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Oh hey, a thread that goes into the OWoD's crazy religious leanings. This is a neat topic.quote:I've said for a while that the position of V:tM lore is that young-earth creationist fundamentalist christianity is right.  " at some of the more culturally hosed up things that made it to print is potentially on point and extremely hilarious if true.As one of the biggest examples of what I mean: I remember that the most extreme and over the top Gehenna source book scenario had Caine crawling out of the rubble of global civilization after an apocalypse that (if you read between the lines) straight up exterminates the biosphere needed to support human life, likely rendering the planet uninhabitable in the long run**. So, Caine sees the nightmarish devastation from Cronenberg-esque horrors that humans had been turned into due to Tzimisce loving around (more on that later), the literal hordes of batshit insane hive minded Malkavian victims (Which are humans, now, and can infect anyone that they get some blood into.) that literally obliterate the concept of reality around them like the Wyld from Exalted is on a lark through Creation, the nuclear devastation from the Camarilla ripping the mask off and going full bastard in a "Germany will burn before I fall" Hitler-esque sort of way, and Lasombra's Antediluvian literally plunging the world into absolute darkness for a full on month and promptly screams to the heavens: "Why won't you let me die?!" God is described as answering back with what is explicitly uproarious mocking laughter at the slaughter of an entire planet and the few Cainite survivors starting the entire nightmare over if humanity somehow manages to claw it's way back from this extinction level series of events. *Mark Rein-Hagen allegedly has some...Opinions of the bigoted and neo-nazi sort, according to many people i've seen posting about him in the past. No idea if this is true, so maybe someone can elaborate on it. But it would go a long way to explain the shift of tone on such subjects like God in later material as new people came in and freaked out at some of his more racist antics. Also, it explains stuff like that Gypsies book. Which all by itself could probably get a page or two of content as people try to dissect just what the authors of it were saying about certain groups of people. ** In the most gonzo scenario the Lasombra antediluvian straight up turns off the ability for sunlight to hit the Earth's surface for a full month at one point. Suffice to say that any human that isn't in a sealed bunker with heating is dead, and anything above a single celled lifeform deep in an underwater ravine probably joined them. Edit: Another interesting thing I remember is that the old White Wolf OWoD loved dipping into the crazy conspiracy theories that kooks came up with for material. Not sure how that'd play with people nowadays though, given how dangerous conspiracy theorists have become to society at large, though. Just an example of something from the same Gehenna scenario though: Tzimisce literally turns every human and vampire in the world into a Cronenberg-esque monstrosity straight out of John Carpenter's "The Thing" by hijacking a spell performed by the founder of Clan Tremere. This was a spell that was only doable because the Mormon Church had created a full genetic database of everyone human on earth that could be used as a focus for a thaumaturge or mage to basically alter humanity at will. Obviously this goes off the rails in a big way because it's VtM and vampires are neither as smart nor as hot poo poo as they wish they were. Literally, the whole thing with the Mormon Church was using some of the crazier conspiracy theories about the Mormon Church trying to forcibly baptize people into their religion as a vehicle to advance the plot by having Tzimisce gently caress up the planet. All to railroad the protagonists into basically having to commit a blood sacrifice (of themselves, no less for that extra heretical take) to God in the hopes that he'd have his ego flattered enough to smite Tzimisce and maybe turn humanity back into humans. TL;DR: The first version of the OWoD went some places, is what i'm trying to say with this. Archonex fucked around with this message at 17:43 on Jul 28, 2021 |
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Jul 28, 2021 17:10
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CommieGIR posted:That's what I figured, from my vague recollection of VtM, mostly through my spouse. I think when one of the heavy duty lore nerds tried to calculate Caine's age, he was well older than a creationist would ever accept. So yeah. Dude wouldn't exist in their eyes. On the other hand, I think it's Demon that said that before the fall multiple timelines could occur at once. So who knows? Dude could have come out of a time paradox from a timeline where the Wyrm was the dominant god of the era before it got tortured by the Weaver, for all we know. 
Archonex fucked around with this message at 17:44 on Jul 28, 2021 |
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Jul 28, 2021 17:25
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Halloween Jack posted:For one, Roma have special connections to certain types of supernatural creatures, namely Gangrel and Ravnos vampires, and there are minor magickal powers that they can have. Also, the pre-revamp Ravnos were related to the Roma and were suggested to have similar personality traits. Basically saying as a result that the Romani people are a magical, perfidious, and fundamentally untrustworthy people who prefer to move around a lot and will con you in a heartbeat like some sort of hammer horror movie satire. Basically, really racist poo poo that probably forced certain folks to take a backseat in writing materials, given that reception to the book caused a far less bigoted take on the Ravnos to come about and the Gypsy book in particular to be retconned from existence before anyone ever even had time to consider the mistake of using the thing. Edit: You know that weird schtick of some backwards villagers in horror works, that maybe travel around in wagons and cast curses on people that displease them? That's the Gypsies book. The OWoD Wiki posted:One of the most infamous and ill-advised White Wolf supplements, this book has earned a great degree of ire for reinforcing harmful stereotypes and assigning supernatural and magical qualities to a real-world minority. Or to put it another way, imagine if someone put out a book called "The Old World of Darkness: Native Americans" where every person of native american descent was depicted as a really racist "Me smoke-um peace pipe." type magical shaman who danced around the fire at night to ward off evil spirits while getting liquored up on firewater. Only the writer/s tried to portray this as a good thing that is normal and isn't at all loving horrifying in the level of bigotry it shows off. That's basically how the Gypsies book was, only for a different minority. Suffice to say that they quickly backtracked on the book so hard that it's basically an old shame now on par with that hardcore porn VTM novel (Eternal Hearts, or something like that?) that some random author was hired to write, where all the vampires inexplicably really like to engage in some really messed up loving. Like, really messed up. Archonex fucked around with this message at 18:12 on Jul 28, 2021 |
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Jul 28, 2021 17:50
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Dick Burglar posted:Penultimate means "second-to-ultimate," so who's the ultimate villain? Who's a greater villain than god? Sure doesn't sound like it's Cain. I mean, if you want to go into a really deep lore dive then you could argue that it is in fact Caine in a darkly hilarious "This man is terrifyingly powerful yet also an utter gently caress up at everything he tries to do." sort of way. Since I think it's Demon that suggests that Caine's gently caress ups go far outside the realm of VtM itself, one of the bigger examples being introducing the concept of murder to reality by offing his brother Abel. That lead to like maybe a little over half of Lucifer's allies going AWOL (Some of them were genuinely heroic. Others...not so much.) during the whole war in heaven thing that was meant to uplift humanity and (allegedly) keep the loyalists from screwing with them. Said AWOL angels ended up setting up their own often hosed up fiefdoms with ideologies that ranged from "humanity should serve us as slaves" to 'Hey, human experimentation is great don't you think?". A rough TL;DR of all of that is that as a result the rebels all promptly got their poo poo kicked in when the revitalized opposition decided to either use this new thing called murder to curb stomp the rebels or simply zerg rush them, slaughter their followers, and put them in chains. At which point they subjected all of the rebels (save Lucifer) to unending torture so horrific that by the time the playable segment of Demon rolls around even the ones that could have been called good had turned into insane demons without a human host to stabilize them. Meaning the Gehenna-esque apocalyptic Demon scenarios (along with the slow decay of humanity due to not only all sorts of other assholish stuff being able to run rampant, but also the former angels turned demons themselves once they get loose) are at least partially Caine's fault as well. And all this doesn't touch on the stuff about Wycks or the Wyrm. The latter of which I very vaguely recall there being some tiny blurb suggesting Caine could have had a run in with it at some point. Or as TVtropes summed it up years back posted:After Caine invented murder, Lucifer essentially lost control of three of his five legions, and many of those renegade Fallen didn't take long at all to more or less spiral into Stupid Evil. The Fallen who kept their poo poo together were pretty much hosed from word go because they had to spend almost as much time and effort fixing their fellows' screw ups and bullshit evil experiments as they did resisting the heavenly host. Note that this is kind of a theme in Caine's life too. Nearly all of his possible backstories have him repeatedly barreling into situations he knows nothing about, assuming being nigh omnipotent is good enough to handle any issues that come up, and then poo poo just going sideways as a result of him not taking a second to think about the consequences of his actions or restrain himself for the greater good. Failing that, they have him just backstabbing and/or enraging every ally he could have had, up to and including one angel that took it upon itself to warn him that in no uncertain terms should he ever turn someone into a vampire because bad things would in fact happen as a result of it. Basically, there's a good case to make that the penultimate villain in the OWoD is the setting's version of God for being a self aggrandizing (but ultimately kind of lazy) malicious jerk. Whom is trumped only by Caine due to him being the living incarnation of that "Local man ruins everything." meme on account of his constant habit of repeatedly doing the performative equivalent of running into his own fist on an often literally cataclysmic level. Edit:And to be clear, i'm not joking about Caine being a walking, talking, accidental catastrophe producer to the point where people started producing memes about it.  If the old novels are anything to go by though, he gets over this habit of his and is genuinely regretful over how much vampires (and his mistakes by proxy) have made the world a lovely place to live in. So like with a lot of other stuff in VtM there's some moral complexity there, I guess. Archonex fucked around with this message at 01:56 on Jul 29, 2021 |
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Jul 29, 2021 00:45
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Perestroika posted:As somebody who is only superficially familiar with the setting, I wonder how it's treating the whole concept of the (second) inquisition and hunters? On the one hand I'd expect it to come down on it fairly harshly, since the setting and writers don't seem to be fans of the religious fanaticism inherent to movements. On the other hand... well, the inquisition kinda does have a point when there really are blood-drinking monsters preying on humanity, doesn't it? Politically speaking, the second inquisition are cleaning out the trash. And by the trash, I mean the worst assholes in VtM's sects that were convinced they could get away with doing anything to anyone, often due to a (as demonstrated in V5) false belief of superiority over humanity/other vampires. To give an idea of it, the Sabbat is entirely missing from V5 outside of some cameo's thus far because they "suddenly" decided to go crusading in the middle east once humanity started introducing them to the wonders of white phosphorous coated rounds and carpet bombing via drone strikes. Something that literally cleared out their strongholds to the point where their south american holdings were collectively one of the first big casualties aside from the Tremere inner council. Who went down like utter chumps to a single missile after centuries of giving the Setites a run for their money in the category of "Pompous, supervillain-esque and all around monstrous bastards that are long overdue in needing a good staking.". Unfortunately there is some dubious politics there. The Camarilla source book has what appears to be a writer of a CIA document referring to people who are LGBT as deviants on par with vampires, for instance. Which is rather chilling given how certain groups on the Hunter end in V5 prefer to deal with vampires they take prisoner. Though given who contributed to the Camarilla source book this is dubiously canon given that that book was the book that literally almost started an international incident after the then management had spent like a year and a half signaling hard to literal neo nazis and the like. Suffice to say that they peaked with that book in a pretty over the top way. Also, interestingly enough Rein-Hagen was involved in the actual controversial text too, to go off of what Holden has said (and I should note that Holden Shearer's increasingly infuriated twitter rants on how Mark Rein-Hagen was dumb as a box of rocks and refused to understand how using LGBT minorities as a punching bag in the setting is bad and would rightfully piss people off are genuinely hilarious, despite any alleged issues with Exalted 3e.) on twitter since he was fired from Exalted 3e and doesn't need to keep his mouth shut anymore. Even if those remarks aren't canon the way the SI treats vampires in other books varies according to the country and organization that finds them. For instance, in the London book it's made clear that if you aren't some mass murdering psychopath, deranged blood cultist, or mafia-esque Camarilla fanatic the UK's anti terrorist unit will actually let you live in peace so long as they can track your position to make sure you don't relapse into old habits. Other areas where groups like the Society of Leopold/Catholic Church/the actual first Inquisition remnants and less tolerant counter-terrorist forces hold dominance however will, assuming you aren't killed outright, typically put you in the vampiric version of a gas chamber set to incinerate you to ash. There's multiple implied references to a kill'em all policy on that front, with one fiction blurb of a guy that straight up agrees with the opinion that the Camarilla needed to burn yesterday since the sheriff murdered his family for shits and giggles. He gets incinerated regardless of that and has an understated gently caress you to the SI as well for killing him, demanding that they just get it over with and put him in a sun facing cell already. Typically this occurs by way of the SI securing the vampire in a prison cell facing the morning sun once it rises. Which, aside from the implied horror of the deviants thing mentioned above is probably one of the less pleasant ways for a character in the setting to go out depending on how fast the sun hits their entire body. 
Archonex fucked around with this message at 09:27 on Jul 29, 2021 |
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Jul 29, 2021 08:53
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Ronwayne posted:Wait, is this the Swedracula/Chechen Vampire Pogrom thing? Yes. And then some. That was just the absolute peak of the poo poo iceberg of reprehensible and on more than one occasion downright abhorrent things that those guys got up too. It's honestly kind of astounding we still have V5 being developed given how thoroughly they poisoned the well when it came to people willing to buy the books. LA by Night by Geek and Sundry probably did a fair bit to recover the damage they did. Though that's off topic for the D&D thread I guess? Archonex fucked around with this message at 09:28 on Jul 29, 2021 |
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Jul 29, 2021 09:07
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RoboChrist 9000 posted:I get the obvious ways that the 'Gypsies' book is bad - I mean the title of the book is a loving slur FFS - but I'll be honest; I kind of feel like it's less offensive than the Ravnos. Requiem made an entire set of Indian bloodlines (Well, actually, the closest thing the setting has to an organized nation state in the modern era.) along with doing the same to the cultures of several other nations and their myths in the region actually. I don't know if the Ravnos revamp came before or after that, but if it was after then they took some heavy inspiration from Requiem and what you're saying. Beckett's Jyhad Diary literally has him going overseas at which point he encounters a society of vampires that are way different than anything the Camarilla would ever expect to encounter or deal with. Hence why they want to control or exterminate them like some sort of lovely goth imperialistic colonialists, since the Camarilla is basically what happens when a gerontocracy turns rotten due to corrupt people at the top not being filtered out due to old age. Archonex fucked around with this message at 10:54 on Jul 29, 2021 |
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Jul 29, 2021 10:45
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RoboChrist 9000 posted:You also had the Nagaraja in VtM which despite the name seem more like - and the name of the one Nagaraja in Bloodlines would suggest a deliberate connection - Pishacha than anything related to Naga. Actually, Requiem goes even further back than VtM does. At least one bloodline is heavily implied to date back to before humanity even existed as we know it. As a side note, Requiem gets a bad rap from certain folks but in retrospect it definitely was a hell of a lot more fun to play. It's less about some unstoppable metaplot that rolls inexorably forwards and more about dealing with all the night to night bullshit vampires deal with. Sadly, it's less global and more local focus along with the lack of over the top faux pas means that it's hard to apply Requiem to this thread outside of pointing out that VtM shamelessly stole a lot of great ideas from Requiem. And then had Sweddracula try to claim that Requiem sucked and it was all their idea to create systems that were...literally ripped wholesale right down to their titles straight out of Requiem. All while doing their damndest to dick over the devs that kept the WoD franchise alive through the NWoD for years on end, and arguably did a better job of it. Archonex fucked around with this message at 11:01 on Jul 29, 2021 |
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Jul 29, 2021 10:55
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RoboChrist 9000 posted:Huh! I guess I know even less about CoD than I thought! Oh man, i'll have to do some digging since I can't recall their names and there's no good wiki for it but there's multiple bloodlines books related to India, Thailand, and I believe also a Hinduist belief system? It's been so long that I can't remember the finer details. But a whole lot of areas of that region of the world got some neat detailing in V1 of VtR. Actually, there's some neat D&D appropriate politics stuff in it. One of the organizations straight up has a caste system where there are Kshatriya, Brahmin, etc, etc with a big focus being on the younger generations wanting to break out of the caste system and embrace the modern world while the older vampires are locked into requiring the caste system to maintain their social power that the Brahmin caste don't even deserve since it's stated that the Ventrue diablerized the real Brahmin caste and covered it up many centuries ago. The real Brahmin caste members were the aforementioned "predates humanity" eldritch type of vampire. to the point where they will hunt down those that leave the country with no intention of coming back with the intent of murdering them or something brutal like that. Complicating this is the fact that the Invictus (The closest local level but globally dispersed version of the Camarilla.) is right up there with the Lancaea et Sanctum (Basically, evil christians that believe they are superior to humanity. Imagine if the Sabbat took the whole religious aspects seriously and then had a supremacist oriented right wing evangelical view to it to boot. The former group wants to exploit the natives. The latter group wants to exterminate any religious belief system other than their own.) in wanting to continue the horrors of imperialism on the region, meaning the elders really do need the manpower that comes from the support of the younger vampires. I mentioned the gerontocracy thing before and if i've remembered the details right then it gets a different take from anything in VtM here. The whole thing comes off as a bunch of people way too fond of the perks of the status quo committing suicide by imperialism and past grudges. All because they don't want to consider that someone else in their own in-group could be right. All while themselves unwittingly being wrong about everything about their society, since their highest caste was straight up murdered by the ancestors of those imperialists a long time ago. Meaning their entire reliance on the caste system has become a tragic farce by proxy due to the mounting losses that can be attributed to a strict adherence to it. Aside from that, there's also multiple bloodlines centered around mythological beliefs that were turned to vampiric purposes along with more mundane stuff like a hosed up Nosferatu-esque nobility that travel abroad as wheeling and dealing businessmen while also acting as spies for their allies back home, etc, etc. Had to be at almost a dozen of bloodlines spread out through the books all told. They definitely did the concept of it far better justice than the OWoD did, and it's obvious that some of it heavily "inspired" the Jyhad Diary take on the Ravnos. If I get a chance i'll see if I can't look them up some more if folks are interested in that diversion. Or someone else can post about it. Edit: As for the other possible meaning of your question: The Mekhet (A word used in VtM, no less.) are the bloodline that are confirmed as being something else that predates humanity. The clan book has one of the most entertaining characters from VtR's literature get a peek back in time. She gets tricked into using an artifact that shows the last moments of now deceased Mekhet vampires going all the way back to ancient Egypt (Where you'd think they'd originated from given the name.). She discovers however that the presumed Egyptian origin is complete bullshit when her mind is then dragged even further back in time to prehistory after the demise of the vampire in that segment. Instead, she finds herself occupying the consciousness of a many tentacled thing that waits and slithers in the dark of a cave, brandishing swords with it's tentacles as it prepares to try to fight off the entities massing outside to slay it. Which is as far back as she can go. Archonex fucked around with this message at 11:48 on Jul 29, 2021 |
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Jul 29, 2021 11:16
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Randalor posted:
So unless it becomes an even bigger thing in the thread I won't go into it more than what i'm about to post as it's more to do with the creators rather than the setting itself. But to elaborate just a bit further so people who aren't as familiar with V5 know what went down and it doesn't have to get a retread over and over: When we say that V5 had a lovely start under Sweddrac, we aren't kidding. From the moment Paradox picked it up to the moment Paradox cleaned out the management it was filled with PR blunder after escalating PR blunder. With the blunders looking a lot less like blunders and more like "these people are abhorrent assholes" as time went on and they just did not stop with the awful behavior and in fact kept escalating as Paradox turned a blind eye to it. Which makes it all the funnier and more ironic that they ultimately got fired for pissing off an even nastier and eviller group of bigots and supremacists. Likewise, when we say that V5 management got up to some skeezy poo poo, we really aren't kidding. The whole "let's accidentally almost make a bunch of violent genocidal bigots go to the international stage with their issues against us!" thing was just the amusingly over the top ending to a whole series of bad incidents. There were articles floating around for awhile that looked more like dissertation papers in terms of length due to all the bad poo poo they got up too. To give an example of a single other incident amongst the multitudes (Which started out with treating Onyx Path lovely and running LARP's with rapey rules.) they hired on a transphobic individual who had a history of doxxing people who would go on to (amongst other things) put the name of a transwoman he had harassed in the game as a transwoman who liked to catfish men as a hooker, give them a blowjob and then reveal she was trans. If they acted disgusted she ate them alive. If they were fine with it she let them go. TL;DR: The point was that the writer was using a reference to a transwoman to suggest that transpeople were sexual predators. And he appeared to have used one of his past victims to do it. Also, his lovely minions and parachute accounts (Which if I recall correctly probably existed on here and definitely on rpg.net before they got caught. He was a bit of a joke when he got found out.) harassed an Onyx Path writer out of his job. His explanation on the forums just came out and said that the aforementioned transphobe (Who was a whole lot of phobic things, really.) in question was straight up having people chase him around in his personal life harassing him. Paradox did not care until the "Oh poo poo, the literal real world genocidal monsters are screaming for our blood because of what a bunch of edgy neo-nazi nerds we thought were competent did." thing happened. At which point they canned the folks responsible for V5 and assigned people who would focus on redeeming it's image in the eyes of the public. All of this is at least tangentially relevant though, as it colors the material in certain books released during a brief period of time. Which makes it of dubious reliability in discussing the wider setting that's been established for awhile now. Also, as a side note this makes me think that there's a bit of a neat discussion of the meta narrative of the live game/broadcasted show LA by Night. Since a big discrepancy of the show is the more idealistic character (Annabelle) wanting to make a home for the Anarchs and talking up some progressive points while the greater community literally does evil poo poo like slaughtering a nightclub filled with people early on. Kind of has some commentary on VtM's general view and outlook of idealism and privilege, I think. golden bubble posted:That's why Mage: The Awakening is better. In awakening, the bad guys are the old wizards of yore, who seized ultimate magical power only to pull up the ladder behind them and break the world. Awakening though is commonly used on these forums as a weird masturbatory screed of how _____ poster would (ironically, much like the mentioned rear end in a top hat old wizards) use magic to forcibly insert their own political beliefs as the dominant motif of reality. To hear people talk of it on here it's less of a game and more of a really tiresome and kind of nightmarishly hypocritical politicized thought experiment that certain folk just can't seem to pull free off, hence the joke of magechat being a big part of the game and being utterly inescapable. There's some neat meta narrative stuff there with regards to politics and how privilege could gently caress up a legitimately decent view and turn it rotten. But some of the stated aspirations of major Awakening posters is so deep into being part of remarkably niche themed games that it would never even show up for most people that post on here. Also, getting into the parts that certain posters don't agree with/don't make mages smell like roses narratively speaking is playing with fire. As past experiences have taught me the hard way that some posters will gleefully poo poo up a thread with contrarian magechat nonsense filled with jargon that no one aside from a devout contrarian or someone who takes their ideas very personally could ever be bothered to memorize if it disagrees with their weirdly niche interpretation of the setting. So it's...kind of a minefield to discuss. Archonex fucked around with this message at 12:08 on Jul 30, 2021 |
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Jul 29, 2021 22:38
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Klaus88 posted:"Huh, isn't White Wolf that Neo-Nazi outfit?" To be fair, the newer management is not like that. To keep this on track, I mentioned it in my last post but I'd recommend the canon LA by Night series on Youtube as something people interested in this thread might enjoy watching. It is actually relevant to the thread, as it gives a decent street level (and very Requiemish at times) look at the political going on's of a bunch of younger vampires in the setting when it veers into that direction of play. Just be aware that it takes awhile to aim in that direction. And that the latest season is on the WoD official channel instead of the Geek and Sundry channel. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jFyQtOghqwA Archonex fucked around with this message at 23:07 on Jul 29, 2021 |
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Jul 29, 2021 22:52
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Gulping Again posted:Didn't the overwhelming majority of the Technocracy's leadership dive too deep into deep space and get turned into some incredibly horrible thing named something like THREAT:NULL or was that a fever dream? So, I only vaguely remember stuff about it. So feel free to correct me on the stuff i'm likely very wrong about. But from what I remember from long ago: Threat Null is literally an abstract manifestation (Backed by maybe some higher ups that have become avatars of the reality of what the Technocracy is, due to staying in the weirder parts of reality for too long. Maybe the Weaver is involved in it too, but that's just speculation due to some text that suggests that the higher ups in question may have been infested by spirits aligned with it or something similar to that.) made manifest of what the Technocracy is going to become if their views are taken to completion. As a result, it's hard to get into it without getting into the negative aspects of the Technocracy. Basically, imagine a bunch of crazed transhumanists that have just completely divorced themselves from their humanity, all while having the modern Technocracy's intolerant traits to other ideologies or even things fundamental to being human like free will. Mix the borg, the agents from the Matrix, Elon Musk on a permanent "Science for the sake of science!" binge while on a bunch of dissociative personality inducing hallucinogenic drugs, and a hive minded hyper-authoritarian and you get something resembling their various factions and unified ideology. They are essentially the Technocracy with none of the redeeming traits or any remnant of decency or even basic humanity. And I mean that last bit in a metaphorical and literal sense. And to be clear, their version of Earth if they won would be such a nightmarish dystopia that it'd make even Pentex and the utmost fanatical adherents of the Wyrm screech in absolute terror. The Technocrats are no exception to being subject to the horribleness of this dystopia either, meaning there's no Awakening-esque "The Seers expect to be exempted from all of their evil oppressive bullshit." hypocrisy. What this means is that everyone suffers if the Technocracy gets their way. Everyone loses. No exceptions. You'd think that the Technocrats would want to fix this Caine level ideological and occult flaw in their organization! But you'd be wrong since A. Most Technocrats (Void Engineers excepting. More on them later.) in the know don't give a drat and are convinced that someone at the top will come up with a fix any day now, meaning they can just ignore the issue. If you want an example of the thought process of a bunch of fictional wizards in this situation then think of it like how politicians would rather foist the responsibility off when it comes to climate change and rely on someone else coming up with a fix so they can keep pursuing more personal interests. The awful secret is that there's no one at the top. All the magical Elon Musk's of the world are relying on a kafka-esque system of occult and practical bureaucracy and leadership that moves as much under it's own inertia due to existing as much as it does through a unified ideology that is fundamentally self destructive and destructive. The ones that are likely higher up than them are part of Threat Null as well. Meaning salvation is decidely not forthcoming without them actually being willing to themselves make some sacrifices for the greater good of of the future of humanity, be willing to be more accepting of other ideals, and generally get their hands dirty in stopping the potential of their worst selves. Which they won't, since they're the platonic equivalent of an empty suit expecting an empty room full of decidedly nonexistent suits to handle all their problems. B. Even the ones that do care and would be more representative of 2nd ed's more seemingly heroic Technocracy are thoroughly hosed since Threat Null, being a future distillation of what the Technocracy is, has the control codes that let them control the members of the Technocracy. Since, yes, the Technocracy was stupid and arrogant enough to brainwash it's own members with a means to make them subservient at a moment's notice without wondering what would happen if the activator for it ever fell into the wrong hands. As a result the moment Threat Null pops into normative existence everything is going to come full circle as the Technocracy itself is going to become the victim of it's own oppression. C. On some level, the Void Engineers seem to realize how hosed up the rest of the Technocracy has become* and are trying to keep the existence of Threat Null a secret for fear of what might happen if the rest of the Technocracy found out about Threat Null. For the most part this is partially because Void Engineers themselves were always one of the token good guys that seemed to buy into the more noble ideals of what the Technocracy originally set out to do. The other part is probably an unstated and not unreasonable concern of what the response is going to be regarding some of the necessary actions needed to keep Threat Null out until it can be dealt with. Since they discovered how utterly hosed up Threat Null is they've become more militant (presumably to try and take out Threat Null themselves, amongst other things) and have even gone so far as to prolong the avatar storm to the detriment of many other very powerful mages, since it's keeping Threat Null from reaching Earth. They've even gone so far as to break the mind control that the Technocracy put on them, letting them presumably at least make a valiant last stand if they fail in their efforts to keep Threat Null out of reality. The latter of which is potentially really bad if word gets out, since it means that they'd essentially be rogue agents in the eyes of some members (who themselves are part of the reason why the Technocracy are antagonists) of the Technocracy. Or to put it another way, the Void Engineers are in the middle of having a Sons of Ether tier epiphany that the Technocracy was probably a bad idea in the long run, even if it did fricassee a bunch of eldritch abominations like the Ravnos antediluvian to keep Earth safe. It's to the point where there literally isn't a known Threat Null version of the Void Engineers (all the factions in the Technocracy have a hosed up counterpart except for them) for debatable reasons.** *One thing that isn't mentioned is that the Technocracy technically wasn't founded by a bunch of capitalists (They didn't even exist back then.) and corrupt/intolerant religious types that wanted to exterminate every ideology but theirs but rather people who genuinely despised the fact that the medieval equivalent of the traditions were originally basically the Exarch's from Awakening as mortal mages due to them hoarding magic while acting like callous and corrupt poo poo birds towards mundane humanity. All that awful poo poo the Technocracy came up with occurred later on as the Order of Reason got the upper hand against their enemies and became far more lax about pursuing their ideals. Back then, what's now the Technocratic Union's (Then known as the Order of Reason.) views probably looked a heck of a lot more appealing if you gave a poo poo about the well being of humanity at large and it's future. Having people die young of preventable diseases and seeing them perpetually stuck in a lovely existence as a serf to a feudalistic and medieval environment, all while being preyed on by various malicious supernatural entities due to a lack of technology and knowledge in exchange for you yourself having magical power is a lovely thing to turn a blind eye to if you're an empathic or decent person. It's to the point that even the official wiki goes on to say this as it's very first words on their predecessor organization: quote:The Order of Reason, founded in 1325 CE, was a group dedicated to the protection of humanity from the depredations of the supernatural – specifically mages, and more specifically the Order of Hermes. A look into how their opposition, the Order of Hermes, viewed humanity at large posted:The new millennium brought several upheavals. The Bubonic Plague devastated the Order of Hermes' infrastructure and led to further disgruntlement among the population for the arrogant wizards in their towers, who lorded over the peasants like kings and cared nothing about their plight. Keep in mind that the Order of Hermes is the group that gave us such wonders as VtM's Tremere (Famed for mass soul eating they later framed the Salubri for, horrifying human experimentation on par with the poo poo the rebel angels got up too, the mass extermination of a potentially token good clan of vampires, and for generally being just utterly sociopathic hyper-authoritarian power hungry scum who'd go on to betray almost everyone that ever met them.). They also weren't at all against straight up exterminating houses that fell afoul of their politics or were momentarily vulnerable due to politics or something else. There's a reason even Phil Brucato said that the Technocracy were originally the good guys and were the better option depending on the version of Mage that's being used. **People say that they think that the reason why there's no Void Engineers counterpart that's visible in Threat Null's ranks is because they'd just go off further into space to explore things that even the Void Engineers can't find. But i'm of the opinion that given their actions it's just as likely that they were eradicated by the other Threat Null factions since it's evident given their increasing militarization (To the point where they've literally gone and added the concept of space marines to their repertoire. And never mind that there's implications that it's slowly becoming their main thing above even exploration due to them throwing everything they can at stopping Threat Null and other apocalyptic threats.) that they're basically the token good guys of the Technocracy and are very much not cool with Threat Null or some souped up Nephandi stuck outside of reality having their way with the world. Factor into that them breaking their social conditioning/mind control and Threat Null can't just use the control codes on them, which leaves violence as the only other alternative. Archonex fucked around with this message at 15:05 on Jul 30, 2021 |
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Jul 30, 2021 12:25
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Oh, and as an addendum to that insanely  y mega post (Holy poo poo, I did not expect it to be so long. I had to rewrite large parts of it several times. ) I should add that in a weird sort of way Caine is the tiniest bit responsible in a very tangential sense for mage society going so haywire. Remember that post about how Caine introduced the concept of murder to existence, which let the loyalist angels defeat the rebels, which lead to demons being created as the loyalists tortured the crap out of every rebel angel aside from Lucifer? Which is why Caine is kind of the ultimate villain of the setting in a darkly funny way due to how he fucks up everything by accident and is basically the catalyst for a whole bunch of poo poo inevitably going wrong outside of VtM itself? Well, Demon's storyline reveals that Lucifer was as mentioned exempted from imprisonment and being turbo-tortured alongside the other rebels. So over the millennia he started to work on trying to free his comrades from the most absurdly hosed up punishment ever. He started with his most trusted lieutenants during the war, planning on summoning them to earth and using their overwhelming power to kickstart the war again. He even went so far as to create religions that would enable their release and afterwards worship them to feed them Except when he found them he discovered something awful. They had all become insane, monstrously evil bastards who blamed Lucifer, God, and usually also humanity as well for their defeat and subsequent insanity inducing torture. Turns out a dip into the abyss is not good for your sanity. So, realizing how badly he had hosed up (...By not realizing his comrades couldn't keep it together until he could get them free. Or by assuming the evil/AWOL ones that needed to be taken down would have had an epiphany that they shouldn't have been such bastards to humanity. To be fair, that one wasn't really on Lucifer.) Lucifer set about a number of countermeasures to weaken the power of his lieutenants so that these Earthbound demons wouldn't go starting up a demonic apocalypse. One of them was the advancement of science over religion, to the point where religion would not be the dominant force in people's lives anymore. Which would deprive the Earthbound of their source of power. Meaning that the Order of Reason was getting a huge boost from Lucifer working in the background to save them all from death by batshit insane demon. Meaning the Order of Reason didn't have as hard as a time as they might have in beating down the medieval era mages. Meaning the Order of Reason got to slack off on some of it's ideals, leading to the Technocracy more likely than not and failing that definitely enabled their victory over the medieval era traditions regardless. Meaning that one salty ur-vampire murdering his brother because he thought that a god that was okay with sanity raping torture liked his brother more than him ultimately kickstarted the series of events and poor decision making that lead to the Technocracy happening. Suffice to say that the OwoD's take on religion is kind of hosed up. Archonex fucked around with this message at 15:43 on Jul 30, 2021 |
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Jul 30, 2021 15:22
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Digital Osmosis posted:See, this is what I mean about the metaphysics of the setting muddling the discourse in oMage and obfuscating Ferrinus' point. Like, I think these are valid objections, but also that Ferrinus' read is correct, and I think that the reason both of these can be true is because the oMage metaphysics are incoherent and unworkable. In oMage the villains really are capitalism, and also the hero's plans really are "destroy the germ theory of disease." nMage's politics are clearer, sure, but that's not the only reason the discussion is different. It's not just blunter political metaphors in nMage, it's also a metaphysical framework that doesn't make a victory for Mages something that's easy to imagine as utterly terrifying. The thing is, the idea of a reality where humanity has power to determine it's own fate and prosper by itself by way of science is explicitly not a bad thing. Where you're getting hung up is that the Technocracy has become less about being a force of protection and progress from it's Order of Reason incarnation and has instead become more of some sort of self serving oppressive nightmare. It's a plot point across multiple game lines (when it's looked at with a bit more introspection than usual) that science and technology itself is potentially a unilateral good when used properly. It's when you end up with a ceaseless lack of care towards the consequences of the pursuit of these things that you end up with a bad situation --- be it through the oppressive ideology of a fallen Order of Reason that gave up it's higher ideals and became the Technocracy or the rampant murder-suicide capitalist cult that is Pentex. This in no way exonerates the mages that made up groups like the Order of Hermes, who would want to roll back the changes the Order of Reason had worked towards. Nor does it mean that science or technology is inherently bad as the way the world was before they showed up shows that inevitably you get some Seer-esque mages running things callously and gallivanting about while normal people die of dysentery in a ditch. Ferrinus point is wrong not because of an obfuscated point he made (Which does exist.) but because he starts a line of reductive reasoning that when spun out to its end basically ends up with a Phil Brucato-esque conclusion that nature is inherently good and technology/science inherently equals capitalism or western society, which it decidedly does not. And I should add that i've read a quote from Brucato himself who once said something to the tune that the traditions were not the good guys opposing capitalism or whatever but instead dangerous luddites and that a big part of the problem is that the Technocracy needs to get it's poo poo together and act right. It was quite some time ago that I read the quote but I also clearly recall he even he explicitly cited the point that the traditions way of thinking fucks over all of humanity by rewriting reality to a primitive standard that leaves them in a supreme position of power for their own gain. Which is a very Seers sort of thing to do, I should add. fool of sound posted:Honestly I find that old mage better reflects the tendency for real world occult and pagan revivalists to imagine themselves as ideologically superior to existing systems of power when there isn't actually any reason to believe that they're not just a different flavor of the same basic thing Yeah, this is the actual thread relevant thing that you can take away from this Archonex fucked around with this message at 16:14 on Jul 30, 2021 |
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Jul 30, 2021 15:59
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I also think that sometimes people end up reading into some of the stuff on display way too much and inferring a political or deeper meaning in it that might not necessarily be there. I mean, sometimes you just want to write something that's just loving cool for your big headliner events. How else are you going to explain stuff like the Ravnos Antediluvian (who is actually possibly a vampire that ascended to become a literal demon lord like this is some anime) waking up and mind raping a good chunk of the planet while a bunch of vampires from all over Asia band together to take it down by engaging in a week long epic kung fu battle with the Antediluvian under a blotted out sun? And then the finale has the Technocracy finally taking the gloves off once it's been weakened by the aforementioned vampires and displaying their implied power in the text in explicit form by just straight up nuking the thing out of existence with a sun powered death ray. And then there's an explosive stinger to it all where Enoch gets hit by the ghost of a nuke or something like that, the Underworld gets wrecked as a result of this, Wraith ends, and nothing is entirely the same again for several types of supernatural beings. Sometimes a giant sun powered death ray is just a giant sun powered death ray. Likewise, sometimes the ghost of a nuke blowing up the first city is just the ghost of a nuke blowing up the first city. Archonex fucked around with this message at 16:36 on Jul 30, 2021 |
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Jul 30, 2021 16:24
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Toph Bei Fong posted:I like your vision of the game as an optimistic enlightened Marxist revolution much better than the one that was printed by White Wolf. But that's the thing. It's not what was printed by White Wolf. I mean, if we're talking about homebrew lore and such that's fine but that's not solely what's there in the actual produced product. And I don't know how to say this without potentially catching a probe, Ferrinus, but it's obvious you take an incredibly narrow view of Mage and it's backstory, despite also having a very passionate interest in it. Like, you say poo poo like this on the regular: quote:First, lots of real-life leftist factions - and certainly the materially successful ones - are organized hierarchically. If you think the problem is "hierarchy" rather than capitalism you've already been fooled by liberal ideology. And it's obvious you're impressing your own personal political views onto the setting. Which is fine! Part of what makes the OWoD games is that they are so open to many different interpretations. But that doesn't change the fact that the actual work we're discussing is a bit more nuanced than it simply just being a work-wide metaphor for the glorious revolution against capitalism and the righteous downfall of the liberal ideology. This doesn't mean that I disagree with your posts that the game would be interesting if that's how it was. But I have to question just what you're trying to accomplish by arguing with people (and the statements of a foundational dev going all the way up to M20!) by insisting that that's the only interpretation? I mean, you're more likely to drive people away from posting in the thread by doing that than anything else. Archonex fucked around with this message at 18:20 on Jul 30, 2021 |
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Jul 30, 2021 17:57
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MonsieurChoc posted:Let's talk about how Cappadocius tried to diablerize God. Aside from the topic in question, Voormas from Mage poisoned the concept of necromancy somehow to make those that got strong enough in it become pushed towards triggering the apocalypse by causing some sort of hosed up planemeld type event where the underworld would merge with the living world and the platonic concept of death would overwrite mortality or some crazy bullshit like that. Basically, Voormas took a page out of Exalted (Have I mentioned that Exalted was supposed to be the forgotten prehistory of the setting? Because these nebulous references to it are all over the place.) and apparently nebulously poisoned the death oriented magic of the setting so that people that use it are pushed towards loving up reality without realizing it if they aren't given a heads up about this. Also, he's some sort of weird tantric sex practitioner that can do magic by boning and...Well, look, any summary of Voormas inevitably devolves into coming off like someone wrote up a major OWoD antagonist that was supposed to be really edgy and metal while on some really heavy drugs. Let me just post a few comparatively short tracts of his official wiki summary and you'll get the idea of what I mean. quote:At the behest of powerful spirits who claimed to be Kali and Shiva, Voormas had gathered the powers of death and misery and used them to fuel the dark essence of his Realm. Over the time, the House of Helekar turned into a bone-dusted shrine to depravity and pain. Voormas sheltered the Realm's true nature and purpose for 200 years. Blackmailing Doissetep's finest granted him access to some of the foulest Nodes in the Tellurian. Studying the old secrets of the Idran, he tried to command the raw Entropy of these places. He wanted to master Death itself – the one thing he still feared after centuries as a Chakravanti. The gods appeared to him then and told him that true Living Death could only be achieved when the whole cosmos was united by annihilation. I could go on, but his his story just keeps getting more and more over the top until he starts to resemble some sort of weirdly pseudo-psychosexual death and apocalypse obsessed villain from Exalted. Just read the summary the official wiki has if you're interested in it. https://whitewolf.fandom.com/wiki/Voormas So yeah, given all that i'd say the tragedy of Cappadocius is that while he may have been a decent man (Highly debatable. His appearance in Beckett's Jyhad Diary paints him as a power hungry psychopath more concerned that "his" divinity was denied to him instead of more pressing matters like, say, his clan having been slaughtered by traitors or the fact that he is literally dead and a ghost.) at one point that was pushed into insanity, no one knows that bit about Voormas in VtM. Meaning everyone that survived the purge thinks of him as a monster solely of his own making with delusions of grandeur. Also, unless god happens to be the Ebon Dragon part of the Shadow of all Things from Exalted (Also something that was a thing at one point.) or the Dark Mother is the one from Exalted it's doubtful he was going to even find god to diablerize in the Underworld. So there's good odds the guy was seriously barking up the wrong tree by looking in the underworld for god. Of course, there's another possible story to his plans in that Jyhad Diary book that suggested that the diablerize god thing could have been a cover for a far more worldy and nightmarish attempt to murder or diablerize all vampires so as to empower himself into destroying the Shroud or something like that. Alternatively, it's possibly the Giovanni that tricked everyone up to try and do the aforementioned genocide to tear down the shroud thing once Cappadocius was gone. I can check out the finer details when I get a chance. Anyways, all that also means that any other necromancers that get strong enough are potentially on track to make the same mistakes. And see that bit about the Giovanni for why that's bad. Turns out a world that is riddled with conspiracies and secret societies with actual supernatural power ends up with a lot of very dangerous secrets leading to potentially apocalyptic events. Many of which could have been entirely avoided if the world was less of a rat trap of secrets and lies. Probably a meta narrative you could apply to real life there, but it'd be a bit weird I imagine. At the very least it goes a long way to explaining the Feast of Folly and other similar events he perpetrated towards the end of his life. Not sure how much it has to do with politics and the thread topic aside from a meta narrative that says that conspiracies are bad for everyone though.
Archonex fucked around with this message at 20:33 on Jul 30, 2021 |
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Jul 30, 2021 19:23
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MonsieurChoc posted:One of the designers is a "Nixon was right to bomb Cambodgia" Republican. Kenneth Hite. The neat thing about this is that Delta Green were supposed to be an above board XCOM-esque unit decades ago until the bad guys (and their own gently caress ups) got them black balled. Hence the push towards a more extremist angle. You're literally playing your bog standard outlawed extremist group in RPG's that wants to save the world by doing unethical things. That includes all the baggage that comes with that. Also Delta Green isn't so much a political oo-rah for neoliberalism as much as it is a Deux Ex-esque look at a world ten minutes before it straight up just loving ends. That whole tagline Deus Ex's latest incarnation started out with, "It's not the end of the world, but you can see it from here." could sum up Delta Green pretty well. I remember there being a fiction blurb that even shows this happening. One of the Delta Green agents (Presumably one of the hard liner types you just described.) earned the attention of...something... which decided it was entertaining enough to witness the end of the world. So we fast forward to many years in the future as the guy's life deteriorates and he's forced to watch it happen many years in the future. I think it's at least implied that the guy basically eats a bullet as much from the eldritch horrors as from fact that it's evident to him at last that all the awful poo poo Delta Green got up to in it's later years accomplished nothing but maybe bought people a decade more of time to live before being annihilated. With the caveat that better (or eviller) groups might have found a way off world to survive with the time they bought. Key word is, might. TL;DR: Delta Green is a bleak as gently caress game and it's kind of fitting that it has that as a political metanarrative as a result. It's like someone stripped all the horny and anime out of Cthulhutech and focused on making some bleak apocalyptic fiction out of it. Only instead of going full anime like in Cthulhutech humanity more or less gets curb stomped in the end instead of just going "Yeah, gently caress this poo poo." and getting Archonex fucked around with this message at 14:14 on Aug 4, 2021 |
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Aug 4, 2021 02:14
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RoboChrist 9000 posted:Maybe it's the existentialist in me, but delaying the inevitable apocalypse seems heroic and meaningful and triumphant enough. Doesn't DG also go after the eldritch entities and cultists that want to help as well? I dimly remember some intimations that they're on their poo poo list as well. If so, they might end up hurting as much as they help. Like, I know at least one alien race and one conspiracy was supposed to be looking into off world evacuation. Granted, their methods are horrific to a human, but still. Like, it seems like they'd not be down with letting humanity flee into the Dreamlands or something that would let them live on in some form that isn't necessarily human anymore. They've gone all Warhammer 40k-esque "death to the Edit: And there is definitely some fiction blurbs of the eldritch gods potentially loving up Earth earlier than that. Though they might have changed that. In addition to that even a cursory look for this stuff online leads to the TVTropes page that touches on another very iffy political issue for a lot of people - The Manning and Snowden leaks contained data about one end of the overall US and affiliated operations on the conspiracy/Delta Green end of things. Any implicated personnel were instructed to pretend to be insane or a criminal on pain of death. Also, any journalist that pieced things together is implied to be dealt with, though none has managed to do so yet. Governments murdering journalists is a pretty hosed up thing. And the text basically suggests the US is approaching the issue of handling leaks and troublesome journalists the same way that nations like Russia does. Which is kind of yikes. Archonex fucked around with this message at 03:26 on Aug 4, 2021 |
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Aug 4, 2021 02:25
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Kestral posted:Hite is part of a nearly extinct breed of non-conservative old-school pre-Tea Party Republicans, which makes his politics really interesting and sometimes difficult to parse out. He shares precisely zero of the GOP's flagstone modern cultural stances, spent the entirety of 2015-2020 mocking Trump and all his works, being horrified at the direction his own party was going, and co-hosting a podcast where he regularly makes it clear that he's mostly on the right side of history in terms of American social trends. "America hosed up every other country it got its hands on" is such a regular take for him that it's become almost a running joke. Just a side note, but criticism of the US government and the idea of a noble murderous conspiracy fighting against _____ alien horrors probably extends past that one dev as well. Keep in mind that one of the devs for Delta Green was involved in the [Prototype] series, which has a clear Delta Green expy in the form of Blackwatch. Blackwatch is even worse than any incarnation of Delta Green to the point where at times it almost seems almost like they're poking fun at Delta Green and other conspiracy fiction's bad habits in a satirical manner. To get into it: Blackwatch regularly indulges in unlawful and nonconsenting human experimentation, genocide of US and possibly foreign civilians, and generally has all sorts of ugly poo poo going on on it's research end. Hell, the first scene of the first game has you in a literal human incinerator/test chamber like they're the gestapo. And then they release hordes of viral infected on you, all while the lead researcher literally cheers you on as you devour them. In a hilarious twist of events, all of this was to stop the apocalypse they knew was coming, much like how Delta Green occasionally gets up to some poo poo. Or to put it another way, it's the usual narrative sop of the organizational equivalent of the whole "the shady authoritative strongman was right even if he did some tremendously evil things". Except...No, not really. Since bioterrorism is a huge thing in the setting of [Prototype] it shouldn't come as a surprise that viruses can mutate and take new forms. So after fifty some years of prepping for the outbreak the idiots find themselves fighting an apocalypse (In New York City due to them setting up research centers for a virus and it's new form that had might as well be two Tzimisce antediluvians from the OWoD on steroids. Again, they did this in a major population center that's indispensable to the global economy. So they can't just nuke it straight off without it being obvious to the outside world that things are really off the rails. Suffice to say that it's obvious that the lack of oversight and accountability from the public or competent bits of the government at large due to being a conspiracy has made Blackwatch go a bit off mission objective. ) that they're all but totally unprepared for due to one sociopath that they themselves employed to work on modifying the virus that they were supposed to keep from triggering the apocalypse.Also, the last outbreak of it was technically triggered by them and would have stayed contained indefinitely if they had just stepped down the aggression and focused on containing the test subjects of the hosed up experiment they did in rural America decades back. Meaning the entire thing is literally their fault on multiple levels and in multiple ways. Since not only did they focus on aggression against perceived threats over defense of key assets they absolutely had to defend to fulfill the objectives of their organization, they were the ones that pushed the aforementioned scientist into unleashing an apocalyptic bioweapon out of spite due to their dickish conspiratorial actions. After that, by the time the sequel has rolled around they've seemingly realized how hosed their efforts were in the long run due to not understanding one basic scientific concept. So, instead they've ripped off the mask, instead mostly going all in on trying to genocide the poor and minorities (one of their side hobbies) in lieu of a pretense of any noble goal. It's notable that the genuinely good military faction, the National Guard, is almost completely missing in the sequel due to seemingly having given up on NYC (Or more likely having been ordered away by the politicians, generals, and capitalists that control Blackwatch so that there was no risk of some officer just ordering the National Guard to waste the Blackwatch troops and scientists on the ground out of sheer disgust at their antics and the inevitable apocalyptic consequences they lead to.) leaving Blackwatch and the other villains to basically use New York City as it's own personal petri dish. Edit: Also, [Prototype] was a fun as gently caress game and it's a shame that the company that made them closed down after the second one. At least a bunch of indie devs are making great progress on Cepheus Protocol. Which is a fun as gently caress RTS/simulation game inspired by Prototype from the perspective of the conspiracy. Notably, it lets you choose your RoE. Meaning you can choose to go the Delta Green route or be the more lawful and positive route that never gets featured in games that are grimdark that focuses on protecting and providing medical treatment to civilians while dealing with the threat like how a government organization is supposed to do. Archonex fucked around with this message at 05:09 on Aug 10, 2021 |
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Aug 4, 2021 14:17
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Relevant Tangent posted:Let's talk about the Baali. They are vampires who have been almost hunted to extinction because "they worship Satan." Think the Satanic Panic, only in the WoD it also had fangs and scared vampires as well. They're Third Way Democrats turned into a bloodline (they're a clan, really, most of them are so busy doing vile things that they don't have time to travel and they can't interact with vampire society without everyone trying to murder them) that is written as the most evil in the setting, despite the fact that they're generally the only ones even trying to keep the demons asleep. The Baali are the only vampires in the setting who have a sensible goal. All they want to do at the end of the day is keep the demons, which they know are real, asleep so they don't destroy the planet. This involves vile things, because demons. I feel the political comparison is obvious. This seems like a bit of a stretch, barring me missing something. Unless that is Pelosi, Hillary, and other centrists secretly have a spawning pool they visit where they take their victims to be used as incubators for the insect and amphibian hordes to serve as an offering to an eldritch horror. But i've probably missed that memo if so. As of their latest writing I feel like it'd be fair to say that the Baali have a lot of really evil people in their ranks that wouldn't mind starting an apocalypse with the caveat of that one group you mentioned. The rest do want to wreck the world up and are proud of it or just want to usurp the demons of the setting to the point that they have a devil complex. It'd be more accurate to say that they're something way off the mark from a political ideology barring a few smaller groups. While there's implied to be at least three factions of Baali, the apocalyptic ones more resemble a straight up doomsday cult with satanic (and as they got more writing attention, pseudo-lovecraftian) leanings. And by doomsday cult I mean most of them are in later writing implied to want to cause a literal doomsday. To do a TL;DR it: The group you're talking about is only one faction out of like what's suggested to be three. In the case of the one you discussed, they want to stop the apocalypse (by doing horrific poo poo that would probably be pre-empted by just getting the nearest mage cabal, small army of werewolves, or just reawakening the loving Exalted or whatever to burn the eldritch horrors down). One other are card carrying villains that are outright proud of trying to murder the world in the most sadistic way possible, and the last have a major devil complex. And even that one antiheroic "good" guy faction may have a group inside of it that just spitefully said gently caress it and wants to burn the world down for being forced into becoming vampires of the literal worst type. And all this doesn't get into the really crazy poo poo that requires a deep lore dive and navigating numerous retcons. Like some of them worshipping/trying to stop the release of what may essentially be OWoD's version of the Neverborn (Which reading between the lines are more than likely just demons that got offed during the war instead of being imprisoned in mega-super-ultra torture land for millenia on end until they went nuts. Granted, they're still nuts and evil, but that's probably because they got dipped in the abyss just like the living ones. ) while others rightfully want to keep what may just in fact be a bunch of undead insane fallen angels locked up. If anything they seem more like a group of religious cults with varied apocalyptic leanings. Only these cults have secret insights into the more hosed up parts of the OWoD, as opposed to your usual bog standard apocalypse cult. Which way they lean on those insights depends on the group. Also, they're unilaterally abusive as gently caress religious cults because there's some subtext there that's about as subtle as a hammer. To give an idea of it Saulot lost his poo poo so thoroughly upon seeing the "we want to stop the apocalypse by doing horrific poo poo" faction in their human form that he basically went on a murder spree (Which could definitely drop him out of Golconda, incidentally.). That last bit means that whatever they were doing to each other must have been really hosed up even by the standards of abusive cults. Archonex fucked around with this message at 20:05 on Aug 5, 2021 |
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Aug 5, 2021 03:05
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Triskelli posted:It may fail the definition of “Adequate” but John Company and An Infamous Traffic (by the designer of Root) make their satire/critique a little more obvious by talking a step backwards into colonialist societies. You’re not the invisible hand of Capital trying to do A Colonialism the best to get the most points: you’re a family patriarch trying to use the revenue from the colonies to throw opulent weddings & own the fanciest hats. Yeah, plenty of games adequately critique things from the perspective of the person doing harm. I mean, Monopoly was originally invented as a critique of unrestrained capitalism. Which is why it's so infuriating to play for everyone but the one person that gets lucky and gets the most spaces first. It's just that people are dumb, companies want money, and between those two groups the actual message can be subverted along the way. And that's if the message was clear in the first place. Edit: A good example of this is actually Monopoly in another way, actually. When the game was stolen for mass production from it's original creator for the purposes of profiting off of it, part of the rules were left out. Specifically, that if one player pulls ahead (At this point in a likely unfair way, since barring cheating it's all luck of the dice whether you passively get rich off of everyone else by getting lucky enough to claim enough spaces early on or are constantly sucked dry of your money under the unrestrained capitalist system of rules.) of the rest the other three can by majority vote switch from capitalism to what by modern standards would probably be a form of Georgist socialism. Which (to quote another website) switches from the capitalist rules to a more socialist game and rule set where public services are nationalized, the only tax levied is on the unimproved value of land, and everyone is rewarded when wealth is created. Curiously, the thieves that stole the property originally left that part of the rules out of the game. And then Parker Bros basically screwed the original creator over with a pittance of money and no royalties on a massively popular game, violated their deal to get access to the license by altering it immediately to keep those rules removed, did everything to cover up the story of what they had done for like 50-70 years, and generally just proved themselves to be horrible people who should have never been permitted a position of any great power. All of which ironically lends an entirely different subtext to their version that speaks more to corruption and greed than anything else. Archonex fucked around with this message at 19:35 on Aug 6, 2021 |
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Aug 6, 2021 18:32
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Reveilled posted:I'll give both of them a look, I haven't played either, thanks! I mean, originally you are the ones doing harm according to the first ruleset you have to play with. That's literally why monopoly is such a tedious ragefest for many people, since the unrestrained capitalist ruleset is designed to be extremely unfair and biased to the point of frustration and tediousness and the second half of the game was never included in the rules. I'm arguing that the original rules are accurately trying to show why unrestrained capitalism doesn't work by showing you what happens to people that would support the system under initial circumstances. No one starts out as a landlord. They get the opportunity to become one through luck and move up in the world for a period of time before the nature of the system starts depriving them of more and more opportunities (and eventually even stealing the achievements you've made away as things get more unbalanced depending on the edition) as power gets consolidated into the hands of one player. It's just that in the original rules the game goes from that situation to highlighting a failing of this fundamentally biased system to show how consolidating power under a system of unrestrained capitalism can potentially lead to it's own downfall into something else. Since if all the people (Who it should be noted are usually rapidly not becoming landlords at all, and later on are potentially more in line with being tenants as the advantages of the lead player exponentially increase over time.) actually find the courage to stand up and say "gently caress this. We're not playing by these hosed up rules any more." then the unrestrained capitalist's/lead players massive and unfair lead due to an inherent bias in the rules ends up demolished by throwing out those rules in favor of rules that gives benefits to everyone regardless of their position in the hierarchy of winners and losers. If you don't do this you are repeatedly taxed by the landlord controlling most of the board, start losing properties as they essentially become a monolithic giant (Or as some might say, a monopoly.), and eventually lose the game. Contrast this with the georgist/socialist ruleset that gives benefits to everyone by taking away the unfair advantages of the guy that ruthlessly exploited (or more likely lucked into) the advantages of unrestrained capitalism. Or to put it in a more TL;DR way: First time players are going to start up the original monopoly, get part way through, and have an "Am I the baddies?" moment when they realize the rules are fundamentally rigged to ensure that no matter how successful they originally were they can never truly succeed under this system and ultimately can only exploited into bankruptcy. They've essentially walked into the tabletop game equivalent of a trap that has wasted their time by promising something it has no intention of really giving once you've invested a minimum of effort into it. It's a meta-narrative in action through having you occupy the role of the bad guys without realizing it until you hit a certain point in the game. This is when the game posits a choice that determines how the rest of the game will go. At this point everyone not winning will either vote to dump the unrestrained capitalist system in favor of the Georgist one or lose horribly as they are ruthlessly* exploited into bankruptcy as tenants. Which is absolutely a political underpinning to the game given the economic context behind it, even if some won't agree with it. Seeing as how the company and the person who stole it basically exploited a number of loopholes to gain wealth and even straight up stole the game in the first place it also acts as a wonderful commentary in relation to the themes of the game itself on the people that publish and originally stole Monopoly as well. That's part of why it's such a neat little topic that was visited heavily in the news and media for a bit. Along with the shift towards what it's modern incarnation is all about when it comes to Monopoly. Which as I recall involved releasing downright contemptuous and very right wing/corporatist editions like the Millennial Edition and that "for Women" edition or whatever it was called. *And indeed, in a way passively, as the rules mean that no matter how nice the winning player is they ultimately can't even stop themselves from draining the other players money without the greater population forcibly taking action to stop them. This biased advantage is so extreme that if you are working with property trading rules the winning player may not even be able to stop themselves from outright stealing the rightfully earned property of other players under the dictates of the unrestrained capitalism system of rules. Meaning their inherent advantage due to the biases of the system is so great that even if the the lead player realizes that being the first to get a solid lead meant they were actively loving over the other player's fun they literally cannot stop hurting the other players under their own power. The only thing they can do is to join with the other players in voting to abandon this system if they care about their enjoyment or the idea of a fair competition. Failing that act of empathy, they will most likely have their unfair advantage forcibly taken from them by ensuring that their properties benefit all, themselves included. Which is actually pretty loving brilliant as a a narrative for wealth inequality, greed, unrestrained monopolies, and the harm those things bring. Archonex fucked around with this message at 21:41 on Aug 6, 2021 |
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Aug 6, 2021 20:51
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Reveilled posted:But again, that supports the point I'm making. There's two games here, The Landlord's Game, which was the original, and Monopoly, which was the Parker Bros ripoff. In Monopoly, you play only as the unrestrained capitalists until one person wins. In The Landlord's Game, you may start out playing as the capitalists, but there are specific mechanics which allow and indeed encourage you as players to transition instead to playing as the working class. And of these two, only the one where you play as the working class is an adequate critique of landlordism, because it's the only one which supports play as the oppressed. The other one is just a poo poo game. Monopoly is literally a bastardized version of the Landlord's game. We're on the same page with that. That's why I keep referring to the original ruleset. Monopoly is like half of the total original product. As part of the overall chat about Monopoly I was referring to the original Landlord's Game rules in my prior posts and why it has multiple intended and unintended politics, along with how Monopoly ended up being stolen goods to create an extra layer of (hosed up) implied politics behind it. I'm probably not being clear either. Since my opinion was that the Landlord's Game technically does show you as one of the oppressed. It just tricks the ever loving gently caress out of you by making you think early on you were going to be one of the wealthy and important people that end up loving you over later on. It does this by not telling you that you are not playing under a system of rules that is truly fair and balanced (IE: The Georgist/socialist rules.) but instead a set of rules that are predatory and demand exploitation. In a way, it's a critique of capitalism as a whole delivered in the form of you taking the role of anyone that ever wanted to make it big and get rich, be they working class or born to wealth. To try and sum my thoughts up: The Landlord's Game/original rules starts you out thinking you're going to be the oppressor, thinking that you're one of the ones that are going to hit it big (IE: The whole "embarrassed millionaire" thing.) and then part way through the game you realize that you were tricked into becoming the oppressed by trying to compete in this system instead of throwing it out from the start. Since under the initial system of unrestrained capitalism the only probable outcome is that you are bled dry by degrees into bankruptcy by the luckiest player of the bunch to get a sizable lead first. As it becomes apparent that what little you achieved before the initial stages of a formation of a monopoly is slowly but surely taken away from you, you are forcibly regressed more and more back into being a landless tenant (paying money with less and less money as income as time goes on) under this system than the landlord as you initially assumed you were going to be. At which point you can for whatever reason decide to meekly bow your head at this state of affairs alongside the other players and lose horribly or make a decision as a collective majority to throw these rules out for something that benefits everyone. To a certain extent, this is even true of the oppressor/winning player, since the initial player with a sizable lead over all the others cannot even stop ruining the fun of other players via this incredibly rage inducing system even if they wanted too. Which has a meta-narrative of it's own. It's a system that fucks over anyone remotely decent or empathic in multiple ways from multiple angles and tricks you into thinking you're going to be something it has no intention of letting you actually be. Or to put it in a more succinct way: The Landlord's Game had might as well be telling a story about upwards social mobility under rampant capitalism and the attendant impossibility of it. Edit: I should add that the pieces Monopoly had (No idea if they were in the Landlord's Game, sadly.) kind of add a certain bit to this as well. They're just as much working class symbols (A clothing iron, a boot, a dog, etc, etc.) as they are things that you would think are for the wealthy (A yacht, a fancy car, a top hat, etc, etc.). Assuming they were the same in the Landlord's Game it's not unfair to say that in the end the unrestrained capitalism ruleset fucks over everyone equally, to the unintentional and usually unwitting benefit of the winner. And it's more or less dumb luck in determining who wins/exploits the hell out of everyone else under the unrestrained capitalist ruleset on top of that. Now obviously I do agree it doesn't just go out and out and say that you're one of the oppressed from the word go. But that's because the nature of the point it makes wouldn't land quite as hard if it did. I'm not even sure you could make the point as effectively solely from a working class position where you're obviously going to get hosed over from the word go.
Archonex fucked around with this message at 04:31 on Aug 9, 2021 |
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Aug 6, 2021 21:55
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fr0id posted:Yes, but everyone playing REMEMBERS the loving state. That is key. There is a history to Oath that is lacking in other games. This sounds incredibly entertaining in a "This game is liable to create a tabletop gaming blood feud amongst my friends." sort of way and it makes me wish interesting board games were more of a thing amongst my social circle.
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Aug 7, 2021 05:13
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To get back to the original thread topic, and VtM specifically, something i've noticed in VtM is an odd habit of lionizing the gerontocracy in direct contradiction to what is described as them being a total negative to the well being of the world or the people they want to force into becoming their subordinates. To give one particular example of this, despite being presented as bad and self destructive (to the point where the elders are spiritually rotting inside) the big bad's representative of the corrupt system just as often seem to be taken down in a grand and glorious conflict where they get an epic last stand that wouldn't be out of place in a game with a less introspective take on the characters. You would assume they'd go down just as much from their own corruption, mistakes, and refusal to change given the overarching themes the writers say that VtM is about. But this is not as common as you'd think. This is especially true of V5. For every Inner Council getting air striked to oblivion in a hilariously abrupt way (thereby signaling it's ultimate insignificance despite the fascist leanings and all the atrocities it committed to get ahead) there is a Mithras. Who is depicted as going down with soldiers and I think even APC's swarming him like ants if he gets his original power back in V5. That post talking about how the devs are seemingly enamored with their own self declared elites within the setting seems strangely spot on, the more I think of this. Edit: VtMB, interestingly enough, kind of zig zagged on this. Sure, you have to take down Ming Xiao when she goes full tentacle monster. And sure, you basically Matrix your way through the final building. But the actual punchline to this seems very apt to how you would assume a corrupt prince would get taken down just from reading the surface level claims of the text. Which is probably part of why the ending is so memorable to people that played it. Also, I suspect this thread probably shouldn't have had it's title switched over to being about tabletop games quite as early as it did. As having it be about a specific game or game line was liable to attract people curious about it in particular and encourage more engagement.
Archonex fucked around with this message at 16:49 on Aug 16, 2021 |
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Aug 16, 2021 16:03
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Angry Salami posted:Man, that "AuZtralia" game just sounds repulsive. I don't know if it's worse if I take it as endorsing 'terra nullus' doctrine and directly erasing indigenous peoples from Australian history, or if I take it as using hideous Lovecraftian monsters as a stand-in for them. As a side note to all this, I also thought of something kind of fucky with VtM. But I have to go into the lore to explain it. So in the backstory Tremere was originally a group from Mage the Awakening (and Ars Nouveau). As they got older, their leaders and membership at one point began to fear death so much that they turned themselves into vampires. Coincidentally, Tremere were a house in the Order of Hermes back in the old days before they became vampires. The Order of Hermes is obviously the same one we discussed a few pages back that the early form of the Technocracy formed to depose since they were mostly all colossal assholes that deserved it. So it should come as no surprise that how they betrayed the Order of Hermes and became vampires is kind of hosed up. Y'see, mages aren't vampires. So the only way these mages could turn into vampires was by what was essentially magical mass diablerie. They did this in part by eating pretty much the entirety of Clan Salubri, including Saulot, token good guy antediluvian (dubiously) of the VtM line. They also ate a gently caress ton of Tzimisce and other vampires.* This had the side affect of descending their soul and forcing them to use This is why in some versions of VtM it's extremely easy to pass as a Tremere without advanced blood sorcery being used on you to detect your bloodline. Since the blood of the Tremere is literally a hodge podge of other lines they hijacked to serve their own generally hosed up and evil purposes. So basically one could say as far as the clans go their blood purity stat would be a flat 0 if a certain book's mechanics were adapted to them. Coincidentally, this does not make them very popular with vampires old enough to remember how they became vampires. Since a fair number of them lost friends and allies to these bastards, who are sometimes even referred to as usurpers. Like, that's actually one of their nicknames! Though not a publically spoken one obviously. They murder people for that to...Uh, keep up their good PR. Which just shows how loving evil the Camarilla is, I guess. Though this is somewhat off topic and off thread, obviously. Though I guess you could get into a realpolitik allusion/discussion about that habit of theirs if you wanted to stretch it a bit. So what does this have to do with politics in the sense of the thread topic? Well, look back on the first few pages for that in-game screenshot from the super racist "Gypsies" book and find the bit about blood purity and given the contents of both the most gonzo and second most gonzo Gehenna scenario you might see where i'm going with this. So it comes to light in the Gehenna book that anyone bearing the blood of Tzimisce can be possessed by Tzimisce since Tzimisce is more a cancerous biome and virus than a vampire nowadays. This is actually relevant to the plot! Since the only reason the Mormon proxy-baptism-cronenbergering thing occurs is because Tremere (IE: The guy who orchestrated the mass diablerie in the first place.) gets possessed by Tzimisce at the last second upon Tremere mind controlling the planet via the ridiculous Mormon Genealogical Proxy Baptism spell. So in a very real way a lack of maintaining the purity of their blood basically got the world Cronenberg'd. Of course the implications of this get a bit more disturbing. All this means that the only reliable way to kill Tzimisce is to: A. Genocide his entire bloodline out of existence. B. Genocide anyone that has ever taken drank or come into contact with the blood of Tzismice out of existence. This includes large parts of the civilian populace and probably everyone that lives in or has traveled to/or has drank the water in New York City. This is due to one Gehenna scenario saying he can ghoul and flesh meld any humans or animals that drank the blood of a Tzimisce or knew flesh crafting. Since Tzimisce was lairing there in the sewers cooking up all sorts of horrible concoctions for quite awhile it's safe to say the entire city, any past residents, and associated infectees would have to be massacred to actually stop him once and for all. C. Never compromise the purity of your blood.** Now, granted, I will give this one kind of a pass since this reads less like "Lovecraft thought that interracial marriage is bad so this is a proxy for that in the form of eldritch horrors and the Innsmouth taint." and more "These evil, hosed up, and monstrous people that thought they were beyond consequences did something evil, hosed up, and monstrous only to promptly realize that consequences do in fact happen to them.". Basically, that "Well, well, well, if it isn't the consequences of my own actions." meme in gothic horror form with a bunch of innocent people caught in the crossfire. But holy poo poo does that come close to being a hard yikes. *As a side note: They would then take their rampant dickery even further by abducting random vampires and essentially magically molding them into Also, remember that whole "sexualization of violence" thing that Vampire has that was mentioned on the first page? Well, you had might as well add "rape as the only viable means of procreation" in with that in multiple ways. Since Gargoyles can't themselves reproduce through a normal embrace, meaning they have to basically drag someone down and just utterly destroy who they were right down to their memories and personality to make a new Gargoyle. The alternative to this for free Gargoyles is to go extinct due to persecution. So yeah. I really wasn't kidding when I said that the Order of Hermes was full of evil little shitlers back in the day. Voormas (Literally the mage version of a Gehenna scenario all by himself) originated from it as well, I think. Though i'd have to check that last bit. **This was also alluded to in earlier books. Since it was heavily suggested in one myth that the sacred fire flower that let the Sabbat break the blood bonds might have come from Tzimisce's body itself. Meaning the Sabbat were all infecting themselves with Tzimisce. Which could potentially imply that one small part of why the Sabbat going straight to monster town and becoming rapacious supremacists and all around cackling douchebag monsters might have also been due to it's influence due to them...guess what? Compromising the purity of their blood. The other cause is outright stated to be (to the point where the Beckett's Jyhad book points out that the Salubri weren't around to counter the Tzimisce clan's influence. In fact, it mentions that if they had survived and joined the Sabbat in rebellion against the elders the Sabbat would not only be more peaceful and philosophical, but basically be the dominant force with the Camarilla mostly restricted to Europe. Basically Tzimisce is a poison in multiple ways.) because the vampires of Clan Tzimisce hosed everything for them. Edit: And to expand on that Shitlers remark: Until V5, the Tremere still were evil little genocidal authoritarians, to the point where they enslaved all lower members to the leadership. Now after verbally excoriating them I will say that at least there's a breakoff faction in V5 that wasn't genocided by dint of their blood and lack of loyalty. And yes, they did that. The allusions to the Tremere being magical little fascists demanding everyone serve their authoritarian pyramid scheme has been made by other posters years back in other threads. Of course, the group they did this left to join the Sabbat. And during the genocide Goratrix and the few survivors got possessed by Saulot or something like that. So one might expect them to give a hearty mea culpa for their errors if it was freedom from some of the most evil vampires in the Camarilla they were seeking, instead of just wanting to evil even harder. The V5 breakoff is in the Anarchs, who took the opportunity to break with the Pyramid after humanity gave the Tremere higher ups (Who might have just been Saulot or Tzimisce throwing a tantrum at the time.) a healthy dose of karma by way of air striking them out of existence. These vampires are edgy wicca lovers and Lilith worshippers that have mixed in with what earlier books would say are basically libertarian techno mages. Because of course we gotta have some cyberpunk technocracy-esque blood magic in the comparatively modern faction. Stereotypes in fiction gotta stereotype I guess.  Contrast this to the actual feminist group that wanted freedom from the Pyramid and...rejoined the Camarilla? I don't even know how that works. Is it even political in this context? Like, a commentary on how sometimes accepted in groups that were previously persecuted sometimes end up supporting established power structures or something? Or did that entire plot point about Carna going on a rampage due to centuries of misogyny and bullshit from the Tremere get retconned? Maybe someone can explain why Carna went from "freedom or death!" to "Actually I think formal serfdom is great.". Though I suppose from certain books they dropped a few leads that she might not be in control of herself any more in one way or another. Also, holy poo poo was that way more than I intended when I started this. Apologies to folks that don't enjoy megaposts.
Archonex fucked around with this message at 06:08 on Oct 4, 2021 |
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Aug 17, 2021 15:24
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citybeatnik posted:Voormas was a Euthanatos, a hodge podge of Hellenistic death cults and "what if Temple of Doom, but the Thuggees have actual powers". Yeah, I remember the Tzimisce book straight up having fiction about a nazi obsessed with blood purity (Why does this keep coming up?) and his "race" getting embraced in a tank that some Tzimisce used the crew to make insulative lining out of. Said Tzimisce was just gaga over this guy's massive amount of genocidal bigotry.
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Aug 17, 2021 18:55
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TheCenturion posted:That's my point. If you have a race of creatures who, by divine fiat or whatever reason, don't care about objects, how would that shape their outlook and culture differently? Lots of human cultures have 'property' inextricably intertwined with concepts like 'marriage.' From outright 'I'll trade you my daughter for a diplomatic alliance' to 'our children shall be wed, uniting our houses' to dowries, bride prices, etc. Hilariously enough, divine fiat would make far more sense than what i'm seeing. Like, I can buy that some trickster god made The Most Annoying Species Ever™ as a way of screwing with everyone else. If you wrote something like the Kender version of Coyote or Loki or whatever the heck being up in the astral plane giggling his rear end off due to them creating this species of kleptomaniac gold fish brained jerks (who don't realize they're jerks) that cause almost everyone to foam at the mouth in rage and frustration after interacting with them for five minutes then yeah, sure. That's kind of clever in a meta sort of way since you've got to interact with these people (and it gives both the players and their characters a reason to be mildly annoyed with said deity) and funny to boot. But "person who can pathologically steal something and then the writing gives them a partial free stealing poo poo pass because they don't have a concept of property despite making excuses for stealing the property" is stupidly circular writing that hedges on a lot of leeway that not everyone might want to give them. The fact that some of the excuses are portrayed as excuses that someone who got caught stealing something in real life might give is even more suspect and calls to mind the OWoD's "Gypsies" fiasco on the first page. Archonex fucked around with this message at 07:56 on Nov 10, 2021 |
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Nov 10, 2021 06:57
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90s Cringe Rock posted:If only they had sweet bikes. What makes you think they don't? All will be equal in their excess under the touch of Slaanesh and his prophet known as the Doomrider. 
Archonex fucked around with this message at 11:02 on Mar 22, 2022 |
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Mar 22, 2022 10:57
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SlothfulCobra posted:With fantasy and sci-fi, it's common for writers to want to add in weird elements for the sake of the weird idea, even if there's no greater philosophical purpose meant to be expressed. That's often the dominant purpose of the genre, in fact. Just to have wild fantastical concepts. Even when the weird things are meant to be metaphor or allegory, they can easily drift away from the original intention to just be weird things standing on their own. The Orks are pretty bad too, FWIW. Keep in mind that this is the species that had Margaret Thatcher added to it. They're hyper-violent uncultured and douchey soccer hooligans in space that exist to krump poo poo up and steal what isn't theirs. It's just that the viewers can see the more humorous perspective of them due to the macro perspective that partially obscures all the awful stuff they do. Like invading a planet, taking over it's civilian areas, and then running labor death camps to maximize looting the place while efficiently killing the survivors like in that one space wolf novel that showed what they get up too off screen. Edit: As a side note, WH40k as a whole can extremely easily be seen as a satire of conservative ideas and "values" across the centuries. An act that is mostly done by having the writers go "Oh, so ______ thing is true? Well here's the nightmarish dystopian hellscape that would result if you were telling the truth and weren't lying poo poo bags out for yourselves while screwing over everyone else." and then ramping up the consequences of that to eleven. Like, you could lay this out in a conversation to really piss off conservatives and fascists that are into gaming. That is, you could do this if they didn't willingly blind themselves to this to try and appropriate the game making fun of them due to the closest thing to good guys in it being genocidal hyper fashy theocrats (The writers were way ahead of the curve with that one.). Just to start off with the big one: You say that every other religion other than Christianity are comprised of evil heathens and demons who need to be shown their proper place? Whelp, guess what. In Warhammer 40K they loving are. And your soul ain't going to heaven no matter what when you die. In fact, your belief in them being awful coupled with the own innate hateful towards others alongside the generally awful state of your beliefs is a direct contributor to why the galaxy is such a gently caress awful place to live! But never fear, for their are valiant defenders of mankind in this festering turd of a galaxy! Like the Inquisition, which enforces the will of In fact, it's so bad that even deviating from the mean of whatever a human is in a given location by so much can get you purged. Why? Because mutants are treated badly and therefore have a tendency to turn to whatever cold comforts they get and psychics (Literally witches according to some factions of the Imperium, I should add.) are prone to going full on demonic horrorfest via getting possessed by a demon of those evil And never forget the most elite of the elite, the Space Marines. Which are secretly such stunted brainwashed man children meant to act as disposable shock troops that the last time they realized just how little the Emperor cared for them it literally started a galactic war that's still technically ongoing to this day. All that talk about honor, pride, or And did I mention that the Emperor is such a racist militant atheist that he'd make other racist "atheists" like Dawkins and co look sane in their post 9/11 bigotry by comparison? And lest we forget, this is the Emperor who basically  ed so hard that he had to embark on a series of events that would inevitably turn himself into an eternally shrieking and even more eternally tortured skeleton seated on a golden throne (technically making him a literal golden idol that he is worshipped as) feeding off the souls of countless children to even have a chance of slowing down the total extermination of humanity after he hosed up in "saving" it with his hyper authoritarian policies. Policies that totally weren't also setting himself up to be turned into a new chaos god like the eldar did by murderfucking Slaanesh into existence on a galactic scale. So, uh, yeah. Dude was pretty clearly an arrogant gently caress up disproving the great man theory on a narrative wide level.He did this after alienating all of his potential allies and exterminating an even more technologically advanced human empire that had successfully contained chaos. The latter of which is something that even he couldn't do as his solution to Chaos was basically "I dunno, we'll pirate/diplomacy our way into the xenophobic space elves webway project to avoid Chaos forever. Since this is clearly a foolproof plan that can't fail at all. Also, Commorragh? What's that? It sounds like an Ork trying to have an orgasm. Relax. Nothing will go wrong with this plan. I am a genius because I am older than you. ".Also also, please don't forget the slew of people who kept screaming at him to grow the gently caress up and stop being such an edgelordy authoritarian rear end in a top hat. To which he basically laughed and said he was above consequences. Suffice to say that he kind of got [s]the blood of an entire galaxy] egg on his face there with that little gently caress up. And don't forget the anime space communists, the Tau! Who can and will literally brainwash you into space communism like how some conservatives liked to fearmonger about. I could go on as there is a laundry list of things to point out, but I don't want to get into an essay on it. But yeah. Warhammer 40k ain't conservative friendly at all. Archonex fucked around with this message at 10:32 on Mar 30, 2022 |
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Mar 30, 2022 09:42
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Charlz Guybon posted:Ah...yes, that's You know, you use that emote, but it's shocking how many people really, really, really don't get the joke. I remember laying this out to someone back in college and it was like all the neurons in their brain started firing at once once I pieced it together for them. Prior to that the appeal was just "Wow, this game is dark and metal as gently caress!" alongside the usual morbid fascination in seeing how bad things would get for the characters in it. At least opening up that can of worms was a heck of an eye opening conversation though. Going from him saying something like "Well, the Krieg are just inspired off of WW1 and WW2 Germany! It doesn't necessarily mean anything!" to "Wait, so you're telling me the Imperium is Space Christianity, and the whole dark gods thing is a riff on the hosed up ways Christianity treated other religions when it was the dominant religion in an area?" was a trip and a half, complete with an entire emotional arc as the guy realized he had been accidentally rooting for the literal nazis of the setting. Kinda wonder if you could even get someone to realize that nowadays what with many conservatives embracing literal white supremacists, genocidal religious zealots, and neo-nazis with no shame whatsoever. Archonex fucked around with this message at 10:48 on Mar 30, 2022 |
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Mar 30, 2022 10:34
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SlothfulCobra posted:40k just a different kind of tabletop game. Which is funny, since as time has gone on it's become apparent that Halo's Earth based government is running down a checklist of evil overlord/evil fascist government tropes by the standards of other scifi settings. What's more, the fascists in control straight up have some evil ideals that take some digging to suss out. Like killing yourself before you present a threat to the government's ruling power (One of the academies mentioned indoctrinates applicants via idolizing a general from ancient Rome that was told to commit suicide by the Emperor after he feared he was growing too powerful) in one of the most obvious hypocritical actions out there. Then there's the fact that the "hero" of the game is straight up a kidnapped child by the government that was raised to be a super soldier. How did they kidnap him? By replacing him with a flash clone that would die horrifically in front of his parents after enough time had passed that they'd cover their tracks. The parents of these victims only found out later on and it got handwaved away because *plot reasons that say that Master Chief is never gonna unload a magnum into the head of a murderous fascist that isn't an alien*. Then there's the civil war. Master Chief would straight up be the villain protag or an end game boss if the covenant hadn't showed up. The whole "the rebels are the eeeevvviil ones!" rings pretty hollow if you realize that the rebels were doing unethical poo poo to stay ahead of the even more wildly absurdly evil (Example: Stealing children from the rebelling outer colonies for a literal super soldier project named after a genocidal slave state that regularly murdered their slaves. Or having their CIA equivalent engineer horrifying flesh liquefying viruses.) fascist inner colonies. Which is not inaccurate given the things that many real world rebellions had to do to stay ahead of the ones they're rebelling against. And that includes the US's rebellion against Britain. Go look up how we handled trading with pirates and smugglers for example. Of course, the whole conflict looks even more shady from a narrative intent bent when you count the issue that the Spartans (Another fashie trope) weren't created to fight dogmatic space aliens. They were straight up created to crush rebellions like the Empire does with super soldier projects in Star Wars. The poo poo with the aliens comes afterwards, and was a complete surprise to the UNSC. Honestly, in an alternate universe set of games where it's just the rebels versus the earth government it'd probably end up being a plot point that Reach fell when the rebels overtook it due to the UNSC MAC stations being ordered to turn 60-90 degrees towards the planet and glass it, Death Star style. Archonex fucked around with this message at 23:17 on Apr 1, 2022 |
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Apr 1, 2022 19:04
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Telsa Cola posted:I don't think it ever really tried to be and the people who thought it was don't pay attention to whats actually happening. This happens with like every media. It wasn't really made clear that the UNSC are also the bad guys and the closest thing to good guys in the setting were used as cannon fodder/meat shields off screen in the games until the novels came out later and revealed that the whole abducting children for experimentation to make WH40K space marine knockoffs was not the exception to the rule and the UNSC was in fact an authoritarian militarist state that treated it's rank and file like cannon fodder and indulged in the torture of civilians to the point of inducing insanity if they bucked the trend of letting the government cover up atrocities. So yeah, people can be forgiven for not noticing the whole "Oh yeah, the UNSC are fashie assholes who slaughtered the rebels/left them to die to slow down the Covenant despite claiming they were going to be a part of the UNSC no matter what" issue given that the average exposure to the UNSC in the games for the longest time can be boiled down to "responsible commander man who dies tragically doing his duty", "cowboy marine who is probably going to die stupidly due to his AI after saying some funny/meme one liners", and the rare "rear end in a top hat commander man who the Master Chief intimidates into standing down after he gets in his way; since no one in their right mind is going to pick a fight with a walking force field protected tank that is also a super soldier without the armor". This makes Halo 5 even more infuriating, since we could have had the start of a Marathon-esque duo of a Durandal-eque Cortana and MC teaming up to fend off the UNSC and the Didact while hooking up with the rebellion's last survivors. Instead, we got the world's worst set of contrived plot twists that ended up causing it to flop. Archonex fucked around with this message at 20:14 on Apr 1, 2022 |
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Apr 1, 2022 20:05
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SirPhoebos posted:I never finished RDR, my impression was that John getting killed by the feds is the end of the main story, and playing as Jack is there so you can complete the rest of the open world stuff. Is that not the case? It's not, actually. I think there's the implication that maybe there is a better future for Jack depending on the choices you make? But if you go all the way then yeah, he blows away the last of the feds that betrayed and murdered his father (he doesn't even fight back. He's basically smug and pretty much knowingly hypocritical about the thing, from what I kind of recall.) after forcing John to do their dirty work for them. If you go the route of revenge then there's a heavy implication that he's going to follow in his father's footsteps to the same tragic effect, only with more bitterness and hatred towards his fellow Americans since...Y'know, the government literally betrayed and railroaded his father into a grave while he was possibly (depending on how you played, and if you met the creepy stranger who might be the devil. There's some neat implications I remember reading about that rare encounter.) legitimately trying to make amends for the awful poo poo he got up too in his youth. Basically, if you let the smug bastard that was working for the FBI/marshals/whatever live then it's implied that Jack moves on with this life, probably becomes an author, and gets his "happy" ending at the cost of letting a legitimately awful person live and get away scot free with his own crimes. All while he gets a free pass on condemning the possibly reformed criminal he murdered in cold blood to cover his own rear end. You could argue that said awful person didn't get the justice he deserved to have coming to him simply because he was protected by a greater amount of power and prestige than Jack will ever have. Which is a hosed up ending all by itself, really. If however you give into revenge you pretty much completely kill all of the awful bastards involved in John's murder, close that dark chapter of the Marston's life for good, and Jack maybe either just ends the trouble there and goes home to be a better man than his father*...Or becomes just as much of a rampaging criminal bastard as his father was in his youth. Only more angry and bitter for reasons already mentioned. It's a neat ending and definitely in the vein of this thread's topic as the whole thing touches on the justice or lack thereof in retributive murder. Along with what the overall worth of a concept like justice even is when it's delivered and enforced by people who have no interest in being held to it's standards themselves. Which is a topic I imagine many people can empathize with today, even if it was never explicitly spelled out as the dilemma it is within the story. As for it being weird politics: "Actually, kill your oppressor's and those who have wronged you. No seriously, put a bullet in their head while they think they're safe from consequences for the things they themselves admit to doing." is...Uh, something that I feel like most people are probably going to disagree with in a polite society. Never mind a form of implicit politics that's pretty damned far off into the extreme. So i'm not too worried about talking about the ending here in depth as a sort of headliner to the whole thing, since it needs some clarification. Though I may have misremembered some details. *I remember reading on TVTropes or some place many years ago that depending on some of the choices it's possible that Jack just gets the anger out of his system over how he and his family were wronged and goes home to be a better person than his father was after the game is over for good. It has something to do with a few rare encounters John has if he's playing on the good side of the karma meter, though. So not everyone gets that possibility in their play through. Edit/Comedy Option: Alternatively, John comes back as a zombie and poo poo gets wild. Still disappointed we didn't get an Undead Nightmare 2 expansion for RDR2.
Archonex fucked around with this message at 00:44 on Apr 2, 2022 |
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Apr 2, 2022 00:32
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PeterWeller posted:And in the case of RDR and other open world games, you can continue to play without engaging with the story arc. That's kind of the conceit of open world games, especially when you consider that the mechanical point of their stories is to give you a tour of the open world they built for you to explore. Agreed on that. Only thing that i'll add onto all of this is that the ending being interpreted as a clean cycle of revenge followed by a ruined life is somewhat undermined by the intimate details of the repeating cycle. The marshal/FBI guy made it a point to hunt down John and threaten his family despite (and I may be misremembering this) having not been personally harmed by all of John's antics in his youth. Meanwhile, Jack has a legitimate grievance against the marshal/FBI/whatever dude since he made it a point to threaten his family members if John didn't comply, used his father as a proxy for the crimes the government dude made John go on to do to get the rest of the gang, and then betrayed and murdered John at the end to effectively cover his own rear end all while calling himself righteous. So in that context it's possible to look at it as a real grade A bastard who was protected by the law got what was coming to him, assuming a good karma/honor/whatever run. Since he literally went out of his way to make all this poo poo his problem and then wanted to just walk away with no consequences when the son of the man he betrayed and murdered came knocking looking to get pay back for what he did. Which goes back to why it's probably unconventional politics fitting enough for the thread. Though I don't know if everyone will agree.
Archonex fucked around with this message at 19:45 on Apr 2, 2022 |
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Apr 2, 2022 19:40
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PeterWeller posted:I kinda disagree here. Ross--I think the dude's name is Ross, gonna call him that for convenience--is not personally harmed by John's criminal past (unless something happens to him in RDR2 that I forget) but he does have a personal motivation that is arguably just as justifiable as Jack's motive: Ross believes in the rule of the state and its laws. He believes outlaws like John and the rest of the Van der Linde gang's killers are his ideological and existential foes, so he has them killed without remorse. But as ruthlessly as he pursues that goal, he does also restrain himself from going beyond it. Note that while he holds Abigail and Jack to coerce John, he never harms them and doesn't appear to have intended to ever harm them. He could pursue them when they flee Beecher's Hope, but he lets them go. John and Jack are men of the fleeting and perhaps never more than mythical wild west while Ross is a man of the modern era. I gotta disagree with this, personally. Though I can see why you'd say that and it's certainly a valid take. My thoughts regarding your post are that this goes back to another part of my argument ---- namely that Ross is a hypocrite just like John. In some ways more so than John, since I don't think John ever justifies what he does by saying it's the right and moral thing to do. This is subtly foreshadowed with the way he handles the gang (Murder without trial. And it's a pretty hefty crime too since Ross is technically orchestrating assassinations (one across the border in Mexico, if I recall) through planning out cold blooded assassinations with John as the proxy on the hot end of things.) throughout the game only to be made apparent that he's just as much of a ruthless killer and scumbag as John is when he betrays John by setting him up to be executed by a firing squad without having the jurisdiction, power, or right to do that. And keep in mind that depending on how you play John is cooperating with him, and possibly even trying to be decent. TL;DR: A self righteous cold blooded murderer and criminal is still a murderer and criminal, even if he's got a badge on his vest. And Ross fits that bill to a T. They're alike, save for the fact that Ross made it his problem to go after John on behalf of the state while not representing the state's laws and obligations to others. Whereas John did some really bad things and then tried to go straight later on in life and then got dragged back into it because some federal agent had a bone to pick with a nebulous idea of criminals that was two-faced at best. I recall one cutscene where John even subtly needles him on his delusions outside of the city, in fact. Complicating this further is the fact that (open world antics aside) the body count really starts to rack up once Ross enters the picture and forces John to go apeshit on his former allies. Outside of the usual goofy GTA-esque poo poo John wasn't primed to go on a multi-national rampage until Ross enters the picture and starts threatening his family. Basically, the whole thing comes off as an overreach of police and judicial authority to me. Which is somewhat in line with the times, to be fair. Archonex fucked around with this message at 18:59 on Apr 3, 2022 |
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Apr 3, 2022 18:52
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Arivia posted:I did some quick googling and they were in the Inquisitor War trilogy in 2004, at least as a story told in setting. Pretty sure they all got genocided off screen after the super secret factions herding them together failed to pull their poo poo together and recorporate the Emperor properly. Granted, what i've seen is the fan canon since they basically disappeared. But it's Warhammer 40K. "______ got genocided into extinction!" was a literal plot trope for multiple species in the story and an entire army type called the Squats. Hell, it's an everyday activity every faction engages in to a casual degree. Honestly, at this point the grimdark genocide stuff has been so overused in Warhammer 40K that it doesn't really raise an eyebrow for me anymore. It's the equivalent of having a character in a TV show get murdered (only writ large) to bring in views through trying to inflict pathos and drama for the viewers. Over time it's desensitizing people (in the game, not real life mind you. Genocide is always evil as hell.) to the lore to a very horrific real life thing via overuse of it as a plot development. Or to put it in possibly a more coherent way: The first time your favorite character in a TV show dies it's a series best show* for many people. The seventh time though is just  to pay attention.*Looking at you, NCIS and other crime procedurals. Archonex fucked around with this message at 12:19 on Apr 25, 2022 |
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Apr 25, 2022 11:58
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Ghost Leviathan posted:Squats are actually back now! Do they have trikes again? Because gently caress yes if so.  Edit: For those that don't know it, trikes are essentially grimdark kid's tricycles scaled up to their size. Imagine some gnarly as gently caress looking biker bro with a full beard, a bomber jacket, a bandana tied to his forehead, and all the other accoutrements riding an obnoxious as gently caress sounding motorcycle. Then imagine the guy riding the motorcycle is a space dwarf riding the equivalent of a motorized tricycle scaled down to his size. Now add guns as needed and you have the trike. It's one of the more ridiculous things Warhammer 40K has produced. If that isn't commentary on the more obnoxious types of biker bros I don't know what is. Archonex fucked around with this message at 12:15 on Apr 25, 2022 |
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Apr 25, 2022 12:06
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Ghost Leviathan posted:More people die daily to keep Arby's open I mean, a bit of extrapolation fixes this up a bit. Any time they get low on supplies they just kidnap a loyal planet's population and overwork them to death to make up the deficit in the region. Just look at what happened on Armageddon where they kidnapped the survivors of the war and put them into labor camps to work to death. Insert bullshit excuses about them being heretics, how loyal servants will happily die Aside from that, if worlds are being segmented into sectors then it makes sense that each sector should be self sufficient to a certain extent and far easier to manage logistically. Unless they really are badly managed as the profusion of corrupt planetary governors and other incompetent officials infers they are. IE: The agri world provides food for the hive worlds, the hive worlds provide meat for the grinder, the forge world provides weapons and replacement parts for the hive and agri worlds, etc, etc. Which would handily explain why every featured battle on the planet Backwater 9 of the I Can't Believe Some of These Dipshits Turned to Chaos Yet Again star system is "A battle for the fate of the sector!" or some such nonsense. If the agri world goes people starve to death and billions die from supply failures before there's enough soylent green to go around since the deficit can't be made up without killing even more people. Rogue Traders can only make up so much of an entire planet's needs and besides, that assumes the governor is beneficent enough to pay whatever cut throat prices they'll have on offer during a time of famine. And that the governor is willing to risk being executed If the hive world goes then you've got billions of people that have to be killed before they can kill billions more due to being turned to chaos. Just look at how (insert pretty much any situation where a hive world fell here) could have gone. Or just how things went in one of the companion hive cities to Vervunhive in particular. An entire hive city was turned into technologically induced war slaves for the invaders that then spread out to siege the other hives and if successful probably would have done the same to the survivors. If the forge world goes then billions die as the forge world starts churning out possessed titans and all sorts of technological terrors as the surviving Mechanicus demonstrate why they should have never been entrusted with humanity's technological records. Meanwhile, this situation is extra hosed since forge worlds provide necessary equipment for hive worlds and agri worlds, meaning people are going to die or experience a very violent technological de-evolution as they can't maintain their tech which maintains their way of life. Double up on that again with the fact that whatever guardsmen and space marines that are sent to clean up this mess can't get easy access to ammo, armor, and other supplies and you have a recipe where things might devolve further to where it becomes a massive conflict zone or the exterminatus gets whipped out. This is kind of gone into in the various books centered on the Imperium getting invaded. But I don't think it's never out and out said why everything is so fragile and why so much can go wrong so fast. Which kind of defeats the point of it being satire since fascists will take the whole "glorious struggle" part of the fluff and ignore the whole "because these people are loving incompetent, corrupt, and bigoted as hell to the point that their way of life and ideology is counterproductive to success.". It can still potentially work as satire to show how utterly inefficient the Imperium is as a totalitarian state. The guys who go on about how necessary their evil is are hardly as competent or trustworthy as they'd like you to believe they are since they're used to the waste of human lives to the point of it being impromptu or default policy. Fascists actually didn't make the trains run on time and all that jazz, y'know? Archonex fucked around with this message at 19:27 on Apr 26, 2022 |
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Apr 26, 2022 13:14
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