Yeah, I played werewolf (it's actually the game I have the most play experience with, I think). They're close knit because they're coerced into it by their situation and the rare few elders who don't have their heads up their asses. Outside of that, they're only guardedly cordial to strange werewolves, at best because they can make the excuse of "we don't know if you're a BSD."
Probably the supernatural group most able to play nice among itself is, hilariously, demons. Vampires and mages have politics, secret factions, conspiracies, and absurdly powerful enemies. Hunters have all the culture shown in Supernatural, meaning you get small tight-knit groups, but everyone outside it is treated as a potential enemy. Werewolves, well, remember, the Werewolves are like playing The Doctor of Doctor Who pre-Day of the Doctor, you're part of the group that killed vast numbers of other supernaturals because, essentially, they're the wrong skin colour.
Demons are just five political factions that disagree about what to do now. I mean, sure, there are rivalries, but the seven houses regard each other as siblings, and the rivalries are literally just that. A handful are megalomaniacs, most just want to move on in some way. You could actually have a demon from each faction sit down at a table, and still have a table, room and building when they left.
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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.
If you want an answer closest to canonical setting that still makes some sense, consider that, thanks to known applications of mindfuck Disciplines each and every clan is akin to an ancient unmanned weapon with faulty programming that does not take into account circumstances of today. This is the most sensible reason why the Jihad ever exists and why it is so pointless, but subtle compulsions left by their vampire progenitors is also the most realisitic explanation why most clans still have a tendency to band together against outsiders and why political divisions in the vampire wolrd still are generally based on descent.Prak_Anima wrote: but just like twelve distinct descriptors of vampires that feel some vague kinship to others of their same descriptor, and so act sort of like networks of gangs, so a Brujah from California can meet up with Brujah in Beijing when he goes there, and, as hyzmarca suggests, expect that they'll help him out as a fellow Brujah (though not necessarily give him all their best shit, or show him the best blood drinking spots).
Demons are split into various courts fighting with each other, and normaly have Torment of 6-7, judging by published NPCs. Which means that the average Demon is more of a Killfuck Soulshitter than the average Vampire, and will burn you with the celestial fire for giving the wrong sauce with his fries.Prak_Anima wrote:Yeah, I played werewolf (it's actually the game I have the most play experience with, I think). They're close knit because they're coerced into it by their situation and the rare few elders who don't have their heads up their asses. Outside of that, they're only guardedly cordial to strange werewolves, at best because they can make the excuse of "we don't know if you're a BSD."
Probably the supernatural group most able to play nice among itself is, hilariously, demons. Vampires and mages have politics, secret factions, conspiracies, and absurdly powerful enemies. Hunters have all the culture shown in Supernatural, meaning you get small tight-knit groups, but everyone outside it is treated as a potential enemy. Werewolves, well, remember, the Werewolves are like playing The Doctor of Doctor Who pre-Day of the Doctor, you're part of the group that killed vast numbers of other supernaturals because, essentially, they're the wrong skin colour.
Demons are just five political factions that disagree about what to do now. I mean, sure, there are rivalries, but the seven houses regard each other as siblings, and the rivalries are literally just that. A handful are megalomaniacs, most just want to move on in some way. You could actually have a demon from each faction sit down at a table, and still have a table, room and building when they left.
Huh. Ok, I never saw much of the published characters for Demon. I mean, the factions all break down to:
*Ok, I was never too up on what the cryptics did, but this is as I understand it
- Hey! Let's find Lucifer for one final charge against Heaven! (Luciferian)
- Lucifer's unknown whereabouts are part of a great mysterious puzzle. But once we find him, he'll know what to do! (Cryptics*)
- OH GOD. NO. SERIOUSLY. GOD. MAN, FATHER. WE... FUCKED UP ... SOFUCKINGBAD. TAKE US BACK? (Reconcilers)
- Welp. We lost. And humanity's moved on, completely fucking forgetting everything we taught them. I'm gonna go smash shit till I feel better. (Destroyers)
- If we can harness the collective divine spark of humanity, we can create our own god to kill the father in Heaven.(Faustian)
*Ok, I was never too up on what the cryptics did, but this is as I understand it
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.
If memory serves me, Los Angeles sourcebook had a demon court written, and everyone there was a complete bastard with high Torment.Prak_Anima wrote:Huh. Ok, I never saw much of the published characters for Demon. I mean, the factions all break down to:So, ok, the antagonists published in the book hover around Torment 6 or 7, but the PCs have like 4 starting, and it can fluctuate. Again, I never saw much of the published setting stuff beyond the core book (and it's been a while), but Demon was basically about playing a crippled vet from the war in Heaven. Sure, you'll get into fights with other vets, but you'll also have a lot of friends, and there's no reason for you to hate someone from another house or faction.
- Hey! Let's find Lucifer for one final charge against Heaven! (Luciferian)
- Lucifer's unknown whereabouts are part of a great mysterious puzzle. But once we find him, he'll know what to do! (Cryptics*)
- OH GOD. NO. SERIOUSLY. GOD. MAN, FATHER. WE... FUCKED UP ... SOFUCKINGBAD. TAKE US BACK? (Reconcilers)
- Welp. We lost. And humanity's moved on, completely fucking forgetting everything we taught them. I'm gonna go smash shit till I feel better. (Destroyers)
- If we can harness the collective divine spark of humanity, we can create our own god to kill the father in Heaven.(Faustian)
*Ok, I was never too up on what the cryptics did, but this is as I understand it
Also those crippled war vets have just spent an eternity in a completely empty room with no one to talk to but the other crippled war vets.
good point.
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.
oWoD Wraith was fairly civilisation-based. I mean, people would enslave one another and soulforge one another into ashtrays and stuff, but there was a general feeling of camraderie and being in a civilisation together.
It's a shame that Wraith was, as the common refrain goes, too good an idea to actually be played in any way. It would have made a truly wonderful movie, novel, concept album or single-player game, but trying to shoehorn it into a party-based dynamic simply Does Not Work.
It's a shame that Wraith was, as the common refrain goes, too good an idea to actually be played in any way. It would have made a truly wonderful movie, novel, concept album or single-player game, but trying to shoehorn it into a party-based dynamic simply Does Not Work.
Last edited by Laertes on Sun Aug 24, 2014 5:57 pm, edited 2 times in total.
That reminds me of my idea for a demon possessing steve-jobs teaming up with a rogue technocratic mage to gestalt humanity into a single awakened consciousness using direct neural interface ipods and mind magic cast through the internet.Prak_Anima wrote: [*]If we can harness the collective divine spark of humanity, we can create our own god to kill the father in Heaven.(Faustian)[/list]
You don't even have to be a rogue technocrat for that - Virtual Adepts would be very much on board with the idea.hyzmarca wrote:That reminds me of my idea for a demon possessing steve-jobs teaming up with a rogue technocratic mage to gestalt humanity into a single awakened consciousness using direct neural interface ipods and mind magic cast through the internet.Prak_Anima wrote: [*]If we can harness the collective divine spark of humanity, we can create our own god to kill the father in Heaven.(Faustian)[/list]
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Username17
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There are two ways that White Wolf demographics get stupid: either there aren't enough monsters to cover the factions they claim exist, or there are too many monsters to possibly maintain secrecy or care about doing so. The worst offender for the first is Exalted, where the silver "faction" of side reals is literally capped at four guys maximum. The worst offender of the second type is werewolf.
Consider werewolf from the bottom up: there are literally 255 flavors of werewolf that you can be born as. That's not including changing breeds, tribeless, black spiral dancers, or any of the weird bonus options. That's just the natural reality of there being 17 tribes, 5 auspices, and three options to answer when people ask if your mother was a dog fucker. And all 255 flavors exist, and more importantly exist in sufficient numbers that there can be several distinct levels of commonality for all of them without any of them being unique. Wrap your mind around that! Red talon homid ragabash is a rare demographic, red talon metis the urge is even rarer, and silver fang metis ahroun is rarer still - but it still isn't unique. How many must there be by the time we get to the 'very common' types like bone gnawer homid galiard?
Or we could consider it from the top. There are 17 tribes and 5 auspices, and every garou of any rank has at least two garou of the next lower rank to piss on. We know there is at least one rank 6 member of each tribe with each auspice because otherwise gifts can't exist. That's a minimum of 5355 garou. But it gets way worse than that becasuse we also know that the silver fangs have less lower ranked garou to piss on, which means every other tribe needs to have more. Indeed, there are tribes with intermediate amounts of lower ranked garou, which increases the required expansion exponent to be even higher for the tribes which are 'numerous.' And it gets worse than that, because tribes also have small, medium, and large sizes of higher ranked garou, pushing the pyramid out proportionately.
Or we could do this laterally. Remember that there are regional demographic distributions. So the fact that Get of Fenris is less numerous in the Americas than Europe or the Silent Striders are less numerous in the Americas than in Africa actually just means that however many there are in the new world has to be more than doubled when you include the old world. And of course you have to top whatever your final answer is for all the tribes which are supposed to be more numerous overall, which is most of them.
And of course, whether we decide to include the special Asian flavored sects or not, remember that the total werewolf footprint on the world includes kinfolk - so add a couple zeroes to that shit. There are more people in the werewolf conspiracy than there are Jews. Hell, there are more people in the werewolf conspiracy than Jews and Mormons combined.
-Username17
Consider werewolf from the bottom up: there are literally 255 flavors of werewolf that you can be born as. That's not including changing breeds, tribeless, black spiral dancers, or any of the weird bonus options. That's just the natural reality of there being 17 tribes, 5 auspices, and three options to answer when people ask if your mother was a dog fucker. And all 255 flavors exist, and more importantly exist in sufficient numbers that there can be several distinct levels of commonality for all of them without any of them being unique. Wrap your mind around that! Red talon homid ragabash is a rare demographic, red talon metis the urge is even rarer, and silver fang metis ahroun is rarer still - but it still isn't unique. How many must there be by the time we get to the 'very common' types like bone gnawer homid galiard?
Or we could consider it from the top. There are 17 tribes and 5 auspices, and every garou of any rank has at least two garou of the next lower rank to piss on. We know there is at least one rank 6 member of each tribe with each auspice because otherwise gifts can't exist. That's a minimum of 5355 garou. But it gets way worse than that becasuse we also know that the silver fangs have less lower ranked garou to piss on, which means every other tribe needs to have more. Indeed, there are tribes with intermediate amounts of lower ranked garou, which increases the required expansion exponent to be even higher for the tribes which are 'numerous.' And it gets worse than that, because tribes also have small, medium, and large sizes of higher ranked garou, pushing the pyramid out proportionately.
Or we could do this laterally. Remember that there are regional demographic distributions. So the fact that Get of Fenris is less numerous in the Americas than Europe or the Silent Striders are less numerous in the Americas than in Africa actually just means that however many there are in the new world has to be more than doubled when you include the old world. And of course you have to top whatever your final answer is for all the tribes which are supposed to be more numerous overall, which is most of them.
And of course, whether we decide to include the special Asian flavored sects or not, remember that the total werewolf footprint on the world includes kinfolk - so add a couple zeroes to that shit. There are more people in the werewolf conspiracy than there are Jews. Hell, there are more people in the werewolf conspiracy than Jews and Mormons combined.
-Username17
That's... not even close to being good reasoning, Frank. Let's take it from the top.
Firstly, not every combination needs to be populated. There are no Red Talon homids. There are also close to no Fianna or Red Talon metis, because they either kill them or else fob them off to other tribes. There are canonically only ten Glass Walker lupus, and those ten do not have to represent two of each auspice. You're born with your auspice predetermined, but membership of a tribe like the Glass Walkers is very much an ideological thing rather than a matter of birth. Therefore, if they consist of nine theurges and a ragabash, that's entirely feasible, because those are the ten that felt like joining the Glass Walkers. There does not have to be a single Red Talon Homid Ragabash in existence - indeed there almost certainly isn't, because to join a tribe requires the consent of its totem and there's no way Griffon would consent to having a homid join. Therefore, the bottom up approach must be discarded.
Next the top down approach. There are thirteen tribes and five auspices. It is not written that every Garou of rank X has at least two Garou of rank (X-1) around; indeed that seems unlikely at the lower ranks, considering the brief periods in which one would stay at those ranks. It is safe to say that for most tribes there are more Garou at lower ranks because attrition is a thing, but expecting there to be an exponential doubling at each rank is absurd.
You can estimate a truer number by taking the amount of Renown you need to get to a given rank and using it to estimate how many years you need to stay at that rank, then multiplying that by an annual attrition factor to arrive at a population curve. That means you'll probably have (for example) more rank 2 Garou than rank 1 Garou, because you need more Renown to get to rank 3 than to get to rank 2, and that means you'll be stuck at rank 2 for longer. As a result, the top down approach must be discarded.
There is not at least one rank 6 Garou of every auspice/tribe combination. I have no idea where you got that idea from but it isn't even close to being true. There is, at any one time, up to one rank 6 Garou of each auspice in the world because that's the only way to bind the special totem you need and form the special pack that gives you those Gifts. They temporarily become rank 6 for the execution of a single mission and then go back to being rank 5. As a result, there literally cannot be more than one of each auspice of rank 6.
Lastly, the lateral approach. Of the tribes, most are soundly geographic. Wendigo live mostly in Canada, Silent Striders live mostly in Arabia and North Africa, and Stargazers (and by the way, fuck Stargazers) live mostly in the Himalayas. There are areas of Europe which are mostly Get of Fenris, areas which are mostly Shadow Lord* and areas which are mostly Fianna; which map to nineteenth century notions of whether one's language is Germanic, Slavic or Celtic respectively.** The number of Stargazers in other parts of the world might be very small: individuals who've migrated here and there, or who've joined the tribe for ideological reasons. As with all scatterings of individuals like that, they probably do not make any sort of sensible population profile. The population is going to be overwhelmingly formed out of whomever lives there, with odds and ends from the ideological tribes and people who've moved around. Therefore, you cannot use it as a straightforward multiplier, and so the lateral approach must be discarded.
So what demographics can you draw if these methods can't be used? My campaign demographics are spreadsheet-sized but I'm happy to share a summary here.
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* White Wolf also decided that Japanese Garou were all going to be Shadow Lords, despite that being a largely Slavic-flavoured group, for no reason whatsoever. I don't know what to tell you, I really don't.
** It's not specified what the Basques do; presumably get ignored because White Wolf was fapping over the Magical Native Americans too hard to care much about their nineteenth century racial theories.
Firstly, not every combination needs to be populated. There are no Red Talon homids. There are also close to no Fianna or Red Talon metis, because they either kill them or else fob them off to other tribes. There are canonically only ten Glass Walker lupus, and those ten do not have to represent two of each auspice. You're born with your auspice predetermined, but membership of a tribe like the Glass Walkers is very much an ideological thing rather than a matter of birth. Therefore, if they consist of nine theurges and a ragabash, that's entirely feasible, because those are the ten that felt like joining the Glass Walkers. There does not have to be a single Red Talon Homid Ragabash in existence - indeed there almost certainly isn't, because to join a tribe requires the consent of its totem and there's no way Griffon would consent to having a homid join. Therefore, the bottom up approach must be discarded.
Next the top down approach. There are thirteen tribes and five auspices. It is not written that every Garou of rank X has at least two Garou of rank (X-1) around; indeed that seems unlikely at the lower ranks, considering the brief periods in which one would stay at those ranks. It is safe to say that for most tribes there are more Garou at lower ranks because attrition is a thing, but expecting there to be an exponential doubling at each rank is absurd.
You can estimate a truer number by taking the amount of Renown you need to get to a given rank and using it to estimate how many years you need to stay at that rank, then multiplying that by an annual attrition factor to arrive at a population curve. That means you'll probably have (for example) more rank 2 Garou than rank 1 Garou, because you need more Renown to get to rank 3 than to get to rank 2, and that means you'll be stuck at rank 2 for longer. As a result, the top down approach must be discarded.
There is not at least one rank 6 Garou of every auspice/tribe combination. I have no idea where you got that idea from but it isn't even close to being true. There is, at any one time, up to one rank 6 Garou of each auspice in the world because that's the only way to bind the special totem you need and form the special pack that gives you those Gifts. They temporarily become rank 6 for the execution of a single mission and then go back to being rank 5. As a result, there literally cannot be more than one of each auspice of rank 6.
Lastly, the lateral approach. Of the tribes, most are soundly geographic. Wendigo live mostly in Canada, Silent Striders live mostly in Arabia and North Africa, and Stargazers (and by the way, fuck Stargazers) live mostly in the Himalayas. There are areas of Europe which are mostly Get of Fenris, areas which are mostly Shadow Lord* and areas which are mostly Fianna; which map to nineteenth century notions of whether one's language is Germanic, Slavic or Celtic respectively.** The number of Stargazers in other parts of the world might be very small: individuals who've migrated here and there, or who've joined the tribe for ideological reasons. As with all scatterings of individuals like that, they probably do not make any sort of sensible population profile. The population is going to be overwhelmingly formed out of whomever lives there, with odds and ends from the ideological tribes and people who've moved around. Therefore, you cannot use it as a straightforward multiplier, and so the lateral approach must be discarded.
So what demographics can you draw if these methods can't be used? My campaign demographics are spreadsheet-sized but I'm happy to share a summary here.
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* White Wolf also decided that Japanese Garou were all going to be Shadow Lords, despite that being a largely Slavic-flavoured group, for no reason whatsoever. I don't know what to tell you, I really don't.
** It's not specified what the Basques do; presumably get ignored because White Wolf was fapping over the Magical Native Americans too hard to care much about their nineteenth century racial theories.
Last edited by Laertes on Mon Aug 25, 2014 5:11 am, edited 2 times in total.
clicked this thread, was like "the fuck?"
For a minute, I used to be "a guy" in the TTRPG "industry". Now I'm just a nobody. For the most part, it's a relief.
Trank Frollman wrote:One of the reasons we can say insightful things about stuff is that we don't have to pretend to be nice to people. By embracing active aggression, we eliminate much of the passive aggression that so paralyzes things on other gaming forums.
hogarth wrote:As the good book saith, let he who is without boners cast the first stone.
TiaC wrote:I'm not quite sure why this is an argument. (Except that Kaelik is in it, that's a good reason.)
It's one of the Den's running jokes that supernatural power struggles are roughly equivalent to beingVice President of the Anime Club! in terms of how much authority you actually get.
DSMatticus wrote:It's not just that everything you say is stupid, but that they are Gordian knots of stupid that leave me completely bewildered as to where to even begin. After hearing you speak Alexander the Great would stab you and triumphantly declare the puzzle solved.
There was an very good Wraith based book... Dark Kingdom?Laertes wrote:It's a shame that Wraith was, as the common refrain goes, too good an idea to actually be played in any way. It would have made a truly wonderful movie, novel, concept album or single-player game, but trying to shoehorn it into a party-based dynamic simply Does Not Work.
Red_Rob wrote: I mean, I'm pretty sure the Mayans had a prophecy about what would happen if Frank and PL ever agreed on something. PL will argue with Frank that the sky is blue or grass is green, so when they both separately piss on your idea that is definitely something to think about.
Correct. The assumption that the Garou society is a strict pyramid alone is about as sensible as an assumption that probationers/trainees must necessarily outnumber an organization's regular staff six to one. Because they are the same assumption, in fact. Rank 1-2 Garous are trainees, who are expected to be of some help, but are not allowed near positions of responsibility and given fairly easy tasks with examples from the corebook quite literally amounting to "go, travel to other werewolf groups to see the world and meet good tutors" being a first example. Also it should be considered that mechanically Renown points accumulate really damn fast from everyday tasks or things that you want to do anyway, and barring a really short and tightly paced game, the only real barrier for raising Rank is arbitrary trials made up by your elders, not qualifying for taking them. Taking this into account, Garou's Rank demographics, in absence of recent devastating losses, should be far closer to a bell curve, than a pyramid.Laertes wrote:That's... not even close to being good reasoning, Frank.