens to people who don't deserve it in real life, why should we expect that to be any different in WoD? I mean I get it if you don't want to force people, who have likely suffered a lot, to become self centered pricks who have no greater desire than to ruin your life and kill you. I'm just thinking of it like Disquiet, sunlight, or any of the other big drawbacks of playing as one of the splats in NWoD.
What I'm trying to say is that none of this really stands out at me when I think of the setting as a whole. It fits and further enforces that the WoD is a terrible shit hole of a place to live.
Which was my point.
Note the "RapeDungeon Yes/No?" discussion earlier in the thread.
edit:
One of my favorite settings is Infernum.
A little gore/horribleness/sadism won't scare me off, as long as it serves a purpose.
Nothing pisses me off more than pointless, wasteful brutality.
What's getting me annoyed about Beast is the fact that it keeps flip-flopping on characterization and didn't fulfill certain expectations.(ie The fact that you play people that think of themselves as monsters instead of actual Monsters.)
Here's the thing; all good World of Darkness game are about profoundly unpleasant people, about monsters. They are games about playing horrible, horrible people. The Vampire devs called their game Rapemurder for a reason, werewolf is about the kind of people who flip out and kill people, mages are those arrogant fuckers who think everyone should just shut up and do what they want etc etc.
The key to the success of the gameline was that they concealed these themes behind effective layers of metaphor. Vampire is about rapists and murderers and abusers, but you change those things to blood drinking and blood bonds and so on and while they're still horrible they're not things actual people experience. You can talk about vampires addicting a victim to their vitae all day and be 100% certain you are not going to be talking to an actual person who was actually addicted to a vampires blood; even though what you are really talking about is someone using sex and violence to control another person. Nobody in the real world has actually dealt with a kid turning into a seven foot tall ragemonster and killing half of the people nearby and driving the rest insane; even though what you're really talking about is the kind of spree killers who shoot up schools and leave everyone suffering PTSD. Nobody has had someone cast a magic spell on them to force them to give up all their money to someone else; even though plenty of people have been cheated out of house and home by conmen.
At their hearts the gamelines are about horrible people doing horrible things to people for horrible reasons. Yet we conceal those horrible things behind metaphors and analogies. It's like how X-Men can be a story about [insert blacks/gays/Jews/other persecuted minority here] by being a story about people who shoot laser from their eyes and walk through walls. You remove the immediacy of the thing you are commenting on and thus blunt its impact while still allowing you to tell the story you want to tell.
From what I have seen so far Beast is not that. It's about horrible people doing horrible things for horrible reasons... and just sort of has this wishy-washy pseudo-mythical backdrop which doesn't really effect it. Your PC has a rape dungeon which is... just a rape dungeon. You go out and drive a person out of business because... that's what you do. You're not using magical phenomena to replace contemporary realistic horribleness as an analogy, you're using magical bullshit to allow contemporary realistic horribleness.
It was like "Oh, cool we get to play as a Basilisk in a WoD game!" and then it turned out that by 'Basilisk' they meant 'Guy who creeps people out by putting cameras in bathrooms and posting the footage online'. If I wanted to be an asshole I could do that in any other WoD game and have additional fun stuff as well.
I think we've established that this is a book with serious thematic issues, that are non-trivial and non-dismissible.
As I said, I liked the bureaucrat monster, because it's thematic to me - I could use a being like that as a villain, though with my preference for oWoD I would more likely make it a Drone that moves from bureaucracy to bureaucracy, mercilessly crushing family business after family business, paving the way for a corporate monoculture. The characters could get involve when it start moving in on part of the community that they're guarding/involved with.
Fighting it would be hard - violence wouldn't work, as it's a interchangeable drone rather then some elite champion of Stasis. Kill it and another will be rewoven to take up the same identity. You couldn't appeal to some mercy or humanity in it - it has none. If you try and use magic to stop it, twist the bureaucratic process... well, it has enough special senses that anything you try it sees, anything it sees is vulgar, and it can probably fix anything you change.
To stop it, you have to convince the system to change, to move. You have to campaign against destroying local culture, get the city council involved, weaken the order it draws power from by inspiring people to dream and try new things, get new businesses to open, get people to withdraw support for the machine. You have to go around it, in other words, and make the system subject to people, rather then people subject to the system.
When people like their quirky neighborhoods, when people stand together and form bonds and community rather then interact through impersonal systems, it has no power. People have power, but they've given it away to the monster, and only collectively can they take it back.
Why do your drone doing this? What is the reason? Just now I'm the commander of the army of stasis. Drones have no time for this shit to be honest. It's either the Wyrm attack or maintaining the masquerade because technocracy literally dead or it is absolutely insane spirits of WILD. Seriously why your drone engaged in the destruction of the family business?
And yes drones, it is not Fomorians. If you kill enough drones, Weaver or try to kill you, or retreat . Really very few people able to hear the OneSong. And even less suitable as a material for the drone.
I'm definitely biased here. But Weaver, have motives besides "Argh crush dreams! Kill the fairies!", Although given that changelings sometimes try to take over the city causing uncontrolled vortex of WILD ...
As for the subject matter, I am shocked. No really, the book of madness as I heard good handles, Nefadi. I myself have not read it. But I see a serious discord between the themes of the Beast. I would be okay with all the evil interpretation.
