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Explodingdice
Jun 28, 2023


By popular demand posted:

I'd like to thank you on behest of every internet nerd who hasn't the courage to register on these forums, they deserve to be informed too.

I'll add another voice to that, I've certainly been enjoying the world of darkness stuff, both Joyless's work and Loomer with the novels.

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Explodingdice
Jun 28, 2023


Everyone posted:

I liked the janitor fomori executive who's just trying to fake his way through it all. I imagine him being played by Neil Flynn in his Scrubs glory days.

Executive VP of Marketing Jan Itor.

Explodingdice
Jun 28, 2023


Dawgstar posted:

Man, that's some heavy crossover-itis. And sure, let's just shove every indigenous magical tradition under one umbrella, it's fine, it'll be fine.

Of course. All non-european magic is the same (unless it's kung fu).

Explodingdice
Jun 28, 2023


The intro comic for bastet does have a nice look at a mokole in full dinosaur mode, so the book has that going for it.

Explodingdice
Jun 28, 2023


Bouquet posted:

Playing Mage with the right group was great fun. You got to be super creative with combining spheres and trying to figure out coincidences to mask your use of magic. But the Technocracy in general just isn’t very interesting. Their end goal is to make everything boring and their methods are mostly banality of evil poo poo. Are they worse antagonists than the Banal in Changeling, who are literally so boring it’s painful to be near them for cool wacky people like you?
Pentex is so mustache twirling over the top evil with pollution factories and gum that will turn your teeth into evil spirits and mercenaries who want to skin you that you can just enjoy clawing their heads off.
The Sabbat (before they got overexplained) are also over the top in their own weird way. And it’s also clear that there is so much Camarilla intrigue that you can easily have whole campaigns without the Sabbat appearing.

The technocracy has terminators, so there's that. I admit to a level of fondness for them, the basic mission statement (protect the sleepers from vampires/werewolves/other stuff) is solid and playable and interesting, it's just paired up with the fascism. There's a game progression that can work there where you go from stopping a sabbat pack at the start and work your way up to reforming/removing the technocracy's leadership at the end.

The real problem, I think, is that you have fascists on the one side (technocracy), and anti vaxxers on the other (traditions, or at least the verbena and a bunch of etherites). Unknown Armies handled a lot of the material is a more successful way just by declaring that mages are bad at handling their own lives and thus avoiding effective world spanning conspiracies.

Explodingdice
Jun 28, 2023


Whirling posted:

I like their counterparts in Mage the Awakening, the Seers of the Throne, simply because they're much more explicitly awful people and there's no getting around that. The Mage the Ascension fandom has a lot of people apologizing for/flat out wanting to be a part of the Technocracy because of the aforementioned benefits that don't make up for the horrible things they do, but I've never seen a single person treat the Seers as anything but the worst people on Earth.

Yeah, awakening made some mistakes (first ed core was very bland, I thought, and the Atlantis focus didn't really get worked into something that I would have wanted to use until much later in the line), but the seers were very much what the technocracy should have been. Peel off the good things, and focus in on making them a usable, understandable, and thoroughly unpleasant villain faction.

Explodingdice
Jun 28, 2023


Arcanuse posted:

bit slow on the draw, but re: Chantries
from what I could see, I'm not wholly convinced Lo Pan and friends should've even been in the nephandi section
They are evil, but they don't really strike me as Nephandi Grade Evil(tm) Chantry so much as a Rogue Chantry (run by a former/technically nephandi).
Iunno, not enough weird gribblies, bizarre spacial dimensions, nigh-guaranteed damnation (insidiousness varying), that sort of thing.
e: and, y'know. some non-nephandi chantries in the same book being markedly worse.

Yeah, but he's a nephandi, so just by portraying him you hurt your soul. Brucato says so.

Explodingdice
Jun 28, 2023


John Carpenter's World of Darkness.

Explodingdice
Jun 28, 2023


On casting characters, I've had a fair amount of success with kumu.io. It allows for a quick reference - this character looks like this and we've found this and that out about them.

Explodingdice
Jun 28, 2023


Nessus posted:

I thought those guys canonically got butchered by what's his name the signature Silver Fang, which was like his rank challenge for being King.

They did, yeah. It gets mentioned a couple of times, and I think happens before second edition, but after Rage Across New York sets the scene and gives them an adventure.

Explodingdice
Jun 28, 2023


It's probably beneficial in a way, the Hierarchy isn't something that you really want to portray as an outright good. Like on the small scale sure, have the local centurion be someone the characters can trust (barring anything shadow influenced), but anyone in authority should be at least mildly objectionable.

Explodingdice
Jun 28, 2023


Whirling posted:

hell yeah, lets go, delta green owns

also wait wasn't the most recent delta green campaign book about how ICE is evil

God's Teeth is about the bleakest rpg book I've read in a very long while. Delta Green is nihilistic most of the time, but that book goes above and beyond.

Explodingdice
Jun 28, 2023


joylessdivision posted:

Nothing happened, the thread periodically lulls between reviews.

I'm still working on the write up for CbN, but my work situation has recently changed so my focus is finding another job more than commenting on vampire shenanigans at the moment. Also I just hit the geography chapter and those are my least favorite to write up so thats also slowing me down a smidgen.

Book is real fun though and I really enjoyed it

On the By Night books, I've been reading through LA by Night for some game prep. Having an anarch gang called the Crypt's Sons that's fighting a group of hunters called the Blood was not something I expected to see. I was also not expecting so many gangs of surfer vampires.

Explodingdice
Jun 28, 2023


Loomer posted:

That was the devil known as Brian Herbert and/or Marie Landis. That book is perhaps the [i]actual]/i] single worst oWoD novel, but its close - BoTSun is at least memorably terrible. 'Watcher', an early Werewolf novel, is... Not. There's also Pomegranates Full and Fine in the 'utterly forgettable' stakes, and the infamous As One Dead, featuring a Toreador-Brujah hybrid courtesy of one Nancy Kilpatrick, of regular vampire novel fame. My money, personally, remains on House of Secrets for being the single most egregiously racist thing White Wolf ever published.

I hesitate to ask, but what puts House of Secrets on top of the white wolf racism pile? That seems like a tall order, given some of the books I have read. I only know the one author from the penny dreadful stuff, which I remember as pretty standard white wolf fiction.

Explodingdice
Jun 28, 2023


Pakxos posted:

Check it out now, young clone brother

What are you doing, clone-brother?

Explodingdice
Jun 28, 2023


Kurt Cobain pops up as a ferryman in (I think) Ends of Empire.

Explodingdice
Jun 28, 2023


Opsikion Themed posted:

Honestly, it's one of the three things that inspired me to do the review? The honestly pretty fun Dawn Lands sandbox, one thing in the mechanics chapter that I'll get to when I get there, and then... that. Me spending a chapter wondering "is that the Enohto name for the Wabaandaa? Is it a nation that lives between them?" and then feeling the cold hand of death on my heart when I googled the word.

Hope you're enjoying the writeup anyways. :)

I wonder if the mistakes are things that will get fixed? I really can't get a good feel on how Chaosium's handling 7th Sea. Are they finishing out the required books before trying something different with it, given what seems to be a generally negative reaction to the system?

Explodingdice
Jun 28, 2023


Go for it, Cities of Wonder and Faith is one of the books for the line I haven't read but would be interested to know if it's worth a read.

Explodingdice
Jun 28, 2023


Quackles posted:

Wait, John Wick? The assassin?!


( :v: )

John is a man of focus, commitment, sheer will... something you know very little about. I once saw him write three terrible rules in a bar, with a pencil. With a loving... pencil.

Explodingdice
Jun 28, 2023


Are Cheden smurfs? I'm struggling to think of anything else blue and short.

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Explodingdice
Jun 28, 2023


Libertad! posted:

As for Invoke Patron, it is different from other spells in that it has an explicit limit on how often it can be cast per day, always requires at least 1 point of spellburn to use, and its particular effects are dependent on the patron in question. While they’re detailed in Chapter 10, there are 5 patrons written up which I’ll cover here. They include…

The Amazing Rando: first wizard to die in Xcrawl. Invoke Patron has showmanship-themed effects such as summoning shadow adventurers to attack opponents or ‘rewinding’ time to make PCs immediately heal damage/spellburn loss. Bonus spells are things like turning the caster into a martial arts prodigy and blasting loud damaging music.

Circe: sorceress of Ancient Greek myth. Invoke Patron gives potions, animals, and sea-based effects to aid the caster. Bonus spells are things like forcing targets to lose their will to fight and thus flee the combat, turning creatures into animals, and being able to brew a variety of potions with various unique effects.

Medea: sorceress-turned demigoddess who helps worshipers enact vengeance. Invoke Patron generally imposes misfortune and damage on the caster’s enemies, while bonus spells include the ability to brew various poisons, confusing targets to act randomly or attack their allies, and creating soldiers out of earth to fight the caster’s enemies.

Barzodi: the secret leader of the Necromancer’s Guild, fought against British soldiers during the revolution before being betrayed by George Augustus. Invoke Patron has life-draining and zombie-creating effects, bonus spells include rotting touch saps Strength and can cause fear, cursing enemies with debuffs, and learning secrets from the dead which grant temporary knowledge and skill training.

Prometheus Firebringer: Titan who stole the secret of fire from the gods, specializes in teaching casters about spellburn, but those who have him as a patron risk the wrath of the gods. Invoke Patron grants a broad variety of buffs such as ability score boosts that can be spellburned, regaining a lost spell, or a bonus to the caster’s next attack/skill/spell check. Bonus spells include restoring spellburned ability scores or creating a reserve of energy to draw from for this purpose without risk of cosmic/divine wrath, summoning the power of Prometheus into their next attack that deals extra damage to the target and the damage is then absorbed by the caster as bonus points to spellburn, and calling divine fire down as an AoE attack.


So the greek myth ones are obvious, and I recognize the Amazing Rando from MST3K, but who's Barzodi?

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