OSSR: Breed Book: Rokea

[Mechalich]

Mechalich, as someone who cares an awful lot more about weresharks and actual sharks than I do, I'm interested in what you think the core ability concept of a wereshark should be. From where I'm standing, hulking out into a giant man shark is absolutely mandatory, as is the ability to breathe water and air. But everything else, and I do mean everything else seems to be completely negotiable.

Even transforming into a big actual shark seems rather pointless. A shark form just swims around in the water and kills things. But the man-shark form can swim and it can kill things. The street shark form is already better at swimming and murdering while swimming than any of the other characters are going to be by kind of a lot. So what does the shark form bring to the table? The five forms thing that the Rokea did is completely incomprehensible. When would you ever use all of those forms?

In Hawaiian lore, Kauhuhu sends storms and Nanaue has a shark mouth that vicissitudes around his body while he is in human form. In Chinese lore, the Jiaoren transform from monstrous shark warriors into sexy ladies who can conjure silk and pearls. The Fijian god Dakuwanga is a sharkman who controls tides and also has protection magic.

But I'm curious as to what you think a wereshark should be doing in an RPG.

-Username17

Transforming in a giant shark is there so players can live out Megalodon fantasies. Being able to turn into Megalodon is absolutely necessary for a shark-themed game, even if it is only really useful to fight certain gargantuan creatures of the deep.

But yeah, it's a very good question as to what the core wereshark niche should be. In a D&D-style RPG I assume a wereshark fulfills the same basic role as a werewolf, only for aqautic societies like merfolk or whatever, but it's much more complicated if the weresharks are interacting with land-based society, especially modern society. 'Survive' isn't going to cut it as a mandate. I do like the idea of sharks as ancient. It fits the taxonomy and individual large sharks are pretty long-lived animals (so far as we can tell, kinda of hard to monitor). Immortality was stupid, but I could see weresharks dedicated to preserving a 'world before man' or something.

The weresharks could also have a largely druidic role. As best as current research can tell, the natural state of many oceanic ecosystem, especially coral reefs, is actually predator mediated - with vast predator biomass preying on a small quantity of rapid turnover smaller fish and other organisms. Sharks, alongside large predatory fish like groupers and various marine mammals, are a really big part of that. So you could give the weresharks the 'herdsmen of the deep' role and have them fight weird things.

Having them fight Lovecraftian stuff actually works well - and gives the weresharks a reason to go onto land to clear out Innsmouth and stuff - it's just that Lovecraftian weirdness doesn't fit the existing WoD paradigm very well. Even so, when I ran a rokea heavy game, that was the route I went, fighting the Chulorviah and attacking their elders. Doing it that way also means killing all the sharks isn't just an ecological crisis, it means extra-dimensional aliens are invading from beneath the sea Pacific Rim style.

[Prak]

I knew I should have written it the fuck down, but I was thinking about reduxing the Werewolf fluff last night while reading this review in bed, but that would be an interesting place to go with Rokea. If you kept the Garou War of Rage, you could contrast the two breeds with Rokea basically saying "you fuckers, you're supposed to mediate, not slaughter everything."

[Koumei]

I need to ask about Mega Shark vs Mecha Shark: is it the Sharknado-level B-movie "I can happily watch this but maybe shouldn't admit it" or is it Birdemic-level "so bad it's shit"? Also, do they indeed fuck Sydney up? I would watch it just for that.

[hyzmarca]

I need to ask about Mega Shark vs Mecha Shark: is it the Sharknado-level B-movie "I can happily watch this but maybe shouldn't admit it" or is it Birdemic-level "so bad it's shit"? Also, do they indeed fuck Sydney up? I would watch it just for that.

It's Sharknado levels of guilty pleasure. Teal'c is in it. And yes, they do fuck Sydney up. Mecha-Shark is knocked out of the water and turns into a tank and just starts rolling over people and buildings.

Unfortunately, the damage is a bit low key. They avoid destroying the Opera House, somehow, in spite of the fact that Mecha-Shark lands right in front of it.

[Username17]

Transforming in a giant shark is there so players can live out Megalodon fantasies. Being able to turn into Megalodon is absolutely necessary for a shark-themed game, even if it is only really useful to fight certain gargantuan creatures of the deep.

But yeah, it's a very good question as to what the core wereshark niche should be. In a D&D-style RPG I assume a wereshark fulfills the same basic role as a werewolf, only for aqautic societies like merfolk or whatever, but it's much more complicated if the weresharks are interacting with land-based society, especially modern society. 'Survive' isn't going to cut it as a mandate. I do like the idea of sharks as ancient. It fits the taxonomy and individual large sharks are pretty long-lived animals (so far as we can tell, kinda of hard to monitor). Immortality was stupid, but I could see weresharks dedicated to preserving a 'world before man' or something.

The weresharks could also have a largely druidic role. As best as current research can tell, the natural state of many oceanic ecosystem, especially coral reefs, is actually predator mediated - with vast predator biomass preying on a small quantity of rapid turnover smaller fish and other organisms. Sharks, alongside large predatory fish like groupers and various marine mammals, are a really big part of that. So you could give the weresharks the 'herdsmen of the deep' role and have them fight weird things.

Having them fight Lovecraftian stuff actually works well - and gives the weresharks a reason to go onto land to clear out Innsmouth and stuff - it's just that Lovecraftian weirdness doesn't fit the existing WoD paradigm very well. Even so, when I ran a rokea heavy game, that was the route I went, fighting the Chulorviah and attacking their elders.

That doesn't sound like a good idea at all.

A Wereshark is pretty much always going to be the only Wereshark character on the team, with the other players opting for more usual choices like Vampires, Werewolves, or Frankensteins. King Shark is the only giant shark-man on the Suicide Squad, and in an RPG that's pretty much what you're gonna see.


That's a couple Transhumans, a couple Witches, a Vampire, and one Wereshark. Even in a large group of player characters, that's the likely distribution when any of the players choose to play a Wereshark at all.

What this means is that Weresharks can only be judged by what they bring to a "Justice League" scenario, not on what they do when there aren't any other non-Wereshark protagonists around. And a character's role in that sense is what abilities they bring to the team that allow challenges to be bested. Very importantly, having your own set of enemies is not a role! The Flash brings super speed abilities to the Justice League; his role in the team is not that he is enemies with Captain Cold.

Even environmental abilities are highly suspect. The fact that a Wereshark character can swim around in the water could be useful in the boat shootout in The Usual Suspects because the Wereshark character could flank the Hungarians from the water side. They are helping the other characters with a thing they are doing without leaving all the other players to go play Smash Brothers or something. The fact that they could swim out to some deep sea region thousands of miles from shore is completely meaningless, because none of the other characters can follow them or contribute to any adventures or challenges once they got there.


Do not do this.

The ability to ditch the party and go have solo adventures is not an ability that is meaningful or good in a cooperative storytelling game. Having your own set of enemies isn't even a thing in a cooperative storytelling games. All antagonists are group antagonists by definition.


In a cooperative storytelling game, your whole team faces the whole Secret Society. The fact that Killer Frost is originally a Firestorm villain is not important.

The ability to turn into a man-shark that can rip a car in half isn't nothing. That's a pretty sweet power set that gives you a reason to show up whenever the team has combat challenges (which in most games is most of the time). But it's not really different from the combat role of a Bagheera or Frankenstein. They have to bring more to the table than "be a combat splat" and "look like a shark-man."


Not that looking like a shark-man isn't a cool thing to do, but it doesn't inherently solve any challenges for the group.

-Username17

[Mechalich]

Thinking further, the ideal wereshark role might be 'detector.' Sharks have incredible senses - especially smell, and the somewhat unique electrosensory perception. So they can track like wolverine and probably have some kind of 'shark sense' that mimics spider-man's spidey sense.

Alternatively they could be the true expression of the primordial forces of nature and have druidic powers.

The problem is the wereshark role maps heavily onto the werewolf or werecat roles, as sharks occupy the same ecological roles, just in different environments.

[angelfromanotherpin]

If you wanted to make use of a Wereshark's aquatic abilities without going on an inconvenient solo run, you'd want to include a power which granted underwater life support in an aura so they could take their friends along.

[Username17]

The problem is the wereshark role maps heavily onto the werewolf or werecat roles, as sharks occupy the same ecological roles, just in different environments.

The combat side, pretty much yes. Even Werebears are pretty much interchangeable. They will likely have modestly different stats or power assignments (depending on how your game handles such things), but fundamentally you have a creature type whose main trick is to hulk out into a toothy clawed monster that is then about as good at combat as a splat is allowed to be. Each creature is at the game design imposed ceiling for combat specialization while in monster form, so there's nowhere to go. Maybe the cat monster is faster and the bear monster is tougher or something, but one or the other would only be "better at combat" if the designer has fucked up somewhere.

However, that doesn't mean there isn't room for secondary shticks. The Bagheera is "stealthy" and the Nanaue is not particularly. And while generations of D&D players have talked about invisibility as basically one more way to get an edge in stabbing people, it's actually good for all kinds of stuff from infiltration to spying to theft. Similarly, the Werewolf has an advantage in this sort of thing in that the ability to talk to and control dogs is actually useful in a modern urban fantasy context, while the ability to do that with tigers or sharks is not.

What it comes down to is that in a game where you have different kinds of playable creatures that are expected to be anything like balanced, like for example After Sundown, the kind of combat abilities you get for just signing up as a Lycanthrope (other than a Nezumi) is most of your starting powers. Witches and Vampires are going to be able to do a lot more sorcerous crap because they aren't setting most of their power slots on fire to have a commanding presence in physical combat. There's really just a couple of fixed slots left over for things other than "fights well." If Nanaue got the ability to detect electrical wires and storms and also got to summon storms, that would probably be enough.

-Username17

[DrPraetor]

Rokea need a feeding schedule and grant waterbreathing.

The idea is, you get your power points back by turning into a shark and SHARK ATTACKing swimmers (except you don't). So that does require you to turn into a mundane shark? Also you can take them to your underground sea palace - because faerie tales are the original horror movies - to marry/eat later.

PCs could use these powers for different things, obviously.

[Mechalich]

Electrical sensing is a good bet, especially if it can be used to detect people and maybe even specific identities - being able to identify a person through walls is a useful non-combat ability. At higher levels you can even allow some measure of electricity control - electric rays are simply highly evolved chondritchyians after all.

There are some other modest flavor options I can think of - bioluminescence is a thing in a number of (small, primarily mid-waters) shark species, so that could be an ability. Swallow inorganic matter and then vomiting it up undamaged is a thing tiger sharks can do. Sharks have unusual osmoregulation - they retain urea in their bodies in a way other vertebrates cannot - which might be offered as a kind of poison resistance. Migratory sharks (especially hammerheads) are also apparently able to utilize Earth's magnetic field to navigate.

[Prak]

That sounds like kind of a ranger-y second shtick, which I don't think is inappropriate.

[Username17]

As for feeding schedules, there needs to be a distinction made between monsters that sacrifice a person here or there to do mighty rituals of vast power and creatures that actually feed on people to do their power thing. Vampires need to be on a feeding schedule, but everyone else needs to not be on a feeding schedule unless they are literally intended to bite someone every night and twice on adventure nights. Even most cannibals are not and should not be on a feeding schedule, because the number of people they chew on just isn't high enough for that to be a thing.

As for urea metabolism... that is "trivial." Now I think that it's important for monsters to have a bunch of trivial details that can come up for weal or woe, but they aren't the kinds of things that are in the bullet point power lists. A power on the main list is something like Cloud Memory, where you get to change someone's memories so they don't remember that you ate part of their body or used their keys. That's a big deal. While a lot of other abilities like adjustable buoyancy or something just do not rate on that level.

Too often White Wolf power lists for monsters end up with dead levels because there is this driving need to write up a power for each dot and to write down all the powers you can think of. And then you end up with the ability to detect fucking time disturbances costing as much as the ability to hypnotize people with your gaze. And that's absurd, because you might go three whole campaigns without ever running into a time disturbance to detect, but people you might want to hypnotize are in almost every scene.

So while I do think that it is important that it's noted somewhere that Vampires don't sweat on hot days and that Demons can drink sulfurous sludge without gagging, these are not powers in the same sense as Regeneration and War Form are Powers. That distinction often gets lost in World of Darkness and its many heartbreakers, but it's vital for game balance to even be a thing. Otherwise we're just saying that the 3e Monk is overpowered because she has more text in her level progression table.

-Username17

[DrPraetor]

MRoVP Shark Week: Nanaue-specific
To perform: One hour per day, on each of seven consecutive days, the Nanaue must perform a ritual of purification taking approximately an hour. This requires a lodge, the materials for which are expensive (••) but have multiple ritual purposes so the identity of the ritual is obscure*. The Nanaue must murder a swimmer, while in war form, in the water along the same coastal region, each day during the following week. Thereafter, all humans in the entire region where the attacks took place are subject to Master Passion: Fear for the entire following year.
Learning: The ritual can be taught by anyone who knows it, to any Nanaue with at least a point of Research. Nanaue may learn/invent the ritual spontaneously if they are obsessed with television coverage of shark attacks, and spend at least a week worth of nights obsessively studying the subject (whether the Nanaue reads obsessively or just watches television doesn't matter, but the Nanaue must be exhausted by lack of sleep for the entire week of obsessive study.)

* The MRoVP section needs rules on how much Research you need to identify a given ritual, based either on an intercepted shopping list or on finding the blood-stained altar.

[hyzmarca]

As for feeding schedules, there needs to be a distinction made between monsters that sacrifice a person here or there to do mighty rituals of vast power and creatures that actually feed on people to do their power thing. Vampires need to be on a feeding schedule, but everyone else needs to not be on a feeding schedule unless they are literally intended to bite someone every night and twice on adventure nights. Even most cannibals are not and should not be on a feeding schedule, because the number of people they chew on just isn't high enough for that to be a thing.

As for urea metabolism... that is "trivial." Now I think that it's important for monsters to have a bunch of trivial details that can come up for weal or woe, but they aren't the kinds of things that are in the bullet point power lists. A power on the main list is something like Cloud Memory, where you get to change someone's memories so they don't remember that you ate part of their body or used their keys. That's a big deal. While a lot of other abilities like adjustable buoyancy or something just do not rate on that level.

Too often White Wolf power lists for monsters end up with dead levels because there is this driving need to write up a power for each dot and to write down all the powers you can think of. And then you end up with the ability to detect fucking time disturbances costing as much as the ability to hypnotize people with your gaze. And that's absurd, because you might go three whole campaigns without ever running into a time disturbance to detect, but people you might want to hypnotize are in almost every scene.

So while I do think that it is important that it's noted somewhere that Vampires don't sweat on hot days and that Demons can drink sulfurous sludge without gagging, these are not powers in the same sense as Regeneration and War Form are Powers. That distinction often gets lost in World of Darkness and its many heartbreakers, but it's vital for game balance to even be a thing. Otherwise we're just saying that the 3e Monk is overpowered because she has more text in her level progression table.

-Username17

The usefulness of a power is highly dependent on the premises of your campaign. If you're playing Primeval: The RPG, and most of the action consists of fighting dinosaurs who wander through temporal disturbances into the city of London, then the ability to sense temporal disturbances is substantially more powerful than hypnotizing people is, by a wide margin.

Aquaman powers are great for a sea campaign. Not just a "we're all weresharks" game. But Pirates and shit, too. Pirates and shit, especially. Like, attacking Pentex shipping with a rubber speedboat is perfectly viable for a W:TA game. And Rokea rather powerful in a campaign like that just with their base "breathe water" and "swim good" abilities.

[DrPraetor]

This is why After Sundown wouldn't have "sense temporal disturbance" at all, for the same reason it doesn't have "protection from Steve". All the metamagic effects are powersource specific, and the three power sources are generally assumed to get a 1/3rd share.

So you might have "astral sense", which would detect temporal distortions for dinosaurs and also whatever star gateways the Pods might want to open up and so forth.

You're right, of course, that "Protection from Steve" is a fantastic power - better than Form of Mist! - in the chronicle where you hunt down Steve. That makes the game balance problems worse, not better.

[Mechalich]

Aquaman powers are great for a sea campaign. Now just a "we're all weresharks" game. But Pirates and shit, too. Pirates and shit, especially. Like, attacking Pentex shipping with a rubber speedboat is perfectly viable for a W:TA game. And Rokea rather powerful in a campaign like that just with their base "breathe water" and "swim good" abilities.

This is basically it. Ultimately any aquatic splat type, whether its a wereshark or a weredolphin (and weredolphins actually make a lot more evolutionary sense), aquaman, or the creature from the black lagoon, is going to dominate land-based characters in an aquatic scenario and be of secondary capability in a terrestrial one.

Rokea really don't belong in the stereotypical werewolf campaign - whatever that actually is - but neither do half the changing breeds like Mokole or Nagah. However is the campaign involves oceanic shipping or coastal operations in any significant way, than an aquatic splat will do well even though their power level will swing back and forth from one encounter to the next.

I don't see any easy way to get around the fact that the power 'talk to fish' is utterly useless in one environment and incredibly awesome in another. The same thing is true of 'talk to dogs' its just that the dog-containing environment is the common campaign one.

In most game systems just being able to function properly underwater is a whole power suite - you need breathing but also pressure resistance, proper motion, a way to avoid hypothermia, and a way to deal damage in the high viscosity environment. You average D&D party needs like four spells to fully gear up for underwater action. And lots of games have this in other ways - microgravity adaptation and the ability to survive vacuum is a thing of incredible value in certain space games even though its highly situation-dependent.

It's one thing to talk about weresharks versus other aquatic splats. A wereshark gets high endurance, scent-based tracking, and attunement to electrical and magnetic signals; a weredolphin gets sonar, pack-based maneuvers, and whalesong mental powers; a weresquid gets super-fast reflexes, ink, and a puzzle-solving bonus (and lots of tentacle porn); and so on. These are terms that the Rokea book doesn't succeed on (because White-wolf divided the ocean up between all five games), but that's probably the route to take towards providing both balance and shtick, not a comparison with terrestrial creatures.

So maybe you have weresharks=werewolves, the creature from the black lagoon=vampires, and merfolk=witches.

[Whipstitch]

This is going to sound like an oddball idea, but hear me out.

If the idea is shark people and we're going to pull from folklore, then I actually think you could make a case for giving these assholes some social powers. I say this because unlike werewolves the monster people of the sea are also associated with shit like luring people to their deaths just because they're evil or being revered as deities who command fear and offerings. By combining ass kicking with some Magnetism you could roughly approximate a monstrous siren or Dakuwaqa with the same splat. That hits me as a bonus because honestly weresharks alone seems a bit obscure.

Plus, I feel like you could actually pull off such a build even with the current rules, which is nice:

-Core Discipline: Magnetism-
Attract
Repel
-Basic Disciplines-
Vigor (Basic Clout)
Quickness (Basic Celerity)
Patience of the Mountains (Basic Fortitude)
Supernatural Senses (Basic Discernment)
-Advanced Disciplines-
Summoning (Advanced Magnetism)
War Form (Devotion)

A part of me really wanted sneak Silent Toll in there as their lone sorcery so you would have an excuse to hum the "Jaws" theme as you go in for the kill.

[hyzmarca]

I just imagined that Rokea were hunted after re-entering the water.
Otherwise becoming a Rokean landwalker bountyhunter who hunts on land would make you a bounty target. Creating an infinite loop toward extinction.

I just came across some clarification on this. And yes, Rokea do go on land to hunt land-dwelling Rokea and their children. Especially their children. It's not uncommon for young Rokea to go Jaws II: Land Shark on foster homes housing homid kinfolk (Rokea don't breed true with humans).

Going on land is considered a rite of passage for young Rokea. And they're terrible at it, because they don't understand basic things like clothes and doors.

Betweener status is based on how long you stay on land. Generally, staying on land long enough to actually understand human civilization is enough. But just doing a hunt on unsea and coming right back isn't enough to get labeled a betweener. Probably.

There is a really viscious feedback loop, though.
There are some sample characters in Changing Breed Book 8: Rokea called the Betweener Trio, who are basically juvenile Rokea who went on land to hunt a Betweener and by the time they were finished one of them was pregnant by a human and decided to stay to protect the baby and also because human civilization was awesome. She gave it up to the state, who put it in foster care, and the three moved on, always one step ahead of the hunters (who are easy to avoid because they don't understand how to navigate human civilization). Sadly, the baby was not so lucky, and was eaten by a wereshark.

Anyway, they associate dry land with Qyrl and consider living there to be the equivalent to walking the Black Spiral. Mechanically, it isn't, there is no Wyrm corruption associated with just living on land. But the Rokea believe it is, that all betweeners are dangerously corrupt.