After Sundown tweaks/house rules

[erik]

I was wanting more ubiquitous access to the 3 worlds so I decided the thing to do was to let every single sorcery give the ability to create a temporary portal to their associated world's deeps or shallows. Notion is that it is more like Dresden Files where going to another world as a shortcut is widely accessible but still not always a good idea.

All sorcery paths give the ability to create a temporary portal (approximately person sized, but 15' tall monster-people could squeeze through) to or from the deep or shallow world associated with the sorcery as a complex action to any character with an Advanced sorcery power, or as a simple action to any character with an Elder sorcery power. Each Sorcery's portal is thematically linked to that school.

The cost of opening this gateway is 3 power points and it can remain open up to 3 rounds per point of potency. Return gates function the same except they can be opened anywhere in the other realms and your return gate appears near a suitable local site.

What I'm seeking inspiration for is how the portals appear for each sorcery, and replacements for Elder powers that become rather obsolete with this change.

It's totally okay that some sorcery paths are going to have easier portal locations than others. I won't lose sleep over trying to balance that. It is more important that they be appropriately thematic and cool. Particularly awesome sites knock a power point off the cost of the portal.

Tough thing with some really awesome sites it that they probably might be having shallows or gates in their own right.

My first notions:

Sorcery	Portal	Ideal portal
Call of the Wild	Animal shelters	Bear cave, Zoo enclosure
Chasing the Storm	In a storm	In a hurricane or tornado producing storm
Coil of Thorns	Circle of plants	Gardens of Versailles
Trail of Tears	Pool of water	Cenotes
Veil of Morpheus	In a bed, hammock or other sleeping implement	The World's Most Comfortable Chair
Descent of Entropy	Sites embodying disrepair and abandonment- condemned housing, junkyards	Ghost towns
Names of the Blasphemies	Monuments, memorials, registries(?)	Vietnam Veteran's Memorial
Progress of Glass	Large mirrors	Observatory mirror
Song of Swarms	Places with lots of insects	Giant insect swarms
Walk of Flame	A recently burned fire's coals (or currently burning)	A forest fire or inferno
Lure of Destruction	Hospitals, Hospices	Electric chair, gallows
Necromancy	Graveyards	Famous graveyards (Al Qarafa, Old Jewish Cemetery in Prague)
Play of Shadows	In pitch black darkness	A cave with no light
Path of Blood	Circle drawn in blood or a pool of blood	A slaughterhouse
Symphony of Silence	Music venues	Famous music venue

Elder Sorcery Paths needing replaced:

Trail of Tears- Astral Projection
Walk of Flame- Scorch the Gateway
Lure of Destruction- Shadow Gate

Dream Step and Howl of the Abyss are not on the chopping block since they're more potent version of a portal and worth keeping around.

So needing new Elders for ToT, WoF, LoD.

[Judging__Eagle]

I've tried to handle it a bit differently as well.

I've decided to treat the 3 supernatural worlds as "quantum universes" linked to our own. As well as all three being separate places that you can die and go to. Depending on how you die, or how your body decomposes.

The Astral is responsible for life on our planet (a la H.P. Lovecraft's "At The Mountains of Madness"; and Pods/Elder Things are the source of life; before being wiped out by their Deep One enemy, and their Priest-Emperor Kthuklhu (based on Lovecraft's affectation that it should sound like "Kloo-lhoo"; but not writing like that). Furthermore, the Astral Dreamwild is not some 'other' universe; but a co-terminus expression of the electromagnetic spectrum. Humans see it when they dream; but also when they see heaven; the fact that on Earth, humans all over the place, from Pre-columbian Mesoamerica, to Norse world-tree (stemming from Babylonian "tree of life" mythos) is a helpful thing in tying it together.

[this is more spitballing on the fly; than a method I'm using]

Traveling to the Astral can occur with just good old fashioned meditation (a Athletics/Animal Ken/Medicine or Expression check); amount of hits achieved determines the cap on hits you'll be able to achieve while Astrally travelling); and you obviously can't bring anything physical with you.

Being 'killed' while Astral is shocking, and deals 3 points of damage to your body when you begin gasping from the psychic feedback (I went with 3 b/c it won't K.O. you, and "3 hits" tends to be the standard amount of hits an AS magic power has).

While having your body killed leaves you as an orcish (or Never Ending Story (book) Atreyu-like) Jalus with green skin, and a penchant for conflict, and killing evil plants, and giant animals
[/ideas]

For the Infernal realm (i.e. the Charred Reflection); everything that has ever reached the temperature of fire (~300*C), has an Infernal analog; not just "epic firestorms".

Since Earth started out as a ball of magma; the children's game "the floor is made of lava" now becomes a myth based on Lost who were captured by Fairies/Demons when they were children; and had to escape through the Infernal wilderness.

Walking through a mirror that is on fire has a chance of sending you though. Maybe. I don't have any ideas off of the top of my head for this.

As for Mictlan (i.e. the Frozen Shadows); it's more along the lines of everything that has hit 0*C; and no light (or starlight, to be specific); as it represents where souls travel to when buried; or if it is preserved, and kept out of daylight for the three days that pass after death (as per AS's rules on when can a ghost show up).

Right now, the only method that I've had for entering Mictlan involved being in a cold dark tunnel; while in the presence of a Tibetan ghost-necromancer's damaged artifact tomb which could make people into ghosts, or resurrect them.

Perhaps... walking backwards into a cold place the sun hasn't touched for a year and a day can let you enter Hades/Mictlan. Tying it back to Orpheus, and his myth.

[Username17]

You're also going to be eliminating a good chunk of treasure and a lot of the world's features. If anyone and everyone can just open a portal to one or more other dimensions, then having a stable portal to the underworld in your back yard isn't a "mixed blessing" and is just kind of fucked. A known Shadow Gate stops being a rating 3 Destiny and starts being a Rating 1 Enemy.

More generally, no Duke of Hell is going to bother fighting over a hellmouth, because they can always just send an Asura to make one for them on a moment's notice. That kind of mobility brings us to Werewolf the Apocalypse levels of wall and border bypassage. This in turn pretty much requires the introduction of Werewolf the Apocalypse levels of "important locations" so that people actually still show up for fights rather than just ignoring everyone by going to the Umbra and not giving a fuck.

So you'd need some sort of arbitrary Feng Shui Sites (like W:tA's Gaia and Wyrm nodes) that everyone is required to care about and fight over.

-Username17

[erik]

Yeah, can't make an omelet without breakin some eggs. I'm okay with making stable portal locations less relevant, it's what I'm aiming for. I should clarify these aren't suggestions for the game proper, just my adaptations. Like that I am also cool with werewolf spawn for non-luminaries.

I didn't specify, but the Gauntlet for Limbo would apply to portals. Forgot to include that.

A permanent gate still has some positive value, just less value so the Destiny rating ought be reduced.

[Username17]

A permanent gate still has some positive value, just less value so the Destiny rating ought be reduced.

What positive value is that? As far as I can tell, all it is good for is having monsters crawl out of it. Anyone who knows that the Dark Reflection even exists can make their own portal whenever need arises.

Having a portal that exists permanently and on its own is pretty much good for nothing except having goblins and ghosts crawl out of it while you aren't paying attention.

-Username17

[Orion]

I suppose it saves you 3 power points. And your minions can use it when you're not around. But yes, the utility is marginal.

[erik]

I suppose it saves you 3 power points. And your minions can use it when you're not around. But yes, the utility is marginal.

And it is open longer.
Depending upon the gate it may be larger allowing you to drive cargo through an even crazier version of Ice Road Truckers. But yeah, marginal utility. The only people who would want one are major power players who benefit from the savings on power points and ancillary benefits.

[Lokathor]

Two very minor houserules I use:

• You don't lose all your PP at the moment of death.
• You can spend a PP to get +2 to resist incoming magic against you.

The first cause that's an obvious bug, the second because otherwise it's actually possible to create characters with absolutely no use for PP at all (Baali, Dryad, Deep Ones, and Mi Go), which seems weird and lame to me.

[Username17]

Two very minor houserules I use:

• You don't lose all your PP at the moment of death.
• You can spend a PP to get +2 to resist incoming magic against you.

The first cause that's an obvious bug, the second because otherwise it's actually possible to create characters with absolutely no use for PP at all (Baali, Dryad, Deep Ones, and Mi Go), which seems weird and lame to me.

If I did a second edition, those would be regular rules. Although there does need to be a way to drain power out of a corpse that you don't want coming back, it doesn't have to happen automatically.

-Username17

[erik]

Although there does need to be a way to drain power out of a corpse that you don't want coming back, it doesn't have to happen automatically.

-Username17

Feed a piece to a Troglodyte?

[Judging__Eagle]

Maybe just cut their heart, brain, or liver, out; or rip out their vial of essence like in the animated version of CyberSix?

It would fit with lots of human mythology and rituals; and it's a visceral thing that makes the action obvious as a one-way action.

A question that I have regarding non-Infernal portals, if creatures can't make them themselves is; what should they be for Astral; and what do/should Shadow Gates look like?

[Lokathor]

Although there does need to be a way to drain power out of a corpse that you don't want coming back, it doesn't have to happen automatically.

Yeah, if you put their head in a jar, or throw their heart in a fire and blow away the ashes, or eat their hart, or if a zombie eats your brain, or something else like that, then they're not coming back via Restoration. All of which are totally in-genre events to have happen.

The Restoration power is the only magic that, "officially", will bring back a person from the dead. It has clear limits written into it that make it mostly only useful against natural disaster types of death and deaths inflicted by non-supernaturals (who won't know that they need to "burn the body"). If an MC decides to add additional ways to bring things back from the dead (such as a Ritual) then they need to keep the same sort of limits as existing magic or have the metagame unravel around them; just like with adding any other kind of magic.

A question that I have regarding non-Infernal portals, if creatures can't make them themselves is; what should they be for Astral; and what do/should Shadow Gates look like?

Says right in the book silly:

Physical gateways, though rare, also exist. They are always circles of something, and one crosses the boundary by entering and then exiting the circle. Circles of mushrooms or trees are fairly common as gateways go, but theoretically it could be a circle of anything. In any case, these gateways only function when the moon is visible.

Portals to The Gloom are called "wells" and each one is filled with darkness. The most effective portals are holes in the ground filled with shadow and water -- literal wells. However in some cases a well will appear which is just a hole filled with water or shadow.

[Prak]

What about salting and burning the body to divest it of PP, to steal another page from Supernatural?

[RadiantPhoenix]

I'd go with these:

• Cut it into pieces with its achilles heel (wood, iron, silver) (smaller pieces for higher potency)
• Immerse it in its kryptonite until it disintegrates (water, alcohol, sunlight) (longer for higher potency)
• Keep it secured and dead for an amount of time based on its potency (ranging from "a day" to "several millenia")

[Username17]

What about salting and burning the body to divest it of PP, to steal another page from Supernatural?

Salted/Seeded/Sanded and then burned seems like a good setup. Doing that could drain all the power points out of the corpse, leaving them unable to respawn unless and until someone cleans them off and pumps power points back in.

I've been doing a lot of drunk reading of nWoD and oWoD in recent weeks, and thinking about what I would have done differently if After Sundown had been nWoD instead of the comical abortion they ended up with.

One of the things that really leaps out at me after forcing myself through several nWoD books is that the number of subtypes that a splat type can support is not static. nWoD shoved everything into the "five subtypes" rule, and there are good solid psychological reasons for that choice - everyone can remember a five entry list and virtually no one can remember a seventeen entry list without chunking and other mnemonic tricks. But different groups of supernaturals simply have different mnemonic load. In nWoD, five clans of vampires is actually rather tight, and caused the game to explode into bloodline bloat that exhausted everyone's capacity for giving a shit - but five lineages of Promethean got really fucking repetitive and five paths of Magery was well beyond the giving a shit mark.

Simply put, I don't think there is room for more flavors of Witch, but there is certainly room for more flavors of Vampire. Penanggalan, Pishtaco, Jiangshi, and Vetala are all distinct enough in concept that they could easily be the flag bearer for an extra Vampire subtype. There is simply a lot of Vampire mythos that people want to do, and cramming it all into three subtypes is rather hard. But if you're a wizard and you know devil magic, you can just be a Baali. If you know different devil magic, you can jolly well just learn different sorceries and be done with it.

Lycanthropes are kind of the odd man out. They can be distinct enough to tell one from another just by having a different animal to turn into. You could fill an entire zodiac with meaningfully different Lycanthrope lines. However, it is also true that every animal you add that is "not wolf" gets less and less iconic and makes the whole thing harder to take seriously. By the time we get to werebadgers and wererays, I think we can agree that we're worse off for their inclusion. Obviously you can fill an entire book with increasingly baroque shapeshifters, each clearly distinct from the others. Heck, that has been done, but there's equally obviously diminishing returns going on there. When people talk about the Corax, a little part of me dies. Where the line should get drawn there is a difficult question. Bear, Boar, and Shark all have a certain amount of gravitas.

Another thing I'd do is call the Mirror Goblins, Spriggans, and Trolls "Goblins", and have actual Fairies who live in the Dreamlands. The other worlds could use a somewhat deeper bestiary, and that implies the addition of extra types of non-playable supernatural. Limbo would get the Hellhounds, Wyverns, and Dragons that make it such a dangerous place to be, and the Dreamlands could pick up pixies and leprechauns and such.

In short: having thought about how nWoD bungled the addition of new content through splats, I've thought that if After Sundown did get a new edition, that additional content would fit in several places.

-Username17

[Maxus]

I was thinking about how Scion's concept is...interesting enough. But it almost by definition doesn't fit into the Vow of Silence/Masquerade, because what use is being an up-and-coming deity if you don't reveal yourself at some point?

[Chamomile]

Personally I'd prefer to see a supplement sort of book that takes a more in-depth look at each of the three worlds. Good excuse to expand the bestiary, add new monster types, and a few rules errata can be slipped in somewhere without having to swap out pdfs that are about 80% identical.

[Whipstitch]

It doesn't help that MCs are already sorely tempted to habitually explain any and all non-standard phenomena with "Shapeshifters Did It" even before you hand them a pokedex featuring were-capybara. Such weresplosions can demystify the setting pretty quickly given that AS is already laboring under the assumption that most of the playable splats were just normal dudes at some point by necessity. So making the decision to render even more creatures as having experienced fairly human viewpoints should not be made too lightly. For example, I could easily be talked into having garuda/tengu inspired birdmen in the game--the power sets practically write themselves, after all--but I think it'd be more fun if they were territorial non-playables that you can occasionally find by going mountain climbing in Mayan shallows rather than former pizza guys with big noses.

If you were to do more "Has Monstrous Form X" critters, I'd like to see it shaken up a bit and go non-mammalian for variety. Normally, I'd shill for spiders and call them Arachne instead of Ananasi just to annoy the handful of WW fanboys left on the planet, but that feels sort of awkward given there's alreadi Mi-Go handling bug-based body horror. Plus, the whole point of having spider people is so that people get their innards sucked out with a straw and that begs for a Feeding schedule and feels perhaps a bit too vampiric.

On the bright side, AS power sets remain easy to bang out:

Core Discipline: Play of Shadows
Eyes of the Night
Shadow Casting

Abyss of the Body (Doom Flies Spiders)
Body Colony
Quickness
Clinging

Advanced Powers
Solid Darkness (As close to on-demand webs as you'll get)
War Form: Big Fucking Spider

Power Source: Astral
Power Schedule: Feeding
Flaw: Disloyal

[erik]

Another thing I'd do is call the Mirror Goblins, Spriggans, and Trolls "Goblins", and have actual Fairies who live in the Dreamlands. The other worlds could use a somewhat deeper bestiary, and that implies the addition of extra types of non-playable supernatural. Limbo would get the Hellhounds, Wyverns, and Dragons that make it such a dangerous place to be, and the Dreamlands could pick up pixies and leprechauns and such.

In short: having thought about how nWoD bungled the addition of new content through splats, I've thought that if After Sundown did get a new edition, that additional content would fit in several places.

Amongst the Fairies I like the elves as well. Similar to Asura in capabilities. Basically riffing off of Dresden Files once again.

Silvan
"The humans have forgotten the gods, destroyed the earth, and for what? Parking lots? Shopping malls? Greed had burned a hole in their hearts that will never be filled!"
Silvan appear as beautiful, delicate and exotic humans. Silvan are not required to harm humans but many enjoy doing so. While they gain no benefit from harming people, many do so because they enjoy it or because they feel humanity deserves it. Silvan once lived on Earth but were driven to exile in Limbo and the Dreamlands unable to adapt to humanity's expansion with the proliferation of iron. While some have accepted their exile, few hold any positive associations with humanity.
While technically a Silvan was never a human, they are close enough in appearance and capabilities that their attribute ranges before Potency modifiers are human standard.
Silvan are physically unable to state direct lies, untruth being antithetical to their nature. They place a high importance on ceremony and bargains. They enjoy tricking people, misleading without lying. It is rare for a person to get the better side of a bargain with a Silvan.
Silvan appear similar to humans, but they are not born as children. Silvan instead are spirits with physical form. Any semblance of age or change is a reflection of their psyche rather than biological change. The process by which new spirits are spawned is not fully understood.
Silvan are on a Astral power schedule with their power ebbing and flowing by nature's seasons and the moon's passage.
Silvan suffer from Master Passion: Greed. When a Silvan sees something they want their desire is resolute. A Silvan deciding that they want to have a human child to turn into a flower for their gardens will harry that child its entire life.
A Silvan has an Astral power source and a Lunar power schedule.

Silvan Starting Powers
- Core Discipline: Veil - Hide from Notice (Basic Veil) Mask of a Thousand Faces (Basic Veil)
- Basic Powers - Supernatural Senses (Basic Discernment) Patience of the Mountains (Basic Fortitude) Attract (Basic Magnetism)
- Advanced Powers - Hide in Plain Sight (Advanced Veil) Summons (Advanced Magnetism)
Story Inspiration: Hellboy 2, Dresden Files

Rituals certainly have room to grow. Not just big deal rituals but maybe guidelines for smaller rituals.

[Prak]

I was thinking about how Scion's concept is...interesting enough. But it almost by definition doesn't fit into the Vow of Silence/Masquerade, because what use is being an up-and-coming deity if you don't reveal yourself at some point?

I started doing something like "AS for Scion," I called it Divine Legacy. I need to put some more work into it. Powers for godlings are a bit of a quandry, as are categories. I want to use AS, but godlings basically want to actually be "Steves," rather than "Ok, you have your Elemental Divinities, there are four types. Then you have your Psychopomps, ditto, [etc]"

Rituals certainly have room to grow. Not just big deal rituals but maybe guidelines for smaller rituals.

Personally, I'd like a better idea of how magic items are supposed to be made.

[Lokathor]

I can't imagine there being a reason to not also update the core book as you develop the game though.

Personally, I split it so that I've got one PDF that's entirely faithful to the official forum posting of it as seen over in It's My Own Invention, and I've also got another version that I've been making organizational changes to, editing for clarity, editing in those two rules changes I talked about, and just now I changed all the "fey" into "goblins". It only took about 4 minutes to make all the fey into goblins because I was eating while I did it.

PS: Gargoyles need to be a thing. Like the Disney cartoon version.

[Prak]

PS: Gargoyles need to be a thing. Like the Disney cartoon version.

Totally. The question is, though, what they do, and what world they're connected to.

[Maxus]

Sounds like Dreamlands to me.

[Prak]

I suppose they are kind of sentient chimera, so that makes sense.

[Starmaker]

When people talk about the Corax, a little part of me dies. Where the line should get drawn there is a difficult question. Bear, Boar, and Shark all have a certain amount of gravitas.

Why? The raven is the third most "goffik" animal (after the wolf and the bat). People will want to turn into ravens. Granted, they don't fit the "fear of being eaten" lycanthrope shtick, but assigning the raven form to vampires isn't entirely free of conceptual problems either because ravens are diurnal.