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Joe Slowboat posted:And not 'the seven ranks of spirit all have specific names in First Tongue.'
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Apr 3, 2019 00:05
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I Am Just a Box posted:Contagion Chronicle preview update: vectors chapter. More oWoD rules that mention "unsoakable lethal damage" and all that "coincidental magic" mages are always talking about. Hmmmm. quote:Firstly, I want to say I’m so very, very pleased with the content the authors of this book turned in. To work on this book, each author was tasked with reading and learning at least two new CofD game lines before writing even began. I was keen to ensure this book (being all about crossover) handled subjects as complex and deep as those in Mage and Changeling, as examples, with authenticity.  Basic Chunnel posted:First Tongue is linguistic THAC0. Incidentally, 'Linquistic THAC0' is also the name of my Nerdcore band.
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Apr 3, 2019 00:07
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I'm fine with the First Tongue but as mentioned above some repetition (or just mentioning the name you'll actually remember, and in parentheses the first tongue one) would go a long way. In general my issue with Werewolf is that it seems like there's just way too much poo poo between forms, moon gifts, shadow gifts, wolf gifts, rites, renown, various little things like tracking and hunter's aspect, etc. Also Dalu and Gauru not sounding so similar would help because one person I was playing with kept saying Daru.
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Apr 3, 2019 00:09
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Zereth posted:Do Uratha genuinely believe that a Third Rank spirit is fundamentally different enough from a Second Rank spirit that they don't have a word that covers both? I actually don't hate the fact that each rank has a name (because the difference in rank has significant impact on stuff like ability to deal aggravated damage to it by default) but it's silly as hell that there isn't a name for, like, the concept of spirits that I can remember.
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Apr 3, 2019 00:10
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Crasical posted:...Why? Aggrieved that it was no longer legal to own a Herd of slaves to feed on? Was Lincoln part of a secret society of vampire hunters?
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Apr 3, 2019 00:13
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RE: First Tongue Wasu-im for Weak Wimpy rage, Basu-Im for Burly Beefy rage. Hishu is for Human, Dalu is for Dire Human, Gauru is for Gribblemonster, Urshul is for 'I hate that I have to try and make mnemonics to remember the form names'
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Apr 3, 2019 00:24
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Zereth posted:Do Uratha genuinely believe that a Third Rank spirit is fundamentally different enough from a Second Rank spirit that they don't have a word that covers both?
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Apr 3, 2019 00:36
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Excuse me I have a very important question. When did we start using the word 'woof' and why is everyone just ignoring it. Thank you.
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Apr 3, 2019 00:38
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The “werewolf” caricature in popular culture is entirely distinct from the considerably detailed and culturally rich manifestation in the CoD. They really can’t be compared at all, and so we need a distinct word. There “werewolves” and there are woofs. The difference is so important
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Apr 3, 2019 00:42
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It's fun to call them woofs. Look at them, they're adorable 10 foot tall killing machines that straddle the lines of flesh and spirit.
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Apr 3, 2019 00:50
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Book Werewolves: Noble, tragic idiots, 'The Forsaken'. Players playing Werewolves: Just idiots. 'Woofs'. 
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Apr 3, 2019 00:50
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I would be a lot easier on WTF and its earnest ambitions if it committed to being one thing or another. You can make a super dense fantasy novel complete with untranslated conlang that readers must immerse themselves in to truly vibe with, or you can be a reference manual for a game. The former has its place (tho tbh untranslated bilingualism in fiction only really works when it’s real and culturally specific in a way that supports the text), but the kind of challenge to the reader it presents is actively antagonistic to the function of the latter.
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Apr 3, 2019 00:55
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Joe Slowboat posted:It's fun to call them woofs. Look at them, they're adorable 10 foot tall killing machines that straddle the lines of flesh and spirit.
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Apr 3, 2019 00:57
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I took up war form (quago-im, whatever it’s called) to stop a speeding semi truck in its tracks. Whoops, I got carried away and murdered 70 people stuck in a traffic jam on the freeway that I caused, then woke up with a blood hangover in my ex girlfriend’s apartment. I’m a woof
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Apr 3, 2019 01:00
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Basic Chunnel posted:I would be a lot easier on WTF and its earnest ambitions if it committed to being one thing or another. You can make a super dense fantasy novel complete with untranslated conlang that readers must immerse themselves in to truly vibe with, or you can be a reference manual for a game. The former has its place (tho tbh untranslated bilingualism in fiction only really works when it’s real and culturally specific in a way that supports the text), but the kind of challenge to the reader it presents is actively antagonistic to the function of the latter. Ease of use is not the only value in an RPG. Ideally, one wants to have the easiest possible iteration of one's aesthetic goals, which WtF definitely doesn't... but ease of use as a manual is less important than that the manual produces what it's supposed to. I contend that First Tongue, used more carefully, will always increase the difficulty of use slightly, but can be worth more than the slight bump in 'oh no I had to learn slightly more words in a CoD game, which is 50% Capitalized Words With Unusual Meanings by volume' e: I don't think WtF 2e is terrible at its aesthetic goals I just think it's transparently not its best self. Because all of Chronicles 2e organized the books in a pretty unfortunate way. Joe Slowboat fucked around with this message at 01:10 on Apr 3, 2019 |
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Apr 3, 2019 01:05
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01011001 posted:I'm fine with the First Tongue but as mentioned above some repetition (or just mentioning the name you'll actually remember, and in parentheses the first tongue one) would go a long way. In general my issue with Werewolf is that it seems like there's just way too much poo poo between forms, moon gifts, shadow gifts, wolf gifts, rites, renown, various little things like tracking and hunter's aspect, etc. Agreed 100%. Gifts, Facets, and Renown are a little fiddly, but on their own would be okay. I'm not big on rites and fetishes also being separate things, but I can live with them. The five forms bother me more, especially as the effort to make them distinct and useful was accomplished by making them more complicated, adding auxiliary mechanics to each. The Hunter's Aspect is completely unnecessary and I'm not sure what role it even satisfies beyond symmetry with Vampire's Predatory Aura. It's made worse by a much less accessible presentation in the layout, scattered between auspice writeups and condition appendix. I'm not a fan of dividing Death Rage into two phases, either. (I generally think, while the Predatory Aura works okay for Vampire, the decision to extend that mechanic to other templates has been detrimental. Even Mage's nimbus would probably be expressed better without the immediate nimbus.) Mechanical bloat has been a problem with 2e design as it's gone on, especially in terms of making things into Conditions that don't benefit from being Conditions. Promethean has a separate side effect Condition for every Transmutation and every Refinement. 01011001 posted:I actually don't hate the fact that each rank has a name (because the difference in rank has significant impact on stuff like ability to deal aggravated damage to it by default) but it's silly as hell that there isn't a name for, like, the concept of spirits that I can remember. It makes sense in world that the separate rank names, or something like them, would exist. It doesn't make sense to make a show of presenting them to the player, who might use one once in a blue moon, and makes even less sense to omit a word for the whole category. English has words like king, minister, mayor, peasant, slave, hero, weakling. But it drat well has a word for "human."
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Apr 3, 2019 01:08
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Basic Chunnel posted:I’d bet it’s one of those things where the designer heard the old canard that Inuit language has a hundred words for snow, or whatever, and thought the idea and its intuitive sense was cool enough to run with. Odds are they didn’t try to actually learn Inuit language, because who wants to do all that work just to lend faux-anthropological authenticity to a tabletop fantasy game?
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Apr 3, 2019 01:19
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Joe Slowboat posted:Ease of use is not the only value in an RPG. Ideally, one wants to have the easiest possible iteration of one's aesthetic goals, which WtF definitely doesn't... but ease of use as a manual is less important than that the manual produces what it's supposed to. The obvious comparison here is Demon: The Descent, which as pointed out in this thread before was all but explicitly designed to avoid First Tongue word salad problems. There are a lot of Proper Nouns but their concepts and contexts are comparatively, very accessible. Once you grok the basic premise of the game, you get what Cover is. You know intuitively that a Soul Pact is going to be a bigger deal than a regular Pact. When a guy says “I’m going to Spoof that vampire’s attempt to read my aura”, if I know what “Spoof” means in a normal human context, I understand what’s happening. This even when “Spoof” is just as viscerally stupid a word as the mongrelized Sumerian you’re required to memorize to keep any jaunt to the spirit world smooth and legible in WTF. I mean I still don’t really understand the differences between different kinds of Infrastructure, but no matter what I know my demon’s gonna be pulling out his bendy straw to get at its aether. That right there… that’s a game. And the core book is laid out in a halfway logical fashion!
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Apr 3, 2019 01:23
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I don't disagree that Demon does what it does really effectively! Maybe more effectively than Woof. But they're doing different things, and the particular kind of alienation that the First Tongue is a part of is vital to the game of Werewolf that I want to play. My point is that the game I, and apparently the writers, want Werewolf to be is one that aims at that alienation. So the question becomes, how does one produce those effects and also a playable, fun game, to the greatest degree possible. And, y'know, maybe that means radically cutting down on First Tongue, but I hope not because I find First Tongue's beneficial effects outweigh its frustrations already for me. E: like, 'comfort of the reader' isn't a single category, it's a set of variables and how people react to them. Obtuseness is much less uncomfortable to me than various other qualities a text can have. A 5-hour tutorial in a computer game is fine if the tutorial isn't boring, and 5 hours of boring will ruin a game for me regardless of whether they're in the tutorial or not. Joe Slowboat fucked around with this message at 01:32 on Apr 3, 2019 |
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Apr 3, 2019 01:30
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Zereth posted:Aren't the inuit "words" for snow grammatically equivalent to an english speaker saying "dry powdery snow" or whatever anyway There's this pop linguist I really like (he's an academic too, he just does general audience stuff too.) He had a half hour lecture that touched on this, with the central question being "is it true that English has more words than other languages?" The answer, scientifically, was "what, exactly, is counted as a word? how can you count words in a language if you can't define them? so who the gently caress knows lol."
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Apr 3, 2019 01:32
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Crasical posted:...Why? Aggrieved that it was no longer legal to own a Herd of slaves to feed on? Was Lincoln part of a secret society of vampire hunters? In this case, unclear, though since he was also sending arms and allowing his childer to spawn vampire armies for the Confederacy in order to claim Georgia as his domain revenge does seem a likely motive. Digital Osmosis posted:There's this pop linguist I really like (he's an academic too, he just does general audience stuff too.) He had a half hour lecture that touched on this, with the central question being "is it true that English has more words than other languages?" The answer, scientifically, was "what, exactly, is counted as a word? how can you count words in a language if you can't define them? so who the gently caress knows lol." There's a great example of this kind of thing in East Timor. Apparently the local word (presumably in Tetum) for recycling is literally just an extremely concise explanation of the concept rather than a word per se, or so my social scientist friend who does fieldwork there says. Is it really a word or is it a sentence? It's both!
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Apr 3, 2019 01:55
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I Am Just a Box posted:The shared aesthetic of the First Tongue helps give a bit more character to the Uratha, and also implies a stronger link between the flesh and spirit, going back through history, by the way in which its construction is meant to mirror what extrapolated trends might draw in a line backwards in time from Proto-Indo-European. Or in other words, it is meant to sound from a time before records, suggesting without explicitly asserting that early human language might have drawn influence from traffic between the spirit and the flesh, and thus exposure to the speech of the spirits. Pretty much been my take. I like the First Tongue, but the way it's used in the books themselves is atrocious. I've tried to reference and pull from the various books for my games and half the time I come away asking what the hell the paragraph I just read was even saying. I like Mage (very much so) and I'm pretty sure its own lexicon of weird words dwarfs First Tongue, but it usually takes the time to introduce and describe what the things it is referencing are and does away with using one word when it could use another.
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Apr 3, 2019 01:59
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Loomer posted:In this case, unclear, though since he was also sending arms and allowing his childer to spawn vampire armies for the Confederacy in order to claim Georgia as his domain revenge does seem a likely motive. 'Explodes in sunlight' is def. something that I find extremely desirable in my infantry.
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Apr 3, 2019 02:00
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People are extremely mad about not being able to remember words, I guess? I get that it is hard to remember all the werewolf stuff your first time reading the book, but if you are going to put the effort required to actually play the game it isn't a huge deal to get 80 percent of them.
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Apr 3, 2019 02:00
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Crasical posted:'Explodes in sunlight' is def. something that I find extremely desirable in my infantry. While definitely a deficit, do you want to be the guy who has to explain to General Sherman that silent intruders in the form of loving armour-plated demon-bats (since this is the Tzimisce we're talking about) raided your camp at night and now there's a thirty-foot tall creature screaming and wielding cannons like handguns in the middle of the battle line?
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Apr 3, 2019 02:03
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That sounds rad, can I play in that campaign?
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Apr 3, 2019 02:18
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Loomer posted:While definitely a deficit, do you want to be the guy who has to explain to General Sherman that silent intruders in the form of loving armour-plated demon-bats (since this is the Tzimisce we're talking about) raided your camp at night and now there's a thirty-foot tall creature screaming and wielding cannons like handguns in the middle of the battle line? Isn't Dracula one of those older Tzimisce from before they took up fleshcrafting, or am I remembering wrong?
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Apr 3, 2019 02:23
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xanthan posted:Isn't Dracula one of those older Tzimisce from before they took up fleshcrafting, or am I remembering wrong? Nah, Dracula's line of descent is pure strain body horror (the Eldest by way of the Ruthvens), and even as a mortal ghoul (actually a revenant too - double threat) he even used vicissitude to create a body double to die in his place and straight up went to Yorak (as in, 'Mr Cathedral of Flesh' Yorak) to demand the embrace. His Revenant line, the Basarabs, are themselves innately capable of vicissitude.
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Apr 3, 2019 02:30
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Remind me, did the Tzimisce make weird corpse-hazmat suit antisun stuff or was that a fever dream I had?
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Apr 3, 2019 02:50
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Mors Rattus posted:Remind me, did the Tzimisce make weird corpse-hazmat suit antisun stuff or was that a fever dream I had? I don't particularly recall that, but it wouldn't surprise me and it's kind of a dope idea. The big problem is the call to daylight torpor but that can be overcome. Christ, imagine a bunch of Tzimisce on methamphetamines to outweigh the fatigue wearing grafted vozhd like power armour.
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Apr 3, 2019 03:06
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I Am Just a Box posted:Agreed 100%. Gifts, Facets, and Renown are a little fiddly, but on their own would be okay. I'm not big on rites and fetishes also being separate things, but I can live with them. The five forms bother me more, especially as the effort to make them distinct and useful was accomplished by making them more complicated, adding auxiliary mechanics to each. The Hunter's Aspect is completely unnecessary and I'm not sure what role it even satisfies beyond symmetry with Vampire's Predatory Aura. It's made worse by a much less accessible presentation in the layout, scattered between auspice writeups and condition appendix. I'm not a fan of dividing Death Rage into two phases, either. The thing about Hunter's Aspect that doesn't work for me is that it lands one of 5 Renown conditions, all of which are only gainable from Hunter's Aspect, so it's this weird thing you never remember to do. Predatory Aura is the same roll no matter what for any vampire and always gives you 1 of the 3 conditions you're consistently getting from breaking points so you know exactly what you're getting out of it. The forms are weird and there's too many. Being at a good harmony level lets you do dumb crap like insta-shift to Urhan, pop essence to pre-empt an action, and insta-shift back. It's so expensive to do any Werewolf magic! Also a lot of it sucks for the pricetag. Some Rites and Facets are in a weird place where many of them feel like someone's obligated to take them, too (why is Sacred Hunt not just something you get by default?). Condition bloat is real as hell. I went back to look at it and I had completely forgotten about Flaring Renown, which can give you one of 5 conditions, which only does something if you activate it, provoke a response, and then use it. It's so complicated. One "fun" interaction is that the Siskur-Dah condition combined with Persistent Inspired from the Song from the Heart merit gets really, really dumb because you can be getting 2 beats every time you get an exceptional success (which is on 3 successes). Love the game though.
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Apr 3, 2019 03:53
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Yeah we definitely cheesed the Sacred Hunt rules
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Apr 3, 2019 04:10
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01011001 posted:Condition bloat is real as hell. I went back to look at it and I had completely forgotten about Flaring Renown, which can give you one of 5 conditions, which only does something if you activate it, provoke a response, and then use it. It's so complicated. God, I forgot that was a completely separate thing from the Hunter's Aspect. I remember reading those rules and thinking "oh, okay, so this is never going to be useful to try to do."
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Apr 3, 2019 04:59
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It's very good if you can pull it off (free successes are no joke) but like...pulling it off is hell. And it's once per story.
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Apr 3, 2019 05:01
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Zereth posted:Do Uratha genuinely believe that a Third Rank spirit is fundamentally different enough from a Second Rank spirit that they don't have a word that covers both? Rank 1 spirits are comparable to animals, 2 to children, 3 to an adult. This is in regards to needs, depth, ability to think and logic through things, all around the way they act. Once you get to Rank 3 you're dealing with things that can trick you in more subtle ways than 'look behind you there's a monster I swear.' So it's similar to humans having different names for people based on their level of maturity and ability (baby, toddler, child, tween, teen, young adult, adult). That said, in game 'what is your Rank' isn't really something that comes up much. It's a penalty for some rolls, so it usually stays in mechanical fields, but no one has gotten to the honorary ranks in our game to the point where it matters. Though as they act differently usually you can figure it out by dealing with them a bit. nofather fucked around with this message at 17:20 on Apr 3, 2019 |
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Apr 3, 2019 17:16
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New book out on the ST Vault https://www.storytellersvault.com/product/271688/Venice-Unmasked
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Apr 3, 2019 18:05
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I've been reading Rose Bailey's 'Bite Me: How To Write Vampire' and it's really, really good.
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Apr 3, 2019 18:45
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Dawgstar posted:I've been reading Rose Bailey's 'Bite Me: How To Write Vampire' and it's really, really good. It’s basically the writer’s bible for 2e Requiem, minus the prototypes for what ended up as some of its mechanics. I first read that thing in a series of hospital waiting rooms while my dad was dying, in prep for working on the game.
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Apr 3, 2019 19:00
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Dave Brookshaw posted:It’s basically the writer’s bible for 2e Requiem, minus the prototypes for what ended up as some of its mechanics. I first read that thing in a series of hospital waiting rooms while my dad was dying, in prep for working on the game. Jesus that's dark. I guess anything to get your mind off what's happening, but man. That must have been a bad time.
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Apr 3, 2019 19:40
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01011001 posted:Condition bloat is real as hell Good: The "this power can do this for this splat" stuff is cute and interesting a lot of the time in its implementation, like the power that lets certain groups treat a corpse like a 3-dot Library for rolls related to its life Bad: Some of these would just work better as plain powers for those groups in their core materials and the xp system kinda sucks Hilarious: Unless I'm missing something, none of the beast-specific subgroups got a bonus related to any vector (like how a vector might do one thing for vampires, one for hunters, and an additional thing for Lucifuge specifically), which: good, ignore them.
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Apr 3, 2019 21:17
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