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Kurieg
Jul 19, 2012

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

Gerund posted:

Tremere had the most lore-central position because being the Wizard-like clan in a roleplaying game gave them huge appeal for writers and readers, and the 'history' (as was told to me) was that all Tremere were actually just Tzimisce that ate their way up to Saulot so all three clans get circled around.

The body-hopping part mostly feels like a way to keep the players from just offing the physical body with numberwang before going through the riddle of how to 'kill the soul'.

Also Saulot was a special snowflake holy vampire who could do no wrong and was sacred and pure and his bloodline is also sacred and pure and has magic holy powers so he's always going to show up in something plot significant.

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Nessus
Dec 22, 2003

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



Kurieg posted:

Also Saulot was a special snowflake holy vampire who could do no wrong and was sacred and pure and his bloodline is also sacred and pure and has magic holy powers so he's always going to show up in something plot significant.
If he’s so strong, why did he lose to Nappa? Checkmate Salubrilures

Night10194
Feb 13, 2012

We'll start,
like many good things,
with a bear.

Kurieg posted:

Also Saulot was a special snowflake holy vampire who could do no wrong and was sacred and pure and his bloodline is also sacred and pure and has magic holy powers so he's always going to show up in something plot significant.

This seems very unusual for a vampire. I thought all the ancient ones were supposed to be bugfuck crazy abominations from beyond on some level.

JcDent
May 13, 2013

Give me a rifle, one round, and point me at Berlin!
I may get to get down to writing up Degenesis char creation tomorrow.

It's a long loving section.

Kurieg
Jul 19, 2012

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

Night10194 posted:

This seems very unusual for a vampire. I thought all the ancient ones were supposed to be bugfuck crazy abominations from beyond on some level.

Saulot's clan flaw is that they cannot feed on blood that has not been freely given. Also he's one of the few vampires who has canonically undergone Golconda, which requires you to be more human than normal humans.

At least until swedracula came in and swung his dick around, knocking over all the plates and chairs and declared that Vampires don't have souls, and they only get their soul back once they have undergone Golconda. Meaning that several of the horrifically evil vampire wraiths that were rather explicitly not on the path of humanity now have, at some point in their backstory, undergone Golconda.

This hasn't been explained and never will be probably.

Jerik
Jun 24, 2019

I don't know what to write here.

Night10194 posted:

The specific way they work in Hams has always been 'fear is bad, terror is worse'. In the RPGs, fear makes you freeze up, terror actually makes you run away and inflicts Insanity points if you fail the save.

In Ravenloft, too, Horror is worse than Fear, though it's also qualitatively different in that Fear is more about being confronted with a direct physical threat, while Horror is more about realizing that something is wrong. (And the text explicitly says that some situations may call for both a Fear check and a Horror check.) In the original Ravenloft boxed set, Fear makes you run away, and Horror... makes you roll on a table to randomly select one of six possible effects.

As for Madness... turns out that's not in the original Ravenloft boxed set after all; Madness checks weren't added till the second version of the boxed set in 1994. Huh; I hadn't noticed that before. I guess that makes it less likely that Ravenloft's Fear/Horror/Madness checks were inspired by WHFRP's Fear/Terror/Insanity, and suggests the apparent similarity probably was coincidental after all...

Halloween Jack
Sep 12, 2003

La morte non ha sesso

Night10194 posted:

This seems very unusual for a vampire. I thought all the ancient ones were supposed to be bugfuck crazy abominations from beyond on some level.
Saulot has a unique and convoluted backstory worthy of Big Two comics. The short version is that he's the "good" Antediluvian, who invented Golconda and sired the Salubri clan, a weird rare clan with healing powers. The Tremere became vampires by diablerizing Saulot, and persecuted the Salubri to hide their crimes.

There was a general implication--eventually confirmed in Gehenna--that Antediluvians can't really die at the hands of a lesser vampire, and diablerizing one doesn't really put you on their level. Saulot's soul bounces around in Tremere's body for centuries until he eventually takes control in 1998. Tremere is also infected with Vicissitude, which is really going to be a problem for Saulot. So it's pretty fair to call Saulot a "bugfuck crazy abomination." As for his state of mind, his plan has always been to redeem Kindred and end the Curse of Caine, but he's a very ends-justify-the-means kinda guy.

For example, Saulot also sired the Baali clan, for reasons that are open to interpretation. They're a clan of devil-worshipers so insane that even the Sabbat has a kill-on-sight policy. But the Baali are very good infiltrators, and what better place to hide than a sect that tolerates depravity and models its rituals on blaspheming the Catholic Church?

Halloween Jack fucked around with this message at 20:17 on Sep 20, 2019

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!

Halloween Jack posted:

Saulot also sired the Baali clan, for reasons that are open to interpretation. Saulot has always wanted to redeem Kindred and end the Curse of Caine, but he's a very ends-justify-the-means kinda guy.

About the only thing I remember about the Baali is that their apex ability is essentially "you end the world by summoning a demonic kaiju that no one's gonna have much luck stopping."

Night10194
Feb 13, 2012

We'll start,
like many good things,
with a bear.

PurpleXVI posted:

About the only thing I remember about the Baali is that their apex ability is essentially "you end the world by summoning a demonic kaiju that no one's gonna have much luck stopping."

That seems like a very counterproductive thing for Vampire Jesus to give people the ability to do.

Mors Rattus
Oct 25, 2007

FATAL & Friends
Walls of Text
#1 Builder
2014-2018

Vampire Jesus is not a good planner.

Kurieg
Jul 19, 2012

RIP Lutri: 5/19/20-4/2/20
:blizz::gamefreak:
It's sort of the whole "For vampire good to evil then vampire evil must exist" thing. And since Vampires are already starting from a low point, the counterpart to vampire Jesus skins babies and wears their entrails as a hat.

Night10194
Feb 13, 2012

We'll start,
like many good things,
with a bear.

The designated hero of the story being a fuckup who does extremely stupid and destructive things all the time is also very 90s metaplot anyway. Especially if they do it for 'balance' between good and evil or some other silliness.

Night10194 fucked around with this message at 20:23 on Sep 20, 2019

Lord_Hambrose
Nov 21, 2008

*a foul hooting fills the air*



Saulot hung out with a bunch of Kindred of the East guys, so he was down with some weird stuff.

Halloween Jack
Sep 12, 2003

La morte non ha sesso
Saulot's not seeking some absurd notion of balance. He believes that the Curse of Caine can only be ended in a very specific and nigh-impossible way that involves forcing Caine's hand and/or getting a chance to talk to God Himself. (Depending on the Gehenna scenario you go with, he's probably right.) He'll do whatever is necessary to bring that about. Like, in the Fair is Foul scenario, he's trying to stop Lilith because he believes that if Caine is killed by anyone other than God or himself, it will unleash Armageddon.

As for the Baali thing: even before Gehenna rewrote every Discipline 10 power as "Plot Device," this power was a plot device. It's different depending on what sourcebook you read. It requires Daimonion 10, a lengthy ritual, a massive human sacrifice, and destroys your character. Since there are canonically no 3rd Generation Baali, this isn't really a power but a scenario, where the PCs have to stop a Baali from diablerizing an Antediluvian and performing a ritual to summon the Devil. If they pull it off, what happens next is up to the Storyteller, but you're encouraged to whip out some real Prince of Darkness, Mouth of Madness kinda poo poo.

I think it would be fun to include in a Gehenna scenario, where a Baali manages to eat a weakened Antediluvian and summon Lucifer, and the PCs have to deal with it. I know absolutely nothing about Demon: the Fallen, though, and I'd want that for background.

Halloween Jack fucked around with this message at 20:36 on Sep 20, 2019

Pieces of Peace
Jul 8, 2006
Hazardous in small doses.

Halloween Jack posted:

I think it would be fun to include in a Gehenna scenario, where a Baali manages to eat a weakened Antediluvian and summon Lucifer, and the PCs have to deal with it. I know absolutely nothing about Demon: the Fallen, though, and I'd want that for background.

Ironically, from what I remember in the DtF corebook (possibly retconned by metaplot of course), Lucifer was just Caine 2: But Bigger; he was never trapped in Hell/The Abyss with the other Demons, he wasn't particularly evil or corrupt (because he hadn't been imprisoned in Sartre-style torment for eternity), one sect of Demons still revered him and tried to find him/carry out "his plans", and he was wandering Earth trying to pull off his own background metaplot shenanigans (probably would have shown up as a cab driver in a Demon cRPG, etc).

So you'd probably just have to retcon the Baali ritual to "they just think that's Lucifer" and conjure up one of his kaiju-level lovely jerk lieutenants from Hell instead. That was one of the big problems with the oWoD cross-line metaplot: they always had to top themselves.

ChaseSP
Mar 25, 2013



Lucifer and Caine work on a startup Taxi company together and thats the only lore I'll accept.

Dawgstar
Jul 15, 2017

Lord_Hambrose posted:

Saulot hung out with a bunch of Kindred of the East guys, so he was down with some weird stuff.

You make it sound so nice. Saulot wanted to learn from them, but the Bodhisattva Kuei-Jin disdained him and called him uncool and gaijin and stuff and sent him packing. Then they went back to, I dunno, practicing the blade.

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!

ChaseSP posted:

Lucifer and Caine work on a startup Taxi company together and thats the only lore I'll accept.

"So what you guys have been working on all along..."

"Yes, isn't it fiendishly evil?"

"...I mean, yes, it's loving, excuse the term, satanic in terms of darkness. But I wasn't expecting Uber."

[a duo of mad genius cackling]

Halloween Jack
Sep 12, 2003

La morte non ha sesso

Lord_Hambrose posted:

Saulot hung out with a bunch of Kindred of the East guys, so he was down with some weird stuff.
He also killed a whole loving lot of them, according to Gehenna, but I don't know why.

Halloween Jack fucked around with this message at 21:08 on Sep 20, 2019

JcDent
May 13, 2013

Give me a rifle, one round, and point me at Berlin!
You know, you learn of VtM from Bloodlines, and it feels tidy! 8-ish clans of variable weirdness and the Tzimitche as weirdo outcasts, ghouls and thinbloods, and oh, what this, a Chinese vampire?

Then you read about the RPG and suddenly, there's clans upon clans...

By the way, is nuVamp so dead and boring that nobody ever talks about them?

Lord_Hambrose
Nov 21, 2008

*a foul hooting fills the air*



Halloween Jack posted:

He also killed a whole loving lot of them, according to Gehenna, but I don't know why.

Antideluvians are whimsical in their cruelty.

Kaza42
Oct 3, 2013

Blood and Souls and all that

JcDent posted:

By the way, is nuVamp so dead and boring that nobody ever talks about them?

nuVamp isn't really boring, but there is less content so you're going to see less discussion of them in a review thread. Personally, I vastly prefer nuvamp over oldvamp

Halloween Jack
Sep 12, 2003

La morte non ha sesso
Requiem is designed to give you ideas and tools to design your campaign. It focuses on establishing theme, mood, and atmosphere in a living, breathing city. Instead of metaplot, it gives you possible secret origins that you can use, combine, or discard according to taste.

There's no canon timeline going back thousands of years, no convoluted metaplot with contradictions and retcons. This makes for a better game, but Masquerade made for better reading on the toilet and then arguing online.

JcDent posted:

You know, you learn of VtM from Bloodlines, and it feels tidy! 8-ish clans of variable weirdness and the Tzimitche as weirdo outcasts, ghouls and thinbloods, and oh, what this, a Chinese vampire?

Then you read about the RPG and suddenly, there's clans upon clans...
Not only are there Clans, there are Bloodlines, which are (usually) functionally the same, but rare special snowflakes who don't have an Antediluvian founder. And then they made subclans! There are two types of Brujah, two types of Tzimisce, two types of Gangrel, three types of Salubri, three types of Assamite, and don't ask me what's going on with the African vampires.

Halloween Jack fucked around with this message at 21:16 on Sep 20, 2019

Chernobyl Peace Prize
May 7, 2007

Or later, later's fine.
But now would be good.

Kaza42 posted:

nuVamp isn't really boring, but there is less content so you're going to see less discussion of them in a review thread. Personally, I vastly prefer nuvamp over oldvamp
Yeah, also nuVamp doesn't really lend itself to beer-and-pretzels-and-popcorn-and-:gonk: the same way oVamp does, so it doesn't drive as much discussion when it's here. And it's probably the smallest divergence from oVamp compared to how Mage and Werewolf take huge leaps away from Ascension and Apocalypse, respectively.

Dawgstar
Jul 15, 2017

JcDent posted:

By the way, is nuVamp so dead and boring that nobody ever talks about them?

Oh, I'll talk about its clanbooks all day because they are all uniformly excellent - the line as a whole has produced some amazing gems - but as dumb as metaplot can sometimes be when most of your game is a toolkit there's not nearly the amount of common ground.

Freaking Crumbum
Apr 17, 2003

Too fuck to drunk


Night10194 posted:

That seems like a very counterproductive thing for Vampire Jesus to give people the ability to do.

IIRC he didn't create the baali intentionally, it was like back in the day (like the BCE) some vampires that knew how important he was wanted to show him how cool and powerful they were and invited him to a feast in his honor and then when he got there it was a bunch of gruesome hosed up stuff and vampire jesus is all "gently caress, you guys are twisted, imma drop the roof on your heads and then find something else to do" and he killed them all and peaced out. but he didn't make ultra-double sure that they were dead and their evil vampire blood somehow re-congealed in their bodies and they came back twice as evil and depraved and started actively trying to summon the devil as a gently caress you to vampire jesus. meanwhile vampire jesus goes off to explore asia and then get diablerized and the baali are making progress on their whole "be as transparently cartoonishly evil as possible" action items so they just kinda go with the inertia they've already built up. i don't recall whether or not any of the baali even knew what happened to saulot (or if they would even care at this point)

Mors Rattus
Oct 25, 2007

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2014-2018

Halloween Jack posted:

There's no canon timeline going back thousands of years, no convoluted metaplot with contradictions and retcons. This makes for a better game, but Masquerade made for better reading on the toilet and then arguing online.

There actually is an extensive timeline and history but it's less 'insane metaplot' and more muddied.

Halloween Jack
Sep 12, 2003

La morte non ha sesso
To be honest, I haven't kept up with how the whole setting fits together since the transition to calling it the Chronicles of Darkness and all that. I was horribly confused by them introducing a new edition of V:tR in the form of Blood and Smoke: the Strix Chronicle and a new WoD corebook in the form of The God Machine Chronicle.

Mors Rattus
Oct 25, 2007

FATAL & Friends
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#1 Builder
2014-2018

Basically, the backstory of Vampire is long and heavily detailed but learning it requires reading through, like...the clanbooks, the Requiem for Rome books, Ancient Bloodlines/Ancient Mysteries, maybe the Covenant books, the Testament of Longinus and Dracula's diary...and almost none of that history is relevant. Like, yes, there was a Camarilla once in ancient Rome. They don't matter. Yes, the Ventrue have entirely falsified their own origin stories to conceal that they descend from random Germanic nobodies. That doesn't matter. The closest any of it comes to mattering is that, like, there's an ancient Strix buried under London that is running out the timer on being trapped and is gonna come out and start doing murders Soon(TM) in revenge for the breaking of the Julii pact in ancient Rome. And you don't have to know poo poo about the Julii or their pact for that.

e: Basically, it's there if you want to seek it out but vampires are, by design, the splat that knows and cares the least about its own history and mythos.

Halloween Jack
Sep 12, 2003

La morte non ha sesso
It's like the opposite of oWoD metaplot! Confronting it and making it relevant to your game requires going out of your way to do so.

Whereas oWoD wrote stuff into the metaplot like "Your Clan left the Camarilla. And you over there? You're dead."

1994 Toyota Celica
Sep 11, 2008

by Nyc_Tattoo
there was a whole medieval effort to recreate the camarilla using the mortal holy roman empire as scaffolding and that doesn't matter either

Kurieg
Jul 19, 2012

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

Halloween Jack posted:

It's like the opposite of oWoD metaplot! Confronting it and making it relevant to your game requires going out of your way to do so.

Whereas oWoD wrote stuff into the metaplot like "Your Clan left the Camarilla. And you over there? You're dead."

The Stargazers and the Salubri are too powerful, You can't play them anymore. Here are rules to play them. Stop playing them.

Tuxedo Catfish
Mar 17, 2007

You've got guts! Come to my village, I'll buy you lunch.

Halloween Jack posted:

So vampires are mafiosos, werewolves are street gangs, mages are detectives, hunters are vigilantes, demons are spies, Prometheans are homeless. Geists are...Wobblies?

Geists are the working-class labor activists to Mage's academic Marxists, with a generous dash of "mystery cult" thrown in for flavor.

Zereth
Jul 9, 2003



Mors Rattus posted:

e: Basically, it's there if you want to seek it out but vampires are, by design, the splat that knows and cares the least about its own history and mythos.
Doesn't being in torpor for an extended period of time mess up your memories, and any ancient vampire has either spent a lot of time in torpor or is somehow feeding entirely on other high-power-stat vampires exclusively?

Joe Slowboat
Nov 9, 2016

Higgledy-Piggledy Whale Statements



Tuxedo Catfish posted:

Geists are the working-class labor activists to Mage's academic Marxists, with a generous dash of "mystery cult" thrown in for flavor.

I mean the Free Council also exists.
I would have said the difference is that in Mage you're fighting Capitalism and the Patriarchy and in Geist you're fighting The American Empire and Colonial Powers - there's a specific manifestation, the Underworld, which you can go into and blow up and so on. So the struggle is real and valuable but you can play it more like the ANC overthrowing Apartheid, while in Mage things are either apocalyptic revolution or long-term simmering insurrection.

(Spire is a good game, on a related note.)

Mage certainly has a more academic bent.

Kurieg
Jul 19, 2012

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

Zereth posted:

Doesn't being in torpor for an extended period of time mess up your memories, and any ancient vampire has either spent a lot of time in torpor or is somehow feeding entirely on other high-power-stat vampires exclusively?
High blood potency vampires need to feed off of other vampires. And extremely high blood potency vampires can only feed off of other high blood potency vampires. The fact that this is unsustainable is what eventually drives vampires into torpor, during which your blood potency degrades back down to 'can feed off of people' levels.
Spending time in torpor for extended periods of time messes up your memories but also Torpor does some weird magical poo poo where it will give you memories and languages that you need to survive once you wake up. You'll be slightly out of date but more "That's not how you use a touchscreen, grandpa" and less "Please stop calling it a mechanical velocipede."

Froghammer
Sep 8, 2012

Khajit has wares
if you have coin

Kurieg posted:

The Stargazers and the Salubri are too powerful, You can't play them anymore. Here are rules to play them. Stop playing them.
Also even though we've established in canon that under certain circumstances Werewolves can, in fact, become Vampires, we're not going to tell you how that works because then you'll want to play one and we don't want you to want that.

Zereth
Jul 9, 2003



Kurieg posted:

High blood potency vampires need to feed off of other vampires. And extremely high blood potency vampires can only feed off of other high blood potency vampires. The fact that this is unsustainable is what eventually drives vampires into torpor, during which your blood potency degrades back down to 'can feed off of people' levels.
Spending time in torpor for extended periods of time messes up your memories but also Torpor does some weird magical poo poo where it will give you memories and languages that you need to survive once you wake up. You'll be slightly out of date but more "That's not how you use a touchscreen, grandpa" and less "Please stop calling it a mechanical velocipede."
:hmmyes:

Which means nearly any ancient vampire is not a very reliable source on ancient vampie history even if they were, personally, there.

Also it means you can PLAY an ancient vampire without the issues with Generation you had in oWoD

Kurieg
Jul 19, 2012

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

Froghammer posted:

Also even though we've established in canon that under certain circumstances Werewolves can, in fact, become Vampires, we're not going to tell you how that works because then you'll want to play one and we don't want you to want that.

In first edition they stated that you could make vampires out of all the were creatures. Second edition walked that back a bit, specifically for the Sun based were-beasties. Corax self immolate in a pillar of sunlight, killing themselves and the vampire who tries to embrace them. Mokole don't work most of the time and when it does they just go into permanent frenzy in their godzilla form.

So when Kitsune were introduced late in the line they stated in no uncertain terms that no, they cannot be embraced, they literally burst into flames if you try because WHO THE gently caress KNOWS BUT STOP loving TRYING.

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Nessus
Dec 22, 2003

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



Kurieg posted:

In first edition they stated that you could make vampires out of all the were creatures. Second edition walked that back a bit, specifically for the Sun based were-beasties. Corax self immolate in a pillar of sunlight, killing themselves and the vampire who tries to embrace them. Mokole don't work most of the time and when it does they just go into permanent frenzy in their godzilla form.

So when Kitsune were introduced late in the line they stated in no uncertain terms that no, they cannot be embraced, they literally burst into flames if you try because WHO THE gently caress KNOWS BUT STOP loving TRYING.
I guess what I'd have asked there is, "What is your goal in making a vampire werewolf?"

Are you doing mad science? Sure, the abomination rules work.
Do you want to be 2gether 4ever with your soul bond? You can just ghoul 'em.
Do you want to stack combat dice? Well I think the only thing vampires have that weres didn't is Potence, and ghouling handles that too.

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