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Kavak posted:Any campaign that results in a Judge Judy episode where she smacks down petty supernatural bullshit is a good campaign. Of course, this means that there is also supernatural Jerry Springer. "Vlakoth the Defilier, you are NOT the Sire!"
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Oct 19, 2016 21:01
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Doresh posted:Coming soon: Lawyer: The Precedent. Isn't that nChangeling?
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Oct 19, 2016 21:01
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unseenlibrarian posted:"The Anti-priests of the Atheocracy of Lom" and "The Autocossacks of the Iron Tsar" are tied for "The most Jack Kirby sounding things in the setting." Just gonna assume that most pre-Shattering supertech has lots of visible circuitry lines and runs on kirby dots and big hats. Godbound have all the dots.
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Oct 19, 2016 21:01
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potatocubed posted:I think the problem TFV would face with mummies is that a) a mummy is extremely difficult to put down even once and b) they can do unspeakable amounts of collateral damage in the attempt. Meteor showers, earthquakes, blasting people into pillars of salt, zombie plagues... Due to the Mummy's poor memory, TFV convinces him that he's actually someone's lost grandpa who just got turned around and has been missing for 20 years. Ends up spending the remainder of his particular rising in a retirement home until he runs out of Sekhem. I Am Just a Box posted:Although I did enjoy the tangent that emerged on rpg.net awhile back which started at this premise and went in the opposite direction: because mummies have brief periods of terrifying power, have little reason to respect any kind of masquerade, make unclear demands addled by their initial fogginess on rising, and direct hidden networks of followers, the government's response is to drop all other priorities in favor of a Global War on Mummies. Someone's slightly batty grandparent, except if you don't bring him that glass of cobra's milk right away, he's going to turn you into salt. A game about playing as a Mummy's minions, trying to satisfy his occasionally baffling, but rarely ever malevolent, demands, so he doesn't throw a fit that ends up destroying the town.
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Oct 19, 2016 21:14
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Now I'm picturing neophyte vampires getting busted for Insurance Fraud and werewolves being warned by the cops to have a license for that 'wolfdog' the neighbors spotted on their property or else they'll have to seize the animal to destroy it.
Robindaybird fucked around with this message at 21:22 on Oct 19, 2016 |
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Oct 19, 2016 21:16
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PurpleXVI posted:Due to the Mummy's poor memory, TFV convinces him that he's actually someone's lost grandpa who just got turned around and has been missing for 20 years. Ends up spending the remainder of his particular rising in a retirement home until he runs out of Sekhem. Conveniently, this suddenly becomes something that works as a group game. There aren't enough games about being the Minions or Cultists or Mooks.
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Oct 19, 2016 21:17
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Night10194 posted:Conveniently, this suddenly becomes something that works as a group game. Mummy does have a page or two about running a game in this format, but the actual advice is pretty broad and general, unfortunately. It's nothing as robust as Ars Magica.
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Oct 19, 2016 21:24
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unseenlibrarian posted:"The Anti-priests of the Atheocracy of Lom" and "The Autocossacks of the Iron Tsar" are tied for "The most Jack Kirby sounding things in the setting." Just gonna assume that most pre-Shattering supertech has lots of visible circuitry lines and runs on kirby dots and big hats. Godbound are obviously the Fourth World after THE DEATH OF THE OLD GODS what with the new ultimate divinities and cast off weapons from the wars to end war. What is The Source Wall but a Celestial Engine?
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Oct 19, 2016 21:25
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Someday I want an RPG where I have to request to engage in the name of Dr. Igor Tarantula, MD while trying to avoid getting killed by oversexed British jackasses with tiny pistols.
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Oct 19, 2016 21:26
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Night10194 posted:Conveniently, this suddenly becomes something that works as a group game. Paranoia XP is basically this, actually - it directly takes inspiration from My Life With Master, and admits that. Considering that the old Troubleshooter concept is just being minions of the Computer, expanding it and tweaking it in a bunch of ways works really, really well.
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Oct 19, 2016 21:27
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Doresh posted:You also have the Dark Knight from Final Fantasy. And to stick with tabletop RPGs, Microlite d20 (or was it d20 Microlite?) has you cast spells from your HP. Way, way, way more people are scared of clowns then of mummies. And I can think of a bunch more scary clown media than mummies. I like Ankaris from Darkstalkers though, he's cool. WoD must have a scary clown somewhere, right? Old beat em ups had special moves that used your HP. Usually a jumping kick.
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Oct 19, 2016 21:30
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Count Chocula posted:Way, way, way more people are scared of clowns then of mummies. And I can think of a bunch more scary clown media than mummies. I like Ankaris from Darkstalkers though, he's cool. WoD must have a scary clown somewhere, right? Man, I can already picture the possible splats: Pennywises, Killer Klowns... and normal clowns who can't quite figure out what the hell is going on. And for another tabletop example, the odd Princess meets Fate meets Strike! game Sparks of Light has you cast spells with Hope Points, which were also your HP. Combat basically boils down to a math problem, where the gorup figures out whether its more HP-efficient to just spam their attack spells instead of getting hit (monsters hit everyone automatically per round). The game's a bit weird, tbh.
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Oct 19, 2016 21:35
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Ramsey Campbell has a book, Grin in the Dark, about an ancient clown cult. Ironically, creepy clowns are ancient compared to the modern idea of the mummy's curse, which is a holdover from British colonialism instead of an ancient theatrical tradition like clowns. If WoD is doing Universal Monsters, why can't I play the Creature from the Black Lagoon. Kaza42 posted:I am not a lawyer, but the intersection of law and the supernatural is just really interesting to me. I want to have some sort of Supernatural Law Firm (like Wolfram and Hart, but not evil) that exists just to help sort out the legal issues of magic, undeath, shapeshifting, astral planes etc. Would Sutenkamen have a case, and if so is Luke Fallon liable for any damage or charges beyond just having to give the jar back? Can vampires collect life insurance on themselves? Do property owners also own the rights to the astral and shadow space that their property occupies? This comic has been running forever: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supernatural_Law And this superhero law blog is great: http://lawandthemultiverse.com/ quote:Due to the Mummy's poor memory, TFV convinces him that he's actually someone's lost grandpa who just got turned around and has been missing for 20 years. Ends up spending the remainder of his particular rising in a retirement home until he runs out of Sekhem. Bubba Ho-Tep? Count Chocula fucked around with this message at 21:59 on Oct 19, 2016 |
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Oct 19, 2016 21:45
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I didn't quite expect so many people to either know Mummy already, or be itching to talk about it. I'll be addressing a ton of this stuff in the writeups to come, but here's a few quick answers:ZeroCount posted:Mummy has an insanely cool atmosphere and central idea so far. The reverse power curve is dope. But boy oh boy do they even bother trying to put in advice for running a Mummy in a cross-splat game? That sounds loving bonkers. PurpleXVI posted:But I guess, in that case, if they're hard to play together... how do their power levels support them hanging out with, say, Vampires or Mages at certain parts of their Sekhem cycle? I mean, yeah, I know, cross-splat play in anything made by White Wolf/Onyx Path is an absolute joke, but sometimes it's more absurd than in other cases. Mummy was explicitly written to not give a poo poo about cross-splat, and internally assumed it was in its own setting, though had a few token references to other lines. Kellsterik posted:Mummy does have a page or two about running a game in this format, but the actual advice is pretty broad and general, unfortunately. It's nothing as robust as Ars Magica. Pretty much. They realize that it's hard to wrangle the game as presented into the traditional way of playing WoD lines, and do their best to provide a bunch of alternate play formats (Ars Magica lite, everybody shares a cult, rotating who's playing the mummy and who's playing the cultists, and so on), but they're more suggestions and less actually supported. Nessus posted:Could the mummies unify their cults and register as a religion for tax purposes? You joke, but registering your cult as a legitimate religion for the attendant advantages is actually something you can do. Cults come in three types - tribal, conspiratorial, and enterprise-based. It takes almost no effort to restructure the presentation of Tribal or Enterprise (depending on your angle) to represent running Our Lady Of Perpetual Tax Exemption. The cult rules are, without reservation, really loving good. This is in large part due to Greg Stolze writing them. Kaza42 posted:I am not a lawyer, but the intersection of law and the supernatural is just really interesting to me. I want to have some sort of Supernatural Law Firm (like Wolfram and Hart, but not evil) that exists just to help sort out the legal issues of magic, undeath, shapeshifting, astral planes etc. Would Sutenkamen have a case, and if so is Luke Fallon liable for any damage or charges beyond just having to give the jar back? Can vampires collect life insurance on themselves? Do property owners also own the rights to the astral and shadow space that their property occupies? This isn't quite related to the review, but I actually play in a game set a few decades in the future after the secret got out about the supernatural, where the PCs are agents of the United States Department of Paranormal Affairs. Stuff like this is my absolute favorite part of the game and worldbuilding shoot-the-poo poo discussions.
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Oct 19, 2016 22:24
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Kaza42 posted:I am not a lawyer, but the intersection of law and the supernatural is just really interesting to me. I want to have some sort of Supernatural Law Firm (like Wolfram and Hart, but not evil) that exists just to help sort out the legal issues of magic, undeath, shapeshifting, astral planes etc. Would Sutenkamen have a case, and if so is Luke Fallon liable for any damage or charges beyond just having to give the jar back? Can vampires collect life insurance on themselves? Do property owners also own the rights to the astral and shadow space that their property occupies? Night10194 posted:These are (unironically) the questions that interest me most in urban fantasy. The more I thought, and thought, and thought about it, the more I found that "can't go out in the daylight" is the hardest part of Vampire to swallow. I guess it's because I was a teenage fan of the game, and when I became an adult, I realized there are a million things you have to do, and most of them require going to an office that's only open while you're at work. If Vampirewanted to stretch its themes of gangsterism and feudalism as far as they can go, PCs would either be desperately reliant on the criminal networks that allow them to own property and hold jobs, or they'd have to be anarch squatters who are out of the system completely. Taking a realistic view of things, if you're some Ventrue corporate lord, you're one subpoena away from having all your assets completely hosed.
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Oct 19, 2016 22:25
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Everybody remembers TFV and VASCU (for good reasons), but there's also the Barrett Comission!
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Oct 19, 2016 22:33
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Halloween Jack posted:The more I thought, and thought, and thought about it, the more I found that "can't go out in the daylight" is the hardest part of Vampire to swallow. I guess it's because I was a teenage fan of the game, and when I became an adult, I realized there are a million things you have to do, and most of them require going to an office that's only open while you're at work. I guess that's what ghouls are for? Someone you completely dominate who can act more or less normal and go out in the daytime. They're your public CEO who has to go to court, they visit the bank during office hours, etc. I also imagine that in major cities with a decent vampire population, there are vampire-owned services that are available at night to perform the most important functions. Edit: If vampires try to vote, is that voter fraud? They are dead after all Kaza42 fucked around with this message at 22:38 on Oct 19, 2016 |
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Oct 19, 2016 22:36
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Halloween Jack posted:The more I thought, and thought, and thought about it, the more I found that "can't go out in the daylight" is the hardest part of Vampire to swallow. I guess it's because I was a teenage fan of the game, and when I became an adult, I realized there are a million things you have to do, and most of them require going to an office that's only open while you're at work. Kaza42 posted:I guess that's what ghouls are for? Someone you completely dominate who can act more or less normal and go out in the daytime. They're your public CEO who has to go to court, they visit the bank during office hours, etc. I also imagine that in major cities with a decent vampire population, there are vampire-owned services that are available at night to perform the most important functions. The Sun-Walking Knights from one of the Vampire supplements are an excellent look at this. They're a covenant with a secret rite that makes your clan weakness far less hobbling, but makes it so your blood doesn't magically warp people's brains to enslave them. This led to the covenant's ghouls effectively unionizing once they realized they were utterly vital to the operations of their domitors, and now the covenant has an (often shaky, abusive, and manipulative from both sides) understanding between its vampires, ghouls, and attendant blood dolls that actually gives the humans a say in political matters.
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Oct 19, 2016 22:40
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And I'm reminded of an Urban Fantasy kitchen sink game I was in years ago (self-created rules which didn't really pan well but I digress), and I picked a highlander-style immortal who lived as long as she had not because she's a good fighter or able to run, but because she was really loving good at forging documents, since every few years to decades, immortals need to pull up stakes and move to avoid being found out and you can't do anything in modern society without some form of identification.
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Oct 19, 2016 22:47
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Kaza42 posted:Edit: If vampires try to vote, is that voter fraud? They are dead after all Given that they are of sound mind, are US citizens and aren't felons I would assume they'd keep the right to vote since it'd be unlikely there would be anything to trigger removing them from voter rolls when they temporarily "die". If they start a new life with a new identity see the felon part of the first sentence. Inheritance law for Vampires must be a nightmare for the courts to sort out between birthed and sired descendants possibly numbering in the thousands or more.
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Oct 19, 2016 22:48
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Someday, I'd like a world like World of Darkness where there IS no masquerade. We know these things are out there, they know we're out there, and now society must contain both.
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Oct 19, 2016 22:51
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Kaza42 posted:Edit: If vampires try to vote, is that voter fraud? They are dead after all There's a nice scene in The Rhesus Chart where two British police officers discuss this - if you view a vampire as already dead, then yes. But if you say a vampire clearly isn't dead on account of walking and talking, and is just a very sick human or one with certain dietary requirements, then they're not just alive but citizens.
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Oct 19, 2016 22:52
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Barudak posted:Given that they are of sound mind, are US citizens and aren't felons I would assume they'd keep the right to vote since it'd be unlikely there would be anything to trigger removing them from voter rolls when they temporarily "die". If they start a new life with a new identity see the felon part of the first sentence. It's like half the reason the Invictus exists.
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Oct 19, 2016 22:58
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Night10194 posted:Someday, I'd like a world like World of Darkness where there IS no masquerade. We know these things are out there, they know we're out there, and now society must contain both. I was stuck on an idea for a game like this a while ago. The idea being that it was sort of an open-secret by WWI, but WWII had the different governments fielding their different secret supernatural weapons against each other, culminating in an American mage cabal trying to figure out how far they could push magic before it broke, culminating in there being several large holes in Japan where reality used to be, and basically no hope in maintaining any kind of masquerade.
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Oct 19, 2016 23:37
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Actually how do mummies stay secret? They seem to have approximately zero reasons to respect the Masquerade. Are they afraid of people destroying them while they slumber?
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Oct 19, 2016 23:48
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ZeroCount posted:Actually how do mummies stay secret? They seem to have approximately zero reasons to respect the Masquerade. Are they afraid of people destroying them while they slumber? The Judges bitchslap them senseless if they try getting too uppity and publicly controlling, plus for all their powers, Mummies are very weak to fire, can easily be put in a situation where their cult's dead and they're screwed out of being active for over a thousand years unless someone pokes their corpse, and completely destroying or otherwise trapping a mummy's body while their resurrection's on cooldown forces them into a very awkward position where they have to either regrow out of their canopic jars - which is a one time deal per jar, meaning many mummies don't have that option - or rely on their cult to perform an extremely risky ritual to put them in a sacrifice's body, where screwing up means your soul's eaten by Ammut. Mummies are scary as hell, but they're not completely unstoppable, especially because after a month or two awake an average cell of hunters with spray cans and lighters can put them in the ground with only a few casualties.
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Oct 19, 2016 23:55
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That and sometimes you have those weirdos in the Faithful of Shulpae unintentionally covering up the existence of mummies by eating them.
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Oct 20, 2016 00:03
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Kellsterik posted:Mummy is actually very good at giving you stuff to do in a session: find magic items that rightfully belong to you and yours and were stolen, fight the bad guys with your cult by your side and get the relic back, return them to your tomb. The rest of the game is variations and expansions on that premise. This speaks to one of the things that jumped out at me as a pretty obvious fix, and perfect for gaming tables. The Arisen have these crazy huge powers that are sort of referred to as ritual magic all the time, but they're mechanically still basically just "spend MP, get immediate effect." There's some weak cost-sharing mechanic, but you're likely pushing hard to be able to use the powers you personally bought for your character anyway so uh. Which is why a book about "mummies are the immortal class of servant guilds of a long-dead magical empire" really really should've focused more on actual teamwork mechanics. Needing an entire player group to summon a meteor or resurrect an ally is sitting right there, just on the game's periphery. 
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Oct 20, 2016 00:07
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Like Captain Planet? I remember reading about a group of US soldiers who were protecting ancient artifacts looted from Iraqi museums. There's your fix for Mummy: set it in the Middle East. Mummies wake up, try to get artifacts back, find chaos. No need for a Masquerade, and modern armies are a decent match for them. Plus you get your modern resonance. Like this Sam Kriss article, minus the politics: http://salvage.zone/in-print/benghazi/ quote:Mummies did Benghazi. Something was opened up there, a long time ago, on that crest of land falling into the Gulf of Sidra. All those stamping feet, one invader after the next – the Greeks, the Persians, the Egyptians, the Carthaginians, the Romans, the Rashiduns, the Ottomans, the Italians, the Germans, the British, the Libyans, the Americans, the Islamic State, the gods, the ghosts, the drones, the spaceships – they wore away at reality, and something broke. I tunnelled through the ruins of the city as new ones were being built on its surface, the smash of every shell sending low muffled roars deep underground. Down there, lodged in the ancient clay, I found one fragment of a Euesperidean urn. The goddess, crudely etched in thick black lines, directing the first seafaring colonists to battle against the native Berber tribes. Her face, serene with deathless evil, the one I’d seen shining from a TV twenty-five centuries later. Mummies did Benghazi.
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Oct 20, 2016 00:08
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Hostile V posted:That and sometimes you have those weirdos in the Faithful of Shulpae unintentionally covering up the existence of mummies by eating them. Hold onto this. We'll come back to it later.
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Oct 20, 2016 00:13
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Night10194 posted:Someday, I'd like a world like World of Darkness where there IS no masquerade. We know these things are out there, they know we're out there, and now society must contain both. The Dresden Files books are kind of like this. There's not much of an intentional masquerade going on, it's just that magic fucks with technology, normal people are really, really good at studiously ignoring blatantly supernatural poo poo that happens right in front of him, and most of the non-human supernaturals stay cloak and dagger because of internal politics rather than any conscious attempt to hide from humans. It's that second point that's the most important in the series. People know the supernatural isn't real, and so most people are really good at rationalizing away even the biggest displays of supernatural power they see happening in front of them. Wizards have gone on talk shows before and demonstrated to the world that magic is real, and everyone complained that the special effects were lovely.
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Oct 20, 2016 00:14
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https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_Valley_(TV_series) Death Valley needs more love, it did this really well. Blade was neat 'cause it was pure oWoD with superheroes.
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Oct 20, 2016 00:34
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Mors Rattus posted:Hold onto this. We'll come back to it later. Maybe the allure of the power of the gods is enough to justify having an amazingly lovely meal but it sure wouldn't be for me. I can imagine a bunch of Faithful unenthusiastically having a little and being like "oh no I mean it's good but I think I've had enough, mmm, the power, so overwhelming".
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Oct 20, 2016 00:41
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Eating mummy parts was a real thing for ages.quote:“The question was not, ‘Should you eat human flesh?’ but, ‘What sort of flesh should you eat?’ ” says Sugg. The answer, at first, was Egyptian mummy, which was crumbled into tinctures to stanch internal bleeding. But other parts of the body soon followed. Skull was one common ingredient, taken in powdered form to cure head ailments. Thomas Willis, a 17th-century pioneer of brain science, brewed a drink for apoplexy, or bleeding, that mingled powdered human skull and chocolate. And King Charles II of England sipped “The King’s Drops,” his personal tincture, containing human skull in alcohol. Even the toupee of moss that grew over a buried skull, called Usnea, became a prized additive, its powder believed to cure nosebleeds and possibly epilepsy. Human fat was used to treat the outside of the body. German doctors, for instance, prescribed bandages soaked in it for wounds, and rubbing fat into the skin was considered a remedy for gout. Count Chocula fucked around with this message at 00:59 on Oct 20, 2016 |
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Oct 20, 2016 00:57
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I'm aware. Doesn't make it any less silly and any less of a lovely food.
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Oct 20, 2016 01:00
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It became pretty usual in later TES games, but Daggerfall had you mixing mummy wrappings into potions. For someone being introduced to alchemy in games for the first time and who knew about the mummy craze, I thought that was a really cool touch.
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Oct 20, 2016 01:18
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One thing I really appreciate about the older Bethesda games is how they embraced the genuine crazy you can find in human history.
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Oct 20, 2016 01:29
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Arivia posted:It became pretty usual in later TES games, but Daggerfall had you mixing mummy wrappings into potions. For someone being introduced to alchemy in games for the first time and who knew about the mummy craze, I thought that was a really cool touch. Mummy dust/bandages keep coming up as crafting materials for disease cures.
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Oct 20, 2016 01:33
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gradenko_2000 posted:Mummy dust/bandages keep coming up as crafting materials for disease cures. The latest Chinese fad cure turns out to be mummy bandages, the PC's, low on Mummy Mana, have to hide from shady Chinese businessmen who want to bundle them up and sell them as a substitute for Viagra.
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Oct 20, 2016 02:37
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Kaza42 posted:I guess that's what ghouls are for? Someone you completely dominate who can act more or less normal and go out in the daytime. They're your public CEO who has to go to court, they visit the bank during office hours, etc. I also imagine that in major cities with a decent vampire population, there are vampire-owned services that are available at night to perform the most important functions. MonsieurChoc posted:It's like half the reason the Invictus exists. Well, here's where it gets tricky. In the setting, yes, this is most of the reason ghouls exist (they're much more valuable for that sort of thing than as cheap muscle). Being able to set up these kinds of networks is a primary reason young Kindred stick with the establishment; in Requiem, it's a big part of the appeal of the Invictus, who buy the related Merits at a discount. But in practice, you're free to build your character with like, Resources 2 and Influence 1 and Haven 3 and say you have some kind of night job--there's nothing in place that says you have to either live off the grid, have some arrangement that protects your assets, or your assets are extremely precarious. (As opposed to, say, the Profession rules in Conspiracy X that explain your resources and powers, and bind you to a dual allegiance.) Of course, the Storyteller will probably ask you for an explanation if you say you're a mailman, or if you have Haven 5 and Resources 0, but probably not in a lot of less obvious cases. I've considered alternate rules for Vampire where they can go out during the day, but at great cost and with extreme vulnerability, losing access to their powers. Maybe I'm just a huge nerd and nobody cares how a yuppie vampire dodges mandatory 8:00am meetings. Night10194 posted:Someday, I'd like a world like World of Darkness where there IS no masquerade. We know these things are out there, they know we're out there, and now society must contain both. Robindaybird posted:And I'm reminded of an Urban Fantasy kitchen sink game I was in years ago (self-created rules which didn't really pan well but I digress),
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Oct 20, 2016 02:49
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