Eh, that's just a generational power gap.

Antediluvians have always been bullshit, and once you get past the thirteenth generation, you've got to use special rules because your vampiric blood has run too thin.
Well yes, but 'god-like Vampires try to eat world, each other, God,' and 'gritty urban fantasy with Vampires' are very different games, and probably should haven't have tried to do both at once. Which is why Requiem is so much better.
 
Well yes, but 'god-like Vampires try to eat world, each other, God,' and 'gritty urban fantasy with Vampires' are very different games, and probably should haven't have tried to do both at once. Which is why Requiem is so much better.
IIRC, the antideluvians aren't mean to be played and one does not actually have the capability to be at their level at all. The eat the world and eat god thing has less to do about vampires in different games and more to do with how White Wolf was wanting to bring about an apocalypse which they did for all their lines.


Why ISIS? if you have the resources for drone strikes, you could I don't know have government help for a cover up.
 
IIRC, the antideluvians aren't mean to be played and one does not actually have the capability to be at their level at all. The eat the world and eat god thing has less to do about vampires in different games and more to do with how White Wolf was wanting to bring about an apocalypse which they did for all their lines.
Doesn't change the facts that Antediluvian (well, third generation Vampires) are playable and present in the setting when they really shouldn't be.
 
Doesn't change the facts that Antediluvian (well, third generation Vampires) are playable and present in the setting when they really shouldn't be.
Fair enough. I just see it as powerbloat which creeps up as series grow older . Like OMage released that book where powers were off the chart and unlikely to ever actually be used by gaming groups. Or DnD which realeases class after class and abilities after abilities that end up with spellcasters becoming unto gods or the basic class being rendered irrelevant to the point people start with advanced classes for their gaming sessions out right.
 
Doesn't change the facts that Antediluvian (well, third generation Vampires) are playable and present in the setting when they really shouldn't be.
Third generation vampires are not playable, and have never been playable. I don't really know where you've got that from; the generation table has never gone past the fourth generation.
 
Has anyone here played Demon: The Fallen? Just picked it up in a used book store and I've fallen in love

I've played and run it. The gist is cool but I advise to make the great demonic return happens in 1945 at least to let demons form communities, or else play up the fact there is no demonic societies. The powers are bit of a mess in practice but that's par the course for WOD
 
Question for anyone who feels like answering: If you were commissioned to write a splat of "superheroes in the nWoD" how would you do it? I've been playing Princess, mixed bag that it is, for the past few months; it's made me wonder about this on and off.
 
Question for anyone who feels like answering: If you were commissioned to write a splat of "superheroes in the nWoD" how would you do it? I've been playing Princess, mixed bag that it is, for the past few months; it's made me wonder about this on and off.

I'd get very questioning about why the person wanted it, because the overtness of superheroes stands against the intended game mode of hidden-supernatural urban fantasy of the nWoD. IMO, it's not really the nWoD if the supernatural isn't hiding.

But given I was being paid for it, I'd shrug and then turn superheroes into a thing about celebrity, and how it makes the celebrity less real because their image in the thoughts of others is something manufactured. The superhero is an idea, and thus your superhero form exists only as an idea. You'll never get recognised for who you "really" are, because it's "not real" - but your superhero identity will bleed into the culture and people will copy it without knowing. And it's so easy to give up to the demands of the idea that others have of you, and stop living in the real world, only existing in a way that others can see you for medicinal reasons, losing all your friends and your contacts with normal people as you embrace the heady life of the superhero.

plus i'd probably just make the antagonist splats capeshit that wants to grab you and pull you into the realm of ideas and never let you go, recycling you time and time again and grafting your supehero personality onto someone new when your mortal shell dies

there's probably two of those big bads

they're probably controlled/generated by mortal corporations who might not even know how they're warping the world of ideas
 
I'd get very questioning about why the person wanted it, because the overtness of superheroes stands against the intended game mode of hidden-supernatural urban fantasy of the nWoD. IMO, it's not really the nWoD if the supernatural isn't hiding.
Yes, that's something I keep getting hung up on - I'm coming around to think that it probably wouldn't work very well unless you get reaaaaaaally reality-warping, and at that point I think it would be pushing on Mage territory a little too much for me to be entirely comfortable.

But given I was being paid for it, I'd shrug and then turn superheroes into a thing about celebrity, and how it makes the celebrity less real because their image in the thoughts of others is something manufactured. The superhero is an idea, and thus your superhero form exists only as an idea. You'll never get recognised for who you "really" are, because it's "not real" - but your superhero identity will bleed into the culture and people will copy it without knowing. And it's so easy to give up to the demands of the idea that others have of you, and stop living in the real world, only existing in a way that others can see you for medicinal reasons, losing all your friends and your contacts with normal people as you embrace the heady life of the superhero.

plus i'd probably just make the antagonist splats capeshit that wants to grab you and pull you into the realm of ideas and never let you go, recycling you time and time again and grafting your supehero personality onto someone new when your mortal shell dies

there's probably two of those big bads

they're probably controlled/generated by mortal corporations who might not even know how they're warping the world of ideas
curse those blasted caped crusaders and their capitalistic chains

... I mean honestly there's probably a good game of some kind in "we chained the words and symbols of the gods with the crass avariciousness of our society" and just go full Grant Morrison, where superheroes are the words and names of a higher dimensional being/divinity and are just used to maintain the status quo for literal parasites of imagination, the game then being the bastard love child of The Invisibles and the OG Captain Marvel. Also oMagey but still cool.

Something like, superheroes are people garbed in imagination, wearing the symbols of the gods that humanity can be, as they fight for imagination - but not every idea that can be imagined is good, and you become more like what you imagine and less real the more powerful you grow, like if Changeling was about becoming the Gentry.
 
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But given I was being paid for it, I'd shrug and then turn superheroes into a thing about celebrity, and how it makes the celebrity less real because their image in the thoughts of others is something manufactured.

Aberraaaaaaant

Actually you could go with that and make it specifically sports celebrity, especially given the whole NFL scandal regarding traumatic brain injury. What makes someone willingly take up something that has a good chance of crippling or killing them and has a pretty small chance of actually giving out dividends?

So your nWoD superheroes are literally people who have some archetype from a numinous astral realm of ideas grafted to them, and each of them, at some point, volunteered to do this shit for Reasons. That, I think, would be the central difference between nWoD superheroes and other nWoD splats. Fundamentally, a nWoD splat is something forced upon you. Awakening is completely random, vampires are made by other vampires, werewolves are werewolves, Changelings got kidnapped, Prometheans were never human, Geists all got killed, Demons were never human, etc etc.

Why does someone volunteer to do something like this? Were they misled? Do they desire the fame? Do they think it's the only way they can better themselves? Is it an escape from something? Do they just like the idea so much that they're willing to struggle through the unglamorous parts? What?

And the capeshit antagonists are maybe the idea-realm's antibodies, here to take their toys back.
 
I'd get very questioning about why the person wanted it, because the overtness of superheroes stands against the intended game mode of hidden-supernatural urban fantasy of the nWoD. IMO, it's not really the nWoD if the supernatural isn't hiding.

But given I was being paid for it, I'd shrug and then turn superheroes into a thing about celebrity, and how it makes the celebrity less real because their image in the thoughts of others is something manufactured. The superhero is an idea, and thus your superhero form exists only as an idea. You'll never get recognised for who you "really" are, because it's "not real" - but your superhero identity will bleed into the culture and people will copy it without knowing. And it's so easy to give up to the demands of the idea that others have of you, and stop living in the real world, only existing in a way that others can see you for medicinal reasons, losing all your friends and your contacts with normal people as you embrace the heady life of the superhero.

plus i'd probably just make the antagonist splats capeshit that wants to grab you and pull you into the realm of ideas and never let you go, recycling you time and time again and grafting your supehero personality onto someone new when your mortal shell dies

there's probably two of those big bads

they're probably controlled/generated by mortal corporations who might not even know how they're warping the world of ideas
So the guy from perfect blue would be a major antagonist?
 
Probably, yeah, get your idoru and stalker on. Also any Satoshi Kon reference is a good one.

reeeeeeeee
The classical conflict in the superhero life is how diving into it gives you something that you is a escape from your real life, and how you can never turn things from there into a long term improvement of your regular life. And those two try to do so are becomming the vilians.
I would play around with the status quo, with the hidden life being a escape that you chose to join as you could have resisted the call but you did not and how you spend your time between both ends of it , knowing that you deal to much with one side of it you wither away the other one.

So I am halfway stealing from Werwolf the Forsaken there :p
 
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I'd get very questioning about why the person wanted it, because the overtness of superheroes stands against the intended game mode of hidden-supernatural urban fantasy of the nWoD. IMO, it's not really the nWoD if the supernatural isn't hiding.

But given I was being paid for it, I'd shrug and then turn superheroes into a thing about celebrity, and how it makes the celebrity less real because their image in the thoughts of others is something manufactured. The superhero is an idea, and thus your superhero form exists only as an idea. You'll never get recognised for who you "really" are, because it's "not real" - but your superhero identity will bleed into the culture and people will copy it without knowing. And it's so easy to give up to the demands of the idea that others have of you, and stop living in the real world, only existing in a way that others can see you for medicinal reasons, losing all your friends and your contacts with normal people as you embrace the heady life of the superhero.

plus i'd probably just make the antagonist splats capeshit that wants to grab you and pull you into the realm of ideas and never let you go, recycling you time and time again and grafting your supehero personality onto someone new when your mortal shell dies

there's probably two of those big bads

they're probably controlled/generated by mortal corporations who might not even know how they're warping the world of ideas
The other angle is to throw this one Monte Cook setting book into a meat grinder and harvest its vital essence.

"Superheroes" are people who start perceiving a supernatural aura that random objects passively emit, and are overcome with an urge to collect articles of such mystically-active junk. Once a critical mass of material is acquired, they black out and awaken to find that they've assembled their magical tchotchkes into a mask - considering the "junk" part of that phrase is paramount, these masks are usually rather odd-looking (one example is made of tape casette ribbons, hairpins, and carved-up book covers, with tufts of Troll doll hair for decoration).

When you put the mask on, "you" end, and a Hero begins. It's a piece of who you are, but bigger, louder, more. The Hero takes one of your core personality traits and then cranks up the contrast until it's unrecognizable, creating an alien caricature that then gets garbled even further by lingering traces of the disparate talismans you ripped apart to make your mask.

A happy-go-lucky jock might end up with a Hero form that embodies his physicality, with rippling, grotesque muscles barely restrained by a too-bright replica of his varsity jacket, and a sledgehammer where its face should be. On the other hand, his mask might birth a capricious, anarchistic Bacchus with stage light eyes and a hallucinogenic aura that smells like the turf on the football field - hungry to feel and live and experience, and oblivious to how it drags people near it into its insane revelry.

Heroes aren't usually stable, or peaceable, or even particularly smart, but they're powerful, oh so very powerful, and you always remember the cool parts of what you do as a Hero better than the... other parts.

Eventually, you might realize the human cost of your new hobby, but by then the Hero's been allowed to breathe, gotten used to living outside of your cramped little skull. It doesn't want to go: if you stop being its sidekick, it'll get grumpy, and then it might think about making a mask of its own. After all, you're so boring and dull! Shouldn't you be the one that has to ride shotgun?

Also, Heroes naturally attract each other, and once two Heroes become allies - or rivals, or secret lovers, or mortal enemies - their human "owners" find it even harder to put down the mask for good, because now they have to worry about the other guy's Hero coming after their "secret identity" and trying to force their Hero back to the surface.

----


To be a bit more Doylist, the "superheroes" are people who've become some sort of hithimu-equivalent entity - a "Hero" is an inhuman force driven by human motives/concepts, taking something their host cares about, or something they hate, and then "dealing with it" in an utterly unhinged fashion. They're a satire of the inherent psychological weirdness of how comic book characters often try to use costumed capers to accomplish goals that would be better accomplished in a less flamboyant fashion. They try to reduce complex problems into something they can solve with their fists, and everything that happens around them is either meaningless background scenery or a new component of their narrative.

Heroes are the new Olympians, and like the Olympians, they're capricious madgods who can drop out of the sky and tear down your world at any moment, yet demand acclaim and consider themselves paragons of virtue.
 



ISIS was operating in 2008, under the name Al Qaeda in Iraq. They only changed their name in 2014, when Al Qaeda expelled the Iraq chapter for being too violent. They then rebranded themselves the Islamic State of Iraq, and eventually the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, when they expanded. But the organization was totally there in 2008. And if AQI did something, it would be totally correct to say that ISIS did it, because it's just a name change.

Of course, there is no way in hell they'd have the resources to attack Austria at the time, even if they were interested. They were totally focused on Iraq at the time, and not particularly large or powerful.


Eh, that's just a generational power gap.

Antediluvians have always been bullshit, and once you get past the thirteenth generation, you've got to use special rules because your vampiric blood has run too thin.

Third generation vampires are not playable, and have never been playable. I don't really know where you've got that from; the generation table has never gone past the fourth generation.

Yeah, I saw the table for Methusalahs, but i'm pretty sure the book just went "And then the Antediluvians just fuck you"

Antediluvians were subject to power creep over time, which just got worse in Revised. And the Revised Antediluvian generally don't match the Lore or actual history.

Third generation not being playable was more an issue of "you'll never meet one" than "they're too powerful for you to fight." Indeed, a huge chunks of the Lore are all about weaker vampires murdering Antediluvians. Two entire Clans are predicated on the fact that Antediluvians can be murdered by weaker vampires. That's literally how Tremere and Giovanni became Clans in the first place. It's baked into the Lore on a fundamental level. And the entire reason that the Sabbat exists at all is that the Tzimisce supposedly murdered their Antediluvian during the Anarch rebellion and didn't want to subordinate themselves after going to so much trouble. So, if the Antediluvians weren't vulnerable, then two Clans and an entire Sect wouldn't exist. This was part of the setting since 1st edition. Heck, 1st edition even had rules for 10 Dot Disciplines, which were very powerful but nowhere near godlike.

It's really only in Revised that all the dead Antediluveans, including the ones that are confirmed to have been eaten, steepled their fingers and said "just as keikaku" in a way that does doesn't make sense. They basically retconned their entire history so that whenever an Antediluvean appeared to be vulnerable and was killed this was actually part of an elaborate plan because underpants gnomes. I guess.

Godlike Antediluveans really doesn't jive with a reality where Tzimisce was hanging around Europe during the early Renaissance. Particularly not the Gehenna scenarios where the awakened Antediluvians conquer the entire world in a couple of days.

Of course "the Camarilla doesn't believe in the Antediluveans" also doesn't jive with a reality where Tzimisce was hanging around Europe during the early Renaissance.


The Antediluveans' upgrade from powerful but mortal to basically gods was the result of White Wolf becoming far too enamored with their apocalypse metaplot to the detriment of their apocalypse metaplot. Every Antediluvean scenario has one thing in common. They're boring.

Question for anyone who feels like answering: If you were commissioned to write a splat of "superheroes in the nWoD" how would you do it? I've been playing Princess, mixed bag that it is, for the past few months; it's made me wonder about this on and off.


I'd go the Marvel Mutant route. Having superpowers is something that you want to hide, because everyone hates and fears people with powers. Not to the same extent as in Marvel, but enough that it's a huge issue. Like being gay in the 50s, but with more explosions. Keep the powers street level. They're potent, but not so much that a normal human ever stops being a threat. More like 80s Wolverine than 00s Wolverine.
 
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But given I was being paid for it, I'd shrug and then turn superheroes into a thing about celebrity, and how it makes the celebrity less real because their image in the thoughts of others is something manufactured. The superhero is an idea, and thus your superhero form exists only as an idea. You'll never get recognised for who you "really" are, because it's "not real" - but your superhero identity will bleed into the culture and people will copy it without knowing. And it's so easy to give up to the demands of the idea that others have of you, and stop living in the real world, only existing in a way that others can see you for medicinal reasons, losing all your friends and your contacts with normal people as you embrace the heady life of the superhero.

Perfect Blue: the Dissonance
 
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