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Cassa posted:Thanks Inklesspen DalaranJ posted:Also thank you, Inklesspen.
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Sep 10, 2019 03:31
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Ithle01 posted:I wouldn't want to use oWoD rules anyway, I just meant more like the fact that oWoD was an over-the-top ridiculous setting where superheroes with fangs was considered more acceptable than in nWoD which tries to focus on more personal horror elements. I just want to know how well Promethean enables the crazy stuff or if the rules (and by rules I mean super-powers you get) are more down-tuned than up-tuned. The thing about nWoD, and nWoD2/CoD especially, is that while it's much better at supporting the actual style of play it says it's about*, it's still full of crazy weird shenanigans. Ignoring the sadbrains elements of a given game line is usually pretty easy if all you want to do is have Frankenstein and Galatea team up to fight a government conspiracy that wants to suck out all their magical sapience juice. There are hooks in places that it will unbalance some, but for the most part it won't really gently caress up a ton of a game's mechanics (with the exception of Changeling where Clarity is all over everything). * As opposed to say Masquerade's "oooh the long dark ennui and personal horror of being a fireball-throwing telekinetic vampire wizard on the Path of gently caress You right out of the core book."
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Sep 13, 2019 05:37
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Jerik posted:"Gold Mycelium"? I guess maybe the creators of Eldritch Century thought they were making up a mysterious-sounding name, but, well... "mycelium" is already a word. It means the weblike underground part of a fungus. I don't think fungus filaments would make a great versatile building material even if the fungus was somehow made of gold. I mean, do you really think they didn't know what mycelium is? Maybe it bothers your particular sensibilities, but it's perfectly cromulent scifi bullshit to me.
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Sep 14, 2019 08:08
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Yeah Masks can be impressive but ultimately an Ochema can just like banish them to an extradimensional oubliette or outright unmake them backwards in time with a wave of whatever appendage it happens to have.
That Old Tree fucked around with this message at 16:34 on Sep 18, 2019 |
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Sep 18, 2019 16:30
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wiegieman posted:What's an Ochema? Mage monster? Usually but not always the super-spirit lieutenants/avatars of the evil god-kings of the universe. In game traits, most ephemeral entities are Rank 1-5, and anything 6+ is basically just a plot device. The weakest Ochema start at Rank 5, and regardless of beefy ephemeral entity traits they all have crazy Supernal mage magic anyway.
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Sep 18, 2019 16:44
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Freaking Crumbum posted:i've seen snippets of geist lore pop up as people have done other write ups, but i was really bummed that there's not an entry for them in the archive. without having to trawl through a bunch of wiki pages, can somebody provide the gist of what geists are, what they do and how their lore is supposed to interact with the rest of the splats? So you died, but instead of staying dead and possibly leaving behind a ghost of your own, a ghost comes to you and offers a Bargain. You get to live and merge with them, but now you've got to use your new superpowers to deal with all this ghost crap that goes on behind the scenes everywhere, both in the material world and the crazy twisted Underworld. A lot of what the book sets you up doing is more narrowly directed than other lines, because it assumes a more specific ideological approach: "the Underworld sucks, let's be the revolution." You build a cult called a Krewe which is unfortunately also the name for a PC group, and they enact local change like uncovering ghost clues or helping elect the mayor you like. PCs tend to become magnets for Ghost Problems and have to solve their worldly woes or destroy them. The Underworld is a place full of Dead Dominions, separated by rivers, where strange Old Laws are enforced by Kerberoi (super beefy ghosts) and Cthonian gods. It really only overlaps significantly with Mage because they're the only other line with ready access to and a strong reason to go to the Underworld or deal with ghosts in general.
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Sep 19, 2019 19:11
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Night10194 posted:I'm gonna need more detail on this. Skimming the book to refresh my memory, so some of this may be a little off: The Zigg are from an alternate universe and are stealing all the Avatars. The Grays (yes, those Grays) show up to find out why all their alien "science" (a la Technocratic magic) is starting to fail. Everyone's looking for Zoraster, the extradimensional city that is the last true source of magic, and even in the "good" ending it gets booted out of our universe into a new one where it becomes the legendary source of all magic in that universe. EDIT: The above scenario and the "a meteor is coming to destroy everything, and its spirit avatar is a big golem that wants to marry the Earth" scenario both have a lot of stuff about UFO cults, which seems like an overabundance. EDIT 2: very topical 
That Old Tree fucked around with this message at 21:41 on Sep 19, 2019 |
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Sep 19, 2019 21:34
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Night10194 posted:As much as Ascension is already an incoherent mess, you'd think it wouldn't be very hard line to come up with ending scenarios for. "Reality consensus shifts, new Paradigms A-F depending on what the PCs want and how they do." seems like it would be natural. Instead of aliens stealing all magic to Zeta Reticuli and accidentally creating some other setting's realm of magic. The very first scenario in the book is much more of a "this is where our metaplot is pretty clearly going" and there are chapters and sidebars and stuff to change things around. But, ultimately, having whole chapters dedicated to very specific, idiosyncratic scenarios seems dumb. Like, "a meteor is coming to destroy everything, and its spirit avatar is a big golem that wants to marry the Earth" is in my opinion an amazing starting point that could use a page or two of write-up for a given table to build on top of, but instead it's 22 pages full of details I frankly cannot care about and I doubt are very interesting to most other people.
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Sep 19, 2019 21:46
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 01 — Geist: the Sin-Eaters 2nd Edition — Introduction   No bones about it! ”Nothing is born which Death makes not subject to his state.” —Bhartrhari, “Of Time the Destroyer” Developed by our own GimpInBlack, with an impressive authors list of voices for diversity and revolution including Vera Vartanian, James Mendez Hodes, Olivia Hill, Filamena Young, Eloy Lasanta and Chris Spivey, Geist: the Sin-Eaters 2nd Edition is one of the best of the generally quite good Chronicles of Darkness/New World of Darkness 2nd Edition game lines. I am only fairly recently deep into Chronicles and am basically totally unfamiliar with Geist 1st Edition except for second- and third-hand reports that it seems to have been kind of cool but also totally broken and sort of aimless. I can’t make much comment on that, but I can say this: Geist 2nd Edition is one of my favorite recent games. That’s why I want to talk to you about it today. Let’s That quote up top accompanies a pretty good piece of full-page art on the very first page of the book. The next piece of meat in the book, after the credits and table of contents, is of course chapter fiction. It’s actually pretty good. Jade and Trisha, a couple of young sisters the former of which is “sensitive”, are doing the whole pajamas-and-Ouija thing. This spurs hope in Oliver, a young man’s old ghost who desperately wants to communicate with them to relieve his monotonous, repetitive, depressive, obsessive deathly existence. He likes them so much sometimes instead of re-”living” his death he watches the girls leave for school and listens to them talk about all the stuff nowadays that sounds like science-fiction to his early 20th century ears. Things go sideways when the young ladies immediately get distracted bickering. Trish won’t even let things get started without needling Jade about this being some weird prank, and their stomping and leaning against the table makes the floorboards creak and reverberate, just like they did when some maniacal goons came to beat him into the floor and cut up his body to send his father a message. It’s too much, and in dramatic poltergeist fashion poo poo starts flying around the room and all the doors in the house are slamming open and closed. The girls’ father, Hari, runs out of his room to see what’s up. The circuit breakers flash, the lights go out, and Oliver, manifested in bloody horror, shambles towards them pleading for help.  It’s hard to say which sister is which in this picture since they don’t match the descriptions in the fiction very well, but I assume Trish is the one wearing a cat pajama jumper to poo poo all over her sister’s Very Legitimate Ghost Concerns. Themes posted:Geist: The Sin-Eaters is a game about people. Some of them are alive, some of them are dead, and some of them stand between the two, but they’re all people. Geist 2nd Edition bills itself as a game about four main themes: Empathy, Self vs. Service, Hope and Joy, and Looking Back to Look Forward. Sin-Eaters, the principal characters of Geist, have skittered along the line between life and death, made a Bargain with a powerful, Underworld-addled geist, and merged with them to struggle towards both parties’ unfinished business. They are not necessarily bleeding hearts—in fact the hosed up world they're thrust into makes that kind of a hard thing to be—but they find themselves naturally acting as intercessors between the worlds of the living and the dead. They are well aware of the capricious nature of death-in-life, and also now of the oppressive, gut-wrenching existence on the other side as a shade. Death is broken, and even if they’re not particularly altruistic, in order for Sin-Eaters to understand who they are and where they’re going, they’ll have to try to undo some of that damage for others as well as themselves. Here we get the usual sidebar of Myth vs. Fact, so I’ll just run down the truths real quick: Sin-Eaters aren’t possessed by their geist, they’re in a partnership. They technically, according to mortal science, have “come back from the dead” but for mystical purposes they are just dead and so they’re subject to anti-dead guy magic, and their remembrances don’t feed ghosts. They’re rough and tough but they’re not immortal, and can die of old age. They obviously speak to the dead, and in fact act as focal points that make it easier for ghosts to Manifest. And they lead “death cults”, or krewes, which are sort of ancestor-worshipping groups that help them chase down ghost clues, squabble with other krewes over praxis, and win mayoral elections in order to improve both the worlds of the living and the dead.  Eh, okay now. There’re typical sections on How to Use This Book and What Are Gaming? so we’ll just skip on ahead to Inspirational Media. Death: The Trip of a Lifetime, Expiration Date and Sparrow Hill Road are all recommended books, as are the movies Coco and ParaNorman. Mama (2013) is held up as a quintessentially Geist movie. I’ll admit I’m not a horror or scary story fan and I’m not familiar with any of these recommendations, except ParaNorman which I enjoyed quite a bit. The Lost Room is recommended not for being a ghost story (which it isn’t), but because it’s apparently full of just weird bizarre environmental stuff and strange objects. I may actually check one or two of these out, but that’s what I said about the other hundreds of things in my to-do pile. Finally, there’s a glossary of terms that as usual can help you understand some of the stuff later in this book as you read it, but mostly just gives you a rough picture of stuff right off the bat. At least it’s not like Werewolf 2nd Edition where the glossary is two chapters and nearly 80 pages into a book filled with conlang jargon. Next Up: I’m going to skip ahead to the setting chapter because, like a proper Sin-Eater, I am a rebel. That Old Tree fucked around with this message at 07:51 on Sep 23, 2019 |
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Sep 20, 2019 00:17
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JcDent posted:I thought they did away with Clans in nWoD, and you're like, a Christian fundie vampire, a "we want to be Dracula" vampire... Clans still exist and are your blood lineage* while Covenants are your ideological group. It's a much clearer distinction from Masquerade, where Clans were also ideological groups for a nice whiff of  (Though of course "the bloodline that makes you charismatic" doesn't totally leave that garbage in the dumpster either.)* But there are also bloodlines which, just like Masquerade, are principally distinguished by just being much smaller than and thus looked down on by the Clans. That Old Tree fucked around with this message at 07:03 on Sep 21, 2019 |
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Sep 21, 2019 07:01
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02 — Geist: the Sin-Eaters 2nd Edition — Setting Basics, Part 1 Lethe me ask you a question. “Life is a promise to death.” —Geist: the Sin-Eaters 2nd Edition Welcome…to Deadworld!  BEING ALIVE AND THEN NOT What is it like to know about death? In Geist we start learning about the world we’ll pretend to inhabit with ruminations on how our perspectives of life and death change and grow. When you’re young, very young, you likely have little conception of the future if you even think about it in the first place. Things like college or having your own children are barely perceived, notional barriers beyond which lie complexities and challenges you don’t understand at all. Then you grow up little by little. Reality creeps in. The fantasies you’ve constructed to explain the world to yourself are chipped away and replaced with new ones a little closer to the truth. Death is perhaps the greatest of these watersheds, a grand adventure about and beyond which countless tales are told by people who have never experienced it. This being the Chronicles of Darkness of course bits and pieces of the Real Truth have filtered into living superstition and religion, but the full truth is at once bigger and smaller than the living guess, and so much more horrific. When a person dies, even the most serene and content saint, it is only natural for them to find death a wanting experience. Almost no one who dies is done, but they’re finished anyway. This and the natural tendency of people to always have something going on gives rise to the sense that ghosts linger due to unfinished business, but that is not the fundamental nature of ghosthood. You become a ghost because you don’t want to stop, and once you are a ghost “keep going” is all you get to do. On top of that, humans aren’t the only ones who don’t want to die, which is why beside ghosts with gaping head wounds or rattling chains hanging across their suit jackets, there are also ghosts that bark and want to play fetch or find shiny things to put in their nests. Even places and things can become ghosts. This doesn’t mean that everyone and everything leaves a ghost behind, but the invisible “wavelength” of existence known as Twilight is as teeming with the dead as the rest of the world is teeming with life. Their afterlives so thoroughly defined by singular connections to the living, ghosts are creatures of obsessive habit. For the weakest kinds of ghosts, these keystones are all there is to their existence. They can’t really engage in conversation or deviate from their repetitive tasks unless driven off-track by some outside disruption, which tends to provoke instinctual, violent response. Ghosts with stronger senses of self are still chained to a small set of defining ideals and treasures, but are afforded a little more independence and recognition of people who aren’t themselves. Obviously the intensely emotional connections for which ghosts linger spur them to reach out, to try again to be a part of the remains of their lives. The stirred up ghost-stuff of powerful wanting extrudes into the world of the living, spilling your classic ghost-slime known as “plasm” into the material plane. Plasm is the “physical” substance of the ghostly world, from a ghost gun to a ghost doorway to a ghost body. While we’ll dig into the gamey rulesy details later, I'll mention here that plasm is also what Sin-Eaters use and sometimes literally consume to fuel their powers, which is a potentially disturbing angle to their relationship with the dead they’re supposed to be helping.  Randos at the bus stop will still tell this lady “Give us a smile, huh?” Prisoners of the memory of their lives, ghosts don’t tend toward much self-improvement or change, which for eternal shades fixated on the inevitably doomed lives left behind can be a bit of a downer. Being reminded of and remembered for their life keeps a ghost going, but all that stuff is as finitely alive as they proved to be. As the call of the living world fades the call of a different place rises, a place just for ghosts: THE UNDERWORLD “Twilight” is a veil between ghosts and the living in the material world, but even it has a geography. Places great in the energies of death, particularly graveyards, sink a little lower, and in their center are Avernian Gates: old, sealed passages into the Underworld. When a ghost’s Anchors have all worn away and they’re out of This may seem foolish to say, but: the Underworld is underground. Not beneath the soil of the Earth, rather there is no outside to it except back through the Avernian Gates. It’s all the biggest cave system that’s ever been. Except is it a cave? The Upper Reaches where you arrive first—the book tells us this isn’t even technically “the Underworld”—resemble the subterranean features near to the Gate you came through: sewers, subway tunnels, an unusually long and mazy crypt. You could swear you’re still on the other, warmer side, it’s all so mundane and natural. But it’s so quiet and so still, and no one living is going to hear your screams through that grate. It’s always cold, it’s always damp. There is always water gathering and flowing, down, down, always and forever farther down. These wending places are also scattered with bizarre detritus, the constantly descending inanimate echoes of just “stuff” without Anchors to tie them to the living world. Sometimes ghosts drawn to the Underworld linger in the Reaches, afraid and not yet forced to go deeper, eking out a middle existence, forming enclaves for protection or raiding, before a Reaper or something even worse comes to steal them down lower. Eventually through enough tunnels you’ll find yourself at a confluence, where all that water becomes a proper River. Not everyone knows them, but most Rivers have names and they tend to have something to do with what will happen to you if you drink from them. Even if you’re adventurous enough to seek their curse or blessing, these Rivers aren’t always water by the time you’re venturing down deeper, or at least not water you’d want to drink. They can be stale, terrible liquids, swampy flowing bogs filled with strange plants, choking flows of dust, or streams of pus and scabs. Still, some ghosts will risk it and grow heavy with the power of the Underworld in their bellies. That’s where geists come from. They are stronger than ghosts who still hold close to what it was to be alive, but sometimes the pangs of memory stir in them and they make a Bargain with someone to turn them into a Sin-Eater. The Rivers are the defining geographic feature of the Underworld, and in the small and vast caverns below the Upper Reaches they are the centers of and borders between societies. River Cities dot their banks, where ghosts have found each other and, as they always do, built a reminder of the living world. They find others who shared their religion in life and now keep the faith in death, they find fellow craftsmen to charter guilds that take the plasmic harvests of the Underworld to feed and clothe and house themselves, they form hierarchies to rule over each other. As with everything that lesser ghosts do with themselves, they are always subject to the depredations of older, nastier things from below. River Cities can thrive for centuries before being wiped out by a band of Reapers or the surfacing of a hungry Chthonic monster.  This is Rich Ghost Hell because it’s nothing but favelas. As prominent and relatively consistent features, the Rivers are also a key method of travel from one part of the Underworld to the other. Yet mastering them is difficult, and travelers will have to rely on the Boatmen, often presenting themselves as the classic Ferryman, but they might instead look like a mudding good ol’ boy or a travel agent. They are shallow, strange creatures always willing to take you downriver, and once we get to the Ocean of Fragments you might have an idea why. Like most of the living legends, they require payment: Coin, plasm, blood, secrets, or other, stranger things. Sin-Eaters can act as their own Boatman, if they know how to navigate the Rivers. The Rivers, of course, descend still, into the Lower Mysteries, the caverns filled with the Dead Dominions, where Kerberoi and grand Chthonic gods rule. Kerberoi are ancient ghosts powerfully bound to their Dominion, compelled to shape it and police it according to their strange Old Laws. Every Dominion is behind a gate, specified in the book to resemble the Sumerian gate to the underworld, and its guardian is always ready to inform visitors of the Laws before they enter. The higher Dominions, closest to the River Cities, have short lists of simple, usually pretty understandable Old Laws. “Do not stand idle in the market streets” might be the straightforward dictum of an upper Dominion, but get deep enough and you’ll be subject to “Speak only of the past.”  The artist has taken some liberties. Chthonic entities are the weird natives of the Underworld, unknowable minds slinking through the Underworld in impossible, patchwork charnel bodies, all stinking meat, wrong limbs and snapping insect mandibles. The smaller of them are like fish and toads in the Rivers, eaten by some fisherghosts of the River Cities. The greatest of them are hulking beasts, blindly or uncaringly roaming their territories in search of things to eat, worshipped by cults of deranged ghosts for their obvious power and delectable cast-offs. Descend past even these depths and you’ll reach what could be considered the end of all things: the Ocean of Fragments. An unknowably vast cavern, you’ll stumble out of a cave onto the shores of an inky black sea stretching endless to an unseeable horizon in the shadows. The Rivers above are a solution that dissolves ghosts bit-by-bit, but here the depthless Ocean drowns and wears away the sparest fragments of living memory, a final forgetting beyond all remembrance. All things in the Underworld descend inevitably here, even Dead Dominions crack and break through the distant cavern roof to crash into the waters below. On the Ocean’s Black Beach lives a strange hermit who strolls the sands looking for discarded memories, at times visited by those most forlorn ghosts building up the courage to wade out and meet their total end. Only a handful of things seem to survive the wearing waters. There is the Freighter, which in the past has been all kinds of boats but is currently the HMS Titanic, and its forgetful crew that trawls the waters for memorable treasures. Below the Ocean’s waters swims the Leviathan, the awesomely vast Kerberos that enforces the unknowable Old Laws of this last, deepest Dominion. COMMENTARY I love it. The Underworld hinted at in other Chronicles books isn’t particularly interesting. What’s here in Geist is, for lack of less ironic words, alive and vibrant. It’s full of stuff to tear down or save, a place where things are happening despite the relatively static nature of ghosts. It’s a place to stick any old bit of mythology you want, but also an alien and insidious realm so you can mix and match and warp it all to your heart’s content. It has a natural and narratively satisfying progression from spooky rat-catcher catacombs to the ageless dark temples of ancient gods. It’s also just written well, excellently conveying the tone of a struggle that is powerful and doomed yet not truly hopeless. This post covers roughly the first and last main sections of chapter 2, concerning the natures of ghosts and the Underworld. Sandwiched between these sections is stuff about our protagonists, the Sin-Eaters and their Bargains with geists. I’ll get to that in the next post. INSERT JOKE TITLE ABOUT OLIVER TWIST You may have noticed I didn’t say anything about the chapter fiction. I’ve decided to skip those for now and cover them all together later. I feel the first chapter fiction is well-written and pretty effective for opening the book and starting the review while the rest of the fiction isn’t strongly tied to each chapter, plus there’s not all that much to the introduction, and also I didn’t think about this until after I made my first post. Next Up: What if the Ghostbusters were also half ghost? That Old Tree fucked around with this message at 07:03 on Sep 28, 2019 |
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Sep 21, 2019 12:03
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Green Intern posted:Does Geist talk about how utterly bizarre/upsetting it might be for ghosts of various religions to find out that their expected afterlife was also incorrect? This is the most direct thing I could find on a quick search: quote:Many ghosts cling to their old religions, sectarian difficulties breaking down and blending in the face of an Underworld that doesn’t conform to anyone’s expectations. Some adopt a faith and culture they never held in life, believing this to be the darkest foxhole you can get, while the most militant atheists rage at the lack of cessation or material rebirth. But slowly, the word spreads: you must find new gods, in a place like this. All the other references to faith that aren't about the cults that Sin-Eaters start are relatively brief bits about people finding new things to believe in. Mostly continuing to believe what they did in life, but modified as necessary to account for the terrible purgatory they find themselves in, or switching to worship of the various powerful beings that rule the Underworld. There are also a few spots about "maybe there's something beyond this, just as this was beyond life" but it's all very much "who the gently caress knows?" territory. EDIT: I think something that can help explain this away, which I'm not sure is the intent, is that ghosts really are inherently bound to who they were in life. Rank 1 ghosts might recreate certain sounds important to how they lived and died, but they're basically trapped in reminiscence, not really capable of considering the philosophical implications of what's happened to them. Rank 2 ghosts are much more actual people, but they're still magical echoes of something much more vibrant that, at least at first, rely on remembering and being remembered for who they were before they died. There is a great deal of incentive for them to keep believing what they did. That Old Tree fucked around with this message at 23:30 on Sep 21, 2019 |
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Sep 21, 2019 23:15
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03 — Geist: the Sin-Eaters 2nd Edition — Setting Basics, Part 2 Revolutionary Ghost Utena. “And, like all of the living, they died.” —Geist: the Sin-Eaters 2nd Edition  TAKE ON ME As far as capstones go, death is pretty lacking. Grand or mean, beneficent or avaricious, whether you were a lazy rear end in a top hat or workaholic activist, at the end of it all waits a moment of ultimate humility and, often, pain. In a split second you’re there then: poof, it’s all over for you. (Barring, you know, certain circumstances.     )Of course even without the other game lines in the mix, we already know that’s not really true. Geist says that in fact most people can’t help but become ghosts, and it’s in that instant of tearing away, searching, reaching for more that, sometimes, something from the other side reaches back. A geist has shambled up out of the Underworld and, in pursuit of Remembrance for the life they’ve mostly forgotten, someone’s death catches their attention. They intrude. They’re here to offer a hand up, to dust you off and keep you going better than just to be a ghost yourself but to live again. And you’ll owe them. This isn’t an act of altruism, not totally at least. In someone’s most extreme moment, with a barely-glimpsed hell of shades and monsters right around the corner, the geist offers a Bargain. No one knows exactly what happens to would-be ghosts who refuse. They don’t seem to be around to let anyone in on the secret. For those that accept, they’re Bound, to themselves and to, or by, their geist. Geists are still independent ghosts, with their own unique goals and desires twisted though they are by drinking from the Rivers of the Underworld. They’ve taken a keen interest in their Bound and tend to hang out with them a lot, seeking to draw their attention to things that resonate with them. It’s a Bargain after all, and while the Bound get to keep on living, the geist wants something in return, to unsmooth themselves of the wear the Underworld has done to them, to touch and see the living world again, to remember. And sometimes they’ve got their own business to attend to, leaving the Bound to a new kind of loneliness, an un-dead without even their savior to keep them company. Bound tend to have some explaining to do, if they don’t just disappear into a new life. “I’m back! Boy that aortic rupture really took it out of me. All better now, though!” doesn’t tend to mollify most people. On top of that, the Bargain tends to require a lot of death resonance to be going around, so pretty often the Bound could be the victim of a serial killer, or on palliative care in a hospice. Someone’s likely to notice that you died and got better. The book doesn’t present a lot of answers here, just problems for your character to figure out. There’s a side note that Bound used to arise in great waves during deadly catastrophes, but in the modern world the Bargain seems to be struck any old time. Some say that the immense population of humanity and its concomitant mortality guarantees enough death resonance for Bargains any place, any time. Others say “Yeah, because of all that forever war, too.” Still others think that, whether chicken or egg, the Underworld is bloating and getting ready to devour the world of the living. Fun stuff. This is why, while there’s a lot of shared and old tradition among the Bound, it’s scattered and discontiguous. There have definitely been whole societies of Bound, but they rose and fell with the deadlier times. Now that  is everywhere, for whatever reason, and also thanks to things like telephones and the internet and internet-telephones, things are more connected than ever. Unfortunately, smartphones and the surveillance state also make it harder to keep to the shadows while you do the important work, whatever that means to you. ”Hey, how ya doin’?” TAKE ME ON Being Bound isn’t the same as being a Sin-Eater. You can make the Bargain and hang with your new geist pal, but that doesn’t automatically make you the protagonist of Geist. Everyone who sees the other side knows that something is seriously wrong with the afterlife, but Sin-Eaters are the Bound who decide to do something about it. Of course, what’s a revolution without friends? That’s where krewes come in. Whatever your hot takes in life, becoming Bound puts you squarely in a supernatural environment. You see the ghosts that are everywhere and the rotting Underworld waiting for them to fall inside, and your humanity or instinct to tinker or rebel compels you to figure out how to fix it. Being as magic and the afterlife are clearly real at this point, it looks like you’re going to have to resort to religion. That’s what a krewe is, a little religion all for you (and your friends). There have been countless krewes over the course of human history, some of them long-lasting, some of them just tiny cults that burn out as fast as their members. They take bits and pieces from “normal” religion, stuff that seemed to work even for people who haven’t been to ghostland and back, and they also pass on their own traditions, or invent entirely new ones. They take advice from other krewes, from mainstream denominations, from little out-of-the-way heresies, and even from ghosts. A grand game of telephone for the hows, whys and wherefores of dead spells. Geist: the Sin-Eaters 2nd Edition posted:Modern krewes take all those forms and more. A mahjong group that meets weekly. A cell of DEA agents in a bust that went sideways. A fantasy football league. An after-work jazz band that always seems to meet but has never played a venue. These days, krewes can even be scattered around the world and connected with technology. Some even practice their faith openly, either as a fringe sect of a larger church, a “revival” of an old religion, or an entirely new doctrine. Even in countries where religious freedom is nominally the law of the land, though, faiths outside the mainstream (or worse, that seem “foreign” to the people in power) are often targeted for harassment, so openly religious krewes have to tread carefully. We’ll see later in the book that krewes are comprised of more than Sin-Eaters and their geists. They include living devotees, “sensitive” or not to the weird poo poo Bound get up to, as well as friendly ghosts. In fact, the whole krewe is an important part of the game, with its own sub-systems. It really is a religion, with trappings and rituals to help Sin-Eaters do their jobs, as well as influence in the living world to uncover hauntings or canvas neighborhoods for that city councilwoman you like. And, of course, a krewe lends itself to more private character moments, and troupe play! While Sin-Eaters’ principal activity in a game will presumably be outward-focused, starting cults or soothing and banishing angry ghosts or fighting evil ghost-kings, there will always be a lurking element of understanding your connection to your geist and just what their whole deal is. When a ghost drinks from the Rivers and swells with power, they begin to shed or bury a lot of their humanity. As a Sin-Eater’s and geist’s relationship—Synergy—grows, this proves to be just as powerful, or even more so, than the liquid horror of the Underworld. This can lead to one of the three main end-game scenarios of being a Sin-Eater, to unlock both the memory and power of your geist through Catharsis. This ultimate understanding between Bound and geist tends to be the end for a character both narratively and physically; they’ve resolved the conflicts that kept both of them here and are ready to move on to whatever comes after. There are more details and expanded options concerning this and other end-game scenarios later in the book. Another option for the end-game, which is not mutually exclusive to Catharsis, is Catabasis: Descending into the Underworld to engage in ritual challenge against its dark gods, overthrowing them and building a better afterlife for everyone. It’s been attempted more than once in the past, and the ruins and corpses left behind are proof it didn’t work. That’s why it’ll be even cooler when you manage it yourself! The least savory end-game option the book presents us with is to pursue the opposite of Synergy: Tyranny, and its end in Cabeiros. The Bound bullies and masters their geist, turning them into a slave. They need to find out at least a little about them in order to hurt them best, but once they have their Touchstone, they can force-feed them on the Rivers of the Underworld, to grow fat with power, then destroy the Touchstone and crack the geist’s plasm open like a bone to suck out the delicious, powerful marrow.  ”Mom said it’s my turn on the X-Box!” COMMENTARY As you might guess from how I’ve structured my review, I’m not a big fan of how this book is laid out. (A sin to lay at the feet of all the Chronicles games, to greater and lesser degrees.) This post covers the middle part of the second chapter. Nevertheless, my most substantive complaint is definitely that this section is a little too poetic and light. There’s a lot of tone-setting without enough detail to really get across just what you’ll be doing playing a Sin-Eater. There is a fair amount of redundancy about loss and finding meaning throughout the bulk of this chapter, and even without an expanded word count I think the sections on Sin-Eaters, the Bargain and “the Carnival” (Sin-Eater society/religion) could’ve acted as a clearer introduction to the structure of the game. But! To fresh eyes this grabbed me, and months later I still like it. You aren’t just a revolutionary of circumstance, driven to riot and overthrow simply because you’ve been left no other choice. In fact, Bound are fairly privileged in the hierarchy of the dead. The game, like all the others, has its moral mechanics to it, but fundamentally the driving force of why to play is simply that you see that something is seriously wrong with the world and want to fix it. There’s no -2 dice penalty for not agitating for change enough, because this game: a) can’t make you play a revolutionary if you don’t want to; b) can let you just have fun ghost adventures if you want to, anyway. This may seem obvious, but many Chronicles games have serious moral dimensions to their mechanics that are meant to drive the main, intended conflict of the game. Of course, Geist does have some of that in your relationship with your geist, but as far as ghostly revolution is concerned the book is only here to encourage you to play that way, not to make it happen for you. I appreciate that, and it’s a kind of restraint that some of the other game lines could’ve benefited from to varying degrees. Next Up: Let’s get the chapter fiction out of the way because it’s already written up and the character creation stuff is going to need more time. That Old Tree fucked around with this message at 07:03 on Sep 28, 2019 |
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Sep 22, 2019 21:22
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Halloween Jack posted:And while Requiem 2e looks better, the prose is absolute dogshit. I'd rather not impugn a writer entirely for a misfire. In any case fortunately, from what I recall, that style falls off precipitously after the first couple of chapters when the book starts digging into the rules. Apart from my complaints that tend to apply to the entire Chronicles franchise in general, for me the biggest problem with nVampire2 is they kept the frequently hard-to-read header font from first edition. Also, Purple, people talk about how nVampire is good all the drat time. It's mostly in the WoD/OPP thread, but it happens here too. That Old Tree fucked around with this message at 14:57 on Sep 24, 2019 |
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Sep 24, 2019 14:50
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Halloween Jack posted:Also I'm very sorry I did not finish the next chapter of the Vampire review last night. I spent the last few days nursing my wife through a flu, which I have now caught, and I was hosed up on apple brandy and cold medicine and it seemed like the perfect time to get through another chapter, but I passed out. ban this sick filth
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Sep 24, 2019 15:13
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04 — Geist: the Sin-Eaters 2nd Edition — Chapter Fictions QUIP. ”I’m under the floorboards.” —Geist 2nd Edition character Oliver LaVoie As I said in a previous post, since we’re skipping around a bit, here’s where I’ll tackle the opening chapter fictions. This will cover the fiction openers for the rest of the book. But not in order, and you’ll see why. Chapter 1’s opening fiction introduces us to an idea of Sin-Eaters’ day-to-day. Leah, High Priestess of the Church of the Brighter Morning, is busying herself fixing up her house while her geist, the Abandoned One, lurks. We get a brief flash of memory of her drowning, and the Abandoned One coming to make the Bargain with her. He alerts her that someone’s coming to the door, a krewemate named Mark and his geist the Open-Throated Saint. The Sin-Eaters make some awkward small-talk, while their geists sort of square off like uncomfortable pets before Leah puts a stop to it. They start over with more formal, cult-y greetings, and Mark presents her with the case from the prologue fiction, asking her to take care of it. Mention is made of their fallen comrade Aiden, his recent no-take-backs death weighing on them and driving them apart. Another krewemate, Oumil, isn’t available because he’s in the Underworld somewhere, and Mark has to go “make peace with Fifth Street.” Leah doesn’t want to do it but her geist does, so she acquiesces. This fiction honestly isn’t very interesting narratively, but it does help set expectations for how Sin-Eaters and their geists interact. Chapter 2’s opening fiction tells the story of how the family from the introductory fiction, the Patels (Hari and his daughters Jade and Trisha) have been persuaded by a family friend to ask for help from the High Priestess of the Church of the Brighter Morning, Leah. The Priestess gathers her celebrants and uses incense, booze and a stick to manifest the ectoplasm that is invisibly slathered all over everything in the house. She uses this to draw forth Oliver and promises to help him and his family quiet their dead hearts and find their eternal rest. Unfortunately some external force goes all poltergeist and riles up Oliver, poo poo goes sideways kaio-ken x20, and the house cracks like an egg before falling into the void. I’ll take a moment here to say that the previous two chapter fictions’ dialogue was…alright. This one’s is not. Narratively this continuation is great, but there’s a lot more dialogue and it’s a bit mediocre. Chapter 4’s opening fiction picks up in a Dead Dominion, as Jade and Trish scramble to recover their father from the rubble of the house, while Leah and her geist confront the Reaper that dragged them down here. Reapers are a powerful kind of ghost that use Deathmasks to venture into the world of the living and retrieve lingering ghosts into the Underworld. The Reaper starts off as a ball of chains made out of bones, but uses its mask to take a human form. It tempts Oliver with promises of reuniting with his family, but the Patel sisters unearth their sorely injured father and their plight moves him to help them return to the world of flesh. There’s a bit of a scuffle—Oliver tries and fails to punch the Reaper—then Leah diverts the Reaper by forcing her to replay her death on loop while the Priestess, Oliver and the Patels book it for a nearby River which they can follow back to the living world. There is a fair amount of dialogue in this one, too, but it’s mostly short and punchy. Chapter 3’s opening fiction is an interlude, where Leah’s krewemate Mark visits an apartment building controlled by a rival krewe: the Fifth Street Titans. He’s there to broker peace between their warring groups. His geist the Saint growls at things and he plays with some magical dice from a cheating dead gambler that are an opening peace offering for negotiations. Right as he’s sitting down with the Titan’s Golden Tycoon to talk terms, he gets a 911 text from the krewe. The Tycoon warns him that poo poo’s about to get real if he walks out now, and then Mark proves he’s as badass as his name and does indeed leave the end hardly anything happened. I guess the dice were cool: they’re a pair of normal looking six-siders but the Tycoon asks the dice if they’re the real deal and they roll themselves to show 8 and 10. I give this fiction a “meh” out of 10. Chapter 6’s opening fiction is the second and last interlude. Mark arrives at the crater where the Patels’ house used to be, and the battered krewe celebrants, who escaped the collapse, give him the low-down. He makes a little pick-me-up speech, and then they all pile into his car to go to the hospital. They hear sirens approaching, one of the celebrants worries what they’ll tell the authorities, and then Mark takes a badass stance and fade to black. This is the most filler-feeling of the fictions. I don’t hate it, but I am glad it’s short. Chapter 5’s opening fiction finds that Leah, Oliver and the Patels are fleeing down a tunnel searching for a River to navigate by. Some bickering breaks out, but they’re interrupted by Jade’s cell phone receiving a text. Leah uses the phone to call Mark. They have a very brief exchange before being interrupted by Hari Patel collapsing and succumbing to his wounds. Leah tries to enact a rite to ensure he doesn’t leave a ghost, but Jade is furiously playing the blame-game. Hari’s ghost leaves his body and is immediately lured away, trailed by his daughters. Leah informs Mark she’ll have to follow them into the Dead Dominion they seem to be wandering into, then hangs up the phone. Chapter 7’s opening fiction follows Leah as she creeps into the weird village Dominion the others wandered into. There are insensate ghosts milling about, and when one breaks off to enter an unearthed bomb shelter in the middle of the village, she slips in behind him. The summoned ghost completes a phalanx in the middle of the room; near the front of the formation Jade is suffering some seriously inky, full-body varicose veins as she futilely shakes her father’s ghost to try to get him to leave. A column of wings appears out of the shadows, presumably the Kerberoi of the Dominion, unfolding to reveal a funky chunk of heart-shaped meat in its center that scolds the interlopers before the wings enfold Jade before flinging her viscera around the room. The Cage of Wings approaches Oliver and Trisha, who are cowering behind some boxes. Leah and the Abandoned One argue about what to do, but unlock some of her geist’s memories: he was a little boy, fleeing a war, dying in the cold, snowy forest. Leah acquires new ability: Rock-fist. poo poo’s getting real, Mark and Oumil show up, Oliver makes a valiant sacrifice so everyone else can get out, and they make their way up the River to the sewers and then to daylight. The final opening fiction, before the appendices, is an epilogue. It has been a couple weeks since the escape from the Underworld, and Trisha Patel’s deadened senses are finally returning. Her mother found her crying in the shower, presumably in grief, but she was actually crying in relief that she could finally feel the heat of the water again. The Underworld will gently caress up a mortal, yo. She can see ghosts now. She makes her way to the Church of the Brighter Morning to talk with them about what happened, and they reassure her they strive to free everyone from the bondage of life-after-death, including her father, who is still trapped down there. Which is why she’ll be joining the Church. The End. All in all, a good narrative marred by some clunky dialogue and the interludes, which feel like expansions on stuff that should’ve just been off-hand mentions if they came up at all. Next Up: The unbearable lightness of being (character creation et al).
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Sep 24, 2019 18:07
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Freaking Crumbum posted:so geist is basically jojo with stands et al You can definitely get up to poo poo with your geist, but they're actually immaterial even to other ghosts, though ghosts can still see and hear them. Despite the fact that none of this would happen without having a geist where your soul used to be, Sin-Eater powers are mostly doing stuff with that power for themselves.
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Sep 24, 2019 19:15
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JcDent posted:So, ugh, what happens when you ensure "they don't leave a ghost behind?" Usually, you perform some mollifying ritual so they don't leave a ghost. Despite all that stuff in my second post, "moving on" either at death or from ghostly existence is consistently framed as a happy release or accomplishment. Still no one knows to what or where this leads. Figuring that out might be a good story hook for an Underworld overthrow. quote:Also, how do Sin-Eaters know that the Underworld is bad and not just functioning-as-intended? How much can they do to change what are probably it's physics? It's a lot like a political/economic system. Probably no one deliberately made it that way, but it's obviously horrific and no matter how used to it everyone is there's no compelling reason to think it couldn't be different. It's familiar and hard and a lot of work, but that's not the same thing as natural or not worth remaking. And if someone did make it that way on purpose or it is "natural", this is the perfect opportunity to have a "let's go beat up God" story. That Old Tree fucked around with this message at 21:12 on Sep 24, 2019 |
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Sep 24, 2019 21:09
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Mors Rattus posted:They're not even useful NPC rules because they tell exactly one story: A Zeky has shown up and now the entire town is dead and radioactive. I'm only lightly familiar with Promethean, but I feel like there would've been an okay ticking clock scenario in the Zeky if their rules were a more toned down extension/modification of the Extreme Environments rules. Of course in any case they need to have their escalation rate curtailed.
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Sep 24, 2019 22:07
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ChaseSP posted:Late on this but, I feel like a Promethean post achieving their goals being a regular human with maybe some memories is perfect for the whole focus of their splat to be honest rather than being some special human given the focus of an abomination just wanting to be human and not actively ruin any people around it if it stays in a given area. Kinda sucks if you're attached to a PC though. I mean, as a player you exert a lot of control over how the Pilgrimage happens. It's an end point more definitive and defining than most of the other games (Geist has something similar, though), but it's really not going to cone out of the blue and it can be put off almost indefinitely.
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Sep 25, 2019 03:14
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Vampires and mummies probably not, since they're typically metabolically inert or even magically static. Sin-Eaters are scientifically alive, so they'd generally be hosed, though they can take a ridiculous amount of punishment as we'll see in my next review post.
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Sep 25, 2019 11:38
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05 — Geist: the Sin-Eaters 2nd Edition — Character Creation, Part 1: Sin-Eaters Trait me like garbage. Really nice garbage. “If you are silent about your pain, they’ll kill you and say you enjoyed it.” —Zora Neale Hurston Geist is a game about people and all the complexities that drive them to act, particularly within a world full of impersonal injustice that oppresses everyone with a sense of casual utility. What intersection of self-interest and empathy is necessary to turn someone into a revolutionary? Let’s boil all that down into a handful of phrases and a series of numbers. Welcome to character creation!   YER TRAITS ARE BASIC Like most games you’ll want to have a rough concept in mind before beginning, which will be better informed by content we’ll cover in the next post. Advice peculiar to Geist is to think about your character from the two distinct perspectives of what they were like in life and what they are like in “death.” Did their death transform them totally, or did it merely bring new focus to what they’ll keep doing with themselves? Have they taken the chance to continue or even improve their old life, or abandoned it completely to begin anew? The first traits you’re asked to define are Aspirations, short phrases that outline character arcs you’d like to see your character go through. These aren’t necessarily what your character aspires to accomplish; they can be things that they’d really rather not happen. It can be the character’s personal goals or simply what you, the player, want to see happen to them. Each player character should have one long-term Aspiration and two Short-term Aspirations. You’re expected to make significant headway toward an Aspiration about once per session, which will earn you a Beat (which is one-fifth of an Experience). You don’t have to agonize over them, or even nail them down before the start of the game. They’re meant to change over time as you progress through and resolve them, and you can even just get rid of them and choose new ones if they don’t work out. After that, you assign your Attributes, Skills and Specialties. The former two are fixed traits rated by one to five dots, while the latter are specific areas of expertise under a Skill. For most actions you’ll combine an Attribute and Skill, rolling that many ten-sided dice. Specialties add +1 die when they apply. Every die showing 8+ is “a success” and, most of the time, you can re-roll 10’s to try for more successes. That’s known as “10-again”, and other dice tricks exist such as 9-again, 8-again, or rote where you re-roll every non-success die once. You just need one success to accomplish a task, but if you get five or more that’s an “exceptional success.” If you attempt something and your dice pool is reduced to 0 or less, you’ll roll a “chance die” where only a 10 is a success and you don’t re-roll for a success. Rolling 1 on a chance die, or voluntarily making a regular failure worse in exchange for earning a Beat, is a “dramatic failure” that can really gently caress you up.  ”Oh my god, my twin is also in this hospital!” SIN-EATER TEMPLATE Now it’s time to add the magic. Choose your Burden, the principal circumstance of your death that attracted your geist, made you accept the Bargain and informs what you’re going to do with your second chance. You get an extra Aspiration that ties your life, death and Burden all together. Unlike a regular Aspiration, resolving your Burden Aspiration grants you a dot of Synergy (your power stat) and increases your geist’s Rank by 1 (your geist’s power stat). Each Burden is also associated with three Affinity Haunts, which are your magic power sets that a given Burden gets an Experience cost discount on. Finally, you should choose an Innate Key associated with your Burden and death, which among its powers allows you to boost your Attributes, regain Plasm (magic points) and open Avernian Gates. You’ll gain another Innate Key from your geist, and can access more Keys through Mementos or by eating other geists. Oh, and this isn’t mentioned anywhere in the character creation section, but all Sin-Eaters gain free access to a handful of Ceremonies: Bestow Regalia, Krewe Binding, Speaker for the Dead, and Pass On. Ceremonies are rituals for dealing with the dead that are used to define the specific faith of a krewe, but can also be known and practiced by individuals. They aren’t even necessarily overt magic, as many of them are performed regularly by mundane religious organizations. You can learn more Ceremonies as Merits, or you can use the Ceremonies of your krewe as long as your initiation rank equals their rating. We’ll get into more detail on Burdens, Haunts, Keys and Ceremonies in later posts. You have one dot of Synergy, your power stat that determines how many magic points you can hold as well as how many points you can spend in a turn. It also tends to figure into dice pools for magic powers and similar actions. Really high Synergy also allows you to increase Attributes and Skills above five dots. Many of the things ghosts do relate to their Rank, and Sin-Eaters have an effective Rank equal to the lower of your Synergy or your geist’s actual Rank. Your Synergy reflects how closely you are bonded with your geist, and that in turn helps determine what happens when your geist wants you do something that you won’t do. I’ll cover that in more detail when we get to geist creation. Like most Chronicles games you can “spend” or lose dots of your power stat in order to achieve certain effects. The most typical for these games, creating magic items, is here, but you also lose Synergy when you eat other ghosts to stock up on Plasm, when you drink from the Rivers of the Underworld, or when you die and your geist has to bring you back to life again. If you wind up at Synergy 0, you lose most of your cool powers and can, you know, die for reals. You can’t buy yourself back up from Synergy 0 with Experiences. You’ll have to either complete a Remembrance (we’ll look at those under geist creation) or, if you’ve previously reached Synergy 3 and gotten your geist’s Remembrance Touchstone (also more below) you can smash it and switch to Tyranny, gaining one dot in that trait, where you’re less like a partner and more like a master to your geist. Plasm are, as I’ve said before, your magic points. It’s also the “physical” substance of the world of the dead, so, uh. You’re filled with ghostflesh! It can appear in the material world for a number of reasons, perhaps most often when a ghost Manifests in various ways. It typically appears as a milky-white goo, though it can also be thicker and comes in all kinds of gross colors associated with death and rot. Sin-Eaters can consume it to add it to their pool of power points, but in this case “consume” doesn’t just mean “eat” but can include smoking or injecting it. Consuming Plasm is subject to the same per-turn limit as spending it. Consuming Plasm in a situation resonant with a Sin-Eater’s death grants a couple of bonus points that can take you over your maximum pool, though any excess disappears at the end of the scene. Plasm left behind by a ghost who “moves on” totally refills your pool. Obviously, you can spend Plasm to produce cool effects, often in the course of using Haunts. Innate powers for every Bound include accessing the Remembrance Traits of your geist, or coating something in it to make the subject “Open” to ghostly powers. One of a Sin-Eater’s beefiest powers is healing with Plasm, because they can downgrade any type of damage one step for one Plasm, or shed Tilts from physical harm for more, reflexively and ignoring their per-turn limit. While this can get expensive, it’s readily available to all Bound and is only stopped by wounds inflicted by their geist’s Bane. Unlike normal people’s Virtue and Vice, you have a Root and a Bloom. These are the main ways you’re likely to regain Willpower points, an expendable source of hero points for getting some bonus dice on an action or fueling strong magic. Examples include Advocate, Antihero, Enabler, Pollyanna and Servant, but you’re encouraged to come up with your own. Root Basics posted:
Bloom Basics posted:
I won’t wait for the commentary section to note that, while this is in some ways more generous than typical Virtue and Vice, it seems a little too harsh restricting full Willpower recovery to once per story (multiple game sessions defined by a story arc) instead of once per chapter (a single game session). I suspect this may be a mistake. You also have Touchstones, one based on your Burden to start out with, then at Synergy 3 one tied to your geist’s Remembrance, and finally at Synergy 6 one that represents what you desire to change about the Underworld. When you’re making an effort to pursue and protect a Touchstone you get +2 Synergy dots; when you’re pursuing two or more Touchstones, you get +3 dots. These dots don’t count towards how many Touchstones you can have or increase your traits past the normal cap, but otherwise act as normal Synergy dots, increasing your Plasm pool and adding to relevant dice pools. If you resolve a Touchstone, your geist gains 1 Rank. Like your Root and Bloom you should feel free to come up with your own, but the book provides some examples. Maybe you keep the community center going, or you’ve become an alcoholic like your geist was in life, or perhaps you’ve developed a relationship with your neighbor after you left your old life behind. FINISH HIM Apart from figuring out derived traits like Health or Speed, your last step is figuring out your Merits. Merits are a catch-all for stuff like a character’s social capital, liquid finances, or being very attractive looking. You also buy individual access to Ceremonies as if they were Merits. On top of the 10 dots of Merits you get, Sin-Eaters start with two Merits for free: Medium and Tolerance for Biology. Medium is what “normal” people use to contact the dead or other kinds of spirits, which for the purposes of simple communication tends to be inferior to a Sin-Eater’s inherent ability to see and hear immaterial ghosts. However, it can also be used to “Open” an area, making it easier for ghosts to use their powers there. Tolerance for Biology just means you’re not particularly phased by gross-out stuff like blood and guts. Sin-Eaters also get a free dot of Mystery Cult Initiation (see below) as long as they don’t opt-out of starting with a krewe. Geist has a pretty brief list of Merits compared to most of the other games, but this isn’t necessarily a bad thing. There’s still a good amount here, and you can look to other books if you really needed five more fighting styles. Geist also introduces a more robust set of keywords for Merits. Where previously there was pretty much just “Style” to denote a fighting style (itself a definition stretched to breaking in some game lines), here we’ve got “Shared” which formalizes a piecemeal rule from previous books allowing player characters to pool Merit dots for a mutual benefit like a hideout, or Krewe and Krewe-only which are Merits that can (or can only) be bought by your death cult. Some Merits also have special extra effects depending on your Burden. Here are some highlights:
 If your gun is too stringy, try adding lemon juice. COMMENTARY While to some degree we all come here for the numberwang, it’s hard to be as effusive as I’d like to be about a bunch of basic trait explanations and charts. Of course, I have a variety of  Opinions about how layout, organization and rule-making should be done, but most of these concern what’s basically the trade dress of Chronicles at this point, or even “just how it is” for traditional RPGs in general. Let’s leave that boring, sadsack poo poo aside.Geist does a pretty good job of tying your character into the basic premise of the game. Root, Bloom and Touchstones are good motivators for being a mediator between the living and dead worlds. The toys that really sell the Sin-Eater experience are in later posts, but the fundamentals here are a good start. One specific thing I’ll call out for praise is breaking out rules into summary bullet points at the end of the sections about them. Geist is the first Chronicles game to do this, and hopefully not the last. It’s a good move, especially for games with this level of interconnected complexity. Next Up: Let’s talk about geists, bay-bee, let’s talk about krewes and XP. That Old Tree fucked around with this message at 09:48 on Oct 1, 2019 |
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Sep 26, 2019 06:33
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Libertad! posted:Geist 2e is still as a KickStarter, but is there a possible soonish release date? It seems like the workings of a complete book along with art in the review indicates so. I was meaning to read Changeling or Mage 2e after I finish Demon (which I need to get back to), although Geist 1e would've been next. According to the last Monday Meeting Notes it's still undergoing indexing. I don't know how long it's been since that started, or how long whoever they use tends to take (or even if they have a regular indexer).
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Sep 26, 2019 08:06
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JcDent posted:I wondet how convincing a demon must be to be able to buy abstract concepts like that. A pact has to be an actual, written contract of exchange. Demons can't outright lie in the contract, and it has to convey to the human the core purpose of the pact ("I will give you X for Y"), but it can otherwise be as manipulative and full of fine print and loopholes as you're willing to hope they won't notice. Soul pacts have to be signed in blood.
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Sep 27, 2019 07:20
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Nessus posted:I think Demons can put up Resources dots for people so basically someone will literally buy your student debt and credentials from you. Or your lousy work history. Or your bad relationships that you regret. Cash money on the barrelhead. Demons can grant basically any Merit, but "external" stuff like Resources is harder and requires at least two separate pacts to get really crazy, unless the person is already doing pretty well. As an aside, there's an off-hand mention of being able to boost Attributes, but the only core traits there are mechanics for are Merits and Skills.
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Sep 27, 2019 07:43
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Nessus posted:Even so! "I would like to buy your regrettable college years, and in exchange you will at least be able to pay it off with money leftover, OR POSSIBLY, I am also accepting your debts" - this is a message that would probably get some replies on craigslist. Oh there are definitely enough flippant or weird people around to collect a fair amount of contracts based solely on "lol why not?"
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Sep 27, 2019 08:17
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PurpleXVI posted:Can demons "source" parts of covers from supernaturals as well, or only mortals? They can, but only stuff that amounts to "mortal" details. They can't incorporate having Supernal magic or Disciplines or whatever. If they try to soul pact a supernatural, they get all those mortal details but the magical stuff shorts their circuits. So then they have like a 1,000-year old persona that is definitely not a vampire.
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Sep 27, 2019 18:59
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EimiYoshikawa posted:I maintain that the extreme neutering of the Changeling pact system in 2e (in my opinion largely as a reaction to the Demon pact system pinching that bit of game design territory) was one of the edition's greatest mistakes, and hugely detrimental to the thematic underpinnings of the game line. Making a life-changing bargain you didn't understand with some weirdo you didn't understand is, like, at the heart of huge swathes of the "fairy tales" that Changeling draws upon as the base (and then expands upon enormously) of its concept as a game. I think it was a reaction to the original system being not great and a little exploitable, plus the current one more bring underexplained/underdeveloped and not necessarily neutered.
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Sep 27, 2019 21:41
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Nessus posted:Can y'all tone down the Internet cult poo poo over Jenna Moran like four notches? Sidereals was not some immaculate tome disgorged by the Amida Buddha, beyond critique How about we just don't call perfectly nice people "idiot dumbfucks" because you don't like the book they wrote.
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Sep 28, 2019 00:45
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Tasoth posted:Jumping in late to the Demon chat. Yeah, Flowers of Hell, the players guide. The Embed Deep Cover allows you to spoof being other supernatural creatures instead of just a normal human. The Exploit Show of Power lets you replicate a specific supernatural power you've seen before at fairly minimal effectiveness. I'm not 100% sure how that shakes out for Supernal magic considering how hard it is to quantify just what "a spell" is, but presumably they reproduce what they witnessed including Reach effects because otherwise they could only do the piddliest little spells and would always take three hours to do it.
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Sep 28, 2019 23:00
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wiegieman posted:Can Infrastructure cause Silent Hill poo poo just by leaking magic waste heat out or does it have to be deliberate? Either.
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Oct 1, 2019 00:23
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While it's up to an individual reader whether they like that sort of poo poo or not, the God-Machine absolutely is similar to the Exarchs in that there's no Canonical Grand Plan that spells the end of the game line, and that's not some ~spooky mystery~ or whatever. There's certainly a lot more science-fantasy whimsy mixed into Infrastructure, but whether it's more season 1 Twin Peaks or season 2 Twin Peaks depends on the table.
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Oct 2, 2019 18:37
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I think the "God-Machine/Exarchs sometimes also prevent disasters" is more intended as "and then things continue to be interesting" when you beat them, instead of "and then everyone in the restaurant stood up and clapped." The God-Machine is specifically noted to be an engine of oppression, so whatever you want the lessening of that to look like. I'll admit, it would be really nice if there were more discussion in any of the CoD games about what low- and mid-tier "win" states look like, and how to continue playing beyond them.
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Oct 2, 2019 19:16
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I'm not even sure it's useful, outside of one or two wacky "What if…" books like Shards of the Exalted Dream (but better), to tackle "what is ultimate victory like?" for CoD games. But the games could absolutely use more discussion on what the process and result of lower-level successes mean for the protagonists. Like, Catabasis in Geist has shades of that to it, but it's got more shades of "ultimate victory" than "a significant step towards ultimate victory" and it's still pretty brief.
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Oct 2, 2019 19:35
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I like everything about Carta except the "sometimes she's just loving ccccRrrraaazzZzyy." It's a lot less interesting and subversive to her cause than something more subtle and high-level.
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Oct 4, 2019 00:31
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06 — Geist: the Sin-Eaters 2nd Edition — Character Creation, Part 2: Geists, Krewes & Advancement Mysterious and spooky. FRIENDLY GHOST CREATION  Ugh, I made an entire character, more or less. And now I have to make another one? Who designed this, the ghost of Reuben Garrett Lucius Goldberg? Fine. As with a principal, Sin-Eater character, creating a geist is all bound up with the core concept of how the character died. This determines the Key that resonates with them, which acts as an additional Innate Key for the Sin-Eater and also a power the geist can use in the rare times it manifests physically. You might have only the vaguest notion or a detailed idea, but geists are archetypal creatures. They’ve gorged on the power of the Underworld’s Rivers, burying their past and humanity. Yet there’s enough left there for the Sin-Eater’s death to draw them in somehow, to tantalize them with the possibility of reconnecting with their own lost life. Geists have forgotten so much of themselves, they don’t even have names, they have titles evocative of their nature or urban legends that they’re connected to. Geists are so deformed from their time in the Underworld that those who might recognize them from their former life struggle do so (a Resolve + Composure roll), while in social situations they are largely only interested in and affected by fear (non-intimidation/fear Social rolls are a chance die, coming and going). Geists, remnants of some poor human, have a Virtue and a Vice, which for all ghosts are reversed in effect: they regain all Willpower when indulging their Vice, and only one Willpower when struggling to maintain or protect their Virtue. There are a number of traits that geists lose and share with their Bound when the Bargain is struck, and Willpower is one of them, which is a little bit of a problem because just how that works is unclear. Geists suffer a serious lack of self-agency, which makes it very hard for their Virtue and Vice to come up due to their own actions. But if the Sin-Eater has “access” to them, that seems like something the book would, uh, mention out loud. Like every other ephemeral entity, geists have a Ban and a Bane. A Ban is some behavioral restriction, like being unable to cross water or having to flee from freshly broken sticks arranged a certain way. A Bane is something of such metaphysical disharmony that it is uncomfortable to be around, harmful to touch and can cause serious damage when used as a weapon, like the murder weapon used to kill a ghost’s living self. Every geist has a starting Remembrance, a basic jumble of sensations that are clues for the Bound and their geist to find out more about the geist’s past. Following these clues over the course of a story leads to another Remembrance, drawing up more detail from the geist’s past and leading to another, final Remembrance that reveals the circumstances of the geist’s death and what originally kept them going in the afterlife. While the first Remembrance is mostly up to the Sin-Eater’s player, it’s supposed to be a mysterious ghost story so it’s encouraged that the subsequent Remembrances primarily be devised by the Storyteller. Each time a Remembrance is resolved the Sin-Eater gains one dot of Synergy and the geist gains one Rank (up to a maximum of 5). Connected to a geist’s Remembrances are Remembrance Traits. You start with one and gain another one with each subsequent Remembrance resolved. These are Skills or Merits with a value of three dots or less that the Sin-Eater can spend Plasm per-dot to gain access to for a scene. This can take the form of sharing sense-memories or the geist just giving really good advice. Dots gained from a Remembrance Trait are cumulative with your own and can exceed normal trait maximums, which is usually only relevant to Skills. After the scene you suffer “echoes”, weird memories of stuff you should be able to do but can’t because that’s someone else’s history, imposing a -1 die penalty on further uses of a Remembrance Trait until you get an exceptional success or buy a new dot in it. Also based on their Remembrances are a geist’s Crisis Triggers, circumstances that dredge up their mortal trauma. They start with a Hazy Trigger, gaining a Vague Trigger with their second Remembrance and a Specific Trigger with their final Remembrance. You’re encouraged to come up with your own, but there are some examples provided such as Jealousy (Hazy: neglecting pursuing Remembrance in favor of the living; Vague: try to prevent the geist from flipping out to protect a loved one; Specific: actively work to find a way to sever the Bargain). There is also a set of Universal Triggers that apply to all geists, like when the Bound suffers harm from the geist’s Bane or ignores the presence of the geist’s Ban. When a Crisis Trigger arises a Sin-Eater can intercede in order to calm down the geist. This is, as far as it goes, the “morality stat” for Geist. If the Bound chooses to intercede they roll a dice pool based on their relationship with the geist, which is strictly tied to their current Synergy. At one dot the relationship is “Coercive” and the roll is made with a chance die. At 2-4 dots the relationship is “Positional” and the dice pool is equal to Synergy. At 5-7 dots the relationship is “Sympathetic” and you add the lower of your Manipulation or Presence Attributes to your Synergy, while at 8+ dots it’s “Empathetic” and you add the higher of those two Attributes instead. Failure on these rolls doesn’t guarantee your geist flips out, but the worse your failure the harder and more costly it is to rein them in. To avert a crisis after a dramatic failure costs a dot of Synergy, and on top of that the next intercession is resolved as if the relationship was worse by one step. If a geist facing crisis is not soothed, either because the Bound chooses not to or fails, then the geist is Unleashed, becoming physically manifested and reacting in one of four ways: Defending the Sin-Eater, grabbing the Sin-Eater and running away, lashing out violently at both the Trigger and anything that gets in the way of doing so, or becoming fixated on the Trigger (and attacking anyone that tries to distract the geist). If the Trigger is or comes from a human, the latter response freaks them the hell out in turn, which is a breaking point (basically, psychic stress). Though, really, any encounter with an Unleashed geist is likely to constitute a breaking point for normal humans. Sin-Eaters can voluntarily Unleash their geist once per game session. As ephemeral entities, geists are numerically pretty beefy, but putting this advantage to good use leaves the Bound in a perilous position. Geists in a Bargain don’t have their own Willpower or Essence pool like a regular ghost. They share the Sin-Eater’s Willpower, and while the geist is Unleashed, they take control of the Plasm pool and the Sin-Eater can’t spend it. If the geist is taken down by lethal or aggravated damage, neither of them “die” but all that delicious Plasm is gone.  Deal with iaaAAAUUUGHHH!!  Geists, like all ghosts and other ephemeral entities, have a simplified set of Attributes, seen above, and they don’t possess Skills. They get a big pile of dots to distribute among their Attributes, with a pretty high cap based on Rank (9 max at Rank 3, 12 at Rank 4, etc.). “Normal” ghosts have Numina—discrete powers like “energy blast” or “cause hallucinations”—and one or more Influences that are distantly similar to Mage’s magic, being a generalized scale of power over purviews based on their death like “my Anchors”, “stabbings” or “car crashes.” Bound geists don’t have Numina or normal ghost Influences, or even really any powers when they’re not Unleashed. In the event that they are Unleashed, a geist has access to their Bound’s Haunts, and the geist’s Key acts as an Influence with dots equal to their Rank. LET’S YOU AND HIM FIGHT  Regardless of the specific attitudes of a character—or perhaps instead it’s a key conflict for you—religion and religious ritual is a demonstrated practical reality in Geist. Just, you know, not quite the ones anyone was ready for in life. Any given group of Sin-Eaters tend to form a religion called a krewe, which in addition to the Bound includes both living and dead celebrants. Here’s where we found our ancestor cult/communist afterlife revolution. During this process is also a good time to “introduce” the main characters to each other, form connections, explain why they’re founding a religion in the first place (or why they’re joining an existing one). Then you’ll create the supporting cast, each of which may “belong” to the player who creates them or may be used as-needed by anyone. Troupe play is encouraged! The guidelines for creating ghost celebrants amount to “go through the steps to create an entire ghost character”, and you aren’t expected to come up with a ghost for every player. For living celebrants, you’re mercifully given simplified rules, choosing a concept, two Aspirations, and three areas of expertise in which they can roll 5, 4 and 3 dice respectively. However, despite the order here and in the book, it’s probably best that your first step at least lays the basis for the krewe’s philosophy. Obviously, the conception of the krewe should be a group effort, since it’s a collective resource for all the player characters. In particular the group will need to settle on a krewe archetype, which reflects a broad but fundamental philosophy that underlies the more complex doctrines and rituals of the krewe. Is the krewe more concerned with changing the Underworld directly, or by first changing the way the living approach death? That sort of thing. In the next post we’ll get into the details of these, after we tackle the Burdens of Sin-Eaters. Each krewe has a Creed that is the easier part of keeping the faith, something that the celebrants enjoy doing or feeling in pursuit of the krewe’s goals. They also have a Virtue, which is the part of their philosophy that is more likely to make itself a challenge when it comes up, but is invigorating when you stick with it. These act basically like an extra Vice and Virtue for members, granting one Willpower or full Willpower respectively when collectively pursued and protected during a scene. Ghost celebrants can gain Essence instead. The example given in the book is a Creed of “Hope” where proselytizing on a mission trip grants one Willpower, and a Virtue of “Loyal” which fills participants’ Willpower if the celebrants go through heckfire to fulfill their promises. A krewe’s three Doctrines are a lot like Aspirations, discrete goals informed by their philosophy that grants Krewe Beats when resolved. Redefining a Doctrine is costly, while acting directly against them is either severely demoralizing for the membership or someone’s dark secret, depending on how public the action was. On top of the universal Bestow Regalia Ceremony, each archetype determines a specific set of three other Ceremonies a krewe starts with. Any member can perform a krewe Ceremony as long as their Mystery Cult Initiation Merit rating is equal to or greater than the Ceremony’s rating. Again, we’ll get to those in a later post. Regalia are philosophical and symbolic actions, dress, tools and roles that create a favorable Condition for krewemembers who adopt them through the Bestow Regalia Ceremony. They’re pretty beefy, granting a basic effect like 8-again or access to a Key, and then resolving by dumping a pile of automatic success on you or activating a powerful Haunt without difficulty. Resolving Regalia grants Krewe Beats. Unfortunately, a starting krewe won’t have any Regalia. Krewes have simplified Attributes just like ghosts, though of course they represent even more abstract things like cohesive group loyalty. Krewes also possess Merits, but just those that have the “Krewe” or “Krewe-only” tags. These act as group resources that can contextualize what the group itself can achieve or that its members can take advantage of individually. Each krewe starts with one dot of Safe Place, their central site of worship, and then get seven more dots to distribute among things. Krewe Merits include obvious social and temporal assets like Allies, Status and Resources, but also things like Good Time Management (makes the krewe’s actions easier to accomplish) or Supernatural Membership (some members have dots of various supernatural Merits). A krewe’s Esotery is its “power stat”, measuring symbolism and faith. It determines Attribute maximums, the limits of krewe actions, and how many Regalia its members can adopt (0 at Esotery 1). Finally, a krewe has its Congregation which is sort of like Health, but also sort of like morale and faith, too. It takes bashing, lethal and aggravated damage, which represent escalating risks of faithlessness and dissension, including the formation of heresies. When trouble breaks out the resolution usually involves changing a Doctrine or losing an Attribute dot. Krewe actions are gestalt group initiatives. The Storyteller should first gauge the action’s Complexity on a scale of 1 (“locate Elvis’ ghost’s Anchor”) to 10 (“infiltrate the CIA”). This determines the number of Tasks the action encompasses, which are the smaller, discrete group actions—each taking at least an hour but potentially days, weeks, months—where you usually roll a krewe Attribute + Esotery to generate Effort. A participating krewemember with a good, relevant dice pool can substitute for the roll. Tasks can be run simultaneously, or certain Tasks may only be possible after first resolving a preceding Task, or one Task may be harder if another related Task fails. During participation in Tasks a character can spend Effort to gain temporary, relevant Merit dots, but this is probably a bad idea most of the time for any action worth caring about until the krewe is at pretty high Esotery. Succeeding at a Task generates one point of Effort; exceptional success generates two points and grants a beneficial Condition to the krewe. Failure generates no Effort and also immediately results in a Complication (see below), while dramatic failure applies a negative Condition to the krewe and lowers the Task limit for the current action by one, the latter of which can really screw you up. Krewe actions are always successful at their core goal, unless abandoned. Once you’ve resolved the Tasks for an action, if you generated Effort equal to the action’s Complexity, congratulations, you win and can watch the credits roll. If you fall short, the action is still successful but each point you lack becomes a Complication, such as suffering serious casualties or generating a lot of heat from authorities. an example of a krewe action posted:Say the krewe is searching for the location of a sunken, folklore-shrouded graveyard where powerful Mementos or clues to a Kerberos’ past might be found. The Storyteller decides this is Complexity 4, so it will involve four Tasks. The players and Storyteller work out that this will involve two teams of celebrants jet-setting to exotic museum archives, while another team surveills some tomb-robbers suspected of having clues of their own. All three of those Tasks will take about a month each, but they can also all be done simultaneously. Finally, the final Task will be sending a scouting party to wherever the clues lead to pinpoint the boneyard’s location. This last Task suffers a -2 dice penalty for each of the other Tasks that fails. Krewes can, of course, fightmans at each other, initiated by at least one krewe’s action. For krewes of equal Esotery, each Task roll is contested and the winner gains the Effort. If a krewe is attacking another with lower Esotery, the lesser krewe must start its own krewe action to oppose the assault or else the higher-Esotery krewe’s rolls become unopposed. Effort translates into damage to Congregation and appropriate krewe Conditions. THE LADDER TO HEAVEN Just for a brief handwave toward completeness’ sake, even though I’m not going into deep detail on these sorts of things, Geist features three mutually exclusive types of points for advancement. There are “normal” Beats which generate generic Experience which can be spent on anything, “Synergy” Beats and Experiences which can only be spent on advancing Synergy, and Krewe Beats and Experiences which can only be used to advance a krewe’s traits. They all revolve around earning “Beats”, which you earn individually for given actions or challenges, such as resolving a Condition or Aspiration, or volunteering to turn a failed roll into a dramatic failure. Beats all go into communal pools, and when there are five Beats in a pool, all players gain an Experience point of that type. COMMENTARY As it’s all tied-up with the main thrust of playing a Sin-Eater, I’m absolutely here for the creation of your geist. In fact, I’d like there to just be more to it, more hooks, more for your geist to do or draw you to do. I’m also a fan of krewes. As the book notes, this framework is a great skeleton on which to hang extended vampiric coteries or mage cults or other group-as-character stuff like maybe a spy agency run by demons. These are both great candidates for expansion in the Kickstarter stretch goal book, though I think they’re just putting in more Regalia and Ceremony stuff (plus other things not related to this post). Unfortunately, I feel that krewe traits are a little muddy and underdeveloped. Obviously it’s hard to firmly distinguish what “Power” and “Finesse” mean as measurements of a group of people performing any action from a street brawl in an alley to converting an entire small country to their death-religion. I’m pretty fine with that, honestly. Yet while fundamentally the Attributes are rooted in the faith and loyalty of the membership, those same things are sort of the forefront principles that define both Esotery and Congregation. You deplete your Esotery to change Doctrines, but you also reduce your Attributes when your celebrants are shaken, but also your Congregation takes damage from a disinfo campaign meant to undermine the faith. A clearer distinction between all these things would, I believe, lend itself to both making clearer suggestions to how each trait would be used and how to resolve their uses when they come up. One last krewe-also: I’m not sure resolving a krewe’s Virtue should, as the book implies but doesn’t outright state, restore a dead celebrant’s entire Essence pool. While most dead krewemembers are likely only Rank 2, that’s still up to 20 points of Essence. Sure this doesn’t exactly translate to the same “value” of Willpower but it’s not nothing either. If you’ve managed to accrete a supporting cast of very powerful ghosts—and why not?—that’s possibly many dozens of points of Essence. It’s not going to break the game over its knee or anything, but I’m a bit leery. Anyway. I’m very glad to see group Beats presented as the default here, and on top of that are some rules additions that expand on the concept from previous games to balance things out better. There’s a limit of one type of Beat earned per scene, which will keep advancement from rocketing out of control, which is a problem I’ve encountered, though this might put a slight drag on players looking to resolve some Conditions, which is a problem I’m not too concerned about because I don’t really like how Conditions work anyway. I also prefer siloing power stat advancement further, so that players don't have to worry about chasing that fairly boring but vital trait, but eh. It's not like I didn't know I was buying a Chronicles game. Next Up: The real spoopy fun beings (Burdens and Krewe Archetypes). That Old Tree fucked around with this message at 19:31 on Oct 9, 2019 |
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Oct 4, 2019 09:53
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Sorry for the delay, and for the weird edits. I don't know what happened with my cloud-saved draft versus my on-disk draft. Anyway, it should be fixed now. I was hoping to keep up the pace of roughly ~2 days but it looks like another mildly busy weekend so obviously that's not happening. At least most of the rest of the book should flow a little faster, since I'm not trying to concatenate information from all across the book like I did for character creation/traits. I just had no interest in running piece-by-piece through each chapter, but I still wanted to lay the core information out there so I couldn't really skip it all either. Though I am definitely skipping most of the Traits and System chapter because fundamentally it's a pretty trad game, and if you want more details just go buy the book(s). I expect the rest of the book to also just be more interesting, because we're done with the relatively mundane "put numbers on paper" stuff, though there are still a couple bits of character creation coming up next.
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Oct 4, 2019 10:23
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Josef bugman posted:Hard agree. Like, this would be such a cool setting and world but it's attached to something that is a bit too complex and hard to utilise for most casual DM's and players. While I certainly would like CoD to be much lighter in general, I think Demon contrasts to most of the other game lines in that it has more of an Exalted-style problem. Its powers are mostly a giant laundry list of highly idiosyncratic tricks with insufficient siloing. It suffers from "widget paralysis" in a way most of the other CoD games don't. This is a hurdle that plenty of people are willing to overcome who don't even like that they have to, but it's not all that fun unless it is specifically your jam, and it's a hard roadblock for a lot of other people. Despite my ridiculous 50-page Mage cheat "sheet" I just don't have the patience I once did to extensively coach someone through the weeds to get them into an especially complex game, and in all the CoD games I've run Demon is the one that stumbled the most because of this problem. (Mage has a similar but distinct problem that I find less onerous, though that has at least somewhat to do with my Mage bias.)
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Oct 5, 2019 08:52
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I thought the pregens in SR2E were cool and those glossy full color pages are why I bought the book in the first place. Of course I was about 12 years old at the time.
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Oct 8, 2019 23:18
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JcDent posted:Also, I don't get Brandon: why do you want human witnesses that don't form memories? Like, what does him being there do that's better than no human being there in the first place? Infrastructure can frequently rely on fairly normal human labor to get built and keep running, but also it's a bunch of magical horseshit that freaks humans out. More enhanced humans/cultists, like stigmatics, don't have that problem but are obviously harder to create and control. Apparently, according to Brandon's write-up, it's also harder to mind-wipe people after the fact instead of raising up a generation of sleeper cultists who enter a fugue state when tapped for Infrastructure work. And/or keeping a lid on all that supernatural crap can just be easier if people in general tend to black out instead of doing stuff like becoming a hunter or whatever.
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Oct 9, 2019 17:34
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