World of Darkness

[clear delta]

Head destruction is very lethal for vampires

[grave gulch]

[radiant marsh]

It's generally held together by the Judges and their dictats.

The different splats tend to be more like philosophies rather than formal

[clear delta]

I see. You a fan of mummy?

[radiant marsh]

I think its' pretty awesome, though I haven't played it and I have no idea how I'd run it. 😛

Though the guilds are the same guilds that were in Irem

So which one you start with tends to be the one you were actually a member of back in the day

[clear delta]

I have 1e mummy

Guild changes are very rare, I read

[grave gulch]

i'm feeling tempted to get this

@mighty zephyr @clear delta have yall any comments on this book?

[clear delta]

I think I saw that one
It has stuff for chronicles in space, right?

[mighty zephyr]

I have never read it

[high current]

nah, Bleeding Edge is purely just 'what if nwod rules, but cyberpunk?'

there is a non-Bleeding Edge Mirrors though, which has uhhh
World of Darkness Revealed, the masquerade/delirium/disbelief are gone and everyone knows about all the stuff
World of Darkness Destroyed, which offers a bunch of apocalypse scenarios
The World of Dark Fantasy, which is just 'what if fantasy WoD', has some alternate takes on the splats(Atlanteans, Dhampirs, Wargaz, Dark Heroes)
and then an appendix of alternate/optional rules like point-buy character creation, mechanics for representing relationships, and then Storyteller advice essays

[radiant marsh]

I have it. It's pretty neat.

Er...

Or rather, I have the Mirrors book, not the Bleeding Edge one

[clear delta]

Oh wait, it's infinite macabre tgat has space stuff
@grave gulch

[clear delta]

Like using avernian gates in space to take shortcuts through the underworld

[clear delta]

Imagine if a mummy awakened in the far future, then kept rising further and further into the past
Probably having a bunch of time loops

[grave gulch]

How often do mummies go insane?

cause i feel like that would break anyone

[clear delta]

The problem for them is losing their sense of self and becoming an automaton for the judges

[clear delta]

Oh by loops I mean realizing your future self did something in the past and that you need to pull it off

And prepare prophecies

[radiant marsh]

Depending on your definition of 'Mummy' it can be even worse.

The Decieved are literally sharing a body with a fragment of a completely inhuman and utterly insane god.

They're also cursed to be completely immortal and indestructable.

Meaning they have no end goal that will put them to rest

The heat death of the universe will occur and the Decieved will still be aware and conscious the whole time

Shuankhsen meanwhile. They need to devour Sekhem to stay active, be it from artifacts or other mummies. Unlike the Awakened, they remember everything, and considering that they were all slaughtered in a ritualistic mass sacrifice, and then given to Ammit the Devourer as tribute, as a test for the actual Rite of Return, this is...Problematic.

Also when they're not active, their time in Duat basically consists of being chased down by Ammit and being devoured, over and over again.

Naturally this doesn't particularly lend itself to mental stability

[clear delta]

Irem was fucked up

[clear delta]

So idea I discussed in mage cord
Mummy wakes up in the far future, tries to help humanity survive extinction, and keeps having Descents further and further into the past. She cannot confirm her efforts to save humanity paid off
From everyone else's perspective, after helping humanity, she faded away (actually her entering the timeline after the Rite of Return)
No one knows in details what went on in her final descent (first in the persoective of others). Maybe she gets destroyed backwards into existence. Maybe she achieves apotheosis and escapes her reversed life

Ugh time stuff can be confusing

[clear delta]

@radiant marsh

[radiant marsh]

I like it

[clear delta]

Mummy has nice metaphysics

[grave gulch]

Are mummies undead?

[clear delta]

A mummy known for the prophecies she grants her cult, but won't see all the results

[clear delta]

Well, yes, but actually no
They read as dead and alive to magic

They're corpses filled with potent life force

And the power of eternity

[grave gulch]

Scary

I feel like you dont wanna mess with them unless you really have to

[clear delta]

Let me tell ya, they are one of the strongest splats, though they have heavy downsides
They can call down meteor showers and horrors from the stars, manipulate minds through dreams to get cults
As long as they have Sekhem, they can get back up after dying, but you can send them back to their death sleep and they'll only get back up after something triggers their awakening

Permanently killing one is a tall order. Think you gotta nuke the city? Even so their cults can bring them back

They have defense against attempts to alter their time and fate

[high current]

a freshly awakened Mummy is on-par with a Mage or a Loud Demon in terms of bullshit potential iirc

(they get weaker the longer they're awake, until/unless they swap sekhem for memory, which is kind of an archmastery tier goal, if not ascension, from what i remember)

[clear delta]

They can drink sekhem from vestiges and relics

This can restore their sekhem

Even if the roll fails, the act still resets their sekhem timer

So it still extends their time

[grave gulch]

a mage is still a mortal even if powerful

If mummy has the same bullshit potential they are already a lot scarier just for being timeless

[clear delta]

And having no paradox

They also get powers to command the dead

Oh mummies can kill you and erase you from people's memories

[grave gulch]

Does that include undead?

Like if im a death mage with a zombie working for me

Can they just take them from me?

[versed zodiac]

never assume your powers take precedence over a Mummy unless you're a Demon

[clear delta]

I need to check
But they can make zombies and do some stuff with ghosts

[versed zodiac]

or a REALLY strong Mage who has very specific and hardcore stuff going on

[clear delta]

Mummies are really fucking cool

[clear delta]

I don't see zombie stealing powers, only making zombies

But either way, you're fucked against a mummy

A just woken mummy is way less reasonable and merciful

[radiant marsh]

Mummies, at least in theory, stand for Law and Justice

It's just a very Bronze Age / Old Testament idea of Law and Justice

Or rather the Judges they serve are avatars of that sort of thing

[grave gulch]

ok so stay out of their way

[radiant marsh]

Mummies are also extremely hard to permanently get rid of.

[grave gulch]

will they remember me?

[mighty zephyr]

Maybe

They will in their experience of time

but they don't experience time linearally

[radiant marsh]

They also come back quicker if they're destroyed than if they achieve the goal they were ressurected for

[clear delta]

A decrease in their Memory stat could make things unclear or forgotten
High Memory means they will remember.
If spiteful enough and Descending in a time you're alive in, they might set up a revenge, maybe send someone to get you
Could even have your parents killed before you're born if Descending further back

[grave gulch]

[clear delta]

Mummies don't fuck around

Most forgot how to human

And come off as cold

[clear delta]

Mummies of the Heart pillar keep a better grip of humanity

[grave gulch]

there are a couple of splats that have a bit of an emphasis on humanity it seems

[clear delta]

For mummies, it is through rebuilding their souls and memory

At low memory, they're closer to automatons

[radiant marsh]

A low Memory mummy is pretty much

"Awaken. Find artifacts for judges. Remove obstacles in the way of thus. Die. Repeat."

[versed zodiac]

all of 'em

[clear delta]

Oh, mummy 2e incorporates the various immortals that 1e had as their own book

So blood bathers, body thieves, those immortals tgat use special objects all interact with mummies

[dusky ledge]

Welp. Coterie found a Thin-Blood who:

• Hasn't announced herself to the Prince
• Doesn't know who her sire is
• Instantly told her mortal sibling she was a vampire

[acoustic plaza]

Uh oh

[clear delta]

So mummy now adds to ghost twilight

• Chimeric monsters that eat ghosts
• Fucked up storms with demons or something
• Fiends from Duat
  Poor ghosts

Todo dia é um 7 a 1 diferente
(Everyday is a different 7 to 1)

@grave gulch

[grave gulch]

[clear delta]

Combine with geist and ghosts really face a lot of problems

The amkhata, the chimeric monsters, can be made through rituals

[clear delta]

The amkhata customization system is cool

The sphinx head is very menacing. It's smart and manipulative

[clear delta]

So, haruspex draft, a thyrsus legacy
Oblations: butchering or other jobs that involve meat, autopsies, reading omens in your daily life, prayer and sacrifice
Yantras: blood and remains of living beings,

First attainment: divination with reach to make more specific, can be done on store bought entrails

2: maybe constant presence or shield of chronos? Since you predict future to have success, you'd want to protect your successes or hide your planning sessions

4: prophecy with reach for social interaction, you must kill an animal

5: present as past. Kill a human

The wiki mentions the haruspex, but not which book.
Made this for fun

[vast blaze]

Need some help with a WoD build, is it possible to make a Mage that swings around a great big fuckoff Berserk greatsword or am I better off going for a vampire for that sort of fantasy

[patent stirrup]

In oWoD mage that's not to hard TBH and Vampire is going to be worse for that fantasy unless your ST is going full on suppers with fangs

But problay of oWoD your best bet is a wearwolf with a great Klave

[vast blaze]

I'd go werewolf, but the thing is, I wanna be a regular knight aesthetically, rather than turning into a werebeastie

[patent stirrup]

I mean you can have knightly wearwolf

The Silverfangs are for example related to the Romanovs

[vast blaze]

Hm, true

...I do wanna make a mage-knight, but at the same time I hear that WoD mages are bukus more complicated than CoD mages

[patent stirrup]

that could be the case we don't like CoD for how it wedged the part of vampire we like the least into every splat. but mages are not hard to build the main thing is there magic is more open ended

[vast blaze]

So it's less "this is a web of complex bullshit" and more "you have A Fucking Lot to play with"?

[patent stirrup]

yeah kinda, you know 40k orcs at all

But yeah your problay want forces 2 to convert ""basic"" forces like heat, sound, electricty, into kentic energy to help you swing your sword for the mage knight, and the Order of Hermies is the tradition that has that as there spheare

[clear delta]

In NMage there is an order dedicated to combat, who can use their fighting motions to cast spells

You can probably get an enhanced or imbued sword to be able to swing it in spite of the weight. Or just use a spell if you know the right arcana

[vast blaze]

Or magically enhance myself

[midnight grotto]

Muscle Mages are 110% A Thing in Awakening

[clear delta]

There's a group that perfects their bodies and minds

Actually multiple groups about enhancing the body

[midnight grotto]

There's a Legacy of fucking space/time-bending ronin

Cut you in half from across the room

[clear delta]

Ah yes, the brotherhood of the demon wind

They worship a wind that links all battlefields across space time

[mighty zephyr]

My Adamantine Arrow was a Perfected Adept

which let him do shit like the bullet deflect in Anarchy Reigns and it not count as magic

[clear delta]

Oh Voy I'm doing a thing in mage discord homebrew. Haruspex legacy
You don't usually post there so I didn't know if you'd not want to be pinged

[mighty zephyr]

what mage discord what

[vast blaze]

What is this Vergil-ass shit

[clear delta]

You're not there???
I was so sure you were

[midnight grotto]

You just answered your own question

[clear delta]

Always a fun time
You can just run towards guards, deflect all tbeir bullets, pass by without hurting them
They'll just be so confused, thinking about that for the rest of their lives

[mighty zephyr]

https://youtu.be/3EZOX0IPbqU?si=bXNgeQ833Gp-d5si&t=3375

thanks thumbnail

[clear delta]

https://discord.gg/xy7pKb8M
The mage server
So, haruspex draft, a thyrsus legacy
Oblations: butchering or other jobs that involve meat, autopsies, reading omens in your daily life, prayer and sacrifice
Yantras: blood and remains of living beings, divination tools (plus two if made of remains), altars and shrines associated with blood and guts, butcher knives, holy calendars and holy days
Theory: the potential life holds warps and pulls the future, as well as grows through it. Tearing into the guts of a living patterns allows one to touch the future

First attainment: divination with reach to make more specific

2: maybe constant presence or shield of chronos? Since you predict future to have success, you'd want to protect your successes or hide your planning sessions

Attainment 3: cast acceleration on yourself. Maybe hung acceleration with a set timing to activate?
Casting acceleration on your future self would be cool, but there's no sympathy to the future (that could be a good concept for another legacy)

4: prophecy with reach for social interaction.

5: present as past.

You can use store bought entrails for rituals. Killing an animal grants a bonus to acting on your predictions. Killing a human, even more

[vast blaze]

Lore question, did Medieval-era folks know about all the paranormal shit like vampires and werewolves and mages and all that, or were they just as much in the dark as the modern WoD setting?

[clear delta]

Old or new world?

[vast blaze]

I... don't know, actually

We're using Mage: The Ascension if that helps determine it at all

[clear delta]

Old

I'm not a specialist in the setting, but at that moment belief in the supernatural was still common

Before order of reason came on the scene

[mighty zephyr]

Then yes they had secret societies dealing with it but people just generally assumed the world worked like it worked

They had a basis of knowledge that's the same as historical

[patent stirrup]

Dependign on the exact edition your using mideval mage is just Aris Magica, but the other ones still have it as the traditions bieng alighend wiht consesnuial relaity

[vast blaze]

Yet another Mage question: Is it feasible to make a Mage that uses a giant sword and a huge shield or am I better off sticking with just the giant sword

This is for a Medieval setting, so I wouldn't look out of place lugging around this gear beyond "Jesus fucking Christ look at the size of that guy's sword"

[mighty zephyr]

A regular human could do this

So yes

However I think in a historical setting it'd look incredibly silly and people would make fun of you

[clear delta]

@grave gulch

[grave gulch]

i'm in there already

anyways i gotta get back to studying buh bye

[clear delta]

Oh I was showing tbe legacy

[midnight grotto]

It might be out of place if you're not in the specific social class allowed to own and carry swords

[vast blaze]

I'm a knight, so that wouldn't be an issue

[midnight grotto]

Medieval times weren't an MMO, walking around with a full-sized sword on your back is the same as going into Walmart with an AK

Ah okay that does help lol

[vast blaze]

Plus like

I could just do Mage shenanigans and shrink it down to fit in my pocket or something

[clear delta]

Transformation sequence

[vast blaze]

Dunno, cause like, if Elden Ring can make colossal sword + greatshield look neat, and if the Living Armor from Dragon's Dogma can pull it off, surely I too can manage to make it look neat

[mighty zephyr]

Yes you can in a fantasy setting

But in the real world where everyone's dressed and acting like real people

it becomes silly to dress like a fantasy character

[clear delta]

I think you can, to some extent, pretend people would see a big sword as just an uncommon variant on regular swords
As long as it's not a ridiculous size

[high current]

if your sword isn't big enough to prompt a berserk quote, you're not doing it right

[barren vortex]

counterpoint: landesknecht

[mighty zephyr]

Yes I don't think we're talking about a claymore though

we're talking about like

Dragonslayer specifically

[barren vortex]

Aha, going that big

widesword

[radiant marsh]

Solution: Play Exalted. 😛

[vast blaze]

Exalted?

[short quiver]

Exalted!
Champions of the gods wielding swords built like surfboards in sword and sandal fantasy times.

It was the prehistory of the Word of Darkness for like a week before they decided they didn't want to stick with that and ditched it.

(although the corebook still had that "THE SCIENTISTS ARE LYING TO YOU" thing on the cover blurb in like 2006 because back then "lightly conspiratorial" still seemed like good fun)

[vast blaze]

That aged a bit poorly

[short quiver]

yeah a lot of it did tbh

Mage is kind of particularly egregious about it
much love for Ascension but

[mighty zephyr]

Eh

[radiant marsh]

Speaking of, I just got the Awakening 2nd Edition book for my birthday

[grave gulch]

HAPPY BIRTHDAY @radiant marsh

[radiant marsh]

\o/

[clear delta]

Happy birthday!

[grave gulch]

done with today's mage game

it was hilarious

for me

players are bleeding and shot at each other

the cop player also left their gun at the crime scene

alongside a pool of blood from both the players

[chilly vault]

Fun fact! Blood has very little DNA in it, it can be hard to sample

[grave gulch]

interersting

still they did leave a gun there

from the cop player

[vast blaze]

Reading through the Mage: The Ascension quickstart book

Is there any meaningful difference between a greataxe and a greatsword?

The only thing I can find is that a greatsword has lower difficulty, which seems like it just makes it better.

[mighty zephyr]

you'd have to post their stats

for most to tell

[vast blaze]

Oh, hang on

[mighty zephyr]

Yeah looks like the greatsword is just better

[vast blaze]

Yeah, like

Far as I can tell there's no real point in the axe

Unless higher Difficulty is better?

[mighty zephyr]

it's worse

[vast blaze]

Yeah so there just straight up isn't any point in taking a greataxe, just reflavor a greatsword

What a stupid design

[velvet sparrow]

Welcome to Mage: The Ascension

[clear delta]

@radiant marsh favorite judge manifestation?

[radiant marsh]

No idea

Isn't there a list of like 50 of them, or am I thinking of something else

[clear delta]

There's a list of judges manifesting into the material world

For mummy 2e

They just grant the human (or rarely animal) powers
But can upgrade into a divine avatar form that burns through Sekhem

[radiant marsh]

I'll have to dig out the book again

Because I 100% do not remember that

[clear delta]

It's fucking cool

One can negotiate to take your Sekhem and help your Memory

Another causes space to distort and spreads health ruining vermin

[patent stirrup]

Yeah old white wolf stuff was not the best made, like how the short sword is just better then the sword as well. and that's not getting into the amout of "see pg. xx " that every older book

[clear delta]

@grave gulch

[grave gulch]

so i can be just a guy and get real cool powers in mummy?

[chilly vault]

Not really, Mummies are extremely powerful but are also bound in service to a significant degree

[chilly vault]

what a curiously specific list

[clear delta]

Hm, there are requirements

[clear delta]

Basically, Judges pick their hosts with these requirements

• Being powerful (rich, a CEO, an actual judge in human law), or very low (living in squalor, a convict)
• Be passionate about whatever the judge is in charge of, and have killed someone for that, by your hands or ordering the death
  Also, while you can act against the judge (ending your Crowned state), the judge will be infuencing you, and Judges often use and abuse their hosts for their goals
  Also your presence will just fuck up people in the area

[grave gulch]

ok so not a great position to be at

[clear delta]

Skully is asking about the humans that get Crowned, being used as bodies by the Judges of Duat

[clear delta]

Well Judges don't always hurt their hosts
A former host may even miss the feeling of divine power and being able to enact their own judgement and justice
Others are horrified by their actions in this state

[grave gulch]

so it depends on the judge?

[clear delta]

Yeah, some Judges are more known to fuck up their hosts
But no Judge truly cares for humans, so even those without a tendency to abuse their hosts may do so in pursuit of a goal

The Judges are alien beings who decreed the Law of Suffering upon the universe, and crave the Sekhem the living produce
The Duat is a place of intense suffering

[clear delta]

Hey @radiant marsh @mighty zephyr
Got any idea why duat shades exist and are different from ghosts?

[mighty zephyr]

They might be actual souls

Instead of what ghosts are, which are essentially traumatic psychic echoes

[clear delta]

True

[radiant marsh]

Which also sort of brings up the question of is Duat part of the larger Underworld, connected to it somehow, or something completely different?

[clear delta]

Since judges do stuff with the soul

A lot of souls magic

[clear delta]

Mummies find themselves stopped from wandering too deep across the Rivers, and Anpu is always ready to take them out of the underworld

[clear delta]

Perhaps something parallel, each a path meant for souls and ghosts

[radiant marsh]

Did anybody ever read Book of the Decieved?

[clear delta]

I have it

Gotta read

[radiant marsh]

I recall the opening fiction bit having a lot about the nature of Duat in it

From the perspective of one of the Shan'iatu

A lot of my books are in boxes right now, sadly, which is annoying

[clear delta]

Git it thanks

[clear delta]

So, haruspex draft, a thyrsus legacy
Oblations: butchering or other jobs that involve meat, autopsies, reading omens in your daily life, prayer and sacrifice
Yantras: blood and remains of living beings, divination tools (plus two if made of remains), altars and shrines associated with blood and guts, butcher knives, holy calendars and holy days
Theory: the potential life holds warps and pulls the future, as well as grows through it. Tearing into the guts of a living patterns allows one to touch the future

First attainment: divination with reach to make more specific

2: maybe constant presence or shield of chronos? Since you predict future to have success, you'd want to protect your successes or hide your planning sessions

Attainment 3: cast acceleration on yourself. Maybe hung acceleration with a set timing to activate?
Casting acceleration on your future self would be cool, but there's no sympathy to the future (that could be a good concept for another legacy)

4: prophecy with reach for social interaction.

5: present as past.

You can use store bought entrails for rituals. Killing an animal grants a bonus to acting on your predictions. Killing a human, even more

Could add plot hooks for interacting with mummies? Due to life force and time stuff

[clear delta]

@grave gulch

[grave gulch]

[grave gulch]

@clear delta imma steal that

[clear delta]

Have fun

[clear delta]

Someone on onyx path fiscord suggested the rituals being scene long
Use whatever you think is balanced

[grave gulch]

[clear delta]

Reverse echo walkers who see angels as the future and mess with their souls to become like them

[vast blaze]

Lore question: What did WoD's setting look like in 30BC?

I know that mages specifically generate less paradox due to belief in magic being more widespread, but were there more monsters afoot?

More vampires, more werekin, more horrible beasties lurking about?

[patent stirrup]

You know the myths of old? that was how relaity was back then

[vast blaze]

So it really was just the Wild West of magic then?

Anything goes, don't worry about Paradox?

[patent stirrup]

Not quite but not to far from it.

[vast blaze]

I do know that like

You can get away with a LOT more magic than in modern WoD

What's the extent of that?

Like how much can you get away with before Consensus starts being a killjoy?

[patent stirrup]

so you know Ars Magica? that used to be he cannon past of oWoD

[vast blaze]

Hoo

That permissive?

[patent stirrup]

That was back when it started to firm up

[mighty zephyr]

The world largely looked the same

Just sometimes superstitions turned out to be true

[patent stirrup]

It was not just a sometimes thing, like we are talking about back when baba yaga was waling around openaly

[vast blaze]

Apparently Paradox just wasn't even a thing at this point

It's Backlash that was an issue

[high current]

yeah dark ages and earlier instead of paradox/reality backhanding you for doing obvious magic, the big thing was reality backhanding you for doing things wrong

quite literally just from failing the roll to cast a spell, you gained points of backlash (though technically it only happens on a botch)

[vast blaze]

Is dual wielding any good in M20?

I'm vaguely wanting to do a sword and staff build

[grave gulch]

Do Lamprey hosts thirst for blood?

I know they come from a blood dimension

[clear delta]

Yes

You pay them in blood when you make deals with them

@mighty zephyr

[mighty zephyr]

Yeah

They don't come from the blood dimension though

They make the boundary between worlds INTO the blood dimension

[clear delta]

Yeah

And want to connect the blood dimension to here

Needing to accumulate a lot of blood for that

[grave gulch]

thats neat

[dusky ledge]

Wanting some more perspectives to brainstorm ideas

So my Tremere neonate is currently planning to pursue a position as Primogen in Chicago. However, basically their entire coterie is Anarch (most of whom are fledglings at that). Right now, their loyalty to the Camarilla is primarily from a place of desiring security above anything else. The plan has always been for them to eventually go full Anarch. How can I gradually move them towards that position?

[high current]

meeting a member of house carna or ipsissimus would help, i imagine(as would finding an anarch chantry)

[dusky ledge]

Actually managed a Carna ally already! Erichtho, if you're familiar with v5 Chicago

And my neonate is already partial to that faction themselves

[red flower]

I have a question.
How are you supposed to roleplay in Vampire?

A bit of context.
My GM started with a session 0 with us all dying and being turned. The story continues directly after that point, so we are all brand new vampires.

4 Characters instantly went to the idea of killing and eating a person. The power of being a vampire and all that entails. Fantasies of revenge or just violence.
The other 3 (my character included) were a lot more hesitant or outright disgusted at the idea. The horror of what we now were and that our former moral lives were over.

Its now 2 sessions later, first was an introduction for the characters to vampire society, the second was us closing out affairs with our human lives.

So of the two reactions, what is most normal, and how would that change in the future?

[spice abyss]

Both reactions are normal.

[valid merlin]

You have seven players?

But yeah both of those are pretty common reactions

[clear delta]

Gonna be tense when people from both camps work together

[high current]

yeah that's kind of the core conflict of vampire, "I'm undead and eat people and have all this power hahaha!" vs "Oh no I'm a horrible monster who needs to be nice and make amends for the bad shit I do"

see: the Humanity tracker, which exists purely to keep track of where your character sits on this subject

[clear delta]

On that note, don't let them replace humanity with paths of enlightenment unless you trust them.
Not only are those alien value systems harder to roleplay, many players just use them as excuses to freely commit atrocities without care for roleplaying

Of course, you could just not uses the paths at all

[dusky ledge]

A big factor here is what edition you're playing v5 can't really handle the first approach, and is more explicitly focused on the horror of being a monster, whereas v20 and its paths of enlightenment can

Either way, this is something that should have been handled during session 0

[mighty zephyr]

I mean V5 can do the former

Killing doesn't cause Humanity loss unless you have a specific conviction that says you shouldn't

If you have "The Guilty Must Pay In Equal Measure" then you'd get Stains for not killing

[dusky ledge]

No, the v5 book pretty explicitly says that regardless of any tenets that cold-blooded murder should cause stains. Also, convictions can't give you stains, they exist to prevent them

You can strongarm v5 into it (Sabbat book has some suggestions iirc), but it's really not built to handle it

[mighty zephyr]

https://i.imgur.com/PnsDM3k.png

The only things that 100% give Stains regardless of Tenants or Convictions are Ghouling, Embracing, and Diablerising

[dusky ledge]

Huh... I could have sworn

Still, probably something to talk out with the ST. By now you should have established tenets and convictions, so make sure they're used

[red flower]

We are playing V2

But yes it was not established how we would be acting.
We established what topics not to brush on but beyond that the personal roleplaying of the characters was not discussed

[lethal idol]

“How would my character feel about killing” is pretty much the central idea of VtM

One of the tricky things about VtM — especially chronicles about new vampires — is that there will frequently be some level of ethical conflict about violence and killing

It’s not a good or a bad thing, just something that tends to come up

[orchid void]

No it’s a good thing it’s kind of the main theme of vampire

All of em

You have to hurt and kill and lie to survive

That worth it?

[grave gulch]

HUNTER THE PARENTING IS OUT GO GO GO GO

@mighty zephyr i salute you and the team behind it

Wrong emote

Omg i just cant english today

[grave gulch]

HOOOOOOOOLY

that was so friggin good

still i think there's still more to this

[frank atlas]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZqAydPy1Y40

[vast blaze]

Possibly a stupid question

Is it possible to play as a robot in any of the WoD or CoD splats/books/whatever

[velvet sparrow]

You can do a cyborg in Deviant...

Oh, probably in Promethean

I don't know the types of Prometheans off the top of my head but there's gotta be an artificial construct in there, right?

[vast blaze]

I believe there is, but Promethean is too "Become a Real Boy" for my tastes

I know there's Promethean communities that prefer remaining as they are but the entire point of that game is becoming a real boy and at that point I may as well play something else if I'm not going to pursue the objective

Anyway. Deviant might be worth looking into, yeah... something about a digitized consciousness or a high-tech golem powered by necromancy or some such.

[patent stirrup]

IWRC there is a splat book that lets you play Itteration X in Old Mage but they are the worse then the players faction (but not as bad as the rest)

[mighty zephyr]

Demon the Descent

is about playing a robot

[vast blaze]

Oh yeah it is, innit

Forgot that WoD's demons are fallen angel robot thingies

[dusky ledge]

I'm sorry what

[patent stirrup]

Well CoD's demons

[dusky ledge]

As someone very unaware of the greater WoD lore please enlighten me

[mighty zephyr]

Demon the Descent is a game about espionage against God

[patent stirrup]

So in Chonicals of Darkness, no Wold of darkness God is a Macheine and demosn are rouge servators of tha

That*

WoD demos are diferint and more clasical becosue chrisnity exiests

[mighty zephyr]

you are a malfunctioning robot-angel of the God-Machine (now a Demon) who must use pacts and wishes to steal bits of lives from mortals to build a Cover. You use this false patchwork life to sabotage the works of the God-Machine and try to work to salvation for you and every other Demon.

[dusky ledge]

On a different topic, I could use some advice on how to help another player in the v5 game I'm in

Very short summary of his character concept: mortal immigrant with Mafia ties gets Embraced into a mercenary Gangrel pack of Garou hunters. Has since escaped said pack, now lives in his mawla's house with his ghoul.

The current problem: he's frustrated that SPCs connected to his character have to be represented mechanically on his sheet in order to do anything. This is in spite of already having a 2 dot ally, mawla, and contact, plus a dot of influence with the Mafia (which has at least some presence in the city we're playing)

He also hasn't done much to rope those SPCs into the story, while I'm being WAY more proactive and I think he's starting to get bitter about it. Any ideas on how I can help enable him to engage with the game more? I'm trying to approach this from a place of helping instead of just bitching about him playing "wrong"

[mighty zephyr]

Are you taking him along and suggesting when his NPCs might be useful?

[dusky ledge]

As much as I can. We've only properly met the mawla, and just recently learned the ghoul existed. Both in and out of character we know next to nothing about what they can do

[mighty zephyr]

That's rough

[dusky ledge]

Our ST even kicked off a little quest involving some connections, and he didn't really do much with it. My Tremere ended up doing most of the heavy lifting

[mighty zephyr]

It's kinda hard to navigate "mediocre player that still wants to be the center of attention"

[dusky ledge]

That's very much what we're navigating, yeah

From what I know of this guy, he seems way more comfortable doing plain unstructured text RP, and doesn't enjoy his characters being limited

[mighty zephyr]

Well you can always let him know that like

Merit dots just mean "You can access this with an easier/no roll"

Regular rolls can still be used for "I know a guy"

[dusky ledge]

See then I foresee him getting upset about needing to roll for it

[clear delta]

Changeling the lost has manekin kith
You're a doll or mechanical.

[vast blaze]

That's promising too...

[clear delta]

I don't remember what it gets you in 2e

[olive idol]

Is picking up 2e Werewolf a good idea

From what I know of it, it's like spirit police?

[clear delta]

Like park rangers, plus really violent gardening

[grave gulch]

Werewolves are cool

I really wanna use one in my mage game

I want to capture how terrifying they can be tho

[high current]

you're running nMage aren't you?

other splats are immune to Lunacy, so you don't necessarily get the primal fear aspect out of it, but an uratha in gauru is still an absolute beast--and they get +2 Stamina to help withstand any physical spells directly affecting them

temporary gauru form lasts for (stamina+primal urge) turns, and the werewolf still has full control of themselves--after that, they either make a resolve+composure roll every turn to stay in that form or fall into death rage(you can choose to skip the roll and go straight to rage), at which point any attempts to influence their behavior takes a penalty of twice their primal urge, on top of supernatural tolerance(simply adding primal urge to a resistance roll)

in short, angry werewolves are hard to control, they go until everything that isn't also a raging werewolf is dead or else no longer a concern

(primal urge is to werewolves as gnosis is to mages)

[grave gulch]

scary

I love that

[high current]

nWerewolves are mostly concerned with protecting their pack/territory and keeping the balance between the spirit and the flesh

So if you've got a Thyrsus who makes a habit of abusing spirits or messing with the Shadow, or anybody in your group is likely to piss off a hippie commune or hacker collective or anything like that, that's a starting point

Hacker collective mainly for Iron Masters, the nWoof version of Glass Walkers

[open roost]

A couple of days ago i found this tutorial comic for changeling and i think its artstyle is just so endearing

I dont know who the original artist is sadly :(

[mighty zephyr]

I think so

Forsaken 2e is one of my faavorite RPGs

[clear delta]

Werewolf is very cool

[grave gulch]

Im gonna run werewolf for some peeps! It's a one shot but im gonna do werewolf the apocalypse for them

[grave gulch]

I wanna go apocalypse cause i think i can get a hang of the rules a bit more easily since i ran Hunter 5 before

[open roost]

Always play werewolf forever

[vast blaze]

Random thought

A WoD mage gets shunted to some traditional fantasy land with elves and dwarves and orcs and magic and what have you, how well do they fare

[short quiver]

probably pretty well
one of the biggest limiters in WoD is that everyone knows magic isn't real, so if they're shunted to a place where magic is real they're a lot freer to go wild

[vast blaze]

True

No Paradox to worry about when not only is magic accepted as a basic fact of life, it's a pervasive force that the entire world is teeming with

[acoustic plaza]

Probably realize that this is some sort of Faerie trickery and they need to beat the shit out of whatever ruler is on top so they can claim this place for whichever faction of the ascension war they are on

[vast blaze]

Wonder how a Mage's magic would interact with fantasyland's magic...

[acoustic plaza]

Walloping

Mage magic is based on alterations to the natural laws on the molecular level

Meanwhile fantasy magic is much closer to linear magic/sorcery than it is True Magick

[vast blaze]

True

[acoustic plaza]

Also wait

[vast blaze]

...Jesus, imagine a WoD mage in the Forgotten Realms or Golarion, where like 90% of all casters can only spellsling a handful of times a day before needing to take a nap

[acoustic plaza]

How aren’t vampires, werewolves and other night-crawlers paradoxed out of time?

[acoustic plaza]

Vancian Magic’s biggest limitation is very much based on a small number of powers that are usable

[vast blaze]

Handwavium

[acoustic plaza]

Gotcha

[vast blaze]

Yeah that's honestly been my biggest issue with Vancian casting, is that it emphasizes magic as this like, rare and potent resource you should only ever get to use a handful of times rather than a more dynamic system

[acoustic plaza]

I think it works per setting

[vast blaze]

It works in the setting, but gameplay wise it just feels

Very eh

[acoustic plaza]

Definitely not in the generic fantasyland settings that PF and modern DnD are going for

But if works much better in more classic fantasy stuff

Also vancian magic in its modern sense, to me at least, feels more in line with clerics than magi

My settings tend to be “sorcerers can cast as much magic as they want, but that doesn’t making them free from consequence”

[short quiver]

So, the Mage explanation is "the different supernaturals are their own kind of Awakened-ish Avatar, which lets them function in accordance with their own quaint little paradigms cosmologies, tragically ignorant of the actual nature of consensus reality"
while from the other gamelines' PoV the answer is "because we make things work with our own terms and aren't declaring the Mage point of view as having veto power over another gameline"

[acoustic plaza]

Makes sense

[spice abyss]

looks at gods in Pathfinder Hubris kills them.

[mighty zephyr]

Mages are the only things affected by Paradox

[short quiver]

the various WoD lines have always been kind of fuzzy on crossover, where the books would be written on the assumption that all the varied PC types were coexisting and could interact but also were written with assumptions of functionally contradictory cosmology between lines
usually every gameline had in-cosmology explanation for all the others ("vampires are wyrmspawn," "mages are playing with God's power of creation") but with the "real" answer being somewhere between "every game is written assuming its own cosmology is accurate" and "it's a spoo~ooky mystery!"

The closest we ever got to a difinitive answer was "the prehistory of the World of Darkness is Exalted's Creation" and that was a thing for all of like a week.

(But Mage was, and I say this as someone who loves Mage, always kind of the worst in terms of "my answer is the real answer and everyone else is wrong and dumb")

[mighty zephyr]

Mage and Demon are the worst

In this regard

[short quiver]

Oh yeah, Demon is close, your PC was literally there for it
although it did write in the whole "before the Fall mutually contradictory things were simultaneously true in ways that are impossible to explain now" and "you've seen all of time and existence but also you're a fundamentally broken and traumatized transcendent being trying to process those memories with a squishy meat-brain" stuff to give it some flexibility

Mage tried to get some of that flexibility with the whole "everything is true" postmodern paradigm stuff but in practice that kind of wound up being in practice "only we are right about the specifics of how everything is true"

[acoustic plaza]

I actually don’t like this specifically because it leads into the Kue-jin being real

Speaking of licks

Do all nos have to look like orlock?

[short quiver]

No, it's kind of the classic but they change it up sometimes.

[acoustic plaza]

Gotcha

I really like this HTP design and I will not except naysayers

(She prebbity)

[short quiver]

& yeah, that...
yeah

[acoustic plaza]

The kuejin aren’t real The kuejin aren’t real The kuejin aren’t real The kuejin aren’t real The kuejin aren’t real The kuejin aren’t real

[short quiver]

I'm not trying to defend it but I really need to understand just what level of "ambient weeb" you had going around in the WoD-adjascent culture at the time

[acoustic plaza]

My retcon is “the kuejin are just a term used by clueless hunters from before in the day, and are just normal vampire bloodlines”

[vast blaze]

Monster lovers ate GOOD with that episode

[radiant marsh]

Sludge Lad!

[mighty zephyr]

No in V5 they can just be normal looking

[acoustic plaza]

Oh booo

I like my fucked up guys

[mighty zephyr]

They can also be fucked up

They can just also be normal looking but reviled

[acoustic plaza]

Ah so just an Aura of Bad Vibes™️

[dusky ledge]

Wait I thought they all had to be hideously deformed?

Not necessarily like Orlock, but visibly repulsive in some way

And that the Embrace was an extra long, extra painful process for them because of that physical transformation

[mighty zephyr]

https://i.imgur.com/1ckZu6i.png

[dusky ledge]

So, they are deformed then?

[vast blaze]

I certainly wouldn't call this not deformed

And this is the tamest I found, most nosferatu are absolute Creechurs

[vast blaze]

...actually that isn't really deformed, on a second pass, it's just the ears and teeth

[dusky ledge]

But again, tame as possible

My game's Nos is similarly Not That Bad. Black sclera, and some real nasty scarring primarily around the mouth is the worst of it for him

But it still fits the "enough to put off most people, not enough to be obviously supernatural" qualifier

[vast blaze]

Makes sense

[radiant marsh]

So V5 sort of takes the VtR route with them?

Because VtR Nos can be hideous, but they can also be like, normal-looking or even attractive, but always have something off-putting or uncanny-valley about them

[dusky ledge]

I don't think so

[clear delta]

Yeah. Vtr nosferatu can have a creepy shadow, a smell of death

[acoustic plaza]

Wait fuck

Nos are just incels

[clear delta]

Not really

[dusky ledge]

Some definitely are though

It's not uncommon for them to deliberately embrace beautiful people out of jealousy

[grave gulch]

[orchid void]

What is a vampire but the scourge of g-d upon man?

What could their sun be, but vanity

[grave gulch]

trying to figure out what a werewolf mechanic would have for skills and stats any suggestions? what else would they have?

[radiant marsh]

Academics, Technology, Science

Really anything you want, but those seem suited to a technical character

Awareness and Investigation, probably (spotting problems)

[grave gulch]

true

[acoustic plaza]

Werewolf is just the Unabomber but Furries

[short quiver]

(Subterfuge ("oh yeah, turns out the whole thing needed to be replaced, that'll be another $3K" (not that i'm bitter)))

[lethal idol]

IIRC Academics is more literature, history, etc but I agree that Science & Technology could both fit

[vast blaze]

Athletics would make sense for a mechanic

Assuming they's a like, car mechanic or something that does a lot of heavy lifting

[turbid ferry]

does this thread account for chronicles of darkness stuff too? i couldn't find anything else

[grave gulch]

yes!

[grave gulch]

true....i didnt think of that

[turbid ferry]

yipppeee

[barren vortex]

chronicling darkness in here

[vast blaze]

She Chronicle on my Darkness til I

[turbid ferry]

holy shit it's mage oomf

[barren vortex]

surprise bees character

[orchid void]

yeah chronicles is wod

they renamed it

to chronicles

but it used to be a wod

so it goes here

also hiiiiiiiii

[vast blaze]

World of Darkness 2: The Chronicling

[dusky ledge]

Update on this situation:

Talked to him a bit, got more info. I think it's mostly stemming from a fundamental misunderstanding of what the game is about, and not actually reading even the core book. One example he cited is our ST shutting down his neonate from taking the "living in the past" flaw. Y'know, the one that explicitly says only ancillae and older can take it. On the same page. And somehow being supposedly very good with computers with no narrative justification. I digress

Anyway he also seems upset about the idea of flaws at all, which is why I say I think there's a fundamental misunderstanding.

[clear delta]

Moros legacy
[Name pending]
A history of sorrow stains a house. A badly maintained device fails and breaks. These alchemists do not neglect how objects accumulate history, and take up their tools to polish the spiritual
Order: adamantine arrow, silver ladder
Ruling arcana: Spirit. Optional: death, matter
Theory: the ephemeral is no mere byproduct, showing how the past is carried by all, and how trauma and pain may echo forward.
Oblations: maintenace and cleaning, hours reforming a building, repairs, cataloguing history of something, measuring the state of something
Yantra: tools of maintenance, blueprints, history, specs of a device

@mighty zephyr @grave gulch
So the idea is like. They could deal with haunted buildings. But you can go for someone managing a facility's systems, a sewer worker, someone into sustainable towns

I'm surprised no canonical legacy like this exists

Death optionals would be more proeminent, but matter is such a good thematic fit. They'd at least have a lot of good rotes for maintenance

[chilly vault]

I like Requieum Nosferatu better where they're not necessarily ugly but they are extremely offputting in one way or another

[grave gulch]

i like

[grave gulch]

I have a nosferatu npc on hold who looks like a big porcelain doll

[clear delta]

Idea got kinda picked apart in the onyx path server

You can use it, but it kinda similar to lords of the inanimate

[grave gulch]

[clear delta]

So I'll probably work it into being a Lords variant or create a more ephemeral focused legacy

I'll see what I can transfer here

So one way is a variant of the lord of inanimate. They'd treat spirits as another aspect of perfecting tools and places, and their subordinates in alchemy
Another is moros who want to polish and purify the ephemeral, helping ghosts move on and cleaning resonance

[orchid void]

Hi everyone has to look at my Forsaken, Miss McCoy

[clear delta]

She looks cool and fun

[patent talon]

Fuck yeah

[orchid void]

luna's favorite caililth (she would be a slasher by now if not for luna)

we love when the screaming moon bares its soul to you, and makes you its daughter

[grave gulch]

there's bears on the moon?

[orchid void]

she also lost her pack to an idagim so she's FINE she's NORMAL she's DOING GREAT

[orchid void]

thank u dear my brain was parsing it as good bc bearer as a word i love englissssh

[grave gulch]

i actually thought u were talking about moon bears

i was just making a lil joke

there's a kind of bear called "moon bear"

they look funny

i hope delilah saw the bear

[orchid void]

i did

[grave gulch]

i hope i didnt offend you btw

[orchid void]

its all goood

[clear delta]

So how useful are each mortal merit for dealing with spirits or ghosts?

[clear delta]

Like medium, camera obscura, the exorcism merit, the one about being haunted after a traumatic event

[orchid void]

i feel like

they're probably pretty good for dealing with ghosts as presented in the bluebook

since bluebook reallyyy leans in on the horror vibes when you start getting supernatural

[clear delta]

Ah good. Do you like all of them?

[orchid void]

i like camera obscura but that's bc its such a classic

A lot of it has to do with. idk useful feels like the wrong metric

does this make the kind of scene i want to happen, happen is more the question i usually ask about merits

why is contacts there? because in many ways the core of wod's narrative-mechanics is noir and detective stories and my character should have a scene where they badger a guy they know for rumours about weird shit happening that leads them to the monster

why am i taking camera obscura? because i want to use an ancient camera to take pictures of ghosts, we're playing Mortals/Bluebook, this is a Ghost Story

[clear delta]

Cool.

Was wondering how mechanically and narratively fun each one could be

The one where you're haunted by a spirit attracted by a traumatic event sounds rather cool

[clear delta]

@orchid void so over at onyx path discord we were talking about how each mage might grasp tgeir path lessons better but have bigger challenges with them, and thyrsus hit a snag

Now that I think on it, being a moros might mean a respect for death, but also means you know keenly how finite what you truly care about is
Which might inspire worry abd desperation if you can't handle it

• Acanthus will see the momentum of future and imposed choices bearing down on them, as well as consequences of their own actions. They might let themselves be cowed, or try to avoid responsibility and blame other forces

• Mastigos will have limits they fear to break, matters they fear to face. They see all they and others feel, all connections, so they know and fear what they poke

Based on someone describing obrimos as finding the hole where god should be

So maybe they obsess with an idea of what fills the role, blinding themselves to further truths when tgey fail

@grave gulch

[grave gulch]

Hi

[clear delta]

Just seeing if you have thoughts on this

I think voy is asleep, so better not ping

[clear delta]

@mighty zephyr

[grave gulch]

@clear delta i dont have much to say i`m sorry

i think that's some cool things to point out about the paths tho

[clear delta]

Is fine

You don't gotta apologize

[grave gulch]

[candid shadow]

I may be playing a Hunter game soon!

Which means I’ll actually be able to play my mafia cleaner character idea

An old school mafia cleaner who recently found out his boss was a vamp, murdered them, and then skipped town to run away

Not even for killing a vamp but just for killing a mafia boss

[candid shadow]

Hmm, y’all think push a large book shelf over them and then beat them to death with a hammer is a good first hunter kill?

[orchid void]

Staked for the sun seems the most effective

[candid shadow]

I mean yah but I was kinda thinking of this as like, a spontaneous unplanned thing

I’m just wondering what’s reasonable for someone who was unaware of the supernatural until then to kill a very high generation vampire

(High as in like, generation 14-15)

Thin blood levels

[dusky ledge]

Presented without (in-universe) context:

I was infodumping about my chronicle to my manager at work, and they got so immediately invested that they made this

[clear delta]

So death by nuclear reactor failure is key of misfortune or key of sickness
What could be a good name such a geist
Decaying Haze maybe

[midnight grotto]

that sounds like an enviable manager/managee relationship

[vast blaze]

Key of Misfortune I say

Given how stringent nuke reactors are these days you'd have to be several degrees of unlucky to die to one

[clear delta]

True. Multiple keys fit a death, so I was listing the two possibilities that came to mind

Could also go for pyre flame, if you take the radiation directly and get burned

[candid shadow]

So I know the baseline assumption with hunters is no longer imbued

But are imbued a thing at all in H5?

[dusky ledge]

It's great, they're super cool

I remember during my interview when we first saw each other there was just a mutual look of "oh I'm gonna like you"

Autists gotta stick together

[clear delta]

On that thing from the other day
Think that thyrsus' problem could be realizing how alien and horrific the world is. They are equipped to see how predatory the shadow is, how brutal nature is, more than others
So they are probably challenged by reconciling their humanity with the world's song

@grave gulch

[grave gulch]

[clear delta]

Also, an user on onyx path discord commented a thyrsus can see in detail people's health and how spirits influence humans

Lots of events could be set up by them

[dusky ledge]

Oops my neonate just got a threatening letter from their presumed-dead sire

[candid shadow]

Just a reminder, you need to do a lot more then just believe in a religion for true faith right?

[velvet sparrow]

Depends on how you define "believe" I guess

[radiant marsh]

You can go to church every sunday for your entire life and not have True Faith

[patent stirrup]

The big thing is in the name, you need to belive and have faith in a vary total way to have true faith

[candid shadow]

Yah that’s what I thought

[dusky ledge]

True Faith always makes me think of whatever bible verse about the mustard seed and moving mountains

True Faith, the way I read it, means more than belief. It means being unshakeable. Not just because you're sure of yourself, but of your certainty that existence itself stands with you. It's exceedingly rare, and so hard to understand for those who lack it

[patent stirrup]

It's depending on the source book at least the most common for of ""supernatural"" power a mortal an have, but also a mortal with 1 dot of true faith dose wont be ablet to do to much that flashy,

[patent stirrup]

That and less then 5 dots dose not get you that much like being able to keep a vampire out if a holy site with a faith roll posesd by the vapire's willpower wich puts the roll at a toss up if they are ate the same rough level

But like once you get seven dots of faith acordingto the book we have handy you can bless a holy item to always do damage to the supernatural

[candid shadow]

Actually I wanna ask, I know hunters are very ignorant of their prey

But how knowledgeable of supernaturals are other supernaturals?

Like how much of the garou does your average vampire know?

And vice versa?

[turbid ferry]

my wod lore is a lil rusty but iirc most of them are pretty insular or outright on-sight type hostile and don't know much about the other

[candid shadow]

Ah, alright

[turbid ferry]

vampires know stuff like "werewolf live jn woods do not fight them" and werewolves know shit like "vampires stink of the wyrm, kill them"

mages probably know the most cause of the whole thing where they shot a vampire with the orbital sunlight cannon

[patent stirrup]

And Trameir knows a lot about the order of hermies becosue they used to be part of them

[candid shadow]

What’s that?

[clear delta]

Tremere

[turbid ferry]

yea true

[candid shadow]

I meant the order of Hermes

[patent stirrup]

They are one of the 13 traditions, the PPC mage factions

PC*

[clear delta]

Samuel Haight knows about everyone but is now an ashtray

[candid shadow]

Ah ok

[turbid ferry]

of course the tremere guard all their knowledge very jealously so that does not translate other vampires knowing much at all

[candid shadow]

Damn tremere

[patent stirrup]

The OoH used to also be who the Tremere were part of when they were full on mortal mages and not blood socerers

[clear delta]

Wraths might know about supernaturals? Lots must be victims of them

[turbid ferry]

it doesn'tt even translate to all tremere knowing! they hide their knowledge from each other too

[clear delta]

Also they can snoop on supernaturals who have no ghost powers, hate the Giovanni vampires for enslaving them

But all in all, think most of them know little of the other supernaturals

[patent stirrup]

Yeah Other then groups like the Archnium (who the OoH dose recrute acolites from) and changlings for the most part a lot of the spolts stay out of each others terf and ignore each other

[mighty zephyr]

The Order of Hermes also thinks "fairies" are as bad as undead

The Mages also didn't actually kill the Raavnos ante

[turbid ferry]

don't remember if it's like outright stated anywhere but since the technocracy has a vested interest in keeping the public unaware of the supernatural and magic gives them the means they probably have the most collected knowledge about other supernatural things

[mighty zephyr]

they did it on accideent by clearing the cloud cover the 3 Kuei-Jin Boddhisaatvas had created to kung fu it for 3 days

[patent stirrup]

TBF Redcaps eat humans only slightly less often then vamps do

Kuei-Jin were remvoed from canonn IWRC

[clear delta]

No more baby killing for enlightenment

[clear delta]

House of Ariadne is perfect for playing Disco Elysium in mage

[high current]

The spirit nuke killed the bodhisattvas, the sun laser killed Zapathasura, I thought?

[red flower]

Going to fight a Hunter tonight.

Man with Baseball Bat vs Batman with Baseball Bat (gangrel) in an alley way alone.

Either I win or I get my shit kicked in with no in between.

[vast blaze]

Good luck, bring pocket sand

[turbid ferry]

i think the gangrel wins this one

[grave gulch]

me too, but hey maybe the hunter has a trick

[turbid ferry]

yes the hunter in this scenario has to be either insanely stupid or crazy smart with no in between

[clear delta]

Social moros. Spirit death
Actions improved by teamwork
1- Understand resonance, spirit dynamics. Understand ghosts, and memoria seeped in objects
2- ephemeral shield, make presence unremarkable
3- Summon spirit/ghost, create open condition. Bolster/create resonance?
4- Banishment. May use honorary rank against death beings
5 - Purification. Big ritual. Shape spirit, may remove concepts, even cure magaths. Ghosts experience remembrance, can resolve an anchor or pass on

[velvet sparrow]

Hunter could be Imbued, or have True Faith, or have a buddy with a shotgun hiding behind the dumpster ready to shoot the Gangrel the second they turn their back

[clear delta]

Also, first attainment
I think I'll make it feel like small insights you get, specially as you interact with the community.
Oblations are community work, reforming something, people watching
Yantra: handiwork, agreements, collective plans, teamwork
Yeah bit dubious on yantras.

[clear delta]

@grave gulch @mighty zephyr @orchid void thing I made

[mighty zephyr]

Looks neat

[clear delta]

Thanks

[clear delta]

Ah, forgot the initiation proccess

[grave gulch]

I like

[clear delta]

Gotta make the name yet

Also someone suggested cerimonial/religious clothes for yantras

Also I think negotiation tables are neat yantras

[candid shadow]

Ok I need to know

Could I reasonably in a hunter the reckoning game

Justify ghosts possessing animatronics?

[valid merlin]

yes

[candid shadow]

Perfect

[valid merlin]

just prepare for all the FNAF jokes

[candid shadow]

Oh

Trust me

That’s the plan

[valid merlin]

I figured 😛

@heady kestrel
keeps half joking that you could do William Afton as a villain in pretty much every CofD game

[candid shadow]

Fazbear Entertainment is also a company that could easily be the villain of a werewolf game

With how they keep refusing to profit off child murders and ghosts

[patent stirrup]

Fazbear Entertainment would be for a pentax front preaty tame TBH

[heady kestrel]

William Afton in every Chronicles splat as an antagonist

Vampire: Serial Killers make humans skittish, skittish humans are bad for people who have to eat people to survive
Werewolf: Afton is literally doing the child murder to farm suffering, the ghosts in fnaf could just as easily be extremly loud ecosystem disrupting spirits as actual ghosts
Mage: Mages are always looking for some sort of bullshit to stare at for far longer than possibly comfortable, Afton and his weird ghost necromancy stuff would be a great mystery for a Moros/Someone interested in Death as an arcana
Hunter: HE KILLS PEOPLE. Could probably play him as a Slasher with ghost backup
Deviant: William would be like, normal, inside the the web of pain, @hybrid dock joked that Circus baby would be a great Deviant charecter
Promethean: Similar reasons actually, just make him an alchemist/demiurge and make Agony weird Pyros or something.
Changeling: So there are two routes here, normal Afton is the sort of abusive fuck that would just make Changelings mad that he exists. Get Him. Get His Ass. OR you could have like, an Afton flavored Gentry who leans into the idea of Afton as a trusted adult abusing his power to take advantage of kids, Spring Bonnie Gentry. Ballpit or something
Geist: ... Do I Even Have To Explain This One? Like? This is just a normal geist villan, the only wild part is the sci fi supertech
Mummy: I dunno he's screwing with the borders of life and death, maybe he pissed off the judges.
Beast: He is an infamous serial killer with a very solid personal aesthetic, he makes for a perfect annoying apex predator who's aesthetics start to leak into your lair until you deal with him.
Demon: Somehow what he is doing is part of god machine infastructure. Maybe he's a psychopomp exile or something

[candid shadow]

Jesus Christ he actually does work in every single one

[heady kestrel]

Psychopomp exiles are great

what if theere was a guy making GM infastructure for fun

[vast blaze]

https://tenor.com/view/five-nights-at-freddys-five-night-freddy-freddy-gif-23631661

[hybrid dock]

oh thanks for pinging me here
i was right

[clear delta]

Should rotes based on fear only use intimidate, or are empathy and socialize valid too?

Persuasion instead of socialize

[grave gulch]

@clear delta is every host bad?

Like theres a bunch of hosts in werewolf in forsaken

Are they always bad?

[heady kestrel]

iirc crow hosts aren't that bad

[grave gulch]

what do they do?

[heady kestrel]

I wass just going off this one the wiki

[radiant marsh]

I love the Halaku

They're a great way to mess with players' heads.

Given their whole schtick is observers.

So you can definitely foreshadow something major happening by having a bunch of them show up

[short quiver]

For a definition of "not that bad" which includes "pecks people's eyeballs out stare out of their sockets whilst controlling the dead person like a marionette"

[heady kestrel]

we all have our flaws

[mighty zephyr]

Hosts are bad until they gain enough sentience to get free will

Unfortunately by the time they do so, they're almost a God in flesh and their divine momentum stops them from ever being able to be any semblance of normal or good

[radiant marsh]

They're 'not that bad' in the sense that they're not causing horrific spiritual damage/widespread suffering by their very presence.

Yeah it sucks to be the guy who gets his eyes pecked out, but they're not like chewing holes in the Gauntlet to let a bunch of plague spirits through, or actively feeding on human fear and terror, and the like.

[grave gulch]

i`ll say

werewolves are always dealing with weird stuff

both in forsaken and apocalypse

[short quiver]

yeah
I feel like Werewolf might, all things considered, be the gameline (in both Ws oD) that's furthest from the basic horror concept that inspired them

there's probably competition but still

[clear delta]

Werewolf is ultra violence against super monsters

To quote voy

JOIN THE LEGIONS OF THE MOON AS BLADES OF SILVER ILLUMINATE THE NIGHT SKY
PARA-DROP ONTO A WHALE THE SIZE OF NEW HAMPSHIRE
A WRITHING GOD DESCENDS FROM ON HIGH, IT BELLOWS IT'S SWAN SONG WITH THE CHOIR OF A MILLION EMPTY VOICES
RIP IT'S HEART FROM IT

[short quiver]

(I mean, it's a lot of things, but yes)

At least in part, I think, because the basic werewolf story of the 20th century ("you're Bit, now you're Some Dude for most of the month but then you need to work out how to not murder your family") is an effective horror scenario but a bit thin for a whole game line.

& you want to not make this "Furry Vampire" so you want to pivot a bit

although "werewolves with a holy duty to fight the forces of Hell" was a thing

[clear delta]

Geist is horror but hopeful

[short quiver]

yeah, I think a good few of the ChrOD books tried to ease up the "there is no hope & everything sucks forever" angle you got in more of the oWoD books

[clear delta]

Mage there is some hope, but taking down the exarchs is mega far off

Promethean is just about a personal goal you can achieve
Though zeky (sing zeka) have ambiguous hope
And pandorans have no hope

[tough pebble]

My experience with werewolf myths is surface level but to my knowledge, yeah, werewolves (or more broadly people who turn into wolves) was a lot of things over time. The modern concept of a werewolf is very recently codified.

Vampires also, but maybe not to quite the same extent.

[clear delta]

Vampires are just fucked, no hope

[tough pebble]

(turns out werewolves are a bit like dragons: the same word for a lot of vaguely similar myths)

[clear delta]

Demons can achieve the lives they want, but must eternally struggle to protect them

[turbid ferry]

does CoD still have golconda

[clear delta]

Mummies can end up rather well, in spite of their awful situation. They can free themselves and be immortal for a long time, building relics to leave for the future

[clear delta]

No

[short quiver]

Vampires, in terms of the modern understanding, can be directly traced back to John Polidori's The Vampyre (1819), which was started as part of the same slumber party that gave us Frankenstein: the Modern Prometheus, meaning that two of the most influential stories in the English language are fundamentally about how much Lord Byron's friends hate him.

[turbid ferry]

good

[short quiver]

Modern werewolves can really be traced back to The Wolf Man (1941)

[clear delta]

Don't like it?

[turbid ferry]

i think vampires should suffer (affectionate)

[tough pebble]

and this is why any horror monster is worth giving a twist or a stunning change.

life is too short to limit the boundaries of your ideas to something so recent

[clear delta]

Yeah

[short quiver]

Now, in both cases there are literally thousands of years of folklore of vaguely similar concepts that people have gleefully pilfered to change up adaptations, but those are the "codifers" for the concept in both cases.

[clear delta]

Requiem made "vampire" be like crab
Something life drinking creatures keep doing convergent evolution

[tough pebble]

Besides, being Nature's Supersoldier on a Mission From Gaia is a super hardcore idea

[short quiver]

oh yeah it is dope
just thinking about how it's maybe the most completely original, without being something adapted from the inspirational material.

(or maybe extrapolated; "gangster politics with fangs" isn't really a major feature pre-VtM vampire media, but it's a pretty reasonable inference from the starting point if "vampire society" is more than "Dracula and his three girlfriends, and yes they suck blood")

[tough pebble]

again, like dragons

convergent evolution of giant powerful scaled animal mish-mash with vaguely magic

(I once made this joke in a short fiction I once wrote: carcinogenesis but for dragons, dragons just keep on independently evolving on entirely different worlds)

[clear delta]

There is a dragon fan made game

[tough pebble]

And Forsaken is.... Gang warfare tropes, I think.

[clear delta]

Enthusiastic gangster gardening

Spirits and humans are the plants

[tough pebble]

I mean the thing I vaguely recall behind the renown mechanic is that its written into your spirit-half as a kind of magic tattoo

And then you show it off to other uratha so they know not to mess with you

And then the general interaction between uratha is small-scale petty territory fights

I'm probably half-remembering it wrong from looking at the lore years ago, though

[clear delta]

I know. Just including the fact you tune the spirit and flesh to your tastes

Like say you want your territory to benefit arts or sciences

You start manipulating things to get the right resonance

[tough pebble]

I love determinative abstract animism mechanics

[short quiver]

It's a good parallel. Fundamentally, a gangster tagging a wall and a wolf pissing on a tree are making the same statement

But then, yeah, there's the whole spirit aspect of Werewolf, which is awesome, but not that I'm aware of really part of any previous lore
Maybe some of that "werewolves vs the forces of hell" folklore mixed with 90s New Age

[high current]

*the Ordo Dracul disagrees with this, in theory

iirc VtR has no 'you can become human again' but the Ordo gives you access to a set of disciplines that let you overcome/ignore various banes that go along with being a vampire, although its all temporary and there is no getting around the need for blood

[clear delta]

Also advanced ordo powers may require inhumane experiments and atrocities

[short quiver]

incidentally, also like dragons
"vampire" is a category of fictional creature that people can generally recognize, based on many different traits or characteristics
(almost?) none of which is individually required for something to be recognizably a "vampire."

[clear delta]

Tbh, the dragon fangame didn't interest me much
But it's funny you can drink fuel

[short quiver]

oh yeah, I just mean that, like
"A dragon is a giant, scaly, winged monster that breathes fire."
"Also it might breathe something other than fire. Or not."
"Also it might not have wings."
"Also it might not have scales."
"Also it might not be giant."

just making the connection that there are a whole list of things that define "vampire" in a similar way, and if you remove all of them you probably don't have a vampire but you can take any single one away and still have a vampire.

[clear delta]

Oh not disagreeing

Just got reminded

Think I'm just not as much of a dragon fan anymore?

Guys, tell me what you think of the fangames?

[short quiver]

haven't played any

read Genius a while ago, though, and thought it was a really cool concept/mechanical game

A good bit of thematic overlap with Mage but enough going on to really be its own thing

[high current]

Genius is legitimately just someone being buttmad about nMage having a specific paradigm that isn't as inclusive for techno magic/enlightened science stuff

Also "convergent evolution" is legitimately the explanation for vampires in VtR

To the point that iirc the Night Horrors books for VtR have a lot of implied "this could at some point end up becoming a new Clan/Bloodline"

[mighty zephyr]

The guy who wrote Genius also wrote Book of Hungry Names

[clear delta]

What is that?

[mighty zephyr]

W5 text-based CYOA

Insanely good

[short quiver]

also, I never watched enough magical girl to really give an opinion but I know some people with very high praise for Princess

[short quiver]

& hey, if you were into the MAD SCIENCE aspects of M:tAs, I feel like it's fair to spin out that aspect into its own game
I love Awakening but it is a much more direct (single paradigm) Mage game than Ascension's high-concept paradigm stuff

[fair tapir]

I can't believe I never put together that my interest in Mage was the same as my interest in mad science (even though I read Genius before, uh, any other WoD content)

[short quiver]

yeah, which is
There's not really a difference between "mad scientist" and "wizard," in a real sense, except in terms of some external stuff about definitions and, well, paradigms

(which starts to get into questions like "is 'supernatural' a coherent concept in a scenario where 'the supernatural' exists")

[fair tapir]

So here's a totally non-controversial question: which edition of Mage is the best one, if I wanted to read one?

[spice abyss]

I have a personal distaste for Ascension.

So my answer has to be Awakening 2e

[short quiver]

I don't have the same hate for Ascension, but I'd still say Awakening 2.
Awakening and Ascension share some terms, concepts, and mechanics but they're very different concepts. In Ascension, magick works because you know magick works; all worldviews are true and the consensus of human belief shapes the nature of existence.
In Awakening, you are a wizard who knows how to do magic.

(There is more too it than that, the thing that distinguishes the Awakened from someone who bought a few supernatural Merits is attunement to the Higher Truth beyond the world, but it's still a much more straightforward Occultists At Large than Awakening, where global finance, mad science, and Hermetic ritual are all equally magick)

& between editions Awakening 2 is just better.

more consistent and workable magic system without the arbitrary swings for balance reasons, systematizing stuff like Mage Armor which used to be a different effect for every Arcana that just happened to work similarly, a real fun take on Paradox where you decide how much to risk and whether to suck up the consequences personally or dump Should Not Be into the surrounding environment
collecting all the cool Awakening lore and worldbuilding concepts into the body of the corebook instead of shuffling them into the back appendix and talking about ATLANTIS ATLANTIS ATLANTIS for so goddamn much of the setting description
just big improvement all around

[rotund lynx]

i was drafted for a werewolf game

theurge silver fang

party leader and kooky witch lady

[heady kestrel]

I really like awakening 2 too
Its not quite like, brainrot levels, but it reminds me of talking about esoteric christian lore with my friends at lunch

[radiant marsh]

TBF, I do like the whole 'fallen world, lost civilization' angle. But I will admit that 2e did it a hell of a lot better and more interestingly.

(Not least of which because if you look into the RL 'lore' about a lot of this sort of thing, it very quickly becomes hella sus.)

Or: It turns out all the 'lost super-civilization' conspiracy stuff is universally White Supremacists making up shit for White Supremacist reasons

But like the whole 2e conceit of "It doesn't exist. There is literally no way it could exist given physics and history, and yet here it is, because it's as much a Supernal Concept as it is a physical ruin" is just cool.

[short quiver]

Yeah
and given what we know from Imperial Mysteries, it actually makes perfect sense

Atlantis never existed, because after it fell, it had never existed. But you can still find some pieces of never-was in the world that exists.

[radiant marsh]

It can't have existed without the Supernal, and since the Fallen World is cut off from the Supernal, it therefore can't have existed.

And it explicitly being called 'Atlantis' specifically because the Diamond are exactly the sort of pretentious old-school intellectuals who think that Plato was the most enlightened person to ever exist.

[short quiver]

very much like the whole shift from "the Diamond Orders are the unbroken tradition since the days of Atlantis" to "the Diamond Orders are organizations of Magi whose structures can be traced back an intermixture of Greek and Indian Awakened. They also hold themselves to be expressions of an unbroken tradition reaching back to Atlantis (which, again, never existed)"

perhaps unsurprisingly on this server, though, I'm Free Council for life.

[heady kestrel]

I’m a really big fan of the silver ladder

They are like, kinda what I came to mage for honestly

Champagne Socialist, Hubristic, “Cultists Of Human Divinity”

[short quiver]

yeah, I kinda dig all five.
(Mysterium least, honestly? "they're the Mage Mages" ok i guess)

[orchid void]

LETS GO MYSTERY CULTS I LOVE THE GUARDIANS OF THE VEIL

[radiant marsh]

I honestly like the Mysterium

Because, let's be honest here

"Hubris? What hubris? I don't have time to look before leaping when pursuing KNOWLEDGE!" is a whole vibe

(I know the real history/science isn't exactly this, but example)

The Mysterium are the equivalent of a physicist working on the A-bomb who determined there was a chance that it would incinerate the atmosphere of the planet, and went for it anyway.

[short quiver]

incidentally, I do think it's kind of funny that the FC are often seen as the hippy quirky human rights Mages
but when it comes to the Seers, the Ladder is like "their work is the antithesis of everything we've hoped to achieve, but we're rebuilding the Awakened into one Nation--including the Seers of the Throne"
the Arrow is like "our cause and theirs must be at odds. There are times that these conflicts may drive us to the point that the causes and struggle that define us leaves no choice but to take their life, and live with the consequences for ourselves and the world."
Guardians have their spy-vs-spy and "when there is no other option, when the greatest good calls for it, we will take the sin of this deed on our own head to spare that of others"

& then the FC is going "I find it best to think of it as Seers of the Throne who aren't on fire yet"

[radiant marsh]

The FC are the Modern Political Ideology Mages

Like the Carthians are the Modern Political Ideology Vampires

Except FC vs Seers does away with all the lovey-dovey liberalism and goes full Bash the Fash

[short quiver]

I just find it very funny that the "life is struggle" warrior-monks and the self-hating sin-eater mystery cult are both all "at times, in the service of Truth and necessity, our struggle with the Seers may force us to this extremity" & then you have "Truth is sought by freedom, human effort is magical, death to every servant of the Pyramid"

[radiant marsh]

TBF

'Truth is sought by freedom, human effort is magical' is diametrically opposed to everything the Seers stand for

[short quiver]

tru, tru

[fair tapir]

very belated (I was asleep), but thanks for the insight, folks. Sounds like Awakening goes on my reading list

[mighty zephyr]

Adamantine Arrow my beloved...

[turbid ferry]

im playing one rn. lemme fight em. lemme fight seers.

[grave gulch]

fight em Ashley

kick their butts!

[turbid ferry]

born to cast
world is a lie
kill em all 2024
i am adamantine arrow
410,757,864,520 dead seers

[midnight grotto]

It is worth saying that while Awakening hinges on a single paradigm, it's entirely possible to make a mad scientist or finance guru whose spellcasting, while built on the same foundation as anyone else, leans into the symbology and methods of their personal belief system.

[spice abyss]

There's one Truth, but you can take multiple approaches to that truth!

[midnight grotto]

Also the Truth is too big for the book itself to really nail down. There's a lot of room for the other guy to be right

I may be a little unfair here but I think Ascension tries to hold your hand and say "your fringe beliefs are true because all beliefs are true, really, and you just have to navigate the Marketplace of Ideas." Awakening goes "oh you believe in the luminous aether? we're not gonna tell you you're right but here's the tools to try and prove it"

[spice abyss]

"Everything is true" vs "What is Truth in this world irrevocably tainted by Lies?"

[midnight grotto]

I encountered someone who hated Awakening because--well pretty much the exact reason people supposedly made Genius. They thought the Paths were too prescriptive (tried to make some kind of case that everyone was like, warlock pacted to the Watchtowers?) and thought that it wasn't enough to like, be a slightly weird FC Obrimos because in the system/setting's eyes they'd just be delusional

[spice abyss]

See, that's someone not prescribing enough to how Truth works. 😛

[heady kestrel]

Also you ain’t warlock pacted to shit 💀 💀 💀

My boys in the silver ladder wish the oracles or whoever called them back

[spice abyss]

You want a pact, go talk to the Abyss, see how it works out.

[heady kestrel]

Prelacy is also very warlock pact coded, though you could read it as more evil cleric core

[spice abyss]

Also true.

For better or worse, as a Mage you technically don't answer to a higher power.

And the ones who do are chumps who quit the game >:D

[heady kestrel]

The pentacle if the oracles also made prelates

pan over to like, generic solarpunk utopia image

I think about Seers a lot
They are really neat antagonists with a lot of good musical support

[turbid ferry]

i think oracles not offering direct juice is a pretty important part of their differing ideologies and what makes the pentacle vs seer struggle work

[spice abyss]

puts on FC hat Seers and Scelesti are fucking losers who looked at their capacity to change the world, went "That's scary", and signed up for fuckwits who want to tell them how the world should be.

[turbid ferry]

should you meet an oracle on the road, kill them. and all that

[heady kestrel]

All of the awakening antagonists are really good for darknessgame setups

Because they can be horrifyingly evil, pathetic and/or have really compelling dynamics with the PCs

All of them are quite pitiful

Even the abyss in a way

[spice abyss]

Especially the Abyss

It's simultaneously existentially terrifying, a tremendous threat to all that exists, and a sad wet cat.

Once again, Intruders is a great book.

[heady kestrel]

Annukai are really fun to brainstorm
I thought of one a while ago that I haven’t had the chance to use for anything

Where its a world that is exactly like earth in every way, except there is no people or animals
And the world really wants there to be people inside of it
But people who spend too long there end up “digested” by shadow monsters appearing and killing them

Bro just wants you to come visit(it will kill you to come visit)

[spice abyss]

See, sad wet cat.

[clear delta]

The stewards celestial orrery are a funny group similar to seer methods

[heady kestrel]

The seers are also both Horrible and Pathetic

Like on one hand they are on that “Pearl Jam-do the evolution” grind

But also you have things mentioned like the Praetorian being endlessly jealous of the Adamantine Arrow because they have something worth fighting for.

[midnight grotto]

They're not the prison guards, they're snitches

[valid merlin]

The very act of bearing witness to earnest heroism can be painful for a sell-out.

[grave gulch]

What do u think of snitches

[sour zephyr]

speaking of intruders, i was reading the first chapter of that today cause ya'll reminded me of it and i had a thought
would the consequences of scp-140 (a chronicle of the devas) count as an abyssal intrusion?

[radiant marsh]

There's already an Abyssal intrusion like that

https://whitewolf.fandom.com/wiki/Prince_of_100,000_Leaves

(So yes, that is 100% valid fodder for an Abyssal manifestation)

[clear delta]

Oh delilah you saw my legacy?

[turbid ferry]

the pin.. whoa mama

[orchid void]

its good

it get pin

[clear delta]

So I gotta find a name for this legacy

[short quiver]

Yeah, although instead of "Mad Science, global finance, and Hermetic ritual are all magick because they get results in their own paradigm" it's more "science, finance, and Hermetic ritual are all ways of glimpsing the quasi-Platonic Higher Truth that allows magic"
but yes, you have plenty of room to mess with you tools and practice for a bunch of different approaches
and Free Councilors specifically can use Techne to get magic power out of computer science or the power of rock

[short quiver]

meanwhile, as far as "crazy postmodern magick" goes, I gotta show some love to Unknown Armies
which isn't any edition of WoD but was very clearly written in conversation with WoD

[clear delta]

@mighty zephyr how well do you think Father Wolf got along with Helios?

[mighty zephyr]

Average brother in law relationship

Barely exchange a single word and then claim afterwards it was a good talk

[clear delta]

Beer night. They watched humans play ball games

Or octopi play

[mighty zephyr]

Also soft request to stop pinging me for tidbits please

[clear delta]

I'm sorry!

I'll not ping you for a while, promise

[olive idol]

Oh huh did someone mention Dragon the Embers?

Ironically enough that never really interested me.

[sour zephyr]

I haven't heard of that one

[clear delta]

There's also Dragon the adamant

[grave gulch]

anyone who played any of the 5th edition games

what`s a tenet? as in Chronicle tenets

i dont really know what that word means

[mighty zephyr]

It's a statement that says what matters to your chronicle thematically

And becomes a rule therein

[grave gulch]

Soooo

Could "Dont leave a fellow hunter behind" be a tenet?

[mighty zephyr]

ya

[grave gulch]

I see thanks Voy

[grave gulch]

Ok

Most players made characters good at fighting for the one shot

What do yall recommend i do to make sure the experience is fun?

Lots of things to kill?

[queen heron]

dont be afraid to use down and dirty combat rules

and use them to stress how good they are at violence

to the point a group of weaker enemies isn't more than a single roll

[grave gulch]

[open roost]

So like, whats the vibe on changeling? Like i have the impression that its lighter in tone than the rest of the WoD catalogue but i sometimes hear something like "oh its actually way sadder" and i cant tell if thats coming from contrarion nerds or not

[clear delta]

So! There are two changelings
Dreaming and Lost

Dreaming is whimsy, but also the whimsy and dreams are being steadly destroyed so you fight for them and your individuality hoping your fae soul won't starve

Lost is about escaping monstrous being who hurt you and rebuilding your life and mental health while fighting to not be taken back to the horrors you escaped from

[open roost]

Ohhhh ok

Lost is chronicles, right?

[clear delta]

Yeah

[open roost]

Honestly from that description dreaming sounds like its tone depends on the gm. Like i could easily see that premise both as like, fun enough for kids or sad enough for adults

[clear delta]

Yeah sounds the same for me

[heady kestrel]

I love that one of the main antagonist types in Dreaming is

“Guy who says magic isn’t real fucking dumbass and your powers don’t work and then your soul starts dying”

[open roost]

Thats arguably true about mage

[heady kestrel]

In mage that can’t like…. Destroy you
Like just from them doing that and standing around

Being boring/annoying

[open roost]

The technocracy could at the very least try

But yeah banality/glamour sounds like a fun system

[heady kestrel]

I am pretty sure certain technocrats do actually trigger this effect for changelings on crossovers, I don’t have evidence of this but I remember it from a wiki dive

[open roost]

Like, its funny. Ive seen people powerscale WoD monsters and put the fey above like, werewolves, and in wta5 the way they talk about them makes them sound fucking crazy dangerous but when i read up on it i'm consistently like... "Wow, if i had to run an rpg for a bunch of school kids this wouldnt be a bad choice in the slightest"

OBVIOUSLY theres something i havent read rhat would make that a bad idea but like, as it stands yknow

[heady kestrel]

Their superpower is childish imagination

Unfortunately, your ass also needs to pay taxes

Has been my impression of the game

[open roost]

I wonder if this team of creatives working on a game that takes place almost entirely within the minds eye was feeling a type of way

[heady kestrel]

Autumn people(which are people with high-very high banality, specifically the special variants from the autumn people book, stick in my head a lot) person who doesn’t have a personality, so they use X to fill the space, and then they get some sort of minor banality spreading power based on what they use to fill space

I just think about them a lot, kinda cute, potential for some very evil Yuri or something between a heavy sleeper and a changeling since heavy sleepers aren’t like… evil just radioactive and annoying

[open roost]

Ooooo

I got some friends who love evil yuri. Maybe i can use this to get them into my hyperfixation

[heady kestrel]

Some of them are like, evil authoritarians who only 75% of the time act like normal humans

But other times they just like…. Really like Star Wars and it makes Star Wars collectibles radioactive with banality

Like they are in fact, so boring and annoying about it that it saps their soul, but still, the pitch of “guy who doesn’t really have anything going on behind his eyes so he tries to fill the void with something physical he can base his life around” appeals to me

[grave gulch]

Every wod splat needs to pay taxes except for mummies

[heady kestrel]

What about Wraiths? Do they have like… ghost taxes

[grave gulch]

Actually i dont know but the underworld is so messed up that they just might have something equivalent

There's a ghost police im pretty sure

[open roost]

Ohhhhh do not fuck with the ghost police

[clear delta]

Yeah wraith has a tight society ruled by some powerful ghosts leading legions

[turbid ferry]

i think there's a thaumaturgy ritual that removes you from the records so you don't have to pay taxes anymore

[open roost]

I mean if im a nosferatu im basically presumed dead already. Ill just bum it in some asbestos laced abandoned shack

So like, im currently under the impression that changelings use specialized custom magic, kinda like the mages, but if they use the same spell or glamour or whatever they start generating banality. How close am i to getting it, and how does it work mechanically

[elder fulcrum]

is there something like a google sheet or anything for Hunter the Reckoning character sheets, or is it just a matter of filling in the sheet from the pdf?

[short quiver]

Mr Gone has been the definitive WoD interactive sheet guy for like 20 years

[radiant marsh]

Does he do 5th edition sheets?

[short quiver]

he does
https://mrgone.rocksolidshells.com/index.html

[queen heron]

its one of the more emotionally hitting CofD lines for me

theres a real tension between like

the wonders of faerie

and the horror of the worst parts of it

but you can't go back to who you were

In Demon, the GM is after you and squeezing like a vice

in Lost, the threat is more how

[clear delta]

Oh hey, welcome back Scout

[queen heron]

the True Fae are probably not there, they might not even think about you, or want you back....

but can you ever be sure?

[grave gulch]

u can if they sent a hunter on your butt

[queen heron]

👋 Stuff Happened™️ and I kind of disconnected from a lot of stuff, but ty

thats true

but its the paranoia

its not being secure in yourself

[grave gulch]

You can never be sure they dont want u i imagine

[queen heron]

if thats knowing if your fears are valid, if your perceptions are 'too much', if you're over-reacting

[grave gulch]

Specially cause u'll see other changelings getting chased by hunters and whatnot

[queen heron]

its why the virtue stat is Clarity

its damage to your self-confidence

[clear delta]

Different vibes of paranoia for demon and changeling

Changeling is all about trauma and mental health

[queen heron]

and its on that border between optimistic and hopeless

something like Deviant, its dark - you are broken and you're almost certainly not making it out

something like Mage can be ran very inspiring, you've broken through to the Truth, you can change the world and stand up against the fucked system

Changeling can be either real easily

[queen heron]

also it makes for fun antags

to have Changelings very understandably driven by a desire to not go back

but then willing to chuck others under the bus

Dreaming I dont have as much experience with

I think it sounds alright

I always bounced off some of the framing of whats banal though, like the sciences

wym that shit destroys your soul its the music of the spheres bro. Its the subtle harmonies of the world interacting in a system unfathomably interconnected. smh.

[clear delta]

You can run changeling without true fae as the antagonists
Just the struggle of the traumatized

[queen heron]

its got a weaker gameloop than most of the other big CofDs

much more sandboxy

focused on how you rebuild your life, and what matters to you after all you've been through

[fair jungle]

Sorry if I gonna sound lazy
but what is the Willpower mechanic again?

[queen heron]

I can only speak to CofD

[queen heron]

which ruleset are you asking about?

[fair jungle]

Hunter The Reckoning, latest edition

[queen heron]

¯_(ツ)_/¯

cant help you there, sorry

[fair jungle]

Me and a friend are brainstorming some stuff for Lancer and we were thinking in mixing the basic of WoD with Stress + Lancer
To spice things up on the pilot side since we found a bit sauceless

[mighty zephyr]

Spend a willpower to reroll 3 dice

[fair jungle]

thank!

[short quiver]

I love how much there is in just the question of "what do you do about your Fetch"

[short notch]

When my group played Changeling we were pretty irreverent and silly about it, as we tend to be, but a lot of our gags wound up being low-key horrifying regardless

eg there was a joke that my character's fetch was just a balloon with a face drawn on it. not as its unglamored true form, that's just what it was.

(you matter so little that your absence goes unnoticed. no effort needs to be expended to disguise the fact that you're gone)

Another character had a running gag where they kept coping with Clarity breaks by selectively editing the offending incidents out of their memory. This led to, amongst other things, refusing to acknowledge that Canada exists

(you will become a monster without realizing it. you will do horrible things and never learn better from them)

CtL is just a pretty potent game by nature

[clear delta]

Funniest way to deal with a Fetch is pretending to be siblings and guilting anyone who questions this for forgetting

[grave gulch]

are Mages and Geists the only ones that can have a somewhat nice life after becoming a super natural?

[short notch]

It depends a lot on what you define as "nice life" and also whether you're talking about WoD or CoD

Like CoD changelings absolutely get beaten to shit with the trauma stick as part of the gameline's premise--but like anyone who's gone through trauma, they can find ways to cope and rebuild a life for themselves

Prometheans and Demons potentially can find ways to self-actualize that can give them lasting peace or at least something worth living for

[clear delta]

Werewolves can cope with their instincts and duties

[queen heron]

Vampires can live in luxury at the expense of others

people irl chase that as a nice life and they don't even have the excuse of needing to steal vitality as a walking corpse

mummy the ship kinda sailed

if they didn't want a rough life(?) maybe they should have tried to get out before the giant sacrificial ritual to bind them to The Worst Guys Ever, eternally, in service

[clear delta]

But apotheosis is a way out for mummies

That or optimized incompetence to be allowed into A'aru

[queen heron]

I dont know if either of those are somewhat nice lives on the way