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White Wolf's World of Darkness

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The other week I found a new podcast, 25 Years of Vampire: the Masquerade, an ongoing look at the VtM game line from a pair of long time fans. They're doing it book by book from the original rulebook to the newest books. It's a good series and worth a listen to.

Plus they have some amusing stories from their years of playing VtM.
 
Okay, so I have a question. How does two-sided sympathy work for Space? Like, let's say an example: how close of a relationship you have with something determines sympathy, right?

But what about two people who have a different sympathetic bond to each other? Would each be individual?

Let me give an example.

John, a vampire, slaughtered Jane's entire family, her loved ones, her pet dog, and her best friend in a Frenzy. He doesn't remember it (frenzy, man!) and doesn't know her from Eve.

Jane, on the other hand, became a vampire hunter whose entire life is DEDICATED to killing him. So, just asking, mechanically and metaphysically, would it be two different Sympathetic Bonds, one of 'Literally who' for him and 'All of My Fury' for her, or how would that work?
 
The Laurent said:
Okay, so I have a question. How does two-sided sympathy work for Space? Like, let's say an example: how close of a relationship you have with something determines sympathy, right?

But what about two people who have a different sympathetic bond to each other? Would each be individual?

Let me give an example.

John, a vampire, slaughtered Jane's entire family, her loved ones, her pet dog, and her best friend in a Frenzy. He doesn't remember it (frenzy, man!) and doesn't know her from Eve.

Jane, on the other hand, became a vampire hunter whose entire life is DEDICATED to killing him. So, just asking, mechanically and metaphysically, would it be two different Sympathetic Bonds, one of 'Literally who' for him and 'All of My Fury' for her, or how would that work?
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Not all sympathetic bonds are two-way. For instance, a picture has sympathy to you, but you don't have sympathy to the picture.
 
The Laurent said:
Okay, so I have a question. How does two-sided sympathy work for Space? Like, let's say an example: how close of a relationship you have with something determines sympathy, right?

But what about two people who have a different sympathetic bond to each other? Would each be individual?

Let me give an example.

John, a vampire, slaughtered Jane's entire family, her loved ones, her pet dog, and her best friend in a Frenzy. He doesn't remember it (frenzy, man!) and doesn't know her from Eve.

Jane, on the other hand, became a vampire hunter whose entire life is DEDICATED to killing him. So, just asking, mechanically and metaphysically, would it be two different Sympathetic Bonds, one of 'Literally who' for him and 'All of My Fury' for her, or how would that work?
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Well, obviously.

If you have a piece of their hair, giving you an Intimate connection to them, they don't get an Intimate connection back to you.
 
Hm. So the only explanation I've gotten from my group about Ley Lines is that they provide 'infinite free energy - non-magical, not useful for spells like Mana is, but not just electricity'. If that's the case... can you guys think of any way to either link a suit of power armour to the ley line at range, so the armour can go do shit elsewhere without worrying about power, or some way to cheat and make massively efficient energy storage using only things available to a Mage?

I've also thought about using it to power a big fuck-off railgun, in an abandoned subway tunnel or something, and building an Apportation into a gun that looks like a cosplay Noisy Cricket or something, for a BIG punch from a little 'toy' gun. Any way of improving that setup you guys can think of, even if it takes a bit higher Space than I've got? Preferably minimising Vulgarity, though, whether that's by making whatever spells are in it non-Vulgar or by making them long-duration, so you only need to risk the roll once per combat.

If anyone's got a better rundown of Ley Lines, I'm all ears!
 
Vindictus said:
Start up an electric company selling the free energy to the masses at just under market rates, and rake in the dough for massive piles of cash.

All further problems will be solved by throwing money at them.
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Hm. While we have no Guardians to castigate us for that, we are not all Free Council - I'm Mysterium, for one. Also... we kinda already have All The Money. We were in the lair of a magical creature in an Otherrealm based on Lewis Carroll's stuff, and... our Matter Mage may have animated an 11-metre-long anaconda of pure gold, used it to help kill the monster, then rode it to the Red Queen's court and delivered the monster (Son Of Jabberwock)'s head. We managed to finagle our way into sending it to our Sanctum, and when I calc'd the value, using then-current gold prices in October 2013...

There were 3,868,424.29 cm3​ of volume, 19.32 grams of gold per cubic centimeter, 74,737,957.2828 grams makes for ~74.738 metric tonnes, 1 ounce = 28.3495 grams, ~2,636,306 ounces, $1,343.86 per ounce, $US3,542,826,197.078 as of Oct 2013.

...so our seven-strong Cabal has over three and a half billion dollar's worth of gold to split between us, that the Matter Mage can trivially reshape into gold bars. We could crash the global market in gold, if we're not careful.
 
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So, the truth is that you don't have 3 and a half billion dollars worth of gold split seven ways.

You have whatever's left of the market once it crashes split seven ways. Not that that's not a lot of money, but yeah.
 
The Laurent said:
So, the truth is that you don't have 3 and a half billion dollars worth of gold split seven ways.

You have whatever's left of the market once it crashes split seven ways. Not that that's not a lot of money, but yeah.
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Yeah, there is that. We figure if we're careful, and ration it out over the next several decades, we should see most of the value. Of course, that's beyond the scope of the game, so for now, we're going to invest a chunk of it in getting Resources 5, each. ST has ruled we can get things like that without XP, simply by finding a way for our money to make more money for ourselves. I'm still trying to figure the best way of doing that, that lets me retain my Occultation 2.

EDIT: I mean, I want to become the shadowy backer of both a space program and bring Fusion into reality, but A) a seventh-share of three and a half billion is not enough for that, and B) I would not see a good return on investment for a while. I could always buy a company that makes fission plants, but the US hasn't built any new fission plants in decades - I'd have to do all my initial stuff in France, and who knows what kind of Old World bullshit I'd have to deal with from all the bloody crisscrossing alliances and feuds of the supernatural world in Europe. The US is bad enough, and apart from the First Nations, as well as some input from Norse cultures, they've only had a couple of hundred years to build up bullshit!
 
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RecklessPrudence said:
Hm. While we have no Guardians to castigate us for that, we are not all Free Council - I'm Mysterium, for one. Also... we kinda already have All The Money. We were in the lair of a magical creature in an Otherrealm based on Lewis Carroll's stuff, and... our Matter Mage may have animated an 11-metre-long anaconda of pure gold, used it to help kill the monster, then rode it to the Red Queen's court and delivered the monster (Son Of Jabberwock)'s head. We managed to finagle our way into sending it to our Sanctum, and when I calc'd the value, using then-current gold prices in October 2013...
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Incredibly generous of your GM.

Any Lewis Carroll based place is either a) astral or b) fae. In the case of the former, it's only as tangible as thought. In the case of the latter, never trust fae gold not to turn back into leaves.
 
EarthScorpion said:
Incredibly generous of your GM.

Any Lewis Carroll based place is either a) astral or b) fae. In the case of the former, it's only as tangible as thought. In the case of the latter, never trust fae gold not to turn back into leaves.
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I wonder what you could do with the "Idea" of 3.5 billion dollars of gold. I have no clue, but it seems like it could be interesting? Or like, the gold is 'real' in the Astral which means you can use it to buy and sell services from Goetia (though in the Astral, Gold is a lot more common).
 
EarthScorpion said:
Incredibly generous of your GM.

Any Lewis Carroll based place is either a) astral or b) fae. In the case of the former, it's only as tangible as thought. In the case of the latter, never trust fae gold not to turn back into leaves.
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Yeah, I don't think he quite realised how much an 11-metre long, 1.2-metre thick snake made out of the only available material around - gold - would be worth. And he had already established that this realm kidnapped mortals regularly, and that much of the Jabberwock's - and thus the Son Of Jabberwock's - hoard was accumulated over the millennia from mortal sources - we found some magical items we're trying to research on the down-low, too - so while he still has the out of having it all be Fae gold, at least a fair portion of it is probably real. Unless it spending so much time in the fae realms - millennia, for some of it - changed its very Nature, we should still have a sizable nest egg.

EDIT: He's actually admitted he expected us to only be able to scoop up a few handfuls and shove them in whatever means of carrying them we had. He didn't expect the Matter mage to just animate multiple tonnes of gold and the Space mage to figure out how to send it home.
 
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My players accidentally the Prince of 1000 Leaves last session. Turns out causing dissonance in an Imperial Spell on a place tainted by the Abyss isn't the best idea. It's not fully manifested, but it's bad enough that they managed to skip right to the final climax instead of having a few sessions of relative downtime.
 
RecklessPrudence said:
Yeah, I don't think he quite realised how much an 11-metre long, 1.2-metre thick snake made out of the only available material around - gold - would be worth. And he had already established that this realm kidnapped mortals regularly, and that much of the Jabberwock's - and thus the Son Of Jabberwock's - hoard was accumulated over the millennia from mortal sources - we found some magical items we're trying to research on the down-low, too - so while he still has the out of having it all be Fae gold, at least a fair portion of it is probably real
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Well, no, actually.

The volume of gold you imply as the realm being made out - if it's anything like Smaug's place in the Hobbit movies - is more gold than exists on Earth. All you have on Earth that's ever been mined is just a cube that's 20 m^3. And most of that mining was done in the past century.

Therefore nearly all the gold in that realm is fae trash, and you really have very little real gold indeed - if any. The less gold in that place, the more likely it was real. Ludicrous amounts of gold mean that it's nearly all fake, and the real amount you got is negligible.
 
If you're playing Changeling: The Lost, and you make a secondary character just in case your first one dies, because you know the ST is the sort who likes killing characters off, would you call that a Spare Changeling?
 
RecklessPrudence said:
...so our seven-strong Cabal has over three and a half billion dollar's worth of gold to split between us,
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Or, in other words, you've got $500,000,000 in an asset... that will crash in value if you attempt to liquidate it.

Meanwhile, a random electric company I pulled up (Covanta Holding Corporation - Covanta Holding Corporation Reports 2016 Fourth Quarter And Full Year Results And Provides 2017 Guidance) had 1.6B in revenues, with most of their costs coming from the expense of operating and maintaining their energy production facilities.

A cost, I'll note, that is cut down to basically zero by the fact that you can just tap into infinite free energy.


So, let's spitball the results of my plan as a billion dollars of net profit per year, after expenses and taxes are accounted for.

It's not 'Unlimited' money, but it's money you can actually spend, and which you don't have to worry about turning back into leaves at an inopportune moment.
 
So awkward question. Does anyone know of a PDF Reader for Mac that can do write ins for the virtue, vice, and merits section of the standard fillable CoD sheets? I've worked around it previously on the assumption everyone else did but recently discovered it's actually possible to do for some readers.
 
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