- Location
- Denmark
And besides that, it's just not a very good measure of the 'sin' of a splat that is specificly against the gods, concidering that it litterally means "to go against the will of the gods"
White Wolf's World of Darkness
Isn't the specific Wisdom 10 sin actually "using magic when you could accomplish the same task mundanely?" You might get dinged for using Life 2 to heal yourself when you get a papercut because fuck having to deal with that papercut, but even at Wisdom 10, I don't think you'd get dinged for using Life 2 to heal a gunshot wound that might kill you before you can get regular medical aid. Or like, genuinely curing someone's mental illness via Mind (with their consent), because you can't do that mundanely .
vicky_molokh
Posthuman spidery thingy.
- Location
- Kyïv, Ukraine
It seems to be pretty logical that a faction that is so much about going against the gods will be prideful and overconfident and think "we know better" a lot. (As a negative thing, 'hubris' probably is meant to describe the latter three rather than the mere fact of going against the gods [edit=to clarify]in the context of Awakening[/edit], IMHO.)
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It could mean a few things;
It often depends on the context and culture.
Here's the thing.
Mage society teaches that it's no big deal to use magic to do whatever you want. Just like vampire society teaches that it's no big deal to drink the blood of the living, and mortal society teaches that everyone wishes they could punch that jerk over there in the face and it's fine to think that as long as you don't do it (unless you have a good reason for doing it).
There is a good reason that almost no mortals are Morality 10, Vampires are Humanity 10, and mages are Wisdom 10.
Wisdom 10 involves embracing the idea that magic is something precious, something sacred and something which should only be used after careful thought. Wisdom 10 is the path of the pre-Fall Timori, the proto-Banishers who abandoned the hubris of the Awakened City and abandoned the idea of setting themselves apart from the world and used magic only to see the natural harmonies of the world and repair them where the power-hungry Atlanteans damaged them.
The game is built around the idea that most characters will drop to the Morality 3-5 range, becoming tarnished by their encounters with the World of Darkness, because it's a gothic horror meta-game. Mortals become worn-thin investigators, nervous and consumed by their fear of what they saw in the shadows - or else they become a mortal form of predators. Vampires tell themselves there's nothing wrong with drinking blood and accept that they're going to accidentally manslaughter sometimes. And Mages? Mages put themselves above other men, and go "Meh, there's nothing wrong with easing the wheels with some mind control or a bound ghost or two". Characters' morality, by design, will usually decline - and raising it again is hard work and XP-inefficient.
(And a Wisdom 10 mage doesn't fight the Seers - and doesn't even punch people in self-defence, let alone cast spells to hurt others. Because the other thing the World of Darkness says is that if you're not prepared to dirty your soul and blacken your karma, you're not going to get anything done)
- Location
- Pittsburgh, PA
Hence why if I ever ran a World of Darkness game, I'd ditch the idea of the "Morality" scale having anything at all to do with morality & ethics, and instead be a measure of how far your internal paradigms have drifted from the societal norm - the reason a low-Humanity vampire has trouble interacting with people is because her way of thinking and the way she tends to react to various stressors no longer really overlaps that much with that of the average human, and the mortals she interacts with can pick up that there's something not right about her. Whether that means she's let her Beast take too much ground and is starting to sink into draugrhood or that despite her best efforts to not be a monster, the pressures of undeath have made her twitchy and paranoid and a little too quick to consider violence as a solution to problems is entirely up to the individual vampire.
Derangements from lost "Morality" now represent the person's mind starting to warp from the pressure of adapting to the psychological pressure cooker of having to hold "vampire/mage/etc. rules" and "human rules" in their head at the same time - hiding big chunks of your life from others is a strain, and knowing that monsters and miracles are hidden everywhere behind the facade you've been obliviously living inside your whole life is enough to make anybody pick up a few DSM-V entries even without the former dichotomy stressing them out even further. Thus, low-Humanity supernaturals often start moving to the peripheries of human civilization to reduce the pressure, while the ones that stay involved with society long-term are usually mid/high Humanity to represent that they've managed to strike some kind of balance between normal life & monster life, or at least gotten very good at faking the behaviors for the former.
Thus, Prometheans are incentivized to strive for a high Humanity because it represents them learning how to grok human civilization and human psychology - higher Humanity equals a better shot at the New Dawn because it's a mechanical representation of how well they've grasped the world they're trying to join. Mind you, that also means they start with fairly low Humanity ratings because the whole point of the Created is that they lack the cultural background and shared experiences that bind mankind together, and have to work it out for themselves over time.
Meanwhile, Changelings just keep Clarity as-is, to emphasize that for them what matters above all is keeping a clear head & avoiding actions that rile up their Arcadian PTSD, and keeping in touch with social norms is just the easiest of the anchors they can use to accomplish that. Werewolves aren't really human to begin with and have a well-established civilization of sorts, so they still use Harmony to continue being the creepy Uncanny Valley guys who look like ordinary people but really really aren't, and Sin-Eaters do likewise with Synergy because their connection to death has removed a lot of the stress that would normally accrue from being exposed to violence and mortality.
Derangements from lost "Morality" now represent the person's mind starting to warp from the pressure of adapting to the psychological pressure cooker of having to hold "vampire/mage/etc. rules" and "human rules" in their head at the same time - hiding big chunks of your life from others is a strain, and knowing that monsters and miracles are hidden everywhere behind the facade you've been obliviously living inside your whole life is enough to make anybody pick up a few DSM-V entries even without the former dichotomy stressing them out even further. Thus, low-Humanity supernaturals often start moving to the peripheries of human civilization to reduce the pressure, while the ones that stay involved with society long-term are usually mid/high Humanity to represent that they've managed to strike some kind of balance between normal life & monster life, or at least gotten very good at faking the behaviors for the former.
Thus, Prometheans are incentivized to strive for a high Humanity because it represents them learning how to grok human civilization and human psychology - higher Humanity equals a better shot at the New Dawn because it's a mechanical representation of how well they've grasped the world they're trying to join. Mind you, that also means they start with fairly low Humanity ratings because the whole point of the Created is that they lack the cultural background and shared experiences that bind mankind together, and have to work it out for themselves over time.
Meanwhile, Changelings just keep Clarity as-is, to emphasize that for them what matters above all is keeping a clear head & avoiding actions that rile up their Arcadian PTSD, and keeping in touch with social norms is just the easiest of the anchors they can use to accomplish that. Werewolves aren't really human to begin with and have a well-established civilization of sorts, so they still use Harmony to continue being the creepy Uncanny Valley guys who look like ordinary people but really really aren't, and Sin-Eaters do likewise with Synergy because their connection to death has removed a lot of the stress that would normally accrue from being exposed to violence and mortality.
Vito Scaletta
Immoralist
- Location
- The City of Empire Bay
As some of you may know, I am a fan of the OSR movement within RPG's and while that is more of a D&D thing, I bring it up because I have thought about applying the OSR mindset of gameplay and GM style to WoD, with an emphasis on early Vampire: The Masquerade (pre-Revised).
Before anyone jumps my ass for "Playing The Game Wrong" because I don't like Personal Horror or Post-Modernist elements, I would like to state that this is not an attack on Gothic-Punk aesthetics, Personal Horror, or Post-Modernist themes, but more of a musing about applying an old-school style of gameplay and game mastery to a game that is typically thought of as the beginning of "new school" RPG's with its modern setting and narrative-driven focus. I'm not going to attack other people's styles of gameplay or ramble about my own setting hacks to WoD or CofD (and I'd like to be shown the same respect) I just want to share some insight I've stumbled upon.
The OSR (Old-School Revival) movement in RPG fandom is focused on making retro-clones of TSR-era versions of Dungeons & Dragons under the Open Game License, as well as original games and game settings heavily inspired or derived from these editions. Notable OSR games include retro-clones Swords & Wizardry, OSRIC, Basic Fantasy, Dark Dungeons, and original games in the old-school style such as Dungeon Crawl Classics. Now why is this relevant to World of Darkness? I'll get to that right now.
The OSR mindset isn't just cloning or emulating old editions of D&D, but also playing games in the old-school style that was extremely prevalent in the early days of RPG's during the 1970's and early 1980's. The style in particular is a mostly sandbox style of gameplay, with an emphasis on role-play over roll-play, rulings over rules, and character immersion in a setting over a direct narrative focus. That's not to say there can't be stories or plotlines in a game run in the old-school fashion, but that the player characters aren't railroaded by an over-arching story or metaplot and instead opt to make their own destiny in the world they are in. The Old-School style of play is a sandbox, not a railroad. In such a game, the story is driven by the players and not the other way around.
This style of play doesn't have to be exclusive to older editions of D&D or OSR games, you can also apply it to either version of World of Darkness, though in the case of Revised Edition Classic WoD, you may have to invoke Rule Zero and either modify or completely discard the metaplot to make such a gameplay style work, as the metaplot of WoD is rather infamous for railroading the PC's and de-emphasizing them in favor of major setting characters like Anatole, Lucita, Vykos, and the like.
Now, my favorite version of WoD is the very first editions of Vampire: The Masquerade and Werewolf: The Apocalypse. Throughout 1991 and 1992 (and even into early 1993), White Wolf's games were actually fairly old-school in their style of play. Yes, the setting was a modern-day Gothic-Punk Earth instead of the typical Swords & Sorcery or High Fantasy fare of old-school D&D and most OSR games, but if you actually read the First Edition core rule book for Vampire: The Masquerade (I should know, I own it on hard copy and have read it extensively ever since I bought it off of Amazon last year), the assumed style of gameplay is fairly Old-School, despite often being attributed to narrative-driven and thematic-driven games of personal horror and post-modernism.
Yes, the back of the corebook calls Vampire "A Storytelling Game of Personal Horror", but that is just window dressing compared to what is actually in the corebook, where personal horror and post-modernism are presented, but are simply just two thematic styles out of many other equally valid themes and styles. Yes, there is the struggle of Humanity vs. The Beast, but it's supposed to be for the purposes of character immersion and to help with individual role-play, not as a means to enforce thematic purity or indulge in misery tourism like it would commonly be associated with in later editions of WoD and later on, Chronicles of Darkness.
Vampire: The Masquerade 1E is narrative-driven, but not in the same new-school way as Revised (or even 2e for that matter). The focus of the narrative is on the player characters, not the metaplot concerning the greater setting as a whole. Mark Rein-Hagen essentially wanted to make an old-school style game for a new generation and in a modern style, especially after AD&D 2e became sanitized and bloated. Everyone talks about the influence of Ars Magica and Call of Cthulhu on the development of Vampire: The Masquerade, but Original Dungeons & Dragons was also a major influence on Vampire's development and Rein-Hagen even acknowledges it at the very back of the First Edition corebook, along with the more well-known influences of Call of Cthulhu and Ars Magica. (He notably refers to it as "Dungeons & Dragons" and not "Advanced Dungeons & Dragons").
Chicago by Night 1e, the signature setting book of this era, was not a hard-coded metaplot set piece like New York By Night or Lair of the Hidden. It was merely a toolkit of characters and plot-hooks a Storyteller could include for his players. The same applies for Milwaukee by Night and the Denver mini-setting of Alien Hunger. Early Vampire was a sandbox-styled RPG and its supplements were meant as toolkits rather than gospel canon for the setting.
The focus of 1e Vampire was all about character development and immersion into this Gothic-Punk version of early 1990's Earth, which was a lot more vast, mysterious, personal, and individualistic at its inception than what the World of Darkness would later become. Hell, in the early days of White Wolf, it wasn't even called World of Darkness, instead it was titled the "Storyteller" series of games, which was supposedly closer to the real-life world of the 1990's than what the setting eventually ended up as. The original vision was Vampire, Werewolf, Mage, Ghost, and Faerie. Each game would be fairly self-contained (with crossovers presented as an option for ST's if 1e Werewolf is anything to go by) and there an implication that the setting of 1e Vampire was the future of the setting for Ars Magica 1e/2e (this was quietly dropped after the 1e corebook's released and was completely phased out by the time Mage came out)
The WoD games were originally referred to as the Storyteller series even as late as 1994 (Street Fighter: The Storytelling Game even refers to Vampire, Werewolf, and Mage as the "Storyteller" games and not as "World of Darkness"). Originally, World of Darkness was the title of a single late 1e supplement for Vampire released in 1992. It wasn't until later did the name refer to the greater setting as a whole.
So, despite Vampire: The Masquerade being seen as the beginning of the "New School" of RPG design and gameplay, I believe that it started as an "Old-School" style of RPG that became "New School" in its presentation after Mark Rein-Hagen and the first generation of WW personnel had left the company.
There is nothing wrong with "New School" RPG's or play-styles, but there is also nothing wrong with "Old School" styles of play either. I just wanted to give my two cents on the matter. I will also be running a 1e Vampire game off-site, set in the typical 1990's Gothic-Punk setting but with the OD&D-influenced sandbox style of gameplay centered on immersion and character role-play.
Before anyone jumps my ass for "Playing The Game Wrong" because I don't like Personal Horror or Post-Modernist elements, I would like to state that this is not an attack on Gothic-Punk aesthetics, Personal Horror, or Post-Modernist themes, but more of a musing about applying an old-school style of gameplay and game mastery to a game that is typically thought of as the beginning of "new school" RPG's with its modern setting and narrative-driven focus. I'm not going to attack other people's styles of gameplay or ramble about my own setting hacks to WoD or CofD (and I'd like to be shown the same respect) I just want to share some insight I've stumbled upon.
The OSR (Old-School Revival) movement in RPG fandom is focused on making retro-clones of TSR-era versions of Dungeons & Dragons under the Open Game License, as well as original games and game settings heavily inspired or derived from these editions. Notable OSR games include retro-clones Swords & Wizardry, OSRIC, Basic Fantasy, Dark Dungeons, and original games in the old-school style such as Dungeon Crawl Classics. Now why is this relevant to World of Darkness? I'll get to that right now.
The OSR mindset isn't just cloning or emulating old editions of D&D, but also playing games in the old-school style that was extremely prevalent in the early days of RPG's during the 1970's and early 1980's. The style in particular is a mostly sandbox style of gameplay, with an emphasis on role-play over roll-play, rulings over rules, and character immersion in a setting over a direct narrative focus. That's not to say there can't be stories or plotlines in a game run in the old-school fashion, but that the player characters aren't railroaded by an over-arching story or metaplot and instead opt to make their own destiny in the world they are in. The Old-School style of play is a sandbox, not a railroad. In such a game, the story is driven by the players and not the other way around.
This style of play doesn't have to be exclusive to older editions of D&D or OSR games, you can also apply it to either version of World of Darkness, though in the case of Revised Edition Classic WoD, you may have to invoke Rule Zero and either modify or completely discard the metaplot to make such a gameplay style work, as the metaplot of WoD is rather infamous for railroading the PC's and de-emphasizing them in favor of major setting characters like Anatole, Lucita, Vykos, and the like.
Now, my favorite version of WoD is the very first editions of Vampire: The Masquerade and Werewolf: The Apocalypse. Throughout 1991 and 1992 (and even into early 1993), White Wolf's games were actually fairly old-school in their style of play. Yes, the setting was a modern-day Gothic-Punk Earth instead of the typical Swords & Sorcery or High Fantasy fare of old-school D&D and most OSR games, but if you actually read the First Edition core rule book for Vampire: The Masquerade (I should know, I own it on hard copy and have read it extensively ever since I bought it off of Amazon last year), the assumed style of gameplay is fairly Old-School, despite often being attributed to narrative-driven and thematic-driven games of personal horror and post-modernism.
Yes, the back of the corebook calls Vampire "A Storytelling Game of Personal Horror", but that is just window dressing compared to what is actually in the corebook, where personal horror and post-modernism are presented, but are simply just two thematic styles out of many other equally valid themes and styles. Yes, there is the struggle of Humanity vs. The Beast, but it's supposed to be for the purposes of character immersion and to help with individual role-play, not as a means to enforce thematic purity or indulge in misery tourism like it would commonly be associated with in later editions of WoD and later on, Chronicles of Darkness.
Vampire: The Masquerade 1E is narrative-driven, but not in the same new-school way as Revised (or even 2e for that matter). The focus of the narrative is on the player characters, not the metaplot concerning the greater setting as a whole. Mark Rein-Hagen essentially wanted to make an old-school style game for a new generation and in a modern style, especially after AD&D 2e became sanitized and bloated. Everyone talks about the influence of Ars Magica and Call of Cthulhu on the development of Vampire: The Masquerade, but Original Dungeons & Dragons was also a major influence on Vampire's development and Rein-Hagen even acknowledges it at the very back of the First Edition corebook, along with the more well-known influences of Call of Cthulhu and Ars Magica. (He notably refers to it as "Dungeons & Dragons" and not "Advanced Dungeons & Dragons").
Chicago by Night 1e, the signature setting book of this era, was not a hard-coded metaplot set piece like New York By Night or Lair of the Hidden. It was merely a toolkit of characters and plot-hooks a Storyteller could include for his players. The same applies for Milwaukee by Night and the Denver mini-setting of Alien Hunger. Early Vampire was a sandbox-styled RPG and its supplements were meant as toolkits rather than gospel canon for the setting.
The focus of 1e Vampire was all about character development and immersion into this Gothic-Punk version of early 1990's Earth, which was a lot more vast, mysterious, personal, and individualistic at its inception than what the World of Darkness would later become. Hell, in the early days of White Wolf, it wasn't even called World of Darkness, instead it was titled the "Storyteller" series of games, which was supposedly closer to the real-life world of the 1990's than what the setting eventually ended up as. The original vision was Vampire, Werewolf, Mage, Ghost, and Faerie. Each game would be fairly self-contained (with crossovers presented as an option for ST's if 1e Werewolf is anything to go by) and there an implication that the setting of 1e Vampire was the future of the setting for Ars Magica 1e/2e (this was quietly dropped after the 1e corebook's released and was completely phased out by the time Mage came out)
The WoD games were originally referred to as the Storyteller series even as late as 1994 (Street Fighter: The Storytelling Game even refers to Vampire, Werewolf, and Mage as the "Storyteller" games and not as "World of Darkness"). Originally, World of Darkness was the title of a single late 1e supplement for Vampire released in 1992. It wasn't until later did the name refer to the greater setting as a whole.
So, despite Vampire: The Masquerade being seen as the beginning of the "New School" of RPG design and gameplay, I believe that it started as an "Old-School" style of RPG that became "New School" in its presentation after Mark Rein-Hagen and the first generation of WW personnel had left the company.
There is nothing wrong with "New School" RPG's or play-styles, but there is also nothing wrong with "Old School" styles of play either. I just wanted to give my two cents on the matter. I will also be running a 1e Vampire game off-site, set in the typical 1990's Gothic-Punk setting but with the OD&D-influenced sandbox style of gameplay centered on immersion and character role-play.
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I HAD THE BEST IDEA
World of Darkness.
A corporation discovers vampires exist.
They immediately rush to start collecting young Vampires with majesty
Offering backing and money in exchange for vampire celebrities advertising products and music and such
Vampires as popstars and Kardashians and shit
Because this one asshole corporation found out about vampires and went
Holy shit we have to exploit this before the other guys
Enter the PCs, who have to get to the bottom of this shit and ideally deliver the genius behind it to their Invictus or whatever boss.
World of Darkness.
A corporation discovers vampires exist.
They immediately rush to start collecting young Vampires with majesty
Offering backing and money in exchange for vampire celebrities advertising products and music and such
Vampires as popstars and Kardashians and shit
Because this one asshole corporation found out about vampires and went
Holy shit we have to exploit this before the other guys
Enter the PCs, who have to get to the bottom of this shit and ideally deliver the genius behind it to their Invictus or whatever boss.
Jon Chung
=][=
Sell your Wisdom for XP at chargen. You're going to lose it anyway, very quickly. Might as well get something out of it!
Vito Scaletta
Immoralist
- Location
- The City of Empire Bay
Has anyone ever thought about compiling playlists of songs to use as a soundtrack for your campaigns just for fun? You don't have to incorporate the music into your actual games, of course. But I was thinking of picking some songs for a soundtrack to serve as the unofficial soundtrack to my Vampire: The Masquerade 1e old-school sandbox campaign, set at an unspecified point in the 1990's.
As for the setting itself? Not sure if I should use the classic Chicago setting, or make my own city setting instead. I'll figure it out.
I had a few ideas for songs from multiple genres and decades, and not a single song I have in mind so far was released after 2000. I may divide my picks into multiple playlists (sort of like the in-game radio stations in Grand Theft Auto).
As for the setting itself? Not sure if I should use the classic Chicago setting, or make my own city setting instead. I'll figure it out.
I had a few ideas for songs from multiple genres and decades, and not a single song I have in mind so far was released after 2000. I may divide my picks into multiple playlists (sort of like the in-game radio stations in Grand Theft Auto).
Vindictus
XENO
- Location
- Texas
ganonso
Compulsive Quest Starter
- Location
- PACA France
So coming back from a convention game of Vampire 20th
The group was composed of four 7th gens, a Tremere (played by me), a Gangrel, a Brujah, and a Ventrue waking up in 1910 Sarajevo from torpor after having been felled in a battle to retake the city from the Anarchs in 1450. The first scenes had us slaughter the team of humans who were excavating the rocks hiding us.
We were next introduced to the wonders of the wonders of the modern world while managing to get a Blood Hunt called on us at the first moment because a) the Prince was our Brujah's traitorous childe responsible for putting us in torpor, and b) because our Brujah seeking to jump between roofs miscalculted his strength and fell through several floors before slaughtering a family and returning to us with modern clothes and Celerity 4 active.
Other highlights of the game include but are not limited to
Our party getting drugged on whore blood offered by a suspiciously nice Nosferatur.
That was after dispatching a whole party of neonates without killing any of them. Despite my Tremere abusing blood drain and the Brujah sending one of the enemy vampires into a group of the others like a bowling ball.
The whole finale: After a moment respite, we learned the traitor Prince was in cahoots with a coterie of diablerists and we decided to appeal to the common vampiric people. So we went (still under the Blood Hunt) to the local Elysium passing in the broad streets. We annouced our lineage to the Keeper of the Elysium, barged in and accused the Prince of Diablerie. There, seeing as we had several high social states, we managed to have the Keeper enable Auspex on the grounds while the Primogen and the Prince were ready to judge us for Masquerade Breach.
The Tremere Primogene activated Auspex, and promptly attacked the Prince with Cauldron of Blood. He was accompanied by a coterie of diablerists but our Ventrue managed to get the Keeper Dominated into declaring the place non-Elysium leading to the high-level diablerists being swamped in mooks. The game ended with us as the new power in Sarajevo, renewing our vows to the Camarilla and admiring our enemies being consumed by the sun.
So all in all a very good gonzo game where the social rolls in the Elysium provoked more tensions at the table than the whole fight scene earlier.
The group was composed of four 7th gens, a Tremere (played by me), a Gangrel, a Brujah, and a Ventrue waking up in 1910 Sarajevo from torpor after having been felled in a battle to retake the city from the Anarchs in 1450. The first scenes had us slaughter the team of humans who were excavating the rocks hiding us.
We were next introduced to the wonders of the wonders of the modern world while managing to get a Blood Hunt called on us at the first moment because a) the Prince was our Brujah's traitorous childe responsible for putting us in torpor, and b) because our Brujah seeking to jump between roofs miscalculted his strength and fell through several floors before slaughtering a family and returning to us with modern clothes and Celerity 4 active.
Other highlights of the game include but are not limited to
Our party getting drugged on whore blood offered by a suspiciously nice Nosferatur.
That was after dispatching a whole party of neonates without killing any of them. Despite my Tremere abusing blood drain and the Brujah sending one of the enemy vampires into a group of the others like a bowling ball.
The whole finale: After a moment respite, we learned the traitor Prince was in cahoots with a coterie of diablerists and we decided to appeal to the common vampiric people. So we went (still under the Blood Hunt) to the local Elysium passing in the broad streets. We annouced our lineage to the Keeper of the Elysium, barged in and accused the Prince of Diablerie. There, seeing as we had several high social states, we managed to have the Keeper enable Auspex on the grounds while the Primogen and the Prince were ready to judge us for Masquerade Breach.
The Tremere Primogene activated Auspex, and promptly attacked the Prince with Cauldron of Blood. He was accompanied by a coterie of diablerists but our Ventrue managed to get the Keeper Dominated into declaring the place non-Elysium leading to the high-level diablerists being swamped in mooks. The game ended with us as the new power in Sarajevo, renewing our vows to the Camarilla and admiring our enemies being consumed by the sun.
So all in all a very good gonzo game where the social rolls in the Elysium provoked more tensions at the table than the whole fight scene earlier.
Vito Scaletta
Immoralist
- Location
- The City of Empire Bay
So, White Wolf has just released a "Style Guide" for their upcoming Storyteller's Vault where players can submit their own content for Vampire: The Masquerade, and that includes all four editions (1e, 2e, Revised, and V20) and while the Storyteller's Vault isn't operational yet, the Style Guide is still very useful for capturing the feel of different editions, both mechanically and thematically.
- Location
- Somewhere!
- Pronouns
- She/Her
Okay, probably dumb setting question, but with the older Mage stuff and the consensus reality mechanics, how far can a normal person influence that?
Like, would changing your name, faking your death and moving around have any material effect on reality? Could you lie about your past until enough people know and believe the lie that it's true?
Like, would changing your name, faking your death and moving around have any material effect on reality? Could you lie about your past until enough people know and believe the lie that it's true?
I'm working on an idea. Hunters with mutations given to them by an EVIL CONSPIRACY. Think The Witcher by way of River Tam.
I am...not sure how to begin going about this, though! For Hunter the Vigil. My first and, um, kinda only idea is "Low level vampire disciplines" but I mean...at that point aren't they just...ghouls?
So, any advice for homebrewing this?
I am...not sure how to begin going about this, though! For Hunter the Vigil. My first and, um, kinda only idea is "Low level vampire disciplines" but I mean...at that point aren't they just...ghouls?
So, any advice for homebrewing this?
- Location
- my house
Why not make them ghouls? You said it was an evil conspiracy and that is what vampires are for. Well them and the technocracy
They're not supposed to be ghouls, though. They're supposed to be Hunters with powers, is the thing, and ghouls is a different tone altogether. River Tam isn't a monster herself, you know? She's a girl with skills and some weird powers.
- Location
- my house
Ah, okay. I did indeed miss the point.
Basically my intent is to run a game that is "Supernatural Seasons 1&2 starring River Tam and Geralt of Rivia".
Okay, so at a mechanical level, decide how much complexity you want to do in your Endowments and whether there's any unique quirks in how they operate (for example, are they surgically implanted, do they slowly poison you with mercury, are they drugs, do you need to fight against the demon/spirit/monster you've been possessed with, whatever). If it's just that you've been changed, buy a merit to represent how you've been changed, then cross-reference against existing Endowments for effects you like and borrow them.
The thematic level is both easier and harder. Easier because mechanical balance isn't a thing; harder because you actually need to have inspiration - and in many ways you need the inspiration before you can do the mechanics.
Off the top of my head, I might suggest "we had them possessed by an evil spirit, but they managed to fight it off, and their bodies have been left changed by this". That would suggest power trees around:
- EX-POSSESSED: I can sense spirits and demons, pull them out of other people's bodies to stop possession, trap them in my own body, heal myself by draining essence from a spirit I've trapped, etc
- SUPERHUMAN BODY: Grab-bag of changes from having had a demon trapped in you - you need to decide on the theme of the spirits that the conspiracy used on them, and then base these powers around that
- SPIRIT ORGANS: Likewise, grab-bag of little effects that are basically you using the spiritual organs that were mutated in the possession. Theme these powers around the organs in some way - maybe base off the chakra points, or Roman ideas of anatomy.
Vito Scaletta
Immoralist
- Location
- The City of Empire Bay
Anybody want to discuss their WoD or CofD head-canons?
My Classic WoD has no metaplot, and removes Demon: The Fallen and Kindred of the East (they are instead replaced by Street Fighter: The Storytelling Game and the fan-game Senshi: The Merchandising).
Essentially it's WoD in the 2010's but Revised Edition never happened, so there was no Avatar Storm, no Week of Nightmares, the Ravnos are a full clan, the Stargazers are still in the Garou Nation and the Gangrel are still in the Camarilla.
Gameplay is more of a sandbox than a railroad, and most of the signature NPC's (Anatole, Lucita, Vykos, Albrecht, etc.) have been removed as well, with the noted exception of Beckett and the NPC's presented in Chicago By Night and Milwaukee By Night from First Edition.
Stylistically, it's more like 1e and 2e, and nothing at all like Revised or the upcoming 5th Edition.
Anybody else have setting hacks or head-canons for their WoD games?
My Classic WoD has no metaplot, and removes Demon: The Fallen and Kindred of the East (they are instead replaced by Street Fighter: The Storytelling Game and the fan-game Senshi: The Merchandising).
Essentially it's WoD in the 2010's but Revised Edition never happened, so there was no Avatar Storm, no Week of Nightmares, the Ravnos are a full clan, the Stargazers are still in the Garou Nation and the Gangrel are still in the Camarilla.
Gameplay is more of a sandbox than a railroad, and most of the signature NPC's (Anatole, Lucita, Vykos, Albrecht, etc.) have been removed as well, with the noted exception of Beckett and the NPC's presented in Chicago By Night and Milwaukee By Night from First Edition.
Stylistically, it's more like 1e and 2e, and nothing at all like Revised or the upcoming 5th Edition.
Anybody else have setting hacks or head-canons for their WoD games?
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Kalzky
The Patron Saint Of Thowing Stuff In The Sun
- Location
- MI
Mages, unless it is a Mage game, are nerfed to high heaven.
- Location
- Georgia
or else you get nerfed to lawn chair.
Kalzky
The Patron Saint Of Thowing Stuff In The Sun
- Location
- MI
Pretty much.
This is a really fascinating idea, thank you!