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Ningyou
Aug 14, 2005

we aaaaare
not your kind of pearls
you seem kind of pho~ny
everything's a liiiiie

we aaaare
not your kind of pearls
something in your make~up
don't see eye to e~y~e

Bieeardo posted:

Changeling bent over backwards to play up the magic of feudalism and colonization, while making it explicitly clear that modern contrivances like the scientific method or psychiatric medication were Bad Things that could kill fairies dead and make people not see The Truth.

On that note, I'm pretty sure I remember one of the major antagonists/THREATS TO FAERIEKIND :frogsiren: in Changeling being a fuddy-duddy psychiatrist (who went around pushing the equivalent of reparative therapy on those poor whimsical dreamers and just *oozed* with Banality.)

Subtlety? Never heard of it!

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wdarkk
Oct 26, 2007

Friends: Protected
World: Saved
Crablettes: Eaten

Ningyou posted:

On that note, I'm pretty sure I remember one of the major antagonists/THREATS TO FAERIEKIND :frogsiren: in Changeling being a fuddy-duddy psychiatrist (who went around pushing the equivalent of reparative therapy on those poor whimsical dreamers and just *oozed* with Banality.)

Subtlety? Never heard of it!

Was one of the writers mad about being taken to psychiatrists as a kid or something?

deadly_pudding
May 13, 2009

who the fuck is scraeming
"LOG OFF" at my house.
show yourself, coward.
i will never log off

wdarkk posted:

Was one of the writers mad about being taken to psychiatrists as a kid or something?

:ssh:Scientology:ssh:

To be fair, I'm pretty sure vampires are the only WoD supernatural that aren't actively pissed at science for existing.

Young Freud
Nov 25, 2006

Halloween Jack posted:

I don't want to make assumptions about who wrote Destiny's Price, especially since four of the six co-authors never contributed to another roleplaying book in their lives. (Gee, I wonder why?) But what are the odds this is a middle-class straight white guy telling us about the HARD STREETS, YO?

This feels much like the same text used in Cthulhutech. Are you sure Matthew Grau didn't write this...

Halloween Jack posted:

Somebody could write an entire book about the weird aesthetic of the 90s and how it was obsessed with conspiracies, apocalypse, subculture, and crime. Why all the crime? Crime was dropping when this book was published.

I had this discussion with a friend when I was rewatching Wild Palms. The closest I can come to an examination is that the zeitgeist at the time had a lot to do with the end of the Cold War. Suddenly, there were no more Big Bad Russians read to invade America and it opened up the nation to a sort of introspection into what was wrong with the country. Even tinpot dictators like Saddam were no match for American-led Western military might and what that spelled out was the Pax Americana was here, straight out of Francis Fukuyama's The End Of History. You no longer had international communism around to provide as a distraction or as a counterpoint to American exceptionalism, so a lot of people tried to go into diagnosis mode. It's why you had a lot of books and films examining the American psychological malaise like "Infinite Jest", "Fight Club", "American Psycho", etc. In the war for the soul of the world, consumerist captialism won.

Unfortunately, following Ruby Ridge and Waco, a lot of folks latched on to the federal government and that precipitated the rise of the conspiracy culture during what was probably the most transparent administration in recent memory. If Reagan had ordered something similar during his administration, almost no one would have batted an eye. It didn't help that Clinton ended up declassifying a bunch of stuff, like the DoD-DoE human radiation experiments and Operation Northwoods, which drove those folks insane.

The same kinda goes with this book. At the time, especially indicated by the Ice-T song, the only way someone from a middle-class suburban life would have contact with crime was on TV or radio. They knew that there was a problem, but don't know what the solution is, so they try to come up with one inside their paradigm of life in the suburbs. Usually that means "bootstraps". But since they are also rebelling against that suburban lifestyle, they think that's the only alternative to it.

Young Freud fucked around with this message at 18:33 on Jan 9, 2014

Ningyou
Aug 14, 2005

we aaaaare
not your kind of pearls
you seem kind of pho~ny
everything's a liiiiie

we aaaare
not your kind of pearls
something in your make~up
don't see eye to e~y~e

wdarkk posted:

Was one of the writers mad about being taken to psychiatrists as a kid or something?

That, or they had a reeeeally specific target audience in mind when writing Changeling books. :v:

Robindaybird
Aug 21, 2007

Neat. Sweet. Petite.

There's a lot of little things I like about WW, but sneering at scientific progress, the worship of the Noble Savage-archetype (and not understanding it's a racist concept), and the idiotic idea that Art and Science are just incompatible is rage inducing (EXPLAIN THE RENAISSANCE THEN, JACKASSES).

Halloween Jack
Sep 11, 2003

La morte non ha sesso
On reflection, the trend that was running through most media I was exposed to in the 90s, gaming included, was that it was thoroughly adolescent. Adolescents are preoccupied with entertainment that's "serious" and "not for kids" but their tastes are still simplistic and indulgent. This is why the 90s gave us things like a Sonic the Hedgehog cartoon with cybernetic body horror and comic book superheroes with names like Deathblow and Hellstrike.

What separated White Wolf from their dozens of imitators was that they had some genuinely creative people, and they also had some people with perspective who could handle creative leadership--enforcing a consistent vision of the world, and running herd on people (usually freelancers) who wrote poo poo that was self-ignorant and downright ludicrous. When that oversight broke down, it blurred the line between White Wolf and its ripoffs.

(This is my thoroughly biased perspective: I turned 18 in 2001, and I grew up with action and genre fiction, so I'm completely ignoring romance and comedy.)

Davin Valkri
Apr 8, 2011

Maybe you're weighing the moral pros and cons but let me assure you that OH MY GOD
SHOOT ME IN THE GODDAMNED FACE
WHAT ARE YOU WAITING FOR?!

Halloween Jack posted:

On reflection, the trend that was running through most media I was exposed to in the 90s, gaming included, was that it was thoroughly adolescent. Adolescents are preoccupied with entertainment that's "serious" and "not for kids" but their tastes are still simplistic and indulgent. This is why the 90s gave us things like a Sonic the Hedgehog cartoon with cybernetic body horror and comic book superheroes with names like Deathblow and Hellstrike.

What separated White Wolf from their dozens of imitators was that they had some genuinely creative people, and they also had some people with perspective who could handle creative leadership--enforcing a consistent vision of the world, and running herd on people (usually freelancers) who wrote poo poo that was self-ignorant and downright ludicrous. When that oversight broke down, it blurred the line between White Wolf and its ripoffs.

(This is my thoroughly biased perspective: I turned 18 in 2001, and I grew up with action and genre fiction, so I'm completely ignoring romance and comedy.)

And now you've got me wondering what 90s media looked like in countries that had a lot more reason to be happy, broadly speaking. I'm probably wrong, but I can't see that sort of "pseudo-dark and nihilistic" mood prevailing in, say, Poland or the Baltic states.

(And I don't think it's just you, either. I turned 18 in 2009, and I remember seeing stuff like the Men in Black cartoon, Gargoyles, SWAT Kats...then again, there was also stuff like Pokemon, Freakazoid!, and Samurai Pizza Cats, so it wasn't all darkness :3: )

Tasoth
Dec 12, 2011

Robindaybird posted:

There's a lot of little things I like about WW, but sneering at scientific progress, the worship of the Noble Savage-archetype (and not understanding it's a racist concept), and the idiotic idea that Art and Science are just incompatible is rage inducing (EXPLAIN THE RENAISSANCE THEN, JACKASSES).

The Technocracy.

Robindaybird
Aug 21, 2007

Neat. Sweet. Petite.

Tasoth posted:

The Technocracy.

...I walked into that one. :golfclap:

Ningyou
Aug 14, 2005

we aaaaare
not your kind of pearls
you seem kind of pho~ny
everything's a liiiiie

we aaaare
not your kind of pearls
something in your make~up
don't see eye to e~y~e

Robindaybird posted:

There's a lot of little things I like about WW, but sneering at scientific progress, the worship of the Noble Savage-archetype (and not understanding it's a racist concept), and the idiotic idea that Art and Science are just incompatible is rage inducing (EXPLAIN THE RENAISSANCE THEN, JACKASSES).

but butbutbut they weren't sneering at science all the time i mean Mage let you play the gently caress YOU DAD hackers who literally hack the planet with magic computers and magic maths and the dirigible-ridin' steampunk gentleman aethernauts/wacky fringe scientists that's science right :ohdear:

Toph Bei Fong
Feb 29, 2008



Tasoth posted:

The Technocracy.

And this, I think, is one of the reasons that the Guide to the Technocracy was such a good book. Unlike the previous convention guides, it transformed the "I didn't understand 1984!" style mustache twirlers who wanted to crush all dreams and hopes and creativeness into a group of (mostly) well-meaning people who were terrified by the Randian psychos who thought it would be alright to reshape the world into a brutal nightmare and undo things like preventative medicine and hygiene in favor of whatever they feel like at the moment. Sure, your bosses are jerks, and some of the people on your side are fascist assholes, and some of those Iteration-X guys are pretty creepy, and those Progenitors clones are downright weird, and the Void Engineer guys who spend too much time in space tend to come back wrong, and the Syndicate guys keep falling to the Wyrm, and the NWO guys were cooler when Hulk Hogan was their leader... but, you know, they kept Ravnos from killing most of India, and have dropped infant mortality rates to almost nothing, and have finagled it so countries with McDonalds in them don't go to war with one another. That's progress, ain't it?

A good villain can be seen as right. You can understand their point of view, and why they are they way they are. The best villains are right. :v:

Davin Valkri
Apr 8, 2011

Maybe you're weighing the moral pros and cons but let me assure you that OH MY GOD
SHOOT ME IN THE GODDAMNED FACE
WHAT ARE YOU WAITING FOR?!

Spoilers Below posted:

And this, I think, is one of the reasons that the Guide to the Technocracy was such a good book. Unlike the previous convention guides, it transformed the "I didn't understand 1984!" style mustache twirlers who wanted to crush all dreams and hopes and creativeness into a group of (mostly) well-meaning people who were terrified by the Randian psychos who thought it would be alright to reshape the world into a brutal nightmare and undo things like preventative medicine and hygiene in favor of whatever they feel like at the moment. Sure, your bosses are jerks, and some of the people on your side are fascist assholes, and some of those Iteration-X guys are pretty creepy, and those Progenitors clones are downright weird, and the Void Engineer guys who spend too much time in space tend to come back wrong, and the Syndicate guys keep falling to the Wyrm, and the NWO guys were cooler when Hulk Hogan was their leader... but, you know, they kept Ravnos from killing most of India, and have dropped infant mortality rates to almost nothing, and have finagled it so countries with McDonalds in them don't go to war with one another. That's progress, ain't it?

A good villain can be seen as right. You can understand their point of view, and why they are they way they are. The best villains are right. :v:

It sounds like White Wolf's Mage series is like the Gumshoe book The Esoterrorists...told from the POV of the Esoterrorists? :confused:

deadly_pudding
May 13, 2009

who the fuck is scraeming
"LOG OFF" at my house.
show yourself, coward.
i will never log off

Spoilers Below posted:

and the NWO guys were cooler when Hulk Hogan was their leader...

Needs to be Mage canon. Just keep it all the same, except NWO is a bunch of edgy heel wrestlers in matching t-shirts. The players who don't get super mad and walk out as soon as Hollywood Hogan emerges from the black helicopter are the players you want to keep around :3:

Evil Mastermind
Apr 28, 2008

Spoilers Below posted:

And this, I think, is one of the reasons that the Guide to the Technocracy was such a good book. Unlike the previous convention guides, it transformed the "I didn't understand 1984!" style mustache twirlers who wanted to crush all dreams and hopes and creativeness into a group of (mostly) well-meaning people who were terrified by the Randian psychos who thought it would be alright to reshape the world into a brutal nightmare and undo things like preventative medicine and hygiene in favor of whatever they feel like at the moment. Sure, your bosses are jerks, and some of the people on your side are fascist assholes, and some of those Iteration-X guys are pretty creepy, and those Progenitors clones are downright weird, and the Void Engineer guys who spend too much time in space tend to come back wrong, and the Syndicate guys keep falling to the Wyrm, and the NWO guys were cooler when Hulk Hogan was their leader... but, you know, they kept Ravnos from killing most of India, and have dropped infant mortality rates to almost nothing, and have finagled it so countries with McDonalds in them don't go to war with one another. That's progress, ain't it?

A good villain can be seen as right. You can understand their point of view, and why they are they way they are. The best villains are right. :v:

But...but...technology BAD! Technology gave us guns and bombs and vaccines that cause brain damage and a spy drone in every room of the house!

Yeah, the Technocracy was so bad as presented. Especially since oWoD had the subtlety of a thrown brick and it was total black-and-white morality at that point. Technically both sides are right, they just take things to the extremes without realizing it, but instead it's pretty much TRADITIONS GOOD TECHNOCRACY BAD.

It doesn't help that the Technocrats, who were the guys fighting the very idea of magick, were themselves mages. They just didn't realize it. :jerkbag:

Since we're on the topic of the dumber parts of oMage, who wants to talk about Paradox Flaws and Spirits? :v:

Bieeanshee
Aug 21, 2000

Not keen on keening.


Grimey Drawer

wdarkk posted:

Was one of the writers mad about being taken to psychiatrists as a kid or something?

In all seriousness, I wouldn't be surprised if the thought processes that led to the creation of Banality as a character stat, and all of the thematic fallout from that came from someone having an epiphany while watching a stage production of Peter Pan. Like, what if nobody clapped and shouted that they believed in fairies, and Tinkerbell died, man?

And sure, belief as a cornerstone of metaphysics-- hell, the global metaphysic-- is a cornerstone of the old WoD. That can work, and interestingly... until you start throwing in the kind of stuff that makes people surprised to hear Charnel Houses of Europe: the Shoah was actually a good book.

MadScientistWorking
Jun 23, 2010

"I was going through a time period where I was looking up weird stories involving necrophilia..."

Young Freud posted:

Unfortunately, following Ruby Ridge and Waco, a lot of folks latched on to the federal government and that precipitated the rise of the conspiracy culture during what was probably the most transparent administration in recent memory. If Reagan had ordered something similar during his administration, almost no one would have batted an eye. It didn't help that Clinton ended up declassifying a bunch of stuff, like the DoD-DoE human radiation experiments and Operation Northwoods, which drove those folks insane.

Except the conspiracy culture early even in the 1970s. Its just that most of the quite frankly Nazi levels of disgusting stuff that has happened which was probably more ingrained into the game developers of that time period than the 90s stuff is completely unknown to us.

Young Freud
Nov 25, 2006

Robindaybird posted:

There's a lot of little things I like about WW, but sneering at scientific progress, the worship of the Noble Savage-archetype (and not understanding it's a racist concept), and the idiotic idea that Art and Science are just incompatible is rage inducing (EXPLAIN THE RENAISSANCE THEN, JACKASSES).

poo poo, you can see this now with modern artists from an engineering or architectural background like Richard Serra or artists who dabble in biomedical fields like Stelarc or Orlan. You have to know how things how things fit before trying to put them together in new and interesting ways. It's why modern art is so infuriating to a lot of folks because they don't know what actually goes into producing that work.

Humbug Scoolbus
Apr 25, 2008

The scarlet letter was her passport into regions where other women dared not tread. Shame, Despair, Solitude! These had been her teachers, stern and wild ones, and they had made her strong, but taught her much amiss.
Clapping Larry

deadly_pudding posted:

Needs to be Mage canon. Just keep it all the same, except NWO is a bunch of edgy heel wrestlers in matching t-shirts. The players who don't get super mad and walk out as soon as Hollywood Hogan emerges from the black helicopter are the players you want to keep around :3:

I'd actually play Mage in that setting.

Bieeanshee
Aug 21, 2000

Not keen on keening.


Grimey Drawer
My first brush with Mage was actually GURPS Mage, and I read it backwards. gently caress if I know why, but it gave me a headache. It also got me an early look at the bestiary, and I loved the Paradox spirits they had in there. They were unpleasant at best in retrospect, but goddamn.

Wrinkle (I just realized his name was probably a reference to A Wrinkle in Time) was my favourite. Mess around with the timeline, and this friendly old fellow shows up to ask if you'd set it back straight, if you could. You tell him off, he goes back and makes sure you were never born. Hilarious. Hell of a stick for the players who can't keep it in their pants, but if you whip that one out you're bound for more problems one way or another.

Halloween Jack
Sep 11, 2003

La morte non ha sesso

Bieeardo posted:

And sure, belief as a cornerstone of metaphysics-- hell, the global metaphysic-- is a cornerstone of the old WoD. That can work, and interestingly... until you start throwing in the kind of stuff that makes people surprised to hear Charnel Houses of Europe: the Shoah was actually a good book.
I could never reconcile the cosmologies of Mage, Werewolf, and Vampire, myself. Honestly I thought Gehenna was pretty ballsy for saying "Yep, Adam, Eve, Cain, Abel, and Lilith existed and they were cursed by the God of the Old Testament, eat it nerds."

Evil Mastermind
Apr 28, 2008

Halloween Jack posted:

I could never reconcile the cosmologies of Mage, Werewolf, and Vampire, myself. Honestly I thought Gehenna was pretty ballsy for saying "Yep, Adam, Eve, Cain, Abel, and Lilith existed and they were cursed by the God of the Old Testament, eat it nerds."

Hell, White Wolf couldn't even reconcile the cosmologies.

Which wasn't so bad until Mage came out and all of a sudden it was all "wait, how come vampires and werewolves don't generate Paradox", "How the hell can vampires use their Disciplines to resist someone reshaping reality", and "why do werewolves and mages go to two separate spiritual realms?"

Halloween Jack
Sep 11, 2003

La morte non ha sesso

Ningyou posted:

but butbutbut they weren't sneering at science all the time i mean Mage let you play the gently caress YOU DAD hackers who literally hack the planet with magic computers and magic maths and the dirigible-ridin' steampunk gentleman aethernauts/wacky fringe scientists that's science right :ohdear:
That wasn't science :engleft:, it was SCIENCE! :science:

And by the way, I played Mage when the Revised version came out, but...the Avatar Storm and all the stuff that was endlessly argued about online never factored into our games at all, and neither did the new viewpoint on the Technocracy as being no worse than the Traditions (who apparently want to turn Earth into the Dying Earth). My understanding of the Technocracy came from the fiction, where they were ludicrously evil motherfuckers who kept mages in torture chambers and powered their brainwashed mutant cyborg assassins with batteries that run on the suffering of a million kicked puppies.

Evil Mastermind posted:

Which wasn't so bad until Mage came out and all of a sudden it was all "wait, how come vampires and werewolves don't generate Paradox", "How the hell can vampires use their Disciplines to resist someone reshaping reality", and "why do werewolves and mages go to two separate spiritual realms?"
Frankly, Mage shouldn't have been part of the World of Darkness, for so many reasons.

Nostalgia4ColdWar
May 7, 2007

Good people deserve good things.

Till someone lets the winter in and the dying begins, because Old Dark Places attract Old Dark Things.

poo poo, sorry to jump it early. I spent a lot of time on d20 Modern (I was even involved with the early pre-publishing work) and there's a lot of weird things that happened with it.

If you want I can edit out my post and you can edit out the quote in your reply and we can keep it a surprise for anyone who didn't read it or has me on ignore. :)

Toph Bei Fong
Feb 29, 2008



Davin Valkri posted:

It sounds like White Wolf's Mage series is like the Gumshoe book The Esoterrorists...told from the POV of the Esoterrorists? :confused:

It is. :getin:

If I wanted to give Mage a lot of credit, the fact that each tradition book is written from a completely biased point of view is one of the major attractions and themes of the game. Consensual reality meaning that of course the group would only see things from their perspective, and would be attempting to shoehorn in "their version" of history as the real one. Unfortunately, in practice, this meant that they tended to be really hit and miss when it came to actual writing, with a lot of really naive and racist implications that just don't seem to have been fully thought out by the writers.

The Dreamspeakers book, for example, presupposes that all the Native Americans want is a return to the primitive lives of their ancestors, rather than, you know, fulfilling careers and safety and financial security. Any of the very real tensions that exist in the community (and, seriously, this is a huge issue both generationally and historically within the community, with a vast range of opinions on all sides that need to take into account the very different circumstances that different people live in) are pretty much ignored in favor of a media friendly "urban shaman" type thing and any dissension is blamed squarely on the Technocracy, because why else would a Native American not want to live freely on the plains, hunting elk with a spear, running with the spirits and living in the communal dreamtime alongside the gods?

There's enough detail in the book to show that it is clearly a topic the author cares about, and did put a lot of work into, but not to the point of analyzing the modern community itself in a deep enough way. And so it comes off really, really bad.

edit:

deadly_pudding posted:

Needs to be Mage canon. Just keep it all the same, except NWO is a bunch of edgy heel wrestlers in matching t-shirts. The players who don't get super mad and walk out as soon as Hollywood Hogan emerges from the black helicopter are the players you want to keep around :3:

This would be the best Mage game ever.

Toph Bei Fong fucked around with this message at 20:18 on Jan 9, 2014

Bieeanshee
Aug 21, 2000

Not keen on keening.


Grimey Drawer
I always saw most of it as a matter of perspective and ignorance. Mages and woofs both go to the Umbra, but mages generally give no fucks about the Atrocity Realm (being about the mind, maaaan) and both IT-X and the Glass Walkers have an unfortunate fixation on Autocthonia. There was definitely a link between Gnosis and Quintessence (hence caern raiding) and I suspect there was one between them and Glamour as well. But all of the core books just gave little shrugs about the other splats, maybe with some goofy theory about them, like how Changelings think all of the others are Kithain who have really fixated on poo poo. Most of them didn't know for sure, and the rest didn't really give a drat.

And maybe they were all expressions of something bigger-- Disciplines and such as rotes, from a Mage perspective, only whatever is underlying even that. Or something. I was always against mixing splats. Playing Mage? Those tomes of Vampire data don't apply; it's not the world that Vampire describes, run by a bitey Illuminati.

Honestly, I think it all poo poo itself when Demon came out, and those rumoured angels haunting the occasional sourcebook turned out to be real. That nailed a lot of things down, and sat really queerly against all of those other bits that came before.

Halloween Jack
Sep 11, 2003

La morte non ha sesso
If I remember correctly, the first Akashic book basically asserts that the principles of the Shaolin temple formed the basis of all East Asian civilization.

deadly_pudding posted:

Needs to be Mage canon. Just keep it all the same, except NWO is a bunch of edgy heel wrestlers in matching t-shirts. The players who don't get super mad and walk out as soon as Hollywood Hogan emerges from the black helicopter are the players you want to keep around :3:
Dude, even wrestling fans got sick of Hogan. But if they sneer at Malenko vs. La Parka, gently caress 'em.

Halloween Jack fucked around with this message at 20:25 on Jan 9, 2014

Majuju
Dec 30, 2006

I had a beer with Stephen Miller once and now I like him.

50 Foot Ant posted:

poo poo, sorry to jump it early. I spent a lot of time on d20 Modern (I was even involved with the early pre-publishing work) and there's a lot of weird things that happened with it.

If you want I can edit out my post and you can edit out the quote in your reply and we can keep it a surprise for anyone who didn't read it or has me on ignore. :)

No it's cool, nobody reads these things anyhow. What's your favourite d20 Modern splatbook, for when I finish the core?

Mors Rattus
Oct 25, 2007

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

Evil Mastermind posted:

Hell, White Wolf couldn't even reconcile the cosmologies.

Which wasn't so bad until Mage came out and all of a sudden it was all "wait, how come vampires and werewolves don't generate Paradox", "How the hell can vampires use their Disciplines to resist someone reshaping reality", and "why do werewolves and mages go to two separate spiritual realms?"

Man, White Wolf can't reconcile cosmologies within Werewolf, the sharks have a different and mutually exclusive cosmology from everyone else.

Ars Magica: The Contested Isle

Leinster is the southeastern province of Ireland, with the strongest links to England and Wales. Its people were the Laighin, descended from the uncle of Mil, Lughaidh mac Ith. They were formally founded when Labraid Loingsech, grandson of the high king, was forced to eat the hearts of his father and grandfather. They'd been murdered by his great-uncle, who became the next high king. From that day, he was either struck dumb or never spoke, until one day when he hit in the shins during a game of hurling and he said 'I am hurt!' Someone shouted 'Labraid', meaning 'he speaks', and that was forever after his name. Labraid was forced into exile and had many adventures, becoming the bodyguard of to the King of France, but he came home when an Irish princess sent him love poems. He returned with a bard and a druid, along with an army of men wielding blue-tipped spears from which the word 'Laighin' is derived.

Labraid's great uncle, High-King Cobthach Coel Breg, wanted to avoid a fight and gave Labraid Leinster, but he soon treacherously attacked. Labraid built an iron house at Din Rig, inviting Cobthach and thirty enemy kings to parley. They wouldn't enter until Labraid's mother and jester entered first, fearing (correctly) a trap. Both mother and jester willingly sacrificed their own lives when the house was chained shut and a fire built around it with the use of a magic bellows. The High King and his allies roasted to death, and Labraid took the throne. He was born with donkey's ears, which he hid beneath long hair, and he killed all of his barbers until one eloquently pleaded for his life and moved Labraid's heart. He allowed the man to live if he would tell no one. However, the barber whispered the secret to a willow tree, which was then cut down and used to make a harp. Whenever the harp was played, the tune sounded like 'Labraid Loingsech has the ears of an rear end!' and, moved to shame, Labraid cut his hair and revealed his ears.

Leinster itself was founded by Ugraine Mor, a great high king of the Laighin stock, but for centuries was divided north and south. The Ui Cheinnselaig ruled the Wexford region and the Ui Dunlainge ruled Kildare, until the Ui Cheinnselaig united them in the eleventh century. It was the final Ui Cheinnselaig king, Diarmait mac Murchadha, who brought the Normans to Ireland. His intrigues led the high king Toirdelbach Ua Conchobair to send King Tigernan Ua Ruairc to despoil the kingdom and drive Diarmait to exile. Diarmait, of course, called on the Normans, as we know. After recapturing Leinster, Diarmait was devastated by the death of his son, Domhnall, and of course by marrying his daughter to Strongbow, he passed the royal line to the English after his death in 1171.

The western part of Leinster is home to the former kingdom of Ossory, home of the Osraighe - the Deer People. They descend from Oengus Osraigh, and they were a powerful kingdom until their defeat by the Ulaidh at the Battle of Tola in 571 and subsequent wars against the Vikings and Laighin that weakened them until their kingdom split into three parts in the 12th century. Their tuaths became part of the Kingdom of Leinster, but they have risen up to rebel against Strongbow. Their hostility has made them early targets for subjugation, and William Marshall has been subduing their lands and building castles. Their royal dynasty, the Mac Coilla Phadraig, or Sons of Patrick, one of their great kings, have largely accepted English rule and their name has been Anglicized to fitz Patrick. Many Osraighe remain hostile to the English despite the prosperity that has come to their lands, and they are particularly devoted to Saint Ciaran.

As we've noted, the Ostmen founded all the cities in Ireland. In Leinster, that's Dublin and Wexford. Their influence was fairly limited. They began to intermarry among the Irish, and by the 10th century they were essentially Christianized and assimiliated, though retaining large aspects of their culture, and by the 11th century they were speaking a Norse dialect of Irish. The Ostmen, while still known as Ostmen, are now extremely Irish.

Points of interest...well, there are plenty, but I am skimming over them. In Wicklow, there's a hill on top of which is a rath. Within the rath is a mound with a stone door, which usually has a very weak Faerie aura. The druids are said to have kept an eternal bonfire there, and at midsummer, a fire appears, which burns until the first rain. While it burns, the Faerie aura grows stronger. The fire is rich with Ignem vis, but any gathering it must defeat the inhabitants of the mound in a contest chosen by the fae, which changes each time based on the identity of the faerie tasked to guard the vis that year. Challenges of the past have included dancing, music, storytelling, climbing and javelin hurling, but there has never been a full repeat.

There's an abbey in an area called Glendalough whose abbot was once Saint Kevin, who taught Psalms. One day, one of his students fell sick and asked for fruit to ease his pain, but at the time there were no fruit trees in the abbey. Kevin prayed to God for health-giving fruit, and God granted a miracle. The monastery's cemetary was built near an old willow, which suddenly sprouted oblong white fruits, and filled with fruit within minutes. The boy ate of the fruit and was miraculously cured. This happened many, many years ago, but the willow still bears Kevin's fruit, as do the willows the monks planted around it the first year it recurred. The fruit appears on the date of the miracle and has healing powers, which the monks use to heal the sick. It is known as the Fruit of Saint Kevin and as many as 24 may sprout each season. Ancient tradition holds that anyone buried in the cemetary escapes Purgatory and goes directly to Heaven. The English priests mock this superstition, but many heroes have chosen to be buried here.



Nearby, the road paces a cliff waterfall that falls into a black, silent pool. The area is known to be haunted by a Puca or kelpie, a malevolent creature that appears as an attractive black horse that wanders, apparently lost. If mounted, it runs downt the road very fast and plunges into the pool, either drowning the rider or possibly eating them. While the locals know and avoid the beast, especially at night, no one knows if the kelpie is magical, faerie or infernal.

Leinster is home to the covenant of Ashenrise, founded by magi of the Normandy Tribunal. They are survivors of the fallen covenant Moles Magna and they hope to claim a dominant position in Hibernia so that they may update and civilize its barbaric Peripheral Code. To demonstrate the barbarity of Hibernia, they chose as their cathach the disinterred corpse of Rhiannon, former Prima of Merinita, who was buried in the Ui Riain homeland of Ossory. The magi acquired the corpse by convincing a local English lord, Raymond le Gros, that his vassals in the Ui Riain clan were plotting rebellion. In the chaos, they attacked the clan chief's rath and stole the body. In 1186, they announced their covenant: a FitzGerald castle they would be permanent guests in. It was scandalous, and Wars were declared, but the Praeco, Conan Deg, approved their cathach, ruling that the vis within the skeleton qualified. They defended it, with difficulty, for a year. The corpse is now enchanted to resist rot, and it can dance on command. The magi of Ashenrise feel this is an excellent demonstration of their point.

There is also the covenant Lambaird, meaning 'arm of a bard'. It's an old covenant, dating back to 826 and a pair of Flambeau. It is home to the school of combat magic known as the School of Raghallach, and has always been a Flambeau covenant. It is a strong protector of traditional ways, recently taking up the cause of protecting the Irish from the Normans, and have so far avoided sanction by claiming they are merely protecting themselves and their resources, though many suspect them of instigating raids. The cathach of Lambaird is a false arm made of silver. It was forged by a magical smith for a bard named Cairpre, and acted as a true arm. Cairpre was slain by a Lambaird magus the same year the covenant sought recognition. The magus, whose name has deliberately been struck from records, was enraged by one of Cairpre's satires and ignored the laws against harming bards. He was killed in a Wizard's War by his own pater, Petrifer, for his crime. The hollow arm is worn by one of the covenfolk over their true left arm, and wearing it is an honor. The arm is incapacitated, as the magic arm moves of a will of its own, animated, legend tells, by the spirit of Cairpre. Lambaird is a highly untraditional covenant, and its magi act more like noble lords than wizards or scholars.

The School of Raghallach focuses on overcoming defense with overwhelming power. Raghallach's druidic tradition used blood and self-inflicted pain to gain power, a technique known as cndmh greamu, bone-biting. The feat has since been lost, but the School is still expert in defeating supernatural foes. They study techniques to strip Magic Resistance or dispel it rather than avoid it, and are noted for stalking their prey to gain Arcane Connections before attacking - preferably blood retrieved on the weapons of their soldiers.

Another covenant of Leinster is the Paruchia of Nerius. A tiny number of the holy Celi De have joined the Order as part of Ex Miscellanea - just three, since 1189. Two monks and one manaim who live in the otherwise uninhabited island of Little Saltee off Wexford's coast. They were inspired by a vision that a Hermetic magus, Fedelmid of Limerick, had of the mysterious magus-saint Nerius while on pilgrimage to Rome. In the Alps, he found a valley where he had several visions. He sought out the secrets of Holy Magic and trained an apprentice, Indrechtach, who taught a manaim of his monastery. All three are Gifted, though Indrechtach's lack of Gentle Gift got him exiled from the monastery. The three have founded a new monastery-slash-covenant at Little Saltee. Their cathach is a holy relic of Nerus. Given the mystery around Nerius' martyrdom, it's unclear how Fedelmid found it, and it possesses three Faith Points and is kept in a small shrine. It is said to have worked miracles, but no one is entirely sure what its powers are, as the covenant keeps it secret.



Next Time: Meath

Halloween Jack
Sep 11, 2003

La morte non ha sesso

Majuju posted:

No it's cool, nobody reads these things anyhow. What's your favourite d20 Modern splatbook, for when I finish the core?
I hate it when I don't get any response to my writeups, so I want you to know that yours are appreciated. I just pretty much read 'em and say "Yep, it's D20 90s Television Show." It's got all the problems of D20 but it's not balls-hanging-out crazy.

Vox Valentine
May 30, 2013

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



I intentionally skipped over the roles in IntSec other Service Groups provide for a mini update, so now's as good a time as any.



ARMED FORCES

Crowd Control: Crowd Control differs from Goon Squad pretty heavily. Goon Squad's job is to be scary and intimidate people. Crowd Control's job is to keep crowds pacified through superior firepower/repeated clubbings/lots of yelling. There's a certain degree of overlap but barking orders and waving a loaded gun is practically Intro to Armed Forces 101.

Special Weapons Division: Remember when you had a cool new toy and you refused to let anyone play with it because it was yours and awesome? The Special Weapons Division exists to do that with grown-rear end citizens. SWD has the big guns and they force their way onto teams, claiming that they're absolutely necessary because they have the big guns. IntSec and the other departments hate them for their redundancy and bravado showboating but nobody wants to try and can them because, well, they know how to use those big guns.

Power Armor Corps: Power Armor Corps is actually useful, however, using both IntSec and Armed Forces personnel to train Troopers on the proper use of power armor. And unlike SWD, they share their toys, even if their toys are hard to use, slow and noisy.

Civilian Recruitment & Rendition: You get to shanghai treasonous criminals and force them into service as Troopers. Or, more likely, claim you're making them into Troopers then stuff them in a crate and take them to use as Armed Forces soldiers/target-holders in a firing range.

Explosives and Demolition: You're the bomb squad in the sense that you handle all of your problems with bombs. Traffic jam? Blow it up. Treasonous material? Blow it up! Terrorists in a reactor core? BLOW IT UP! Giant fancy out-of-control R&D superbomb threatening to explode? Disarm it and take it for yourself.

CPU

Archival Data Retrieval: Thanks to MemoMax recordings, every single microsecond of a clone's life is recorded from their brain. And thanks to Alpha Complex being a super-advanced police state, most of those microseconds are recorded by camera, surveillance device or transaction receipts. ADR workers have the job of digging up minutiae from the lives of citizens and cross-referencing it with every little possibly treasonous thing, and then withholding that information from the people who really need it.

Correctness Assessment & Reinforcement. Be! Efficient! B-E efficient! Your job is to increase efficiency and improve procedures for IntSec whenever possible. Being its own self-contained beast that "knows how to run itself", IntSec generally resists this and fights it every step of the way. It's also your job to "suggest" that they follow these new procedures.

Credit License Checkers: It's your job to investigate fraud and credit reports and throw fines at everyone. It's an enviable position because despite being an accountant cop you get to free up credits and make sure they go to the right people (i.e. an unlicensed credit stick in your pocket).

HPD&MC:

Public Hating Coordination: You make sure people hate the right people, make sure the Troopers oppress the right Secret Societies and make sure everyone is afraid of the mutant menace. You're a fear-monger, basically, and most of the time you're probably pushing your own sinister traitorous agenda to help discredit your enemies. If you're an Anti-Mutant, then you're probably in the right mindset to do this job: counter-productive and self-loathing.

Embedded Reporter: you have a camera in your helmet and it's up to you to make sure those jackbooted thugs you're following around look like good, clean, morally upstanding jackbooted thugs that make all citizens strive to be good citizens. Oh, you're also reporting live and you're technically not allowed to view everything and you can't let the citizens watching see certain things, like the inside of an Ultraviolet bathroom or where IntSec's waterboarding facility is or how the Troopers you're following are really just murderous fascists.

History Purification: You work with Reality Control to help adjust the history of Alpha Complex so that everything lines up evidence-wise. Of course, this job is a lot like pulling a loose thread on an old weather-beaten sweater and you only have chopsticks to re-knit the sweater.

R&D

Happiness Enhancement & Management: You help IntSec make people happy! This generally means making drugs, electronic shock-happy machines and giant laser arrays that beam radio-waves of happiness into the heads of citizens. Or more likely you're helping to clean up the mess of an exploded machine and an exploded citizen's skull.

Field Testing: This is normally a job for Troubleshooters, but then again there are some things to test you just can't trust a Troubleshooter with. Or maybe you're being punished by your superior. Just try to get the data and not cause too much collateral damage.

PLC

Security Supply: You follow Troopers and IntSec officials around, kissing their rear end and trying to get them interested in neat, new PLC supplies and services. You're basically a salesman to cops, and they might just live the dream of denying your sale with a big enough gun.

Marketing and Brand Management: You get to keep the money flowing by making Troopers as marketable as possible. This is harder than it sounds; you can slap a bunch of endorsements on them or just lie about them and how they behave, or you can actually try to make them good, popular, marketable commodities. Guess which job is easier?

TECH SERVICES

Plumbing and Wiring Consultants: Yeah, sure, you can put a new security camera in that there wall, but that's a load-bearing wall and it'd require its own dedicated power supply. Your job is to make sure that IntSec's scheming and machinations don't bring Alpha Complex crashing down or that the Troopers don't destroy anything too important.

Hardware Support: Nothing too fancy. You destroy/fix Trooper hardware if they need it. Not everyone can have a glamorous, destructive job.

POWER SERVICES

Collateral Damage Assessment Bureau: If Plumbing and Wiring Consultants make sure important stuff doesn't get broken, then you should be able to make sure power doesn't get disrupted by Troopers or IntSec. It's only fair, right? Those stupid Tech Services jerks with their fancy machines and construction.

Mandatory Team Member: How come Tech Services gets two temporary roles? We should get two too! It's only fair! Those traitorous Commie jerks! You get to show up and fill an empty spot.

Nostalgia4ColdWar
May 7, 2007

Good people deserve good things.

Till someone lets the winter in and the dying begins, because Old Dark Places attract Old Dark Things.

Majuju posted:

No it's cool, nobody reads these things anyhow. What's your favourite d20 Modern splatbook, for when I finish the core?

Go with d20 Future or d20 Apocalypse. I've basically got all the official d20 Modern stuff as well as some of the more popular early d20 works by other companies. I'd love to see your take on them.

Gotta say, I'm really looking forward to when someone does the d20 Future book, since I was pretty heavy into the playtesting (I have an early release plastic ringbound copy without all the artwork and poo poo) and want to see how many people ID the obvious problems that were pointed out and ignored.

Neat Fact about d20 Modern vehicles: The reason why military vehicles and weapon ranges were actually cut down so far is because the designers felt that it wasn't fair to players. The tank was brought up and one of the designers was talking about how his tank during Desert Storm was disabled due to small-arms fire, and when pressed admitted it wasn't disabled but deadlined. It was still combat capable, but just was missing 2 lights and an antenna. Then they tried the 'it wouldn't be fair to the players to have an enemy with a tank be invulnerable to their weapons' to which a lot of us responded with "Uhh, it's a TANK!" and said that it was a GM/Player problem. With the firearms ranges they were all talking about about how 'the ranges aren't for some guy who made a world record shot' but when it was pointed out that in order to qualify for Army basic training you'd need a handful of feats in order to just get 26 out of 40, since you're expected to hit out to 300m. I used to recommend that the range in feet was changed to meters. Then the magic problem. Oh, God, the magic problem. Wanted to play "Charmed" with d20 Modern? Forget it unless you're ready to put in 3-6 levels in a class before you can even toss off one underpowered spell. Although some of the spells were funny, mixing magic and modern technology. Nothing like texting a foe a swift kick in his balls.

Goddamn, d20 Modern used to result in HUGE flamewars back in the day.

Vox Valentine
May 30, 2013

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

Yeah, every time I see d20 get mentioned it's generally "oh d20 sucks" or "oh d20 conversions make the games suck". I tried to run a d20 conversion for Deadlands because I couldn't play actual Deadlands with friends online because it requires decks of cards to play, and I just got bogged down in how different it felt.

d20 Apocalypse would be cool. I think I have that book because I liked the idea of randomly-generated ruins to loot and Fallout-style radiation mutations but I just didn't feel like dealing with d20 anymore.

Majuju
Dec 30, 2006

I had a beer with Stephen Miller once and now I like him.

One of the things this re-read has really got me appreciating is the decreased power levels and the eschewing of WIZARD SUPREMACY. There's a better balance between classes and it means you're more capable of playing the character you want in *some* form (especially with multiclassing) than if you have to min-max to get the best save-or-die spell you can (case in point, the magic system for Urban Arcana). It's not about making your character into a god-tier superbeing, it's about making a character who's flavourful and fits into a plausible world.

That said the supplement books go completely overboard with power creep from what I remember.

Oh, and as for changing ranges to metres, I don't think the RPG community was ready for the metric system at the time :)

Siivola
Dec 23, 2012

Either Urban Arcana or d20 Future. Those two were a hoot back when I was getting into RPGs, even though all I can remember of them is how Urban Arcana had some really endearing art of various D&D things in the modern day.

Nostalgia4ColdWar
May 7, 2007

Good people deserve good things.

Till someone lets the winter in and the dying begins, because Old Dark Places attract Old Dark Things.
Yeah, that was half the problem. I told them "Just use yards instead of meters, it's pretty basic."

The power creep was terrible in Urban Arcana, and although the book was full of all kinds of good stuff, a GM really had to be careful or the mage would outshine and outfight everyone in the group.

The Wealth system wasn't too bad, but it wasn't explained very well and was pretty thick because the examples weren't very good. I liked the abstract system for money, and I loved the resources from d20 Apocalypse. I really felt the system could have done a lot better if Wizards had given it even the most modicum of support. I used to talk to one of the writers of d20 Apocalypse all the time, and I've got my advance copy around here somewhere. I'd love to see people's take on it.

Although I have to say I hated the Zombie Apocalypse as it was presented in the Apocalypse book.

EDIT:

Kobold Special Forces troops, gently caress yeah!



Meepo loving rocks.

If you didn't play at least one game as kobold military troops you weren't playing right.

Nostalgia4ColdWar fucked around with this message at 21:58 on Jan 9, 2014

Rand Brittain
Mar 24, 2013

"Go on until you're stopped."

Bieeardo posted:

In all seriousness, I wouldn't be surprised if the thought processes that led to the creation of Banality as a character stat, and all of the thematic fallout from that came from someone having an epiphany while watching a stage production of Peter Pan. Like, what if nobody clapped and shouted that they believed in fairies, and Tinkerbell died, man?

I mostly got the impression that the original World of Darkness was basically written by people just out of college, and that the don't-trust-anybody-over-thirty was all more or less sincere.

Then they all turned thirty, and then forty, and that's how the nWoD was born.

citybeatnik
Mar 1, 2013

You Are All
WEIRDOS




Spoilers Below posted:

It is. :getin:

If I wanted to give Mage a lot of credit, the fact that each tradition book is written from a completely biased point of view is one of the major attractions and themes of the game. Consensual reality meaning that of course the group would only see things from their perspective, and would be attempting to shoehorn in "their version" of history as the real one. Unfortunately, in practice, this meant that they tended to be really hit and miss when it came to actual writing, with a lot of really naive and racist implications that just don't seem to have been fully thought out by the writers.

The Revised Son of Ether book is easily one of my favorite splat books (up there with the Revised Bone Gnawers Tribebook), and I think that part of that is the ton of work that went in to it, the book not really shying away from going "oh yeah, the Victorian Era Etherites were hilariously racist and would steal credit for stuff their non-European students would do", and a potentially throw away line concerning why Etherites tend to dress like something out of a silly pulp novel - it's their giant middle finger to the baked-in cynicism of the WoD itself.

That and it gave us things like the Russian Science-Adventurer that was powered by Soviet Super-Science and the Civic Engineer that used the layout of entire cities as her foci.

Toph Bei Fong
Feb 29, 2008



citybeatnik posted:

The Revised Son of Ether book is easily one of my favorite splat books (up there with the Revised Bone Gnawers Tribebook), and I think that part of that is the ton of work that went in to it, the book not really shying away from going "oh yeah, the Victorian Era Etherites were hilariously racist and would steal credit for stuff their non-European students would do", and a potentially throw away line concerning why Etherites tend to dress like something out of a silly pulp novel - it's their giant middle finger to the baked-in cynicism of the WoD itself.

That and it gave us things like the Russian Science-Adventurer that was powered by Soviet Super-Science and the Civic Engineer that used the layout of entire cities as her foci.

That sounds awesome! I'll need to give the revised books a look. I could never find paper copies back when they first came out, so all my impressions are based on the originals.

Toph Bei Fong fucked around with this message at 21:57 on Jan 9, 2014

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SirPhoebos
Dec 10, 2007

WELL THAT JUST HAPPENED!

Halloween Jack posted:

I hate it when I don't get any response to my writeups, so I want you to know that yours are appreciated. I just pretty much read 'em and say "Yep, it's D20 90s Television Show." It's got all the problems of D20 but it's not balls-hanging-out crazy.

To be honest, d20 Modern felt downright sensible next to 3rd Edition D&D. Then again, I probably have less exposure to different systems than a lot of folks here (I just want to tell everyone how cool Planescape is, is that so bad? :( )

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