The Gaming Den

Dracula's story can indeed be vague, what cannot be vague is the nature of vampirism, and if we're operating in a paradigm wherein Dracula triggered a change from how vampires operated historically in the bronze age through the middle ages to how they operated in the modern era, how in the hell he d...

I would add that, just because you have a setting where the vampires don't kill people very often doesn't mean your vampire society cannot be far more violent and murderous than that of ordinary society. Vampires are immortal, and they are also by nature engaged in practices that put them at odds wi...

Thing is, it is much easier to make up a completely new world at a lower technological level, because the sphere of things the average person knows, and the amount of information the average person could reasonably access, is so much lower. Even the most knowledgeable persons of the ancient world pr...

If witches are more powerful than normal humans, why wouldn't vampires want to convert them? And if witch-vampires are more powerful than witches or vampires, why aren't they running the show? I think it's a pretty important question to answer early. The power level of witches is a general question...

Without about 100 vampires, you aren't going to care what "The Toreador" think because "The Toreador" is one guy named Tom. The entire model of clans and primogen representation and conflicting coteries and shit requires there to be about 100 vampires. At 1:100,000, you can only...

I think witches and werewolves can safely predate vampires and go back clear to the bronze age Hypothetically, you could work it that Vampires are ultimately just a highly specialized kind of witch - or what a witch becomes after practicing too much blood magic and related dark deals. Then Dracula ...

Also the Revised Edition straight up cuts tribes. Some are dead and the Stargazers left to go join the Beast Courts. So in Revised you have twelve tribes, where two are native American, zero are African, zero are Asian, zero are Pacific Islander, and ten are some flavor of white people. It kinda so...

There doesn't have to be no enforcement mechanism. One of the better setups for small groups of characters to have serialized supernatural adventures is the Scooby Doo model. If the player characters are the enforcement mechanism, traveling to small rural areas where local supernatural creatures ar...

I think it’s important to look at the overall goal. Here that means producing a vibrant and interesting multi-faceted vampire society that is hidden behind a masquerade. That’s what VtM claims to do (but really doesn’t) and it’s also what your average urban fantasy series featuring vampires (nearly ...

If your GM does this, you can, and should, leave the game immediately and never trust them to GM anything ever again. Metagaming against "don't split the party" is absolutely to be encouraged, because splitting the party hurts the game so you should contrive IC reasons to never split the ...

Though, hypothetically, a lot of characters are going to be supported by someone with Resources 6+. Best case scenario, the vampire who embraced you has both permission from the Prince and good resources, and you basically live off his dime. Worst case scenario, the Prince needs knights, and feudal...

As much as Havens of the Damned is about anything other than a little more money in the bank, it's a callous appeal to every player that is so inured to or slightly guilty about their comfy middle-class existence that they can play poor and desperate people with no resources for fun. It's a book wr...

Now, that was all very long, but I thought we should go through it because that is the vague meat and questionable potatoes of the whole fucking book. 36 powers with few stats and which don't make a lot of sense, and a lot of magickal technicalese. Which is hilarious, given the Tradition's position...

Everyone getting Tanged is actually the Traditions' win condition, as of their Time of Judgment book. It makes about as much sense as anything else. To go full on with the anime analogies, the Trads want to Evangelion the world, while the Technocracy just wants to Rahxephon it. The latter is a lot ...

I'm not even sure what it means that the Ascension War can't be won through violence. I'm pretty sure killing everybody that doesn't believe in your paradigm makes your paradigm win by default. This isn't exactly a philosophical struggle, because the Technocracy sure as shit is supposed to be tryin...

While there is a philosophical argument to be made for how one can ethically utilize one's magical abilities...this isn't it. I mean, these dudes aren't even scraping the surface. What if you're effectively homeless? What if you travel about in a magical cardboard box that opens up into a mansion f...

So I'm trying to figure out if the writers were actually self-aware enough to customize the themes to make it look like the Technocracy is fundamentally on the wrong spiritual path because they've been successful at impressing their will on the universe instead of...uh...y'know, letting people die ...

So this is an OSSR of the 2e Masters of the Art then, and not the Revised one? That's what the cover art choice implies at least.

You could also have planet-wide seasonality if the planet was in a multiple star system, which is the premise of the Helliconia novels.

I'm gonna say "But the KKK went around using crosses and nobody banned all crosses" and also say that I know the reason, that the US is christian majority and the cross has a lot of history there and so on. The swastika was also a Christian symbol pre-Nazis, though admittedly not an espec...

The economics of Star Wars are a huge mess. No one can agree on even the most basic things, never mind huge issues like how supposedly ubiquitous labor droids affect work effort. There's all sorts of contradictory commentary floating around and way too much complexity (for instance differences in pr...

Maybe not fully on-topic, but after reading the OSSR for this, Vampire, Mage, Werewolf, Mummy, Promethean, Changeling, Black Hand, and numerous others, I have to ask, why was the fluff to this so popular? Not the crunch, which is generally awful, but is not the reason I've heard as to why people pl...

One of the interesting ideas for the Sabbat in this book - and thus one which was immediately abandoned - is that vampiric existence is cyclical and that Gehenna is just the Kali Yuga. The elders rise and feed on the young, the strongest survive, and then they become the elders and the whole cycle ...

I have no justification or defense for the way the Executor 's demise was handled on-screen. If I had been writing Return of the Jedi, there would not have been a second Death Star at all, but rather a massive throw-down between the Rebel and Imperial fleets (probably in orbit over Kashyyyk), with ...

So, speaking as the obsessive fan who will justify and mind-caulk any plot holes with obscure EU references when needed...yeah, that explanation is 100% retconned bullshit and unless there was a lot more damage inflicted than we saw onscreen, the Executor should have been able to transfer control t...