Rehabbing WoD, but keeping it's spirit

Prak · Post by **Prak** » Tue Oct 28, 2014 10:51 pm

This was going to be a response to the politics bit on the Mummies review thread, but it's getting lengthy.

Basically, even before you get to actual politics, you need to outline what the types of supernaturals are andgenerally want, yes? Preferably in such a way that creates interesting stories, rather than just making arbitrary restrictions like "Werewolves and Vampires will never work together, don't even think about it, Hunters will never willingly work with any other supernaturals" etc.

So an overhaul of WoD's supernaturals in such a way that they are generally the same would be in order (vampires as social creatures that scheme and make half-vampiric servants, werewolves as hereditary shapeshifters that don't pass on the condition, etc)

Vampires
Undead people generally want things normal people do, just tainted through unlife. So they pursue sustenance in the form of blood, security of such through cults and herds, and since they cannot die from exposure, and violence has to be fairly specific, they pursue security of social position rather than shelter, per se.

Werewolves
Werewolves have a lot of problems in WoD. The native american theme, regardless of tribe, seems vaguely racist, especially when it's basically a 1950's Disney understanding of native culture. Also, I'm pretty sure that werewolves are almost purely European in mythology, with the closest the First Nations had in their mythology being people who had magic. Then there's the fact that they are probably the cosmology that sticks out most in WoD. Finally, dogrape.

Celtic mythology has werewolves that are actually good, or at least neutral, and maintain peace and order. If you're going to have protagonist werewolves, you could do a lot worse than basing them on Celtic mythology.

The easiest way to have a lot of philosophies be equally plausible and possibly true seems to be to make your world animist at it's base. You can always say YHWH is a powerful spirit in an animistic world, but Gaia can only ever be a fallen angel in a christian cosmology. So Werewolves are still hereditary animistic shapeshifters, but rather than having their own special cosmology, they are fit into a broader generalized animistic cosmology which can cater to the whole game world. They can believe whatever the hell they want, and they do get to interact with spirits, because spirits exist, but there's not necessarily any empirical proof that the top of the cosmology is Gaia and three lackeys. Moreover, lets just say they believe in a triat that orders all things, Ag Tosu, who creates all things, Beath, who holds things in form, and Cur Deireadh, who ends all things. They believe themselves to be of Ag Tosu, and their first loyalty is to that spirit, believing Beath and Cur Deireadh to be anathema to the chaotic genesis of Ag Tosu, thus they oppose Cur Deireadh, because that is destruction, and are not fond of Beath because that's stasis, but understand the necessity of such. Then you have some who seriously believe that the ever changing chaos of Ag Tosu is the best thing ever, and so oppose stasis and destruction and don't know why people want to get rid of cancer, and others who respect the fact they would not exist were it not for Ag Tosu, but really like having a single consistent form until they decide to change it, and so are kind of more on the side of Beath, those two factions aren't fond of one another, but they can sit down over a beer together. Then you have werewolves who think the werewolf tendency to flip out and fuck shit up shows they have more than a little Cur Deireadh in them, and think it's totally awesome to flip out and fuck shit up and they're seen as dangerous psychopaths by the others, but maybe can be worked with when a threat is big enough.
Basically, I think the Wyld/Weaver/Wyrm thing was cool, but wonder why the game was about "destroy the universal force of destruction" rather than "slip the universal force of stasis some prozac" and think maybe that should be fixed.

On the dog rape, that's actually really easy to fix. Werewolves are the result of human and wolf spiritual energies mingling. This can happen a few ways-- a wolf's spirit can be awakened with a bit of humanity, and they become a full werewolf who is just more comfortable in wolf form, a human's spirit can be feralized with a bit of wolfishness, and they become a full werewolf who needs to get use to being shorter and lacking in hands when they're in wolf mode, or two full werewolves can bone and produce a child who is a full werewolf and pretty equally at home in all werewolf forms. Wolfweres can mate with normal wolves, but they generally consider it to be pretty fucked up because a part of them is human and they have human rational ability whereas normal wolves don't. Generally a wolfwere would only screw a normal wolf if said normal wolf had been awakened and made a wolfwere and then consented (ignoring actual rapist wolfweres for the moment, who are considered to be fucked up by all werewolves). A previously human werewolf can mate with normal humans, and it's not considered fucked up, because humans are rational beings and can respond intelligibly to questions like "dtf?" If a werewolf mates with a normal human, there's a chance that the resulting child will be a werewolf, but it's somewhat small. If they mate with a normal wolf, nothing special happens. You can't awaken something by putting your dick in it, or siring it. Werewolves born of two werewolves are considered spirit-touched and actually respected by most werewolves.

I'll brainstorm more after a shower, since I have work in a bit.

Josh_Kablack · Post by **Josh_Kablack** » Tue Oct 28, 2014 11:05 pm

First Reaction

Second reaction, isn't After Sundown already a thing? How's this different from re-reinventing the wheel? Or are you just talking a palette-swap on After Sundown with altered cosmology and different playable monsters?

Mistborn · Post by **Mistborn** » Tue Oct 28, 2014 11:05 pm

Um... didn't we do this already and the result was After Sundown? What's wrong with that game as your rehabilitated World of Darkness?

Prak · Post by **Prak** » Tue Oct 28, 2014 11:12 pm

Because AS isn't WoD. It's certainly a functional horror rpg, but it ditched WoD's setting entirely, or very nearly so. You'll notice that Frank is discussing how to fix WoD's setting in the Mummy thread because AS really became it's own game rather than a rehabbed WoD, and while AS is cool, people want WoD too. It would be like if someone said "Ok, so Greyhawk is a ball of shit, but there's a salvageable game in there," and instead of just fixing the things that don't work in Greyhawk they made Eberron with an entirely different system. They're both fantasy games, but Eberron isn't Greyhawk.

OgreBattle · Post by **OgreBattle** » Tue Oct 28, 2014 11:30 pm

Eberron has a very different mood than Greyhawk though. Would you say AS's 'mood' is different from WoD?

hyzmarca · Post by **hyzmarca** » Tue Oct 28, 2014 11:45 pm

The dog rape is actually easy to deal with in another way: All canines are fully sapient, they just can't speak English. But your Werewolf can speak Wolf because he's a freaking Werewolf. This means that having consensual sex with wolves is completely okay and you can interrogate Fido about who killed his owner in the locked room with no other witnesses.

You can extend this to other animals, as well.

Red_Rob · Post by **Red_Rob** » Wed Oct 29, 2014 12:10 am

Right up until the point you realise you just created a slave race of intelligent beings that humanity treats literally as animals and for some reason has never noticed are actually plan-making forward thinking creatures just because they never said "hi".

So that would be like the opposite of a solution.

Prak · Post by **Prak** » Wed Oct 29, 2014 12:26 am

Red_Rob wrote:Right up until the point you realise you just created a slave race of intelligent beings that humanity treats literally as animals and for some reason has never noticed are actually plan-making forward thinking creatures just because they never said "hi".

So that would be like the opposite of a solution.

AKA the world of Disney's 101 Dalmations.

Occluded Sun · Post by **Occluded Sun** » Wed Oct 29, 2014 1:50 am

Technically all dogs are sentient creatures in reality. (Protip: try looking up 'sentient' in a dictionary.) They're just not very bright, and their minds are structured in unfamiliar ways from the human perspective. But it's been speculated that if they had a different vocal structure, they could 'talk' as humans do - that is, they have the raw brainpower to communicate, they just can't do so in a way that humans can readily perceive.

hyzmarca · Post by **hyzmarca** » Wed Oct 29, 2014 2:00 am

Red_Rob wrote:Right up until the point you realise you just created a slave race of intelligent beings that humanity treats literally as animals and for some reason has never noticed are actually plan-making forward thinking creatures just because they never said "hi".

So that would be like the opposite of a solution.

While the whole intelligent pet genre does bring up questions about the morality pet ownership that tend to get brushed aside or ignored, I'd say that in this case its a feature rather than a bug. Having a slave race in your game is only bad if you present slavery as good. In this case its merely another source of conflict for werewolves who are already very close to being radical ecoterrorists anyway.

TheFlatline · Post by **TheFlatline** » Wed Oct 29, 2014 3:07 am

Two things.

1. You guys are way too fucking obsessed with dog rape. Just say that wolves are sapient and that dogs, while the same species, allowed themselves to be domesticated and lost the wolf spirit mystical mumbo jumbo bullshit. Wolf-dog hybrids don't breed werewolves the same reason as dogs do.

Or just... you're not actually a wolf. You can't fuck a wolf and breed.

Done. No more dog-fucking. Move. on.

2. WoD succeeded as a thing partially because it came about at a specific time in the 90's where the goth angst thing was approaching mainstream. That subculture has kind of passed. Part of the nostalgia for WoD is, as Frank and others have pointed out, that it got us laid. Part of it was the zany shit that went on in the metaplot and in the games. Very little of it was the actual intended themes.

The idea without some major theme reworks seems... well... boring as fuck nowadays. You want some secret conspiracy that watches over humanity and guides it like puppets pulling strings? Vampires aren't doing that, the NSA is.

Much like Gibson-esque hard cyberpunk & trolls with pink mohawks, culture caught up to, and surpassed WoD. Anne Rice isn't the cultural force she used to be, and it's hard to find people who read Anita Blake any more.

Koumei · Post by **Koumei** » Wed Oct 29, 2014 3:14 am

Isn't the "spirit" of WoD "Behold this DARK AND DEPRESSING world. YOU CANNOT CHANGE IT OR DO ANYTHING OF NOTE, EVER. Also have some ANGST." and basically nothing else?

Lago PARANOIA · Post by **Lago PARANOIA** » Wed Oct 29, 2014 3:18 am

TheFlatline wrote:1. You guys are way too fucking obsessed with dog rape.

Look, like it or not you're either going to have to excise that shit from the game or get used to the snickers and sneers if you keep it in. There is no option 3. Exalted tried for an option 3 and now they're known as the ghost rape game. Attempts to justify their design decision with appeals of maturity or genre-emulation or DAHKE AND EJJY have only reinforced non-fans' perception of Exalted as the ghost rape game.

That's the road you go down when you put questionable content in your campaign setting. If you're lucky you'll be ahead of the social evolution curve and then you get to be smug about how progressive your game is; I don't see this happening for dog sex, no matter how much you go on about informed consent. I say just take it out of the game entirely, all it is is an unnecessary distraction.

Prak · Post by **Prak** » Wed Oct 29, 2014 3:55 am

Ok, maybe spirit is the wrong word. The whole GRIMDARKEDGEALLISHOPELESS thing was shit, and keeping that is not the intention. I want to keep as many major elements as possible as recognizable as possible, short of copyright infringement. Something like "here's what WoD might be like if White Wolf could tell game and setting design from a shit hole"

Koumei · Post by **Koumei** » Wed Oct 29, 2014 4:03 am

So what you actually want is a better game while fooling the players into thinking they're playing WoD so they don't bitch about learning new game rules and think they can import their Tremere Antitribu who learned Mage Rites? Or you want there to be "vampires divided based on being magickal, shadowy-spooky, necromantic, beautiful, up-themselves, animalistic, serpentistic, assassinationey, ugly" and such?

Josh_Kablack · Post by **Josh_Kablack** » Wed Oct 29, 2014 5:11 am

Koumei wrote:Isn't the "spirit" of WoD "Behold this DARK AND DEPRESSING world. YOU CANNOT CHANGE IT OR DO ANYTHING OF NOTE, EVER. Also have some ANGST." and basically nothing else?

The text would seem to indicate such, however actual experience around here it seemed that the Spirit of WoD tended to be SoCo

Whipstitch · Post by **Whipstitch** » Wed Oct 29, 2014 5:20 am

I think the simple version of what Prak wants probably boils down to ditching AS's Monster Squad setup and going back to a world where it's just a bajillionty different vampires and werewolves running around. I'd call that a fairly lame design goal, but it certainly is doable.

Prak · Post by **Prak** » Wed Oct 29, 2014 5:54 am

Koumei wrote:So what you actually want is a better game while fooling the players into thinking they're playing WoD so they don't bitch about learning new game rules and think they can import their Tremere Antitribu who learned Mage Rites? Or you want there to be "vampires divided based on being magickal, shadowy-spooky, necromantic, beautiful, up-themselves, animalistic, serpentistic, assassinationey, ugly" and such?

More the former. The less I have to hear "but i don't want to learn a new gaaaaammmmme" bitching, the better.

However, things would be tweaked such that monster squad is possible, because that sort of thing is what most people I know who played WoD wanted, and it makes it easier to use monsters as enemies in each other's games too.

Username17 · Post by **Username17** » Wed Oct 29, 2014 7:33 am

Prak wrote:The easiest way to have a lot of philosophies be equally plausible and possibly true seems to be to make your world animist at it's base.

No. Not just no, but hell no. The easiest way to have a jumble of weird magical crap in your world is to have the world be at its base completely materialistic and have a lot of magical crap around that each only affects the world as far as it can personally reach. All the magical shit in your world takes up conceptual space, and if every tree and rock and tea set has its own talking spirit in it, that's basically all of your conceptual space right there. Just the fact that every time anyone masturbates or poops they are being watched by hundreds if not thousands of spirits that could potentially act as witnesses for the spirit cops makes the game world into a panopticon dystopia more extreme than The Demolished Man or Minority Report. That is obviously and extremely not compatible with throwing in a jumble of different ideas and magical concepts, because very few gothic horror fantasy stories people might want to tell are in any way compatible with the idea that everyone is living in Thatcher's England of the 23rd century.

One of the key conceits of World of Darkness (or literary low fantasy in general) is that the magic creatures are special. If literally every single fucking thing is magical, then by definition nothing and nobody is special. Animism is the worst possible idea for a world of darkness type thing to embrace, and obviously has to be binned before you can even consider moving forward on any other goals.

Occluded Sun wrote:Technically all dogs are sentient creatures in reality.

True. People actually mean "sapient" when talking about dog rape. Doesn't change the underlying argument though.

Prak wrote:So an overhaul of WoD's supernaturals in such a way that they are generally the same would be in order (vampires as social creatures that scheme and make half-vampiric servants, werewolves as hereditary shapeshifters that don't pass on the condition, etc)

Here's your fundamental problem. You can't take each of the creatures and have them stay generally the same. You just fucking can't. Because the different lines were written by different people at different times and have completely different points of view. The world of darkness from Vampire is totally different than the world of darkness from werewolf. Neither one of those things are the same as the world of darkness from mage or from changeling.

Let's look at things from the perspective of Masquerade for a moment. According to the Vampire books, Gangrel go off into the woods and chill with werewolves and Malkavians and Ravnos have fairy bros. But if we look at the other lines, those statements couldn't be true. Gangrel in Apocalypse are walking talking wyrm taint, and Malkavians in the Dreaming piss banality instead of urine. The authors of the minor lines deliberately shat all over the possibility of making a coherent world of darkness by repeatedly gainsaying every single fucking thing from the main line and distancing things are far as fucking possible.

Basically you have to pick a line and excise all the crap that all the other lines say that isn't compatible with the line you've chosen. And that means that when you look at incredibly greedy settings like Werewolf (which conscripts basically the entire world of darkness including rocks and trees into its stupid war) or Mage (which mansplains every event and magical power in the entirety of everything into their inane naval gazing theory of everything), you pretty much have to let them take over everything or retcon away the entire thing.

Basically, Mummy 1st edition was a Vampire book and Mummy 2nd edition was a Werewolf book. And that is why in Mummy 2nd edition they can't even figure out a way to suggest putting a team of characters together, because the red lasers and blue lasers teams of Werewolf are so rigid and so global that there isn't any way to fucking put a team of characters together. While of course, in Mummy 1st edition they had no problem suggesting that you'd team up super friends style, because Vampire doesn't have any restrictions from doing that.

Back in the day, when people tried to make unified World of Darkness setups, they usually tried to do so through Werewolf or Mage, because those were the biggest and greediest of the settings. And that is why those attempts were shitty. The reality is that you should probably give the claw to the big and greedy settings so there is some fucking conceptual space left off for all the other creatures and groups you want to use.

-Username17

Chamomile · Post by **Chamomile** » Wed Oct 29, 2014 8:14 am

Your goal is currently pretty vague. Based on things in the past, I think what you're trying to accomplish is to have a modern horror setting where each individual monster type has enough going on to be an entire setting unto itself, except that they actually work and function with one another and you don't get the problem where the second and third most popular lines are completely and vehemently incompatible both with one another and the flagship title. If that is your goal, then Frank is right, and you need to pick a line that plays relatively nice with the others (Vampire is probably the smartest choice, you might be more interested in Demon which I don't think has any more compatibility issues than Vampire) and then comb through the other games and ripping out everything that isn't compatible with your chosen line. Which means hacking Werewolf and Mage to ribbons with a machete, which I'd be totally okay with because they both sucked. The basic conflicts can persist, but only if you hack away all the appendages that stuck their fingers in every other setting's pie.

Dean · Post by **Dean** » Wed Oct 29, 2014 8:38 am

How is there a discussion about changing WoD cannon to reduce dog rape? Don't make less dog rape get rid of dog rape. If werewolves can only breed with werewolves or humans you don't have dog rape and that's good because, scientifically speaking, the ideal amount of dog rape in a story is no dog rape and the worst amount of dog rape is any. Every great author has understood this silent rule for instance did you know that in all 238 pages of Tale of Two Cities there isn't a single dog rape.

Prak wrote:Ag Tosu, who creates all things, Beath, who holds things in form, and Cur Deireadh, who ends all things. They believe themselves to be of Ag Tosu, and their first loyalty is to that spirit, believing Beath and Cur Deireadh to be anathema to the chaotic genesis of Ag Tosu, thus they oppose Cur Deireadh, because that is destruction, and are not fond of Beath because that's stasis, but understand the necessity of such.

Here's the deal: Werewolves is a game where the only option is to roll Barbarian. If the Werewolves objective in the world isn't roaming around smacking up other supernaturals then you have fucked up. Werewolves could be the Supernatural order keepers, Judge Dredd style cops of any supernaturals that need to be put back into line or put down. They could also be some sort of white blood cells of the WoD world, hunting down and murdering supernatural shit that gets too heavy and weird. They could be anything but whatever their campaign objectives are they should appeal to people who sign up for a game about flipping out and killing people in a totally insane way.

Prak · Post by **Prak** » Wed Oct 29, 2014 8:54 am

I'll be the first to say this-- I don't give a shit about Conceptual Space. Even your game where you said "NO. 18 is the number thou shall count, and the number of the counting shall be 18, no more, no less! Overlap is right out!" wound up with discussion of new playable types in a second edition that took the supposed conceptual space out back, bent it over a barrel and crammed half again it's allotment of playable monsters into it's arse.

Moreover, admittedly anecdotally, players have a lot more capacity for concepts than you apparently think they do. Now, clearly, this depends on the experience of the player. The woman I introduced to D&D most recently would probably have difficulty naming all the PHB races of 3.5, whereas here are all the WoD groups I can name off the top of my head:

Aasimite
Brujah
Ravnos
Malkavian
Tzimisce
Toreador
Tremere
Nosferatu
Giovanni
Lasombra
Baali
Gangrels

Black Furies
Bone Gnawers
Children of Gaia
Fianna
Get of Fenris
Glasswalkers
Ronin
Stargazers
Shadow Lords
Silver Fangs
Wendigo
Uktena
Red Talons
White Howlers
Bunyip
Black Spiral Dancers

Gurahl
Bastet
Nuwisha
Ajaba
Corax
Kitsune
Ananasi
Rokea
Nagah

Devils
Malefactors
Defilers
Scourges
Slayers
Devourers
Fiends
Earthbound

Akashic Brotherhood
Celestial Chorus
Euthanatos
Verbena
Dreamspeakers
Sons of Ether
Virtual Adepts
Order of Hermes
Cult of Ecstasy
Marauders

And yes, I have at least a good idea of what each of those is, and what their place in their game is. I didn't include things I just knew the name of.

My point is that different people have different Conceptual Space capacities.

As for an animistic set up taking up the game's entire conceptual space... ok, sure, each sperm cell theoretically has it's own spirit. Each one's alive too. That's not particularly helpful to an investigation. Just because something has a spirit doesn't mean it's a helpful spirit. Every game that has a "talk to animals" power straight up says "a lot of animals won't be entirely helpful" and I don't know why you expect sperm and chair spirits to be helpful, or even particularly useful or interesting, just because you can theoretically talk to them. Convince a bolder to roll into the path of a car, sure--I mean, rocks aren't known for their speed, but you can try. Ask sperm if the woman you found it in consented... not so much. I'd probably tie spirit sapience to size, generally speaking. A grain of sand doesn't have much to say, a mountain can tell you stories for decades.

On the "Gangrel have werewolf bros/Garou hate all vampires thing" sure. You're right, of course. But there should be a way to have a game where the werewolf nation and the Camarilla and mages and the fallen exist and you can realistically have a party where each player is a member of a different one of those groups and that works because there's room for a werewolf to work with a vampire other than "Ok we're playing an evil game, everyone get ready for graphic rape and murder scenes because this game is DARK AND EDGY"

Chamomile wrote:Your goal is currently pretty vague. Based on things in the past, I think what you're trying to accomplish is to have a modern horror setting where each individual monster type has enough going on to be an entire setting unto itself, except that they actually work and function with one another and you don't get the problem where the second and third most popular lines are completely and vehemently incompatible both with one another and the flagship title. If that is your goal, then Frank is right, and you need to pick a line that plays relatively nice with the others (Vampire is probably the smartest choice, you might be more interested in Demon which I don't think has any more compatibility issues than Vampire) and then comb through the other games and ripping out everything that isn't compatible with your chosen line. Which means hacking Werewolf and Mage to ribbons with a machete, which I'd be totally okay with because they both sucked. The basic conflicts can persist, but only if you hack away all the appendages that stuck their fingers in every other setting's pie.

Also looking at things in the past I am eminently terrible at putting what I want into words.

Looking at some of what I've had percolating in my head for this, I'm setting fire to huge swathes of the Werewolf and Mage canon, like prehistoric Garou civilizations holding people like chattel for mating, and whatever the fuck Avatars were.

Dean: ...maybe I'm doing that thing where I suck at explaining myself again, but... siding with the force of formless chaotic creation against the forces of stasis and destruction in no way invalidates a game about flipping out and killing shit. It just means you spend most of your time flipping out and killing enemies that either calcify shit or rot it away.

Chamomile · Post by **Chamomile** » Wed Oct 29, 2014 8:59 am

Werewolves are the home of both "sneaking out with other pariahs to be yourself" and "transforming from different forms, possibly in a way that is not fully under your control and one or more of the forms may not feel quite right" themes. I would suspect that these themes are at least as compelling to Prak as the theme of having a hair-trigger temper and being worried about hurting the people you love and/or destroying your place in society in a violent rage, and even if they aren't they are themes that are more at home in werewolves than any other major creature. And even if that weren't true, you can absolutely have entire werewolf stories that revolve around solving a problem without wolfing out, because in most werewolf stories where the wolf is actually a sympathetic character wolfing out is their lose condition. On the other hand, it's something that has to happen for it to actually be a werewolf story and the trope of the werewolf wolfing out at exactly the right time and saving the day is also a thing.

What I'm getting at here is that there is a lot going on with werewolves, so even though it is true that having a main conflict that revolves around straightforwardly murdering things is an easy and effective way to have a werewolf game, it is absolutely not true that werewolves have to roll barbarian. That's only true if you want mass appeal and I doubt Prak intends to get this thing on store shelves.

Prak · Post by **Prak** » Wed Oct 29, 2014 9:02 am

I'd like this thing to generate some money, but I'd also like to sprout a nice pair of tits. What I'd like and what's likely are not the same thing. Yeah, this is just another project on the heap that will probably see more use in my group than space on a store shelf.

Koumei · Post by **Koumei** » Wed Oct 29, 2014 9:11 am

Prak wrote:here are all the WoD groups I can name off the top of my head:

I think a big thing here is that you haven't just picked the book up. I'm pretty sure AS was made as a game that you could get someone to play if they had never played a WoD game before, even if it's not a game you play as your first RPG ever (because your first RPG ever is D&D, there was a law written in the nineties). Future editions could add more, particularly if they have the assumption that people played the previous one.

If you're specifically making the game for people that played WoD (and in this instance you are), then yes, you're specifically dealing with players that have had years to memorise all the weird crap and can name most of the sub-branches of Lasombra and most of the critter types that have "necromancy" and so on.

In that case, you have more leeway in having thirty starting options - as long as people can quickly figure out what had its serial number filed off, so they can go "Ah right, it's a Brujah, gotcha." and attach all their Brujah preconceptions without needing to remember new lore. Even then, you still might want to make a "core rules" document, and then have the documents for "the things that are basically vampires", "the animal-people" and so on, just to help people flip to the section they want (and ignore the chunks they're not interested in).