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CAPT. Rainbowbeard posted:So... how did the werewolfs gently caress things up? That sounds like a God Problem. The Garou decided that they were Gaia's chosen above all other Changing Breeds and every other race should share their secrets with them, starting with the Gurahl (werebears) who knew how to bring somebody back to life if they hadn't died too long ago. The bears told the woofs 'uh, no, you're really not ready for it' so the woofs started genociding the other Changing Breeds who wouldn't play ball. This included Bastet (cats), Ratkin (er, rats) and Mokole' (gators/crocodiles/big lizards). The problem is the Garou knew how to fight in packs and the others didn't so they were able to faceroll the other breeds. The problem was Gaia gave a job to each of the Breeds - Ratkin were supposed to mind humanity, Mokole' remembered things, Bastet... well, they're cats so they do whatever they want more or less - so now with the other breeds severely depleted to say the least (other breeds went totally extinct) the woofs now have to do all their jobs too and they're really bad at it. Things have been steadily spiraling out of control since. And that's the War of Rage! (The first one.)
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Jul 18, 2020 01:48
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In addition to the War of Rage that Dawgstar covered, here was the Imperigum. Basically the Garou decided that humanity wasn’t very useful and enslaved everyone to keep them as breeding stock. Humanity is now collectively traumatized by the event, which is why seeing a werewolf causes delirium. So basically a supernaturally enforced masquerade that prevents them from working with humans.
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Jul 18, 2020 17:31
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Werewolves are only good at violence, and all of their problems are those that can't be solved by killing people.
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Jul 18, 2020 19:33
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Honestly, things were always messed up. Intelligent creatures didn't want to live like animals and eat their meat raw, so the ultimate problem with the Golden Age the Garou look back to is that nobody actually wanted to live in it. They didn't really cause that, but they have pretty conclusively failed to realize it or deal with it for the past ever.
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Jul 18, 2020 19:49
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Edmund Lava posted:In addition to the War of Rage that Dawgstar covered, here was the Imperigum. Basically the Garou decided that humanity wasn’t very useful and enslaved everyone to keep them as breeding stock. Humanity is now collectively traumatized by the event, which is why seeing a werewolf causes delirium. and because WoD prehistory is fuzzy, there were a bunch of other events happening at the same time. Vampires founded the first city, Set (a demon/spirit/mage became a vampire as well to beat his brother Osiris) founds his cult and starts hunting the other egyptian gods chosen (these gods are also demons/spirits/mages in some combination) which means that while the war of Rage is going on, set is using it as a cover to help kill the egyptian changers, while also corrupting some of them to help make his cult, which he then uses to run the werewolves out of North Africa altogether. Bear didn't just refuse to teach the woofs how to resurrect the dead, he taught magic to humans and created the first mages so they could rebel against their enslavement by woofs and vampires. It is unclear if this happens before or after the War of Rage begins - werewolves claim it as justification for fighting bear, most shifters claim it was a response to the war, and the Bears (who would remember) say it's in the past and the truth wouldn't do anyone any good because Shifters have to move on and fix things. That's if you can wake one up and get them to talk to you, of course. Now that humans have magic they start fighting back against the spirit world, and help cause an event called the sundering that shatters the world as it was (maybe pangaea, maybe just the reality were the supernal realms and mortal realms were the same). This may or may not happen at the same time as the elemental changlings are fighting their war against fire because fire taught people how to craft, and humans immediately began to turn other elemental changelings into things like tools. This especially pisses off the earth changelings, who cause a huge earthquake that separates the continents and is MAYBE the quake that destroys the first city (where vampires ruled over humans as their kings). Also Set is fighting Osiris, and a whole bunch of REALLY dumb stuff happens involving Golconda vampires that I'm not going to get into, but at the end of it the sundering happens, Set kills Osiris but Osiris death splits his soul into millions of fragments (along with his followers) that become the basis for Mummies, arguably the most powerful supernaturals in WoD. The also zoop and zoom in pieces across the spirit world, which might be the cause of the sundering more than human magic, and does some flim flam so now human mages have to bond with some free-floating magic juice thing called an avatar (it's like an ideal given form, but totally not a changeling) in order to do magic. The elemental changelings gently caress each other up so bad almost all of them go to sleep. The Bears are so saddened by all the death, carnage, chaos and destruction that they all go to sleep. The Changing breed survivors go to places where the wolves won't go (which is my Mokolai, the were-lizards dudes, are found mostly in the pacific island and Werecats are mostly in africa and werecrows are mostly in the America's etc.). Werewolves pat themselves on the back for a job well done and allow their gently caress up to devastate the world for a few millenia. With all these things loving up and going to sleep, and all this damage being done to the spirit world, no one notices that hell (a giant ball thingy in the middle of the lands of the dead that is spiritually linked to the Lasombra) has developed a couple of holes and Demons start to come out to play after being mostly trapped for centuries. Several of the Earthbound (demons who never went to hell, but bound themselves to the Earth as they fell and are much more powerful than their counterparts but can be defeated by destroying whatever their bound to) wake up and start making deals and pacts, most notable the Tzimisce vampires make a deal with Kupala to develop one of the earliest forms of Vampiric magic. The Tremere don't happen until the dark ages when a group of mages tries to make themselves immortal by mixing magic and vitae and embrace themselves, but several other clans already have magic in one form or another by that time. All of this is connected, but you don't actually know what causes what because the prehistory timeline is intentionally shaky.
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Jul 18, 2020 22:10
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I've always found it best to play by the lens of whatever game you were running. Engaging with the game's mythology should be done as little or as much as you want, and dropping another game's (or more) can just overload things. If you're in a woof game, vampires are just possessed by Leech-spirits. If you're in a vampire game, werewolves are psychotic killing machines who mostly live in the woods (which is actually a constant across all game lines). Unless you really want to, which is fine, don't worry about Gaia and Banes and whatever else because unless your vampire game is very focused on werewolf lore it's probably not going to come up anyway. Heck, in a Vampire game vampire lore might not come up much anyway. (And the dirty secret is they were never written to be compatible. If you squint and shove some square pegs into round holes you can make it work in some cases, but that's a lot of hassle.)
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Jul 19, 2020 00:59
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It’s suggested that the war of rage (all 3, Werewolve’s only did the second and third) the Impergium, etc. were the physical manifestation of the spiritual rot I discussed earlier. One of the great tragedies of being a werewolf is that as a servant of Gaia you represent all 3 factions and therefore you are irrevocably stamped by the Wyrm (Rage the powerstat is, itself, potentially a piece of the Wyrm’s destructive urge at the very core of who you are.) As reality is bent at the foundational level so is everything that is a part of that reality thusly bent.
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Jul 20, 2020 21:41
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Captain Monkey posted:It’s suggested that the war of rage (all 3, Werewolve’s only did the second and third) the Impergium, etc. were the physical manifestation of the spiritual rot I discussed earlier. It's also suggested that everything bad that's happened has been a part of the weavers attempt to control everything (which is it's nature) and the general inability of the other two parts of the triumvirate to do their drat jobs. When the Wyrm was locked away Gaia should have freed it (by creating new outlets for the Wyrm) but instead she continued to create new forms of life, which the weaver and wyrm would then corrupt to their purposes. It's highly suggested in the End Times book that Gaia is a big potential villain and may have been the first one to go mad with the power of creation, and the other two have just been unable to actually stamp her down. The actual werewolf end times book has a different scenario for each "this was the real villain all along" with an explanation as to how they were responsible for all the corruption, which helps explain why everything is so fuzzy and up to interpretation.
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Jul 20, 2020 21:47
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On a whim I re-installed with Bloodlines with the patch that came out in June and wesp5 never fails to impress. The tutorial area alone looks a lot better now, and they even restored a line from Nines during the fledgling's trial.
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Jul 22, 2020 00:30
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I echo the sentiment that the oWoD games are irreconcilable. If you’re playing VTM, Vampires are cursed by God and woofs are just savage woodland monsters. If you’re playing werewolf, leeches are foul spawn of the Wyrm, and woofs are noble but tragic doomed heroes. If you’re playing mage, vamps and woofs are strange atavistic throwbacks hiding in a wierd loophole of consensual reality, and sure, I guess the Triat is a real simple way of looking at the universe for children.
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Jul 22, 2020 23:18
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TheCenturion posted:I echo the sentiment that the oWoD games are irreconcilable. If you’re playing VTM, Vampires are cursed by God and woofs are just savage woodland monsters. If you’re playing werewolf, leeches are foul spawn of the Wyrm, and woofs are noble but tragic doomed heroes. If you’re playing mage, vamps and woofs are strange atavistic throwbacks hiding in a wierd loophole of consensual reality, and sure, I guess the Triat is a real simple way of looking at the universe for children. It's fun to believe this, but there are enough multi-genre villains (plus many of the smaller lines, like Mummy and Demon, absolutely played with mixing the myths). Set in particular is a demon/vampire/mage/spirit hybrid and Kupala is an Earthbound who hates/is hated by the shadowlords and gives magic to Tzimisce. It's easier to ignore it, also easier to pick one any say "this is right" but realistically you kind of just have to throw your hands up in the air and go "those are myths and legends, not absolute truths." Oh, and loving Hunter: the Reckoning and it's angels giving powers but giving too much knowledge the first time and people learning the real truth driving them mad because it's not meant for mortal minds and all supernat's (save demons) are mortals to that extent, so they can't know the whole/real truth.
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Jul 23, 2020 01:29
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TheCenturion posted:I echo the sentiment that the oWoD games are irreconcilable. If you’re playing VTM, Vampires are cursed by God and woofs are just savage woodland monsters. If you’re playing werewolf, leeches are foul spawn of the Wyrm, and woofs are noble but tragic doomed heroes. If you’re playing mage, vamps and woofs are strange atavistic throwbacks hiding in a wierd loophole of consensual reality, and sure, I guess the Triat is a real simple way of looking at the universe for children. Yeah. It's bad to make your game's mythos beholden to another game, even if White Wolf really really really wanted you to buy all the game lines. (That's just stupid, of course. Only a real sucker would do such a thing. Ahem.) And while I try not to bring the Magechat, Mage's cosmology kind of runs roughshod over the others. (Wraith is pretty self-contained, if that helps.)
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Jul 23, 2020 01:54
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TheAnomaly posted:It's fun to believe this, but there are enough multi-genre villains (plus many of the smaller lines, like Mummy and Demon, absolutely played with mixing the myths). Set in particular is a demon/vampire/mage/spirit hybrid and Kupala is an Earthbound who hates/is hated by the shadowlords and gives magic to Tzimisce. It's easier to ignore it, also easier to pick one any say "this is right" but realistically you kind of just have to throw your hands up in the air and go "those are myths and legends, not absolute truths." Wasn't it some Kindred of the East that were handing out powers to Hunters?
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Jul 23, 2020 02:20
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CAPT. Rainbowbeard posted:Wasn't it some Kindred of the East that were handing out powers to Hunters? Sort of. In the Hunter's Storytelling Guide it says the Ebon Dragon and Scarlet Queen are supposed to be the two last angels and the one who gave the Hunters their stuff, the Messengers, since they gave the job to the Kuei-Jin ages ago but the Kuei-Jin botched the job. Of course the Messengers also sort of botched the job with the Imbued. So.
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Jul 23, 2020 02:23
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Honestly, Mage spends more time pointlessly including the cosmology of other games than it does running roughshod over them (the Triat are pretty important in mage; mages just don't really anthropomorphize them).
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Jul 23, 2020 02:26
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CAPT. Rainbowbeard posted:Wasn't it some Kindred of the East that were handing out powers to Hunters? Sort of. As mentioned earlier, the ST guide said the angels handed the job off to the last two earth-bound messengers, Scarlet Queen and Ebon Dragon but they REALLY hosed up and made both the demon hunters of KoE and the Wayward (Hunters who learned to much and now hunt all supernaturals, especially other imbued). So actual angels had to do the work of imbuing, but they can't even reveal themselves without breaking mortal minds, so the actual "which angels" is unknown, especially as Demon hints that there are no actual angels left and it's just redeemed Demons trying to do God's work after the end of The Plan. Mummy, likewise, has the claim that is was the same angels who Blessed the Children of Osiris (a clan of vampires who opposed Set and had a power that had elder levels of "your vamp is now in golconda.") But everything about the Children of Osiris was ridiculously stupid, and it's only mentioned as a theory in their "about other supernaturals" section, and the rest of Mummy is amazing. EDIT: Honestly, Mage spends more time pointlessly including the cosmology of other games than it does running roughshod over them (the Triat are pretty important in mage; mages just don't really anthropomorphize them). Also true - mage is all about it's lore, but all the traditions have their own personal hot takes and they're all wrong on some level. Except and Especially the Order of Hermes. TheAnomaly fucked around with this message at 03:11 on Jul 23, 2020 |
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Jul 23, 2020 03:07
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TheAnomaly posted:It's fun to believe this, but there are enough multi-genre villains (plus many of the smaller lines, like Mummy and Demon, absolutely played with mixing the myths). Set in particular is a demon/vampire/mage/spirit hybrid and Kupala is an Earthbound who hates/is hated by the shadowlords and gives magic to Tzimisce. It's easier to ignore it, also easier to pick one any say "this is right" but realistically you kind of just have to throw your hands up in the air and go "those are myths and legends, not absolute truths." Just because they attempted little cross-overs and nods to one another and special guest villains doesn't mean the cosmologies are compatible. The crunch behind V:TM states, flat out, that vampires are the descendants of Caine, personally cursed by God. Period, end of line. Meanwhile, the Werewolf crunch flat-out states that no, the universe was spawned by the Wyld, ordered by the Weaver, and kept from stagnation by the Wyrm, until poo poo got hosed. No Jehovah floating around in there. So, if you're playing Werewolf, there's a Malkavian on the board of Pentex because vampires are wyrm spawn, so of course one of the Wyrm's more powerful minions is doing the Wyrm's thing. But if you're playing Vampire, there's a Malkavian on the board of Pentex becuase he's crazy and there's probably going to be a really 'funny' practical joke in ten years. I don't know if any Mage supplement ever actually mentions Pentex. If you're playing Hunter, you're Imbued by Angels. If you're playing Hunter Rev, you're what's left of a solar exalted. Or is it the other way around? The individual gamelines weren't terribly consistent, so how could the entire publishing arm be? Quick, is or is not vicissitude a weird alien disease, to pick an egregious example.
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Jul 23, 2020 23:05
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TheCenturion posted:Just because they attempted little cross-overs and nods to one another and special guest villains doesn't mean the cosmologies are compatible. Being the descendent of Cane could absolutely be in line with a metaphorical telling of the Cane/Able story. The Judeo-Christian baggage is stuff that grew up around it, rather than being literally YHWH. Cane, in this case, would be an expression of the first murder, which echoes the Wyrm's insanity as it's meaningless destruction rather than 'proper' destruction. Back in the day in the Werewolf/Mage cosmology, the spirit and material weren't separated. The Weaver caused that as the universe fell apart. Like I don't even disagree with you, but there are various parallels there in the later editions that point to a potentially semi-coherent story across the lines, even if the particulars disagree and are convoluted and messed up across various editions, but you can make as good an argument that they are related as you can that they aren't. And that's part of the way they designed it. Pick and choose, it doesn't really matter, it's all fictional.
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Jul 23, 2020 23:42
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I see WoD as the same as Rick Riordan's Percy Jackson Universe, he has 4+ series devoted to different mythologies where each one is facing end-of-the-world quests, yet each series overlaps very little with each other. You just kind of ignore the fact that the whole world is in peril from Greek, Roman, Persian, and Norse deities all at the same time.
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Jul 24, 2020 04:17
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Captain Monkey posted:Being the descendent of Cane could absolutely be in line with a metaphorical telling of the Cane/Able story. The Judeo-Christian baggage is stuff that grew up around it, rather than being literally YHWH. Cane, in this case, would be an expression of the first murder, which echoes the Wyrm's insanity as it's meaningless destruction rather than 'proper' destruction. Back in the day in the Werewolf/Mage cosmology, the spirit and material weren't separated. The Weaver caused that as the universe fell apart. According to Demon: the Fallen Caine is both a literal dude that whacked his brother aside the head with a rock and a metaphor for kinstrife in general. Something for everyone!
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Jul 24, 2020 06:19
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citybeatnik posted:According to Demon: the Fallen Caine is both a literal dude that whacked his brother aside the head with a rock and a metaphor for kinstrife in general. Something for everyone! IIRC it also revealed that Charon was an angel of the Halakim who created the Underworld to hide souls from God who apparently eats them.
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Jul 25, 2020 14:08
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Hexenritter posted:IIRC it also revealed that Charon was an angel of the Halakim who created the Underworld to hide souls from God who apparently eats them. Nah, Charon was an Etruscan soldier. The angel was just also named Charon. But the Maiden of Fate was Eve.
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Jul 25, 2020 15:39
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IIRC the Lady of Fate/Eve dubbed the wraith Charon after the demon so he would fulfill some kind of destiny.
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Jul 25, 2020 17:49
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Edmund Lava posted:IIRC the Lady of Fate/Eve dubbed the wraith Charon after the demon so he would fulfill some kind of destiny. Orpheus explains all this better, but Charon the demon made the underworld to keep souls away from God (who Charon believed benefited from their Faith in a way similar to Demons). The first wraith is Abel, who sets up a Kingdom because he doesn't know what to do. The first Wraith to figure out how to escape is a greek dude who gets the title of Charon from Greek Myth and teachers other powerful wraiths how to usher souls into their afterlives (which creates the ferrymen). Abel gets pissed off about this. At the same time, one of the first "hunters" created by the KoE die and sets up the Jade Kingdom as his version of the Chinese afterlife in the deadlands, and the other Wraith leaders create their own cities. They all get old, get powerful, and hate on the Charon the ferryman and conspire to "handle" him.. .and eventually use a set of wraith powers to trap him in the body of a little boy. The Charon Group, a pharmaceutical company that has knowledge about the deadlands through a series of hired mediums and has come to find medicinal purposes for ghost emanations - things like ectoplasm, but also relics of the ghost world - finds about about said boy, gets ahold of his body for "research purposes" and starts kidnapping/hiring people with strong connections to the other side. They figure out how to use the boy as a portal for these new groups, called Orpheans, who go to the world of dead and recover things for their corporate overlords, willingly or unwillingly, but eventually figure out what's going on. Also, Orpheus is the best OWoD game and you should play it.
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Jul 25, 2020 23:52
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TheCenturion posted:So, if you're playing Werewolf, there's a Malkavian on the board of Pentex because vampires are wyrm spawn, so of course one of the Wyrm's more powerful minions is doing the Wyrm's thing. But if you're playing Vampire, there's a Malkavian on the board of Pentex becuase he's crazy and there's probably going to be a really 'funny' practical joke in ten years. I don't know if any Mage supplement ever actually mentions Pentex. If you're playing Hunter, you're Imbued by Angels. If you're playing Hunter Rev, you're what's left of a solar exalted. Or is it the other way around? In the height of the games' second edition crossover-itis, there was indeed a Mage/Pentex crossover. The Syndicate's Special Projects Division had been infiltrated and corrupted by Pentex (the SPD vanished when the Avatar Storm happened).
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Jul 26, 2020 03:06
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The Technocracy remains infiltrated by Capitalism and Imperialism though.
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Jul 26, 2020 04:26
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MonsieurChoc posted:The Technocracy remains infiltrated by Capitalism and Imperialism though. Both of these are flaws ab initio. Giving neat devices that start to work for anyone is what gives capital an edge on labor. And knowing you’re right is the first step to Imperialism.
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Jul 26, 2020 04:27
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ulmont posted:Both of these are flaws ab initio. Giving neat devices that start to work for anyone is what gives capital an edge on labor. And knowing you’re right is the first step to Imperialism. That's what I keep saying! For all their words about ideals and freedom, the first targets of the Order of Reason were a bunch of other wizards and helping Europe conquer everything in the name of God instead of fighting the actual genocide monsters running around. Judge people by their deeds, not their words. The Craftmasons quickly saw they had made a huge mistake and that's why they got owned.
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Jul 26, 2020 04:52
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Isn't the current metaplot for the Syndicate that some of the younger members tried to tilt the economy away from late-stage capitalism towards something more egalitarian... only for the paradox backlash to cause a major global economic downturn? Meanwhile the Giovanni and Ventrue just keep gleefully buying up distressed properties.
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Jul 26, 2020 05:51
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Oh, is it magechat again? Making the fascists into a playable faction was deeply irresponsible, and they keep doubling down on that.
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Jul 26, 2020 05:58
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Nawh i'm trying to drag it back to vampire with the Ventrue slumlord thing. Here's another V5 question: did they ever track down where the Cathedral of Flesh decided to gently caress off to when the building got bored of being a Fiend home decorating challenge and just got up and walked away?
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Jul 26, 2020 06:01
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citybeatnik posted:Here's another V5 question: did they ever track down where the Cathedral of Flesh decided to gently caress off to when the building got bored of being a Fiend home decorating challenge and just got up and walked away? Nah. There are rumors there are now multiple Cathedrals, including one under New York which might be the Eldest itself.
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Jul 26, 2020 12:11
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MonsieurChoc posted:The Technocracy remains infiltrated by Capitalism and Imperialism though.
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Jul 27, 2020 15:02
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Capitalism and Imperialism are mechanisms of control that the technocrats tried to use to manage the world and that they completely messed up, like everything else mages do.
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Jul 27, 2020 15:16
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Mages ruin everything.
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Jul 27, 2020 15:21
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TheAnomaly posted:Also, Orpheus is the best OWoD game and you should play it. Hell yeah.
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Jul 27, 2020 15:34
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TheAnomaly posted:Also, Orpheus is the best OWoD game and you should play it. Orpheus is a better iteration on Wraith. I got rid of player Shadowguiding (as the GM I took on responsibility for all the Shadowguiding), but even with that most players I found really couldn't identify with playing a dead person. Orpheus nullifies that problem because you are playing living humans who can enter the Wraith world. Also it gives that sense that a player is entering an alien world where they do not belong. So yeah, Orpheus owns.
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Jul 27, 2020 16:55
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Orpheus expanded on all the coolest poo poo in Wraith and KotE, namely traveling through the Shadowlands and having crazy rear end adventures.
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Jul 27, 2020 17:01
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Fuzz posted:Orpheus expanded on all the coolest poo poo in Wraith and KotE, namely traveling through the Shadowlands and having crazy rear end adventures. I thought Crazy  Adventures was a Black Dog line.
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Jul 27, 2020 18:11
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One day I'll run the entire Orpheus campaign.
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Jul 27, 2020 20:28
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