White Wolf's World of Darkness

[The Laurent]

Also, I never realized how dependent I was on the subnet for Changeling information without looking in the books. The link broke or something so that now Changeling goes to Mummies, and I'm just like flailing desperately trying to remember some minor rules and stuff for Ensorcellment and other things...it's dreadful.

 

[Vindictus]

The thing that gets me about Beast the most, I think, is that in all the other settings when you say 'I am a monster', you're actually telling the truth.

When you play Vampire, you are an incredibly powerful blood drinking thing.

When you play Werewolf, you are the animal that stalks and murders in the dark of night.

When you play Mage, you are the mothefucking wizard with a SMG

But when you're a Beast, you're not actually a beast. You're Bob from Accounting, who gets off on denying people the funding they need to make their projects work, or Joe-Bob Cletus who rapes, murders, and eats people in his basement dungeon, or something else that's just pointless to play as.

 

[tzar1990]

Speaking of Beast, good news! The Devs heard the complaints, and are addressing them by rewriting mass portions of the text, as well as adding 15,000 words designed to expand on what Beasts do besides be assholes, the relationship between them and heroes, and so on. Most notably, Beasts are granted a Horror (the new term for Soul) when an existing beast offers them the chance to be converted and then eats their original soul to make room for it. They're supposed to teach primal lessons through fear, and the "just a horrible asshole" beasts are those who are explicitly failing at their duty in order to revel in power and horror.

They've shared the rewritten introduction already, which you can find here.

 

[cmwatford]

Most notably, Beasts are granted a Horror (the new term for Soul) when an existing beast offers them the chance to be converted and then eats their original soul to make room for it. They're supposed to teach primal lessons through fear, and the "just a horrible asshole" beasts are those who are explicitly failing at their duty in order to revel in power and horror.

They've shared the rewritten introduction already, which you can find here.

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All of my hate. ALL OF IT. They've taken the narrative soul of Beast (the Homecoming) and replaced it with a cult that thinks it can save the world with fear and terror. They've ruined the family thing they were going for by making beasthood a fucking conjob on some hapless idiot that thinks selling his soul for nightmare powers will help the world somehow.

 

[notanautomaton]

All of my hate. ALL OF IT. They've taken the narrative soul of Beast (the Homecoming) and replaced it with a cult that thinks it can save the world with fear and terror. They've ruined the family thing they were going for by making beasthood a fucking conjob on some hapless idiot that thinks selling his soul for nightmare powers will help the world somehow.

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Your tears are delicious.

 

[Roadie]

While I'll agree that the version of Beast presented in the new version of intro has its rough spots, I like it much better than the original.

In particular,
- the awkward attempt at presenting Beasts as outsiders despite being best buddies with other supernaturals is gone,
- the implicit sense of superiority to other supernaturals is gone (and seems to be replaced by a more pleasantly crossover-play-enabling "student of other supernaturals" theme),
- the whole "dream imposed on the real world" thing as a theme played through with both Beasts and Heroes removes the worst of the thematic conflicts inherent in "you are a primordial monster yet are totally human physically by default", and
- Beasts feel much more like actual characters by default instead of petty assholes and/or edgelord strawman revenge fantasy placeholders.

Also, there have been a number of complaints about the way Devouring is presented in the new draft.

Here's a thought:

What if it was reversed? What if it wasn't the monster Devouring you, but instead you Devouring the monster?

Of course, this would probably be quite a dangerous process, liable to kill or drive utterly mad someone who isn't properly prepared. It would make being a Beast feel less like "joining a club" and more like a mystical initiation of the kind historically practiced in the real world, or like the initiation rites of the Mawé people, where a boy ready to become a man sticks his hand into hundreds of (incredibly painful) live bullet ants.

 

[cmwatford]

The Homecoming was what sold me on Beast. It's what set the narrative tone of the whole god damn game.
I posted this on the OP Forum:

The Homecoming emphasizes that Beasts are part of the same family of primal nightmares that have haunted humanity forever.
The Homecoming emphasizes that Beasts are born the way they are, and that the Hunger is a basic need of life.

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This was a big part of what I liked about Beast. It lets characters say "I am a monster, now what am I going to do about that?" There's still plenty of narrative room here for the whole teaching through fear angle. This is the point where the Big Sibling pops up and says "Let me show you a way to fulfill your needs and help the world at the same time."

The difference between the old and the new is being born with a great gift and having to make a choice about how you'll use it vs being inducted into a mystical cult that wants to make the world better through fear and terror. It's changed the entire narrative feel of the game by changing the starting conditions.

 

[Hydroplatypus]

Added another chapter to my changeling fic.

 

[The Laurent]

Incidentally, having not read the original, what WAS the deal with the "Beasts are like totally the Big Brothers of the other splats" thing? I mean, I remember feeling vaguely uneasy at the whole thing, but since I didn't read the alpha-book or whatnot, I have no reason to assume anything.

 

[cmwatford]

Incidentally, having not read the original, what WAS the deal with the "Beasts are like totally the Big Brothers of the other splats" thing? I mean, I remember feeling vaguely uneasy at the whole thing, but since I didn't read the alpha-book or whatnot, I have no reason to assume anything.

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Beasts were descended, spiritually not physically, from the dark mother whom the beasts believe is the mother of all monsters. They believe that all the supernatural weirdness in the WoD is ultimately descended from her in some way. With beasts being one of the oldest branches of the family naturally they should take care of their younger siblings/cousins. Naturally weather or not this is true is left up in the air but they have some powers that seem to back up the claim. It's really just an excuse to have beast characters dabbling in the affairs of other supes and not have them torn into giblets for their trouble.

 

[SinisterPorpoise]

Incidentally, having not read the original, what WAS the deal with the "Beasts are like totally the Big Brothers of the other splats" thing? I mean, I remember feeling vaguely uneasy at the whole thing, but since I didn't read the alpha-book or whatnot, I have no reason to assume anything.

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.

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Also Demons were explicitly called out as being not related to Beasts.
This fact tends to make Beasts uncomfortable, at best.

 

[BlueBiscuit]

There was an update regarding the Mage/Werewolf Dark Era expansion: Neolithic.
Sounds cool to me, thoughts anyone?

My own Awakening game is going strong, despite some initial awkwardness from the players, but now everyone is having fun with it, enjoying the power over reality itself and fearing the mad unreality of the Abyss (the Guardian and the Arrow players almost died saving the ass of the other cabal members from a mob of Sleepers being influenced by an Intruder, the Guardian in particular ate so much resistant damage).
Once again now, I ask what volume I should feed my hunger for Mage stuff with. The prievious suggestions were all so awesome and useful (the Order of the Gate from Seers in particular has become a big part of it's plot), so I wondered what else should I turn my eye towards?

 

[EarthScorpion]

Once again now, I ask what volume I should feed my hunger for Mage stuff with. The prievious suggestions were all so awesome and useful (the Order of the Gate from Seers in particular has become a big part of it's plot), so I wondered what else should I turn my eye towards?

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Do you have any of the following:

• Astral Realms - book on the Onieros (the human soul-space, useful for solo-play and character exploration), the Tenemos (the collective human unconsciousness), and the Dreamtime (the soul of the world, good for more abstract things. Also, the Aeons). Pretty great.
• Left Hand Path- "order" book for Apostates, Scelesti, the Mad and the Tremere. Nicely done, and expands these usually more minor antagonists and the way you can use them. I have to say that the Tremere as written here really went a bit sour for me - they're trying to be too special snowflake and riding too much off the oMage Tremere name. But the other stuff is great.
• Summoners - all about summonable things. Nice chapter on Abyssal Gulmoths, very nice added flexibility for Mind mages with summoning astral things, general expansions of stuff, also a chapter of some weird things. I'm not a fan of the Supernal summoning they give - I'd make it harder or scrap it entirely.

 

[BlueBiscuit]

Of those three I only have Astral Realms, since I remember you already suggesting it pretty strongly. And yeah, I love the Aeons, and the stuff on the Oneiros came useful when one of our Mastigos went "dumpster diving" for information inside the head of a suspected enemy patsy.

The Tremere are expanded? Do they fix the problem where it's impossible for them to not hit Wisdom 0, at least by RAW?

Summoners may be perhaps the most immediately useful book to me, if it has more stuff in Abyssal creatures and pacts with them. You say the book gives rules for actually summoning Supernal creatures? As in Angels of the Aether, or the creatures of the Primal Wild? Sounds cool to me, but when you say too easy, it takes too little effort for too big a reward? Or something else?

 

[TheLastOne]

Do you have any of the following:

• Summoners - all about summonable things. Nice chapter on Abyssal Gulmoths, very nice added flexibility for Mind mages with summoning astral things, general expansions of stuff, also a chapter of some weird things. I'm not a fan of the Supernal summoning they give - I'd make it harder or scrap it entirely.

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I like the idea of the Supernal summoning - if you were playing up a Kabbalist angle as a summoner of 'angels' (which is in no way limited to Obrimos), that's the kind of thing you would want to do.

But mechanically? Good god is it broken, and there's no mechanical support of several fluff issues, for instance I remember the Moros having to get close enough to death that they risked dying to use it... except that that wasn't supported at all mechanically. Or the whole summon a fetch to replace someone you know trick that Acanthus have... I forget the issue. I just remember that it was broken in a 'this doesn't mechanically work' sense.

So yeah, I want to like it, but it's a mix of too easy, badly written, and simply non-functional.

 

[EarthScorpion]

So yeah, I want to like it, but it's a mix of too easy, badly written, and simply non-functional.

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It's one of the big reasons I'm really not hopeful for Awakening 2e (apart from "uses the fucking GMC") - Dave B is not good with mechanics. He did the Summoners rules for Supernal Summoning, he did the complete pile of horse excrement that is the magic system in Blood Sorcery (seriously, I can't emphasise heavily enough that it's so terrible that I'd refuse to play in a Vampire game which let Blood Sorcery exist, because it snaps the game and the cross-covenant balance clean in two)... his record is bad.

 

[TheLastOne]

It's one of the big reasons I'm really not hopeful for Awakening 2e (apart from "uses the fucking GMC") - Dave B is not good with mechanics. He did the Summoners rules for Supernal Summoning, he did the complete pile of horse excrement that is the magic system in Blood Sorcery (seriously, I can't emphasise heavily enough that it's so terrible that I'd refuse to play in a Vampire game which let Blood Sorcery exist, because it snaps the game and the cross-covenant balance clean in two)... his record is bad.

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I didn't actually look deeply enough at Blood Sorcery to pick up it's mechanical issue, because I quickly realized how it managed to drain the flavor out of Cruac and Theban Sorcery, so I quickly stopped reading it.


I liked the second chapter much better, but I found the sacrifices for the Threnodies a bit too uneven. They sort of treated social fluff resources like friendships and face as cheap filler you could casually sacrifice. I would have trouble justifying buying several of them, simply because you would spend experience points on something that would actually make you permanently worse off if you ever used.

If these were abilities you could just use if you were willing to make the sacrifice, that would be different, but as paid for abilities, there were a number that weren't worth it. Not all of them, mind. Some WERE clearly worth the buying, but again it was uneven. I suppose you could make it so that the crippling costs were for Threnodies you hadn't bought, so you were negotiating with your beast from a place of weakness, and the more reasonable priced ones were for ones you had paid for with experience. Still, that would involve rewriting a bunch of stuff.

 

[EarthScorpion]

I didn't actually look deeply enough at Blood Sorcery to pick up it's mechanical issue, because I quickly realized how it managed to drain the flavor out of Cruac and Theban Sorcery, so I quickly stopped reading it.

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It gives flavourless, do-everything freeform magic to two of the five Covenants. It doesn't even have the limitations (like Paradox) built in, and their areas of coverage are wider than the Arcana. They literally have access to sympathetic magic and can do scry-and-die on you, and you're a vampire so you've got sweet-fuck-all to defend yourself.

One of the major balancing points in Mage is "everyone can do it". Not true here! If you're not a blood sorcerer, you're shit out of luck.

It's powerful enough that it makes it so you're a fucking moron if you're a member of the Invictus, Carthians or Ordo Dracul. Because ha ha ha, oh you guys who can buy merits cheaper or get really expensive small changes to the nature of the Curse. The blood-magicians get Mage-style magic. It's one of the things that the WoD team doesn't seem to grasp - that just because there's no such thing as perfect balance in a tabletop game doesn't mean you shouldn't try. And obvious things like "maybe you should get similar levels of benefit from joining the different Covenants" seem to have passed over them entirely.

 

[TheLastOne]

It gives flavourless, do-everything freeform magic to two of the five Covenants. It doesn't even have the limitations (like Paradox) built in, and their areas of coverage are wider than the Arcana. They literally have access to sympathetic magic and can do scry-and-die on you, and you're a vampire so you've got sweet-fuck-all to defend yourself.

One of the major balancing points in Mage is "everyone can do it". Not true here! If you're not a blood sorcerer, you're shit out of luck.

It's powerful enough that it makes it so you're a fucking moron if you're a member of the Invictus, Carthians or Ordo Dracul. Because ha ha ha, oh you guys who can buy merits cheaper or get really expensive small changes to the nature of the Curse. The blood-magicians get Mage-style magic. It's one of the things that the WoD team doesn't seem to grasp - that just because there's no such thing as perfect balance in a tabletop game doesn't mean you shouldn't try. And obvious things like "maybe you should get similar levels of benefit from joining the different Covenants" seem to have passed over them entirely.

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I vaguely remember there being a system on the time economy. I think they probably fell into the same trap D20 fell into in thinking in terms of combat rounds, when the wizard can (and not just mechanically, but thematically should) be doing the hard work in advance, in a ritual space they control, never seeing the person they're attacking. That's fine with normal Cruac and Theban Sorcery - you don't have a lot of great scry and die. But break that, and the game breaks. It doesn't matter if the mega-death spell takes ten minutes to cast, ideally you shouldn't ever care because you cast it from safety rather then in the middle of combat.

 

[EarthScorpion]

I vaguely remember there being a system on the time economy.

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Yeah, but that doesn't actually matter at all. Like, at a basic level, when the normal vampires are getting a single power from their XP expenditure, and the blood sorcerers are getting a freeform selection of powers, there is basically no way to balance it. Their XP efficiency is just that much better.

 

[The Laurent]

It gives flavourless, do-everything freeform magic to two of the five Covenants. It doesn't even have the limitations (like Paradox) built in, and their areas of coverage are wider than the Arcana. They literally have access to sympathetic magic and can do scry-and-die on you, and you're a vampire so you've got sweet-fuck-all to defend yourself.

One of the major balancing points in Mage is "everyone can do it". Not true here! If you're not a blood sorcerer, you're shit out of luck.

It's powerful enough that it makes it so you're a fucking moron if you're a member of the Invictus, Carthians or Ordo Dracul. Because ha ha ha, oh you guys who can buy merits cheaper or get really expensive small changes to the nature of the Curse. The blood-magicians get Mage-style magic. It's one of the things that the WoD team doesn't seem to grasp - that just because there's no such thing as perfect balance in a tabletop game doesn't mean you shouldn't try. And obvious things like "maybe you should get similar levels of benefit from joining the different Covenants" seem to have passed over them entirely.

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How valid is that in 2e? I mean, I remember reading Blood and Smoke and maybe I wasn't focusing enough on the other two Covenants (because the character I was making wasn't part of them) but I don't remember them being that unbalanced.

*Goes to glance again at the pdf that I totally legally downloaded and paid money for and stuff.*

 

[BlueBiscuit]

I think that at least in B&S the Blood Magic rituals are fixed, I believe, and that they have a limited reach of 1 mile, even with sympathetic connections and such, so even if they have mage-like scry-&-die effects, they can't do it if you just skip town.

 

[Scia]

How valid is that in 2e? I mean, I remember reading Blood and Smoke and maybe I wasn't focusing enough on the other two Covenants (because the character I was making wasn't part of them) but I don't remember them being that unbalanced.

*Goes to glance again at the pdf that I totally legally downloaded and paid money for and stuff.*

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By fluff and the base examples they are not, by the actual rules for how to do blood magic.. And even with the reduced range you can still hit people as they visit the Elysium and skipping town IS a win for the caster as that means that you can gobble up the territory of the old one . Oh and did I mention that they can appear as illusion inside of the Elysium so you can't even use that to pin them down?

 

[TheLastOne]

Yeah, but that doesn't actually matter at all. Like, at a basic level, when the normal vampires are getting a single power from their XP expenditure, and the blood sorcerers are getting a freeform selection of powers, there is basically no way to balance it. Their XP efficiency is just that much better.

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As I said, they aren't the first ones to make that mistake. Though I suppose that only makes it worse.

Still, even if the system was robust and balanced, I still wouldn't like it. One of the things that Vampire the Requiem does better then Vampire the Masquerade is that the magic system is more interesting. Blood Sorcery undermines that.

 

[davebrookshaw]

It's one of the big reasons I'm really not hopeful for Awakening 2e (apart from "uses the fucking GMC") - Dave B is not good with mechanics. He did the Summoners rules for Supernal Summoning-

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As a cursory check of Summoner's credits page will show you, no, I did not. I didn't work on that book at all.

he did the complete pile of horse excrement that is the magic system in Blood Sorcery (seriously, I can't emphasise heavily enough that it's so terrible that I'd refuse to play in a Vampire game which let Blood Sorcery exist, because it snaps the game and the cross-covenant balance clean in two)... his record is bad.

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Operating under heavy restrictions as a jobbing writer, yes. Rose specified what she wanted the dice rolls to be, what the Theme and Motif system should be, everything like that. It's a system that only works if you're willing to tell players "that ritual is out of theme for your covenant and the game," rather than treat it like Mage's Arcana. I fixed it as much as I was able to in Requiem 2e, thanks to the new extended action system in 2nd edition Storytelling, but eh.

Fundamentally, "we want these two covenants to have a freeform magic system" is an inherently unbalancing thing, and if your chronicle isn't based entirely around one of them. I'd ditch improvised rituals for them entirely and just use Blood Sorcery as a means of designing new, set ones.