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I've been catching up on this thread since hearing that new classic old 20th 5th edition vampire was actively courting nazis. this thread is depressing af. so here's something not depressing: changeling the lost still totally owns, I'm hopeful the second edition will own just as much, and I probably haven't felt this excited about a pen and paper RPG since the first time I "got" apocalypse world also, basically the same paragraph as above but copy paste mage over changeling and replace "impending second edition" with "impending any new book in the line."
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Jul 18, 2018 07:16
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Harvesting, IMO, is best used as a chance for your character to connect to their court / their way of dealing with their own trauma. It's more personal and less predatory than vampire, but you'll still want scenes of your player's Summer rage monsters starting bar fights or Spring coke heads partying to excess to forget their sorrows. It can be brutal, but it should always be partially brutal to the character harvesting. Less "Dexter needs a kill of the week" and more "Don Draper can't help being a manipulative rear end in a top hat, again."
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Jul 21, 2018 06:27
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Dave Brookshaw posted:Doctor Who, Glow, and Crazy Ex-Girlfriend. Please have whoever's writing C:tL2E put Crazy Ex-Girlfriend in the reference media section and include rules on musical numbers, TIA
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Jul 24, 2018 14:23
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Lurks With Wolves posted:Counterpoint: Capitalism grinds everyone who is not hyperrich into dust between it's cogs to funnel power to the hyperrich and almost everyone who ever plays Geist will have no contact with anyone in said hyperrich category and it is as inescapable in modern society as our inevitable deaths, so the metaphor stands. a specter is haunting the underworld
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Jul 25, 2018 03:55
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Also, I've never read the books, but Harry Potter does kinda map onto Mage? I mean ignoring the fact that it seems like the Magical Goverment in Harry Potter are basically the Seers, you got your "let's use magic to defend what's ours" faction (arrows, gryffindor) your "the wise will lead us all to victory" faction (ladder, ravenclaw) your "keep magic for mages" faction (guardians, slithern) and your "magic will set us free and even boring people are special" faction (free council, hufflepuff.) Uhh, I guess the Mysterium are the teachers? Idk, like I said I haven't read the books or even seen all the movies, maybe they go into the mechanics of magic somewhere in a way that's explicitly anti-gnoistic or whatever.
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Jul 25, 2018 06:28
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Lurks With Wolves posted:Well, one, that's a really weird interpretation of the four houses, and two, one of them is about understanding the way the universe really works and the other is a whimsical adventure in a British boarding school where magic isn't really examined on a level beyond cool things you can do with your wand. I tried to acknowledge that with my "magic in HP works differently and isn't gnostic" statement but yeah, I understand thematically they're very different. Although there's nothing stopping you from turning Mage into a game with simpler "smash the bad guys" themes. As for the houses, like I said I'm not a big HP fan so I concede the point if you think that's off. I was basing them off of what I remembered from looking up the origins of the houses on some harry potter wiki when I got bored in the middle of one of the movies. Specifically I was trying to remember who the founders of each house wanted to teach magic too. IIRC it was something like the brave, the wise, those of magical blood, everyone who can learn it for gryf, raven, slith, and hufflep respectively. But I don't know jack poo poo about harry potter and was kinda just being silly and seeing if I could stretch a point, which is why I threw in so many disclaimers. I mean of loving course poo poo like the invisibles is a better reference point
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Jul 25, 2018 16:57
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I'm not 100% up to date on this scandal as I've been pretty content with the Chronically of Darkness, but what was the 1488 quote from if not the corebook?
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Jul 26, 2018 16:22
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I mean, following the demographic change is why new old white wolf is a moral abomination full of nazi references. They were appealing to edgelords in 1990, they're appealing to edgelords in 2018. The only difference is the edgelords got organized, powerful, and really loving scary in the past decade or so.
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Jul 26, 2018 20:28
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Rand Brittain posted:The transgression-for-its-own-sake-let's-shock-the-normies aesthetic has basically no traction right now. My dude, I would loving LOVE to live in the reality you live in
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Jul 26, 2018 23:16
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Guy Davis is so goddamn good that when he took over the art on B.P.R.D. from Mike Mignola and I was like "not bad, actually."
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Aug 2, 2018 05:50
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Ratkin are objectively the best changing breed; they had auspices to play a rat of NIHM and to play an insane swashbuckling Baron Munchausen edit: By the way, anyone see any reviews for CtL 2E? I bought the physical book but not the pdf because I didn't know there would be like a year difference between their release dates, and I'm hungry for more information / wondering if I should just double-dip and buy the pdf.
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Aug 13, 2018 17:36
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Confession: I've been into WW poo poo since around oWoD second edition. Barring a very few exceptions (any of the werewolf comics, the opening to CtD 2E) I've always skipped right over the fiction. I have nothing against WoD fiction, I read a chunk of that huge clan-based novel series. And when information is presented in character (like say Clanbook: Mekhet) I'll sometimes read it. I have no idea why I'll read a stupid vampire novel series and not read a stupid vampire short story, especially considering I love short stories, but the pages spent on fiction in WoD sourcebooks have always been something I found mildly annoying.
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Aug 15, 2018 15:30
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That'd be the seriously underrated Mad Max 3: Beyond Thunderdome. Everything bad people say about it is true but there's a loving ton of good in it as well and the big chase at the end is my favorite chase scene outside of the entirety of Fury Road. Loomer posted:Psychotic survivalists ruining the remains of civilization is a huge part of the plot of the Postman. It's a big part of why it's such a good novel. This is weird, I just started watching The Postman tonight; I finally let my morbid curiosity get the better of me. Stop stalking me. I think in general the reason post-apocalypse as a genre tends to be so depressingly grimdark and unrealistically lovely is a combination of the previously mentioned power fantasy it offers to the rugged Randian survivalist types and because we really don't have any other models to imagine. "It's easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism" and all that. But yeah, post-apocalyptic lawyers would loving rule. I love how important lawyers are in Glorantha and what little I know of the Icelandic sagas. I have no idea if anyone's ever played them, because I feel like it's nearly impossible to play, but I dig that Exalted has a bureaucrat-hero splat too. Shin Godzilla also pulled off that trope really well, but it seems drat hard to make organically happen at the game table. Maybe with a shitload of storyteller pre-planning and railroading it could happen, but IMO even curious and non-violent players tend towards sweet talking their foes over suing them.
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Aug 24, 2018 04:30
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ProfessorCirno posted:The problem with [almost all of oWod is that it's] rank poo poo for a game you're supposed to play, not just read about.
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Sep 12, 2018 05:50
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PHIZ KALIFA posted:edit- So y'all answered my questions about jiangxi-style "hopping Chinese vampires" as they're covered by Kindred of the East, but has any splatbook (new or old) covered the taoist martial arts that folks used to control them? I'm explicitly looking for something like the Mr. Vampire saga, where priests use red paint brushes, broken bottles, fire, and spell tags to combat the supernatural. They've got a mix of ritual and improvising that I find really compelling from a conflict perspective, and it's something I'd like to try capturing in a tabletop game. my friend you are looking for Demon Hunter X and their coverage of the Shih. spoiler alert: they loving rule
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Sep 21, 2018 18:03
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PHIZ KALIFA posted:If you aren't using blood magic forged to defeat an antediluvian to roll up at Elysium with a ridiculously opaque fog bank why EVEN be undead. I think it honestly might be this. What's the point of being a powerful vampire if you can't brood on your balcony with a goblet of blood while a thunderstorm rages? Related to thamauturgy chat: I really like Blood Sorcery in nWoD. Seems like a really nice halfway between mage style "it's magic! make poo poo up!" and vampire style "here's the creepy stuff you can do." Strict limitations that are constantly tied to creepy vampire poo poo, which keeps the theme, but room for a lot of improvisation and outside-the-box thinking that keeps the D&D wizard theme.
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Oct 12, 2018 16:19
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I've forgotten huge chunks of oWoD lore, so forgive a simple question but: what was the Wyrm before it went nuts again? Was it just a "good" destruction element, something representing natural mortality / entropy, or did it have a whole different aspect? And on a similar note: what was behind the Wyrm going crazy? I remember the Weaver tried to trap it and that's what caused it to go evil, but why did that happen in the first place? Just the Weaver overstepping it's bounds? Some kind of "well if nothing dies everything will be perfect and static forever" justification?
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Oct 17, 2018 14:45
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Mors Rattus posted:The Triat in their original form were basically a Middle Class White Kid understanding of the Creator->Preserver->Destroyer cycle of the Hinduisms slammed head first into a Captain Planet cartoon. Yeah, this is how I came to my reasonably close correct guess. My line of thinking was "what the hell was the Wyrm before it went all evil? Hmm, they probably just cribbed off of Hinduism." I also like your description of that understanding as "Middle Class White Kid" because a) I distinctly remember learning it in eight grade in my Middle Class (slightly less than the stereotype but still largely) White school and b) I still don't know much more about Hinduism than that. It's like a very serious gap in my Important World Religions knowledge, and I learn about that poo poo in my spare time for fun. Anyway, thanks guys!
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Oct 17, 2018 15:09
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As an American, I feel the strong urge to "anything you can do we can do better," so I'd like to point at Wind River (2017) for the "deserted company town out in the middle of nowhere" vibe and Hold The Dark (2018) for the "life at the savage edge bleeding into evil leftover from how brutally white people colonized the place" vibes. Wake in Fright sounds great though, and is going on my list, thanks for shouting it out. To be fair, Hold The Dark is set in Alaska, but Wind River is in the continental states and still has that good good desolation. Also to be fair, I'd 1000 times rather be stuck in the middle of Alaska than the middle of the outback. Your whole continent seems like it was designed to murder people.
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Oct 18, 2018 04:47
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Joe Slowboat posted:Every single horror setting is becoming Bloodborne and I'm all here for it. I watched Gareth Evan's new film, Apostle, last weekend. At some point my buddy turns to me and goes "I think we're supposed to think the main character's from London, but he's 100% from Yharnam." (Also, Apostle was very good.) PHIZ KALIFA posted:This is fascinating. You're fascinating. I'm curious, are their any other parallels between what generates horror in post-colonial white societies? What's different between post-colonial white societies and, say, impoverished white areas of Europe? All "genre" fiction is really about the contemporary society it's created in, but horror tends to be some of the most obvious. Another thing American and Australian media has in common is our perennial obsession with "westerns," with re-telling the story of our frontiers - largely I think because the settling of our countries was volitional and occurred in historical memory. At some point, way the gently caress back, people decided to settle Britain - but we don't know poo poo about them, so there aren't a ton of stories of civilization vs. the wild to tell in that setting. (Notable exception: the disappearance of the Roman 9th legion, which gets told a loving TON in British media.) I don't know a ton about the contemporary horror stories of less developed white Europe. The Witcher sprang to mind, although it's a big stretch to call Poland "impoverished." To my mind there's something distinctly Slavic, maybe distinctly Polish (I don't know enough to spot the differences...) in the way that series interprets monsters and horror. Although he only sometimes tinges into horror, and as far as I know hasn't done anything overtly supernatural, Finland's Aki Kaurismäki has a dark streak and his movies can be thrillers at times. Similarly I know almost nothing about the very well regarded Romanian New Wave other than that it exists and that it produces mostly social thrillers. I'd love to hear from anyone else who's thought about the scary stories of uh, just about any culture! Tell us more!! What deep seated cultural fear do those Chinese hopping vampires embody?
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Oct 19, 2018 04:50
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Loomer posted:So I watched Apostle. Spoilers re: viewing it as an oWoD film. If you view the Goddess as a Koldun, you get literally the perfect film about a Tzimisce herd-cult. I viewed her more as a Fae entity, although I'm not entirely sure why, might just be my biases. You certainly have ample evidence, based on what we know of Her physiology, to suspect something vampire. In nWoD terms she fits perfectly in the Circle of the Crone, either as an extremely powerful member or as some of the weird poo poo they interact with. Anyone here know what language she was speaking? It sounded Gaelic to me, so I assume it was Welsh because Evans is Welsh and used to teach the Welsh language, but I can't find anyone to confirm it. Any other thoughts on the film, Loomer? I liked it a lot, thought it wasn't incredibly deep but was gorgeous, extremely well paced, and just cruelly effective all the way through. I also really dig horror stories where there is some supernatural poo poo going on, but the real villains are people. The vampire movie Byzantium did something similar, and it's always a trope I love because human motivations are usually more compelling to me.
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Oct 21, 2018 17:27
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Basic Chunnel posted:I haven’t, but my general experience of synthesized systems is not great. And I can tell you off the bat that 105 pages is probably 10x as much as any PBtA system should really need The majority of the rules seem on a once-over to be pretty light and cromulent with PBtA's philosophy; the bulk of the book is translations for like every single discipline you can think of. They even have Mytherceria! Mytherceria!!! Probably not the smartest use of time, given all NPCs in PBtA work on the "they do what the GM says happens" principle and given how much PBtA encourages GMs to write their own moves, but they seem fairly reasonable, not too complicated, and it was kind of amusing to see how the various necromantic paths or whatever were translated into PBtA's rules.
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Oct 23, 2018 04:51
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PHIZ KALIFA posted:I've yet to read any of the books I bought because the r/relationships thread in GBS is a laugh riot. i didn't know about this and didn't need to know about this, you rear end in a top hat. there's over three thousand pages to read, drat you, three thousand!
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Nov 8, 2018 20:00
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The Victorian trilogy is actually pretty good, huh? Do they have any Kiasyd characters in them? Asking uh, for a friend Okay, broader question: Why are there still metaplots? I guess I understand why V5 had metaplot tie-ins, if you wanted a metaplotless Vampire you'd use Requiem and they were hoping to lure back people nostalgic for the way things were in the 1990s. But my understanding of the RPG industry is that it's simply way, way too small to support the kind of thing a lot of games had in the '90s, with a continuing storyline that you'd buy multiple sourcebooks to follow. Is it because the LARP side of things has a metaplot and the designers want to sync them up? I know nothing about LARPing, WoD in any flavor or otherwise. It doesn't seem to me that a lot of the other current hot pen and paper RPGs have a metaplot - I don't think D&D/Pathfinder has one, I know the Apocalypse World games don't, uh I dunno what else is selling - so what's the purpose of having one, given how the game market is in 2018?
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Nov 11, 2018 19:12
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PST posted:He's a lovely hack writer who got lucky with a single concept that other people made better. hey, don't make fun of my goal in life
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Nov 12, 2018 00:09
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Mors Rattus posted:So today I learned about one of American history's weirder figures, and you get to now too: this guy rules quote:There, they would produce the New Motive Power, a "mechanical messiah" that would bring about true paradise. The New Motive Power would be built of zinc, copper, magnets and a dining room table. It would take nine months to build, a time period carefully selected by Spear. So is he the first person to talk about the singularity? I'm reading a collection of historical essays that have strains that lead to accelerationism and I don't think the whole "the machines will build better machines until the machines run everything, as it should be" crops up in those lines of thought until around the 1870s.
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Nov 12, 2018 19:55
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I guess I'm cautiously optimistic about the upcoming changes? oWoD didn't have a ton of hooks in me, I read and loved and very rarely played it when I was younger but it seems like there's almost nothing that it does that nWoD doesn't do better. I heard a couple of mechanisms that V5 did that sound pretty drat cool, but it seemed too tied to nostalgia that i straight up don't feel to appeal to me... and then when all the literal Nazi poo poo around it came to light it became an immediate "I will never buy this" to me. I still don't really see what it does that the 2E nWoD games don't do better, but if they purged the edgelord nazi fucks from their production line I'll I guess at least give it a chance. Swededracula sounds to me like a straight up conman running an affinity fraud. I very much doubt they'll retcon his stuff, or introduce V6 or whatever, but a lot of WoD lines, both n and o, have pivoted hard from the implications in their corebooks, so I think the line is still probably salvageable. If some of their later products (probably the ones Onyx Path have a hand in, but I'd have an open mind for other folk's work as well) manage to turn the line into something interesting, I'd probably buy some books. If not, as long as OPP keeps churning out nWoD books I'll keep buying them - and I hope Paradox finds a good use of the license as a video game property. I'm in love with Paradox's current computer game content, so I hope they can use the license well both for the sake of the WoD property and for the sake of the company. I guess overall I'm hopeful they can turn this around. Even if there's no pressing need for a new oWoD to exist, if they can right the ship I'll be happy to buy their products. Purging the literal Nazis is an important first step, and I hope they take this poo poo seriously. Signs right now point to them doing so, but we'll see. I'm a fan of both Paradox and the various WoDs (WsoD?) and so it'd be lovely if they could turn out interesting / non-offensive products and make money doing so. We'll see. Like I said a couple of pages ago it really seems to me like the current P&P RPG market is different and smaller than it was in the 1990s - I'd love to see someone turning a comfortable profit in it even given those structural changes. Except, of course, if they make the profit by catering to literal Nazis. Like, this shouldn't really need saying, but if you're a brand in tyool 2018 maybe don't cater to Nazis?
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Nov 17, 2018 07:56
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Terrible Opinions posted:So question on this does Chechnya actually have a proper autonomy? I was under the impression they were wholly owned by Russia. Putin basically made a deal with Ramzan Kadyrov where Putin would let Kadyrov run the country however he wanted and in exchange Kadyrov would tamp down on Islamist / Separatist terrorism. They've had a few moments of tension since (Kadyrov once said that he'd tell his police to shoot any FSB (basically the Russian FBI) agents they found in Cechnya but it's working out for both of them - Putin wants some threat of terrorism to justify his authoritarian politics and Kadyrov wants to show his people he's anti-Russian so they don't go like "wait we were fighting for independence and am now ruled by someone handpicked by the head of Russia."
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Nov 17, 2018 19:42
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Dawgstar posted:I have decided metaplots are cool and good if done like they are in the Requiem Clanbooks, where it's super subtle but there. It's however even there definitely an optional extra. See, I don't really consider that a metaplot, per se. (Although, I do consider them loving awesome, go read the Clanbooks if you haven't yet guys.) There's an ongoing plot set in the world, but it doesn't really tie directly into the situation of your campaign unless your Storyteller goes way the gently caress out of their way to make it tie into your campaign. oWoD metaplot affected things like which clans were in which political alliances, or even were alive - they affected the base assumptions of the setting. Of course a given group could have chosen to ignore the changes to the status quo, but it there were still things like "the ravanos are mostly dead now" or "no one can really go to deep astral space anymore" that would likely affect most campaigns. Like if a storyteller killed off Frances Black I'd be sad but it wouldn't alter the role that Mekhet or the Dracul play in the world. I've been craving some post-apocalyptic poo poo after beating the new Fist of the North Star game, so I re-read my old Deadlands: Wasted West games and they had a slightly different way of dealing with the metaplot. Some of it I liked - they never did anything like "this major faction is now dead" which kept it from being all-consuming, it was mostly just a string of epic adventures that ended in a big battle between the good guy factions and the bad guys factions with the PCs playing a pretty pivotal role. Some of it I didn't - there were still some writer's pet NPCs doing stuff I thought was too pivotal, and a lot of the GM guides would be like "we're not telling you what the cause of this weird thing we mentioned because we're saving it for later" which is really annoying. Still, it felt pretty different from a lot of the oWoD metaplot because, again, that was used to change fundamental assumptions about the campaign setting. And what if like, the PCs had already hosed with something major the metaplot decided to play with? I mean obviously you could adapt around that, but then why have the metaplot in the first place? I guess what I'm saying is: recurring characters - good. Linked adventure paths - can be good. Needing to buy supplements to understand the ever changing status quo of the setting - bad because it fundamentally doesn't interact with the players' agency.
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Nov 21, 2018 08:25
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Loomer posted:Someone really needs to give the aristocracy some condoms. Even in the modern day they keep pumping out tons of kids. I take it you're not a Crusader Kings 2 player? Pumping out tons of kids is the most important job of an aristocrat! Mors Rattus posted:They were also groups, whereas these Entitlements are almost entirely singular entities, with group ones ('legion entitlements') being extremely rare and coveted. Aww, that's kind of a shame. Entitlements-as-groups often made more sense to me than the seasonal courts did (I know, I know, the seasonal courts not making sense is their whole point...) I really liked the idea that there were small - but still sometimes politically relevant - groups of Changelings dedicated to murdering fetches, taming hobgoblins, negotiating with the Fae, or whatever. Although I will say Entitlements-as-personal-supernatural-bargains definitely matches the word better, and is more in line with what "titles" eventually came to mean with regard to the Fae.
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Nov 29, 2018 09:53
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Loomer posted:Don't be absurd. Just go and unlock the immortality quest chain and then become a satanist to destroy your enemies with black magic like all true rulers. In retrospect, knowing your Great Work, assuming you didn't play CK2 was a poor decision. Cardiovorax - Your opinion was my own after reading the nMage 1E core book. I think the people giving you different "readings" of the Atlantis myth and what it means for mages are giving you what is basically the official party line now, further in the game's life. They really did pivot away from "Atlantis was an actual time and place and it ruled let's reclaim it's lost glory!" Some of that was metaphysical (some of the later books really heavily play up the "the past is the future so let's build Atlantis!") and a lot of it was political, actually. When you have a fully fleshed out ideology and praxis for the Silver Ladder, it's easier to see how nMage can be a forward thinking, dynamic game. A more detailed view of the Seers also works to this end, because knowing more about the enemies of progress shows you a bit what progress is and looks like. Even the most backwards looking mage groups, like the Mysterium, have this inclination towards change and hope built into them, because the writers told us more about what they're hoarding magical secrets for. I'm not trying to argue with you or anything, I'm just trying to point out the difference of opinions here might be a result of some people sticking with the game line after it evolved to deal with some of your totally valid and real criticisms. But also like, if oMage is your cup of tea that's dope too! oMage also rules.
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Nov 29, 2018 18:32
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Hey Cardiovorax, I know you're tired of this poo poo, but IMO the answer to what I read as your implicit question of "how can I make the Exarchs make sense in terms of human motivation" is something like "eh, don't worry about it, make the Seers make sense in terms of human motivation." Like you said, you can grock what the Wyrm is in oWoD, right? So treat the Exarchs like that. Maybe they're literally just supernatural symbols of power - I mean, they are those things, and anything they are more than that is firmly speculative, so just stop there. As for the whole good intentions / understandable motivations leading to moral disaster, put that onto their servants. Have individual Seers be the ones who, long ago, made a bargain with Literally Xenophobia for a decent, understandable reason. In a way, this is a bit like if we were nerding out about trying to understand the volition of the dark side of the force in star wars. The force seems to be somewhat sentient, sure! The dark side has tendencies to corrupt, sure! But The Emperor is a more compelling villain than "the dark side" and Darth Vader a much, much more compelling villain than The Emperor. We need to know enough about the dark side to understand how and why the two human villains did the things they did, but I'm not sure what this philosophical fuckery is going to add to a game. Having said all that, I find this fun philosophical fuckery, and mage (both games!) seems designed to engender that kind of fuckery, so that's why people are being exhausting about all this. But like, yeah, recognizable human motivations rule, so if you want to ascribe them to the Exarchs themselves go for it, but also consider just saving that for the Seers and considering the Exarchs beyond kenning / actually just symbols. okay so now let's talk about who the oracles were/are/will be
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Nov 30, 2018 06:35
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joining the free council: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=acT_PSAZ7BQ
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Nov 30, 2018 07:50
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The Paths, IMO, are closer to the oMage Traditions. A Moros can fit either of the Euthanatos archetypes you mentioned. Your Path in nMage defines some of your overriding magical obsessions, your way of doing magic, and your way of seeing magic. Orders are more political. They can also affect your magic, especially your overriding magical obsessions, because they have political philosophies that are important to them. If Paths are about how you do magic, Orders are about why you do magic. The caste structure thing is a tiny bit true, in that the Pentacle thinks it's building new (or old! time shenanigans) Atlantis and the various Orders will have different political roles in their ideal utopian everyone-is-a-mage society. But again the 1E corebook, IMO, overdid it with the Atlantis stuff - it seemed to imply the Orders were actual castes from actual Atlantis that survived to this day. The various Order books, as mentioned, made it clear that they are historically created human societies that came together and decided they had enough beliefs in common to be (usually) able to work together. Kind of like, I dunno, the Council of Nicaea taking a whole bunch of groups of people who liked that Jesus fella and turning them into a church.
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Nov 30, 2018 17:24
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Also worth noting is that The Corpus Author, the ascended founder of the Mysterium, is very goddamn cool & good, but her order is still a distant second place to a tie between the Silver Ladder and the Free Council, and that the other Orders can go gently caress themselves. I missed out on Harry Potter for kind of silly reasons, but I still ended up seeing a fair number of the movies with friends. The one movie I saw on my own was the third, because I loving love Alfonso Cuarón, and I got bored during it and looked up on the HP wiki why there was an evil house. Anyway, I got into the history and found the houses were founded based on who they thought should be taught magic - Gryffandor thought the brave should, Ravenclaw thought the wise should, etc. Hufflepuff? They thought anyone who wanted to learn magic should be taught it. Which means, due to my ideologically commitment to the Silver Ladder, I'm a diehard Hufflepuff supporter despite having seen only like four of the movies and read none of the books. I've argued this to people in bars. To women in bars. I've referenced nMage to explain where my ideological support comes from. I did not go home with any of them. I regret nothing. Digital Osmosis fucked around with this message at 17:34 on Nov 30, 2018 |
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Nov 30, 2018 17:29
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so uh, do you not believe that magic is humanity's birthright? ban this seer
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Nov 30, 2018 22:40
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LGD posted:If you have the opportunity, check out the off-Broadway comedy "PUFFS" That show was the reason I had that conversation at that bar that time! I am in NYC, but like I said I'm not enough of a Harry Potter fan to think it's worth it. Even off-Broadway shows are pretty loving expensive. I'm ideologically committed to the Hufflepuff cause, but not that much
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Dec 1, 2018 00:10
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I know part of their deal is that they're super disorganized, but I wish there were more examples of Crone cosmology in nVampire, it seems like it could be a rich area to explore. Other nVampire cosmologies are pretty Christian - the Sanctum, I think, is "actually just Christianity but we're evil" and the Ordo's cosmology is "I dunno, Christianity I guess? now let me tell you about this crazy blood alchemy I've been up to." From what I've been told, Beast has a clear non-woof non-mage cosmology, and also from what I've been told it should be avoided as much as possible. Changeling cosmology is pretty focused on Fae poo poo, out of necessity. If you're a Changeling with the wisdom and clarity to ponder the lower depths and you do that instead of pondering the hedge, you're going to piss off most of your support structure. Seems like Changelings only give a gently caress about wider cosmologies when they run into Mages and are like "oh you guys know about arcadia too? wait, what?" Demon has less of a cosmology than you'd expect, and that's awesome. Geist has a cosmology (chthonology?) but I don't know enough about it to be say anything. I can't remember if Mummy has one too, because I was too annoyed at Mummy for using weird 1.5 edition rules to give it a fair shot. In general I think a lot of the reasons Mage gets the higher level view is that mages stick their noses in a bunch of stuff they probably shouldn't, and also have the widest toolset. They're the only splat that can interact with the majority of the weird metaphysical realms, most have one they specialize in. Mages are also predisposed to naval gazing. Like, what happens if you throw a devote follower of the Crone into the hedge? He'd probably think it was loving metal and cool and wonder if the Crone works in mysterious ways. What happens if a Geist slips past the gauntlet? She might wonder where spirits go when they die. In general, the other splats are too busy doing their own poo poo to stop and try and categorize, order, and understand how the various realms they have little to no access to interact. On the other hand, categorizing, ordering, and (failing to) understand stuff is the poo poo that mages are busy doing. Well, that and vicious guerrilla warfare for highfalutin philosophies
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Dec 1, 2018 07:45
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Cardiovorax posted:The artist could've just not been so much of arse Don't hang out with many artists, eh?
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Dec 1, 2018 17:40
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I used to write coverage, basically hollywood talk for book report on scripts, and got passed a lot of horror scripts. To me having an answer can go one way or the other, but having consistency was the most important thing. If the writer had clearly thought through the rules by which the monster worked, and conveyed them either through the text or the subtext, it usually worked for me. I'd say in general I'd err on the side of consistency and no explanation, but either not having an explanation or over-explaining things can be a problem. Too many bad random horror scripts I read were just like "It's idk a demon?" and that combined with their inconstancy made them hard to be really suspenseful, it felt like the writer was making it up as they went along. On the other hand I read a great script where the monster's rules were consistent and at the end they offered an explanation - that the monsters were literal Angels, and that God was probably going to send more because he was loving fed up with us. That was a great closing gut punch! It re-contextualized some of the movie and suggested further, more existential horrors. The down side of offering an explanation is, IMO, best exemplified by Psycho, where there's a hilariously needless scene where a Freudian psychiatrist comes in and is like "oh Bateman's mom held him too much so now he's a serial killer" or whatever. If having an explanation helps the writer come up with and convey consistent rules for how the monster works, then it's a good thing. But if the monster is consistent already, explanations, IMO, can go either way. The monster from It Follows is consistent as gently caress, and terrifying, and I think an explanation would take something away from that movie (because of the themes it taps into around universal adolescent fear of sexuality.) The monster from Friday the 13th is consistent as gently caress, and kinda goofy kinda scary, and I think removing the explanation would take away from that movie (because of the themes the it taps into around specific adolescent cruelty.)
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Dec 1, 2018 20:11
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