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Yeah, Siembieda goes out of his way to make the Coalition cartoonishly, illogically evil--mandatory illiteracy in a technological workforce! Skulls everywhere skulls 40K prices are so high because Siembieda took all the skulls. I think it was really reading the ghost descriptions in the Conversion book ("your trash can be animated by a hostile spirit that can proceed to gently caress your weak SDC body up with it") that made me think the Coalition might have a point about the supernatural being scary...but the Coalition has no capabilities to fight ghosts and emphatically murders anything they encounter that can. And Siembieda keeps writing them as progressively sympathetic. We started out with Erin Tarn condemning their generic authoritarianism in equally generic terms and now we're getting to the wheedling 'but maaaaybe they have a poiiiiint' 'prosek did nothing wroooooong' and they get to crush egalitarian and cosmopolitan and very magically talented Tolkeen because <reasons> With so many parts of the world still undeveloped (India? Most of Africa not that I want to encourage them to dip into that well again) they decided that what they needed was more goddamn Coalition poo poo. Rifts is funny in some ways because it's a major Earth-centered gameline set in the US midwest instead of one of the coasts or an 'exotic locale' like London or Paris. It's just that they decided to keep that stereotype of being bland and milquetoast going strong I guess.
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# ¿ Feb 14, 2025 02:24 |
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Alien Rope Burn posted:
The Republic of Japan made various cellphone functions illegal as 'cyberoid' mods for unknown reasons but since they don't ban Erin Tarn's books they're Good Guys. That's more specific than the Coalition's ban which just seems to assume you would know what cybernetics are illegal in a militarized frontier society. More importantly, a lot of the psionic/magical systems in the game can only be sensed by other psionics or magic, with the exception of a few abilities like Dog Boys have. This has always crippled the ability of the CS to combat the invisible (but very common!) elements of the supernatural that surround them and now they just plain have 'systems' because screw you PCs for exploiting an obvious weakness. If the laws are "about the same" as the 21st century US then some pretty shifty authoritarian poo poo is legal though I can't imagine the Coalition smiling on the gays. occamsnailfile fucked around with this message at 20:40 on May 5, 2017 |
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Alien Rope Burn posted:
You know, with all these flying vehicles piloted by illiterates, the Coalition must have some really, really rear end-kicking air traffic control. Also run by illiterates.
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He also tried to introduce more guns/abilities that did things besides straight damage. A lot of them were OP (or sorta depending on what you were fighting) and Palladium's inconsistency about saves and lack of anything remotely like consistent nomenclature meant that some of the rules were unclear, but they were at least an option besides "roll to hit, roll some piddly damage." And spacewarping capybaras and time-traveling Incan mummies and other craziness. The craziness was something I liked (still like) about Rifts and having less of that (like, an entire book about Juicers, then an entire book about moar Coalition poo poo) makes the line less vibrant. I know Carella worked on Juicer Uprising but it was still kind of a step down from SA 2, though he did some good content work for it.
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You know the thing that bothers me, the thing that's missing from the various Coalition security apparatus, is IT security. I realize when this book came out that the internet was barely a thing for most people but it did exist, and "computer hacking" had been a risk long before that. With threats like ARCHIE 3 out there that seems like another big blind spot in their security right after "most magic stuff" and a missed opportunity for another lovely OCC that claims to be a one-trick pony but really is a no-trick pony that only 13% of characters can qualify for.
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Also living in the Burbs sounds awful but living in ICE detention centers is in some ways worse--you're basically in prison, outside contact and visitation (even by lawyers) is highly restricted, and they move people around at random from center to center with no notification of the prisoner or their families. Siembieda at this point has a queue of 'supremely evil' beings that 'love to torture and sadistically hunt down lesser beings' but he constantly demonstrates a lack of understanding of real evil.
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So now that we've met the Howling Commandos, when do we meet Nick Fury? I would say 'fascist Nick Fury' but I'm not sure how much of a difference there is. Seriously though that's a lot of ![]() Also the rigidly enforced nuclear gender roles are strange--dogs aren't that dimorphic though the book seems to be trying to avoid admitting that not all dogs are boys. In a better book they might admit it says a lot more about the slavemasters than it does the slaves but that is not the Rifts way.
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The Xiticix killer disappoints me just because it isn't a giant interdimensional parasitic wasp. But I guess someone did a cool painting and Kev had to give it stats.
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It's true, drugs in Rifts can turn you into a supernatural being! ![]() Also when I saw that there were two female science NPCs I was waiting for one of them to be a rebellious maternal figure who actually came to care for the
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SirPhoebos posted:One idea is that Amanda Santiago has been doing this for a while, and the first generation of Bradford-clones are coming of age. The PCs travel from town to town, and in each town they encounter a young adult of exceptional abilities that look identical but have radically different personalities. That's fair enough I guess. The whole thing just makes me mentally replace any other images of Bradford with Krieger which is...not far off the mark.
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Covok posted:Spyro is good and fun and should get a PS4 remaster like Crash is getting. Spyro is alas deep in the grip of the Skylander money-printing machine and we'll never see another game in that vein not connected to a series of overpriced landfill-bound figures. Related to thread: Really Siembieda? Now is when you want to talk about credits being insane? I always just pretended they were some pre-Rifts banking system carried forward that people were still sort of willing to trust because worrying about currency conversion was well beyond uninteresting and not what the game was about. I mean it did get steadily more and more ridiculous, especially when products like Phase World finally acknowledged the problem, but among the many inconsistencies of the setting, that's the one he chooses to address?
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MJ12 posted:You know what would be cool if you were doing a more coherently planned out RIFTS with similar concepts (Mega-Damage et al)? Make 'money' come in the form of food, water, power, and ammo. Especially Mega-Damage ammo. Kinda like Metro 2033. So a gun might be worth like, 20 E-Clips or whatever and places with water purifiers and powerplants can literally print money, which is why the Coalition is so powerful relatively speaking-it has a lot of infrastructure and thus can literally print the poo poo that most places consider valuable trade goods. I would play this Fallout mod so hard
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It's also a game that goes "what if all the batshit crazy urban legends and conspiracy theories were true" and works from how scary that would be. Unknown Armies is very much a response and critique to World of Darkness stuff, in that all of its horror originates from humanity. No supernatural monsters required. "You did it."
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The Cactus People in New West are one of the best things in that book so far--which is damning with faint praise but they're just peaceful, odd-looking planties with blood that can power dark rituals and doesn't spoil. That last is a fantastic hook that I am stealing for something else later.
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Darwinism posted:I'm sure this has been asked before but... how do people actually play Rifts? Tons of houserules to make things sort of work, or just completely straight-faced like the rules make sense? In my high-school experience, using the bones of the system (roll d20 to hit, add your cheaty attribute bonii) while ignoring a lot of the additional rules about burst fire that made no sense and probably using the missile rules from Robotech because we knew where in the book to even find those. Our group didn't have a lot of magic-user players so the full brokenness of spells wasn't made clear. Also, all our Rifts games tended to fall apart after a few sessions. I mean, a lot of our games did that, we were just teenagers screwing around mostly.
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At 6.1 million credits for the war horse you might as well just plate it with solid gold and also put sign on it saying "do not steal."
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chiasaur11 posted:If I remember right, it wasn't the case for MD Geist. The head of the company who brought it over just really liked it for some reason. Helped fund a sequel and everything. Eva shocked everyone by becoming the hit that it was--before it was made, execs in production meetings hated the lanky mecha designs, saying "those will never sell toys!" for instance. Anime execs barely even knew what their own market wanted (except T&A I guess), the US market was a baffling annoyance that nonetheless produced a few dollars. Also with regards to anime pricing in Japan as well as the US: Japan has pretty strict laws about the sale of used items and to some lesser degree a cultural distaste for used things. I mean there's a major used book chain, Book Off, which achieved major success by developing a machine that would gently 'polish' the edges of used books to remove the outermost yellowed layer on the pages and make them look new again. Selling used DVDs and BR discs is, if not illegal, heavily restricted so you either buy new or buy nothing. The US obviously isn't like this and the overpricing of anime hobbled the market for a long time and the expenses of translation continue to limit what kind of series are brought over. Fanslations don't help with this since a niche-market series is even more unlikely to get an official release if there's a free translation available which becomes a vicious cycle. Companies bring over the blandest big-name shonen crap because it is the easiest to sell, fans translate more interesting but neglected offerings, companies refuse to take a risk (which they often refused anyway, or pushed to the back of the schedule) and so a series never reaches the US officially so fan markets don't develop as strongly and-- I mean to some degree, as one of those people who doesn't like most anime/manga, I don't care. But it seems silly how much money is just left on the table. Meanwhile, in the Spirit West, we have the third time Rifts has touched upon a real world religion, and the third time it's been immediately done extremely badly. I actually think religion can be an interesting topic in fantasy/SF media, but it's just usually not handled with any grace or care. This is annoying when it's the obvious Evil Pope in the latest Final Fantasy game, but when dealing with religions that have living practitioners, even more care is advised. I imagine this is why many books about even the modern era just plain ignore it--for instance SR doesn't have any Christians does it? Even if we assume that current trends towards nonaffiliation continue there should still be some mainline Protestants left. But there are Ghost Dancers! It sticks out in particular when all the magic minorities have "religion" but the "normal" people don't.
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I've seen some of that "uncooperative" prisoner talk before, in a middle school history book about African cultures. It didn't want to say that some of them took slaves, but you know, they totally took slaves. Including sex slaves. It also didn't want to say that the coming of Islam radically altered the relationship between master and slave in some of these cases, setting out rules about treatment and guidelines for freedom upon conversion because it didn't want to talk nice about Islam. That book was poo poo and had similar problems to what Spirit West is doing here, in trying to distill a large and varied continent into a single volume while pussyfooting over the genuine issues that existed within those cultures. I think one reason for doing that is that some folks will read into any less than utopian depiction and look for reasons to condemn other cultures as inferior and deserving of conquest but I don't think glossing over the faults of history is ultimately productive. There's also the fact that most pre-industrial cultures, including European, were pretty brutal and harsh in their own ways, but we don't realize the extent to which Western culture was identical to those it colonized because we live with the modernized version now.
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This spirit world business in Rifts completely messes with Rifts' cosmology (such as it was) and seems like somebody was reading an old Manual of the Planes that still referred to the "Happy Hunting Ground." I mean Rifts has long acknowledge the existence of some form of soul, but not really discussed specifics of afterlife other than for people who get soul-devoured, and thus presumably don't have one. "Technology doesn't work there" --so like, bow and arrow? How do humans hunt the spiritually possessed imported game? Do you just have the shaman tie a couple feathers on something and say a cryptic prayer so you can shoot your gun? Would that offend the extremely-sensitive spirits? Really these 'spirits' are wound up way too tight and humans are probably better off staying out of their reach.
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Nessus posted:It's Monster Hunter time. Palico Monster Hunter has bowguns. ![]()
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"Eight foot tall acid-spitting killing machine who can chew through metal, survive the loss of multiple limbs and even place itself into suspended animation for centuries" sounds more like a Tyranid than a human and yet people say female space marines "aren't realistic." It's like people flipping out over the idea of a brown hobbit. I once tried to play in a Deathwatch game and the GM really didn't want female space marines for reasons similar to JcDent but he was willing to allow me to be an attached Sister. The only thing was to make a Sister you had to use Dark Heresy rules and then spend like 10,000 XP or something to try and make a near-equivalent. This meant I was running a Sister Celestia (or something, I really don't recall the title) who should have been running a monastery or leading a battle force alongside run-of-the-mill marines and I was underpowered despite the aforementioned 10K XP. Some of that might have been my building choices but I tried to go for effective-seeming power combinations--ultimately DH stuff just doesn't scale well to Deathwatch and I don't recommend ever trying to do it. The 40K universe has some shreds of good ideas in it that twenty some years of fanboys-turned-writers have worked hard to ruin, and now the Space Marines have the Batman problem where they have to be "on" all the time and can't deviate from "archetypal" character.
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ZorajitZorajit posted:I would ask, where would you have come down on if the GM had addressed this like: "You can absolutely be a female Space Marine. But a woman who becomes a Space Marine is an eight foot tall, acid-spitting killing machine, unlikely to have any secondary sexual dimorphism beyond being named 'Susan'." and/or "Your character will be addressed as 'Brother' because 'Brother' is the honorific applied to a Space Marine." This is more or less how I would play a female space marine in general because it's how space marines are often presented. "Battle Brother" would be fine even, sadly Battle Sister doesn't have alliteration going for it. I can't speak for all players of course, and I wasn't bent out of shape over the game itself--I actually like the Sisters and so playing one wasn't an unpleasant thing, except that the rules didn't support mixing them well.
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My first encounter with the word "nunnehi" was "things from oChangeling that were always banned for being OP I guess. I don't know, I never got too far into Changeling stuff. The whole spirits section is again Rifts presenting an overpowered horde of creatures, but at least this time they aren't psycho killers who love to murder, they just hate iphones and wypipo with a blinding but ~*mysterious*~ fury. Also Degenesis sounds kind of interesting or at least different from a lot of other settings, but the writing snippets from the book are really dryly written, which in combination with the graphic-designer-gone-mad aesthetic seems like it'd make the actual book a chore to read.
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unseenlibrarian posted:
The thing I remember most about T&T was that it had a digest-sized rulebook way back in the 80s before games did that, it offered at least a few solo adventures using the system, and some rando dude decided he was going to infringe the poo poo out of their copyrights for no sane reason I ever heard of and kept publishing their materials as his own despite repeated lawsuits and basically said he was never going to stop. He may be doing it to this day, I have no idea. Anyway though I never even saw a copy of MS&PE so this should be interesting.
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Night10194 posted:Chaos Dwarfs legit rule. They're a very unique sort of Chaos character and their specific God is a neat mystery that really doesn't fit any of the other Dark Gods. So what are chaos dwarfs that makes them different from regular chaos things? I vaguely recall the minis having kind of a Babylonian look with beards in ringlets and stuff but that's all.
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Hey so Humble Bundle is doing WFRP. Is this all the good stuff that's been reviewed in the thread?
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Definitely sounds like the first game, down to the Glaive being able to do one thing: Damage, and then the Nano is able to do just as much, and ignore armor, and probably not have to roll to hit (I don't know how the Onslaught power works, but 'ignores armor' abilities didn't usually have to hit IIRC) though the 'doesn't work on things without minds' aspect can actually be limiting given the number of lumbering ancient constructs still carrying out their last orders in Numenera. The Glaive's only cool abilities come from their 'randomly rolled we promise' magical items that make up for their complete skill deficiency and also have a ranged attack. The Jack has a little more potential within the game's stated purpose of exploration but still gains most of their ability from their equipment, and most cyphers are limited-use--they either have a set number of charges or they burn out on a particular roll like 1 on d20. Of course, these are just the beginning characters, the disparity will grow over time. Also guess which stat Glaives have to spend to power their abilities? The one that takes damage first.
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The other thing that irks me about the cube is that it looks like it'd be a huge bitch to store. It's wider and taller than normal books since it has to contain all that other junk--I already hate RPG books that feel they need to be a special size or print horizontally or some other physical gimmick and this one is just bloated. eta: I guess how could he not look like that, really.
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unseenlibrarian posted:I'm not sure 'Shady vaguely supernatural Snake Oil salesman from a low budget Western' is the look you should go for when pitching a 300 dollar RPG in a box. I'm not saying it's the right choice, I am just terminally unsurprised.
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I am in the camp that generally hates fear/insanity/morality systems (and especially anti-fear systems that excuse PCs from adverse mental effects) and yet I have met so many players whose pride and level of identification with their character is such that they take it as a personal affront if their brave murderhobo should ever quail in the face of a thousand screaming demons erupting from a weeping wound in the Earth. The problem with having a system to try and halt that bullshit is that the system tends to be overly punitive and arbitrary, and still doesn't make those people into interesting players. It just makes sullen, resentful monosyllabic responses or dumb fishmalk 'insanity' antics. Unknown Armies at least came closest, since while being overly fiddly it wasn't just a punishment for reacting like a human, and divided psychological trauma into categories based on the problems encountered. Eta: Also having adult conversations at the start of a game about "no this IS the World of Darkness and it's okay to act afraid" are actually helpful in some cases, since some of the folks mentioned above have been censured by bad groups in the past.
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unseenlibrarian posted:On that note, Winter Tide s free on Tor.com in ebook form for the next 48 hours, and the elevator pitch is essentially 'survivors of the Innsmouth raid teams up with an FBI agent to investigate the possibility of Russians using Waite-style body-switching sorcery.' Quoting this because this book is great and so is the precursor story The Litany of Earth as a counterpoint to Lovecraft's horror--it has a lot of human-centric foibles and an acceptance of cosmic insignificance that isn't nihilistic. The basic premise follows the last Deep One survivors of the Innsmouth raid, after years of internment by the US government. Also I can understand being worn out with Lovecraft stuff. There are some modern collections of things written with his toys that are pretty good, but more than that, there are modern horror authors who try to address some of that existential dread and do so in more convincing ways to a modern reader who ain't scared that Earth is a tiny little speck about the size of Mickey Rooney. Thomas Ligotti and Laird Barron are two such.
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Alien Rope Burn posted:
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The picture of the Novaspawn is like, I mean, I would have trouble believing that isn't a painted-over electron microscope photo of a microscopic organism of some kind with maybe some crystals added onto it. In the thumbnail the resemblance is really inescapable to me. I suppose that could be deliberate as everything big comes around to the small again or whatever and maybe Novaspawn are just the bacteria of another, higher, truly large ecosystem-- I got nothing. Huge, planet-devouring lifeforms are a sci-fi staple though and I'm not surprised one turned up in the AA. Otherwise though this is a very lame monster manual.
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I do always appreciate a powerful and dangerous enemy who is defeated with resources the heroes believably put together, without needing the next level of Saiyan transformation or plot device.
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Nessus posted:Niven and Doc Smith are the big sci-fi names I can think of who managed to actually nail "aliens as characters" - relatable, interesting, fully realized as characters but informed by their alien-ness. Maybe once we're done here I'll do GURPS Lensman. (Now THAT one has some issues, even if it's more one big, glaring problem rather than a lot of little edge weirdnesses that accumulate. e: Two, actually, on reflection.) Cherryh and LeGuin are two others who are good with aliens as characters, though their approach is rather different. I've never actually read a Lensman novel though I plan to read at least the first one eventually--but any super special magic space knight order that specifically excludes women for 1940s reasons has eroded a lot of my interest out of the gate. Reading a review of that universe through the GURPS lens (as such) could be interesting.
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Yeah Niven isn't like, a bastion of enlightenment or anything but I never got the impression that the Kzinti were intended to be a model for humanity to follow--they were just supposed to be alien. Granted, a lot of SF authors presented alien gender relations as some reaction to or magnification of 50s nuclear family norms rather than something that felt organic on its own, but I don't think the Kzinti are the worst in this regard either. You're meant to feel a bit disgusted by the idea, and when Chmee the Kzin finds the sentient females he's...not upset by their existence at all. His identity does not depend on the subjugation of females. It has been a long time since I read the books proper though.
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JcDent posted:I guess it's kneejerk backlash to scifi sexism to asume that some sexist alien race in a book is, in fact, author's True View on Women. There is definitely an unfortunate prevalence of alien races (and fantasy races) who are presented as some variation on Extreme Patriarchy, enough that when taken in aggregate, it does sorta feel like SFdom as a whole is trying to suggest something about the nature of gender relations. poo poo like the Ferengi, for instance--females are property and not even allowed to wear clothes? Yeah okay Star Trek writers, way to pander to the absolute worst elements of your fanbase. I don't care what they 'intended' to do with that, it comes off really badly. The book you're thinking of is the Algebraist and it also involves aliens who have either no gender or basically no dimorphism since they're a spawning species that releases essentially tadpoles into the wild and then hunts the surviving adolescents for sport until they reach adulthood. Once in adulthood they're very peaceful and largely uninterested hierarchy, wealth, territory, or any of the other things that the oppressive human government wants. They're not being presented as a utopian alternative to the human government, but they certainly aren't worse. I don't think the AI were necessarily good and noble either, they seemed to be present more to show how ineffective authoritarian suppression ultimately is.
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Scavenger slimes sound like an attempt at a sci-fi gelatinous cube that actually manages to make less sense than the original.
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Prism posted:
I actually like the old art better so I'm only quoting that. I mean it's not super-evocative but the fifth ed one just looks lumpy. Really though the Leucrotta seems to be the inspiration for like half of Siembieda's monster ideas across all Palladium games--"This monster is a complete rear end in a top hat and likes to hurt and torture people and has a picture we drew by mashing together several reference photos." Also they're pretty dangerous to low-level PCs in Nethack, as noted, enough that some folks consider them a genocide candidate if you find an early scroll. Meanwhile, seconding the endorsement of the Urog as kind of fun actually. I mean you're perfectly able to use them as more XP fodder for PCs but the fact that they're just lazyass irritable crystal sloth-slugs makes them cool. Also they don't split into multiple parts or 'something something nanotech'. The writeup doesn't make them sound super-friendly either but I feel like a Void Hag could be a cool PC Patron--you take your marching orders from an angry space grandma with a strict dress code. occamsnailfile fucked around with this message at 15:05 on Nov 23, 2017 |
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# ¿ Feb 14, 2025 02:24 |
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At this point there's a whole lot of urban fantasy fiction that has vampires or other supernaturals as an accepted part of life, so the WoDs trying to keep up the pretense of secrecy actually manages to set them apart. A little bit. A vampire book that explored the difficulties of maintaining the Masquerade in the current era and different factions/age group responses to that would be an interesting idea, though it might require some degree of metaplot or at least heavy GM suggestion as to 'what would happen if'? I'm usually pretty apathetic towards Vampire but they have the least justification for continuing to exist and the weakest supernatural camouflage and the whole group struggling with being outed and society's response to that would interest me. A lot of the urban fantasy mentioned above generally has the open supernatural elements as an accepted thing, there isn't as much that explores the moment of revelation and its immediate impact. Also weren't the Sabbat originally just anarchs back in the medieval period who were really sick of eternal domination and blood-bond enslavement by their elders? I don't remember when the Vinculum was developed but aside from being a bit monstrous it was made as a way of breaking supernatural domination, and that isn't so unsympathetic. I was never clear how they went from bourgeoisie revolutionaries to grindhouse murder cult, especially since it's Elder vampires who were always portrayed as having lost their humanity.
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