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Nessus
Dec 22, 2003

After a Speaker vote, you may be entitled to a valuable coupon or voucher!



wiegieman posted:

So does it seem kinda skeezy to anyone else that VTM has specific jargon for this?
Wait til you find out how vampires eat!

I mean your point is well taken but I actually think the VtM "argot" is "Regnant" and "thrall." Or maybe that's for blood bonds. That said, genre emulation of vampires does require something to call your Renfields.

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LatwPIAT
Jun 6, 2011

Domitor is usually the term for the vampire that controls a ghoul, though strictly speaking it refers to the controlling party in a blood bond. The controlling party in a blood bond is also called a regnant, but this is archaic in the setting. The controlled party is a thrall - or just a ghoul, as you can't blood bond someone in VTM without also making them a ghoul. They can however stop being ghouls before they stop being blood bound, which is where thrall becomes a useful term.

You could also use thrall to describe a blood-bound vampire but for whatever reason this just doesn't seem as common in the texts.

wiegieman
Apr 22, 2010

Royalty is a continuous cutting motion


So I'm hearing a "yes but that's sort of the point", which I guess I should accept, but I suppose that's always been what pushed me away from both versions of Vampire in the first place. I just feel like you can do complex stories without stuff that brings the accompanying odor of cat piss.

LatwPIAT
Jun 6, 2011

Nessus posted:

Does this work so that the +3 is to the NPC's original domitor or to all subsequent Dominate attempts?

+3 to all Mesmerize attempts for the rest of the scene.

Nessus
Dec 22, 2003

After a Speaker vote, you may be entitled to a valuable coupon or voucher!



wiegieman posted:

So I'm hearing a "yes but that's sort of the point", which I guess I should accept, but I suppose that's always been what pushed me away from both versions of Vampire in the first place. I just feel like you can do complex stories without stuff that brings the accompanying odor of cat piss.
I would agree, but it would be hard to do complex stories about vampires without somehow engaging with these matters.

ZeroCount
Aug 12, 2013


wiegieman posted:

So I'm hearing a "yes but that's sort of the point", which I guess I should accept, but I suppose that's always been what pushed me away from both versions of Vampire in the first place. I just feel like you can do complex stories without stuff that brings the accompanying odor of cat piss.

That's just vampires in general isn't it? At least half of their whole deal feels like metaphors for sexual assault dressed up in a fancy waistcoat.

wiegieman
Apr 22, 2010

Royalty is a continuous cutting motion


ZeroCount posted:

That's just vampires in general isn't it? At least half of their whole deal feels like metaphors for sexual assault dressed up in a fancy waistcoat.

It's sort of pressing the same button with me that Cthulhutech did. Yeah, vampires as a metaphor for transgression is a thing, but it seems so lovingly goddamn crafted here that maybe the people who wrote this stuff should take a long hard think about themselves.

Thesaurasaurus
Feb 15, 2010

"Send in Boxbot!"

wiegieman posted:

It's sort of pressing the same button with me that Cthulhutech did. Yeah, vampires as a metaphor for transgression is a thing, but it seems so lovingly goddamn crafted here that maybe the people who wrote this stuff should take a long hard think about themselves.

For Masquerade, maybe. Vampire’s byline has always been “A Storytelling Game of Personal Horror”, and Requiem, I think, is the first iteration to really deliver on that promise. Masquerade had a lot of gross, unnecessary shock material that cheapened the horror and diminished its impact, but Requiem was tightly crafted from first principles to make the experience of luring unwitting humans away from the public eye to drain their blood as viscerally-unsettling as possible. Which is a good thing, IMO, because I mean really. If you don’t want to feel unclean and monstrous, maybe don’t do that.

Ghost Leviathan
Mar 2, 2017

Exploration is ill-advised.
nChangeling is basically all about being a support group for victims of abuse and trauma whose abusers happen to be extradimensional godlike aliens, WoD has never really shied away from these kind of things.

Nessus
Dec 22, 2003

After a Speaker vote, you may be entitled to a valuable coupon or voucher!



Thesaurasaurus posted:

For Masquerade, maybe. Vampire’s byline has always been “A Storytelling Game of Personal Horror”, and Requiem, I think, is the first iteration to really deliver on that promise. Masquerade had a lot of gross, unnecessary shock material that cheapened the horror and diminished its impact, but Requiem was tightly crafted from first principles to make the experience of luring unwitting humans away from the public eye to drain their blood as viscerally-unsettling as possible. Which is a good thing, IMO, because I mean really. If you don’t want to feel unclean and monstrous, maybe don’t do that.
It sounds like the answer is then "don't play Vampire: the Requiem" but at a certain point you're running into line support problems.

LatwPIAT
Jun 6, 2011

wiegieman posted:

It's sort of pressing the same button with me that Cthulhutech did. Yeah, vampires as a metaphor for transgression is a thing, but it seems so lovingly goddamn crafted here that maybe the people who wrote this stuff should take a long hard think about themselves.

It's possible to write about something in detail without approving of it, and the lovingly crafted euphemisms serve several purposes:
a) Be Ann Rice Simulator 1991, complete with sexy vampires doing sexy things
b) Portray vampire society as wrapped in euphemism as part of their attempt to cling to their humanity
c) Make it more palatable to the players. Make-believe and escapism often involve elements that aren't really OK in the real world. The most popular RPG genre involves murdering people to take their stuff. Taking a real-world perspective of things and deconstructing the trappings that make roleplaying ultimately not resemble the real world it purports to reflect can be useful sometimes... But sometimes you just want to kill some orcs. Calling someone a "Regnant" is the just-kill-some orcs version, because having to constantly engage with being an abusive enabler of drug dependency and virtual slavery is just no fun.

Nessus
Dec 22, 2003

After a Speaker vote, you may be entitled to a valuable coupon or voucher!



LatwPIAT posted:

It's possible to write about something in detail without approving of it, and the lovingly crafted euphemisms serve several purposes:
a) Be Ann Rice Simulator 1991, complete with sexy vampires doing sexy things
b) Portray vampire society as wrapped in euphemism as part of their attempt to cling to their humanity
c) Make it more palatable to the players. Make-believe and escapism often involve elements that aren't really OK in the real world. The most popular RPG genre involves murdering people to take their stuff. Taking a real-world perspective of things and deconstructing the trappings that make roleplaying ultimately not resemble the real world it purports to reflect can be useful sometimes... But sometimes you just want to kill some orcs. Calling someone a "Regnant" is the just-kill-some orcs version, because having to constantly engage with being an abusive enabler of drug dependency and virtual slavery is just no fun.
Yeah, having to name everything "hosed-Up Evil Thing #7" would rapidly lose meaning.

I actually think Vampire's "blood economy" managed to make a lot of subtle but important points about their vision of How Vampires Are in the setting, indeed to the point of stretching the masquerade to the point of ridiculousness. Every vampire can hold up to ten Blood Points (or more, with Generation) - and so too does every human, give or take a little on the margins. (A child a few less, the Big Show a few more.)

Every vampire uses one blood point every day as naturalish metabolism. You can, with reasonable safety, take one blood point from a human per week... so already you can't just be with your mortal soulmate. Even if you strive to be moral you HAVE to batten on a large number of creatures - even if you go for animals, you're going through a LOT of them. (of course, this is a point in the favor of Nosferatu.) There is no mechanic for it, but vampires are also capable of transmitting diseases from mortal to mortal. So every vampire is going through about forty humans' worth of blood per year, if we assume a small margin for Discipline use, healing, etc. Doing it ethically is possible - but a struggle, a huge hassle... occupying vast amounts of your TIME, to say nothing of your energy. Is this really unliving, to spend all your time haunting goth clubs and sneaking into houses to nip out a little investment banker? To say nothing of the gradually building risk, each and every time...

Surely nobody could blame you for helping yourself to just ONE.

Or two.

Or fifty per year for five hundred years.

Ratoslov
Feb 15, 2012

Now prepare yourselves! You're the guests of honor at the Greatest Kung Fu Cannibal BBQ Ever!

Dallbun posted:

304: Boarish Behavior

I can’t… find it in the deck. :( Probably there would have been a wereboar? Does anyone else have the deck and the copious amounts of free time needed to comb through it? Failing that, just give me your best wereboar encounter.

The local authorities are not exactly sure what the living hell is going on out in the back woods, but some thing is destroying trees, stripping entire pastures clean, and leaving a horrific stench everywhere. A few peasants have spotted a handful of extremely large, porcine figures, and they reason that this must be a group of wearboars.

There is, in fact, a group of wearboar druids. Not Druids, this is 2e. They're a lot of NG-aligned guardians of nature who are in the region fighting a pack of extremely large feral pigs. They're also losing, and are both able and willing to pay handsomely for some reinforcements.

JcDent
May 13, 2013

Give me a rifle, one round, and point me at Berlin!
What's max nonlethal amount you could extract from a human or an investment banker without killing him?

Also, if you're random mortal, you spend 8 hours or more a day working on securing your food supply, and preparing your food can be a hassle, especially if you're eating healthy or have allergies.

Being a sexy rogue taking the blood capitalists wrung from the people by biting their necks or magicking up goth club chicks to leave them happy and lightheaded (bloodloss and all that) seems better than irl drudgery.

And that's before you try to go into large scale parasitism minimalisation/symbiotism ideas to keep your humanity points and not leave a path of dead husks behind you.

Now, my formative idea of WoD vampires is from the introduction in Bloodlines, so AFAIK vampires neither eat nor gently caress, so that's some pisse forestry removed out of the gate.

One q, though: does the vampire have to sleep during the day, or can he spend 24 hours posting online?

LatwPIAT
Jun 6, 2011

JcDent posted:

What's max nonlethal amount you could extract from a human or an investment banker without killing him?
Up to 30%-ish blood volume, or 3 Blood Points.

JcDent posted:

Being a sexy rogue taking the blood capitalists wrung from the people by biting their necks or magicking up goth club chicks to leave them happy and lightheaded (bloodloss and all that) seems better than irl drudgery.

Magicking up goth club chicks to leave them happy and lightheaded is... well... OK so they're happy but if you had to magic them up you definitely didn't procure consent before stealing their precious bodily fluids, and as Requiem points out the effect of a Vampire mind-whammy is often to leave people feeling confused and alienated because they can't reconcile their behaviour with their own personality. Mind-control the wrong goth club chick and you have someone suddenly worrying why they let a complete stranger nuzzle their neck all sensual when they have a boyfriend/girlfriend they thought they'd never cheat on.

Basically, it doesn't stop being rape just because you drug them first.

And someone who drinks the blood of investment bankers, but it's OK because investment bankers are evil see is on the fast track to becoming a violent fanatic at best and a serial killer at worst.

Now, sometimes it's fun to ignore all this and play a queen of the damned who takes what she wants and has an army of blood dolls, ghouls, and dominate-slaves to toy with and order around, but when the text is engaged with critically the destructive and disruptive nature of vampires is hard to avoid.

Skellybones
May 31, 2011




Fun Shoe
But investment bankers are evil and deserving of predation :thunk:

Kurieg
Jul 19, 2012

RIP Lutri: 5/19/20-4/2/20
:blizz::gamefreak:

Skellybones posted:

But investment bankers are evil and deserving of predation :thunk:

We've got a Beast here folks.

JcDent
May 13, 2013

Give me a rifle, one round, and point me at Berlin!
Being a vampire isn't very Christian or Communist in the first place, and I feel I'd crack sooner and later to go after Koch brothers or whatever.

Imagine a less edgy and smug version of Interplanetary or whichever vomic had gay notBatman hook up with gay notSuperman.

Because as far as mercy goes, you shouldn't kill anyone, ever, as punishment, but playing it like that wouldn't be a fun game experience. Just like not shooting nobles on sight in Dark Heresy.

So, you have to actually hook up with a goth chick to actually mind magic her into not noticing that you bit her and feel good about it? Actually, it would be hilarious to leave one confused: she thought she was gonna get laid with this dude... and he just kissed her neck before woopwoopwooping off.

Unless vampires can have sex - that's how you get bit in Bloodlines.

Wait, can you top up from your ghouls? Or are they no good? Do they need a dose everyday? Can you feed people your blood without making them ghouls? Does drinking vampire blood cure cancer and other illnesses that are not infectious? Can you start a boutique med company selling your own blood medicine to buy packs of blood?

And if you're not Ventrue, you can feed on animals? Would that mean that you can eat about the same amount of cows as a vamp as you would as a person?

Hostile V
May 31, 2013

Solving all of life's problems through enhanced casting of Occam's Razor. Reward yourself with an imaginary chalice.

It might be in your best interests to go check out the World of Darkness megathread to get even more details on the mechanics than the cursory glances you'll get in this one. There is an overlap between the two threads but the other one will definitely satisfy your deeper questions.

Skellybones
May 31, 2011




Fun Shoe

Kurieg posted:

We've got a Beast here folks.

Beasts are the inhuman parasitic monsters that cause anguish and suffering, so they'd be bankers.

MollyMetroid
Jan 20, 2004

Trout Clan Daimyo

Nessus posted:

Yeah, having to name everything "hosed-Up Evil Thing #7" would rapidly lose meaning.

I actually think Vampire's "blood economy" managed to make a lot of subtle but important points about their vision of How Vampires Are in the setting, indeed to the point of stretching the masquerade to the point of ridiculousness. Every vampire can hold up to ten Blood Points (or more, with Generation) - and so too does every human, give or take a little on the margins. (A child a few less, the Big Show a few more.)

Every vampire uses one blood point every day as naturalish metabolism. You can, with reasonable safety, take one blood point from a human per week... so already you can't just be with your mortal soulmate. Even if you strive to be moral you HAVE to batten on a large number of creatures - even if you go for animals, you're going through a LOT of them. (of course, this is a point in the favor of Nosferatu.) There is no mechanic for it, but vampires are also capable of transmitting diseases from mortal to mortal. So every vampire is going through about forty humans' worth of blood per year, if we assume a small margin for Discipline use, healing, etc. Doing it ethically is possible - but a struggle, a huge hassle... occupying vast amounts of your TIME, to say nothing of your energy. Is this really unliving, to spend all your time haunting goth clubs and sneaking into houses to nip out a little investment banker? To say nothing of the gradually building risk, each and every time...

Surely nobody could blame you for helping yourself to just ONE.

Or two.

Or fifty per year for five hundred years.

How many breads have you eaten in your life?

MollyMetroid fucked around with this message at 16:16 on Dec 9, 2017

JcDent
May 13, 2013

Give me a rifle, one round, and point me at Berlin!
Right. Or I should get to read nWoD, for the relevant vampire info.

Bankers are Spiral Dancers.

Rand Brittain
Mar 25, 2013

"Go on until you're stopped."

LatwPIAT posted:

You could also use thrall to describe a blood-bound vampire but for whatever reason this just doesn't seem as common in the texts.

I think most vampires just don't care to admit to having been blood bound.

Kurieg
Jul 19, 2012

RIP Lutri: 5/19/20-4/2/20
:blizz::gamefreak:

Skellybones posted:

Beasts are the inhuman parasitic monsters that cause anguish and suffering, so they'd be bankers.

Right, except within the beast's text, they aren't, they're put there as divine punishment against the bankers. Which is why it's okay that they rape little girls, they also gently caress with bankers. You should be grateful.

Skellybones
May 31, 2011




Fun Shoe
:thunk:

Tibalt
May 14, 2017

What, drawn, and talk of peace! I hate the word, As I hate hell, all Montagues, and thee

RPGs also have the weird trait shared with comic books where, due to the commercial infrastructure surrounding the creative work, you got individual entries that directly contradict or undermine the larger artistic vision. You have serious stories about what it means to never die... interrupted by a team up with super girl or part of a gimmick to gender swap all heroes.

Vampire has the added twist where the consumer of the media isn't particularly interested in the intended experience anyway, and would rather play moody superheroes.

Kurieg
Jul 19, 2012

RIP Lutri: 5/19/20-4/2/20
:blizz::gamefreak:

What I'm trying to say is dehumanizing a group that you don't like is unhealthy and wrong. Doing so within the context of a game is even worse. Just because they're 'acceptable targets' doesn't mean that they aren't people.

Dallbun
Apr 21, 2010
The Vistani of Ravenloft have a special method of telling the future that utilizes

The Deck of Encounters Set One Part 52: The Deck of Wars and Worms

305: In the Path of Battle

A grassy plain between two gently sloping hills, just before dawn. The PCs start to see lights, as if from cities, from either side of the hill. They’re from army camps, and soon “the whole area is bustling with activity,” though the PCs can’t make out many details without approaching one side or the other. But of course the armies rise the crest and charge each other at the least opportune time.

“The charge begins as soon as the PCs are halfway through the valley. Since the armies are so large, they can spread out all along the crests of the two hills, and there is no doubt that the PCs will be caught by at least some of the fighting. If the PCs continue walking when the bugle sounds, they will have to fight through at least 50 soldiers, more if they pause for a time. If they run, they will have to fight only 20. Both sides automatically assume that the PCs are on the other side, and will attack them.”

I’m impressed - this is the absolute least interesting encounter you could possibly have about wandering into the middle of a war. Pass.


306: Avid Reader

The PCs are going to a library or whatever, for their own reasons. It’s musty. The air is dark and dusty. A traveler recently accidentally brought in a bookworm infestation - they haven’t done much damage yet, but they’re working on it. Despite the whole place being filled with easily-accessible books, obviously they’re attracted by the books and scrolls the PCs have, and will somehow get in their bags or scroll cases and start munching? That seems contrived.

“The library, of course, is ruined .The PCs might want to report this, or they might want to flee any possible blame that might be attached to them.” I kind of like that part - both that the PCs might be falsely scapegoated by the lax library administration because they’re convenient suspicious travelers, and that whatever the PCs were coming here for in the first place might have been destroyed. Keep, but I won’t endanger the PCs’ books if they’re not careless.


307: Guess Who's Dinner

The PCs run into a small wagon. The man is dead, the mule is alive but hungry and thirsty. The man is infected with rot grubs that will try to burrow into PCs’ flesh and towards their heart.

How did this guy get infected, anyway? You could extrapolate that he was assassinated, because rot grubs don’t usually live in this forest terrain, and that’s potentially interesting. I suppose.

But really, this encounter is teaching the players that even when there’s absolutely no sign that there might be rot grubs, there still might be rot grubs, and they should never touch anything ever without declaring the all careful precautions they’re taking. This kind of “gotcha” monster just slows games down and makes them less fun. Pass.


308: Food Fight

In a dungeon, the PCs smell something terrible and rotting, then run into a carrion crawler eating some orcs. It immediately attacks. On the third round of fighting, another carrion crawler shows up, from the other side, drawn to the scent of prey. If the PCs get out of the way, they’ll fight each other over the orc corpses instead of fighting them. The orcs have some minor treasure on them. Yeah, fine - it’s a little dynamic, and I wouldn’t necessarily have thought of it on the spot if I’d rolled random carrion crawlers. Keep.


309: Save Your Elves

This is only if the PCs have an elf in the party. The PCs are going along a trade route in the desert, getting near an oasis, when four thri-kreen show up, “chittering excitedly” and eyeing the elf or elves. They’ll attack with throwing wedges and their ridiculous five melee attacks per round, mostly trying to capture or kill the elves, which are of course a thri-kreen delicacy.

I know the thri-kreen were in the Monstrous Manual without direct reference to Athas, but it feels really weird to have this encounter outside of a Dark Sun game. I’m almost kind of charmed? If thri-kreen think stringy, underfed Athasian elves taste good, your average free-range fantasy Wood Elf must be some truly delicious poo poo. On the other hand, it is jarring, and basically just a combat encounter since you can’t necessarily negotiate with mentally-alien flesh-eating gourmands. Pass, I suppose.

Dallbun fucked around with this message at 17:35 on Dec 10, 2017

Bieeanshee
Aug 21, 2000

Not keen on keening.


Grimey Drawer
Yeah, that card felt weird to me. Backporting Dark Sun fluff, that was already built and modified from stock MM data?

Halloween Jack
Sep 12, 2003

La morte non ha sesso

JcDent posted:

Unless vampires can have sex - that's how you get bit in Bloodlines.

Wait, can you top up from your ghouls? Or are they no good? Do they need a dose everyday? Can you feed people your blood without making them ghouls? Does drinking vampire blood cure cancer and other illnesses that are not infectious? Can you start a boutique med company selling your own blood medicine to buy packs of blood?

And if you're not Ventrue, you can feed on animals? Would that mean that you can eat about the same amount of cows as a vamp as you would as a person?
Yeesh, be patient

Vampires can have sex. And the corebooks don't exactly say that they can't enjoy it...but they have no sex drive. It's like eating food for pleasure when you're not hungry. You'll never be hungry again, for anything but blood.

So you can keep animals for food, but drinking an entire cow dry is less nourishing than a human. And a cow is worth $500-$1000 at sale, last time I checked. So you're talking about literally keeping a small farm, just to feed yourself. (You'd also be very vulnerable to attack, living on a farm outside the city.) Animals are also far less tasty than people--and remember, your drive for food, water, sex, drugs, whatever is all bound up in blood now. So in order to avoid feeding on people, you're talking about reorienting your entire existence around a lonely life eating the same bland food every day. It's the vampire equivalent of being a religious hermit; practically no one is going to do it.

You can take blood from your ghouls, and a lot of vampires create a Herd (yes, that's the term) by ghouling a lot of people. But you're going to need a lot of people to take a little bit of blood from occasionally, in order not to kill any of them.

Bieeanshee
Aug 21, 2000

Not keen on keening.


Grimey Drawer
Shameful moment: My first vamp was a Malkavian hacker, who paid his Herd in warez for their services, and gave them sugar cookies after every feeding.

PurpleXVI
Oct 30, 2011

Spewing insults, pissing off all your neighbors, betraying your allies, backing out of treaties and accords, and generally screwing over the global environment?
ALL PART OF MY BRILLIANT STRATEGY!

JcDent posted:

Now, my formative idea of WoD vampires is from the introduction in Bloodlines, so AFAIK vampires neither eat nor gently caress, so that's some pisse forestry removed out of the gate.

One q, though: does the vampire have to sleep during the day, or can he spend 24 hours posting online?

oWoD vampires can choose to have sex, but, uh, turning yourself into something other than a dry, limp corpse for the purpose requires expending a Blood point to fake "looking alive," i.e. blush of healthy red cheeks, uh, juices, some body heat, etc.

As for eating, most vampires can't eat, but a select few have a Perk(or was it an Advantage?) that let them eat like mortals. Zero sustenance from it, but it makes it easier for them to fake being alive, and a bit more fun for them to be undead.

RE: Sleeping, as I remember it, vampires feel... weird during periods where the sun is up. A vampire awakened while the sun is in the sky is definitely more bestial, sluggish, etc. so while you CAN stay up "late" as a vampire, it wouldn't necessarily be very fun, and would probably lead to making weird, stupid mistakes. I also think that in oWoD, how much you could be up during the day was directly connected to your Humanity level. I may be misremembering this, maybe someone with a better memory or the books closer to hand could clarify. :v:

LatwPIAT
Jun 6, 2011

As long as the sun is up, you cannot roll more dice than you have Humanity. You have to roll Humanity to be allowed to stay awake at all, and will periodically fall asleep until stirred again unless you manage 5 successes. Keep in mind that by default Humanity starts at 7, is expected to decline over the course of a campaign, and oWoD dice do not explode!

Haystack
Jan 23, 2005





Dallbun posted:

I can’t… find it in the deck. :( Probably there would have been a wereboar? Does anyone else have the deck and the copious amounts of free time needed to comb through it? Failing that, just give me your best wereboar encounter.

The party encounters a nervous youth who is looking for adventurers to cast a demon out of his uncle's homestead. When pressed for details, he will reveal that the demon actually lives at the homestead and is married to the uncle's daughter. Apparently the demon hid his true nature when he first arrived seeking work as a farmhand, but demonstrated such strength and talents with farm work that the uncle quickly married his daughter to the man to help secure their fortunes. It was only later that everyone learned of the demon's tremendous gluttonous appetite, which is threatening to eat the farm into ruin. Worse, he started scaring everyone by displaying evil magics, and the last few months has locked his wrenched wife up in an outbuilding.

If the adventurers agree to help, they will find the situation much as the youth describes. The demon, who goes by Sus, appears to be a large, thickly built man with a bad attitude, glutinous habits, and great strength. In reality, the "man" is a former Solar reincarnated as a wereboar, who was cast down from Bytopia after getting drunk at a party and sexually harassing a moon goddess. If the adventurers attack him or press their investigation too far, he will flee and retrieve his +2 holy battle rake before returning and trying to drive off the party.

Haystack fucked around with this message at 21:28 on Dec 9, 2017

Liquid Communism
Mar 9, 2004


Out here, everything hurts.




wiegieman posted:

So does it seem kinda skeezy to anyone else that VTM has specific jargon for this?

Nah, vampires are all about having minions, so of course they have language around that, and around poaching each other's minions.

Part of the thing with oWoD is that the Kindred have this whole complicated society built to let them pretend they aren't monsters. It's all about distraction and euphamism, because they don't want to admit what they are. The few clans who do admit to and embrace being monsters become the Sabbat, who are the scariest sort of zealots. Most of them are off the Path of Humanity entirely, having developed completely inhuman philosophies or embraced power for power's sake.

Liquid Communism fucked around with this message at 23:09 on Dec 9, 2017

Feinne
Oct 9, 2007

When you fall, get right back up again.
Dark Matter: Xenoforms




Eurocentrism Mean You Get More Monsters Here:

Europe and the Near East has a ton of Xenoforms to get through, though I will admit some of them are pretty cool takes. Let’s just get right to it.

Basilisk:



The Basilisk is a monitor lizard about the size of a komodo dragon. As with its seeming relative, it turns out to be poisonous (though that wasn’t known at the time of this). They’re rare but still exist in the wild in the same sorts of places where snakes can still be found. They’re often bred by secret societies in Europe because they can get used to human presence and act as decent guard animals. There is one rather significant difference between them and the komodo dragon, however.

See, beyond having a venomous bite, they’re able to spray paralytic venom from ducts below their eyes. This is the source of the legends of their petrifying gaze. It’s apparently accurate to about 10 feet, though they don’t use it unless frightened enough that they’re more inclined to just run afterwards than try and capitalize on paralyzing a target. They’re large and dangerous but in general as you’d expect from a wild animal they mostly prefer to be left alone.

The adventure hook features the PCs investigating some strange events at a logging operation in Brazil. They get to deal both with being deeply unwelcome and with the hook itself, a basilisk. It turns out to be the pet of loving SECRET NAZI DESCENDENTS living in the middle of the Amazon doing creepy occult poo poo. An excuse to gently caress up Nazis is always a win so this has some potential.

Verdict: Not going to lie I like the komodo dragon/horned lizard/spitting cobra mashup we’ve got going on here, it’s not a real animal but it totally combines things that sound like things real reptiles do to give it that air of plausibility.

Gargoyle:



Gargoyles are straight up living statues created by a medieval alchemist in order to defend the Church from evil. Opinion on that sort of occultism was mixed, and eventually the Inquisition burned all the formulas and killed the creators, preventing the creation of more true gargoyles. Still, the vigils of those who have yet to be destroyed continue to this day. Gargoyles faithfully watch over the building they are in, responding with violence against those who would desecrate them or otherwise do evil in their view.

Gargoyles are as tough as you’d expect for animated stone, and are reasonably competent in a fight. They can fly in spite of that being obviously ridiculous because hey magic. The PCs should probably not end up in a situation where they’re fighting them unless there’s a terrible misunderstanding, given they’re pretty much okay guys.

The adventure hook starts with someone recreating the formula to animate gargoyles. The twist is that it’s a powerful diabolist, who wants to use it for evil. They’re tasked with stealing the formula from him, with some general details given of his villa. There’s then a bunch of suggestions for complications, such as other parties seeking the formula and potentially a group of gargoyles having heard of the situation and hoping to prevent their creator’s secret being used for evil.

Verdict: They’re a good rendition of gargoyles but kind of boring.

Gorgon:



Gorgons are, as it happens, entirely human. A rare mutation causes women to grow a mass of creepy fleshy tendrils on their head, suffer from facial deformities, and become venomous (both in claws they grow, and as a constant haze of paralytic that is the source of their mythological petrification). Other than that, they’re humans like you and me. In fact, they even give some rules for gorgon PCs.

Going to go right to the adventure hook since they just fight like any human who is also constantly exuding poisonous gas would, the PCs are tasked with capturing a lady whose gorgon mutation recently started expressing. She disappeared from the hospital, and seems to be behind a series of deaths since. It’s possible she’s working for a local crime family as an assassin, or it’s equally possible that the mob coincidentally has another gorgon working for them. In this option, there’s a further suggestion that the PCs could capture and turn over the assassin and let the poor woman go.

Verdict: I like it, though it’s pretty much the same idea as the Basilisk and that does hurt it quite a bit.

Harpy:



Harpies are a race of winged reptilians who warred with the kinori in times past. They were believed to have been wiped out, but continued on in hiding by interbreeding with humans. They exist on by stealing poo poo and carrying off people to breed with (and sometimes eat as well). They’re gross and smell bad and to human eyes look vaguely female regardless of their gender.

They’ve mostly discarded simply carrying off people into the night in the modern era (though they still do so if they find someone who’s isolated enough while trolling for prey). They instead rely on their high Interaction skills and some Arcane Magic FX to provoke fights (leaving corpses to scavenge) and isolate people for capture. They’ve got magic that alters the emotions and erases the memories of targets that they use both for this and to keep captured humans disoriented and unable to escape.

The adventure hook has the PCs investigating the disappearances of migrant workers in Arizona. When one returns, they are in a daze and believe hags on broomsticks carried them off. The workers, meanwhile, believe their employer has been sacrificing their comrades as part of some dark ritual. The increasingly violent discord might actually be the work of the harpies who are carrying off the workers, who may or may not be in league with the farm owner.

Verdict: I kinda like the harpies, they’re something that could work well as a recurring problem that then turns out to be connected with a larger threat.

Werewolf (Lycanthrope):



It’s rules for werewolves. Lycanthropy in this is a magical disease and a really nasty one that you’re extremely unlikely to recover from. You catch it from getting bitten by one, though it’s rare to actually survive an attack so this isn’t as common as you’d think. The disease has varying severity that can make it manageable, in spite of its relative incurability. Still, the Arms and Equipment Guide’s kit for dealing with werewolves suggests saving one of the bullets for yourself in case you are bitten.

Werewolves are really goddamn powerful in their wolf form and are entirely uncontrollable. They’re strong, fast, and tough. Silver isn’t an instant kill, but it does completely negate their defenses so a silver shotgun slug to the chest should see one off in short order. While specific rules for them aren’t present, it’s noted that in various places and times there have been reports of other werebeasts that suggest the disease can mutate and cause other transformations.

The adventure hook has the PCs investigating cattle deaths in Montana that come on the full moon. The trail leads to a survivalist compound, and the authorities are of course unwilling to gently caress with a bunch of armed crazies because some people think there’s a werewolf. When a local rancher is killed, one of the survivalists eventually confesses to the killings and surrenders. At the next full moon there are no more killings, but since the killer’s arrest the compound has been silent. What all is actually going on is up to the GM.

Verdict: I mean you needed rules for werewolves in a game like this, it is what it is.

Werewolf (Shapechanger):



Shapechangers are people who use magic to turn into animals. They’re distinct from lycanthropes both in generally being able to control their transformation and in that they actually turn into animals rather than hybrid things (though they’re larger and more powerful than a regular wolf, for example). Since they transform through magic, there’s no curse to spread and their bites aren’t anything special.

Shapechangers fight as you would expect an intelligent wolf to do. While they are generally solitary, they will sometimes band together and form packs of their own. They’re definitely more dangerous in this context, as they’re not particularly tougher than a normal wolf (though they also don’t suffer any weakness to silver). Becoming a shapechanger seems to mostly be a thing for terrible people, by the by.

The adventure hook has a rash of wolf sightings in Philadelphia, where I can assure you wolves should not be. The PCs hear a report and end up finding a naked woman running from police. It turns out she’s been having blackouts that correspond with the sightings and was recently given a fur coat under mysterious circumstances, with the suggestion being that someone is manufacturing fur coats that turn you into animals. I think this could be a pretty cool one actually, fur being literally murder and all.

Verdict: The more interesting type of werewolf, but not much to see here.

Next Time: Yarr, Giant Squids and Other Sea Beasties

Angry Salami
Jul 27, 2013

Don't trust the skull.

Dallbun posted:

I know the thri-kreen were in the Monstrous Manual without direct reference to Athas, but it feels really weird to have this encounter outside of a Dark Sun game.

Yeah, if I ran into a Thri-kreen outside of Dark Sun, I'd assume the GM was hinting we were playing on pre-apocalypse Athas, and we were meant to be averting the cleansing wars before they happened or some such...

unseenlibrarian
Jun 4, 2012

There's only one thing in the mountains that leaves a track like this. The creature of legend that roams the Timberline. My people named him Sasquatch. You call him... Bigfoot.
To be fair Thri-Keen were in 1E's Monster Manual 2, well before Athas was a gleam in anyone's eye, and the fact that they really love to eat elves was part of the original write-up, even.

On a vaguely related note, they actually first appeared in...a deck of cards with monster writeups, along with the Grippli (The frog-dudes that aren't bullywugs) and a couple of other things that later appeared in MMII.

unseenlibrarian fucked around with this message at 05:29 on Dec 10, 2017

DalaranJ
Apr 15, 2008

Yosuke will now die for you.

PurpleXVI posted:

As for eating, most vampires can't eat, but a select few have a Perk(or was it an Advantage?) that let them eat like mortals. Zero sustenance from it, but it makes it easier for them to fake being alive, and a bit more fun for them to be undead.

I didn't really think this would ever come up in the context of roleplaying but for a short while I was unable to eat for medical reasons.

Being unable to eat is a profoundly isolating experience. It should have been obvious to me, but consuming food with others is one of the most commonly shared and important social experiences. Not that Vampires need help feeling less human.

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JcDent
May 13, 2013

Give me a rifle, one round, and point me at Berlin!
I would take that perk and eat my way to bliss. Cookies and pizza and confectionaries and whatever for days, without getting fat, though I guess vampire bowel movements are pretty nasty.

So, vampires staying up during the day... is like me staying up at night. Do they also lose humanity for posting on 4chan?

E: Jesus Christ, rot grubs are a horrible monster.

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