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White Wolf's World of Darkness

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An Acanthus in the Silver Ladder, Xeras spent his life pre-Awakening studying string theory and special relativity. He never fully quit himself of his Sleeper life — his passions turned easily into Obsession, and he discovered you saw a whole lot more when you used mage sight to observe photons smashing into one another. Xeras saw time as a vine, sinking its roots deep into the soil, travelling and branching out below ground far from where the plant breaks the surface. He was last seen on his way to gain access to the Tevatron at Fermilab in Illinois, though no records exist of his presence there. Notes he left behind are a mix of complex Sleeper formulae, commentary in High Speech, and several pages written in a language whose origins are yet a mystery. Time mages have used vines, his name, and some of the symbols from his last set of notes to power their spells.
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@davebrookshaw Hey, particle physicist here; photons don't really interact with each other, and even if they did, they're massless and can't really be said to "smash". I would suggest changing it to protons, as those are the particles most used in circular accelerators like the Tevatron and LHC, and so are most often the starting point for theorists who want to predict/calculate what will come out of a collision event in one of those colliders. It does sound fucking awesome to witness, though.
 
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Although photons don't interact with each other at tree level, they can interact through higher-order processes. That's nigh-irrelevant at the optical range, but it could still happen by chance even there, and it's not too unreasonable once we're pushing into at least the low gamma-ray ranges or above. Note that protons wouldn't 'smash' in the ordinary sense unless they're at high energies either, so that's probably a fair requirement.

I think it's a bit weird to say that "he studied string theory and special relativity," though. It's a bit like saying "he studied differential equations and arithmetic." Um, ok? Studying general relativity would make more sense, and at least they're non-trivially related in that the classical GTR emerges as as a limit of string theory.
 
Well, as far as things are going on my on Mage campaign, I followed in EarthScorpion's advice, and the whole thing turned into a procedural drama (and I'm pround of my players here for their portrayals of the PCs) and a lesson on why you really need to network in Mage society, or it becomes too easy to attack you politically.
"We need more friends." - My Obrimos player.

To shorten something like five hours of roleplay, the Libertine PC got brought in front of the Consilium for his continued use of vulgar magic, disrespect towards Consilium Officials and putting the Mysteries at risk of Sleeper discovery. Just as the Cabal is starting to dispair about what to do to prepare for the trial (none of them are Thearchs, or have studied much of the Lex Magica), lo and behold, they are approached by this Silver Ladder (an acquaintance which they had crossed paths with in a previous story) who says he can help them. He talks up how terrible are the charges being brought against the Acanthus PC and how harsh the Consilium's sentence could be, and how with his help, they could at least have a lessened punishment. They'll owe him for this of course, but isn't worth it? Despite misgivings and suspicion, they take the deal.

Cut to the trial, where their opposition is a Guardian with a fondness for calling them (and in particular the Libertine PC) foolish fools and who may or may not have had her dedicated whip on her hip. With the Tearch acting as an advisor, the player all argued admirably in the defense of the Acanthus PC, and I was honestly surprisingly pleased by how into it my friends were.

The final sentence was this: the Libertine would have to surrender a soul stone of his into the custody of the Councillor who represents his Path, which, you could guess, is a Guardian of the Veil. The soul stone will stay in the Councillor's care for 6 months, or until the Councillor, as is tradition, has asked three tasks out of the PC.

Of course, what my players haven't realized (yet), is that the Guardians and the Silver Ladder were both playing them.
 
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Well it is near 700 pages of Reality-warping goodness...

Actually it might be wise to get some shelves reinforced with Magical protection. After all we wouldn't want it warping Reality too much. Or the Sleepers to get their hands on a copy of the book and causing their brains to simultaneously implode and explode.

After all it does make an awful mess of things.
 
Carrnage said:
Whitewolf seems to be lacking in people willing to say "no" to the latest whim of their writers.
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Yep.
Which is why we have Beasts coming out.
Yet another game in the recent lines that I initially went, 'This concept looks great!' and then got an actual peak into the material and went, 'this is awful... why would you do this to me WW/Onyx?'

On the bright side, the 2nd editions of stuff has actually been pretty good so far.
Though, I miss my agg claws... :(
 
AshenFox said:
Yep.
Which is why we have Beasts coming out.
Yet another game in the recent lines that I initially went, 'This concept looks great!' and then got an actual peak into the material and went, 'this is awful... why would you do this to me WW/Onyx?'

On the bright side, the 2nd editions of stuff has actually been pretty good so far.
Though, I miss my agg claws... :(
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You can still get them. Claws of the Unholy. Requires Protean 4, turns your talons into +0A weapons during Frenzy.

And while we have no (mechanical) details yet, Deviant seems exciting, if just from its inspiration list.
 
GhanjRho said:
You can still get them. Claws of the Unholy. Requires Protean 4, turns your talons into +0A weapons during Frenzy.

And while we have no (mechanical) details yet, Deviant seems exciting, if just from its inspiration list.
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I've heard someone complain (haven't looked, probably should) that Deviant's inspiration list makes no sense. They claimed that a lot of the books/media were wildly different and from different genres, and that it couldn't have one 'feel' if those were meant to be equal inspirations. Not sure how true that is, but that is something I remember someone saying when I was talking to them about WW in general. Not that the inspirations were bad, just that they didn't add up to a 'This is a splat about...' vibe. You know, 'Vampires, the all-night society, etc etc.'
 
EarthScorpion said:
And that's why M20 should have had an editor who could do their goddamn job.
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I'm an M20 backer, meaning I got a PDF copy several months ago and despite being nearly 700 pages there's plenty they had to cut out. Hell they had several stretch goals to put the cut material in a companion book, each goal expanding the size of it.

And MtAs isn't the same beast as VtM or WtA, not by a long shot. It needs a lot of those 700 pages.
 
You know, I liked the original Beast writeup. I'm still a little pissy about the whole thing really.
Has anyone tried running it with the kickstarter docs, revised or otherwise?
 
AkatsukiL13 said:
I'm an M20 backer, meaning I got a PDF copy several months ago and despite being nearly 700 pages there's plenty they had to cut out. Hell they had several stretch goals to put the cut material in a companion book, each goal expanding the size of it.

And MtAs isn't the same beast as VtM or WtA, not by a long shot. It needs a lot of those 700 pages.
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Have they cut the half-page-long rant about turning vampires into lawnchairs? Have they exorcised with extreme prejudice the ST "advice" that rails against pizza-eating during the game? Maybe the ST advice that says to not actually kill characters when the rules say they should be dead? (Or, alternatively, the rules that say characters die, if you're not actually supposed to kill them?) Have they snipped out the cruft where Brucato professes his hatred of Abrahamic religions not once but twice? Maybe cut down on the sidebar about non-standard genders, which is a) offensive, and b) twice as long as it needs to be? Do three pages of full art still separate some chapters?

Because there's lots of stuff that can be cut down to save some space.
 
Eukie said:
Because there's lots of stuff that can be cut down to save some space.
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And that's even before we get started on things like the "writing style" - M20 is written like a White Wolf treadmill supplement, where it is imperative that you release two new 200 page books per quarter per line and thus word bloat is encouraged because it makes your customers feel like they're not being ripped off.
 
700 pages? It is literally on the 100 pages more than two basic books GURPS. Or is such a small page? To be fair, some of these pages take lists and lists and over lists, as well as a pointer to the words.
 
AkatsukiL13 said:
And MtAs isn't the same beast as VtM or WtA, not by a long shot. It needs a lot of those 700 pages.
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For what?

Unlike Vampire, Werewolf or any other game in World of Darkness you don't need to introduce five to ten new powers for every political subdivision. You can fit the entire magic system on 30 pages, and lets say another 60 for various example effects. Another 20 pages for ST advice on how to abjudicate creative Sphere use and encouraging players to remain in paradigm. Let's say an even 150 for the entire magic section and related cruft.

The setting chapter shouldn't be more than 50 pages. Another 50 for the broad strokes of Mage society. 3~4 pages for each major Tradition and Convention, maybe 2 pages for the important crafts and dead traditions/conventions. Figure 200 pages for the setting stuff.

Another 50 pages of general ST advice. Another 50 for antagonists and equipment. Another 50 for art and chapter fiction.

At most this should have been 500 pages and that is at the extreme end. Good editorial control and formatting could have cut that down to 400 or 450.
 
Less, frankly. The nChangeling rulebook was 350 pages, and Exalted 2e's and the DFRPG's corebooks are both considered overwritten at 400. WFRP has major supplements like Tome of Corruption that clock in at 250 pages.
 
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Aaron Peori said:
For what?

Unlike Vampire, Werewolf or any other game in World of Darkness you don't need to introduce five to ten new powers for every political subdivision. You can fit the entire magic system on 30 pages, and lets say another 60 for various example effects. Another 20 pages for ST advice on how to abjudicate creative Sphere use and encouraging players to remain in paradigm. Let's say an even 150 for the entire magic section and related cruft.

The setting chapter shouldn't be more than 50 pages. Another 50 for the broad strokes of Mage society. 3~4 pages for each major Tradition and Convention, maybe 2 pages for the important crafts and dead traditions/conventions. Figure 200 pages for the setting stuff.

Another 50 pages of general ST advice. Another 50 for antagonists and equipment. Another 50 for art and chapter fiction.

At most this should have been 500 pages and that is at the extreme end. Good editorial control and formatting could have cut that down to 400 or 450.
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Or in short, if you can reasonably consider using the corebook as body armor, something has gone wrong.
 
C.o.S.a.R said:
What parts of 2ed do you consider overwritten?
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The Charms chapter is about twice as long as it needs to be. Part of that is the terrible formatting, part of that is redundancy of Charm design and part of that is just bad game design space.

The conflict resolution systems needed to be consolidated. You could have saved dozens of pages by generalizing the resolution system for conflicts and then spelling out the specific exemptions that applied to physical, social or mass combat (and as a bonus, would have been able to expand that system out to strategic and logistical levels; ie that Bureaucracy system everyone has been saying the system needs since day 1).

The antagonists section should have been truncated with a smaller system designed to create anatgonists and then a handful of short examples of how to work it in the game.
 
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