What would it take to make VTM 5e not garbage?

ArmorClassZero · Post by **ArmorClassZero** » Sat Mar 03, 2018 7:31 am

@CapnTthePirateG
The onus is on nuWW to make vampires cool again. They're going to have to tell the stories that bring vampires back into the pop-culture limelight.

Vampires and the concept of the Masquerade are great vehicles for telling character dramas, psychological thrillers, horror stories, and / or mysteries, etc. all with a dash of action.

Longes · Post by **Longes** » Sat Mar 03, 2018 8:15 am

CapnTthePirateG wrote:I guess my question is what modern vampire stories can we link to? Buffy is cool and all but that shit was in the 90s and predates a lot of the younger crowd we need to keep this running.

The last big vampire movie was fucking Twilight, and I guarantee you if you have vampires that sparkle in the sun nobody will play that shit.

You have to answer the question "what's so cool about vampires" in an age where 90s goth chicks aren't - to my limited knowledge - running around as much anymore.

No one needs to make vampires cool again because vampires are already cool. It's just that like superheroes went from comic book nerd thing to normie trash, so have vampires went from goth thing to normie trash. Modern vampires don't have dark make-up and old school clothing, they have chiseled abs and a model haircut.

"Supernatural Teenage Drama" is a mainstream TV genre that started roughly with Supernatural (not really), and continues with things like Teen Wolf, Shadowhunters, Vampire Diaries, The Originals, Van Helsing and Penny Dreadful. And arguably even superhero TV shows fall under the same umbrella. Penny Dreadful is probably the best out of those and is not the worst series to emulate.

FatR · Post by **FatR** » Sat Mar 03, 2018 9:13 am

(1) You need a full reboot, as was already mentioned in this thread.

(2) That reboot needs to be based on whatever books/shows about supernatural critters are most popular at the moment, just like Masquerade was Ann Rice: The RPG before bloat and incestuous self-referencing set in. The old baggage has to be, if not discarded completely, on the level of superficial nods. If people want Masquerade vampires they can just play Masquerade, after all.

(2.1) #2 probably means you have to somehow mix Dresden Files' vampires with Twilight's ones.

(2.2) The Masquerade concept as in "monsters hiding from muggles" was kinda stupid before camera phones and is stupid now. It has to be reframed as either "muggles desperately not wanting to admit there are supernatural predators all around even as werewolves massacre their way through police buildings and squads of undead duke it out in the streets, and monsters just giving them a bit of help by disappearing the most glaring evidence" or "monsters are ruling humanity in all but name, and just prefer for their control to remain covert".

(3) You need to choose whether your system would be rules-lite and fast to run or complex and tactical, and stick with your choice. Also, in the latter case mechanical interaction should be actually interesting.

jt · Post by jt » Sat Mar 03, 2018 9:19 am

Start with just what it is that the players are supposed to do, on the first session, as their overall character arcs, and just as bread-and-butter filler session plots. Make sure any random collection of characters has a reason to work together on these things and the capability to. Then make mechanics that support this and don't suck. Like Frank said, make it an actual game.

For my stab at it:

Just surviving life with monster-itis is hard enough that you have to do some sketchy things, either criminal or supernatural. There's a limited amount of crime and dark bargains to go around, so you're going to be stepping on someone's toes immediately. Resources are scarce, power struggles ensue, there's always a reason to dig yourself a deeper hole, you make enemies along the way. Despite this you occasionally have to drop everything and work together with your enemies to maintain the masquerade.

First session is everyone bumping in to each other as they figure out the supernatural side of their city, and then teaming up to figure out how the vampire is going to eat, the werewolf is going to wolf out without killing anyone, and the murderous sex robot is going to find enough electricity to recharge. Inevitably some things go wrong.

The GM has a list of shit that will catch up with you eventually, and rolls on it like a random encounter chart between scenes. Every time you roll a slot that has something, you get a scene dealing with that. If it's not somehow solved, that problem gets upgraded (number on the chart goes up) so it's worse next time. The core dice mechanic might even add to the list; for example d6+mods, but every time you roll a 6 there will be consequences later, and the more powerful options give you extra d6s instead of extra mods.

Username17 · Post by **Username17** » Sat Mar 03, 2018 10:00 am

When Masquerade went live, vampires were going mainstream. They had signed A-list talent to be in Interview. Today, vampires have already gone mainstream. Twilight was such a big property that they could take randos who couldn't act and turn them (at least temporarily) into A-listers. Breaking Dawn made over eight hundred million dollars at the box office despite being a shit movie with 25 percent on Rotten Tomatoes.

So your target is no longer college age women who are discovering that there's a goth genre that had been chugging along without their knowledge for ten to fifteen years. Now your target is college age women who read Twilight books when they were in their teens and are now ready for more adult fare.

So all the dumb questions about whether and how much adult content vampire should have are irrelevant. A reboot of Vampire would absolutely need to have romance and death and shit because your target audience watched True Blood while they were children.

-Username17

DSMatticus · Post by **DSMatticus** » Sat Mar 03, 2018 12:14 pm

The closest you can get to a spiritual successor for V;tM is urban fantasy with a horror spin - something between Stranger Things and Blade/Hellboy/Hellsing, i.e. After Sundown with a fuckton more world-building. Not that Blade/Hellboy/Hellsing are particualrly topical at the moment, but that's what you need to turn Stranger Things into a game where monsters are PC options.

Vampires really don't have the same swag they used to. They are no longer a dark, mysterious underground conspiracy/culture. They're sparkly, brooding, superhuman boyfriends. It would be ill-advised to make a game based off the current crop of vampire source material alone, I think.

Thaluikhain · Post by **Thaluikhain** » Sat Mar 03, 2018 1:15 pm

DSMatticus wrote:Vampires really don't have the same swag they used to. They are no longer a dark, mysterious underground conspiracy/culture. They're sparkly, brooding, superhuman boyfriends. It would be ill-advised to make a game based off the current crop of vampire source material alone, I think.

To an extent, but even those ones often have properly nasty vampires turn up...usually so that the broody bad boy doesn't look like a creepy abusive type in comparison.

But yeah, a lot of vampires these days are either one step away from a restraining order, or are the characters from Mean Girls with pointier teeth. I don't mind the latter so much

EDIT: Actually, now that I think of it, in the old days, people were humans and vampire were scary monsters. Nowdays, vampires are people, and the scary monsters are either extra vampirey vampires (at least compared to the normal ones), vampire criminals or the vampire 1%.

Longes · Post by **Longes** » Sat Mar 03, 2018 1:49 pm

DSMatticus wrote:Vampires really don't have the same swag they used to. They are no longer a dark, mysterious underground conspiracy/culture. They're sparkly, brooding, superhuman boyfriends. It would be ill-advised to make a game based off the current crop of vampire source material alone, I think.

Vampires never had that. Riceian vampires were just brooding superhuman dudes hanging around, mostly on their own. Dracula and Nosferatu were unique individuals. The secret conspiracy thing is a VtM thing, not vampires thing.

hyzmarca · Post by **hyzmarca** » Sat Mar 03, 2018 5:48 pm

Vampires were, traditionally, NPC monsters. You either sold your soul to the devil in order to spite god and live forever as a monster that feeds on the blood and life of others, or you were killed by that dude and your corpse rose as a soulness monster in his image and under his thrall.

Either way, your alignment automatically changed to evil and you handed your character sheet to the GM and eventually you're killed by Roddy McDowall.

Having vampires as protagonists kind of means that you have to water them down because, you know, mass murderers, serial killers, and rapists make for shitty heroes. No one wants to play a game where John Wayne Gacy is the hero. At best you end up with a Dexter style serial killer who kills other serial killers.

Username17 · Post by **Username17** » Sat Mar 03, 2018 7:23 pm

The idea of vampire organizations is pretty much an 80s concept. Anne Rice's vampires had all the weird bloodlines and prophecies and shit as of Queen of the Damned (1988) and also pretty much present in the Necroscope books (1986). Vampires specifically had different powers depending on lineage in Lost Boys (1987), but vampire groups seem to be regional family clans rather than national or international conspiracies..

There's kinda similar things involving widespread vampire infestations that need hunting in the Marvel Previews series that created Blade in the 70s. But of course the real solidified concept of vampire clans with defined shticks and business interests and shit wouldn't get nailed down until Blade's 90s comics, at which point Blade is stealing from Masquerade as fast as Masquerade is stealing from Blade. Similarly, the early Vampire Chronicles books from the 70s pretty much assume that there's no vampire society at all and it's every fang for himself. It's only in the later books where we start talking about millennia old schemes and ancient bloodlines and shit.

In any case, just as Anne Rice solidified the idea that there would be Makers and Fledglings (called Sires and Neonates in Masquerade) back in 1979, Masquerade itself sold the idea of vampire bloodlines and international vampire conspiracies to the public in 1992. That's just how vampires work now, and whether you're talking about the Underworld books or True Blood or even fucking Twilight, that is simply how vampires work in fiction now.

Now a hypothetical reboot of Masquerade can change around what its clans do and mean quite a lot. In fact, they could be totally different. You might want to reuse some of the more popular names like Ventrue and Malkavian, but you might not. There's nothing inherently wrong with making up new Clan names, and obviously you are going to ditch a lot of the shittier clans regardless.

But fundamentally, the regional royalty nomenclature of True Blood really isn't that different from the Camarilla of Masquerade. That's a functional model, and you might as well use something kind of like that.

-Username17

souran · Post by **souran** » Sun Mar 04, 2018 5:42 am

Let's talk about what the Mascarade could/would need to be to not be a hindrance.

Fundamentally, should the core idea of the Mascarade be retained for any reboot?

A game where all the monsters are out in the open True Blood style could be interesting, However, while True Blood was novel in it's approach, one of the aspects of of the WOD games and a lot of Urban Fantasty is the idea that all this crazy shit happens in secret while people go to work, eat fast food, and watch network television. Obviously this isn't true of all Urban Fantasy, especially now. However is you compare the number of Kim Harrison type Urban Fantasies to the number of Jim Butcher type most of them still rely on the "secret supernatural" trope.

Regardless; assuming that the game is going to have the mascarade, and its going to have antagonists who don't necessarily like the mascarade but they should still need to fundmentally follow it. As Frank has pointed out, if they want they could call a press conference and tell the whole world on the 5:00 news at any time.

One thing that might work would be to have the factions of vampires be at odds over the mascarade in the same way that the two factions of of Bond's Magi in Scott Lynch's Genetleman Bastards are at odds.

Without getting into too much detail of the series; Half the wizards want to rule over the world as god-like sorcerer kings and the other half want to make sure that the use of magic doesn't attract whatever terrible doom wiped out the previous societies that left behind all the crazy super magic buildings and artifacts.

Similarly, you could have one faction/side who sees the mascarade as an essential way of life. As long as people don't think vampires they won't hunt them in numbers or do anything else drastic. This is basically the existing macarade position anyway and sort of works.

The replacement Sabbat then would be a group that wants to see Vampires be allowed to rule humans openly. A group that wants to overthrow the existing human social order and put vampires at the top. However, they realize that just they have to stay hidden until they are in control or they will be wiped out.

All supernatural creatures in the game would need to fundamentally have the same sort of standing agreement. Werewolves don't reveal the existence of vampires even though they probably have significant issues with each other.

Username17 · Post by **Username17** » Sun Mar 04, 2018 6:52 am

Souran wrote:All supernatural creatures in the game would need to fundamentally have the same sort of standing agreement. Werewolves don't reveal the existence of vampires even though they probably have significant issues with each other.

This is one of the key portions of the Masquerade: every group has to uphold the Masquerade for every group. So it isn't just that Vampires don't reveal the existence of Vampires, it's that Werewolves also don't reveal the existence of Vampires, and that fucking Hunters don't reveal the existence of Vampires. Every supernatural group is covering for themselves and also every other supernatural group. And the Vow of Silence is kept by all the non-supernatural creature who is in the know - every Renfield, Faust, and Helsing gets up every morning and goes to bed at night (or whenever) without taking their evidence to the FBI or the NYT in between.

While you can have some pro-humanity groups that are officially against the mass carnage that would take place if there were open warfare between Humans and Vampires, groups like WtA Werewolves who want to kill all the Vampires and don't actually care if large numbers of humans die in the process are basically right out. Hunters can be Men in Black, but they can't be anti-Vampire fanatics who are willing to let large numbers of mortal bystanders die.

But in general, it's probably a bad idea to have any distinct supernatural type have a mad hate on for any other distinct supernatural type. It's OK to not like The Black Hand or not like The Covenant or something, but it's probably a no-go for any of the groups to be anti-Vampire or anti-Werewolf or whatever.

-Username17

souran · Post by **souran** » Sun Mar 04, 2018 3:55 pm

FrankTrollman wrote:
But in general, it's probably a bad idea to have any distinct supernatural type have a mad hate on for any other distinct supernatural type. It's OK to not like The Black Hand or not like The Covenant or something, but it's probably a no-go for any of the groups to be anti-Vampire or anti-Werewolf or whatever.

-Username17

While having any groups have D&D level kill on site status with other groups based on their supernatural type is a terrible idea, having groups have levels of in built enmity with each other is fine and can create the kind of tension that is good for helping players roleplay and creating in-story drama.

It's ok for Vampires and werewolves to have a tense relationship like old warhammer elves and dwarves. However, most people have things that they dislike and might even hate that doesn't cause them to murder everyone they see who likes or is said thing.

It's also good for the game to have some antagonist factions that the players can feel fine about using their powers on without holding anything back. If you have a faction of supernatural nazi baby eaters its fine for the other factions to have a standing view that unconditional surrender is the only diplomacy they will accept, at leastuntil they give up the baby eatyng and nazism.

FatR · Post by **FatR** » Sun Mar 04, 2018 3:55 pm

FrankTrollman wrote: This is one of the key portions of the Masquerade: every group has to uphold the Masquerade for every group. So it isn't just that Vampires don't reveal the existence of Vampires, it's that Werewolves also don't reveal the existence of Vampires, and that fucking Hunters don't reveal the existence of Vampires. Every supernatural group is covering for themselves and also every other supernatural group. And the Vow of Silence is kept by all the non-supernatural creature who is in the know - every Renfield, Faust, and Helsing gets up every morning and goes to bed at night (or whenever) without taking their evidence to the FBI or the NYT in between.

Thanks for elaborating why Masquerade-as-hiding cannot possibly work in a world where supernaturals are numerous enough to form societies, and indeed why it never worked in the first place.

Even Butcher's general idea, where humanity (with some help with stuff like vampires working to debunk anything supernatural as hoaxes in public) is just really determined not to believe in monsters, so you can actually show a werewolf on TV a few days after a lot of people got torn apart by something big and vaguely canine, and everyone would just shrug and accuse you of trying to capitalize on tragedy with your shitty SFX; even that makes more sense.

But the most obvious solution is the conspiracy. Wherever you may take your evidence about monsters is run by monsters, so the evidence is just going to disappear, and so are you. Insiders with a grudge against the system who attempt to spread information through social media or something are quickly discredited, magically tracked, and mind wiped into saying that they just were stupid pranksters. All major supernatural factions still have to be on board with the plan, though.

Thaluikhain · Post by **Thaluikhain** » Sun Mar 04, 2018 4:38 pm

FatR wrote:But the most obvious solution is the conspiracy.

Not magic? Magical monsters no-one notices are explained away by more magic in various similarish settings, and it's (IMHO) the best way of making sense of a very nonsensical situation.

Though, that means there's no Masquerade to uphold, as it upholds itself just fine, and as that's one word out of three in the name, dropping it seems a bit drastic.

ArmorClassZero · Post by **ArmorClassZero** » Sun Mar 04, 2018 6:17 pm

@Thaluikhain: Is there really a difference between vampire criminals and the vampire 1%? XD

@Souran: Yes, the Masquerade should remain a core in-universe concept that the supernaturals live by.

Trill · Post by **Trill** » Sun Mar 04, 2018 6:46 pm

ArmorClassZero wrote:I was under the impression that the Masquerade was less of "We're hiding from you guys just under your noses / secret society of supernaturals existing alongside humans" and more of "What Shadow Government? There is no Shadow Government, silly. Don't believe the conspiracy theorists." The implication being that keeping the kine from discovering the existence of the kindred is a supporting pillar but second fiddle to keeping the kine from figuring out that they're being ruled over in the 1st place. There is no reason to rule humans openly because ruling from the shadows is much more conducive to the vampires' rule. And the premise of the Masquerade, or what I thought it was, assumes the vampires are already in control. That they would've become so entrenched in the power centers of world affairs over the past few centuries that any change to the status quo, which is already excellent for them, would undesirable.

As far as I understood, the Masquerade is "We don't like our fellow vampire, but we keep our fellow existence secret, because mundanes knowing about us will lead to our deaths."
They don't risk breaking the masquerade and telling humanity about their enemies, because humans knowing about vampires existing will be a massive danger to them. So they put in some work to keep each other secret, while also working against them. The massive world controlling conspiracy/wrestling groups are mainly there to help against the more obvious cases.

Username17 · Post by **Username17** » Sun Mar 04, 2018 7:52 pm

ArmorClassZero wrote:All this talk about how to reconcile the Vampires vs Werewovles vs XYZ or Vampires + Werewolves + XYZ coexisting, only increases my desire to just write off every non-vampire supernatural as being not real in the 1st place, or as being a misidentified / misperceived vampire.

I don't think you're going to find a lot of people who are down with that plan.

Obviously if you go into Kitchen Sink Vampirism you're going to find all kinds of "Vampires and [Foo]" stories. Even if you limit yourself to major Vampire works, ones that don't posit various other supernatural stuff are few and far between. The Vampire Chronicles have witches, psychics, demons, and ghosts. Twilight has werewolves and psychics. True Blood has fairies, werewolves, shapeshifters, maenads, werepanthers, demons, witches, and ifrit. The Vampire Diaries has witches, angels, psychics, werewolves, ghosts, and kitsune. Even the original fucking Bela Lugosi Dracula movies explicitly live in an expanded universe that includes Frankenstein's Monster, the Wolfman, the Invisible Man, Gillman, and the Mummy.

So if you decided that your game about vampire politics was going to have 7 or 13 flavors of vampires and deep vampire political shenanigans going on all the time, you'd still need to have a few supernatural non-Vampire options. I just don't even see how it's possible to do otherwise. I don't think you need or want 17 tribes of Werewolves or anything like that. But the most Vampire-centric I think it's possible to be is to have 13 flavors of Vampire and 3 flavors of "Not Vampires." Witches, Werewolves, and Fairies, for example. That's super minimalist.

-Username17

Nath · Post by **Nath** » Sun Mar 04, 2018 9:46 pm

One idea that I found interesting was to present the Masquerade more as an established system and less as rushed, after-the-fact reactions with whatever resources are available to the vampire in charge.

All too often, the Masquerade was the Ventrue overseeing the local government and police force and that was it. The idea was to systematically have Malkavians in charge of controlling mental health institutions (or covens and other spiritual retreats in the old times), Nosferatu watching out for local rumors at a local level, as well as spreading conspiracy theories, Toreador checking and influencing the contents of media, novels and medias (and, in the past, shaping mythology and legends), and Tremere and Gangrel watching out for other supernatural events that could lead to a witch hunt that would threaten the vampires (I can't remember what the Brujah were supposed to do...).

This implied that the very existence of the Masquerade relies on the every clan. So removing a clan from a city because of a petty power rivalry was a serious offense to the entire Camarilla, as it risked weakening the Masquerade for everyone everywhere. Actually, the most likely result of wiping out a clan was having a powerful vampire from the same clan coming to town to keep everything on track. But you would instead have feud over clans not doing their job properly (for instance the Toreador of Los Angeles letting way too much movies about vampires being screened). Because the other clans are not allowed to take that job over, such feud necessarily involved supporting a subordinate or a vampire from another city to remove an ineffective clan local leader. It also justified the creation of teams with vampires from different clans as that would give them direct channels to Masquerade resources to deal with the consequence of whatever they will do.

I guess that idea can be adapted to a new set of clans, thought it require that the identify of each clan can be associated with a significant domain for the Masquerade.

Prak · Post by **Prak** » Mon Mar 05, 2018 3:10 am

ArmorClassZero wrote:Also, I think the core conceit of the Masquerade virtually rules out having an entire group of playable characters who's main trait is 'hot-headed', 'loose cannon', 'rebel for the sake of rebelling' aka the Brujah. They would've been persecuted relentlessly by their kin until 'natural selection' ruled out embracing anyone with those traits, (or if those traits were a property of the Brujah blood, the entire clan would've likely been genocided.)

Well, personally, as much as I like the punk aesthetic of the modern Brujah, I think they should really be brought more in line with their Dark Ages incarnation, where they were warrior poets. You can rework the modern incarnation such that it fits that, where the Brujah upper crust is growing increasingly dissatisfied with the status quo, where maybe the people in charge treat them as shock troops and nothing else, and that filters down to the rank and file who are commonly people who are primarily, 1) creatives whose medium is language (writers, singers, poets), and, 2) people who fight, not physically, necessarily, but Brujah like people who are politically involved activists and such.

And that can manifest as a sizable minority of Brujah having been in punk bands in life, but more broadly, it's a clan of people who can tell you to go fuck yourself in the most beautiful terms possible, and have strong conviction.

Frank wrote:Twilight has werewolves and psychics.

Like True Blood, it also has shapeshifters who are distinct from werewolves, ostenisbly, and psychics. Twilight is basically True Blood for teenie boppers. Or True Blood is Twilight for adults... one of the two.

@Nath: That's actually a pretty good set up.

In general, I like the idea that the progression of technology brought back the tradition of misdirection. I mean, as Frank is fond of pointing out, almost 75% of Americans, in the current day, believe in the paranormal, to one extent or another. If there's a masquerade trying to tell people that the supernatural doesn't exist, it's doing a shit job. But if there's a tradition of misdirection where well-placed members of the supernatural community are discrediting specific instances to head off mobs of people with torches and stakes, that works better. You've got scientists who are placed by the vampires saying things like "most stories of vampires are probably the result of pre-industrial people misunderstanding either porphyria or the natural decomposition process" and people placed to say "oh man, that werewolf video is awesome. I didn't know special effects were getting that good!"

Hell, I think Frank once pointed out that, in America, at least, mass shootings play into this well. It's a way that the masquerade can get rid of problems, and it could also be a convenient go to story when you have to modify a bunch of memories to cover up a werewolf rampage.

And then there's the time Frank outlined how the actual bloodbank system is set up pretty much exactly how you'd want it to be for a vampire conspiracy.

hyzmarca · Post by **hyzmarca** » Mon Mar 05, 2018 3:54 am

ArmorClassZero wrote:@Thaluikhain: Is there really a difference between vampire criminals and the vampire 1%? XD

The vampire 1% are old money. Some of them made a killing in grain futures when a guy named Joe gave them a hot tip. None of them need to commit crimes, because they have diversified investment portfolios.

Vampire organized crime are the new money. Guys who don't have the connections and investments to do everything above board.

Koumei · Post by **Koumei** » Mon Mar 05, 2018 3:57 am

Nath wrote:Nosferatu watching out for local rumors at a local level, as well as spreading conspiracy theories,

Basically having Fox News (plus the Sun, Daily Mail etc.), InfoWars (and Breitbart, Stormfront etc.), and President Trump should be a good start to bombarding people with so much bullshit and getting them so used to bizarre conspiracy theories that half the people refuse to believe anything and the other half are ignored because they believe everything. You should absolutely have a saturation of conspiracy theory bullshit, ideally conflicting, such that "there are vampires and they control us" is buried next to "there are [lizard people / fish people / Jews / Hulk Hogan] and they control us".

So I suppose, setting it in Present Day, Present Time is probably a good start. We're already in World of Darkness.

Thaluikhain · Post by **Thaluikhain** » Mon Mar 05, 2018 4:25 am

ArmorClassZero wrote:All this talk about how to reconcile the Vampires vs Werewovles vs XYZ or Vampires + Werewolves + XYZ coexisting, only increases my desire to just write off every non-vampire supernatural as being not real in the 1st place, or as being a misidentified / misperceived vampire. The big hairy wolf-monster your neighbor though he saw? Gangrel. Easy, done. The whole issue of A supernatural keeping B supernatural secret is solved if all the supernaturals are just kindred, figuratively and literally.

If you can have werewolf vampires, why not werewolf werewolfs? I don't see any pressing need to have both, but maybe there's not as much overlap between gangrel players and werewolf players as I'd imagine.

But, yeah, you'd have to have them play by the same rules, and be kindred in a looser sense, but I don't really see a problem with that. Could go all Cold War, with breaking the Masquerade as MAD.

DrPraetor · Post by **DrPraetor** » Mon Mar 05, 2018 4:37 am

FrankTrollman wrote: This is one of the key portions of the Masquerade: every group has to uphold the Masquerade for every group... And the Vow of Silence is kept by all the non-supernatural creature who is in the know - every Renfield, Faust, and Helsing gets up every morning and goes to bed at night (or whenever) without taking their evidence to the FBI or the NYT in between.

I think many writers of modern fantasy believe that there are aliens buried at area 51, 9/11 was an inside job, vaccines cause autism and that the cure for cancer is lemon juice and weed.

This was particularly true for some of the writers of Mage splats. So these writers have defective reasoning faculties and it comes across in how they think the war between the Traditions and the Technocracy would play out - since they think that brave muckrakers have proof-positive that the moon landing was faked and that a conspiracy is able to suppress them.

OgreBattle · Post by **OgreBattle** » Mon Mar 05, 2018 5:02 am

Physical Combat should be straightforward and simple with more mechanics dedicated to running organizations, socializing, and other fun supernatural underworld things