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Cythereal posted:The worst stories I've ever read about that sort of thing were all about oChangeling. Supposedly someone committed suicide so they could go back to the faerie plane. It doesn't help that Changeling as written supports that kind of gameplay. As well as the hosed up mindset that you should have children as soon as possible to carry on your legacy and then leave them to be raised by younger people while you off yourselves to maintain your perfect faerie soul before you succumb to the rigors of adulthood. I think there was an episode of Star Trek like that.
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Jan 28, 2015 22:31
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Then you got the OWerewolf ST who insisted on their players staying in character wherever they meet, and demand pack order obedience. I think Vampire avoided a lot of the worst because of the existing vampire subculture who would laugh at any babybats who waltzed in and claim they're a Torrie who posed for Pre-Raphaelite painters or poo poo.
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Jan 28, 2015 23:07
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Robindaybird posted:Then you got the OWerewolf ST who insisted on their players staying in character wherever they meet, and demand pack order obedience. "Of course I've met Raphael, darling! I was Embraced before he was born. Why else would I pre-Raphaelite?" 
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Jan 28, 2015 23:11
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Thanks, you just made the historian geek in me cringed. As probably anyone who drowns themselves into this fake-reality poo poo - if I had a dime for every reincarnated claimant who said they were burned at Salem....
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Jan 28, 2015 23:15
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If every vampire who said he was at the crucifixion was actually there, it would've been like Woodstock. I was actually at Woodstock. That was a weird gig. I fed off a flower person and I spent the next six hours watching my hand move.
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Jan 28, 2015 23:22
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Yay! As I said before I'm curious to see how it compares to/draws from Rifts, especially with the big K actually endorsing it. Crusading to actually close the ri--breaches is a logical setting goal given the immense damage they could do (I'm guessing) but Rifts never really focused on that for some reason.
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Jan 29, 2015 00:53
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occamsnailfile posted:Yay! Yeah, even though the Coalition has a Rifts Control Group in their hierarchy, they never seem to really do anything except surround them with military units.
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Jan 29, 2015 00:58
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Young Freud posted:Yeah, even though the Coalition has a Rifts Control Group in their hierarchy, they never seem to really do anything except surround them with military units. As far as I remember there was only the Close Rift spell that took a ridiculous amount of power to pull off (and permanently drained a small amount from the caster) that could actually do it. And there was at least one (the Gateway Arch HAR HAR HAR) that the book flat out said could not be closed by any means. Surrounding and blasting anything that comes out is probably one of the best tactics.
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Jan 29, 2015 05:01
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 Breachworld Part 2: Overview and Characters The first thing in the book besides contents and a thanks to the backers is a two page synopsis of the Breachworld setting. It’s just a snapshot to help you understand the world your characters will be operating in, and is backed up by a larger description of the world after all of the rules have been laid out. At some point in the past, humanity was in a Golden Age where the use of a piece of technology called a ‘breach’ was commonplace and allowed people to travel from one point on Earth to another instantaneously. Predictably, the technology was flawed and eventually the breaches catastrophically changed from a single path between two points to each breach becoming a one way door from another dimension. Creatures from thousands of other universes suddenly poured into Earth and became trapped in our world. Some were sentient, some were monsters, and some were more like plant life or insects. The sudden influx caused the total collapse of human society. Now, likely hundreds of years later, people have coalesced into different societies. Some are remnants of the old human world, with high technology at their disposal and reclamation of Earth on their mind. Some are more tribal and mix freely with the aliens from the breaches. Some are just plain alien and based on the strange societies of refugees from other dimensions. Monsters are everywhere and some people seem to have developed powers that defy common explanation. Most importantly, a group of scientists and engineers called The Collective has recently managed to piece together a device that can close breaches. They’ve now begun the long process of sealing off Earth’s dimensional borders. That’s the three paragraph recap of a two page preview. There’s more detail to this story later. In fact, some of the detailed explanation of how breaches work leads to unintentional comedy or perhaps a slow, hopeless apocalypse spread across thousands of worlds. That’s a story for another post, though. From there we move through a very brief “What is Role Playing?” spiel and on into building your character. Character creation is very much of the old school variety, which is probably obvious since it’s based off an engine popularized in the mid-1980s. The rules are actually explained in a later chapter, so some of the particulars of what is happening will probably be lost on a reader unfamiliar with D6. I haven’t played a D6 game in nearly 20 years so it took awhile to get into the swing of things. The Micro D6 engine seems slightly different than what I recall of the revised edition of West End’s Star Wars. It actually seems quite a bit better. For instance, it appears harder to create a Wookie that can dance naked in a barrage of heavy blaster fire in this system, although it isn’t totally impossible. As a rule, D6 is typically classless. Theoretically you come up with a character concept then spend your stat and skill points to make a reasonable facsimile if how that character would appear mechanically. In reality, I’d imagine a lot of people spend their points on what appears interesting and then work backwards to create a character to explain the spread. I don’t recall Star Wars having your race factor into how many points you get to spend, but rather as a minimum or maximum to individual stats. I could be wrong, though.. If it is a new thing, this game actually attaches a lot more power to the choice of race than Star Wars. I guess that’s fitting for a Rifts clone.  Rogue Scholar is still an interesting character concept that no one will play. The first step is to consider your four stats. Each has racial minimums and maximums and each race has a different amount of points to spend. They are: Might – physical strength and toughness Agility – “aim and coordination” Wit – intelligence Charm – personal charisma and willpower, which is a strange pairing For humans, you have 12D of points to spend on stats. They can vary between 1D and 4D. The D you spread around in your stats represents six sided dice that you roll when the situation calls for it. The more dice you can roll the better the outcome is likely to be. After your stats we have a brief, "optional" aside about classes. I don't know how optional it really is, though, since without it there is no magic or psionics in a setting where that's a major selling point. As said, game is generally classless unless you happen to meet certain prerequisites. If you do, you can take an ‘Advanced Class’ which gives you access to powers that other people can’t use. At this time the only Advanced Class is the Epic, which is another name for mage or psychic. It’s someone who can manipulate the Aether that pours through some breaches and allows for otherwise impossible feats. The book follows it up with a list (and only a list) of the many powers an Epic can potentially use. The powers have Palladium-esque, weirdly clinical category names such as Biochemical Manipulation of Space-Time Manipulation. The author mentions that another advanced class still pending will be the Fighter, who has a list of combat maneuvers comparable to the spell list available to the Epic. I will be curious to see if the fighter turns out to be similar in power level to the Epic or if we’re just seen the introduction of the wizard dominant paradigm to a classless system. Next we have skills and perks. Skills are tied to a stat and only go up to 2D at character creation. They add directly to the stat in question when called for. For instance, if you are trying to punch someone, you add your Might stat to your Brawl skill and roll that many dice to hit. Humans have 7D to divide among their 40 potential skills. Since you also use your skill dice to spend on perks, it seems like skills are really only useful to shore up deficient stats. To put it another way, your stats are going to be a lot more important than your skills. You can also list a skill as ‘specialized’ which makes it fit a very specific situation (the given example is ‘climbing’ versus the more generalized ‘athletics’) but provides 3D of benefit for 1D of cost. Perks and complications are the last important thing before we get into races. They work like advantages and disadvantages do in most classless systems. You pay for them using the same pool of dice available to skills and can gain benefits from armored skin to inexplicable luck to a signature weapon. Complications are the opposite and provide extra dice to spend on skills and perks. Maybe your hero is allergic to cats, is illiterate, or just plain cursed by the gods of fate. A last note is to equip your character. For a Rifts-like game, this step is awfully freeform. You just take whatever you think your character would reasonably have and haggle with the GM if there’s something that might not be reasonable. It's hard to say if it's a liberating approach or a lazy one. Either way, it's probably what I would have ended up doing even without their suggestion. Since this post is actually a lot longer than I intended, I will break off races into another post and kiss that optimistic idea of getting this done is four posts goodbye. PS This is the actual, positive quote from Siembieda on the Kickstarter:  Rereading it, I could see it being a catty dig at Jason Richards, but I honestly can't see Siembieda pulling something quite so bitchy and subtle. EverettLO fucked around with this message at 05:31 on Jan 29, 2015 |
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Jan 29, 2015 05:29
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PantsOptional posted:poo poo, and here I thought the guy who brought a replica gun to ours was bad. This one takes the cake. How DID WoD get so many crazies? I don't recall anything like those stories coming from DnD, or even Exalted.
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Jan 29, 2015 05:50
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CommissarMega posted:How DID WoD get so many crazies? I don't recall anything like those stories coming from DnD, or even Exalted. By tapping far more effectively into the angsty, disaffected teenager/college student demographic as I understand it. Can't speak for Exalted, but DnD likes to stress that it's just a game and you need to discuss it with your gaming group if you're not having fun or are bothered by things going on in the game session. WoD, as I understand it, marketed towards "serious ROLE-players."
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Jan 29, 2015 05:53
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Cythereal posted:By tapping far more effectively into the angsty, disaffected teenager/college student demographic as I understand it. Can't speak for Exalted, but DnD likes to stress that it's just a game and you need to discuss it with your gaming group if you're not having fun or are bothered by things going on in the game session. WoD, as I understand it, marketed towards "serious ROLE-players." Because the character concepts were all adolescent escape fantasies set in the now. You weren't just having anger issues because of hormonal changes and general teenage awkwardness. You're a werewolf! Those childhood dreams about magical creatures are real and you're actually a special changeling snowflake. Your parents and teachers actually are trying to stifle your creative spark because you're really a Mage!!!! They're good books and settings but they cater to and reinforce the mindset of disgruntled adolescents.
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Jan 29, 2015 06:08
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I think it's just a typical social trend, one we see today with MRAs or grogs or whatever, where something that's always been a problem is drawn into prominence by broader elements of the community than just "Many WoD LARPers are wannabe rapists." In some ways the 90's darksplosion did enable those particular kinds of shitlords to come out of the woodwork, but I don't think that's really any more WoD's fault than it is, say, D&D4's or Fate's for the current prominence or awareness of MRAs in the hobby. There's more of that kind of stuff going on all over. Like every other social trend, despite protestations otherwise, RPGs aren't exempt from this one either.
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Jan 29, 2015 06:11
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D&D = Fantastic adventure taking place in a made-up fantasy world with wizard's towers and swamps full of undead and flying castles and shooting darts of purple energy out of your fingers at monsters WoD = Fantastic adventure taking place in the real world which is full of hidden supernatural entities and conspiracy theories One of them is a much worse combination with people who have trouble differentiating between fantasy and reality...
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Jan 29, 2015 06:11
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I don't know that the World of Darkness was some kind of special crazy-enabling game line per se, but I will say that it probably didn't help matters that several of the people writing for White Wolf very clearly bought into that particular brand of craziness themselves (see; Brucato, Satyros Phil), whereas I'm not aware of anyone who wrote for Dungeons & Dragons who actually believed that playing D&D would teach you no-poo poo magic for real despite what Mr. Jack Chick would have you believe.
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Jan 29, 2015 07:05
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I can name 3 crazy White Wolf writers off the top of my head, though one of them got better. Another problem that came up often is that the good writers didn't want to touch sensitive topics or the more controversial splatbooks just because they knew they couldn't do them justice. The people who volunteered were the people who thought they could but couldn't. The only notable outlier of a sensitive subject being treated well is Shoah, and thank every single god for that.
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Jan 29, 2015 07:17
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Kai Tave posted:I don't know that the World of Darkness was some kind of special crazy-enabling game line per se, but I will say that it probably didn't help matters that several of the people writing for White Wolf very clearly bought into that particular brand of craziness themselves (see; Brucato, Satyros Phil), whereas I'm not aware of anyone who wrote for Dungeons & Dragons who actually believed that playing D&D would teach you no-poo poo magic for real despite what Mr. Jack Chick would have you believe. Are you saying that when my first DM took me to the Temple of Artemus to learn to cast real spells, that wasn't a normal part of hitting 5th level?
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Jan 29, 2015 07:21
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I don't think it was necessarily intentionally crazy-enabling. It's just that so many of the PC roles were "you are a special snowflake who sees the secret hidden truth behind the boring everyday world" along with the seeming pitch of the line toward disaffected youth that it tended to attract the crazy or at least the easily affected. I'm sure other media does the same thing to a degree, but I don't think it's as visible. I've never encountered any college cults that thought RIFTS or Michael Jackson's Thriller were teaching secret truths, but I drat sure had a nasty brush with one that followed the "secret teachings" of Werewolf and Mercedes Lackey.
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Jan 29, 2015 07:23
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They also released worldbooks that described real life areas and talked about relatively recent events in authoritative tones, only occasionally adding the "oh yeah this is only actually true in GOTHIC PUNK WORLD" caveats.
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Jan 29, 2015 07:32
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Kurieg posted:They also released worldbooks that described real life areas and talked about relatively recent events in authoritative tones, only occasionally adding the "oh yeah this is only actually true in GOTHIC PUNK WORLD" caveats. Wait, how exactly did they go about doing this? I ask because Night's Black Agents freely sows ideas like "frightened criminal interests in former Yugoslavia kill gay people because they think they're vampires" and "earthquakes in Romania are actually tied to the summoning of Count Dracula" in technothriller po-faced tones, but I wouldn't actually believe they were serious. Did White Wolf go too far in their straight-facedness, or not far enough for people to see the parody?
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Jan 29, 2015 07:51
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There are some places where the parody is obvious, but the issue is more that they didn't even let the real history shine through the cracks. Rage Across Australia invents new things for the white man to have done to the Aboriginals because apparently the real things that they did weren't terrible enough. And Rage Across Russia reduces the entire country to agencyless shells of human beings who wouldn't be able to tie their own shoes if a werewolf or vampire didn't tell them to. Literally every russian ruler for the past 600 years is propped up by either a vampire or werewolf faction. And the Bolsheveks were a combined Bone Gnawer/Brujah thing to bring down the Silver Fangs and Ventrue. The history as presented in book is completely different than the history that actually occured. The same beat points still happen but how they actually got there has been changed drastically. To an adult reading the book you can understand that it's all loving nonsense and bad writing. To a 13 year old you'd probably be forgiven for thinking that Russia is actually some magical fairy land that may or may not actually exist. I imagine an actual Russian would feel quite insulted. Kurieg fucked around with this message at 08:03 on Jan 29, 2015 |
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Jan 29, 2015 07:58
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The way White Wolf treats it - everything bad (except Hitler) was a secret Vampire/Spiral Black Dancer/Technocracy plot in history, and every good thing was a Werewolf (Children of Gaia)/Traditions backed faction
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Jan 29, 2015 08:33
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Robindaybird posted:The way White Wolf treats it - everything bad (except Hitler) was a secret Vampire/Spiral Black Dancer/Technocracy plot in history, and every good thing was a Werewolf (Children of Gaia)/Traditions backed faction To be fair this seems like a thing they more or less pulled back from completely with the nWoD, which is much less about sprawling, globe-spanning conspiracies of supernatural creatures doing everything important and more about small cliques of petty assholes too embroiled in their own dramas to do anything like run the world.
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Jan 29, 2015 08:38
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A lot of this problem could be solved if the supernatural elements of the gamelines didn't run the whole drat world. 'Oh poo poo, the Tsarist regime has fallen! What do the supernaturals do when caught up in the storm of a huge political storm and brutal civil war?' is a legit good hook. 'Oh no! The Brujah and Bone Gnawers have defeated the Silver Fangs and maybe some mortal politicians were used as dupe.' is just boring.
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Jan 29, 2015 08:38
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Kurieg posted:I imagine an actual Russian would feel quite insulted. Were the Rus actually a warband of Get of Fenris sent to cull and herd the Slavic human population? Speaking of which, the history nerd in me would think that the Get (basically Werewolf Vikings) would've been all over the place in medieval times. In addition to the Rus mentioned above, they probably would've been there for the Anglo-Saxon invasion of Britain, explaining the bad blood between them and the Fianna. They would've been in Constantinople, with the Varangian guard as werewolf warriors invited by the Emperor to help defend against Byzantine vampires or some poo poo. The Norman invasion could've been framed as a civil war between three different branches of the Get (the Norman branch that was given a duchy to govern in France, the Anglo-Saxon branch who had come there during the Anglo-Saxon invasion, and the original orthodox branch [represented by the Norwegians under Haraldr Hardrada] who had sought to bring England under their sphere of influence for centuries). Hell, you could even see the bad blood between the Get and the Wendigo going all the way back to the founding of Vinland by Norse explorers. I know that in doing this conjecture I'm guilty of the same sort of undermining human history that the oWoD did all the time, with all of human history being reduced to "some supernaturals duked it out," I'm just wondering how far they went with the "X tribe is actually supernaturals of human ethnic group Y, therefore they've been involved in all of that poo poo."
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Jan 29, 2015 08:56
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They made Jesus Christ himself into a Children of Gaia kinfolk.
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Jan 29, 2015 09:12
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Ratpick posted:I know that in doing this conjecture I'm guilty of the same sort of undermining human history that the oWoD did all the time, with all of human history being reduced to "some supernaturals duked it out," It's not quite the same thing though. There's a difference between "human history happened, and some supernaturals got swept along for the ride and had their own struggles and machinations going on at the same time, influenced by the events of the times" and "human history happened, but only because a bunch of supernaturals made it happen, reality is a lie man."
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Jan 29, 2015 09:14
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Kai Tave posted:It's not quite the same thing though. There's a difference between "human history happened, and some supernaturals got swept along for the ride and had their own struggles and machinations going on at the same time, influenced by the events of the times" and "human history happened, but only because a bunch of supernaturals made it happen, reality is a lie man." Not two minutes after typing that did I start thinking "Man, I'm glad Finland is such an insignificant place in terms of history because it would've been really embarrassing to read what they cooked up for Finland had it gotten more than a footnote." Then I realized that Finnish history is fertile ground for the sort of supernatural wank that oWoD was all about. First of all, you've got the bear as a sacred animal and an animistic faith, so obviously the Finns were really in harmony with nature before those evil Christians came and converted them! That's a check for romanticizing tribal lifestyles and another for a jab at Christianity. The Finnish people were obviously ruled by werebears and most of the heroes from the Kalevala were actually werebears too (except for the evil Northeners, they were obviously servants of the Wyrm). Check for turning mythical characters into members of a supernatural splat. The Northern Crusades were obviously orchestrated by the Get of Fenris (who secretly controlled the Swedish monarchy) to give them a pretext to seize the werebears' caerns for themselves. Check for supernatural being assholes and undermining human history by making it "some supernaturals did it." The advent of Christianity in Finland brought cities thus opening the country to vampires and other supernaturals. The wars between Sweden and Russia (which lead to Russia seizing Finland) was just a Get of Fenris vs Silver Fangs war to see who could control the Finnish caerns. Another check for supernaturals dictating history, another check for undermining the agency of the Finnish people in doing so. Finally, the Finnish war of independence (which happened at the same time as the Russian revolution) happened because a werebear seer had seen a vision that if Finland doesn't get out of Russia it will fall under Baba Yaga's supernatural influence. The Whites were not just nationalistically minded Finns, they were warriors of Gaia, while the Reds were unwitting servants of the Wyrm. That's... yeah, that's simplifying a national tragedy to an offensive degree as well as turning into a black and white situation. So, how would I do as an oWoD writer?
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Jan 29, 2015 09:38
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Ratpick posted:So, how would I do as an oWoD writer? Wait, you aren't summarizing an unreleased book?
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Jan 29, 2015 09:49
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Ratpick posted:So, how would I do as an oWoD writer? Find a way to shoehorn in some embarrassing nationalistic/ethnic stereotypes and get every last bit of geography wrong and you're golden.
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Jan 29, 2015 10:20
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Qelong [img=http://s23.postimg.org/6lrwkwi3r/qelong.jpg] Part 3: Exploration, or "The Ho Chi Mihn Trail of Cthulhu" The Exploration chapter covers the general environment of Sajavedra and the Qelong area, particularly its natural and manmade hazards. Sajavedra is a subtropical land in the monsoon belt. It has two seasons, rainy/warm and sticky/hot, and flash floods can occur at nearly any time of the year. This would be it's normal weather pattern, were the land not being constantly bombarded by violent magic. The land is littered with contingency spells and lingering effects, the magical equivalent of land mines, so you can basically justify any sort of spell effect manifesting at random to cause trouble for adventurers. There's a variety of diseases in the countryside. Rules for contracting Fever, Bubonic Plague, and Typhus are briefly included. The primary danger to PC's however, is aakom, the toxic magical substance that leaks from the Cylinder and has poisoned the entire valley. Aakom is described as "a substance somewhere between mana, azoth, and plutonium" that manifests as a sickly green radiance. It's useful raw material for powering the most destructive magic, but though of as so dangerous that even demons don't use it with impunity. The Cylinder was a aakom-powered weapon intended to be used by one of the warring archmages. But it is now since discarded and forgotten, and its toxins have polluted the land, both physically and spiritually. The Referee is intended to secretly keep track of each PC's level of aakom poisoning during their time in Qelong. Generally, characters slowly acquire points of aakom just by living in the Valley and eating any food or water from there (Purify Food and Drink is only 1/4 effective here - one casting purifies enough food/drink for 3 people). Aakom is acquired more quickly if you are wounded in the valley, particularly if the wounds are caused by naga-kin or other mutated creatures. If a PC's levels of aakom exceed his current HP, he must make a save or suffer numerous side effects (Halflings are resistant, tripling the HP for the purposes of aakom poisoning calculation). A failed save means the victim has succumed to aakom poisoning, with terrible effects on the body, mind, and soul. These include: - a tendency to become nihilistic and self-destructive, reflected in a Wisdom penalty - loss of coordination and motor control (penalties to missle attacks and some Saving Throws) - night terrors and fever dreams: PC requires more sleep to avoid the effects of Sleep Deprivation - a chance of spell failure for casters. Spells can be altered by aakom to hit the wrong target, or have catastrophic effects If a character dies while suffering the effects of the poison, there's a 1 in 6 chance he will rise as an aakom zombie to attack the PC's (2 in 6 if Chaotic in alignment. The book outright recommends waiting for the most dramatic moment for the zombie to rise and attack) There is also a chance that any character afflicted with aakom poisoning can acquire a curse - a reverse Midas touch. The PC will develop a touch-based spell attack can never be turned off. This attack is usually a negative status effect (Cause Disease, Feeblemind, Cause Poison) or an area effect centered around the target (Insect Plague, Stinking Cloud). One of the powers that can be activated is The Serpents Touch, a new spell that lets the caster turn Sticks into Snakes like Moses (snakes created by the cursed version do not obey the caster). Chopping off the character's hands will end the condition. If the cursed character is zombified, he will retain this power. If the zombie's hands are chopped off, you then have an animate hand with touch spells! Cure Disease merely masks the symptoms of aakom poisoning by storing it in the recipient's kidneys and liver. The sufferer appears to lose 1d6 aakom points per caster level, but the points simply reappear once HP gets low enough. Permanently removing aakom taint requires a Remove Curse spell from a caster that has spend days studying runes on the Cylinder casing. Thoughts: So, in the form of aakom, we have a system that reinforces the toxic nature of the land and setting itself. One one hand, it's very atmospheric, and reminds me of the Fallout games in that it resembles magical radiation poisoning. It also acts as "the stick" to encourage PC's to track down the Cylinder. On the other hand, it's all too granular for me, and tracking aakom poisoning as a Ref seems like a huge pain in the rear end, especially when you have to track it against HP damage and factor in the little Cure Disease "switcheroo". I like the concept, but I myself would have chosen a less tables-heavy way to represent it. Oh well. Next: Lotuses and Leeches!
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Jan 29, 2015 11:34
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Kavak posted:They made Jesus Christ himself into a Children of Gaia kinfolk. Also a Lasombra who wasn't big on the whole Christianity thing.
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Jan 29, 2015 15:44
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Kavak posted:They made Jesus Christ himself into a Children of Gaia kinfolk. Please tell me you're kidding.
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Jan 29, 2015 15:49
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It might be funny if White Wolf started with a historical event that was entirely 100% human caused and motivated, then had every supernatural faction on the block lining up to claim, oh, yes, that was absolutely totally 100% our idea, uh-huh, yep!, in such a way as to make it clear that they're all just trying to cover for something that blindsided them. Like, the jokey incompetence version of the stuff I'm reading about here.
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Jan 29, 2015 15:51
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Davin Valkri posted:It might be funny if White Wolf started with a historical event that was entirely 100% human caused and motivated, then had every supernatural faction on the block lining up to claim, oh, yes, that was absolutely totally 100% our idea, uh-huh, yep!, in such a way as to make it clear that they're all just trying to cover for something that blindsided them. Like, the jokey incompetence version of the stuff I'm reading about here. That would require a level of self-awareness that I don't believe they had. That and they'd have to deal with the few White Wolf crazies going "how dare they." While I know nothing of oWoD, I've heard that not all those crazies would have been on forums: some would have been in their office.
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Jan 29, 2015 15:55
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Davin Valkri posted:It might be funny if White Wolf started with a historical event that was entirely 100% human caused and motivated, then had every supernatural faction on the block lining up to claim, oh, yes, that was absolutely totally 100% our idea, uh-huh, yep!, in such a way as to make it clear that they're all just trying to cover for something that blindsided them. Like, the jokey incompetence version of the stuff I'm reading about here. I think they sort of did that with Rasputin? Towards the end of oWoD I think all of the splats had claimed Rasputin as one of their own. If you want to read into it, I think you could argue that all the supernaturals want to claim him as their own because both the idea that he was working for the other supernaturals or, worse, that he was an honest-to-god mundane human were just completely disconcerting to them. And while you're at it, the conflicting explanations for Jesus could work for this: the supernatural are just so used to being the power behind the throne that gets poo poo done that they just can't deal with the idea of a human completely outside their understanding of how the supernatural world is supposed to work actually getting poo poo done and starting a new religious movement. Hence they're all lining up to say "Oh, Jesus? Yeah, totally one of us."
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Jan 29, 2015 16:02
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Evil Mastermind posted:Please tell me you're kidding.  Covok posted:That would require a level of self-awareness that I don't believe they had. That and they'd have to deal with the few White Wolf crazies going "how dare they." While I know nothing of oWoD, I've heard that not all those crazies would have been on forums: some would have been in their office. They did have it, just not until Revised. For all that I poo poo on early White Wolf some of their Revised stuff was genuinely good. Get of Fenris revised spends the vast majority of it's pages tearing down the "The only strength that matters is the kind that breaks faces" Mindset. And Stargazers, for all that it espouses "The truth is somewhere in the middle" has more than a few people saying "Hey rear end in a top hat, losing control and tearing someones face off from time to time is fine because you're a loving Werewolf".
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Jan 29, 2015 16:06
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Ratpick posted:Not two minutes after typing that did I start thinking "Man, I'm glad Finland is such an insignificant place in terms of history because it would've been really embarrassing to read what they cooked up for Finland had it gotten more than a footnote."
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Jan 29, 2015 16:12
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EverettLO posted:PS This is the actual, positive quote from Siembieda on the Kickstarter: I assume he provided that quote only on the condition that it's also in the book in three or four places.
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Jan 29, 2015 16:26
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I don't think there were necessarily a lot more WoD crazies than there were earlier D&D ones. Rather, coming into being shortly before the WWW became accessible outside of academia, and positioning itself both for realish-world wish fulfillment and large-scale LARP gave it much better hooks for unstable individuals and made it much more likely for them to come into contact. Terms like 'hivemind', 'hugbox' and 'echo chamber' are fairly recent, but even on USENET and early bulletin boards and blogs you could find proto-otherkin communities festering in their own juices. Similarly, it became a lot easier to find and share reports of loonies.Ratpick posted:I think they sort of did that with Rasputin? Towards the end of oWoD I think all of the splats had claimed Rasputin as one of their own. If you want to read into it, I think you could argue that all the supernaturals want to claim him as their own because both the idea that he was working for the other supernaturals or, worse, that he was an honest-to-god mundane human were just completely disconcerting to them. There was a V:DA adventure path, I can't remember the title, I think the first book was set in Rome or Constantinople. The back matter had an appendix listing famous figures and for whatever reason Rasputin was in there again. That time they had him marked down as: Corax (just kidding).
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Jan 29, 2015 16:46
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