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White Wolf's World of Darkness

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The Armory book constantly got simple facts wrong, like saying that it's illegal to own body armor in the US. It is not illegal. It's not even that expensive.
 
The Laurent said:
Let's play: Mock the fuck out of history in Nwod.

"Unlike the United States, Europe has traditionally had a more comfortable relationship between the religious and secular."
--In Mysteriem Order book, on European Mages and European (as a whole) History. :V

Herp de derpity doo.

More earnestly, this was the sentence that made me quit for the night because holy shit, WW, holy shit.
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Such reading comprehension
much fail
wow

Seriously though, cherry picking aside, you realise this is referring to the Mysterium's internal factions, right?
Here's the full quote
Unlike the United States, Europe has traditionally
had a more comfortable relationship between the
religious and secular. There are fewer sharp words
between Egregori and less spiritually inclined members
of the order; there are also fewer mystagogues
who neglect the spiritually enlightening aspects of
their initiations.
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WW/OP already do enough mistakes with this kind of stuff, really, no need to completely invent them were they don't exist.
 
BlueBiscuit said:
Such reading comprehension
much fail
wow

Seriously though, cherry picking aside, you realise this is referring to the Mysterium's internal factions, right?
Here's the full quote


WW/OP already do enough mistakes with this kind of stuff, really, no need to completely invent them were they don't exist.
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Um, here's the thing, WHY? Like, all throughout most of the book, the ties between Mages and society are talked about, it's the key to a lot of WW stuff. Why exactly would Mysterium's internal factions in Europe have somehow been immune to the partisanship and bullshit of the secular and religious struggles, while North America is noted for particularly being fractious.

It simply doesn't make sense, unless you posit that Mages are completely divorced from all human society and culture, in which case you could swap each of the descriptions any way you want and it shouldn't change anything. One was assuming they were doing it region-by-region in order to create a flavor for the Mysterium based on location and the history and current state of the region.

Like, for what darn reason would a Secularist Mage Awakening in the late 1800s, for instance, suddenly have a collegiate and chill relationship with a Catholic who Awakened to choirs of Angels and such. The conflict between religion and secularism is one of the defining elements of European history, and considering that to this day there's conflict, apathy, and comparative exclusion of some religions from the corridors of power...

The idea that the Mysterium would be smiles and hugs with this is absurd. Like, it's something that *requires* an actual explanation.

Like, WHY aren't there sharp words, again? Every other splat and every other faction is affected by their location and their history and their culture...and then the Mysterium of Europe apparently aren't at all.

I didn't fail to comprehend it. You failed to comprehend how it makes no fucking sense even in context. The religious members and the secular members should have spent all the way into the 20th century at each other's throats, or at least quibbling heavily over the nature of the universe, and then conflicts involving Muslims and their spirituality that they bring to their Awakenings...

It'd be like if for a proposed Middle-East segment, it was said, "Most Mysterium in this region have little truck for religion and don't care about it, and conflicts involving religion or differing views on the nature of the universe within their groups are all but unknown." That's all well and good, but you'd ask *how* a certain group of people (cause Mages come from cultures, you know?) managed to somehow spring up a rather different Mage culture.
 
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Also, on another note, somehow started an argument in a chatroom involving the FC. A lot of people rather disagree with MJ12's interpretations of the FC. I'm handicapped by never reading much about them, but in the process of learning, I suppose. Not that it's a bunch of Pro-FC people, they just think that the interpretation's a little too...anti-generous? Inaccurate?
 
Do you want to talk about mistakes and inaccuracies of White Wolf? Let's talk about how they presented Russia ... Or maybe it is not necessary because most of their perceptions of Russia consists of EVIL Communists + Wyrm +NKVD = terror and fear!

Sorry of course, I'm just still not got over Rage Across Russia. And as I heard in the new world of darkness, Moscow literally citadel of god machine.
 
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The Laurent said:
Also, on another note, somehow started an argument in a chatroom involving the FC. A lot of people rather disagree with MJ12's interpretations of the FC. I'm handicapped by never reading much about them, but in the process of learning, I suppose. Not that it's a bunch of Pro-FC people, they just think that the interpretation's a little too...anti-generous? Inaccurate?
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Who are MJ12?

The Libertines aren't that hard to understand (assuming FC is Free Council.) - they think human culture naturally incorporates Supernal symbols, especially in large numbers. They include a vast variety of mages from Australian Aboriginal Legacies several millenia old to Mastigos researching the interaction of Pandemonium and quantum foam. The Order are hardcore democratic communal sorts (their social structure is based on Spanish Civil War Anarchists), and they really, really hate the Seers of the Throne and Exarchs.

https://drive.google.com/file/d/0BxveHUKxwBU9V1R3RmZuWm5xbE0/edit
 
davebrookshaw said:
Who are MJ12?

The Libertines aren't that hard to understand (assuming FC is Free Council.) - they think human culture naturally incorporates Supernal symbols, especially in large numbers. They include a vast variety of mages from Australian Aboriginal Legacies several millenia old to Mastigos researching the interaction of Pandemonium and quantum foam. The Order are hardcore democratic communal sorts (their social structure is based on Spanish Civil War Anarchists), and they really, really hate the Seers of the Throne and Exarchs.

https://drive.google.com/file/d/0BxveHUKxwBU9V1R3RmZuWm5xbE0/edit
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@MJ12 Commando , who is not a fan of the Free Council, at least as it is in 1e. At all.
 
So, I'm thinking of writing up a few sample creatures from the Lower Depths, as part of a game I hope to run in which the players are Guardians of the Veil, acting as troubleshooters, putting down what other mages have called up.

My plan is to start with creatures from the "nearer" depths, missing only one of the arcana, before going into things from deeper and hollower realms. Unfortunately, I'm running into an issue: While some arcanum's abscences are easy enough to conceptualize (the absence of Death is cancerous growth, mutation, pain unending; the absence of Forces is cold, stillness, silence, and the progression towards entropy), others are harder to picture. What is a being that lacks and devours spirit? Is the lack of Fate better portrated as a grinding clockwork universe or a space in which probability collapses and all things are equally possible? Is the world lacking Prime just hard to spellcast in, or is it fundamentally lesser in other ways as well?

Anyone have any opinions, or sources I could look up to get a better idea with regards to the roles of the Arcana in our world (and thus, the consequence of their absence)?
 
tzar1990 said:
My plan is to start with creatures from the "nearer" depths, missing only one of the arcana, before going into things from deeper and hollower realms. Unfortunately, I'm running into an issue: While some arcanum's abscences are easy enough to conceptualize (the absence of Death is cancerous growth, mutation, pain unending; the absence of Forces is cold, stillness, silence, and the progression towards entropy), others are harder to picture. What is a being that lacks and devours spirit? Is the lack of Fate better portrated as a grinding clockwork universe or a space in which probability collapses and all things are equally possible? Is the world lacking Prime just hard to spellcast in, or is it fundamentally lesser in other ways as well?
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For Fate, I'd go with completely random. You drop a ball, it goes up and turns into a pot of tulips type thing, though likely less extreme. Prime is fundamentally truth. It is the connection between our world and the Supernal. A world without Prime would be the a world with nothing but the worst aspects of the Abyssal Lie, and none of the connection to the Supernal. I'm not sure how you would manage Spirit.

Also, I'm pretty sure this isn't canon, but I remember reading that the Lower Depths are to our world as our world is to the Supernal, and entities from the Lower Depths that come into our world are their equivalent of Mages on vision quests to the Supernal.
 
For a Spirit-lacking entity, I'd say that it seems "normal" in the material world - however, in it's presence, the Gauntlet effectively ceases to exist (strength 0). While this would normally mean spirits could use the area as a gateway, the entity itself stops that: it appears, to said spirits, as a sucking blind spot in their vision, and in addition to passively draining their essence it may devour them with limbs they cannot perceive. While this is bad enough in terms of the chaos it may cause the spirit courts, it has another side effect on mortals. Without a gauntlet, those exiting the entities area of influence, which varies chaotically in size, may find themselves wandering into the Shadow and becoming trapped there.

The reason I'm hesitant to go with "pure chaos" for a being lacking Fate is that it seems hard to describe in a meaningful way, andcould come across as lolsorandom instead of frightening. I feel that the loss of spontaneity and chance, resulting in a purely and obviously deterministic ordered region, would be better for subtle horror (and first it's little things, like dice tending to roll consecutive numbers in sequence, counting up. It's only once players start investigating further and time passes that they realize that luck, good or bad, has ceased to exist.)
 
tzar1990 said:
The reason I'm hesitant to go with "pure chaos" for a being lacking Fate is that it seems hard to describe in a meaningful way, andcould come across as lolsorandom instead of frightening. I feel that the loss of spontaneity and chance, resulting in a purely and obviously deterministic ordered region, would be better for subtle horror (and first it's little things, like dice tending to roll consecutive numbers in sequence, counting up. It's only once players start investigating further and time passes that they realize that luck, good or bad, has ceased to exist.)
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Maybe have the creature destroy order. So, say, two people kiss in a rainstorm, then break up instead of getting married. Things just start to go wrong or weird. Tests are failed, things are lost, and the world falls into disorder.
 
The Laurent said:
Um, here's the thing, WHY? Like, all throughout most of the book, the ties between Mages and society are talked about, it's the key to a lot of WW stuff. Why exactly would Mysterium's internal factions in Europe have somehow been immune to the partisanship and bullshit of the secular and religious struggles, while North America is noted for particularly being fractious.

It simply doesn't make sense, unless you posit that Mages are completely divorced from all human society and culture, in which case you could swap each of the descriptions any way you want and it shouldn't change anything. One was assuming they were doing it region-by-region in order to create a flavor for the Mysterium based on location and the history and current state of the region.

Like, for what darn reason would a Secularist Mage Awakening in the late 1800s, for instance, suddenly have a collegiate and chill relationship with a Catholic who Awakened to choirs of Angels and such. The conflict between religion and secularism is one of the defining elements of European history, and considering that to this day there's conflict, apathy, and comparative exclusion of some religions from the corridors of power...

The idea that the Mysterium would be smiles and hugs with this is absurd. Like, it's something that *requires* an actual explanation.

Like, WHY aren't there sharp words, again? Every other splat and every other faction is affected by their location and their history and their culture...and then the Mysterium of Europe apparently aren't at all.

I didn't fail to comprehend it. You failed to comprehend how it makes no fucking sense even in context. The religious members and the secular members should have spent all the way into the 20th century at each other's throats, or at least quibbling heavily over the nature of the universe, and then conflicts involving Muslims and their spirituality that they bring to their Awakenings...

It'd be like if for a proposed Middle-East segment, it was said, "Most Mysterium in this region have little truck for religion and don't care about it, and conflicts involving religion or differing views on the nature of the universe within their groups are all but unknown." That's all well and good, but you'd ask *how* a certain group of people (cause Mages come from cultures, you know?) managed to somehow spring up a rather different Mage culture.
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White Wolf means, compared to mom and dad. ITs why Europe, and Asian history consists of that part odisastisfied teens would be enticed by whorehouses, no sunday school, sexual permissiveness, martial arts, exotic emphasiszed over the exceptionally more mundane and everyday, and so on, ignoring the context in more local society and how life as tourist and as citizen are different things. Read a WW supplement and then read the barely legitimate "my life in tibet or japan or England" stuff that fills up coffee tables. ITs like night and day.

Its why I cringe when people ask WW for books on real places. NO do your own research and map things out yourself. You'll be no more fully accurate but will have less ... flavored failure in a direction I cringe at.
 
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So, speaking of Mage: The Awakening, what kind of Nimbi do your characters and players have?
 
So I got the Demon Translation Guide, and while it's beyond tortured trying to change one to the other, it does have good advice for moving from one setting to the other. I sort of think a nDemon oWerewolf cross would work really well in a lot of ways.
 
Not an official blog-post, but 3 second edition Fate spells have been spoilered on rpg.et in DaveB's Actual Play Thread for "The Man Comes Around"

The Man Comes Around

Those are actual play examples, including reach-calculation, etc etc, it's an interesting read.
 
Well, apart from the last one, the others were already in the game in 1. Edition.

Forging a Doom/Bane required Mastery though.

Shared Fate is on the same level as before, but the Reach options make it far more useful.

Fate does get buffs though, since, for example, Dialing the Lucky Number has been turned into a pure Fate spell, no more Forces needed etc.
 
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To be fair to MJ12, didn't the technocracy help bring about the modern world and the things we like in it? Like Freedom of Speech and responsible government?

And aren't the traditions all for going back to the way things were before the enlightenment?
 
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