Rehabbing WoD, but keeping it's spirit
Moderator: Moderators
That works fine... if you don't want the body to be doing stuff as well. And if you body can't do stuff independently of your head, what the hell is the point of having your head fly off?
FrankTrollman wrote:I think Grek already won the thread and we should pack it in.
Chamomile wrote:Grek is a national treasure.
It's a smaller target and more mobile.Grek wrote:That works fine... if you don't want the body to be doing stuff as well. And if you body can't do stuff independently of your head, what the hell is the point of having your head fly off?
I mean, that's the myth. The head comes off and flies around with its entrails hanging down, while the body is inert. It drinks blood and its entrails become so bloated that it has to soak them in viniger to shrink them down so that they'll fit back in through the neckhole.
Last edited by hyzmarca on Thu Aug 17, 2017 11:32 pm, edited 1 time in total.
I've been thinking about the subject of building an OWoD that works. I wish it was as easy as renaming some stuff in After Sundown, but the part where there are multiple habitable worlds just sucks all the tension out of the "pending apocalypse" concept. OWoD had it even worse than AS with the Umbra, naturally, but AS has the downside of having been constructed around the core concept of the Astral, Orphic, Infernal trinity.
Anywho, check out the spoiler for my first draft of a new cosmology, list of supernatural critters, and rough draft of society for OWoD. Thanks go to Frank for concepts lifted from After Sundown as well as for earlier posts in this thread containing ideas that I completely ripped off.
For anyone who cares, the major sects I think are worth including other than the Camarilla and Sabbat are the Anarchs, Ashirra, Laibon, and Gui Ren (fuck that half-Wade-Giles, half-Japanese bullshit). Minor sects I have down in my notepad file are the Inconnu, Black Hand, Cult of Set, Tremere, and Syndicate/Pentex. For antagonist-only groups, I have the Inquisition, Black Spiral Dancers, and Red Talons.
Anywho, check out the spoiler for my first draft of a new cosmology, list of supernatural critters, and rough draft of society for OWoD. Thanks go to Frank for concepts lifted from After Sundown as well as for earlier posts in this thread containing ideas that I completely ripped off.
A WORLD OF DARKNESS
The Worlds
The ordinary everyday physical world we are familiar with is teeming with spooks of various kinds. There are many pockets of strange and unsettling phenomena hiding in the shadows of our world, but ultimately there is only one world capable of supporting human (and most post-human) life. That world is in big trouble.
The Spirit Wilds
Most of the physical world obeys normal physical laws whenever explicitly supernatural nonsense isn’t messing with the status quo. This is due to the steady decline of the Great Spirits who once claimed vast swathes of Earth as their demesnes. In the old days, the Great Spirits decided natural law in much of the world and mundanes just had to deal with it, but the march of progress has progressively wiped out the race of the Great Spirits, leaving only a few atavisms lurking in the undesirable and uncivilized places of the world. These remaining throwbacks still have power within their limited areas, but nothing like the godlike might of millennia past. Tribes of the Changing Breeds, whose souls and powers are inextricably linked to those of the Great Spirits, zealously protect those which remain. Sometimes mere mortals - usually children - wander into these places and are not ripped to shreds by werecreatures, but meet with the stranger fate of being adopted by the spirits as their own.
The Underworld
Such pockets of supernatural power on Earth are not the only magical places in creation. The mundane world has a metaphysical echo called the Underworld, separated from the waking world by a magical barrier called the Shroud. Its form is defined by the sapient beings of Earth’s memories of places and things which no longer exist. The Underworld is in a state of constant decay as memories fade, the living pass on, and the things that are gone are forgotten completely. Places in the Underworld that are unformed by living memories are roiling, protean wastes with as much in common with a mortal body of water as with a mortal land; collectively, this unformed expanse of the Underworld is called the Tempest. Fittingly, the echoes of dead people inhabit the Underworld as wraiths. A wraith can only persist as long as the person it once was is remembered in the world of mortals; wraiths gradually lose strength and identity as the earthly imprints of their former lives are erased by the passage of time. In itself, the Underworld is inhospitable and depressing, and even the wraiths would generally prefer to hang out on Earth and peep on the living as intangible phantasms than stay there.
The Hells
To make things worse, the Underworld contains awful places that as far as anyone can tell never existed on Earth. Tucked into the darkest corners of the Shadowlands, deep in the Tempest, burning citadels imprison timeless, implacable evils that were never human. These places are Hells, and each is surrounded by a vast, ever-shifting maze made of the very shadow-stuff of the Underworld called a Labyrinth. Those rare wraiths who wander into a Labyrinth and come back out generally emerge as insane, violent monster ghosts known as Spectres. No one is sure just how many of these cosmic supermax facilities exist or exactly what the deal is with the beings they restrain, but it is unanimously agreed that these beings are sufficiently evil as to be worthy of the name “Demon.”
The End of the World
There are signs all around that the world is on the verge of ending. An ominous Red Star shines in the sky, currently visible only by supernatural means but growing brighter by the night. A great storm in the far reaches of the Tempest draws near to the cities of the Underworld, lashing the quiescent dead into a desperate frenzy to escape into the solid world. The Great Spirits are just about extinct; those that persist are sickly, fading, and under attack. It is said that when the last of them is snuffed out, the Red Star will blaze in the sky night and day for all to see, the Great Maelstrom will break in the Underworld to free all the inmates of all the Hells, and the eldest among the Vampires will arise to consume the world - Kindred and kine alike.
Most among the Kindred, especially those with a vested interest in the status quo, refuse to acknowledge the doom coming for them; the official position of the most conservative social clubs is that nothing is wrong, there is no such thing as an Antediluvian, and everyone should just keep calm and carry on. Many among the Kindred are preparing to fight the apocalypse when it comes for them, but know their numbers are too small and powers too weak for the fight to be anything but hopeless. Some Kindred serve the dreaming Antediluvians (or even worse beings) in hopes of buying immunity to the horrors to come; others have given in to nihilism and are determined to spend their last nights in debauched revelry. These truly are the Final Nights.
THE FACE IN THE MIRROR
Ordinary humans are made of two pieces: a body and a soul. When a normal human dies in mundane circumstances, the trauma of death ejects its soul into the Underworld, where it becomes a Wraith. Wraiths persist until the humans they once were are forgotten or they are annihilated in some way.
Other spirits exist in the world - besides the rare and godlike Great Spirits, there are lesser intelligent spirits that exist in certain special places or are associated with specific special objects or circumstances. Not everything has a spirit, and the vast majority of the spirits that exist are tiny, weak, non-sentient, and part of a particular place, creature, or object.
The prisoners of the Hells are generically referred to as Demons, and though they themselves cannot escape the Labyrinth, splinters of their power can be carried out of Hell under the right circumstances. A Wraith that wanders into the Labyrinth might come back out as a tormented monster among ghosts called a Spectre.
Other than these mundanes and never-human entities, there are a few distinct genera of post-human and near-human monsters stalking the Final Nights that are suitable for play. Within each genus, there are usually a few different species to choose from.
Vampires - You know what they are.
Ventrue - cold, distant nobles that specialize in breaking mortal will
Daeva - slavers of mortal passions, enchanters and tempters
Nosferatu - gutter-dwelling freaks hiding in urban shadows
Gangrel - bestial monsters tearing people limb from limb on lonely roadsides
Changing Breeds - You know what these are too.
TBA
Mages - Anyone can say some words and wave their hands around, but magic doesn’t work for anyone not already magical in nature. Other than being born to the Changing Breeds or Embraced by a Vampire, there are several different ways for a mortal to gain a mystic nature. None of them are pleasant.
Medium - Inviting strange wraiths to share your living soul tends to make you go crazy, but packing ghosts into your mortal body like an Indian train car gives them a chance to experience the pleasures of life anew and gives you access to a bunch of freaky death magic. It’s win-win, sort of.
Nephandus - You made a deal with one of the foul prisoners of Hell to carry an ember of the eternal fire in your soul. This granted you magical power, but doomed you to return to Hell upon your death and also gave you an evil voice in your head that whispers tantalizingly to your worst impulses. Thus far, no one who has gone to Hell has come back sane (and coming back is rare enough in the first place), so most of the Fallen are hustling as hard as they can to avoid the fate they brought on themselves by any means possible.
Changeling - Think of Sen from “Princess Mononoke” or Chihiro from “Spirited Away,” but forget the happy ending. Those who have eaten the food of the Fae and are weird and broken, but gain power over nature, lesser spirits, and dreams.
Jiangshi - You’re dead, but you don’t let that stop you. Your wraith learned the secret of possessing a corpse in such a way that it can be operated like a smelly flesh puppet. Your body might not have been yours to begin with, but it’s yours now - and if something obliterates it or it gets too rotten to be useful, you can just pick up a fresh one from the morgue. You can even mix-and-match parts if need be. No matter how many times you are cremated or run through a wood chipper, you can return. That is, if your soul wasn’t shredded by whatever destroyed your body.
(UN)LIFE AMONG THE KINDRED
The Masquerade
A supernatural individual can have enough power to singlehandedly depopulate a small country. However, these terrifying individuals are the exception, not the rule (and all such titanically powerful monsters that still exist are presently dormant). Your average spook is tougher, stronger, and faster than any mortal, but even one who laughs off machine gun fire probably doesn’t find napalm very funny - and if not napalm, there are a million other ways to be killed waiting in the wings for a spook that presses his luck. The balance of power has been tipping away from the Kindred since the invention of gunpowder, so the modern societies of the night have more or less formed around the idea that supernaturals should remain hidden from mortal eyes for their own safety. A few groups of spooks attempted to keep doing things the old way, and they are no longer with us. Everyone left these days takes care not to rock the boat.
Social Clubs
The various species of supernatural residents on Earth are collectively known as the “Kindred” and are generally on speaking terms. Like any mortal extended family, some branches of the Kindred are at odds with one another, but for the most part members of different clades are willing to attend the same social events without every get-together turning into a race riot. Usually the shooting only starts when Kindred belonging to opposing social clubs run into each other.
The Pyramid Scheme
As one ascends the social hierarchy, Kindred come to associate with each other entirely for selfish reasons, caring about their high status in various social clubs only insofar as it helps them to attain their personal objectives. The oldest and strongest among those who are active may not hold even nominal membership in a recognized sect or cult, instead declaring their allegiance to some informal association of like-minded ancients, an older and fouler creature, or themselves only. Some especially audacious elders maintain senior roles in multiple sects that are nominally blood enemies, concealing this from their zealous subordinates by maintaining elaborate schemes of alternate identities or simply by keeping sufficient distance to avoid scrutiny.
As Kindred get older and wiser (and more jaded and depraved), they tend to lose interest in the petty ideological differences of sects and cults, in favor of other motivations that come to the fore with age. Some elders become enslaved to even more ancient Kindred (some are so enthralled all along, more’s the pity), others to their own lust for power. It is next to impossible to discern the true loyalties or motives of an experienced player of the Endless Game; their every word, deed, and association is buried in misdirection, deception, and manipulation.
SECTS
Camarilla
The Camarilla is the old money yacht club of the supernatural world. Their main goal as an organization is to assist their favored members in growing as old and powerful as possible while remaining under mortal radar. Naturally, members with greater tenure are favored over those with less, putting mortal spooks at a serious disadvantage when it comes to climbing the Camarilla ladder. Generally, the Camarilla sinks its claws into the institutions of mortal society to maintain the power and secrecy its leaders crave.
An intricate network of personal obligations, charters, and covenants dating back millennia binds together a sprawling, baroque edifice that extends in patchwork fashion across the world. The Camarilla emerged from the decline of the Western Roman Empire when spooks in the former provinces of the West found themselves exposed to threats of a magnitude they hadn’t known for a thousand years. As the Roman state on which they had parasitically depended collapsed, the Kindred of Western Europe banded together for self-defense and in so doing shaped the feudal political structure of Europe for centuries to come. When the Age of Exploration came, the Camarilla followed mortal European explorers and colonists as they conquered and enslaved the rest of the world. Though the sun may have set on the British Empire in the 1960s, the sun still has not risen on the Camarilla.
Naturally, any organization so old, so large, and so hidebound has more than its share of idiosyncratic rules and anachronistic practices. Above the level of the local Prince, the Camarilla’s administrative structure is hopelessly muddled in red tape and obsolete bureaucratic ritual. This baroque mess is viewed, more or less rightly, as a throwback to the Dark Ages that has been dragged kicking and screaming into modernity with the fewest possible concessions made to the realities of life in the Final Nights. Camarilla princes no longer rule openly as dark overlords over hordes of shit-covered peasants, soaring through the night amidst a shrieking swarm of bats in search of virgins to kidnap. Rather, they are chauffeured to meetings of various Boards of Directors in nondescript Lincoln Town Cars and induce mortals to serve them with promises of wealth and subtle magics.
The Camarilla is the wealthiest and most influential among the sects active today, but its ability to stand toe-to-toe with some of the more militarily or mystically powerful sects is limited. Fortunately, the Camarilla has been able to buy some powerful friends to shore up its weak points.
Sabbat
The Sabbat is a proudly paranoid, hyper-militarized millennial movement whose self-appointed purpose is to simultaneously thwart the agendas of Hell and the sleeping Antediluvians. To hear them tell it, they are in fact superheroes with fangs (and claws, magic powers, etc.). However, despite their lofty overall goal of saving the world, as a matter of common practice Sabbat packs on the street usually just get fired up over things, get in fights, and commit acts of petty hooliganism.
The Sabbat has a top-down hierarchy structured as a grim parody of the Catholic Church. The leader of the Sabbat is known as the Antipope, who is advised by the College of Cardinals and elected from their number. Since the executive leader of the Sabbat is elected for life, it is rare for an immortal to accept the nomination; the risk of assassination rises exponentially with the number of decades in office. The Sabbat’s basic unit of organization is the pack, which is led by a Deacon.
The stuffed shirts of the Camarilla dismiss the Sabbat as a dangerous conspiracy of unhinged terrorist thugs in dire need of killing. For its part, the Sabbat views the Camarilla as a corrupt puppet of the Antediluvians; a house of lies ruled by duplicitous elders whose duped childer prance down the primrose path even as they are fattened for the slaughter. Though the Camarilla and Sabbat do not cooperate as a rule, they are not constantly at war at all times or on all fronts. When the cold war flares up, low-intensity, localized fighting is the name of the game. The largest Camarilla-Sabbat battle on record took place in 1871 in Chicago, which exhausted both sides for a century and necessitated that the Great Chicago Fire be started to cover up the evidence. Since then, the Camarilla has changed tactics, now preferring to manipulate mortal institutions and pawns rather than meet the Sabbat in combat.
The Sabbat damage control people (who melodramatically call themselves the “Lords of Shadow”) do their best to keep their brethren’s activities on the QT, but their efforts are naturally not as effective as some of the other sects’. The Sabbat benefits from a kind of supernatural herd immunity, as other sects will (resentfully) help to cover up major Masquerade breaches out of enlightened self-interest - though it always costs at least one Lord of Shadow at least one favor.
The Worlds
The ordinary everyday physical world we are familiar with is teeming with spooks of various kinds. There are many pockets of strange and unsettling phenomena hiding in the shadows of our world, but ultimately there is only one world capable of supporting human (and most post-human) life. That world is in big trouble.
The Spirit Wilds
Most of the physical world obeys normal physical laws whenever explicitly supernatural nonsense isn’t messing with the status quo. This is due to the steady decline of the Great Spirits who once claimed vast swathes of Earth as their demesnes. In the old days, the Great Spirits decided natural law in much of the world and mundanes just had to deal with it, but the march of progress has progressively wiped out the race of the Great Spirits, leaving only a few atavisms lurking in the undesirable and uncivilized places of the world. These remaining throwbacks still have power within their limited areas, but nothing like the godlike might of millennia past. Tribes of the Changing Breeds, whose souls and powers are inextricably linked to those of the Great Spirits, zealously protect those which remain. Sometimes mere mortals - usually children - wander into these places and are not ripped to shreds by werecreatures, but meet with the stranger fate of being adopted by the spirits as their own.
The Underworld
Such pockets of supernatural power on Earth are not the only magical places in creation. The mundane world has a metaphysical echo called the Underworld, separated from the waking world by a magical barrier called the Shroud. Its form is defined by the sapient beings of Earth’s memories of places and things which no longer exist. The Underworld is in a state of constant decay as memories fade, the living pass on, and the things that are gone are forgotten completely. Places in the Underworld that are unformed by living memories are roiling, protean wastes with as much in common with a mortal body of water as with a mortal land; collectively, this unformed expanse of the Underworld is called the Tempest. Fittingly, the echoes of dead people inhabit the Underworld as wraiths. A wraith can only persist as long as the person it once was is remembered in the world of mortals; wraiths gradually lose strength and identity as the earthly imprints of their former lives are erased by the passage of time. In itself, the Underworld is inhospitable and depressing, and even the wraiths would generally prefer to hang out on Earth and peep on the living as intangible phantasms than stay there.
The Hells
To make things worse, the Underworld contains awful places that as far as anyone can tell never existed on Earth. Tucked into the darkest corners of the Shadowlands, deep in the Tempest, burning citadels imprison timeless, implacable evils that were never human. These places are Hells, and each is surrounded by a vast, ever-shifting maze made of the very shadow-stuff of the Underworld called a Labyrinth. Those rare wraiths who wander into a Labyrinth and come back out generally emerge as insane, violent monster ghosts known as Spectres. No one is sure just how many of these cosmic supermax facilities exist or exactly what the deal is with the beings they restrain, but it is unanimously agreed that these beings are sufficiently evil as to be worthy of the name “Demon.”
The End of the World
There are signs all around that the world is on the verge of ending. An ominous Red Star shines in the sky, currently visible only by supernatural means but growing brighter by the night. A great storm in the far reaches of the Tempest draws near to the cities of the Underworld, lashing the quiescent dead into a desperate frenzy to escape into the solid world. The Great Spirits are just about extinct; those that persist are sickly, fading, and under attack. It is said that when the last of them is snuffed out, the Red Star will blaze in the sky night and day for all to see, the Great Maelstrom will break in the Underworld to free all the inmates of all the Hells, and the eldest among the Vampires will arise to consume the world - Kindred and kine alike.
Most among the Kindred, especially those with a vested interest in the status quo, refuse to acknowledge the doom coming for them; the official position of the most conservative social clubs is that nothing is wrong, there is no such thing as an Antediluvian, and everyone should just keep calm and carry on. Many among the Kindred are preparing to fight the apocalypse when it comes for them, but know their numbers are too small and powers too weak for the fight to be anything but hopeless. Some Kindred serve the dreaming Antediluvians (or even worse beings) in hopes of buying immunity to the horrors to come; others have given in to nihilism and are determined to spend their last nights in debauched revelry. These truly are the Final Nights.
THE FACE IN THE MIRROR
Ordinary humans are made of two pieces: a body and a soul. When a normal human dies in mundane circumstances, the trauma of death ejects its soul into the Underworld, where it becomes a Wraith. Wraiths persist until the humans they once were are forgotten or they are annihilated in some way.
Other spirits exist in the world - besides the rare and godlike Great Spirits, there are lesser intelligent spirits that exist in certain special places or are associated with specific special objects or circumstances. Not everything has a spirit, and the vast majority of the spirits that exist are tiny, weak, non-sentient, and part of a particular place, creature, or object.
The prisoners of the Hells are generically referred to as Demons, and though they themselves cannot escape the Labyrinth, splinters of their power can be carried out of Hell under the right circumstances. A Wraith that wanders into the Labyrinth might come back out as a tormented monster among ghosts called a Spectre.
Other than these mundanes and never-human entities, there are a few distinct genera of post-human and near-human monsters stalking the Final Nights that are suitable for play. Within each genus, there are usually a few different species to choose from.
Vampires - You know what they are.
Ventrue - cold, distant nobles that specialize in breaking mortal will
Daeva - slavers of mortal passions, enchanters and tempters
Nosferatu - gutter-dwelling freaks hiding in urban shadows
Gangrel - bestial monsters tearing people limb from limb on lonely roadsides
Changing Breeds - You know what these are too.
TBA
Mages - Anyone can say some words and wave their hands around, but magic doesn’t work for anyone not already magical in nature. Other than being born to the Changing Breeds or Embraced by a Vampire, there are several different ways for a mortal to gain a mystic nature. None of them are pleasant.
Medium - Inviting strange wraiths to share your living soul tends to make you go crazy, but packing ghosts into your mortal body like an Indian train car gives them a chance to experience the pleasures of life anew and gives you access to a bunch of freaky death magic. It’s win-win, sort of.
Nephandus - You made a deal with one of the foul prisoners of Hell to carry an ember of the eternal fire in your soul. This granted you magical power, but doomed you to return to Hell upon your death and also gave you an evil voice in your head that whispers tantalizingly to your worst impulses. Thus far, no one who has gone to Hell has come back sane (and coming back is rare enough in the first place), so most of the Fallen are hustling as hard as they can to avoid the fate they brought on themselves by any means possible.
Changeling - Think of Sen from “Princess Mononoke” or Chihiro from “Spirited Away,” but forget the happy ending. Those who have eaten the food of the Fae and are weird and broken, but gain power over nature, lesser spirits, and dreams.
Jiangshi - You’re dead, but you don’t let that stop you. Your wraith learned the secret of possessing a corpse in such a way that it can be operated like a smelly flesh puppet. Your body might not have been yours to begin with, but it’s yours now - and if something obliterates it or it gets too rotten to be useful, you can just pick up a fresh one from the morgue. You can even mix-and-match parts if need be. No matter how many times you are cremated or run through a wood chipper, you can return. That is, if your soul wasn’t shredded by whatever destroyed your body.
(UN)LIFE AMONG THE KINDRED
The Masquerade
A supernatural individual can have enough power to singlehandedly depopulate a small country. However, these terrifying individuals are the exception, not the rule (and all such titanically powerful monsters that still exist are presently dormant). Your average spook is tougher, stronger, and faster than any mortal, but even one who laughs off machine gun fire probably doesn’t find napalm very funny - and if not napalm, there are a million other ways to be killed waiting in the wings for a spook that presses his luck. The balance of power has been tipping away from the Kindred since the invention of gunpowder, so the modern societies of the night have more or less formed around the idea that supernaturals should remain hidden from mortal eyes for their own safety. A few groups of spooks attempted to keep doing things the old way, and they are no longer with us. Everyone left these days takes care not to rock the boat.
Social Clubs
The various species of supernatural residents on Earth are collectively known as the “Kindred” and are generally on speaking terms. Like any mortal extended family, some branches of the Kindred are at odds with one another, but for the most part members of different clades are willing to attend the same social events without every get-together turning into a race riot. Usually the shooting only starts when Kindred belonging to opposing social clubs run into each other.
The Pyramid Scheme
As one ascends the social hierarchy, Kindred come to associate with each other entirely for selfish reasons, caring about their high status in various social clubs only insofar as it helps them to attain their personal objectives. The oldest and strongest among those who are active may not hold even nominal membership in a recognized sect or cult, instead declaring their allegiance to some informal association of like-minded ancients, an older and fouler creature, or themselves only. Some especially audacious elders maintain senior roles in multiple sects that are nominally blood enemies, concealing this from their zealous subordinates by maintaining elaborate schemes of alternate identities or simply by keeping sufficient distance to avoid scrutiny.
As Kindred get older and wiser (and more jaded and depraved), they tend to lose interest in the petty ideological differences of sects and cults, in favor of other motivations that come to the fore with age. Some elders become enslaved to even more ancient Kindred (some are so enthralled all along, more’s the pity), others to their own lust for power. It is next to impossible to discern the true loyalties or motives of an experienced player of the Endless Game; their every word, deed, and association is buried in misdirection, deception, and manipulation.
SECTS
Camarilla
The Camarilla is the old money yacht club of the supernatural world. Their main goal as an organization is to assist their favored members in growing as old and powerful as possible while remaining under mortal radar. Naturally, members with greater tenure are favored over those with less, putting mortal spooks at a serious disadvantage when it comes to climbing the Camarilla ladder. Generally, the Camarilla sinks its claws into the institutions of mortal society to maintain the power and secrecy its leaders crave.
An intricate network of personal obligations, charters, and covenants dating back millennia binds together a sprawling, baroque edifice that extends in patchwork fashion across the world. The Camarilla emerged from the decline of the Western Roman Empire when spooks in the former provinces of the West found themselves exposed to threats of a magnitude they hadn’t known for a thousand years. As the Roman state on which they had parasitically depended collapsed, the Kindred of Western Europe banded together for self-defense and in so doing shaped the feudal political structure of Europe for centuries to come. When the Age of Exploration came, the Camarilla followed mortal European explorers and colonists as they conquered and enslaved the rest of the world. Though the sun may have set on the British Empire in the 1960s, the sun still has not risen on the Camarilla.
Naturally, any organization so old, so large, and so hidebound has more than its share of idiosyncratic rules and anachronistic practices. Above the level of the local Prince, the Camarilla’s administrative structure is hopelessly muddled in red tape and obsolete bureaucratic ritual. This baroque mess is viewed, more or less rightly, as a throwback to the Dark Ages that has been dragged kicking and screaming into modernity with the fewest possible concessions made to the realities of life in the Final Nights. Camarilla princes no longer rule openly as dark overlords over hordes of shit-covered peasants, soaring through the night amidst a shrieking swarm of bats in search of virgins to kidnap. Rather, they are chauffeured to meetings of various Boards of Directors in nondescript Lincoln Town Cars and induce mortals to serve them with promises of wealth and subtle magics.
The Camarilla is the wealthiest and most influential among the sects active today, but its ability to stand toe-to-toe with some of the more militarily or mystically powerful sects is limited. Fortunately, the Camarilla has been able to buy some powerful friends to shore up its weak points.
Sabbat
The Sabbat is a proudly paranoid, hyper-militarized millennial movement whose self-appointed purpose is to simultaneously thwart the agendas of Hell and the sleeping Antediluvians. To hear them tell it, they are in fact superheroes with fangs (and claws, magic powers, etc.). However, despite their lofty overall goal of saving the world, as a matter of common practice Sabbat packs on the street usually just get fired up over things, get in fights, and commit acts of petty hooliganism.
The Sabbat has a top-down hierarchy structured as a grim parody of the Catholic Church. The leader of the Sabbat is known as the Antipope, who is advised by the College of Cardinals and elected from their number. Since the executive leader of the Sabbat is elected for life, it is rare for an immortal to accept the nomination; the risk of assassination rises exponentially with the number of decades in office. The Sabbat’s basic unit of organization is the pack, which is led by a Deacon.
The stuffed shirts of the Camarilla dismiss the Sabbat as a dangerous conspiracy of unhinged terrorist thugs in dire need of killing. For its part, the Sabbat views the Camarilla as a corrupt puppet of the Antediluvians; a house of lies ruled by duplicitous elders whose duped childer prance down the primrose path even as they are fattened for the slaughter. Though the Camarilla and Sabbat do not cooperate as a rule, they are not constantly at war at all times or on all fronts. When the cold war flares up, low-intensity, localized fighting is the name of the game. The largest Camarilla-Sabbat battle on record took place in 1871 in Chicago, which exhausted both sides for a century and necessitated that the Great Chicago Fire be started to cover up the evidence. Since then, the Camarilla has changed tactics, now preferring to manipulate mortal institutions and pawns rather than meet the Sabbat in combat.
The Sabbat damage control people (who melodramatically call themselves the “Lords of Shadow”) do their best to keep their brethren’s activities on the QT, but their efforts are naturally not as effective as some of the other sects’. The Sabbat benefits from a kind of supernatural herd immunity, as other sects will (resentfully) help to cover up major Masquerade breaches out of enlightened self-interest - though it always costs at least one Lord of Shadow at least one favor.
Last edited by Mord on Mon Nov 16, 2015 4:52 am, edited 1 time in total.
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TheFlatline
- Prince
- Posts: 2606
- Joined: Fri Apr 30, 2010 11:43 pm
Serious question. Is the idea of the End Nights/Apocalypse/whatever even necessary?
Thematically in Werewolf it was part of the basic premise to set up the sense of futility. That's fine. But it doesn't even have to be imminent. It just has to be "on it's way" and the werewolves have reached the tipping point where they're pretty sure they can't win any more because they fucked up too hard.
I never played in a vampire game that seriously got into the End Nights crap. Even though like every fucking CRPG Vampire game humped it pretty hard. Then again that's metaplot which usually was a pile of steaming shit.
Thematically in Werewolf it was part of the basic premise to set up the sense of futility. That's fine. But it doesn't even have to be imminent. It just has to be "on it's way" and the werewolves have reached the tipping point where they're pretty sure they can't win any more because they fucked up too hard.
I never played in a vampire game that seriously got into the End Nights crap. Even though like every fucking CRPG Vampire game humped it pretty hard. Then again that's metaplot which usually was a pile of steaming shit.
In concept, I suppose I'm fine with it, at least in the "We fucked up, we can't win, we're all going to due" sense as something the characters believe in game, but the fact that the players were literally never supposed to really win, as regards the metaplot, the "standing on a turd in a toilet, and someone just flushed" setup, as a friend tells me The Dot actually put it himself, was offensive.
Cuz apparently I gotta break this down for you dense motherfuckers- I'm trans feminine nonbinary. My pronouns are they/them.
Winnah wrote:No, No. 'Prak' is actually a Thri Kreen impersonating a human and roleplaying himself as a D&D character. All hail our hidden insect overlords.
FrankTrollman wrote:In Soviet Russia, cosmic horror is the default state.
You should gain sanity for finding out that the problems of a region are because there are fucking monsters there.
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Username17
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The original purpose of the end of nights shit was to go all Highlander/Queen of the Damned. By putting in a big shake up in the near future where elder evils awaken and lots of heads roll, you create a sense of urgency and a built-in conflict. Gehenna was not handled well at any point of the World of Darkness, but the original concept had legs. Highlander and Queen of the Damned are genre classics and the story archetype is an important one for story generating games about immortals to be able to emulate.TheFlatline wrote:Serious question. Is the idea of the End Nights/Apocalypse/whatever even necessary?
Thematically in Werewolf it was part of the basic premise to set up the sense of futility. That's fine. But it doesn't even have to be imminent. It just has to be "on it's way" and the werewolves have reached the tipping point where they're pretty sure they can't win any more because they fucked up too hard.
I never played in a vampire game that seriously got into the End Nights crap. Even though like every fucking CRPG Vampire game humped it pretty hard. Then again that's metaplot which usually was a pile of steaming shit.
The big issue I have with this Gehenna deal is that they completely lost sight of the way those stories actually work in order to go off and spuge about their stupid level 10 vampire powers and shit. In the actual source material, Akasha and The Kurgan get their respective heads chopped off and the protagonist immortals get away with their lives.
The ancient evils waking up to run around eating younger vampires is awesome. But the ancient evils are antagonists you're supposed to be able to beat. Having them go all Akira on things is firstly "fucking stupid" and secondly completely fails to address the stories it's supposed to handle. World of Darkness fell back on unbeatable rule breaking NPCs way too often. The entire point of ancient cannibal villains like Akasha and The Kurgan is that they are hard to beat but actually factually do lose.
-Username17
I blame Justin Achilli. And, while you can say that about almost anything related to Vampire once he got involved with it, I'm actually kind of serious this time.
See, early on, Vampire actually did expect you to beat the elder evils. Among the very earliest Vampire material published were adventures about hunting down and diablerizing 4th-generation vampires -- that was just something you were supposed to do. Let's not forget, after all, that one of the earliest expansions to Vampire introduced a sect of invisible vampire Hashashin. This was, initially, a game about straight-up over the top blood-sucking awesomeness.
As the game got older, though -- and especially once Achilli became line developer -- it started to get away from that. Methuselahs started to become all-powerful killing machines instead of David Lo Pan -- by the time the line wrapped up they'd started writing 4th generations with stats of "doesn't matter, kills you automatically," and probably in another few years 5th generations would have gotten the same treatment. Writers disparaged the action-oriented style of play as "Vampions" -- superheroes with fangs. Vampire became more about enduring the horrible agony of eternity as a super hot immortal who can read minds and change shape -- that's sarcasm -- than about being tormented Elric of Melnibone style antiheroes. There's a long rant in the Revised Storyteller's Guide on just this subject, which is exactly what you would probably envision if someone told you the world's most pretentious Vampire player had penned a guide to how the game should be played.
After all, vampires were dudes who had inherited the curse of a guy who pissed off God, and those guys obviously could not ever really hope to achieve genuine heroism or even any real level of awesomeness. Everybody was fucked, and player characters were especially fucked. So Tremere could not be permitted to have actually triumphed over Saulot -- he just got taken over by his spirit so we could get a Vampire Jesus Christ figure in the Gehenna book. The Tzimisce could not be permitted to have successfully rebelled against their father figure -- it had to have all been part of his master plan to eat them from the inside out. Golconda had to be a myth. The Inconnu had to be just as fucked as everyone else.
In short: it became a lot more explicitly Christian. And I am hard pressed to think of a game where "you're all fucked because you don't have enough Jesus" would improve things.
See, early on, Vampire actually did expect you to beat the elder evils. Among the very earliest Vampire material published were adventures about hunting down and diablerizing 4th-generation vampires -- that was just something you were supposed to do. Let's not forget, after all, that one of the earliest expansions to Vampire introduced a sect of invisible vampire Hashashin. This was, initially, a game about straight-up over the top blood-sucking awesomeness.
As the game got older, though -- and especially once Achilli became line developer -- it started to get away from that. Methuselahs started to become all-powerful killing machines instead of David Lo Pan -- by the time the line wrapped up they'd started writing 4th generations with stats of "doesn't matter, kills you automatically," and probably in another few years 5th generations would have gotten the same treatment. Writers disparaged the action-oriented style of play as "Vampions" -- superheroes with fangs. Vampire became more about enduring the horrible agony of eternity as a super hot immortal who can read minds and change shape -- that's sarcasm -- than about being tormented Elric of Melnibone style antiheroes. There's a long rant in the Revised Storyteller's Guide on just this subject, which is exactly what you would probably envision if someone told you the world's most pretentious Vampire player had penned a guide to how the game should be played.
After all, vampires were dudes who had inherited the curse of a guy who pissed off God, and those guys obviously could not ever really hope to achieve genuine heroism or even any real level of awesomeness. Everybody was fucked, and player characters were especially fucked. So Tremere could not be permitted to have actually triumphed over Saulot -- he just got taken over by his spirit so we could get a Vampire Jesus Christ figure in the Gehenna book. The Tzimisce could not be permitted to have successfully rebelled against their father figure -- it had to have all been part of his master plan to eat them from the inside out. Golconda had to be a myth. The Inconnu had to be just as fucked as everyone else.
In short: it became a lot more explicitly Christian. And I am hard pressed to think of a game where "you're all fucked because you don't have enough Jesus" would improve things.
TheFlatline wrote:This is like arguing that blowjobs have to be terrible, pain-inflicting endeavors so that when you get a chick who *doesn't* draw blood everyone can high-five and feel good about it.
To be fair, the reason that people buy Vampire: The Masquerade books wasn't to tell compelling vampire adventure stories. It was to bang semi-rebellious Christian chicks who thought that wearing black makeup and pretending to be a vampire edgiest thing ever.talozin wrote:I blame Justin Achilli. And, while you can say that about almost anything related to Vampire once he got involved with it, I'm actually kind of serious this time.
See, early on, Vampire actually did expect you to beat the elder evils. Among the very earliest Vampire material published were adventures about hunting down and diablerizing 4th-generation vampires -- that was just something you were supposed to do. Let's not forget, after all, that one of the earliest expansions to Vampire introduced a sect of invisible vampire Hashashin. This was, initially, a game about straight-up over the top blood-sucking awesomeness.
As the game got older, though -- and especially once Achilli became line developer -- it started to get away from that. Methuselahs started to become all-powerful killing machines instead of David Lo Pan -- by the time the line wrapped up they'd started writing 4th generations with stats of "doesn't matter, kills you automatically," and probably in another few years 5th generations would have gotten the same treatment. Writers disparaged the action-oriented style of play as "Vampions" -- superheroes with fangs. Vampire became more about enduring the horrible agony of eternity as a super hot immortal who can read minds and change shape -- that's sarcasm -- than about being tormented Elric of Melnibone style antiheroes. There's a long rant in the Revised Storyteller's Guide on just this subject, which is exactly what you would probably envision if someone told you the world's most pretentious Vampire player had penned a guide to how the game should be played.
After all, vampires were dudes who had inherited the curse of a guy who pissed off God, and those guys obviously could not ever really hope to achieve genuine heroism or even any real level of awesomeness. Everybody was fucked, and player characters were especially fucked. So Tremere could not be permitted to have actually triumphed over Saulot -- he just got taken over by his spirit so we could get a Vampire Jesus Christ figure in the Gehenna book. The Tzimisce could not be permitted to have successfully rebelled against their father figure -- it had to have all been part of his master plan to eat them from the inside out. Golconda had to be a myth. The Inconnu had to be just as fucked as everyone else.
In short: it became a lot more explicitly Christian. And I am hard pressed to think of a game where "you're all fucked because you don't have enough Jesus" would improve things.
The brooding and angst served this purpose much better than an action-oriented style ever could.
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Omegonthesane
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The two really aren't mutually exclusive, you have brooding and wangst at 13th gen and then you brood and wangst about the evils that you've been forced to commit to survive and make it to 9th or 8th and then if you want to keep playing shit gets real, the Antediluvians get up, and you are forced to Alucard in between bouts of brooding and angsting.hyzmarca wrote:To be fair, the reason that people buy Vampire: The Masquerade books wasn't to tell compelling vampire adventure stories. It was to bang semi-rebellious Christian chicks who thought that wearing black makeup and pretending to be a vampire edgiest thing ever.talozin wrote:I blame Justin Achilli. And, while you can say that about almost anything related to Vampire once he got involved with it, I'm actually kind of serious this time.
See, early on, Vampire actually did expect you to beat the elder evils. Among the very earliest Vampire material published were adventures about hunting down and diablerizing 4th-generation vampires -- that was just something you were supposed to do. Let's not forget, after all, that one of the earliest expansions to Vampire introduced a sect of invisible vampire Hashashin. This was, initially, a game about straight-up over the top blood-sucking awesomeness.
As the game got older, though -- and especially once Achilli became line developer -- it started to get away from that. Methuselahs started to become all-powerful killing machines instead of David Lo Pan -- by the time the line wrapped up they'd started writing 4th generations with stats of "doesn't matter, kills you automatically," and probably in another few years 5th generations would have gotten the same treatment. Writers disparaged the action-oriented style of play as "Vampions" -- superheroes with fangs. Vampire became more about enduring the horrible agony of eternity as a super hot immortal who can read minds and change shape -- that's sarcasm -- than about being tormented Elric of Melnibone style antiheroes. There's a long rant in the Revised Storyteller's Guide on just this subject, which is exactly what you would probably envision if someone told you the world's most pretentious Vampire player had penned a guide to how the game should be played.
After all, vampires were dudes who had inherited the curse of a guy who pissed off God, and those guys obviously could not ever really hope to achieve genuine heroism or even any real level of awesomeness. Everybody was fucked, and player characters were especially fucked. So Tremere could not be permitted to have actually triumphed over Saulot -- he just got taken over by his spirit so we could get a Vampire Jesus Christ figure in the Gehenna book. The Tzimisce could not be permitted to have successfully rebelled against their father figure -- it had to have all been part of his master plan to eat them from the inside out. Golconda had to be a myth. The Inconnu had to be just as fucked as everyone else.
In short: it became a lot more explicitly Christian. And I am hard pressed to think of a game where "you're all fucked because you don't have enough Jesus" would improve things.
The brooding and angst served this purpose much better than an action-oriented style ever could.
Kaelik wrote:Because powerful men get away with terrible shit, and even the public domain ones get ignored, and then, when the floodgates open, it turns out there was a goddam flood behind it.
Zak S, Zak Smith, Dndwithpornstars, Zak Sabbath, Justin Bieber, shitmuffin
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Occluded Sun
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Knowing the relative sales numbers of different editions of Vampire might help. But as some of the above comments suggest, the reasons people played the game didn't necessarily have anything to do with the game's themes. To a degree, I think the themes followed the playerbase's needs more than they did any standards of good design - or good taste, for that matter.
If playing up the angst and woobieism made it easier to get into other players' pants, people did that, and very likely the game followed.
In any case, (relatively) modern vampire stories are about two things: sexuality, and being damned. Those are what Dracula is all about.
If playing up the angst and woobieism made it easier to get into other players' pants, people did that, and very likely the game followed.
In any case, (relatively) modern vampire stories are about two things: sexuality, and being damned. Those are what Dracula is all about.
Standing on a turd in the toilet is okay, if you're the one doing the flushing.Prak wrote:In concept, I suppose I'm fine with it, at least in the "We fucked up, we can't win, we're all going to due" sense as something the characters believe in game, but the fact that the players were literally never supposed to really win, as regards the metaplot, the "standing on a turd in a toilet, and someone just flushed" setup, as a friend tells me The Dot actually put it himself, was offensive.
It's one of the things that makes the super-evil antagonist factions viable as PCs.
The Nephandi want to destroy the world? That sounds bad, but then you start thinking about how badly the world sucks and, you know what, they're absolutely right. Everyone would be better off if they were thrown into Oblivion.
All of the unplayably malicious factions dedicated to destroying the world suddenly become the good guys if you look at it that way.
That doesn't really help Vampire, but it's very useful in Mage, Werewolf, and Wraith.
It also has the simple advantage that, since the world is going to end, your characters who are trying to end the world can actually do important stuff and win.
Last edited by hyzmarca on Thu Aug 17, 2017 11:35 pm, edited 2 times in total.
Actually, a Paranoia hack about playing a Bible Age shit farmer, where the computer is replaced with the Old Testament God, would be hilarious.talozin wrote:... I am hard pressed to think of a game where "you're all fucked because you don't have enough Jesus" would improve things.
Instead of a six pack of clones, you have six siblings, referred to your six pack of begats.
Cuz apparently I gotta break this down for you dense motherfuckers- I'm trans feminine nonbinary. My pronouns are they/them.
Winnah wrote:No, No. 'Prak' is actually a Thri Kreen impersonating a human and roleplaying himself as a D&D character. All hail our hidden insect overlords.
FrankTrollman wrote:In Soviet Russia, cosmic horror is the default state.
You should gain sanity for finding out that the problems of a region are because there are fucking monsters there.
I'd consider making a game called Apostles.
The basic isea is that it's thirty-something AD. Jesus just died on the cross. And the PCs are members of the 13 Apostles (yes, Judas is playable).
Their job is to survive being hunted by the Romans, and to spread Christianity.
To accomplish this, Jesus has given them superpowers.
Play style is less dirt farmer and more over-the-top action. The Apostles run around performing absurd feats. Things explode for no reason. Everything is incredibly stylish. Sunglasses exist anachronistically, because the Grace of God makes you look cool.
The basic isea is that it's thirty-something AD. Jesus just died on the cross. And the PCs are members of the 13 Apostles (yes, Judas is playable).
Their job is to survive being hunted by the Romans, and to spread Christianity.
To accomplish this, Jesus has given them superpowers.
Play style is less dirt farmer and more over-the-top action. The Apostles run around performing absurd feats. Things explode for no reason. Everything is incredibly stylish. Sunglasses exist anachronistically, because the Grace of God makes you look cool.
Last edited by hyzmarca on Wed Feb 24, 2016 6:45 pm, edited 1 time in total.
Dibs on Simon Peter with Kamina glassses
Cuz apparently I gotta break this down for you dense motherfuckers- I'm trans feminine nonbinary. My pronouns are they/them.
Winnah wrote:No, No. 'Prak' is actually a Thri Kreen impersonating a human and roleplaying himself as a D&D character. All hail our hidden insect overlords.
FrankTrollman wrote:In Soviet Russia, cosmic horror is the default state.
You should gain sanity for finding out that the problems of a region are because there are fucking monsters there.
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Occluded Sun
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Why actually have them be Apostles? The specific religious stuff can only drag the game down. ('Dogs in the Vineyard' works only because the game might as well be totally fantasy in most people's minds, instead of only significantly fantasy.)
You might as well make a Blues Brothers game. Sunglasses come standard, and they're on a mission from God.
You might as well make a Blues Brothers game. Sunglasses come standard, and they're on a mission from God.
"Most men are of no more use in their lives but as machines for turning food into excrement." - Leonardo di ser Piero da Vinci
There are two reasons for a story about vampires to take place in the last days before some horrific world-ending threat emerges:
1) If we're all immortal and living in a crapsack world of gray-on-black morality with no special interest in anything but power, why don't we all just deposit $5 into a bank account, go into torpor, and wake up in the year 3000 when we're all worth billions? The joke about vampires killing werewolves by going and reading a book for 50 years is apt; there are really very few threats that can't be outlived or just ignored, since all you need is blood. Because the world is at real risk of ending, though, everything you do suddenly becomes time-sensitive, and there are things you might be incentivized to do that wouldn't otherwise make sense for an immortal to bother with. This segues nicely into the next point.
2) The end of days gives even mundane things a huge level of importance that they wouldn't otherwise deserve. This is why people in the world are constantly praying for somebody to nuke Israel so that we can usher in the actual Biblical Apocalypse. There might not be any objective difference from the players' perspective between a pack of werewolves getting killed by some monster after a glorious battle and that same pack being killed by that same monster after an equally glorious battle that happens to take place while their entire race is caught up in doing that exact same thing nearby, but the latter feels more epic.
Of course, if the end literally is just "Antediluvians fall, everyone dies" that's fucking crap. All of the Gehenna scenarios were ass for that exact reason. Blade didn't end with the vampire ghosts exterminating all human life, it ended with Wesley Snipes blowing up the bad guy like a total badass. And then there were sequels, which you can have if all your characters aren't dead.
1) If we're all immortal and living in a crapsack world of gray-on-black morality with no special interest in anything but power, why don't we all just deposit $5 into a bank account, go into torpor, and wake up in the year 3000 when we're all worth billions? The joke about vampires killing werewolves by going and reading a book for 50 years is apt; there are really very few threats that can't be outlived or just ignored, since all you need is blood. Because the world is at real risk of ending, though, everything you do suddenly becomes time-sensitive, and there are things you might be incentivized to do that wouldn't otherwise make sense for an immortal to bother with. This segues nicely into the next point.
2) The end of days gives even mundane things a huge level of importance that they wouldn't otherwise deserve. This is why people in the world are constantly praying for somebody to nuke Israel so that we can usher in the actual Biblical Apocalypse. There might not be any objective difference from the players' perspective between a pack of werewolves getting killed by some monster after a glorious battle and that same pack being killed by that same monster after an equally glorious battle that happens to take place while their entire race is caught up in doing that exact same thing nearby, but the latter feels more epic.
Of course, if the end literally is just "Antediluvians fall, everyone dies" that's fucking crap. All of the Gehenna scenarios were ass for that exact reason. Blade didn't end with the vampire ghosts exterminating all human life, it ended with Wesley Snipes blowing up the bad guy like a total badass. And then there were sequels, which you can have if all your characters aren't dead.
Last edited by Mord on Wed Nov 18, 2015 2:07 am, edited 1 time in total.
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TheFlatline
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Yet my question links back to not the intent, which I sort of understand, but how the game actually ended up being played. And Gehenna games were rare and generally avoided in my experience. Maybe I'm wrong though.Mord wrote:There are two reasons for a story about vampires to take place in the last days before some horrific world-ending threat emerges:
1) If we're all immortal and living in a crapsack world of gray-on-black morality with no special interest in anything but power, why don't we all just deposit $5 into a bank account, go into torpor, and wake up in the year 3000 when we're all worth billions? The joke about vampires killing werewolves by going and reading a book for 50 years is apt; there are really very few threats that can't be outlived or just ignored, since all you need is blood. Because the world is at real risk of ending, though, everything you do suddenly becomes time-sensitive, and there are things you might be incentivized to do that wouldn't otherwise make sense for an immortal to bother with. This segues nicely into the next point.
2) The end of days gives even mundane things a huge level of importance that they wouldn't otherwise deserve. This is why people in the world are constantly praying for somebody to nuke Israel so that we can usher in the actual Biblical Apocalypse. There might not be any objective difference from the players' perspective between a pack of werewolves getting killed by some monster after a glorious battle and that same pack being killed by that same monster after an equally glorious battle that happens to take place while their entire race is caught up in doing that exact same thing nearby, but the latter feels more epic.
Of course, if the end literally is just "Antediluvians fall, everyone dies" that's fucking crap. All of the Gehenna scenarios were ass for that exact reason. Blade didn't end with the vampire ghosts exterminating all human life, it ended with Wesley Snipes blowing up the bad guy like a total badass. And then there were sequels, which you can have if all your characters aren't dead.
Doom cults and the impending end of the world absolutely can have a place inside a game about vampires, but I don't know if it should be front and center, especially when the whole mood of the game is supposed to be Ann Rice levels of brooding on candle flames and being morose over you killing a human inadvertantly. It's a big total mismatch.
As for your first point, I actually like how nWOD addressed it. You get more powerful as a vampire by staying awake. Going into torpor is not a generally desirable thing.
And sure, you could sit in your house for the next 500 years reading and accumulating a fortune, but you still sort of have the brain and mind of a human, and let's face it, that kind of isolation is depressing and self-destructive for most people. Look at isolation studies and then extrapolate those into centuries. Sooner or later, you need to interact. And interacting with the shrink wrapped packs of steak in the supermarket isn't quite as satisfying as interacting with other people. I imagine same eventually goes for vampires and humans. Sooner or later, they will seek each other out just for forming social connections.
In general, the apocalypse in any setting is the kind of thing better threatened than delivered. Once you beat the [hyped world-ending threat], what's next? The stakes are definitionally lower after that point unless you ass-pull an even bigger evil, but that's lame, so either way a lot of the impetus to keep playing vanishes. It's a double-edged sword in that a bona fide Armageddon can be a compelling story element with a lot of mystique to it but it can never possibly live up to the antici-
Maybe this is my own bias, but I never thought of RPGs as being especially good delivery systems for introspective moping. The opportunities lent by the genre do include gloomy in-character soliloquizing about how awful it is to be a magical badass, but the social elements are pretty much lost if everyone is playing out their own private angst. Plus, it's hard to exercise creativity and teamwork in problem-solving when your greatest foe is ennui.
Much as it annoys the WW devs, people are not likely to go for an extended campaign where they play for trivial stakes and ruminate on how awful immortality is (evidence: VtR sales). When you corral four of your friends together for a night of collaborative storytelling, there had damn well better be a story to tell that requires all of you to have shown up. Intraparty conflict is an option for short stories, but it's stressful and annoying OOC more often than not and isn't suited for an extended chronicle, so there typically has to be some goal that the group collaborates to achieve.
Having an interlocking, ascending web of ever-more-powerful conspiracies guarding the secrets of various in-setting mysteries of awesome power seems to me quite worthy as a way to draw PCs into the game world on its own terms. Especially when the tension is enhanced by the notion of impending total annihilation. The Camarilla-Sabbat war is just a starting point; though the actual execution of the Tal'Mahe'Ra story was retarded, I can appreciate the intentions there as far as them wanting to peel back a layer to show players a deeper stratum of the War of Ages.
Tying the notion of conspiracies in with the pending apocalypse is pretty easy - the Antediluvians don't need to have master plans and minions if they're really powerful enough to just eat everyone. The PCs, by delving into the mysteries and either becoming highly-placed within each conspiracy or blowing them wide open, tangibly affect the Antediluvians' ability to devour everyone when they wake up. The climb up the pyramid from one layer to the next can give as much fodder for an extended campaign as you could want.
The Alexandrian has a post about Night's Black Agents that touches on conspiracies and even specifically a "Vampyramid" structure that I think has the potential for a lot of mileage if applied to the OWoD setting. Obviously going with this puts social intrigue front and center and pushes the personal horror angle to the back burner, but White Wolf already bet on people preferring introspection in Bumblefuck Nowhere to high-stakes cosmopolitan shadow politics and they lost big.
There's nothing intrinsically wrong with the notion of Blood Potency declining with time spent in torpor, but since I'm obviously a fan of the "elder evils will be coming back to eat you any day now" trope and its effect on the overall conceptual space, it isn't something that really works for me in the context of "rehabbing WoD while keeping its spirit."
Much as it annoys the WW devs, people are not likely to go for an extended campaign where they play for trivial stakes and ruminate on how awful immortality is (evidence: VtR sales). When you corral four of your friends together for a night of collaborative storytelling, there had damn well better be a story to tell that requires all of you to have shown up. Intraparty conflict is an option for short stories, but it's stressful and annoying OOC more often than not and isn't suited for an extended chronicle, so there typically has to be some goal that the group collaborates to achieve.
Having an interlocking, ascending web of ever-more-powerful conspiracies guarding the secrets of various in-setting mysteries of awesome power seems to me quite worthy as a way to draw PCs into the game world on its own terms. Especially when the tension is enhanced by the notion of impending total annihilation. The Camarilla-Sabbat war is just a starting point; though the actual execution of the Tal'Mahe'Ra story was retarded, I can appreciate the intentions there as far as them wanting to peel back a layer to show players a deeper stratum of the War of Ages.
Tying the notion of conspiracies in with the pending apocalypse is pretty easy - the Antediluvians don't need to have master plans and minions if they're really powerful enough to just eat everyone. The PCs, by delving into the mysteries and either becoming highly-placed within each conspiracy or blowing them wide open, tangibly affect the Antediluvians' ability to devour everyone when they wake up. The climb up the pyramid from one layer to the next can give as much fodder for an extended campaign as you could want.
The Alexandrian has a post about Night's Black Agents that touches on conspiracies and even specifically a "Vampyramid" structure that I think has the potential for a lot of mileage if applied to the OWoD setting. Obviously going with this puts social intrigue front and center and pushes the personal horror angle to the back burner, but White Wolf already bet on people preferring introspection in Bumblefuck Nowhere to high-stakes cosmopolitan shadow politics and they lost big.
There's nothing intrinsically wrong with the notion of Blood Potency declining with time spent in torpor, but since I'm obviously a fan of the "elder evils will be coming back to eat you any day now" trope and its effect on the overall conceptual space, it isn't something that really works for me in the context of "rehabbing WoD while keeping its spirit."
Proximity to the apocalypse is also useful in that it builds in an excuse for why all sorts of different convoluted plans by immortal factions are coming to a head right now as opposed to being scattered across the next couple of centuries. That is very useful in producing adventure hooks and in presenting a cool and dynamic setting without relying too heavily on convoluted metaplot.
At the same time, it has to avoid being overdone to the point that you impose a laundry list of A, B, and C things that pretty much any party must do in order to save the world (or their city or clan or whatever) like Exalted did.
On a slightly different note, I am sympathetic to the concept that being a vampire should be something profoundly un-fun from an in-character perspective. Playing a vampire should not translate into playing a superhero with an odd aversion to sunlight and a need for exotic nutritional supplements. Playing a vampire should mean playing an inhuman undead monster. I think that is an important part of the spirit of VtM. It shouldn't be overwhelming and it shouldn't prevent the characters from having interesting adventures, but it should be there.
At the same time, it has to avoid being overdone to the point that you impose a laundry list of A, B, and C things that pretty much any party must do in order to save the world (or their city or clan or whatever) like Exalted did.
On a slightly different note, I am sympathetic to the concept that being a vampire should be something profoundly un-fun from an in-character perspective. Playing a vampire should not translate into playing a superhero with an odd aversion to sunlight and a need for exotic nutritional supplements. Playing a vampire should mean playing an inhuman undead monster. I think that is an important part of the spirit of VtM. It shouldn't be overwhelming and it shouldn't prevent the characters from having interesting adventures, but it should be there.
Presumably, after the Apocolypse you get the post-Apocolypse. You know, like Fallout with Vampires. You don't have the same world ending threats, because the world has already ended. Instead you have to rebuild it, and you have to deal with other people who are also trying to rebuild the world in their own image. And a few who are just nihilisticly screwing over everyone's rebuilding efforts.Mord wrote:In general, the apocalypse in any setting is the kind of thing better threatened than delivered. Once you beat the [hyped world-ending threat], what's next? The stakes are definitionally lower after that point unless you ass-pull an even bigger evil, but that's lame, so either way a lot of the impetus to keep playing vanishes. It's a double-edged sword in that a bona fide Armageddon can be a compelling story element with a lot of mystique to it but it can never possibly live up to the antici-
Fallout is a good example. If you're playing a pre-war fallout game (which wouldn't really be fallout) then your enemies are the Enclave and Vault Tech, they're powerful, but they're powerful because they have money and political power, not because vaporize cities with their minds. You can reasonably be expected to punch those guys to death, but they can still press The Button.
Last edited by hyzmarca on Thu Nov 19, 2015 4:53 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Occluded Sun
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I think much of the appeal of vampire games is having superhero-level powers without all of the morality baggage.
Of course, you have different kinds of baggage, but it's at least a change.
Of course, you have different kinds of baggage, but it's at least a change.
"Most men are of no more use in their lives but as machines for turning food into excrement." - Leonardo di ser Piero da Vinci