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Freaking Crumbum posted:i've seen snippets of geist lore pop up as people have done other write ups, but i was really bummed that there's not an entry for them in the archive. without having to trawl through a bunch of wiki pages, can somebody provide the gist of what geists are, what they do and how their lore is supposed to interact with the rest of the splats? Ghosts that give up part of their identity and humanity for power, because they are obsessed with making sure...something gets done. They merge with and return someone to life in order to accomplish a goal, though they have trouble remembering what their goal is exactly until they achieve some level of bond with their host.
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Sep 19, 2019 19:04
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Freaking Crumbum posted:i've seen snippets of geist lore pop up as people have done other write ups, but i was really bummed that there's not an entry for them in the archive. without having to trawl through a bunch of wiki pages, can somebody provide the gist of what geists are, what they do and how their lore is supposed to interact with the rest of the splats? So you died, but instead of staying dead and possibly leaving behind a ghost of your own, a ghost comes to you and offers a Bargain. You get to live and merge with them, but now you've got to use your new superpowers to deal with all this ghost crap that goes on behind the scenes everywhere, both in the material world and the crazy twisted Underworld. A lot of what the book sets you up doing is more narrowly directed than other lines, because it assumes a more specific ideological approach: "the Underworld sucks, let's be the revolution." You build a cult called a Krewe which is unfortunately also the name for a PC group, and they enact local change like uncovering ghost clues or helping elect the mayor you like. PCs tend to become magnets for Ghost Problems and have to solve their worldly woes or destroy them. The Underworld is a place full of Dead Dominions, separated by rivers, where strange Old Laws are enforced by Kerberoi (super beefy ghosts) and Cthonian gods. It really only overlaps significantly with Mage because they're the only other line with ready access to and a strong reason to go to the Underworld or deal with ghosts in general.
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Sep 19, 2019 19:11
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So vampires are mafiosos, werewolves are street gangs, mages are detectives, hunters are vigilantes, demons are spies, Prometheans are homeless. Geists are...Wobblies?megane posted:e: or wait, is it that the GM pretends to roll for it, because the winner is already predetermined by metaplot? Because that might be even better. Besides the railroad*, the other problems are that Vampire isn't built to handle big superhero streetfights, and they're unclear on how to handle the Antediluvians. The Red Star makes it possible to fight them, sometimes, but the book also goes on and on (and on and on) about how these NPCs are beyond mechanics. *So many hobo metaphors! Halloween Jack fucked around with this message at 19:32 on Sep 19, 2019 |
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Sep 19, 2019 19:11
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Also about Geist: everything in the underworld haaaaaaates mages, so mages will ask them to help with underworld things.
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Sep 19, 2019 19:17
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You know, if you did a game where the various plans to stop the Antediluvians and stuff accidentally destroyed the Masquerade, but they weren't actually still alive/real/a threat and now you just have to deal with the 'apocalypse' of the setting's status quo, that might be pretty fun. "We accidentally made our dumb slapfights over an apocalypse we made up turn into a real apocalypse for how we used to do things." seems like something oWoD vamps would cause. E: Added bonus of keeping things on the level the system can actually handle! Night10194 fucked around with this message at 19:29 on Sep 19, 2019 |
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Sep 19, 2019 19:21
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One thing that can be confusing: the relatively-normal human you're playing as is called a Sin-Eater. The Geist is the dead dude to whom you are giving a piggy-back ride. The Underworld (the realm of ghosts, where humans hang out when they die, the place Sin-Eaters care about) is legally distinct from the Shadow (where spirits live, the place Woofs care about) and Stygia (the supernal realm filled with Look, when you have twelve different game lines fighting over Christian Pop Mythology for scraps of metaphor, there's going to be some overlap. megane fucked around with this message at 19:35 on Sep 19, 2019 |
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Sep 19, 2019 19:32
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That Old Tree posted:So you died, but instead of staying dead and possibly leaving behind a ghost of your own, a ghost comes to you and offers a Bargain. You may also leave a ghost behind anyway, I am pretty sure. Ghosts are weird that way.
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Sep 19, 2019 19:44
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The solution is to just sit down and decide 'Old Testament and Book of the Watchers: True. Mostly.' and then go from there. I wonder why that never happens, by the way. They always bring in the Christian stuff, never stop with the Old Testament, despite that stuff being considerably more easily put into a game. I suppose "The other sects of Judaism were correct and the Jesus Movement was effectively a heresy" would piss off a lot of potential customers.
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Sep 19, 2019 19:50
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Apocalypse Scenarios! The Last Battleground-After the sacrifices of 3 beings aspected to the different heads of the Triatic Wyrm(that the players could, ostensibly stop but profoundly are not meant to) the Wyrm plops a battlefield down somewhere in the umbra adjacent to a powerful caern. After gathering all their spirit allies from the various umbral realms(Your player characters have been going on wacky adventures in the umbral realms, haven't they? What do you mean you haven't been following the storypath?!) you join the battle, there really isn't an option not to join the battle. You probably lose. A Tribe Falls-This is actually thirteen different scenarios, one for each of the tribes potentially falling. Most of them are basically "There's a bad faction that's been acting in secret for a while but they've struck and now everyone's corrupt" or "The tribe leadership makes a really dumb decision that corrupts everyone" So I'll only comment on some/most of them Black Furies-Due to them channeling wyld energies so much they start to change in various subtle ways, and then not so subtle ways like gaining different sets of memories or becoming an entirely different person. And since they hate the Weaver so much they throw in with the Wyrm and go about trying to bring humanity back to a pre-industrial state. Children of Gaia-So there's a major CoG character named Cernounos, who's a geneticist. And wanted to revive the Bunyip. He was able to scrounge together enough thylacine DNA to actually create shapeshifting thylacines again. But he can't 'science' up a bunyip soul and they're hilariously wyrm tainted. Cernounos e-mailed his findings to the Cog leadership shortly before he was forced to walk the spiral. The CoG leadership read his email and the entire tribe unanimously decides "Hey, we should cure the Wyrm of it's madness." So they perform a very powerful and ancient rite meant to heal the wyrm's broken soul. And the ritemaster botches the roll and instead summons the eater of souls right there in the CoG Caern. The eater of souls spreads a miasma of despair and suffering across all of north america and what few CoGs aren't corrupted by him are killed either by Gaian garou who don't believe them, or their former tribe-mates. Glass Walkers-The concept of Pentex as a whole awakens into an incarnae that performs the spiritual equivalent of a corporate buyout on the Glasswalker's Totem. Red Talons- The red talons eat humans, and get infected with a Prion disease, it doesn't affect them because werewolves, but they are carriers and end up infecting literally the entire native wolf population. Which then promptly dies. They blame humans for this and leap into the loving arms of the Wyrm. Shadow Lords- Grandfather Thunder suggests to Gaia that he be elevated to Celestine status to combat the Red Star. Gaia agrees to do so if the Shadow Lords can accomplish a task in a years time. They obviously can't, and that was originally the entire point, to teach them and Thunder some humility. But since they threw themselves so single mindedly into this task they left their holdings mostly unguarded, so their physical and spiritual enemies are much much much stronger. Rather than admit their colossal fuckup they blamed Gaia and joined the Wyrm. Wendigo-A Wendigo pack that objects to the fact that the us government doesn’t treat indigenous populations well hijacks a nuclear equipped submarine and nukes the gently caress out of the eastern seaboard, the book is very insistant on the fact that they have not fallen to the Wyrm at this point. The rest of the garou nation marches up to the main Wendigo sept to kindly ask them what the gently caress and interrupt their yearly ritual to keep Wendigo from falling to the wyrm! Whoops! If only those horrible Europeans had trusted the Wendigo more when they were literally nuking the entirety of New York State! Everything north of Panama is then immediately cast into eternal hell winter and the wendigo all turn into cannibal super werewolves. Weaver Ascendant- Turns out the Weaver was the true enemy all along! A hyper advanced supercomputer awakens to spiritual sentience and merges with the Weaver before taking over a Zaibatsu which then buys out Pentex and starts wiping out the Fera in Japan and Europe. North America is marginally safer for the Fera/Garou because there’s still a lot of “Rural” out here for them to hide in. However since the Weaver is super powerful it’s nearly impossible to access the spirit world. Thus the Garou and their Fera allies proceed to hack every corporation on earth and dump their receipts onto the internet, every single TV station, and most people’s cell phones while simultaneously having Godzilla march through times square with a mage on it’s back shooting fireballs that spell out “Smash the state”, this weakens the gauntlet enough for the Fera to break through and fight their way to set loose the Weaver’s daughter (which is a backup weaver, basically) the resulting spiritual backlash of which kills the Weaver and frees the Wyrm, but also kills the Fera. And the new Weaver is kinder than the old one, and more than willing to let reality sit in peace, but sees no real need for Fera running around doing werewolf things. Ragnarok- The spirit of the asteroid belt figures that the best way to cleanse the wyrm from Gaia is to throw an asteroid at it. The spirit of the asteroid belt is not smart. The garou undertake a very dangerous rite to move the moon out of orbit and into the path of the asteroid. This works, but severely wounds the spirit Luna and most Lunar Fera in various ways. Regardless, there’s now tons of small asteroids and pieces of moon that impact the earth’s surface and cast it into fimbulwinter. Garou and BSDs fight over the shards as they’re one of the few surefire ways to get back rage and gnosis anymore. World’s dying cloud.
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Sep 19, 2019 19:50
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The Glass Walkers scenario sounds like a hoot, and the Red Talons one is exactly the kind of thing those idiots would do. Like why do you need the Black Spiral Dancers when there are Red Talons? Like the Sabbat with fleas.
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Sep 19, 2019 19:57
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Apocalypse is cool and good. Ethan Skemp actually remembered to make a place for the PCs instead of quietly watching Antediluvians duke it out, or whatever it is Divis Mal does.
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Sep 19, 2019 20:07
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Night Horrors: The Tormented Part 13: Beetle Juice  Hello, I like robots Riley Silverman doesn't particularly get people. She prefers things she can categorize, sort and comprehend via part or purpose. She's able to lose herself for hours working on computer code or engineering designs. People, on the other hand, are messy and inconsistent. They do things irrationally and unpredictably. Riley understands the science behind hormones and biochemistry, and she's studied physiology, psychology and kinesiology in a desperate attempt to make some sense of human behavior. It doesn't work. She just can't figure people out, despite being one. She knows she's not like everyone else, and would probably have an autism diagnosis if she'd been born in a period when the autism spectrum wasn't narrowly defined. A therapist might have been able to teach her ways to understand people, and sometimes she considers therapy, but never for long. The past is boring, and she's developed self-management tools and workarounds via trial and error. She's busy thinking about the future, working to find ways to help herself and others understand ideas that come easily to the neurotypical. Specifically, Riley works at the National Science Foundation's Center for Brains, Minds and Machines, and her work there is vital to her goals. She has doctorates in AI and robotics and could easily have selected any government project she wanted - or, hell, any private company. However, she's not interested in making weapons, space stations, space exploration robots or virtual assistants. She wants to understand humanity. CBMM is the best place to do that. She's years ahead of anyone else there in terms of research, with scale prototypes of her automaton project already made. She's pretty sure she's fallen down some manner of rabbit hole, but she ignores the unease she feels with her own obsessions. As she works on her machine's physical body, she thinks about how to make its power and control systems, doing the math in her head and planning for potential problems. The power system is ingenious, and she knows it's going to change everything when she finishes it. It glows in lines of fire behind her eyes, elegant and perfect - the kind of intuitive yet logical leap that you get maybe once in a lifetime. It could create entire new fields of science. She knows her pride isn't hubris, and while she doesn't have a baseline, she has...something. She thinks it might be faith. Soon, Riley is going to record her idea on paper, taking her time so that her notes are legible and her theories are easy to follow. She never forgets, sure, but you don't take chances with an idea like this. Being patient is hard for her, but she knows she can't rush. That'd invite mistakes. She has to be logical, take things one step at a time. She can name her thing now, though. Names don't have to wait, and naming things makes it easier to classify them. She has named the body she is going to make 'Chiron.' Its heart is an engine in a titanium casing built around synthetic veins that will carry bioconductive fluid. She has had a flash of inspiration in naming the engine, too. She's patented her proprietary tech behind the bioneural internal power system using the trade name "Azoth." Riley is a biracial, dark-skinned woman in her mid-30s. She doesn't have patience for complex personal grooming, and she doesn't especially pay much attention to her own appearance. She's relatively clean and hygienic, sure, but often goes a day to a week without showering. All of her outfits are identical - worn jeans and t-shirts, safety glasses, steel-toed sneakers. She wears her braids in a ponytail to keep them out of her face. She's easily absorbed into her work and has no real attention for anything outside it. If talked to, she is distracted and disengaged, often irritated by pleasantries and chitchat. She doesn't laugh at jokes and doesn't pick up on nonverbal cues easily. Many find her to be blunt and straightforward to the point of rudeness, and she's uncomfortable with prolonged eye contact or social encounters. She does not handle abstraction well. Riley doesn't talk to her coworkers very often and doesn't pay attention to workplace gossip. She guards her research carefully against corporate or government spying, and even the grad students she sometimes oversees as part of her job are not allowed into her personal lab any more. She is concerned because she thinks her wariness stems from irrational paranoia rather than logical risk assessment, but she isn't sure she can tell the difference and isn't about to ask anyone for advice on the matter. Rumors exist of Prometheans birthing human children, though never confirmed. Riley's quest for humanity is extremely Promethean, and her mother left when she was young. Despite having perfect recall, Riley cannot clearly remember her mother. It is possible that the woman was a Promethean, but impossible to prove unless she returns after more than 20 years of absence. Riley's peers often refer to her as 'Frankenstein' when she can't hear, especially those that don't understand her work. While she is trying to make life, in a sense, the rumors about her using dead bodies in her research are 100% false. She sources her biological components from regulated state-of-the-art labs and biomedical firms. It's true that grad students rarely last long under her supervision, but the rumors of her killing them are also false - they're always alive when they leave her oversight. Some say she's working on DARPA military research to make supersoldiers, given how much security she maintains. This is untrue as well. She is not funded by or working for any fringe science organization or classified government agency, as far as she's aware. Riley's a completely normal human, statistically. A smart one, but that's really it. She's got an eidetic memory and is otherwise completely, totally normal, though she may be immune to Disquiet if the GM wants that.  Bug Friend? Sabine Beliveau was raised by her mother on stories of Nicolas Flamel and the Philosopher's Stone. She fantasized about using it to make her dog immortal, make her grandfather healthy and more. As she grew, she still believed a secret awaited her. She was right - at 13, she broke into her mother's basement lab despite warnings to never go there. She found a treasure trove of chemicals, rare minerals, occult machinery and more. Inside a vat of horrible solution, she found a hand - and as she got closer, the hand's owner pressed against the plexiglass. A Promethean, chained to the floor. He watched her silently, pleading with his eyes, and this unnerved her - but she was more fascinated by the books and potions. One, notably, was a bright red liquid containing a single insect suspended in the solution. She drank it, gaining the power to command all the flies and mosquitoes in the garden. Sabine went to the lab again and again, stealing bits of her mother's alchemical lore and concoctions. She drained the vat low enough to talk to the prisoner, learning his secrets. She learned he wasn't human, that he wanted to be, that he would do anything for freedom. She heard him curse her mother and her. She read her mother's notes of how she had made the creature, of the great power he'd had before she locked him away and drained him. Sabine realized this was the true secret: perfection meant becoming something beyond the human. Sabine wanted to become a Promethean. Now, Sabine is 33, and she still doesn't understand the Pilgrimage at all. She's set on transcending her human limits and become a Created in order to shed the frailties of mortality. (The book is now very clearly staring directly into the eyes of transhumanists and making 'tsk, tsk' noises.) Sabine hunts for alchemical formulae in crypts and tombs and for Prometheans to keep her inherited lab stocked with materials. She is a small, athletic French woman of biracial heritage, with curly black hair and glasses. She's energetic, intellectual and friendly, with an infectious smile. She has trouble reading people, though, and has impulse control problems. She's fearless and regularly heads into deep caverns or braves the wrath of Prometheans in the name of alchemy. She believes she is the next Flamel, in fact, destined for fame and glory. She thinks it'll take just the right combination of Vitriol, humours, Pyros and ritual to transform herself. She gains the trust of Prometheans by offering to help them find Athanors and hints at the Pilgrimage in old ruins, and then once she has what she wanted, she betrays one of her partners and drags them to her basement, with aid from the insects she can still control. Sabine has no idea what happened to her mother's captive Promethean. He vanished one day, and she didn't dare ask her mother and reveal what she'd been doing. He's out there, somewhere, and he remembers the girl who never helped him. Sabine's mother died mysteriously. Doctors, baffled by a complete lack of evidence, ruled it was natural causes. The only clue Sabine has to her mother's death is the pilgrim mark etched on the floor next to the body. She's written it down but has no idea what it means. (Pilgrim marks, in case you don't know, are Promethean hobo code. It's part of the Azothic memory.) Sabine has created a false rumor claiming that she is the Mantis Pilgrim, a redeemed Promethean, in order to draw Prometheans to her in the name of solidarity. It is, of course, a complete lie. Sabine thinks she identifies with the Pilgrimage, however, in the false belief that her Great Work is comparable to it. Other alchemists believe she murdered her mother; she's certainly got a reputation among occult scholars, alchemists and archaeologists for having a lot of lore, getting poo poo done no matter how unorthodox she has to get, and an incomparable (and very high-security) library of materials and information. Some say she's got a death curse following her that targets people who work with her; in truth, she merely assassinates anyone she thinks is getting too close and seeing too much of her work. A regrettable necessity. Sabine very much didn't kill her mother, and suggesting she did is a quick way to get on the list of people she wants to gently caress over personally. Sabine loved her mom. Sabine has captured and experimented on Changelings before. They think she must be a Huntsman, sent by the True Fae to torment them, and some have started trying to hire Prometheans to deal with her on the basis that she had alchemy books and they've figured out that Prometheans may know what alchemy is about. In truth, Sabine merely saw through the Masks of some mechanically-flavored Changelings and thought they were Prometheans. She attempted to steal Vitriol they didn't have, and those guys escaped. She's hunting them because she still has no idea she guessed wrong and has instead assumed they're Prometheans they can resist her techniques. Sabine is extremely intelligent, but that and her powers are what she has going for. She's neither strong nor socially inclined. She is a decent fighter, mind, and has a wide and varied skillset...just, on the raw numbers, she'll be outmatched by specialists. She does have a number of Distillations, though, which she can power with her stolen Pyros. All of them are insect-themed - she's limited in her use of them to, essentially, insect-themed results. She can transform herself into insect swarms or grow insect arms and legs she can regenerate by absorbing insects, she can summon insects, that kind of thing. She also has the power to make homunculi, which are weak Pandorans created via human or animal body parts and her own blood. They aren't naturally loyal, but she has the alchemical power to command Pandorans. Next time: The Candyman, The Prophet of the Divine Fire
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Sep 19, 2019 21:08
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Apocalypse was one of the better ones because the whole game up to that point supported what it was trying to do. Plus, WtA was a pretty weird game already and the over-the-top wacky poo poo is exactly the best way to play it. Also, werewolf infected with a prion disease from eating people is actually one of the best NPCs in the whole drat setting, Abnatha the Laughing One. An insane Silent Strider who eats brains to steal knowledge and he would get murdered by the entire tribe were it not for the fact that he mostly kills BSDs and Pentex personnel. Mage, on the other hand, had no idea what it was doing and has without a doubt the dumbest loving ending you can possibly imagine. It's literally 'Aliens steal magic. The end.'.
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Sep 19, 2019 21:13
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Didn't the Mage book also have an "asteroids are falling and there's nothing you can do about it" one?
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Sep 19, 2019 21:15
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Ithle01 posted:Mage, on the other hand, had no idea what it was doing and has without a doubt the dumbest loving ending you can possibly imagine. It's literally 'Aliens steal magic. The end.'. I'm gonna need more detail on this.
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Sep 19, 2019 21:17
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I love Weaver Ascendant because Operation Full Disclosure is the craziest goddamn thing. You hack the entire internet using the supercomputer that is the brain of a Ratkin that was experimented on by Pentex while also breaking the veil all across the world simultaneously. The book even has guidelines for how to build the largest, most obvious Mokolé with which to break the veil. Also the perfect metis comes back and he's perfectly sane and super attractive and rips Zyzrryzryrk in half when she doesn't agree that he should be in charge now.
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Sep 19, 2019 21:21
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Zyzyzrk is so weird. Like a powerlifter in dominatrix gear with a bullwhip who lives in a giant yonic kaiju shows up and you're like "Mommy" but she just wants to scream and kill people.
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Sep 19, 2019 21:27
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Halloween Jack posted:Didn't the Mage book also have an "asteroids are falling and there's nothing you can do about it" one? The Gehenna book had some fun moments I recall. There was a pre-scripted interview with Jan Pieterzoon going on Good Morning Today, which I thought was one of the places where, yeah, that's a cutscene if your characters weren't in the area. There was a creepy thing where Malkav, currently inhabiting a big cluster of former Malkavians, shows up at the rural settlement where Dr. Netchurch is earning his keep with his actual doctoring and wheedles "Douglas" to come out and play. And the end game where Tremere, currently in a 4th generation body, uses hella Thaumaturgy and the Mormon genealogy (as a substitute for the True Name of humanity at large) to a. reduce his Generation back to Antediluvian and b. uh, something, I think he wanted to briefly Dominate everyone else incl. vampires to go look at the sunrise (present company excepted). I believe this has several endings, including Tzimisce boiling out of his mouth after he distills his blood back to 3rd or even 2nd generation and saying "gg no wp" Halloween Jack posted:Zyzyzrk is so weird. Like a powerlifter in dominatrix gear with a bullwhip who lives in a giant yonic kaiju shows up and you're like "Mommy" but she just wants to scream and kill people.
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Sep 19, 2019 21:27
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Night10194 posted:I'm gonna need more detail on this. Skimming the book to refresh my memory, so some of this may be a little off: The Zigg are from an alternate universe and are stealing all the Avatars. The Grays (yes, those Grays) show up to find out why all their alien "science" (a la Technocratic magic) is starting to fail. Everyone's looking for Zoraster, the extradimensional city that is the last true source of magic, and even in the "good" ending it gets booted out of our universe into a new one where it becomes the legendary source of all magic in that universe. EDIT: The above scenario and the "a meteor is coming to destroy everything, and its spirit avatar is a big golem that wants to marry the Earth" scenario both have a lot of stuff about UFO cults, which seems like an overabundance. EDIT 2: very topical 
That Old Tree fucked around with this message at 21:41 on Sep 19, 2019 |
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Sep 19, 2019 21:34
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Mors Rattus posted:She's patented her proprietary tech behind the bioneural internal power system using the trade name "Azoth." I know next-to-nothing about Promethean outside of this writeup. Is this just a big coinkydink or is she in the process of creating an Extempore? Or is that something that's left to the GM?
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Sep 19, 2019 21:38
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That Old Tree posted:Skimming the book to refresh my memory, so some of this may be a little off: The Zigg are from an alternate universe and are stealing all the Avatars. The Grays (yes, those Grays) show up to find out why all their alien "science" (a la Technocratic magic) is starting to fail. Everyone's looking for Zoraster, the extradimensional city that is the last true source of magic, and even in the "good" ending it gets booted out of our universe into a new one where it becomes the legendary source of all magic in that universe. As much as Ascension is already an incoherent mess, you'd think it wouldn't be very hard line to come up with ending scenarios for. "Reality consensus shifts, new Paradigms A-F depending on what the PCs want and how they do." seems like it would be natural. Instead of aliens stealing all magic to Zeta Reticuli and accidentally creating some other setting's realm of magic.
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Sep 19, 2019 21:42
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Night10194 posted:I'm gonna need more detail on this. Okay, so there are two factions of aliens - yes, space aliens - that are involved and both of them are trying to steal awakened avatars or souls or something like that. There's the Zigg who are time-traveling evil aliens from a parallel dimension. They're bad and they want to steal magic for themselves because. Then there's the Greys who are basically from the plateau of Leng. The Greys are sort of 'good' aliens because they're also stealing avatars, but to protect them from the Zigg who want to drain all of the magic juice from our world into theirs. By the way, I would like to interrupt here and just say that this is almost exactly how the book describes things. The Void Engineers have been at war with the Greys since 1945 or there about and have secretly been working with the Zigg because apparently the Technocracy's most out-there free-thinking faction is down with draining magic from the universe. In a sense, yes, the Technocracy and the Ziggs have the same goal, but obviously its really loving stupid. Anyway, you have to go to the Greys spirit world and maybe you stop the Ziggs from breaking in and stealing a ton of the avatars that the Greys have been protecting there, maybe you don't. If you don't magic juice leaks out the world and no one can be a wizard anymore. The end. Also, these are not the only two alien factions in Mage, there's actually a couple others like the squid aliens and whatever lives in the Alpha Centauri dyson sphere, but I guess we don't have word count for that. And yes, the scenario prior to this one in the Ascension book is about a big rock hitting the Earth. It's actually kind of played up as not really an end game thing so much as a possible end of the world if you don't succeed so I guess the writers were just having fun. Overall I actually like that one because it's fairly light-hearted in an absurdist sense and honestly in terms of wacky adventures it's pretty great. There is something you can do about the asteroid by the way, I think it involves a cosmic dance off? Anyway, the whole reason its happening is because the asteroid belt was once a planet that got destroyed by the critters living on it. The asteroid spirit, a schizo nut-job deranged from its planet being blown up (not to be confused with asteroid spirits in Werewolf who are viking badasses) saw what was happening on Gaia and decides to 'save' her. By wiping out all humanity with a big rock. Mars and Jupiter help it do this (Mars was paid off in advance with its two moons Phobos and Demos, former asteroids) by shielding the asteroid from observers before its too late. I think this about covers it, I only skimmed that section. Ithle01 fucked around with this message at 21:46 on Sep 19, 2019 |
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Sep 19, 2019 21:43
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Night10194 posted:As much as Ascension is already an incoherent mess, you'd think it wouldn't be very hard line to come up with ending scenarios for. "Reality consensus shifts, new Paradigms A-F depending on what the PCs want and how they do." seems like it would be natural. Instead of aliens stealing all magic to Zeta Reticuli and accidentally creating some other setting's realm of magic. The very first scenario in the book is much more of a "this is where our metaplot is pretty clearly going" and there are chapters and sidebars and stuff to change things around. But, ultimately, having whole chapters dedicated to very specific, idiosyncratic scenarios seems dumb. Like, "a meteor is coming to destroy everything, and its spirit avatar is a big golem that wants to marry the Earth" is in my opinion an amazing starting point that could use a page or two of write-up for a given table to build on top of, but instead it's 22 pages full of details I frankly cannot care about and I doubt are very interesting to most other people.
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Sep 19, 2019 21:46
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Well, it's ever been an issue in a lot of RPG writing that it isn't always aware it's trying to be a prompt for a story rather than a story on its own. That is again one of the reasons Spire's book is really well done; the authors really have a good grasp of how much detail to give to give a hook a little more of a hook, while keeping it a hook. Knowing how much to say and what to say is almost certainly the hardest part of writing the fluff/fiction side of an RPG. E: There's also always the issue that the amount of detail you need changes a lot depending on what kind of game and setting you're writing, too. Something like Call of Cthulhu, hell yeah I care about the ins and outs of local custom in the adventure location in 1925 because that's probably going to be important. Elsewhere, not so much. Night10194 fucked around with this message at 21:52 on Sep 19, 2019 |
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Sep 19, 2019 21:50
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Nessus posted:And the end game where Tremere, currently in a 4th generation body, uses hella Thaumaturgy and the Mormon genealogy (as a substitute for the True Name of humanity at large) to a. reduce his Generation back to Antediluvian and b. uh, something, I think he wanted to briefly Dominate everyone else incl. vampires to go look at the sunrise (present company excepted). I believe this has several endings, including Tzimisce boiling out of his mouth after he distills his blood back to 3rd or even 2nd generation and saying "gg no wp" quote:Yeah I'm legitimately surprised she never came up in discussions on SA before now, as far as I can tell. Maybe I have my timeline wrong, but I'll speculate that they got the art, decided they didn't want their dominatrix NPC to actually be a dominatrix, so made her an asexual psycho killer who wears fetish gear for no particular reason.
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Sep 19, 2019 21:50
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Flail Snail posted:I know next-to-nothing about Promethean outside of this writeup. Is this just a big coinkydink or is she in the process of creating an Extempore? Or is that something that's left to the GM? She is very much in the process of making an Extempore. Demiurges - humans that create Prometheans - are rarely people with any kind of powers. The key difference is Riley is actually taking pains to document her process for sanity, replicability and logic. e: like, Chiron and Riley would likely get along SUPER WELL and be very good for each others' understanding of humanity. Assuming Chiron wakes up inside a body and not the isolation chamber that is a human-ish mind trapped inside a computer with absolutely no inputs or outputs while his mama makes his body.
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Sep 19, 2019 21:53
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Halloween Jack posted:Zyzyzrk is so weird. Like a powerlifter in dominatrix gear with a bullwhip who lives in a giant yonic kaiju shows up and you're like "Mommy" but she just wants to scream and kill people. I beg you pardon? 
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Sep 19, 2019 22:22
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Halloween Jack fucked around with this message at 22:58 on Sep 19, 2019 |
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Sep 19, 2019 22:54
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Okay sure. That's very peak WoD if anything.
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Sep 19, 2019 22:55
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Ah, yes. The classical attraction of the 'Aryan' physique. Christ, WW.
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Sep 19, 2019 22:58
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Sep 19, 2019 23:01
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Ithle01 posted:Okay, so there are two factions of aliens - yes, space aliens - that are involved and both of them are trying to steal awakened avatars or souls or something like that. There's the Zigg who are time-traveling evil aliens from a parallel dimension. They're bad and they want to steal magic for themselves because. Then there's the Greys who are basically from the plateau of Leng. The Greys are sort of 'good' aliens because they're also stealing avatars, but to protect them from the Zigg who want to drain all of the magic juice from our world into theirs. By the way, I would like to interrupt here and just say that this is almost exactly how the book describes things. I wasn't high when I started reading this post, but now I think I might be?
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Sep 19, 2019 23:05
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The Z'igg'rau'g'l'r'r''''''''' thing was always weird to me because they were just one little weird bit in the 2nd edition corebook, as I recall. Did they build them into a major threat over the course of the metaplot?
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Sep 19, 2019 23:07
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I was going to say the reason they never used "Too many consonants" for anything is that she's not a character so much as a walking crime scene. She doesn't have wants or needs beyond killing things and lots of things. Her only interaction with the plot proper is that she's the avatar of the beast of war, and Her killing 3 werewolf packs before being drowned in a river of their blood is the sacrifice needed to bring him into the world. The first sacrifice was Ravnos, an incarnation of the Eater of Souls, apparently, who was killed at the end of the Week of Nightmares by dropping several spiritually awakened nukes on him followed by having several orbital sun mirrors shined on the spot where his corpse was regenerating (Note: the only actual interaction Werewolves have with this bit of metaplot was that a pack of Garou were sent to the area to figure out what the gently caress was going on. They arrived just in time to get nuked) The last sacrifice is the Perfect Metis, who is the sacrifice meant to bring the Defiler wyrm into the world. The less spoken about how the game means for him to be sacrificed the better, as it's meant to be a personal failure for the pack. The metaplot up until this point is supposed to have the pack not only save the perfect metis, but sort of adopt him as a team mascot because he's honestly just a normal kid who happens to be doomed to have a lot of terrible loving poo poo happen to him.
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Sep 19, 2019 23:26
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Exactly, give her an undercut and make her the face of a game line, 3k Kickstarter backers. You don't even need to change her characterization.
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Sep 19, 2019 23:47
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Ithle01 posted:Mage, on the other hand, had no idea what it was doing and has without a doubt the dumbest loving ending you can possibly imagine. It's literally 'Aliens steal magic. The end.'. I recall enjoying the 'Nephandi Apocalypse War' ending. A three-shot prologue or intermission game set during the last stand at Alexandria always struck me as a fun thing to throw in a broader mage apocalypse chronicle e: Night10194 posted:The solution is to just sit down and decide 'Old Testament and Book of the Watchers: True. Mostly.' and then go from there. OWOD's Demon: The Fallen was a game about playing the demons who descended to earth and bred with the daughters of men in genesis/the book of enoch; after raising weird magical kingdoms in prehistory, losing the war with heaven, and spending the intervening time in hell. hell breaks open as part of an OWOD metaplot progression, and all the demons of hell spill onto Earth as formless spirits. they possess people who lose their souls or die in despair, feed on the faith of mortals, and can spend that faith-juice to do magic and temporarily transform themselves into twisted memories of their celestial forms there are also Earthbound demons who were summoned out of hell by human occultists before hell's sundering, who've dwelt on earth bound to totems and idols for years, sometimes centuries, soaking up faith from cults and sacrifices, remembering secrets from their angel days. one of the big legendary vampire fortresses in the setting was kept occluded from the world by the magic of an earthbound demon bound beneath it, sustained by the rites of cultists run by the vampires. 1994 Toyota Celica fucked around with this message at 00:10 on Sep 20, 2019 |
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Sep 19, 2019 23:53
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 01 — Geist: the Sin-Eaters 2nd Edition — Introduction   No bones about it! ”Nothing is born which Death makes not subject to his state.” —Bhartrhari, “Of Time the Destroyer” Developed by our own GimpInBlack, with an impressive authors list of voices for diversity and revolution including Vera Vartanian, James Mendez Hodes, Olivia Hill, Filamena Young, Eloy Lasanta and Chris Spivey, Geist: the Sin-Eaters 2nd Edition is one of the best of the generally quite good Chronicles of Darkness/New World of Darkness 2nd Edition game lines. I am only fairly recently deep into Chronicles and am basically totally unfamiliar with Geist 1st Edition except for second- and third-hand reports that it seems to have been kind of cool but also totally broken and sort of aimless. I can’t make much comment on that, but I can say this: Geist 2nd Edition is one of my favorite recent games. That’s why I want to talk to you about it today. Let’s That quote up top accompanies a pretty good piece of full-page art on the very first page of the book. The next piece of meat in the book, after the credits and table of contents, is of course chapter fiction. It’s actually pretty good. Jade and Trisha, a couple of young sisters the former of which is “sensitive”, are doing the whole pajamas-and-Ouija thing. This spurs hope in Oliver, a young man’s old ghost who desperately wants to communicate with them to relieve his monotonous, repetitive, depressive, obsessive deathly existence. He likes them so much sometimes instead of re-”living” his death he watches the girls leave for school and listens to them talk about all the stuff nowadays that sounds like science-fiction to his early 20th century ears. Things go sideways when the young ladies immediately get distracted bickering. Trish won’t even let things get started without needling Jade about this being some weird prank, and their stomping and leaning against the table makes the floorboards creak and reverberate, just like they did when some maniacal goons came to beat him into the floor and cut up his body to send his father a message. It’s too much, and in dramatic poltergeist fashion poo poo starts flying around the room and all the doors in the house are slamming open and closed. The girls’ father, Hari, runs out of his room to see what’s up. The circuit breakers flash, the lights go out, and Oliver, manifested in bloody horror, shambles towards them pleading for help.  It’s hard to say which sister is which in this picture since they don’t match the descriptions in the fiction very well, but I assume Trish is the one wearing a cat pajama jumper to poo poo all over her sister’s Very Legitimate Ghost Concerns. Themes posted:Geist: The Sin-Eaters is a game about people. Some of them are alive, some of them are dead, and some of them stand between the two, but they’re all people. Geist 2nd Edition bills itself as a game about four main themes: Empathy, Self vs. Service, Hope and Joy, and Looking Back to Look Forward. Sin-Eaters, the principal characters of Geist, have skittered along the line between life and death, made a Bargain with a powerful, Underworld-addled geist, and merged with them to struggle towards both parties’ unfinished business. They are not necessarily bleeding hearts—in fact the hosed up world they're thrust into makes that kind of a hard thing to be—but they find themselves naturally acting as intercessors between the worlds of the living and the dead. They are well aware of the capricious nature of death-in-life, and also now of the oppressive, gut-wrenching existence on the other side as a shade. Death is broken, and even if they’re not particularly altruistic, in order for Sin-Eaters to understand who they are and where they’re going, they’ll have to try to undo some of that damage for others as well as themselves. Here we get the usual sidebar of Myth vs. Fact, so I’ll just run down the truths real quick: Sin-Eaters aren’t possessed by their geist, they’re in a partnership. They technically, according to mortal science, have “come back from the dead” but for mystical purposes they are just dead and so they’re subject to anti-dead guy magic, and their remembrances don’t feed ghosts. They’re rough and tough but they’re not immortal, and can die of old age. They obviously speak to the dead, and in fact act as focal points that make it easier for ghosts to Manifest. And they lead “death cults”, or krewes, which are sort of ancestor-worshipping groups that help them chase down ghost clues, squabble with other krewes over praxis, and win mayoral elections in order to improve both the worlds of the living and the dead.  Eh, okay now. There’re typical sections on How to Use This Book and What Are Gaming? so we’ll just skip on ahead to Inspirational Media. Death: The Trip of a Lifetime, Expiration Date and Sparrow Hill Road are all recommended books, as are the movies Coco and ParaNorman. Mama (2013) is held up as a quintessentially Geist movie. I’ll admit I’m not a horror or scary story fan and I’m not familiar with any of these recommendations, except ParaNorman which I enjoyed quite a bit. The Lost Room is recommended not for being a ghost story (which it isn’t), but because it’s apparently full of just weird bizarre environmental stuff and strange objects. I may actually check one or two of these out, but that’s what I said about the other hundreds of things in my to-do pile. Finally, there’s a glossary of terms that as usual can help you understand some of the stuff later in this book as you read it, but mostly just gives you a rough picture of stuff right off the bat. At least it’s not like Werewolf 2nd Edition where the glossary is two chapters and nearly 80 pages into a book filled with conlang jargon. Next Up: I’m going to skip ahead to the setting chapter because, like a proper Sin-Eater, I am a rebel. That Old Tree fucked around with this message at 07:51 on Sep 23, 2019 |
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Sep 20, 2019 00:17
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Do yourself an enormous favor and watch Mama as soon as you can, it's basically the best ghost story ever. Also I loving love you for doing Geist, it's one of my favorite gamelines.
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Sep 20, 2019 00:33
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Mama's pretty dope but the ending drags quite a lot. "HELLO AND WELCOME TO CHECKERS WE'VE GOT TWO NEW FLAVORS FOR WINGS IF YOU'RE INTERESTED FOR OUR SPECIALS WE'VE CURRENTLY GOT THE CHEESE-LOADED BURGER AND SIPPABLE ITALIAN ICE SLUSHIES CAN I START YOU OFF WITH AN APPETIZER OR A BASKET OF FRIES" /
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Sep 20, 2019 01:02
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I have a small fondness for Zhyzhak as my pack killed her in the Final Battle after she offed Albrecht. We had a Silver Fang and she was meant to kill the last Gaian king but not the Gaian queen. A variation on the Eowyn "I am no bro" rule for world-ending plots. Now as you read that you will find all of your doors are locked from the outside and escape is impossible, I will tell you about the rest of that campaign.
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Sep 20, 2019 01:37
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