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Princess: the Hopeful The Queen of Spades AKA: The Queen of Knaves, The Queen of Thieves Followers’ Epithets: Knaves (affectionately derogatory), Rogues (affectionately derogatory), Scoundrels (affectionately derogatory) quote:Why does everyone think we knaves are lazy? Being a Knave is hard work, last week I had five parties, five! That was a lot of planning, and dancing all night really tires you out. Then I spent all last night watching great stand ups and making notes. I know everyone in school’s name, that took weeks of work, I had to write songs to help me remember, and then there’s birthdays and everyone’s favourite foods and what kind of jokes they like. After all that you have to keep yourself full of energy because any time something goes wrong people expect you to be the fast thinker, and you can’t do that when you’re tired. quote:Drifting above the mountain-side settlements that form The Confederacy of Four Winds the Queen of Spades rules from a palace carved out of the clouds themselves. Blessed with limitless energy the Queen breezes through her palace and amusements trailing courtiers and petitioners in her wake. Her regal presence comes not from her appearance but from her character. She is youthful, yet she possesses a presence that blows from her; carrying with it a sense of confidence and power, the smell of windswept desert sand, spices and the Queen’s infectious laughter. Fashion at the royal court is a turbulent affair. The Queen changes her style frequently; always trying to keep one step ahead of fashions. This has memorably led to her occasionally preceding over a court of punks and ravers while dressed in ermine robes. quote:Philosophy quote:Background Practical Magic: Dexterity, Wits, Manipulation. i.e. the Finesse Stats quote:Invocation: Aria quote:Quote Inspirations: A character that appeared only once in FullMetal Alchemist Saint Tail Some dude from Shugo Chara (Ikuto Tsukiyomi) Captain Jack Sparrow Aladdin Pinkie Pie Yeah. The other Pony reference. Other appropriate ones: Aang from Avatar: the Last Airbender the Protagonist of Saint's Row IV Next: the last of the Radiant Queens
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May 27, 2015 18:26
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Xelkelvos posted:Angawa Battle Cry and Maintenance/Upkeep for Proficiencies I would also recommend Damage Bonus and Deceptive Defender. Especially the latter sounds fitting if larger folks have a tendency to underestimate our badass gnome. Night10194 posted:I'm always amused when one of these games brings out 'nobility' and 'a better, more civilized time of royalty'. Cythereal posted:They've clearly never played Crusader Kings 2. True, there is not enough backstabbing going on with these supposed queens. But I do wonder if these queens make use of the gavelkind inheritance rule. Would be a hassle with all those princesses around. And since everything in WoD was better in the long forgotten past, I fear we won't get such a clever twist. Alien Rope Burn posted:It's part of my mahoushoujoesque innocence. Why did they turn that hoverbike into what looks like a manta ray gently caressing a gagged duck? Or is that just my imagination? Valatar posted:I've been thinking for the longest time that 2nd edition Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay's system is the perfect fit for Nightspawn. It uses a percentile skill resolution system, rules for terror and insanity, combat is gory and brutal, magic is liable to summon demons to devour the caster, and character progression is fairly horizontal to the point that you're never so badass that you can just ignore taking a hunter's polearm in the guts. All of that seems to go pretty smoothly with the kind of 'oh god we're all hosed' setting that Nightspawn's trying for. And if you're lucky, you might just start with a small (but vicious) dog. That's always a plus. Nessus posted:I actually think it would be more novel to think through the implications of having the presence of objective Good in a setting (if perhaps gnomic or somewhat fluid Good, just so you aren't playing DragonRaid). If Sailor Moon's magical crystal can actually, objectively tell Good from Evil, what do you do with that? Does this mean Sailor Moon will necessarily be the perfect queen? Does it mean that there is no real struggle in the universe? I imagine one argument would be to get like Kreia and try to destroy it, to remove that certainty from the cosmos. Or they could go the live-action route of "Is it really a good idea to grant the most powerful artifact in the universe to a teenager?"
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May 27, 2015 18:28
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Doresh posted:Or they could go the live-action route of "Is it really a good idea to grant the most powerful artifact in the universe to a teenager?" Should at least split that up between five teens with attitude.
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May 27, 2015 18:37
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theironjef posted:Should at least split that up between five teens with attitude. I really do wish Princess was more amenable to Toku stuff. I'll settle for a Compact or Conspiracy (or TFV or Cherion gear)
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May 27, 2015 18:48
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Hunter: The Vigil The Long Night know one thing: the world is ending. Some say God is going to snatch up all the true Christians, and the unworthy will suffer under the Antichrist until Jesus retursn to end it all in blood and fire. They're wrong. Not about everything - but the Rapture? That's not true. Or worse - it's already happened, and everyone left was too wicked to enter the Kingdom. This, my friends, is the Tribulation! The war of the righteous, Armageddon! A man cannot rely on a Rapture to save him - only Bible, voice, fist and gun. The world is sinful, and Christ will not, cannot return until man is worthy! In the meantime, war, famine, plague and horrors. Not metaphors, mind you - real. Walking, talking, hunting horrors, feeding on the innocent. It's time for you, brothers and sisters, to do something about it! Spread the good word! Live a good life! Hunt monsters! The Long Night began in the 1970s, but its members believe it's been around for ever. They also call themselves the Tribulation Militia. They know nothing of their founder, and have little structure. They've included Branch Davidian-style cults, Family Values types, survialists, Southern Baptists, middle-class evangelicals. They're mostly found in the southern US, Australi and southeast England. They've got many takes on what the right response is to the self-evident imminent end of the world. Individual members attend hundreds of churches - some more liberal than others, as they seek to be the True Believers in a crowd of godless liberals. They form cliques, watching their fellow believers for those who aren't at peace. They sound them out, and when they find a fellow travller with the right attitude, they take them on a hunt. That's usually enough to get the member to join up happily. The hunters of the Long Night see the signs. They know that the apocalypse is coming - but they wonder, what if they must happen? What if the devil's agents work toe nsure those happen? What if God can't come until they are dealt with? They realize, in the abstract, that the Tribulation must occur. But it cannot be finished without their help. The world is in eternal night, but the Second Coming will bring morning, they say. Revelations, that is. And so, this must be the Long Night, and these are the warriors who will ensure the coming dawn. They know that monsters must be stopped. Of course, they believe in mercy - their entire belief system is about a loving God! So when they deal with human foes - witches, primarily, and sorcerers - they tend to kidnap them, gag them and bind them, then preach at them until the witch repents. If they don't, the Long Night burn the books. If that doesn't work, maybe they'll have to cut out a tongue. If that doens't work, well...a bullet in the brain is a judgment of another kind. But if the witch repents? Hallelujah, celebrate! Let them go...but watch. If the repentance is false...you get only one chance. Then it' time to put you down. And if you were never human - well, there is no mercy there. Werewolves sell their souls to get their skins. Vampires are damned - if they weren't, they wouldn't be vampires. Demons are from Hell. All of 'em need to be destroyed, so that the Tribulation may end. The Long Night divides itself into various groups. The Hopeless believe that they are damned. Everyone's a sinner - addicts, adulterers, even people with just little sins that normal people wouldn't think worthy of damnation. Some are tainted by the supernatural - used or abused by inhuman forces. The Hopeless know that they cannot be saved...but they can, at least, try to save others from their own fate. The Faithful, on the other hand, believe that because they're doing God's work, God is with them. They are the foot soldiers of the Apocalypse, part of the prophecies. The monsters are prolonging the horror they will cut short, and all of them are tools of God's will. The Merciful, meanwhuile, believe that God is love. They seek to bring mercy and redemption to their monstrous foes, because theirs is the forgiving Christ. They believe that they can bring a vampire back to humanity with a holy blood transfusion or some other means, they can save a werewolf with a diet of wolfsbane and killing the original werewolf that bit them. Rumor has it that some of the Merciful were once vampires, werewolves or witches, now cleansed of evil and ready to stand against the dark. Status in the Long Night is hard to get - they're disorganized and mostly disconnected - but their websites do allow for a loose network and some word-of-mouth recognition. At one dot, you know phone numbers and preaching. You get a free Evangelism specialty. At 3 dots, you can rely on folks from far away to help you out, giving you two dots of Allies. at five dots, you've got your own website and a reputation as a holy warrior. You get the Inspiring merit free, whether you qualify or not, but only for members of the Long Night. This stacks with normal Inspiring if you have that. Stereotypes posted:Network Zero: In the End Times, you make strange friends. I never expected to fight so often alongside someone so irreverent (and with such poor hygiene), but even though he's not Christian, he values the truth. He makes so many things public. He just needs someone to believe him.  Yeah, turns out the evangelical Conservative Southerners are some of the more merciful Hunters. The Loyalists of Thule now...they know secrets. They know occulted things. Some legends say that once upon a time, a lost land - some name it Atlantis, some Mu, some Thule or Pan - gave civilization to the world. A cataclysm destroyed it, but its survivors set sail in painted ships to Europe and Asia. They became the gods and lawgivers. They gave them art, architecture, the secrets of bronze. They gave terrible mystic secrets, now long forgotten save by those few who know where to look. The Loyalists of Thule spent the first half of the 20th century looking for that place, that Ultimate Source. This is their eternal shame, for when they did that, they were the Thile Gesellschaft, A german occult group that took the idea to its inevitable conclusion - that a master race descended from Lost Thule - the Aryans. The German people being the most Aryan. Two of their members founded the German Worker's Party, which became the Nazi Party. By the time the Nazis took power, they had little if anything to do with the Thule Society - the Nazis actually banned mystic societies and eschewed the occult, contrary to popular belief. The majority of the Thules dispersed, leaving an illegal minor group to face the horrors its theories had wrought. When the truth came out at the end of the war, some refused to believe. Some deniued it, or joined even less pleasant societies. And some admitted wronghood. They were horrified by what they had helped to created - a horror compounded by the fact that they had found things. They had discovered the true existence of ancestral ghosts, found proof of the Rmoahals of lost Atlantis. Some had found evidence of Shamballa in Tibet, barely escaping alive. Some had faced wqitches, demons, vampires and wors.e There was a secret world of night out there, and the Volkisch were no kind of master race. To the dead, humans, Aryan or no, were food. To werewolves, prey. To demons and others, toys and insects to be played with and destroyed. These men renamed themselves the Loyalists of Thule. They ended their hunt for Atlantis in favor of more information on the world of night. They needed to know, felt a duty to the world - a debt to humanity. The Loyalists of Thule are also the Indebted, and they know that they will never be able to pay enough. Even today, they keep at it. They're secretive, and few know of them. Not all of their members and contacts know what they once were, not even their name - at least, not until they've broken the law or their morals for the Loyalists and are in too deep to escape. They don't enjoy blackmailing their members. It's just that, if they didn't keept the secret, they wouldn't be able to atone. They have to work alongside other hunters - the Loyalists are mostly scholars and collectors. They give aid and information. They mostly aren't fighters, and they never, ever say who they are. They answer to secretive leaders, each of whom runs the compact on a national level. These leaders answer to the three founders, who still live in Germany. Three men, all in Munich, all over 90 years old. Once a week, they meet and compare notes collected by their secretaries, deciding what to send out to people and what to act on. They have only each other, and each of the three hates the other two passionately - they are reminders of guilt. Those few that have met them say that the old men are only holding on to see which will give up and die first - a hateful, decrepit, remose-filled starng match of a life. They and the Loyalists must know, must find the truth, and then pass it on. If they can save the human race from monsters, maybe they can atone for nearly destroying it. Not all are so ideologically dedicated, of course. Somre are blackmailed. Some find out about their past and are just a little too enthusiastic about it - but they don't last. Neo-Nazi ideology is the one thing forbidden to the Indebted - and anyone wh oexpresses them or even suggests that maybe shame is no longer needed...well, they don't get a hearing. They just meet old colleagues with long, long knives and get a very brief chance to explain themselves. Many of the Indebted believe their job is hopeless - it's impossible to equip humanity to fight monsters, especially when your organization is born out of guilt and secrecy. But then, an impossible task is the only way to atone for an unforgivable sin. Above all, the Loyalists are scholars. Investigators, archaeologists, academics, detectives, antiquarians. They aren't all physically incompetent by any means - in fact, most of them have been forced to learn to handle themselves by the nature of what they investigate. But sitll, they are not warriors. They exist to equip warriors with the tools and knowledge they need. The Loyalists believe in understanding, and they recognize that different monsters are different kinds of threats. Vampires and other undead that consume blood, flesh or souls get a lot of attention. Werewolves, particularly the kind that breed true, don't always pose a threat to humans if left alone. Demons, ghosts and spirits, along with extradimensional entitties, should not exist. They must be studied, their weaknesses found, and then someone found to destory them. If a supernatural creature is no threat, it's still worth studying - knowledge is knowledge, and secrets are always worth knowing. The Indebted also keep an eye out for any creature or organization that supports Nazi ideals or took part in the Holocaust. Magicians proved to support Nazis, a vampire in the death camps, whatever. They must die. Even the most mild-mannered Loyalist will take active part in that hunt. And they make no exception for human hate groups - if a Loyalist finds a neo-fascist demagogue, sure, there's no mystical secrets there. But there is a target that deserves to die. The ultimate goal, still, is to collect knowledge for a purpose: to become indispensable, to earn the respect of their colleagues such that if their past ever came out, they might at least be understood as necessary. The Loyalists are largely on the same page about what they do - it's the why that varies. Most are Scholars, collectors of information about the threats to humanity. They spread this infromation among those who would fight and destroy those threats. They are cautious, prudent and try to avoid the front lines. The Penitents, on the other hand, are basically Indiana Jones. They seek danger, and believe they must take active part, because of guilt. It's one thing just to help, but they beleive the Loyalists must do something about evil themselves. If they die in the process...well, perhaps that's the price of atonement. The Advance, on the other hand, tend to elad the charge. They accept the guilt of the Thules and reason that, yes, they need to atone - but if they're going to do that, they should be at the forefront. They should be leading humanity against the monsters. In gaining knowledge, they gain power over both monsters and their colleagues. They believe that it is the duty of the Loyalists to atone by humbly taking control of the Vigil. The Advance are the rarest of all Loyalist philosophies - some fear that they will bring areturn to the Volkisch views that damned the Thules in the first place. Stereotypes posted:Ashwood Abbey: I spent a month in Ashwood Abbey, actually. Their library was amazing, and I even participated in a hunt, which was most educational. It was just...I mean...I couldn't go back there. They'd found a demon. A vile-looking thing. I told them how to make it powerless, and they did, and then...I can't. Just - I actually felt sorry for the demon. One dot of Loyalist status means you know the secret of the Loyalists and their guilty heritage. If you succesfully risk Willpower on an Occult or Academics roll, you get an additional Willpower back - one which can go above normal limits of your pool. For three dots, you know several other Loyalists, and get a two-dot Mentor. For five dots, you've been to Munich and met the bitter old men. You know the names and addresses of dozens of members, getting 3 dots of Contacts.  And the ex-Nazis are some of the most upstanding guys. Next time: Vampires on Youtube
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May 27, 2015 18:49
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Sorry guys, Ashwood Abbey rules. If you'd hunt monsters without skinning them and grinding them up to make leather jackets and cocaine, I'm sorry you're so boring. It's also literally impossible for Ashwood Abbey to be the most evil PC faction when two of the others are "A fundamentalist church" and "a biomedical corporation." Doresh posted:And if you're lucky, you might just start with a small (but vicious) dog. That's always a plus. Valatar posted:I've been thinking for the longest time that 2nd edition Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay's system is the perfect fit for Nightspawn. It uses a percentile skill resolution system, rules for terror and insanity, combat is gory and brutal, magic is liable to summon demons to devour the caster, and character progression is fairly horizontal to the point that you're never so badass that you can just ignore taking a hunter's polearm in the guts. All of that seems to go pretty smoothly with the kind of 'oh god we're all hosed' setting that Nightspawn's trying for.
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May 27, 2015 18:54
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The Long Night isn't even an organized church. And I love that WW didn't go with the expected "FUNDIE CONSERVATIVE CHRISTIANS SOMETIMES KILL MONSTERS BUT AREN'T THEY THE REAL MONSTERS???" angle. Sure, you might find rear end in a top hat Westboro types among them, but by and large the Long Night is good people, trying to hold back the darkness. They don't forget about the "love thy neighbor" bit (like some other tribulation militias I could care to mention *coughleftbehindcough*), they're not caricatures. Aside from the Abbey, all the compacts are good people. Even the ex-Nazis. Cheiron is less evil and more uncaring, though, but I'll get to that when its writeup is up.
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May 27, 2015 19:01
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Xelkelvos posted:I really do wish Princess was more amenable to Toku stuff. Yeah that would be fun, but how would it ever be all arcane and gothy and have lots of tarot card jargle and faux-latin in it then? It's in the charter that you have to have all that stuff if you want to make a Something: The Somethinging.
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May 27, 2015 19:05
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Hunter (the old version, I admit) was the only WoD game I've ever actually played rather than read, and run myself. What's funny is the Hunter I ran was almost closer to the new one: The Messengers from the old line, the weird assholes who might be the Solar Exalted and Imbued the Hunters, were cast as another kind of monster and another villain, and the protagonists were survivors from a werewolf attack on their life sciences company who were trying to figure out how the hell these things regenerated and how that could be harnessed for human use. They were basically proto-Cheiron, albeit I get the sense DNA was a lot less creepy. It was much more of a 'cover up our activities, try to balance life and the Hunt' sort of game, though I wouldn't say it was particularly grimdark. Just less gung ho, considering it was about a depressed Russian immigrant security guard, a terrified newly minted PhD, and a comic shop owner who was driving her roommate to work on the wrong day trying to fight monsters. It left a good impression and I'm eager to see what the Vigil is like, since I've heard it's far less schizophrenic than the Reckoning, and even that had some satisfying potential. The stereotypes you see in Hunter, I've always thought, were more of the human impression of the other splats. Like, every other splat knows its big reasons why it does the thing it does, but to an outside, human observer most would look like violent psychopaths with weird grab-bags of powers and a logical response would be 'how do we fight these maneating terrors? Because it looks like there are a lot of reasons they might fight us.'
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May 27, 2015 19:07
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Night10194 posted:The stereotypes you see in Hunter, I've always thought, were more of the human impression of the other splats. Like, every other splat knows its big reasons why it does the thing it does, but to an outside, human observer most would look like violent psychopaths with weird grab-bags of powers and a logical response would be 'how do we fight these maneating terrors? Because it looks like there are a lot of reasons they might fight us.' That's the impression that I got, reading over the section on Changelings. I thought to myself, 'Yeah, but those are... oh. Oh, poo poo. How could you tell the difference, even if you were inclined to care?' The Abbey reminds me of horribly British villains from Alan Moore or Warren Ellis comics. Decadent, perverse, a gross exaggeration of rumours about aristocratic tastes.
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May 27, 2015 19:16
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theironjef posted:Yeah that would be fun, but how would it ever be all arcane and gothy and have lots of tarot card jargle and faux-latin in it then? It's in the charter that you have to have all that stuff if you want to make a Something: The Somethinging. Replace all the faux Engrish with faux Latin and make the theme based on the arcane and occult. See also: Kamen Rider Kiva (powers that emuate supernatural types to better combat them), Kamen Rider Wizard (crystallized Mage spells for quick and easy access), Magiranger? Also, I did forget one other character that would fit under the category of Queen of Spades:  Candelira of Kyoryuger. She'd also be a Spring Court Changeling instead
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May 27, 2015 19:16
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theironjef posted:Yeah that would be fun, but how would it ever be all arcane and gothy and have lots of tarot card jargle and faux-latin in it then? It's in the charter that you have to have all that stuff if you want to make a Something: The Somethinging. Xelkelvos posted:Replace all the faux Engrish with faux Latin and make the theme based on the arcane and occult. See also: Kamen Rider Kiva (powers that emuate supernatural types to better combat them), Kamen Rider Wizard (crystallized Mage spells for quick and easy access), Magiranger? Or you just make Arcana Sentai Gothenger, a team of depressed people using tarot-based weapon and summon a giant robot powered by their own suffering in a cold, uncaring world where they can never win because a new monster pops out every week. Speaking of Kamen Rider, the Kuuga's Gurongi would be neat for a Hunter campaign. They take the typical monster of the week shtick of "You're only allowed to fight the hero one at a time" and twist it into a sick game for psychopathic serial killers. Doresh fucked around with this message at 19:33 on May 27, 2015 |
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May 27, 2015 19:30
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Doresh posted:Speaking of Kamen Rider, the Kuuga's Gurongi would be neat for a Hunter campaign. They take the typical monster of the week shtick of "You're only allowed to fight the hero one at a time" and twist it into a sick game for psychopathic serial killers. The Grongi are disturbingly evil for a children's spandex hero show. That one episode where Ichijou takes on the bat Grongi with a shotgun inside a church is WoD as hell.
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May 27, 2015 19:32
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Traveller posted:The Grongi are disturbingly evil for a children's spandex hero show. That one episode where Ichijou takes on the bat Grongi with a shotgun inside a church is WoD as hell. Not to mention that the big bad is a bit like Evil Tokusatsu Caine.
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May 27, 2015 19:34
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Traveller posted:The Grongi are disturbingly evil for a children's spandex hero show. That one episode where Ichijou takes on the bat Grongi with a shotgun inside a church is WoD as hell. Kamen Rider can get all sorts of dark at times and would probably fit right in into the WoD. Even the fruit one.
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May 27, 2015 19:42
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Bieeardo posted:That's the impression that I got, reading over the section on Changelings. I thought to myself, 'Yeah, but those are... oh. Oh, poo poo. How could you tell the difference, even if you were inclined to care?' And even then, there's the not unreasonable stance that even the best of them cover for the worst.
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May 27, 2015 19:45
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HackMaster, 4: Budget, Budget, BudgetSeiklos McBucket posted:Str 13-1 = 12/18 So, the votes (well, the vote) is for Angawa Battle Cry and Maintenance. These cost us 12 BP together. For the Angawa Battle Cry, we need to have novice proficiency in Sarlangan (the language of the Grels who invented the cry), but that won't be a problem when we come to skills. Talents are a bit more of a problem. One-Upmanship is a given at 10BP, but Tough Hide costs a whopping 40. Improved Awareness is also useless to us because assuming we're going to be wearing heavy armor eventually (which we presumably are since we're a tank), the initiative bonus it gives us will be cancelled out by the armor. (Wearing heavy armor can negate an initiative bonus, but can't actually impose a penalty.) quote:P 7 Angawa Battle Cry (need Novice Sarlangan) Now it's time for skills! Skills are percentile based. Regular skill checks are done by rolling under your skill on percentile dice, but with a modifier for anything harder that "hard" checks - -80 for Easy, -40 for Average. This seems a bit odd, but I like the idea that this is a message to the GM that "average" usage of a skill might not be great to roll for. Every skill is governed by one or more stats, and these determine the starting value of the skill. Some skills are Universal, and you get a starting rating of those equal to the value of the lowest dependent stat. So our starting Universal skill scores are: Acting (Lks/Cha) 11% Animal Husbandry (Wis) 6% Animal Mimicry (Wis) 6% Boating (Wis) 6% *Cartography (Int) 13% Climbing (Str/Dex) 9% Current Affairs (Wis) 6% Diplomacy (Cha) 11% Disguise (Int/Cha) 11% Distraction (Cha) 11% Fire Building (Wis) 6% Glean Information (Int/Wis/Cha) 6% Hiding (Int/Dex) 9% Interrogation (Wis/Cha) 6% Intimidation (Str/Cha) 11% Jumping (Str) 12% *Law (Int) 13% Listening (Wis) 6% Observation (Wis) 6% Oration (Cha) 11% Persuasion (Cha) 11% Pick Pockets (Dex) 9% Read Lips (Int) 13% Recruit (Cha) 11% Resist Persuasion (Wis) 6% Rope Use (Dex) 9% Salesmanship (Int/Wis/Cha) 6% Scrutiny (Wis) 6% *Seduction (Looks/Cha) 11% Skilled Liar (Cha) 11% Sneaking (Dex) 9% Survival (Wis/Con) 6% Torture (Int) 13% Tracking (Wis) 6% We're limited in the ones marked with stars, though: Law and Cartography because we're by default illiterate unless we buy up the Literacy skill, and Seduction because of the Abstinence:Sex quirk. We also get a starting roll of 37+2*Int+d20p in our native language. Rolling this, I got a 20 - which, because of the p, explodes, and the next roll of 12 gives a result of 31 (not 32 because 1 is subtracted from the exploded rolls, meaning it is possible to get a 20 by rolling 20, 1) 37+13+13+31 gives us.. Language, Gnomish (Int) 94% Skill levels are divided into ranks based on the rating you have, and the book lists example tasks you could accomplish at each rank (although it doesn't list the modifiers for them, which is a bit of a bummer). Most skills, we are Novice in with a rating of <25%, but we are a Master of Gnomish, able to nitpick grammar with the best of them with the added bonus of actually being right (and having a hammer). You'll also remember that being a Fighter give us a free purchase in a non-Universal skill: Appraisal, Armor and Weapons. Since it's a non-Universal skill, purchasing it means we raise it from 0 to the stat base minimum as above, then roll a Mastery Die. (If we purchased a Universal skill, we'd just roll the Mastery Die.) What's a Mastery Die? It's a dice that governs how many % points your skill increases. The die type is determined by your existing rank (higher ranks roll lower dice, so they have harder times buying up the last few points in a skill) and modified by your stat. As mentioned before, this is a really vicious mechanic at character generation because it means that skill purchases are one-way; if you screw up and realize you shouldn't have bought a skill, your GM would presumably be within the rights to tell you that you can't undo the purchase because otherwise you could just reverse the purchases for any rolls that turned out badly. So. Appraisal is INT-based, so our base from our stat is 13%. That makes us a Novice, so we then roll the Mastery Die for a Novice, which is a d12p, and get a 7. Because of our 13 Int, we get a +1 bonus to the mastery die (the mastery die bonuses are exactly equal to the universal modifiers in D&D 3e+), so we gain 8 points on top of the 13, getting 21%. We're also going to need to buy up the Sarlangan skill for our war cry. Buying languages at character generation is cheap, only 1 BP for a purchase (it gets more expensive in play, since you have to have exposure to the language - unless you took Polyglot, in which case you can buy languages cheap whenever you like). Languages are INT-based, so, dadada, base 13%, roll d12p, get a 9, add 1, Language, Sarlangan (Int) 23% 23 BP remaining And while we're at it: Language, Merchant's Tongue (Int) 16% 22 BP remaining We have only Novice mastery in these languages, which means we can "speak a few common words correctly and communicate with extensive pantomime". That's all we need for Sarlangan, which isn't too popular (it's the Grel language) but for Merchant's Tongue, which is Common, that might be a problem. Ohh, but wait a second! The fact we have a high Intelligence also gives us bonus BPs to spend on Int-related skills. Int 13 gives us only one. Wis and Cha can do that too, but we don't have high enough scores in those. Still, we'll take what we can get: 23 BP remaining You've probably noticed that these skills are.. kinda grainy. And these are only the Universal skills! The full list of other skills (which I won't give the stats for because there's too many) is: Administration, Agriculture, Animal Empathy, Animal Herding, Animal Training, Appraisal, Arcane Lore, Artistry, Astrology, Blacksmithing, Botany, Carpentry, Cooking, Craft, Direction Sense, Disarm Trap, Divine Lore, Fast Talk, First Aid, Forestry, Forgery, Gambling, Geology, History, Hunting, Identify Trap, Leatherworking, Literacy, Lock Picking, Mathematics, Mining, Monster Lore, Musician, Pottery, Religion, Riddling, Riding, Urban Survival, Swimming, Trap Design, Weather Sense. That makes a pretty good shopping list, but.. hang on a second. Before we get too lost, let's think a bit about the next step: our equipment. HackMaster starting characters are poor. drat poor. Even if you use the Social Class table from the DMG, the highest class you can roll is "Upper Lower class". They also give the reason for this: rich or middle-upper class characters would probably have much more sense than to attempt to go adventuring, and so inevitably having such a class means fudging together a backstory about losing everything, and rags-to-riches stories are much more appealing than riches-to-rags-back-to-riches, so why even bother starting high? We get to start with 35+2d12 silver... And I rolled a loving 2. Fortunately, we can buy ourselves a hammer (2 sp), a bigger hammer (5 sp), and a small shield (15 sp), leaving us 15 sp left over. (A medium shield would bankrupt us.) Armor, however, is a problem. Heavy Armor? You're having a laugh. The cheapest is 120 sp. Even if we bought a poor quality suit (which is 25% cost with unspecified penalties that are hidden in the GM's guide..) we couldn't afford it. We can buy leather armor (6 sp, 9 left), and fortunately armor proficiencies are cumulative, so our heavy armor proficiency means we can use light armor too. The reason to think about this is that we can buy more SP at the cost of 1 BP per 5 SP. We can now start to get some statistics together, too: Starting HP: CON + 5 (size) + d10 = 24 Hammer (2.5 pounds): Attack -1 (dex) +1 (int) +1 (fighter/GT) = +1 Speed 8 (hammer) Damage 2d6p+1 (Str) = 2d6p+1 Shield damage d6p+1 (Str) = d6p+1 Defense:-1 (encumbrance) -2 (leather armor) -1 (dex) -2 (wis) +4 (shield) +4 (gnome titan) = +2 Damage reduction: 2 (leather armor) + 4 (small shield) = 6 Notice that armor makes you easier to hit, but gives you damage reduction - heavy armor does even more than this, so you literally end up being a walking tank. Shields are a little odd, in that they also change the nature of your defense roll as well as giving you a bonus to it, but we'll see more about that later on. For now, any requests on skills to buy up or BP to spend on silver to buy extra kit? Bear in mind that our leather armor is already making us lightly encumbered. hyphz fucked around with this message at 00:57 on May 28, 2015 |
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May 27, 2015 20:10
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Hunter: The Vigil Network Zero isn't really secret. You know, every so often a video shows up on sharing sites - YouTube, Vimeo, whatever. It's creepy - dark, badly pixellated, crappy sound, but really good effects. Dude turns into a monster and runs off. Guy must have a killer editing suite even if his camera sucks. Looked almost real. Sometimes, it even goes viral. Everyone wonders how they did it. And the answer's simple: they didn't. You just saw Network Zero in action. The Secret Frequency - not a frequency that's secret, one that broadcasts secrets. For the past decade, Network Zero has been publishing information on the supernatural online for anyone who'll watch. Before that, they were public access cable guys. It's all real. Septemer 22, 1991. Dallas Texas. Jim Harrison gets on the air, really early in the morning. He was an indepnedent filmmaker who, until a few years prior, had done SFX for monster movies. He got three reels of film anonymously in the mail, apparently recorded in the mid-70s from the folks in it and their outfits. One reel shows a gigantic feral dog stalking some residential streets in Philly, at least based on local landmarks. Second reel? Man who's blurry and out of focus, but the rest of the room's crystal clear. He turns into a cloud of mist. Third film? Somethinbg translucent, rubbery, made of tentacles. It comes out of the ground and pulls itself into the sky. No faces in any of the movies, no identities that he could discover. Jim literally cut the film to pieces and spliced it back together to figure out the effects. He couldn't. That morning, September 22, Jim broadcast all three films on public access. At the end, hje asked if anyone knew and gave out a PO box. Jim never did find out the truth there, but he did get letters from folks with stories to tell, and some came with film of their own. That was the start of Network Zero. Jim continued to broadcast regularly, making contacts across the US. He began to believe he was at the edge of some vast conspiracy. He became obsessed. His wife left, but he never really noticed. His contacts, meanwhile, kept up the search. By the time Jim started Network Zero online, in 1999, he had 74 films from various sources, all showring the truly weird. It went worldwide. Network Zero has members everywhere on the globe now. Jim's a true believer, though he's never perosnally encountered the supernatural. Network Zero runs guerrilla now -they post when and where they can, often without introduction or explanation. It gets them into other web communities. Sometimes it even shares what information it has with other monster-hunting organizations - the Network isn't stupid. They know these things are dangerous, and that others are out there. They invite people in regularly - with Web 2.0, millions of videos and podcasts exist, and it's not hard to figure out if someone's on the level. There's at least six members who spend all their time scouring sites and search engines for more evidence to rebroadcast, while others work harder to get more footage. All too often, it finds them. What the Secret Frequency is about is getting as many people as much of the truth as possible. Some of its members want to arm humanity against the monsters out there. Some just want to film weird poo poo. Some want to be proven right. It doesn't matter - pass on the message. They can be militant, sure, and most do go armed on their film excursions, for self-defense. But few of them are physically fit enough to really challenge a werewolf or an angry vampire. Often, they tag along with others, letting the other hunters do the fighting while they hand out information, locations and footage. Jim Harrison and his friends don't actually know much about monsters - they know there's broad categories, but only in terms of behavior and abilities. The problem is, some critters just don't show up on film. It's really frustrating - vampires, for instance. They blur. It's well known enough that Network Zero has started using mobile phone snapshots as a quick acid test to detect vampires. Most of Network Zero are from a philosophy referred to as Record Keepers. They're journalists - they don't judge their material, they record it. Honestly, with no modificaitons. The Army of Truth, on the other hand, is focused on disseminating information at any cost. They'll rip open eyes with stunts, viral memes, hjacked broadcasts and more. They can be militant, and have more weapons-capable Hunters than any other part of the Network. And finally, you've got the Secret Keepers - conspiracy theorists who think the world is controlled by monsters, and who see every piece of bad news as the fault of some fiendish machination. They want to keep the public in the dark, thinking it'll only make the monsters work harder to cover tracks. Instead, they focus on building a case within the group, until they can blow the doors of this conspiracy wide open. Entry into NetZo is by invitation, and you get status by sharing information and footage. At one dot, you have a Network Zero password and can upload to their sites, where they'll spread it across the net. You get a free specialty in either Crafts or Expression involving some form of media. At three dots, you're well known (by your internet handle) to anyone who cares about Forteana, and have free Fame at 2 dots in that area. At five dots, you're a hub of information, getting a library of videos and documents that lets you get the equivalent of Encyclopedic Knowledge related to film techniques and supernatural events that have been recorded. You won't know poo poo about supernatural society and factions, but you know how to spot a vampire or identify a werewolf. Stereotypes posted:Loyalists of Thule: Several of our people out in the field have hooked up with these guys in some way or another. The moment you start pokeing into the weird stuff, the good stuff, it's like they know. They show up and ask if they can help. The question I want to ask is how do they know? Where do they get their books? And if they're so keen on helping, answer me this: why don't they want to tell you who sent them?  The monsters are out there. You just didn't believe it when they told you. Null Mysteriis, if we're being honest, is kind of dumb. But hey, it's a good backbone, at least. Everything has a rational explanation - sciensits just haven't found it for everything yet. They date back to 1893, when Jean-Pierre Brattel walked out of a meeting of the Parisian Theosophical Society. They'd originally intended to apply rigorous scientific standards to religious claims, which Brattel found fascinating, but he found that in practice they were just another religious movement. After a few meetings, he'd had enough. However, he felt that rationalists discounted out of hand that there might still be things unexplained out there. He felt a need for a group to scientifically examine that which was beyond science of the time. By the beginning of World War One, his new organization, Null Mysteriis (abbreviated from Nullum Mysteriis Processit - out of the unexplained comes nothing, very loosely) had several hundred members in Europe and America. Of course, two world wars wiped out most of the organization. They started calling themselves the ORganization for the Rational Assessment for the Supernatural in the 70s, and it's only since then that they've even approached their old membership numbers. They're hobbyists, mostly. A few paid staff in the London headquarters (used sicne 1941), but there's almost no money. Anyone can join, but the membership dues - very minimal - pay the staff salaries, the publication of a monthly newsletter, a yearbook and clubhouse maintenance. Null Mysteriis members have day jobs - generally very educated ones. They hunt for anomalies. UFOs, reincarnation, Stigmata, cryptozoology. They are scientists, and they investigate monsters. A werewolf goes through a shopping center and almost no one admits to seeing it. The lady collecting samples off the tiles? Null Mysteriis. Demonic possession ends in murder-suicide. Guy with the Kirlian camera? Null Mysteriis. Serial killer seizes a victim in a way that should be impossible. Guy with the EMF reader and tape measure who visits once the police leave? Null Mysteriis. Their big problem is that the scientists who make up the organization consider that because they are expert in one field, they are experts in all fields - their meetings are prone to argument as physicists start to hold court on evolution and biologists talk about psychology. It's not helped by the fact that their leadership is schisming. The current General Secretary is Scottish astrophysicist Alexander Watt, who is a solid rationalist that believes the supernatural merits cautious, scientific, sensible study. The Treasurer, Vincent Fielding, is a psychiatrist who is almost a guru to many members, advocating aggressive fieldwork and techniques that Watt dismisses as psuedoscience - hypnotic regression to past lives, spirit cameras, Lovelock's Gaia hypothesis, Sheldrake's morphogenic field theory and more. Watt maintains he'll turn them all into cranks. Some would say they already are; though many of its members are highly respected in their fields, few would admit to being members. Stereotypes posted:Ashwood Abbey: Collective delusions are surprisingly common. Take the occasional groups of thrill-seekers who go out to hunt and kill monsters, solely for their own entertainment. They always seem to find their monsters. Does that strike you as a reasonable or likely outcome? Of course not. Null Mysteriis is about investigation. Not about stopping supernatural events or fighting evil - just about knowing. They hold that the paranormal ius neither good nor evil - it's the result of as yet non-understood orders of energy. And of course often it's wholly explainable by modern science. Sure, paranormal stuff tends to be detrimental to humanity, but you don't call radioactive material evil even though it can kill. If a paranormal energy makes a man invulnerable but turns him into a serial killer, how's that different from radiation sickness, morally? Vampirism, now, vampirism is a communicable disease. It suspends aging somehow and hides life signs as well as making its victim vulnerable to light and requiring a parasitic existence. Lycanthropy? Extreme genetic condition. Ghosts? Energy signatures. Demons and other entities? Made of energy. Could come from anywhere, given form by the viewer's perception. It's all got an explanation. If there's holes, okay, it's hypothesis. That's the best we've got. Now, that's not to say Null Mysteriis won't hunt. Members can and do - taking the rad sickness analogy, if an energy that gets out of hand is deadly, it can't be allowed to get out of hand. If vampirism makes you a psychopath, given it's incurable, it may be for the best to put the poor soul out of their misery. Cancer's not evil, but it can be cut out. Not, mind you, that most of Null Mysteriis is good at violence. Direct violence, anyway. They can be quite good at sneaking up with a syringe. They often find themselves working alongside other Hunters due to their careers and knowledge...and they often find themselves wanting to study the more potent, strange Hunters they meet. Alexander Watt's faction, the Rationalists, are the majority. It's all provable and disprovable with science. Some of it isn't yet, but it will be, with diligent and empirical study. Vincent Fielding's Open Minds believe that the important thing is proving or disproving phenomena by any means necessary - even if it seems unscientific. You can figure out the whys later. They're growing in number. And a similarly growing group, the Cataclysmicists, believe the argument is pointless and instead are concerned with rising numbers of reported phenomena since the millenium, projecting that if it doesn't slow down, the world could be in for a cataclysm of some kind, and that maybe someone should do something about that. Status in Null Mysteriis comes from gathering data and sharing it, maybe even publishing in the organization's journal. At one dot, you're free if not necessarily welcome at any Null Mysteriis meeting in the world. You get a free specialty in Parapsychology in either Academics, Occult or Science. For three dots, you have knowledge of fellow members, many prominently placed, and get a dot of Contacts and a dot of Allies. At five dots, you've been in the field long enough to have some solid theories. You get the equivalent of the Common Sense merit, applicable only to investigating the supernatural.  Problem is, these guys are often portrayed as insisting magic's not real when it provably is, and that it should obey physics when it provably doesn't. Next time: Not in my back yard.
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May 27, 2015 20:16
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If a thing occurs repeatedly and provably then it is possible, and I want to see scientists in some setting who go with "Holy poo poo, we need to rewrite the books!" rather than "We must be hallucinating, this can't be possible!" when confronted with the supernatural. As for the Nightbane powers, hoo boy. That's gonna be a couple more stops down the line, but poo poo gets goofy.
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May 27, 2015 20:29
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Nessus posted:If a thing occurs repeatedly and provably then it is possible, and I want to see scientists in some setting who go with "Holy poo poo, we need to rewrite the books!" rather than "We must be hallucinating, this can't be possible!" when confronted with the supernatural. That's exactly what Null Mysteriis are. If other books (and admittedly, I don't have an encyclopedic knowledge of every time they were referenced anywhere in nWoD) hae portrayed them as "it's all a bunch of simple tricks and nonsense" types, that's a case of the author Not Getting It and should be disregarded.
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May 27, 2015 20:36
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It's more that they keep getting set up with stuff like their Aegis Kai Doru quote where they go 'thing that the book tells us is real and true? obviously nonsense' Like, it may be a semi-reasonable take but it's also making them look stupid when the Aegis Kai Doru get a writeup about eight pages later. E: For that matter it is kind of ridic to go 'guy can turn into wolfoid form that violates mass-energy conversion? OBVIOUSLY it's just a freak genetic thing'
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May 27, 2015 20:45
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GimpInBlack posted:That's exactly what Null Mysteriis are. If other books (and admittedly, I don't have an encyclopedic knowledge of every time they were referenced anywhere in nWoD) hae portrayed them as "it's all a bunch of simple tricks and nonsense" types, that's a case of the author Not Getting It and should be disregarded. See also the sidebar in one of the splats that goes "Task Force Valkyrie? Run by vampires fyi and does all their dirty work."
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May 27, 2015 20:46
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But then you have their quote on the Lucifuges:quote:But I've never seen any evidence of their existence. No, that doesn't mean they don't exist. But that's not the way it works. The Aegis Kai Doru are the most ridiculous of the conspiracies, to be honest. And I don't think you can blame the Null Mysteriis for not having the omniscient knowledge of the setting we have.
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May 27, 2015 20:47
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Nessus posted:If a thing occurs repeatedly and provably then it is possible, and I want to see scientists in some setting who go with "Holy poo poo, we need to rewrite the books!" rather than "We must be hallucinating, this can't be possible!" when confronted with the supernatural. You know, it would be pretty funky to have a version of the WoD setting where all those secret societies are no longer secret. Then again, secret society games come from the same reality as disaster movies where the large majority of scientists are ignorant jerks. hyphz posted:Starting HP: CON + 5 (size) + d10 = 24 I say we shouldn't overdo it with his starting encumbrance. Doresh fucked around with this message at 20:59 on May 27, 2015 |
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May 27, 2015 20:56
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I like the idea of a monster-hunting hunt club, but for god's sake, have some class in becoming the very thing which you hunt. You need that veneer, or else you just come across as dickholes with a clubhouse.Xelkelvos posted:Kamen Rider can get all sorts of dark at times and would probably fit right in into the WoD. Even the fruit one. Apologies for ranting off of one innocent comment, but- It's also a very different kind of darkness, the kind that's supposed to drive one to the heights of heroism. It's not really the horror of the WoD. The main thing is that World of Darkness - even the newer one - is so confused thematically (impossible to avoid when you have over a half-dozen games jammed into one setting, mind) that people think they can just shove anything into it if it has A Bad Thing Happen To Anyone Ever, but Kamen Rider in a world of police corruption and x-files and faerie kidnappers doesn't feel like it would enhance the concept. Genius and Princess and other fan books often feel to me just like spergy messes by taking an interesting idea and not only jamming it into ill-fitting clothes, but also just drowning that concept in words until any of the original interesting parts are hardly recognizable. Adding lingo and splats and delineated power sets to what are essentially archetypes of children's television does warm some nerd cockles, I'm sure. But it just feels to me like the game design equivalent of homeopathy.
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May 27, 2015 20:58
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Rifts Dimension Book 2: Phase World Part 2: “A city where one can find incredible wealth and comfort, as well as rifts-infested hellholes.”  Center’s racial breakdown is 73% ‘other’, which is to say that huge numbers of races have a representation in the city and are scattered liberally about. Even the Promethean natives are not dominant within the city proper. Basically any race with the technology to get to Center has representation there, and probably even some who don’t, who were brought or otherwise found passage. The city houses 600 million people and is a mile high. It’s also the oldest known building in the Three Galaxies which...is impressive. Supposedly it’s an artifact of the First. Shuttles approaching it “will see a white mountain, roughly square in shape.” Getting closer, it’s ridged and curved, balconies and windows cut into its surface. Runes and artificial constructions dot it all over. Thousands of shuttles and flying vehicles make their way around its mass. Once in a while a flare of rift activity livens up the skyscape. Center is generally a 24-7 operation with three shifts a ‘day’. Rift-travelers will find themselves transported into a crowded waystation serving thousands of other comers and goers. An official behind a desk will demand an entry fee (probably the ubiquitous ‘credit’) and they’re on their way. Once in a while a flurry of violence kicks up, is put down, and the bustle continues. People who arrive in Center against their will could be sent back home if they arrived at the gates, but they usually arrive in the bad parts of town, the muck-covered streets and limbs poking out of piles of garbage in the alleyways. Apparently a lot of victims of the Bermuda Triangle wind up in Center, which seems like it might be a problem if people are flying planes out of rifts into buildings. If these unwilling travelers survive, they might prosper in the seething mass of the city.  i don’t...even… According to scientists, Center’s exterior wall materials are at least five million years old, which predates every known civilization in the galaxy. That’s actually...kinda young in general, at least in theory. Like something wiped out all the other precursors in all the galaxies. The prometheans admit they didn’t build it, and so everyone assumes the First did it. The city is built on a massive supernexus that is largely contained by the structure of the city itself. Rift activity still happens, but a lot of it is controlled and deliberate--except at the lower levels, because apparently even godlike precursor races like their filthy slums. The promethean Elders keep enough administrators and forces in the Center to keep it under control if things got really hairy, but they largely don’t interfere. Some say it’s because they can’t, that the city is not truly under their control, others say it’s a longer term plan to trap evil in a single place, mostly the city just keeps going. Its geography is massive and labyrinthine, with large five-hundred foot ceilings and periodic dividing walls to allow cultures to exist side by side. There are ten total levels and the top four are fairly orderly; the bottom six get progressively worse. Getting around inside the city is accomplished via monorails, roads, and sidewalks. Intra-level transport works with elevators, staircases and ladders. Sounds like a confusing jumble eh? Moving between levels generally requires passing a checkpoint, some of which are to keep people in the lower sectors more than anything else. The promethean forces only concern themselves with threats to the integrity of the city or to the planet beyond, anything else up to full-scale war between sections is tolerated and considered a problem of the individual areas. Of course, the city itself is indestructible, but ruining large sections of it would likely get some ire. The spaceports and gates are also heavily guarded. Law enforcement then, is spotty. Bounty hunting is common and meets no interference--any “official papers” will allow a hunter to carry off a captive, and holy Fugitive Slave Act is that abusable. Mostly the problem is dealing with any friends the fugitive may have. The other problem with a massive super-arcology of course is poo poo. Literally the waste of 600 million sentients plus their pets and spawn. Also, food, air, and water for a lot of them. Supposedly a sentient computer runs a bunch of secret systems that keep the city operating--there are no massive air vents, air seems to be rifted in from elsewhere. Likewise fires are extinguished extradimensionally. Food dispensers seem to teleport food in and sell it vending-machine style; nobody knows where the money goes or where they get stocked. Mobs try to control the machines in some areas, charging inflated prices for the products. And the waste--is teleported away. Again.  please don't throw your trash into our dimension Next: The individual levels of the city.
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May 27, 2015 21:00
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Alien Rope Burn posted:Apologies for ranting off of one innocent comment, but- Why, Smurf: The Smurfening would blend perfectly into the WoD. On a more serious note, I really don't get why everything has to follow the same formula, and why it must be cramped into the same setting. How many wildly different kinds of ancient supernatural critters and organizations can you really put on one planet?
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May 27, 2015 21:07
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Mors Rattus posted:It's more that they keep getting set up with stuff like their Aegis Kai Doru quote where they go 'thing that the book tells us is real and true? obviously nonsense' I guess, but I think it's just as valid to read that as "These two groups have had little to no contact so far." Null Mysteriis accepts the supernatural, but they don't blindly believe everything someone tells them without evidence. Take it in part with their Lucifuge stereotype and it reads less as willful ignorance and more as "without direct confirmation, I remain skeptical." Cythereal posted:See also the sidebar in one of the splats that goes "Task Force Valkyrie? Run by vampires fyi and does all their dirty work." Weirdly that book was written by Chuck Wendig, who was the line developer for Hunter, so that's less a case of "freelancer going off the reservation." Not a call I'm particularly fond of, but still.
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May 27, 2015 21:08
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Alien Rope Burn posted:It's also a very different kind of darkness, the kind that's supposed to drive one to the heights of heroism. It's not really the horror of the WoD. The main thing is that World of Darkness - even the newer one - is so confused thematically (impossible to avoid when you have over a half-dozen games jammed into one setting, mind) that people think they can just shove anything into it if it has A Bad Thing Happen To Anyone Ever, but Kamen Rider in a world of police corruption and x-files and faerie kidnappers doesn't feel like it would enhance the concept. Genius and Princess and other fan books often feel to me just like spergy messes by taking an interesting idea and not only jamming it into ill-fitting clothes, but also just drowning that concept in words until any of the original interesting parts are hardly recognizable. Adding lingo and splats and delineated power sets to what are essentially archetypes of children's television does warm some nerd cockles, I'm sure. But it just feels to me like the game design equivalent of homeopathy. Man does that ever accurately describe my feelings about basically every fan construct set in the WoD mold. Every time I hear something like "Hey, play a mad genius" my first thought is always "oh cool, a party with MODOK and Doofenschmirtz and Frankenstein in it, I'm on board" but then I crack the book and it's near-literally all Greek to me. I'd say my least favorite thing about any given fan work in WOD is the need to include "how every individual archetype feels about every other individual archetype in every other book, boiled into a pithy little quote that sounds like it was snipped from Buffy fanfiction."
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May 27, 2015 21:19
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GimpInBlack posted:Weirdly that book was written by Chuck Wendig, who was the line developer for Hunter, so that's less a case of "freelancer going off the reservation." Not a call I'm particularly fond of, but still. And one I write off to my group playing a Valkyrie game as in-setting propaganda. Every supernatural organization they've encountered has assumed something supernatural has to be in charge of Valkyrie because we all know perfectly well that mortal humans are cattle and pose no threat whatsoever to us superior supernaturals. In my campaign, they're... kind of right. The Director is a former Promethean who completed her Pilgrimage.
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May 27, 2015 21:21
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I don't plan to stop this train until I run out of Hunter line books that aren't 100% fiction, so we'll see how Null Mysteriis gets treated in the other six or so books of the line. I honestly can't recall specifics beyond feeling they were done poorly.
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May 27, 2015 21:45
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Red Tide poo poo, I have a game in one hour and I have nothing to show, what do Here we get into Red Tide's set of GM-side tools for a sandbox game. Defining what "sandbox" means is important, as it's one of those terms that means different things for different people. For Crawford, a sandbox game is one where there is no overarching plot - there's no commitment to have any particular event come to pass in the campaign, no fear of the PCs "doing the wrong thing for the story" or "losing the plot." Yes, a GM can run a great story-driven game, but this isn't what it's about. A sandbox game is what the players are doing: if their goal is to take down a corrupt Xianese noble one way or another, that's it. If they later escape the noble because he's too tough to take down on their own and they need to rally a Westmark settlement to fight back against the noble, that's the game. And if several sessions later they've completely forgotten about the noble and are trying to fend off a savage Shou onslaught, then that is what the game is about. The players are the focus of the campaign, and everything else simply exists to give them interesting things to do. But the sandbox world is also alive, and actions have consequences: if the PCs finally kill the corrupt noble, his domain will fall into chaos and infighting. If they leave his daughter alive, she'll send assassins after them half a year later. The PCs get to see the results of everything they do, and NPCs react appropriately.  Dude's hairdo sucks. So how does a GM go on about running a sandbox game? First, it must be made clear to players that they are the main driving force of the game. The GM will provide things to do, yes, but they're the ones that have to bring a goal into the game, even if it's something as simple as "fight evil" or "get rich." Players should also understand that the world isn't automatically scaled to their level - there will be dangers that the PCs won't be able to face immediately, and if a situation looks lethally dangerous most often it will be. The GM won't be shoving them into no-win situations, but if the players foolishly charge into a peril after receiving warning well in advance that's their problem. But the GM also has a series of duties: making judgment calls on the player's actions and how the world reacts around them, giving them opportunities for their ambitions, and preparing the sandbox for them to play in. The advice here is eminently practical: a GM should have a folder - an actual, physical folder - with many pockets, divided into sections of People, Places, Encounter, Chronicle and Maps. The People section includes the particulars of any NPC the PCs meet, which at first doesn't have to be anything other than a name, occupation and location, with space left for further notes as the game progresses. Places contains brief writeups of towns, villages, monasteries, estates and other locations of importance, with notes on important NPCs and events, and what the PCs' actions do to said places. Encounters has sheets of pregenerated NPC and monster stats; these stats can later be reskinned for recycling, since the game is coarse enough that players most likely won't notice if a Shou warrior rolls the same numbers as a tong hatchetman. Chronicle carries the ongoing log of the campaign, to have a reference that can later be checked on to see what the PCs were doing months ago. And finally, Maps are always useful, but particularly if PCs are expected to fight. You don't need a detailed map of a village if the PCs are just buying supplies and gathering information, but you do need it if the PCs are manning the stockades against an orc raid. The folder needs to be stocked, of course. Eventually a GM should be able to pull a night's game just from the folder's references, but at the beginning they will have to put on some time filling it with resources. PCs will need a home base, but since at this point probably not even the players know what they will play you don't want to over commit, so you should make at least two barebones home base locations without burning yourself out on either of them. One should be a city (Xian, for instance), with notes on important services, merchants and some color NPCs. This place should be easily able to be reskinned if the players want to say start in Hohnberg instead, just changing some names and references around. The other potential home base should be a borderlands settlement, closer to ruins. Whatever they pick, keep the other writeup at hand - it will come in handy. After that, you'll need to generate other places of interest, and the home bases should also have options for social and exploratory play for PCs that want them. Finally, the group should have a first adventure to kick things off with - it should be something that gets the PCs together quickly, gives them an immediate goal, should have an easy way to introduce new PCs if one bites it early on (it is oldschool D&D after all  ) and finally should free them to go off on their own later. After that, with an idea of what the players want to do later, you should start generating new places and hooks for them, and if inspiration hits you then by all means go nuts - but everything should be usable, reskinnable. Not seen: the PCs ransacking the place. Between sessions, you use the log and what the players have told you they want to generate content for them. If they want a nobleman's help to depose a tyrannical magistrate, then generate the nobleman's court, and think of the challenges in getting an audience with such an important fellow. You don't need to plan for every single contingency, but you should have at least a session's worth of material together. Sometimes PCs want things that won't take them a full session to solve - then the GM has to think of their immediate goal after that and plan accordingly. If they come out with a wild swerve, that's why the campaign folder is for: pull something they haven't seen, change some names around, and bam. Above all, there is a golden rule that even gets a sidebar: don't prepare things unless they're fun to make or you expect to need in the next session. Don't burn yourself out making things you don't want. GM burnout kills campaigns faster than anything else. To help in the job of creating and maintaining the box, Red Tide has several tools for the GM. Here we have rules to create sites. A site is a place of interest, a place that is worth the player's attention. They're not intended to replace creativity, but are meant to be (a point that Crawford comes back to time and again) a way to simplify a GM's life when it comes to giving life to a campaign. Sites come in court, urban, borderland and ruin flavors. Court sites are places of intrigue: rather than actual locations, here we're trying to present the web of relationships of multiple NPCs and the conflicts that emanate from them. First you choose the location of the court (because an actual noble court is different from an academy which is different from a business and so on), then you define how many people of importance are there (the ones with real power), the details of their sources of power, and finally the conflicts, and what happens to whom when they're resolved one way or another.. The site rules include several tables to roll on, but the GM should feel free to just pick a result or make stuff up: these are only meant to help, not dictate slavishly. For instance, I rolled a temple where the figures of importance are a noble-turned-monk and a somewhat heretical priest. The noble is loved by the temple's peasants and servants, but the priest actually has clerical powers. I roll a conflict and get "Folly: one of the people is making a terrible hash of their duties but will not give it up." Already I see that the priest's power has gotten to their head, and the noble can't go against the priest directly due to the actual, provable divine connection. Some other NPCs are rolled: a seller of religious supplies (the priest's dealer?) a maidservant (follower of the noble since before they took the cloth, loyal unto death), a desperately hopeful petitioner (what would they be able to do just to get the priest to cast one spell?) and a curious scholar (an outsider like the PCs, here to chronicle the deviant beliefs of the priest perhaps). Suddenly, I have something for the PCs to do tonight. Borderland sites are the places between the tamed lands of men and the wildlands where Shou and other perils exist. They're often visited by adventurers, as they're the last outposts of civilization before entering the wilderness. But of course, these people live hard lives, and sometimes they could use an adventurer's hand, or their sword. Similar to the court, we first roll its location (dwarven delve? elven enclave? mining hamlet? trading post?) and then we roll or choose tags for it. Tags are familiar to Stars Without Number GMs, they're basically one entry that specifies a particular quality of the location, and include lists of possible friends, enemies, complications, things and places. For instance, let's say a tag is "Bungling Leadership": the settlement's leader is hopelessly incompetent. Enemies may be the fumbling leader, or a secret power behind their throne. Friends may include a relative that wants to save the leader from themselves, or an elder that sees the problem. Complications can be stuff like the incompetent leader being personally powerful or the only acceptable leader by local customs. Things may be a relic that gives the leader legitimacy, or proof that their advisors are corrupt. Places can be a confused and riotous audience hall, or a decaying, unrepaired wall. These sites have one or two tags, and they can be blended at the GM's pleasure: a delve tagged with Dwarven Outcasts and Faded Glory may be a settlement dominated by the inbred remnants of a once-great dwarf clan. The site should also have services for the PCs to take advantage of before going adventuring, and of course there should be stats for guards and the like, maps of interesting local features, and a hook or two that can give the players reason to take a closer look. Even if they're not immediately interested in the hooks, they can be called back on later, giving the illusion of foreshadowing. City sites are similar in construction to borderlands sites, with different tables to roll on. Cities in the Isles are generally small, with Xian the largest at no more than 12,000 people. Still, if players want a real metropolis these numbers can use an extra zero at the end. After all, if the players aren't "hardcore realism fiends" they won't be analyzing the map hex by hex for arable land and how much population it can support. More attention is given to the social fabric of a city site than a borderlands one: there will be legal systems to contend with, for instance. And of course, there should be hooks for the players to have something to do in cities.  Pick up that can. Ruin sites are the most interesting in construction. You first choose the ruin type, then determine how it became a ruin: though there are tables to do this, rolling in the borderlands tables and extrapolating can be useful: a small colony that suffered a catastrophic Crop Failure, perhaps? Then, you choose the ruin's inhabitants. Red Tide comes with 20 pre-made encounter sheets for different kinds of possible ruin dwellers. Each sheet includes stats for different types of NPCs and monsters, possible treasure they can have, and notes on how to scale each encounter to easy (roughly for 1-3 level parties), medium (4-6) and hard (7-9) difficulties. They also come with a table to introduce complications and twists to their presence. For instance, what if the Exiled Noble and his cronies holing up in this abandoned castle were actually innocent of the crime the noble was charged with? What if these Dwarven Outcasts are Repenters, willing servants of the Mother Below? What if this Shou tribe was led by its witch here to terminate a local Tide Cult, that has masked its true nature and convinced most of its rank and file followers that they worship different spiritual masters? With these sheets and the maps provided by the game, you can have a game's dungeon bash in less than thirty minutes, and if the players don't take up the hooks leading them to it then it's no biggie - save the encounter, reskin it for later.  Budget Altair on the job. Next: wow I managed to write all that and skip the bestiary section, welp
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May 27, 2015 21:48
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Doresh posted:Why, Smurf: The Smurfening would blend perfectly into the WoD. Ostensibly, they don't have to exist alongside each other, it's just that each line is written with the possibility in mind. Each one should be able to be played, themes and all, in a vacuum without any other splat coming around to start a monster mash and mixing things up. On the other side of it, though, the line shouldn't be so exclusive that crossover can't happen. Also, the folks on rpg.net obsessed with making WoD lines may just be poor writers/devs. Here's the Fifth Queen post though. Princess: the Hopeful The Queen of Swords AKA: The Brightly Burning One, The Faithful Marshal, The Queen Errant Followers’ Epithets: Adventurers, Heroes, Martyrs quote:Fire, fire gets a bit of a bad name these days, but fire is really life. Almost every living thing on the planet owes its life to the sun, and we owe everything that makes life worth living to the fire inside us. Life is meaningless if we don’t feel anything from it: Laughter, hope, wonder, even sadness. Without  quote:Philosophy Practical Magic: Strength, Intelligence, Presence. i.e. All of the Power Attributes. Only the Physical Attributes don't show up as a set for Wisp tricks. quote:Invocation: Fuoco quote:Quote Inspirations: Sailor Uranus, Nanoha, Captain Marvel, Indiana Jones. Eventually two others were added later (based on wiki history). Those are Sayaka Miki and Aquaman from Batman: the Brave and the Bold. Both of those sorta work, I guess. Finn the Human from Adventure Time is probably a better example than Captain Marvel of all characters. So that's it for the Queens until we come to the antagonists. Most of them are rather one-note and a lot of the info included was rather useless (the character creation sections are all rather superfluous and useless). We're only about 1/5 of the way through the book and one thing that I had forgotten to notice until now was the lack of Example PCs and an example of Character Creation. While veterans to WoD may not need the examples, it would make sense to have an example that focuses on the portions outside of Core. This may be another element of their perpetuation of development and being too mired in it without taking a step back and looking at the game as a whole and just losing sight of the whole in general. That might be why the Charms section and the Antagonists sections are about 100 pages each. Even Mage doesn't take up quite as much real estate in its books when it comes to spells, I don't think. Anyways, Next: Beacons, Sworn and Shikigami. Akin to Wolf-blooded, ghouls and Fae-touched.
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May 27, 2015 22:25
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Red Tide I'll show you how to kill a god The bestiary section comes before the GMing section but I managed to skip it. Oh well! We first start with Constructs. A fad in the pre-Tide Empire was the creation of artificial servants for all types of duties, from manual labor to warfare. Even small armies of these constructs were built, but the fad died when the prices for the materials needed in their construction became so expensive that it was cheaper to pay a day laborer than building a tireless servant with magic. They became toys for the wealthy, and in the Isles they are very rare, usually only found in ruins or guarding things. Constructs are all immune to sleep, hold and charm effects, and never need to eat, drink, sleep or breathe. They come in civilian and military flavors: Men of Jade and Clay are 2+2 HD creatures mass produced for agricultural labor and simple, but repetitive tasks. They're stupid by human standards, but can reason their way around obstacles and speak the language of their builders. Porcelain Servitors are less sturdy (1+1 HD) but more beautiful and intelligent, made for duties that involve interaction with humans. Some of these have managed to subvert their original programming in the centuries after the exile, approaching true intelligence. Military constructs are meant for warfare, limited in intelligence even compared to a Man of Jade and Clay: Ancient War Golems have 8 HD and hit with two powerful 1d12 attacks, while Black Juggenauts have 10 HD, two 2d6 attacks from the war scythes implanted in their bodies, and a 2d10 geomantic cannon installed in their chest. Fortunately, they can be stopped and put to service by means of keywords or override wands, but where even are you going to find one of those? Demons come from Hell. No one can deny that the Hell Kings exist and they hunger for souls. All demons an speak and understand all languages, have 90' infravision, can cast Detect Magic and Detect Invisible at will, are immune to fire damage and only take half damage from cold and electrical attacks. They cannot be poisoned and are immune to disease, and cannot be injured by unenchanted weapons. However, they're prone to underestimating mortals, gloating about their plans in detail when they should just finish them off and so on. Lesser Demons are fashioned from "fortunate" souls whose wickedness in life pleased the Hell Kings. They're twisted into horrible shapes, bent to the will of the Kings, and while some retain memories of their past lives none can defy their masters. They have 8 HD, three attacks and can petition their masters for the use of a single spell of 3rd level or lower, but they have a weakness shown in the way in which they were warped by the Hell Kings: a demon bound by spikes of ice takes double damage from frost attacks, cruel piercings make them take double damage from edged weapons, and so on. If they show no particular weakness, they take damage only from enchanted weapons. A Mandarin is elevated from the lesser demons to become a closer servant of the Hell Kings. They're the ones charged with more subtle work: secret cells hidden even within other infernal cults, and so on. They have an AC of -1, 12 HD, and hit with powerful 1d8 fists and a 1d12 curse that hits enemies up to 300' away. They can only be harmed by +2 or better weapons. Finally, a Hell King is a terrible thing, growing more daring to strike openly at the world with the Red Tide keeping the gods from interfering. They have 99 HP, attack with a 2d20 hell gaze that harms anyone except the most pure of individuals (so it is said), fail saves only on a roll of 1 or 2 and regenerate 5 HP per round. They may cast any spell except Wish.  Being a demon is a poo poo deal, honest. Celestial devils are the servants of the gods in their most negative aspect. So strict they are that no mortal ever measures up to them, and so they're always Chaotic by LL's alignment standards. With 15 HD and three attacks, as well as all clerical spells and the ability to Teleport without fail they would be dangerous enemies already, but they also can't be harmed by any type of weapon, even enchanted ones. Only spells and weapons especially consecrated to the destruction of the divine or extraplanar creatures may harm them: the exception are those wielded by fighters of 16th level or better (because they're that badass  ) or by dwarves of 8th level or better (because the murder of gods is in their blood ) Bdazz Lizardfolk live along the jungles and warm coasts. They sometimes look humanoid, sometimes as half-snake half-man hybrids, some look almost wholly human except by a trait like a forked tongue. They're divided between standard lizardmen and Old Sleepers, said to be great heroes of a forgotten lizardfolk empire that existed before mankind. The Old Sleepers fell into deep slumber, to awaken in their people's time of need. They have the powers of a 7th level magical user. Ogres are interesting, closer to Ravenloft than the traditional D&D ogre. An ogre is an evil human whose wickedness caused them to be possessed by spirits of evil. They're hideous in appearance, but they have the ability to disguise themselves perfectly as a regular human being with just some concentration. Only a child's touch can break the disguise. Ogres retreat not too far from civilization, to live alone or in groups of like-minded degenerates and raid the human settlements for people to "slake their unholy desires" with. Mercifully, we're not described what exactly ogres do, but they're explicitly mentioned to be created not by birth so there's that. Goddammit, Pathfinder. Shou, we already know. They're the setting's orcs, goblins, bugbears and hobgoblins. Aside from their anti-Tide abilities we saw in the character section and the fact that hobgoblins raise fellow goblins' morale to 9 (they seem to have an innate understanding of squad-based tactics and warfare), they're just the same ol' gribblies.  WAAAAGH Tidespawn! Now we're talking. These are usually fashioned from the people captured by the mist, with only the vaguest remnant of self-awareness. Sometimes the Tide lashes out a tendril to reach the shores, or sometimes Tide Cults summon them into existence inland. They used to be horror stories and little more, but in the last twenty years or so the numbers of Tide Cults have risen rapidly. Weak-willed men and women are tempted by dreams of the Tide to undertake small rituals that bring them a delusive sense of good fortune and abundance while warping their bodies and souls. The lucky ones are caught and executed before they can fully realize what they have become. Creepers are created from small humans, children and halflings. They fight in mad packs, and while they're very weak (1d4 HP, 1d2 or weapon-1 damage) they cause a sense of disorientation with their presence, giving normal creatures -1 to attack and +1 to AC as long as one Creeper is around. Magistrates of Ashes are rarely seen by humans (or rather, they rarely survive to report their findings.) They seem to be some sort of middleman position for the Tide, relaying orders and planning incursions into the isles. It vaguely resembles an Imperial magistrate, clouded with embers and smoke, and likes to teleport around and near foes causing 1d4 fire damage from their blast. They can claw their enemies for 1d6 damage, have 10 HD and can also cast a 2d6 firebolt, but take double damage from cold or frost attacks. Red Apostles are husks of wretched Tide devotees, unsuitable for the inscrutable purposes of their masters. Rather than turned into the other types of Tidespawn, they're wracked with a painful disease that can only be allayed by exhaling cones of burning meat and bone (AOE, 1d6 damage with save for breath weapon) They retain a surprising amount of awareness, and can "encourage" lesser Tidespawn to fight harder, dealing 1d6 damage to them and giving them +4 to hit. Stretched Ones are, well, that - probably humans or demihumans, whose torsos and limbs were elongated to grotesque lengths. They shamble and creep along the ground at great speed, fighting with their limbs or chains of vertebrae, and love to work in pairs to flank opponents. White Chanters are described as gaunt creatures with limbs at strange angles, droning a steady mutter of gibberish. They appear to maintain their intelligence, forming simple but effective battle plans and attacking with 1d8 shriek attacks, and they cause delirium in others with their sole presence (save vs Spells each round, else roll 4+ in 1d6 or be able to only defend). Wormwalkers are THE WORM THAT WALKS HOLY poo poo, and attack with worm tendrils for 1d4 damage - which wouldn't be so bad, except they have three attacks and wounded foes that come close automatically take 1d4 damage as the worms attempt to get into their open wounds. To make it worse, the first time a wounded enemy approaches a Wormwalker they are attacked by an especially large worm (1d6 damage) that attempts to impale them, if the attack is successful the worm deals 1d6 damage until someone slices it off. Any humanoid brought to 0 HP by this damage will become a Wormwalker within the hour without a Cure Disease. Finally, Dream Lords are both commanders and nodes of the Tide infestation. They manifest as echoes of old world rulers, so there's a false Emperor of the Ninefold Celestial Empire ruling where it used to be. They distort reality around them, and True Seeing will be the only way to avoid near instantaneous obliteration. Furthermore, even if a party can get close to a Dream Lord (which entails going into the Tide), the Lord is invulnerable until it is proven that it is not in fact the real lord of the place: in the case of the false Emperor, the party should present the original Tablet of Heaven given by the last true Emperor to Lammach before the escape, but that treasure has been lost to time. If this is done, all the PCs have to do is fight a 125-HP freak that casts any spell it wants once a round and attacks with horrible 2d20-damage visions that cause a save vs Spells or die, aside from their myriad servants and the corruption of the tide... but if a Dream Lord is killed, entire nations can be cleansed from the Tide's corruption in one swoop. Epic campaign time!  If you walk without rhythm, you'll never learn. Next: SPOILERS AHEAD Traveller fucked around with this message at 23:02 on May 27, 2015 |
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May 27, 2015 22:57
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Hunter: the Vigil The Union were born from the labor movement. You got trade unions out of that, but in the early 20th century, you also got the Chicago Union. A group of politicized workers noticed a disease plaguing their children - an unnatural one. Things other than factory owners were bleeding them of flesh, sweat and blood. Alone, they were weak, but together they could be strong, just as against the capitalist fat cats. For a few years, the Chicago Union hunted the monsters preying on their kids. When their job was over, they disbanded. So it went with other teams across the Western world over the next century. The change came in 1999, when Holly Ramirez, an active member of one of these "unions", decided to look online for resources. She found others like her, who had banded together for mutual defense against monsters, via oblique allusions on blogs, blue-collar and parenting forums and the like. She understood the history of the labor movement, and she began to bring people together across the internet. The first Hunters' Union board went up in March of 2000. By June, it was gone - it was too visible, and no one bothered to vet members. More than a dozen folks, not too net savvy and too busy with day jobs and hunting monsters to learn, died because they didn't realize who was reading their posts. Holly and her new friends persisted anyway. Since 2000, the Union has moved web addresses four times, getting more secure with each move. Now, it's invite-only. Administrators keep an eye on the news, and change their roster every six months. If they have a friend in the region, that friend is sent to investigate would-be members and offer them the chance for a little support. The boards are supported by internal donations, and members also help pay for each others' weapons, funerals and medical fees. They watch out for the families of those who fall in the line of duty, just like any good union. The boards have been the cause of several marriages and many friendships now. It's not really political these days, but it still serves the same job as the old Chicago Union did - ordinary people supporting each other against those who would oppress them. It's finally gone worldwide, thanks to Holly, and the Union remembers her fondly, with a banner atop every page linking to a memorial for her. Holly died in 2005, but she went out fighting. Many of the Union would follow her to that death if they had to. You pay your dues, after all. The Union does not distinguish much between monsters. They're a highly heterogeneous group, united by a desire to protect themselves and their families. There's no ideology here, just common defense. They don't care about fine distinctions - any threat has to be dealt with. They don't always stick to monsters, either - muggers, dealers, serial killers and cultists all get the same treatment from some Union vigilantes. The Union is, however, happy to ignore any monster that doesn't pose a threat. They are fundamentally a reactive group, to the chagrin of some members. They stick to their turf - they have day jobs, and they're fine with having a narrow view. They have a lot of information on how to fight monsters...but tracking it down is a problem, given they communicate via a forum. They have subforum that tries to archive information on various types of critter, but it's split into hundreds of threads which are often cluttered by conversation tangents off topic. The forum search function is poor at best, especially since the Union speaks mostly in slang and uses imprecise terminology. What they do have tends to be accurate though, insofar as it describes what monsters can do and how often, what kills them and what can't hurt them. The trick is to figure out what monster a given thread is actually talking about. Sometimes, people die because they make the wrong guess. Most of the Union are of the Home First philosophy - you take care of your turf and your community. Don't look outside that - that's not your job. Now, your community can grow and expand to cover new people you come to care about, new friends and so on, but it's all about keeping them safe and nothing else. The General Strike, on the other hand, believe the Union has a moral imperative to fight the forces of monstrous oppression across the world, to find monsters and, if they're dangerous, kill them. There's not a lot of these guys, not least because there's no more than a few hundred Union members to begin with, and besides, the General Strike die often. Politicals go even further, though - they want to return to the Union's origins and fight all oppression, not just monsters. They hate anyone that exploits people, and are often among the most dangerous Union Hunters. They're extreme in their views and unafraid to be extreme in their actions. Some of them are on terrorist watchlists, in fact. Stereotypes posted:Long Night: I've moonlighted for years now with a woman who belongs to the Long Night. She's mad as hell, runs on high-octane fear of some end-of-the-world scenario I couldn't hope to understand. You know what, though? I don't think I'd ever have anyone else on my side in a tight spot. Union status is less about kills - anyone can claim kills on the internet - and more about giving advice, information and material aid to others. The more you contribute, the more respect you get. At one dot, you have forum access and know the streets a bit, getting a Local Area specialty in either Streetwise or Politics. At 3, you've supported people in the field and online, so you get two dots of Contacts. At 5, you've saved Union lives, bailed folks out of prison and helped pay for a funeral or two. You get what you put in. You get two extra dots of Resources, as long as you can show evidence it's doing some good when you use 'em.  Not that the Union is America-exclusive, but... Now, conspiracies. Conspiracies get weirder. They're old, they're powerful and they're a lot more top-down commanded than the compacts, even the Loyalists. We begin with the Aegis Kai Doru. See, they say that there's a cave somewhere where, for a thousand years, a family has hidden the head of John the Baptist. Sometimes, they say, it prophesies disaster. But who guards the head? They talk about the priest Berenger le Sauniere, who became very rich all of a sudden, left cryptic clues in his church's fabric and, on his deathbed, could not be absolved by his confessor. What did he find? They talk of the lost treasure of Jacques de Molay, but where does it lie? What of Akhenatan's tomb, the treasures of Troy? The Guardians of the Labyrinth know - the Aegis Kai Doru, the Shield and Spear.  Did I mention that their picture is a trace of Dante from Devil May Cry? 'cause it is. The Aegis Kai Doru claim to predate the great flood myths of the world. They say they came from the land before - Atlantis, Lemuria, Mu, whatever. Once, they say, everyone could use magic freely. Even then, they were the guardians of a labyrinth containing great magical treasures. An argument became a war, and one faction ejected them from the isle. They planned to return, but then came the cataclysm, the Aegis say, because the shapeshifting people broke an ancient taboo and brought war between man and spirit. The isle sank forever. The exiles were joined by other, less forgiving exiles. They knew who was to blame - the magicians who cast them out and the shapeshifters who destroyed their homeland. And so, the Aegis took their sacred magical relics, to make war on those who had done the unforgivable and destroyed paradise. More than a thousand years later, they had forgotten the magic of their ancestors, becoming the Shield and Spear, named for the treasure of fallen Troy - they stole it as the city fell. They keep and protect the relics, using them to protect those who suffer at the hands of witches and fiends. This they did through Greece and through Rome, through the Byzantines, the Enlightenment, and even today, always seeking more relics. Even now, the Inner Circle meets in Athens and keeps a list of all known relics, lost, found or destroyed, and a list of all the witches and monsters they have killed. Few have met the Inner Circle, but all who have speak of their inner fervor, and of their vast chamber of a hundred alcoves, where the greatest items of power are kept. Hardly any make it to the Second Initiation into the Secrets of the Aegis Kai Doru. Few are aware it even exists. The Aegis is picky about recruits, spending years watching candidates and their families - generally families whose members have belonged to the Aegis Kai for centuries or longer. Recruitment is often subtle - sometimes, a new member doesn't even know they joined the group. The Aegis Kai Doru hunt mages and shapeshifters, though their targets do not know why, or why they still care. But the Aegis remember - a vow was made, long ago, a vow so binding it holds even now. The First Initiation teaches the why. Each initiate is sent into a labyrinth of hallucinogenic vapors, where they must escape by dawn. Once they do, they are met by the Guardians, who make them vow the Vow of the Sword, to destroy "they who work magic and they who change skin." If you can't escape or are too maddened to make the vow, you fail. Still, in the field, reality can get in the way of the hunt. Sometimes, a wizard's not hurting anyone. Sometimes, the werewolves or mages are fighting among themselves, and maybe it'd be better for one side to win. Sometimes, you just don't have the muscle to take them on alone. While they may once have had lore on witches, the Aegis Kai Doru have forgotten most of it. They have a vague understanding of what magicians can do, though they're often surprised. They know that only some werewolves are man-eaters, but have forgotten quite a lot of what they once knew. As for other monsters? Cells are instructed to take them on a case-by-case basis. Some monsters aren't that bad. Some can be helpful, or at least used. Within the Aegis are smaller groups, each with a purpose. The Sword uphold the Vow to the letter, seeking out shapeshifters and mages to murder. It doesn't matter why the grudge exists or how old it is. A vow was made. They must die. The Sword are proactive, militant and unafraid to charge in. They are also the most numerous among the Aegis. The Temple, meanwhile, guard the Aegis' relics and hunt down new ones and lost ones. Often, they prioritize relics above the Vow, and so the Sword looks down on them, but recognize that they're vital to the group. The Scroll maintains the conspiracy's records and test out how to use relics in the field. They are the Aegis' lorekeepers, and often have the best idea of what they're going up against. Status in the Aegis Kai Doru is tied to finding relics, discovering what they do and using them against foes. At status 1, you own a relic or two and have passed the First Initiation. You can take Relic merits. at 3, you've been at this so long that research is second nature, giving you +1 on all relic and archaeology-based Academics rolls. At 5, you've passed the Second Initiation, giving you the power to sense your ancient foes. You get Unseen Sense applied to mages, or to werewolves if you already had mages. Stereotypes posted:Ashwood Abbey: From a decent vantage point, I observed a group of men and women arrive and then sit down to a meal with the witch. I suspected these were the whore's allies, and so I waited. The group laughed a lot. Shared plates of exotic meats and fruits, but never drinks. Nearly an hour in, the witch looked uncomfortable. Her discomfort grew, and plainly became pain. Agonized, she vomited, but her guests kept laughing even after she toppled from her chair, choking to death. The laughs never stopped. They packed their things and put them back in a picnic basket, and left. They never touched the witch's artifacts, which are now mine.  In my games, I tend to replace the Aegis Kai Doru with a group of Theosophists claiming descent from ancient mystical beings who taught them to use magic items. Theosophy makes more sense to me than a lot of Aegis stuff. Theosophy. Next time: ARAB MONEY Mors Rattus fucked around with this message at 23:12 on May 27, 2015 |
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May 27, 2015 22:58
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I'm not sure if the rest of Hunter does anything with that, but a lot of the AKD's workings maps to the Guardians of the Veil's Labyrinth in Mage, i.e. the myriad false-cults, secret societies and the like used to keep the Sleepers away from Supernal truth.
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May 27, 2015 23:02
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Wait until we hit Witchfinders. Hunter does play with it at least a little. The werewolf stuff also maps fairly decently onto the murder of Father Wolf. It's just super weird and confusing, especially conflating the two.
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May 27, 2015 23:03
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The Union remind me of the old Defender subsplat from the Reckoning. They seem like pretty decent guys.
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May 27, 2015 23:08
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Compacts and Conspiracies should be the next book, since it expands all of the Compacts and Conspiracies of the core and introduces some of the weirder stuff that belong to each.
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May 27, 2015 23:10
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I tend to go by release order, which I believe would put Witchfinders next? Also, edited in the Aegis stereotype quotes. Wordy motherfuckers.
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May 27, 2015 23:12
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