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Mors Rattus posted:(Also, re: the Ebih story, there is apparently no enemy of the gods more patient and terrifying than rocks, between Inanna vs Ebih and Ninurta vs Asag. With the possible exception of salt water.) If the mountain refuses to bow, you have to handle it. Can’t let that big rock get away with this! I personally really love... I think this was in En-Heduanna’s hymns? The way the poet has Inanna/Ishtar both knifing the mountain and burning down its groves and fouling its rivers, there’s an expansive imagination to how a goddess can kill an actual mountain. Joe Slowboat fucked around with this message at 22:50 on Sep 5, 2020 |
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Sep 5, 2020 22:44
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Joe Slowboat posted:If the mountain refuses to bow, you have to handle it. Can’t let that big rock get away with this! I personally really love... I think this was in En-Heduanna’s hymns? The way the poet has Inanna/Ishtar both knifing the mountain and burning down its groves and fouling its rivers, there’s an expansive imagination to how a goddess can kill an actual mountain. Inanna, returning from a trip to West Virginia: Some weapons are too beautiful to use.
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Sep 6, 2020 05:50
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Mors Rattus posted:I didn’t write that bit, but it’s not directly taken from any specific religious thing. The name we went with was Shuila and the concept is essentially divine authority. Anunna Scions and Gods are able to declare themselves in charge of whatever they feel like, basically, and it’s very hard to argue. It'll be interesting how that ability interacts with the Shen ability assuming that the mechanic has a possibility of running into the other.
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Sep 6, 2020 23:13
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It's been a while since I read the Purview stuff we wrote but I don't think they directly interact.
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Sep 7, 2020 01:39
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Dumb question because I can't turn up an answer across Origin, Hero, Titanomachy, or the Mysteries Companion: where are the Purviews and Callings of Prometheus outlined? Titanomachy has Titans but not him (and certainly has a couple Titanic Scions of his), and the other books come up empty too. Which seems weird because, again, Titanomachy has multiple example Scions of Prometheus in it straight up.
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Sep 9, 2020 03:45
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Chernobyl Peace Prize posted:Dumb question because I can't turn up an answer across Origin, Hero, Titanomachy, or the Mysteries Companion: where are the Purviews and Callings of Prometheus outlined? Titanomachy has Titans but not him (and certainly has a couple Titanic Scions of his), and the other books come up empty too. Which seems weird because, again, Titanomachy has multiple example Scions of Prometheus in it straight up. He hasn't actually been statted up yet, but it shouldn't be too hard. If you're going the Hero route (Titans have one Purview, Titanic Virtues, and no Callings), he's probably the Greek Titan of Fire with Fecundity and Egotism as his Virtues. If you prefer the Titanomachy route (Titans have multiple Purviews and at least one Titanic Calling), I'd do him up like this: Purviews: Epic Stamina, Fertility, Fire, Order, Passion (Inspiration) Callings: Adversary, Creator, Sage Virtues: Egotism, Fecundity Epic Stamina being for the whole "regrow your liver every night" bit of Zeus's punishment, Fertility because he created humanity, Fire and Passion (Inspiration) being pretty obvious, and Order because the fire he stole from the Gods is generally seen as both literally fire and metaphorically the concept of civilization. GimpInBlack fucked around with this message at 08:50 on Sep 9, 2020 |
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Sep 9, 2020 08:36
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I tapped into this thread from my pdf of Pentex Subsidiaries and wasn't sure if I was still tapped in. The amount of lovely backbiting and poor hiring choices in Vampire today is really depressing. Are there any other cool WoD products coming I might get excited about?
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Sep 9, 2020 10:36
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Tias posted:I tapped into this thread from my pdf of Pentex Subsidiaries and wasn't sure if I was still tapped in. The amount of lovely backbiting and poor hiring choices in Vampire today is really depressing. Have you seen Cults of the Blood Gods? I've only read a couple of sections from the pre-release manuscript, but it seems rad. An entire sourcebook on vampire religions.
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Sep 9, 2020 10:45
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GimpInBlack posted:He hasn't actually been statted up yet, but it shouldn't be too hard.
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Sep 9, 2020 14:46
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Any Demon supplements worth a quick look if my group is dipping in their toes to see if they want to run the system?
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Sep 9, 2020 20:45
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I recall the ST guide and player guide (Flowers of Hell) being pretty good, and even kind of vital expanding on stuff like Interlocks. I think the player guide, for some reason, is the one with a bunch more stuff on Infrastructure which can be really useful. Enemy Action was on average pretty okay if you want some premade antagonists.
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Sep 9, 2020 20:54
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Flowers from Hell is very valuable. Most important thing we learned from several months of Demon: really, really take time to figure out how you want building new covers to work, because the rules as written are not actually practical and lead to players deliberately trying to not engage with probably the most important system of the game just because it was too annoying to adjudicate.
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Sep 9, 2020 21:23
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Interface, Demon Seed Collection, and Enemy Action are solid but skippable. Heirs to Hell is situational: you will know from the premise alone (the demon-blooded, the result of demons conceiving human children, who inherit a degree of their reality-bending faculty, and their relations with their family and with the God-Machine) whether you want it or not. If you want it it's good and very cool. If the premise doesn't grab you then you miss nothing by skipping it. Flowers of Hell is good for sparking inspiration through character building options: embeds, exploits, demonic forms, and gadgets. Facades, the zero-dot temporary "sub-covers" it introduces, are very useful to keep a game moving smoothly. It has some spots I was disappointed by: it has a weird distorted take on how eidetic memory impacts demonic psychology, and I personally found the section on infrastructure hacking very underwhelming because it does not come close to exploring the wide potential the idea suggests on its own. The Storyteller's Guide (I wish they had kept to the plan of having a complementary name to Flowers of Hell and left it named Swords of Heaven) is very good. It has advice on designing interlocks which are the number one thing people feel they need more guidance on, including a bunch of examples you can steal if you don't want to make them yourself. It helps flesh exiles out and introduces a bunch of new types of antagonists and oddities related to the God-Machine. It has short story hook writeups of inconsistent quality, mostly-good sections on how elements from other gamelines interact with demons in unexpected ways, and a strong set of alternate settings with some mechanics you can choose to import. A surprising contender is Splintered City: Seattle, which is the only "city book" for the Chronicles of Darkness that kept my attention and enthusiasm from beginning to end (well, minus a dip in the chapter dedicated to crossover coverage). Seattle is an excellent travelogue of the kind of hooks characteristic of a game of Demon, explores the "splintered timelines" concept while still having plenty of strong hooks for games not interested in that angle, and has the blockbuster plot idea of "here is a vault where the God-Machine keeps apocalyptic futures locked away and sealed; obviously what you want to do with this is run an epic heist and hold the world ransom." I Am Just a Box fucked around with this message at 22:00 on Sep 9, 2020 |
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Sep 9, 2020 21:58
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Last night I wrapped up a Vampire: the Requiem (2E) chronicle that I had started about 27 months ago and thought it was worth posting an wrap-up here for those interested in V:tR and the CoD in general (as there were some crossover elements in the mix). My players for this experience were uniformly excellent, take a bow Barbed Tongues, Herr Tog, IPlayVideoGames, John Dyne, pynladfysh, and Nalesh. The initial pitch was only "V:tR 2E sandbox game on roll20", but I knew that prior to the first session I would be using Microscope to collaboratively build the setting and Climbing the Ladder (from the V:tR 2E corebook) to help create ties between the characters. For reasons that still escape me to this day, the players wanted to run the game in San Diego so "The Secret History of San Diego" became the starting point for our Microscope minigame. I cannot say enough good things about Microscope as a way to build a setting starting from a basic seed - and it's a great way to get buy-in from everyone right at the beginning as you see what suggestions are thrown out there and what they gravitate to. After two nights of Microscope we had the background: a history of San Diego centered on the relationship between the vampires and various other supernatural entities whose fates intertwined. There was a cabal of mages who tried to stop WWII in advance in 1938 and pay a terrible price, Prometheans occasionally coming through town and not always staying ahead of their Disquiet, changelings running an occult black market that you can find if you know where to look, and most importantly a history of werewolf packs who function as mercenaries - creating an unhealthy symbiosis for both undead and werewolves who became codependent on each other. Climbing the Ladder was less successful, but only because it can be difficult to keep track of 12 times your number of players little story seeds. However, I can still recommend it if you group is so inclined - I had a wealth of potential hooks for both large- and small-scale plots to choose from. Out of character creation came a coterie of young unsworn Kindred who have their haven in the Whaley House, sometimes branded as the most haunted house in America. At the start their only goals were to survive the hostility of the Ordo Dracul (who had previously held Whaley House until the Prince booted them out) and figure out just why their home was haunted. There was a desire to do stories with an "occult investigator" slant, which I admit I only kind of rose to the occasion on. Vampires really don't have a great skill set or resonance with that kind of thing - Auspex can only take you so far and occult mysteries in general is literally Mage's core. But what vampires are very good at is corrupted, persuading, or subordinating resources to serve them so I tried to use that as the procedural focus. They eventually became friends with an mage and enlisted the assistance of a werewolf shaman to get things done, and there is certainly a lot you can do with Auspex (more specifically Spirit's Touch) to help push an investigation along. This was only my second time running any sort of Vampire (I had done a V:tM 3E all-Tremere game a long, long time ago) and I was generally extremely satisfied with the game on paper. I didn't use any of the alternate mechanics provided (never found a good opportunity for the diceless variation of feeding scenes) but feeding and Discipline use were in general very easy to adjudicate. Combats were rare but felt about right - those who were willing to spend Vitae and Willpower freely almost always came out on top unless they ran out of gas or were vastly outclassed. The bestial aura rules came into play on occasion, as it's a good way for Kindred to antagonize each other without outright throwing down. I would have liked better guidelines for when frenzy becomes an issue (outside of hunger frenzy) - this is one place where I think V:tR 5E has really pushed ahead. Once you have a frenzying vampire though, it's very thematic to discover that as a general rule, vampires have ZERO tools to de-escalate a situation. You either send them to torpor, scare them enough to force them to flee (better grounding for this would have been nice), or eventually they WILL destroy the Beast's target. The coterie eventually found themselves a patch of turf, and I was very happy with the supplemental rules in Damnation City for domain play. That level never ended up being the focus of the game, but it was a useful backstop when thinking about questions of how to sketch out a neighborhood that you control and what the relevant levers are to change that. I was really wanting more mechanical help with loving with people at the individual, street level. Specifically I got hung up on Touchstones - which almost all vampires have, and make an excellent soft underbelly for an enemy to target (particularly for my coterie, who had Safe House 5/Haven 5 and were pretty much untouchable in their stronghold). But I didn't want it to seem....arbitrary?....when I would threaten a PC's Touchstone so I never really pushed on that angle. In the end some touchstones ended up mattering a lot more than others, but it's something I felt could use some improvement. Humanity worked well - the players tended to roll well so I think we only had two degenerations over the course of ~55 chapters. Those who slipped became a little more callous, and I had one player who really rose to the occasion of playing a vampire at Humanity 8 and surprised everyone by always looking to help people and not give into baser instincts. I wanted to be true to the intended spirit of the game and shoot for personal horror where possible, which is a tough goal (horror roleplaying in general is a tricky thing, but I'm going to go back for seconds with a Call of Cthulhu campaign) but I think there were moments of it. We did one Embrace scene (the characters didn't do the deed, but basically delivered the victim to the Circle of the Crone to spare her from what they feared would be a fate even worse) and I think it had the right amount of pathos and discomfort for what is almost always an act of premediated murder. I tried to improvise some basic safety tools but I hope to do better my next go around. My players were extremely generous with the story hooks and making selfish choices in the name of drama - Dramatic Failure beats were a staple of the early game but eventually dropped off as the situation became complicated enough. We used Group Beats and I have no complaints, I have seen the wisdom on the subject. I felt that Conditions worked OK - they were best when used as ways of fleshing out Disciplines (particularly Dominate and Majesty), less so when I tried to use them as general purpose dramatic fallout. It might have gone better if roll20's support for cards was not a flaming pile of poo poo - in general I would describe my first roll20 experience as satisfactory, but only barely. I used a premade V:tR 2E character sheet which was pretty poor - the way that CoD expresses health/vitae/willpower as boxes means you essentially can't meaningfully track those values unless you want to do double-bookkeeping. A better V:tR sheet popped up later, but I couldn't switch over to it unless I was willing to re-enter everything so I was stuck with what I started with. I ended up having to cut the chronicle short due to, well, Hellworld 2020 by not running the planned third act - but I had a really great time and I think my players did to, and I can strongly recommend V:tR 2E as delivering on the kinds of experience promised in the text.
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Sep 9, 2020 22:32
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I Am Just a Box posted:it has a weird distorted take on how eidetic memory impacts demonic psychology Would you mind expanding on this? I'm curious, because 'literary figures with an exceptional memory and the weird influence that has on their personality' is a personal interest of mine.
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Sep 10, 2020 00:26
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It's worth mentioning that the angelic Incept powers in the STG are apparently hilariously busted.
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Sep 10, 2020 00:36
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Rand Brittain posted:It's worth mentioning that the angelic Incept powers in the STG are apparently hilariously busted. In fairness, so are the player powers in Flowers of Hell. In particular Demons get a Time Stop Exploit that has no restrictions on using it for combat.
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Sep 10, 2020 01:22
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Second Pantheon preview up for Scion Demigod 2e. It's The Slavic pantheon, the Bogovi
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Sep 10, 2020 05:02
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Tuxedo Catfish posted:In fairness, so are the player powers in Flowers of Hell. In particular Demons get a Time Stop Exploit that has no restrictions on using it for combat.
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Sep 10, 2020 05:24
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Nessus posted:If two Demons have the Time Stop power, can they move in one another's stopped time? It's activated as a reflexive action, so while it isn't explicitly called out as such, that would be one way to resolve the issue of "what if one Demon does it in response to another?" Also on reviewing the rules I was mistaken: it doesn't allow you to hurt frozen targets, it just says right in the rules that you can set up traps or attacks for the instant the effect ends. So you can do the fistful of knives thing, at any rate. 
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Sep 10, 2020 05:40
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Tulip posted:Flowers from Hell is very valuable. Could you elaborate on the covers? I've little experience in WoD or CoD. Is your issue with how covers are built (pacts, and the blowing of willpower / spending of willpower dots) or how they're maintained?
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Sep 10, 2020 06:09
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Joe Slowboat posted:Would you mind expanding on this? I'm curious, because 'literary figures with an exceptional memory and the weird influence that has on their personality' is a personal interest of mine. Okay, ironically enough my memory seems to have blended this together with the takes some fans later spun out of it in forum discussions. The actual passage in the book itself is neither as long nor as extreme as I was thinking of. quote:Which brings us to the next commonly overlooked aspect of Eidetic Memory: emotional content. When a human experiences strong emotion — grief, say, or joy — over time that emotion is blunted. Demons don’t have that. Every triumph and sorrow, every love affair and betrayal, is as fresh to them as though it had just happened. It takes something significant for a demon to forget a grudge — or a favor. The objectionable idea seems to have come more from people who read this passage and interpreted it as meaning demons are all seething with old grudges and trauma from events as if they were still living out every event in their life constantly. On rereading this passage in isolation, it's perfectly acceptable if read to simply mean that demons don't let go of past experiences easily when brought back up by relevant events: a demon never quite forgets a slight or a favor until it's finally made even.
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Sep 10, 2020 09:03
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tokenbrownguy posted:Could you elaborate on the covers? I've little experience in WoD or CoD. Is your issue with how covers are built (pacts, and the blowing of willpower / spending of willpower dots) or how they're maintained? The rules for how covers are maintained and lost are generally fine. The rules for making Cover are often confusing and messy, and while Flowers from Hell adds some needed features it also makes it even less clear. I am struggling to remember which lines in the rules gave us trouble since the campaign was over a year ago, but we definitely had lengthy table discussions that several times ended with "gently caress it, this is not worth it." Demon I think is responsible for nearly the majority of all major rules disputes my table's had, and that's from a decade of playing random systems.
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Sep 10, 2020 13:32
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Tuxedo Catfish posted:It's activated as a reflexive action, so while it isn't explicitly called out as such, that would be one way to resolve the issue of "what if one Demon does it in response to another?" Like many demon powers, it is best used for comedic effect. You can get up to some real loony toons stuff with the timestop, it's what my character with it did.
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Sep 10, 2020 15:04
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Dumb question, does anyone know if Paradox have looked at kicking off Mage:The Ascension 5th ed yet?
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Sep 11, 2020 06:23
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Considering they've announced Werewolf 5th Edition is coming, they've almost certainly talked internally about it and expect to do it in the future. Considering we don't even have any spoilers shared about what shape Werewolf is taking, it's way too early to actually know anything about how an M5 would resemble or differ from its predecessors, or even what company is going to develop it.
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Sep 11, 2020 06:27
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My primary hope is that it won't be the trash heap that was M20. A game where, when my group played it, we consciously jettisoned the majority of both the mechanics and the setting. A game that, for all its sophomoric talk about belief and how that shapes the world, couldn't come up with a core gameplay loop. It'll be an uphill battle to make something functional.
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Sep 11, 2020 07:28
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Shadows of New York is out on Steam now and I'm finding it way more engaging than Coteries, which I did enjoy. Julia's a pretty great MC. I've think I've played her before. The deal the Lasombra struck to get into the Camarilla is certainly... interesting.
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Sep 11, 2020 14:41
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new mage should just be mortals loving around with poo poo they found in grimoires and then attempting to minimize the impacts of the horrors they just unleashed. Big Wizard of Earthsea vibes.
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Sep 11, 2020 14:46
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Dawgstar posted:Shadows of New York is out on Steam now and I'm finding it way more engaging than Coteries, which I did enjoy. Julia's a pretty great MC. I've think I've played her before. It ends well too, unlike Coteries.
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Sep 11, 2020 14:50
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CottonWolf posted:It ends well too, unlike Coteries. Is it another interactive novel type game?
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Sep 11, 2020 15:19
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Soonmot posted:Is it another interactive novel type game? Yep. Visual novel with two real ending and a series of bad ends.
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Sep 11, 2020 15:24
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Soonmot posted:Is it another interactive novel type game? Yup. I really wish there was an option to set text to 'instant' rather than 'fast.' I end up tapping Enter twice a lot, once to advance and once to have all the text appear instead of the distracting and slow typing. Every once in a while I end up speeding through a choice and picking something I wouldn't have. If this game is as railroaded as the previous one, I suppose I shouldn't complain because it literally doesn't matter.
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Sep 11, 2020 15:25
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PHIZ KALIFA posted:new mage should just be mortals loving around with poo poo they found in grimoires and then attempting to minimize the impacts of the horrors they just unleashed. Big Wizard of Earthsea vibes. Do you mean M5, or Mage: The Awakening (aka Mage: the Good One)?
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Sep 11, 2020 20:05
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The second half of the Demigod pantheons chapter has gone up today for backers, featuring the Bogovi (Slavic and Russian) and the Tengri (Mongolian, my good horseloving friends).
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Sep 11, 2020 20:07
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Mors Rattus posted:The second half of the Demigod pantheons chapter has gone up today for backers, featuring the Bogovi (Slavic and Russian) and the Tengri (Mongolian, my good horseloving friends). https://youtu.be/jM8dCGIm6yc Pictured: A Band of Tengri Scions (I really like the Tengri.)
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Sep 12, 2020 10:53
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GimpInBlack posted:https://youtu.be/jM8dCGIm6yc Glad to hear it! I fell in love with them while doing research and writing them up, I just wish that there were more English language resources on them.
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Sep 12, 2020 12:53
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...good heavens. I feel like the guy sitting in the chair in the old Maxell ads, to date myself horribly.
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Sep 12, 2020 13:08
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Dawgstar posted:...good heavens. Oh, is this your first time hearing The Hu? They are wonderful.
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Sep 12, 2020 14:48
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Oh, the whole rabbithole of psuedo-nationalist operatic Mongol, Kazakh, and Uzbek metal is an incredible one. Also? Russian folk music, for some reason, is extremely good.
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Sep 12, 2020 15:12
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