OSSR: Demon the Fallen

[Prak]

Demon the Fallen is probably my second favorite White Wolf game line. This is for somewhat obvious reasons. Playing demons that are railing against God is right up my alley, and it's only second favorite because Werewolf is the game I actually played. I played demons a couple of times in mixed one shots, but never an ongoing game like I did werewolf. It was, of course, WoD, which is to say, it's a bad game, mechanically, but can be fun with the right group.

Demon the Fallen was printed in 2002, so this is fairly an Old School Sourcebook review. But here we get the first problem. White Wolf games are often initialized, and Demon the Fallen initializes to "DtF."

Which of course is much more frequently used to mean "down to fuck." And Google tells me that this term can be found as early as 1968, so... Demon the Fallen wasn't really a great name for the game, but also I must admit that while "Down to fuck" seems to have existed nearly as long as my parents, I never really thought about this until the recent years, where "dtf" and "down to fuck" has become more widely known.

Anyway.

Demon the Fallen
or, "Hey, it's been about thirty years since the general public thought RPGs were satanic, maybe we can write about demons now?"

Demon the Fallen was published in 2002, which makes me a bit sad, because it means I have to wait another six years before I get to see if they're going to do a D20 kickstarter. On the other hand, it gives me six years to get a job so I can back it. Yes, despite there hardly being a need, I do actually kind of want a 20th anniversary Demon book. Like I said, I love this game.

Anyway, you kind of already know what this book is like, just from the name and a basic knowledge of White Wolf. It's about playing a demon, it's about personal horror, and it's about how White Wolf basically wanted to make RPGs about philosophy but couldn't even do a bad idea well.

To set the mood, right before the introduction we get the first of many RK Post illustrations of disturbingly scantily clad celestine figures-


your guess of what's going on here is as good as mine, but that strap between her legs looks really inconvenient and uncomfortable

Looking at the first couple of paragraphs of the intro, I'm wondering who wrote it. It's very "you know what demons are, or at least what the bible says..." and literally ends with "Now (you are) about to hear the other side of the story."

The author credits are a bit weird- William Brinkman, David Carroll, Michael Lee are primarily notable for not having any other apparent game writing credits online, and the latter two for sharing names with (or being) musicians. On the other hand, the book also credits Steve Kenson, who also wrote Mutants and Masterminds, Joshua Mosquiera-Asheim, who currently is the game director for Diablo 3, Patrick O'Duffy and Adam Tinworth are common enough in WW products, Greg Stolze, who also wrote Godlike, a WW2 Supers game, and the novel trilogy for Demon the Fallen...

and LUCIEN SOULBAN.

Yes, that's actually his name. He was born in Saudi Arabia, but is Canadian, and says that Soulban means "Holy Crosses." He got his first name because his mother refused to follow family tradition (alternating Moussa and Shukri), and instead turned the choice of first name over to his maternal grandmother who suggested "Lucien or Christopher."

Apparently Lucien also worked on Silver Age Sentinels, which, of course Kenson also worked on, so I can only imagine that White Wolf reached out to Kenson, and Kenson said "Oh, a game about demons? I know exactly the guy who you should also hire, his name is LUCIEN SOULBAN." But apparently he actually wrote for WW as far back as 1996, so maybe one of the execs just said "Hey, Soulban, how'd you like to write about demons?"

I'm waiting for him to respond on twitter about how much he thinks his name had to do with being put on the project.

Probably most notably, the Dot is only credited with creating the World of Darkness, not with any writing of this book. So.. that, and Achilli's absence from the credits, probably amply explains the relatively low amount of christian repentance bullshit in this game, and the fact that it's more or less playable.

The book then goes into the standard "What is this thing called roleplaying/s]storytelling?" section, that I really think was completely unnecessary by 2002. It definitely didn't need more than a page devoted to it and "Players and Storytellers," which provides an example of what constitutes play in an RPG. After this, we get a description of the World of Darkness and the Gothic-Punk genre.

By 2002, White Wolf could have had a boilerplate introduction that provided a rundown of what roleplaying is, how you do it (preferably without telling you that not using the rules is preferable...), what the World of Darkness is, and what Gothic-Punk is. The fact that so many of White Wolf's books start this way, and it could be just a set thing that gets copy-pasted into the intros, really speaks to putting out a core book before you get into your game lines. Dungeons and Dragons doesn't waste two pages in every setting book with this kind of thing, it puts it in the PHB, and then uses the intros to talk about stuff specific to whatever world book is for. Now, that said, I really don't think that the NWoD core book is the way to go, either. A core book that talks about roleplaying, the setting, and the genre you're emulating is good, and putting your core resolution mechanic in there is even better, but there's no reason to make it a 200+ page hardcover. Especially when you're going to follow that $25 book with $35 books for your game lines. What a company could do, however, is publish a small, maybe 5x8", 10 page pamphlet for that kind of stuff, longer if they want to actually make it the character creation book, and give it away (or sell it for $5 or so), to drive interest in their now svelte $15 or $20 game line books. I could see a $5 or $10 World of Darkness paperback that gives rules for making mortals, some mortal campaign styles based, say, on The Wire, Sopranos, and I don't know a grim and gritty police procedural, but I'm sure one exists. You could also drop some pointers for something like Supernatural, but you'd want to provide some basic antagonists for that.

But I digress.

The introduction has a sidebar explaining that Demon is an urban game, like Vampire, and then gives a moderate length lexicon that... How necessary have these ever been? There are 34 terms in the Demon Lexicon. 14 of those are just names for the houses of the fallen, five are fallen factions, and five are various terms for angels and demons. Which leaves 10 for basic setting terms like "The Abyss" and "The Pit" and game terms like "lore," the term for Demon magic. Basically, this lexicon is entirely unnecessary. The same information could be delivered much better in text, rather than having this chunk of dictionary.

What follows is White Wolf's classic "how to use this book" which wouldn't be fucking necessary if they named the fucking chapters less floridly and more descriptively. At no point should you ever name your character creation just "Feet of Clay," and then use a line and a half to tell people "that's the character creation chapter" in your introduction. If you really must indulge your high school mopeot, then name the fucking chapter "Feet of Clay- Character Creation" in the table of contents. There is no fucking good reason for this fucking introduction to exist and I'm starting to think about whether I have any mixer for the bottle of SoCo by my feet.

After all of that bullshit, they take a moment to flog their hard on for the entirely fucking pointless live-action roleplaying. I've done a live action vampire game. You know what my take away was? "Why the fuck did we stand outside a college at 10pm in January freezing our fucking hands off for something we could be playing around a table with drinks and dice!?" I mean if nothing else, tabletop at least has the possibility of getting an under-the-table handy from the Malkavian clan symbol-wearing goth chick you're there to hit on. That would just be awkward in a LARP.

We finally get the first thing to actually have a reason to exist in this chapter with the Source Material list. Which is actually really damned sad, because the list of Source Material is just "here are some books and movies vaguely related to the game, some of which we'll actually describe, others we'll just say are hard to find!" Source Material lists could be great assets, as they can provide a better insight into what the authors were thinking, but this one ranges from Paradise Lost (makes perfect sense) to THE FUCKING SCREWTAPE LETTERS, which is a book written by CS Lewis that basically is collected letters from a shoulder devil to his boss, and has fuck all to do with Demon the Fallen except for both things being about demons. There is absolutely no time spent in Demon on sitting on someone's shoulder and trying to convince them to eat the whole cake or fuck the secretary.

So, it's a thoroughly unsurprisingly bad start for Demon the Fallen, but White Wolf introductions suck, and we all know that. Those five pages could be whittled down to a single page of source material with real descriptions as to why they are good inspiration for the game with more entries, and then lead into the in-character first chapter that does a much better of establishing what the game is.

Chapter One will be the next post.

[Koumei]

your guess of what's going on here is as good as mine, but that strap between her legs looks really inconvenient and uncomfortable

It looks practically vacuum-sealed.

I mean if nothing else, tabletop at least has the possibility of getting an under-the-table handy from the Malkavian clan symbol-wearing goth chick you're there to hit on. That would just be awkward in a LARP.

Pretty sure you have it the wrong way round there. At the table everyone HAS to sit there so it's all very awkward. With a LARP you both just wander off and fuck in the disabled toilets or wherever. This is a very important thing with LARPing.

[Smirnoffico]

Michael Lee are primarily notable for not having any other apparent game writing credits online

Mike wrote some fiction for Black Library, including a Heresy-era novel about Dark Angels.
And I'm excited about this review. Demon was one of my favourites and I haven't touched the books in ages. Going to be a fun ride!

[Prak]

your guess of what's going on here is as good as mine, but that strap between her legs looks really inconvenient and uncomfortable

It looks practically vacuum-sealed.

It looks like it's going to break a seal if she stretches her legs too far apart...

I mean if nothing else, tabletop at least has the possibility of getting an under-the-table handy from the Malkavian clan symbol-wearing goth chick you're there to hit on. That would just be awkward in a LARP.

Pretty sure you have it the wrong way round there. At the table everyone HAS to sit there so it's all very awkward. With a LARP you both just wander off and fuck in the disabled toilets or wherever. This is a very important thing with LARPing.

Hm, maybe. Malk-chick wasn't that into me, and I only larped once because it was a tabletop game that used larp rules for some reason, but a chick I dated who was more into Bonegnawers and Brujah I tabletopped with was a much different story.

[Smirnoffico]

Sooo, it didn't work out?

[Prak]

The relationship? Not at all. The review? I'll... get back to it.

[Count Arioch the 28th]

My sexual experiences with people I have gamed with has left me reluctant to do anything with someone I game with again. The odds are good but the goods are odd...

[Smirnoffico]

My sexual experiences with people I have gamed with has left me reluctant to do anything with someone I game with again. The odds are good but the goods are odd...

I have it the other way. My best lovers came from games, including my both wives

[Count Arioch the 28th]

Hey, if you can have two wives and not one to kill one/both of them then you have my respect as you are more patient than I am. I prefer to avoid relationships I can't just walk away from when grow tired of them.

[Prak]

Ok, I want to do an OSSR for Mokole, but I figure I should at least do another chapter of the last OSSR I started before I start that. So I'm going to do chapter one of Demon, and then I'll do Mokole, possibly alternating chapters.

Chapter One: In The Beginning

This chapter starts with a short fiction piece in an old english gothic script on a grey scale vague flame-y background. I'm not going to fucking read it, because it's written in Old English, and I've written better fiction drunk at 2am while wishing my office chair had a seat belt. But it's basically about a demon named escaping the Abyss. This is important because it's the demon who will be telling us what the fuck is going on in this chapter, and this is a scene showing him climbing into the body of a guy who just got hit by a car.

Appropos of nothing, the actual chapter, after it's heading and a quote from TS Eliot from Burnt Norton, which seems to have nothing to do with the chapter, continues the fiction but switches to a black televangelist sitting at his desk and reading demographic reports, grumbling that his network should just say "bring in more white viewers." Also struggling with wanting to go see his mistress and thinking about how he'll lie to his wife. Because this is White Wolf and so everyone needs to be explicitly bad in some way. We then learn that his son, whose car is parked next to his in the lot, has been estranged from him for two years because he left the church and turned to atheism, and felt that was the perfect time to call out his televangelist father on, well, being a televangelist.

It turns out that the demon in the illegible pre-chapter heading fiction piece climbed into the televangelist's son's body, and is hear to dick him around. No, seriously, Gaviel pops his apocalyptic form which is basically humanoid fire because he's a devil, and then lets the televangelist believe that he is god come to demand his loyalty. He continues dicking around his vessel's dad who, once he actually realizes he's dealing with a demon (it seriously takes him awhile), begins trying to pray to God for protection. The dicking around continues for an amateur-ly written page before sort of getting to the point, but it takes roughly three-forths of a page to learn that Gaviel wants reconciliation with God and thinks that his vessel's clay-footed televangelist dad can help him get that. Maybe. Assuming it's even possible.

This chapter is basically about laying down the setting specifics for Demon the Fallen, but it's badly hindered by the writer's attempt at writing punchy, amusing dialogue. Which I sort of sympathize with, because I once wrote a scene that was an extended shout out to an Amanda Palmer song between a couple of AS supernaturals making a new Animate. And it was great interaction between those characters, and might be entertaining to read, but it's not actually compelling, it doesn't move the plot along, and it's terrible for actually conveying information. Also there's one Joss Whedon, and even he's not perfect at this shit.

But worse than that, is that this makes the description of "God made seven houses of angels because he was too strong and perfect to directly create the world, and so there were angels everywhere for everything, but not now." I mean, sure, it describes the seven houses, but even with those houses described, this should be maybe a page. Not fucking three.

The next section waxes poetic on the nature of Paradise, using a cup of coffee as a metaphor. This is probably the part that's supposed to touch dicks with Mage the Ascension, because it's all about layers of reality. Except these layers don't exist in the modern world, so.... it doesn't. But the idea is that the cup of coffee that's sitting on your desk that's just a cup of coffee, in Paradise, could have also existed as a song, an idea, or "even a sentient and helpful creature." I don't recall the game ever fucking doing anything with this idea. Possibly because the idea is that these layers don't exist anymore. But this game is all-fucking-about angels and demons and shit, and their magic, and so it should totally have celestials creating those layers anew as part of their magic. Really all that this idea is really used for is to reconcile the idea of a created world, and a world that grew from the Big Bang. I suppose one could use the idea to reconcile game lines for a crossover chronicle, saying that the Creation story of Genesis that is used for Demon and Vampire (and Hunter, ostensibly) is one layer, and the animist story of Werewolf is another layer, and so on. The book actually talks about how, on one layer, Adam and Eve were divinely created humans, and on another layer were generations of ape descendants, so this idea is in keeping with what the book tells us. The Impergium of werewolf, where humans were kept as cattle, could be another layer of the tribulations humans faced during the war, or just after. The War of Rage could be another layer of the heavenly war. Hell is said to have no layers at all, and is basically numbness. In the hands of a more deft writer, Hell could have been used as a metaphor for clinical depression, but no one has ever accused White Wolf of being deft writers.

The rest of the chapter covers the angels wanting to uplift early humans who were "innocent like pigeons" but had the potential to be more, unlike pigeons, angels foreseeing the apocalypse and God saying "chill, it's under control" and a third of angels saying "we will not chill, damnit!" and rebelling to teach humans cosmetology and kick Michael's ass. It covers the war, and the punishment, and talks about Abel and Cain. It says fuck and all about Cain becoming a vampire, but it ends the chapter mentioning faith, and that demons want it, but not why.

This is 21 pages of fiction that conveys info that could have been conveyed in, like, half of that. Probably a quarter of that. And it's done not in omniscient third person, but by a character who sounds omniscient and reliable, but isn't necessarily, and is established as being a dick.

WELCOME TO WHITE WOLF

[Smirnoffico]

The worst thing is that next chapter repeats the whole thing once more. In more detail. The same story. At least, there are some minor things that point at the whole 'we are the good guys' part of the story being not entirely true

[Prak]

Not more book review, as such, just something I wanted to comment on.

So, I've started working on a Demon chronicle, spurred by a podcast I listen to talking about the portrayal of Lucifer on the TV show, er, Lucifer. It made me start thinking about how I'd write a "Lucifer walks around in the modern world" story, and that led to "oh fuck, I could just run this as a game."

So for the past week and change, I've been mulling over stuff for my game, and I remembered one of the very big problems with Demon, which I think is relatively unique to it, in WoD, but I can't be sure:

As you approach non-playability, you become more powerful.

What I mean is that, as you approach the end of your Torment scale, where at 10 you become an unplayable monster, you get more effects/abilities in your apocalyptic form (which is when the demon spends some of their totally-not-a-blood-pool to awaken their true form). Not only that, but each of your magic powers has a standard and a "high torment" version. For example-

** Ignite
A Devil's mastery of fire as a fundamental force of Creation allows him to inspire its existence at will.
System: Roll Stamina + Survival. This evocation allows the Devil to cause flammable objects to burst into flame. The character may attempt to ignite any object within a number of yards equal to her Faith score, and must obtain a number of successes in excess of the target's resistance to combustion. Gasoline, gunpowder or other explosive material might have a resistance of 1. Dry, flammable objects like wood or paper might have a resistance of 2. Inert metal might be rated 5. Water and strictly nonflammable materials cannot be ignited with this power. Fires ignited in this fashion are no more intense than natural flames, and they inflict damage accordingly.
Torment: Monstrous Devils are too fueled by hatred to perform this evocation with any precision. All flammable objects within a radius in yards equal to the character's Faith score are affected. A single evocation roll is made with some materials igniting and others remaining unaffected, based on successes rolled.

So, clearly, being high torment gives you a more powerful version of the evocation. It has it's costs, but, honestly, if you're in your apocalyptic form (and your primary lore is Lore of the Flames), you're immune to fire, so it's entirely valid to say "everyone stay away from anything flammable" and then just let loose. Another example is the 4 dot evocation of the Lore of Celestials, The Fire of Heaven. The standard form is a bolt of heavenly fire that deals Hits#aggravated damage to a single target within Faith yards, but if you're high torment, you deal that damage to everything within Faith yards.

That said, some evocations' high torment powers have actual downsides, like the evocation that turns you into pure fire's high torment version turning you into a burning skeleton that doesn't get the speed buff, and must deal damage each turn, or take a level of damage.

The, ostensible object of the game is to lower your torment, to heal the trauma of the Abyss, much like how the ostensible goal of Vampire is to raise your Humanity to 10 and reach Golconda and stop playing the game. But if you pursue that goal, your powers are weaker, and you have fewer benefits from your apocalyptic form. Like, if your primary lore is the Lore of Celestials, your standard apocalyptic form gives you Wings and lower difficulties on Charisma, Manipulation, Perception and Awareness rolls. At 7 Torment, your apocalyptic form also gives you one of: Strength+2 agg claws and fangs; +4 soak against physical attacks; +1 str, +2 dex and +1 sta; or a gaze attack that forces opponents to roll Willpower against forfeiting their actions for a term. At 8 you get another one, then another at 9, and ostensibly you get all of them at 10, but your character is unplayable, so whatever.

You accrue Torment when you violate your Virtues (Demon uses the virtues of Conscience, Conviction and Courage). If you do something that satisfies your immediate needs at the expense of your ethics (stealing ammo for your Barret light 50, say), you've violated your Conscience. When you do something counter to your beliefs, you roll conviction. When you do something out of fear for your own safety at the expense of others, you violate your Courage. You then roll the violated virtue against diff 8, and if you fail you get a temporary dot of Torment. At ten dots of temp your permanent Torment raises by one.

---

Ok, we're going to break out of general review and specifically review a thing in the book. I'm looking at the rules for torment to talk about how it works here, because I haven't played this since I was dating my first girlfriend, like, 14 years ago.

Ok, so in the Torment section, it says that "if your torment creates difficulty in using your lore" you roll your Faith to use the evocation, as normal, and then look at your successes, comparing them to your torment. If all the successful dice show numbers higher then your torment, you can use the evocation in its normal form, but if any of them are lower than your torment, you have to use the high torment version.

If you go to the page they point you to for "if your torment creates difficulty in using your lore," you see that it says "if (your) successes exceed (your) Torment, the effect is carried off as intended. If (you) roll a number of successes equal to or less than (your) Torment, the high-Torment effect of the evocation occurs, potentially inflicting harm when the character intends to accomplish good."

These entries are 9 pages apart. I went and looked for errata, and the actual errata is a third fucking version:

When making an evocation roll, compare your successes to your Torment- if more of the successes rolled show numbers equal to or less than the character's Torment, the high-Torment effect occurs.

I fucking hate White Wolf and everyone who wrote for them.

---

All of that aside, this game is also a great example of how White Wolf knows fuck all about actual theme or allegory. Demon the Fallen is canonically about playing a war veteran who has trauma from being thrown into a supernatural prison. Outside of that prison, you risk deepening the wounds of your trauma by... betraying completely nebulous and explicitly personal beliefs. So... technically, you could play a demon and say your personal ethics are "fuck everyone else, I'm getting mine" and... never have to roll for increased torment? Maybe only roll for Torment if you, like, give money to the homeless? But, ok, fine. However, you can lower your torment. How?

Well, you can go around and do "Acts of Kindness," which must be "truly kind and compassionate, done for no reason other than the act itself, without expectation of reward." Assuming your GM isn't such an asshole as to say "Well, I know you're doing this to lower your torment, and that would be a reward, so no roll for you," you roll the relevant virtue and your Torment, as separate rolls. This is a one person contested roll (but, honestly, the ST will roll your torment, most likely). If you make a sacrifice or put the needs of others before yourself, you roll Conscience, if you remain true to your beliefs at great personal cost, you roll Conviction, and if you display gallantry and valor for the sake of someone else, you roll Courage. If your Torment wins, or it's a tie, nothing happens. If your virtue wins, you lose one temporary Torment.

Or you can just spend 10 xp to lose one permanent Torment.

So, you heal trauma by doing good deeds, like... your character quits their mortal host's job and spends all their time at a soup kitchen, or you heal your trauma by pissing away points you could be spending on being a more effective character.

Now, I'm not going to say that doing charitable work won't help a person heal trauma. I'm sure there are people for whom that is a valid way to heal. But... it's not the only way to heal, and I don't think it's a good way to heal by itself. If you have PTSD, and all you do is spend all your time doing things for other people, I don't think that's going to help much. Healing trauma requires some amount of coming to terms with that trauma, and as admirable as it is, dishing out food at the soup kitchen isn't going to give you that.

I think the issue is that the writers didn't know what their game was about. I had to go looking, but the book does talk about theme. But the themes it talks about are less story themes, and more "plot ideas you might choose to focus a game on," like the divided loyalties of your characters who were sent to Earth at the behest of more powerful demons, clashing ideals of factions, searching for Lucifer, fighting the Earthbound (demons who were summoned out of Hell and gained immense power as they basically became lovecraftian horrors), or creating a new Eden. Compare this to when Werewolf talks about theme in its Storyteller's Handbook, where it talks about actual themes as in "warriors doomed in eternal struggle," and "the individual versus the pack." It's like if your English teacher asked "What's the theme of The Great Gatsby?" and you said "it's about a rich dumbass who's unhappy." Like, no, that's the plot, that's not the theme.

I suppose part of the problem is that Demon never got a Storyteller's Handbook. It got a Storyteller's Companion, but that's White Wolf's term for the book where they talk about setting history, enemies, weapon stats that didn't make it into the core book, and stuff like that.

Demon could have a number of themes. It could be about faith, it could be about undoing past mistakes, it could be about how a person heals from trauma. But instead, they wrote a game about playing politics, secretly advancing the goals of your boss (which ostensibly everyone has? So why is it secret? Why isn't there a group rota of whose boss the group is helping each week?), trying to find out what happened to Lucifer, and occasionally fighting some lovecraft rip off.

I guess to some extent, this is the lot in life of one of the last games out the door (Orpheus was published a year later, and got even fewer books) before a reboot. But even then, I would expect some clearer concept of what your game is about. Or at least not have three entirely different mechanics for something that's supposed to come up rather frequently between the core book and errata...

[The Adventurer's Almanac]

Damn son where'd you find this?

[Whipstitch]

When I opened this page and glanced around I remembered that pic came either right before or right after the table of contents even before I got to Prak's text. That pic is seriously something that WW was really committed to showing you before you even got to the introduction. I remembered this because how could I fucking not?

[Ancient History]

Ah, Demon: the Fallen. Shitting on pretty much every other interpretation of demons in all the rest of the World of Darkness and trying to double-down on Christianity-is-right at the same time. Good times, good times.

More seriously, this was basically Lucifer: the Roleplaying Game back before they made it a television show.

[DrPraetor]

Are they not compatible with the Demons in V:tM? I'm not an expert in White-Wolf-ology, but I don't remember anything that conflicted with the Baali backstory from my brief perusal of Demon?

I suppose there was some effort to have dark thaumaturgy come from banes? That never made sense: the banes in Werewolf/Mage and whatever infernalists in VtM worshipped are obviously different things, but this predated Demon.

[Count Arioch the 28th]

Are they not compatible with the Demons in V:tM?

Just ask, "are both games made by White Wolf?" If the answer is yes, then no, they are in no way compatible.

Side note: after going on a White Wolf binge (holy crap I didn't realize how prominent wolf rape was in Werewolf, I thought that was hyperbole), I was talking to my ex mentioning how the games aren't compatible in the least. She said in a snotty tone "Everything works if the Narrator makes it work". I replied by that logic, crazed rabid ferrets could be made to work as sex toys but it's just easier to use something better suited for the purpose. She didn't talk to me for three days...

[Ancient History]

I suppose there was some effort to have dark thaumaturgy come from banes? That never made sense: the banes in Werewolf/Mage and whatever infernalists in VtM worshipped are obviously different things, but this predated Demon.

Every flavor of infernalist in every single game and damn near every single product within a gameline has always been a different thing, despite sometimes sharing the same general nomenclature. At any given time a "demon" could be: a fallen angel in hell, a wraith with certain arcanoi (which may or may not think it's a demon), and any of a given number of flavors of evil spirit or bane with vastly different powers and attributes, most of which are completely vague and undefined. Some of them will look like the critters from the Goetia, and others will look like crap from the Monstrous Manual, quite a few are just entities from some non-Western mythology or religion.

So yeah, there was no fucking way to reconcile demonology in WoD, and Demon: the Fallen didn't even try. It just added a new flavor on top of everything else and left it up to the fans to mindcaulk the rest.

[hyzmarca]

Are they not compatible with the Demons in V:tM?

Just ask, "are both games made by White Wolf?" If the answer is yes, then no, they are in no way compatible.

Side note: after going on a White Wolf binge (holy crap I didn't realize how prominent wolf rape was in Werewolf, I thought that was hyperbole), I was talking to my ex mentioning how the games aren't compatible in the least. She said in a snotty tone "Everything works if the Narrator makes it work". I replied by that logic, crazed rabid ferrets could be made to work as sex toys but it's just easier to use something better suited for the purpose. She didn't talk to me for three days...

Smoothing over the oWoD's setting differences is probably easier than putting condoms on rabid ferrets. For one, I could just bang something out in 20 minutes, for the other I'd want thick hazmat gloves.

[Quasinatural]

It's been a long time since I read DtF but iirc not only was there not even a passing attempt to make it flow with any previous WW product, it was an aggresive attack on everything that came before. Demons were the go-to "real evil" option of WoD, a subgenre where the PCs are "the good guys" even though they're murderrapists so the "bad guys" have to be uncomplicatedly and inhumanly malicious to the point of metaphysical purity. Remember, demons are responsible for the Nephandi and the Baali, two not-insignificant factions of supernaturals. They aren't independent of Mages or Vampires -- especially Mages -- they are very much associated with them.

Except they clearly aren't.

DtF demons aren't WoD demons, full stop. They have nothing to do with one another. There's no reconciling it. If you put the two together you are homebrewing. Not mind caulk, not excusing. You're writing a whole new game.

Also: I always thought that mages should have been centered around cults and secret societies because of the emphasis on belief and consensus, which made me think that a parallel to the faith mechanics should have been a concept in mage. You see a bit of that in the Sanctum background (a.k.a., the cheapest power boost this side of Allies, Generation, Herd, and Resources). I may have been alone in that. In any event, the quasibeneficial interaction/mechanics between mortals and demons was the best thing I took from this book.

[Prak]

I think it's easier to make things work if you use Demon the Fallen as your primary. Mages are mortals who've had their divine spark awakened, changelings are those mortals whose souls were received upon death by a demon during the war of angels, and carried to the Sea of Dreams--after the war ended, and the demons were consigned to the pit, these mortal souls were stuck in the Sea of Dreams and slowly became the Sidhe.

Even werewolves and other changing breeds can be made to work in DtF's paradigm. The books suggest that they might be the descendants of some kind of elite angels made for war called the Malhim that appeared during the War of Heaven. I took a look at the seven houses of angels and the huge number of Fera, and was able to basically assign two fera to each house saying "angels of this house reported for repurposing, and became the ancestors of these fera." Given that Demon has this whole "layers of reality" thing going on, it works ok. On one layer, the Malhim were created by the Creator (or a Herald) when the Fallen rebelled. On another, Gaia created them when the Weaver went mad and trapped the Wyrm, driving them mad. It does mean that you're sort of playing fast and loose with the deeper specifics of both splats (what created the Black Spiral Dancers? *shrug*), but for a Demon game, I think it works. It doesn't matter what created the BSDs for my game, it matters whether I can throw garou at the PCs. It matters that I can use Formori. The deeper philosophical navel gazing of WtA doesn't.

I haven't tackled vampires, but the natural inclination is to just lean into Cain being the progenitor of vampires. Altho I have... thoughts on the portrayal of Cain in pop culture. (we're talking about a dude from prehistory. He shouldn't be a grizzeled 50-something a la Supernatural, unless you're saying he continued aging in his immortality until that point, he should look like he's, like, 16, which would be more or less adulthood in a prehistoric era)

Other splats... well, Hunters work fine. They're just dudes what been told "go kill monsters!" by a mysterious force. Which is... strongly suggested to be God/The Angels. Wraith? Mummy? Kindred? Fuck if I know. I know next to nothing about those splats.

edit- honestly, I find the Infernalism stuff as a good way to handle thralls who want magic. Because other wise, you're using the thralls extremely limited faith potential (between 1 and 5) to give them a single Demon evocation. In the actual core rules, when you, as a demon, make a thrall, you can get up to half their faith potential as a daily supply of faith points, and you use their faith potential to pay for any boons you're giving them, at a rough exchange of 1 FP to 10 Freebie Points. Personally, I've decided that while that makes a narrative sense, incentivizing you to give a thrall the smallest boon possible, in a mechanical sense that's bullshit, and have just grabbed the Powers, Taints, Autonomy rules from making a Spirit-possessed character in WtA for thrall boons.

For the demons as portrayed in other splats, you could easily say those demons are Earthbound, demons who were pulled out of the Abyss by mortal summonings early in history, and got stuck on Earth, going mad and Lovecraftian.

[Koumei]

I think it's easier to make things work if you use Demon the Fallen as your primary.

It makes demons easier to work out if you use DtF as the primary source for demons. That's all. You then use MtA as the primary source for mages (and when people ask about the demonic mage faction thing, you tell them to shut the fuck up), VtM as the primary source for vampires (and when people ask about Tremere or Baali you tell them to shut the fuck up), WtF what was Old Werewolf? You use that for the primary source for werewolves/changing breeds generally (and when people ask about whatever crossovers it has with any of the above, you tell them to shut the fuck up), and you use CtD as the primary source for the sex offender registry not-really-fae-but-kind-of (and the usual response for the fey-Lasombra bloodline, or whatever).

Using "your personal favourite splat/faction" as "the overall primary source from which everything else is a bastardisation" makes as much sense as picking your personal favourite schism of Christianity as "the original true texts of godliness from which all others are heresies" and solves the same number of problems.

I happened to like Demon on the grounds that its art quality was consistently fairly decent and the power sets seemed pretty interesting (and I grabbed the core and players-powergaming-book at the same time so "make your own transformation" was right there as another fun option), and another person ran some pretty good games of it (including tricking people into cannibalism). But the tie-in novels were vile, and I wouldn't say Demon added anything to the overall setting or made any kind of importance, and it's laughable to think of it as the canon.

[Prak]

The Old Werewolf was Werewolf the Apocalypse, or WtA.

Sure. The easiest way to handle crossing splats is to just use the core stuff for the splat in question and say "ask no questions and I'll tell you no liesnot beat your head in with the book." And Demon the Fallen is definitely not canon. There isn't an overarching canon for World of Darkness. If I were doing a big cross-splat game, I'd definitely go that route, and if anyone asked how things fit together, I'd give them a completely agnostic "it's a big multi-thousand year game of telephone and no one actually knows, anyone who says they do is lying" answer. Because, honestly? It doesn't matter. Who cares how werewolves fit into the vampire worldview? Does it enrich the game to have an answer? Not really.

For the game I'm running, I'm running specifically a Demon game, and I'm rummaging around with other splats for plot hooks. The first plot hook I have is that a demon found a person who has the Akashic Record written on their soul, and if they can get that person/a copy of the Akashic Record made from their soul, they can learn how to awaken mage avatars and create a sort of hand-picked mage ally force. That's the only reason I'm deciding how mages fit into Demon's worldview. The overarching plot conceit of my game is that Lucifer is back, and is creating their court and maybe they storm heaven with their army of demons and mages and whatever other allies they've made, and maybe they say "y'know? Fuck heaven, we're here on Earth, we're making our court here, and if the Creator has shit to say, they can come say it to our face" (I haven't decided yet).

Basically, put as much thought into how things fit in World of Darkness as it makes the game you're running better.

[Username17]

The more complex the metaphysics get in White Wolf, the worse they are. Adding various magic worlds and types of souls and shit makes White Wolf games worse. Always and without exception. As we talked about in the OSSR of the various Mummy books, there have been various attempts to align all the World of Darkness books into a single metaphysical framework and just hammer in as many epicycles as that required. And like we said in the Mummy reviews: those attempts are fucking terrible.

Demon: the Fallen is actually part of a broader attempt to line up the metaphysics of World of Darkness with Exalted, and that is a shit idea and it doesn't work because that is obviously a shit idea.

-Username17

[Quasinatural]

There's a greater issue here in that while there's a point to unifying the sourcebooks from a player perspective, in that this allows players to use different splats together and explore the relationships between the characters therein, there's no point to this from White Wolf's perspective. WW cared about premise and compelling imagery; they didn't give a shit, as a company, about follow-through or competently exploring themes. For example, powersets were created in batches of fives to fit not a mechanical necessity or a thematic exploration but a self-indulgent design conceit, and conforming to that conceit was easier than magnifying the source material. Supernatural creatures were subdivided into biologically-determined factions for the same reason, source material be damned. If WW didn't give a rat's ass about the themes they toyed with, why would the material suddenly maintain thematic coherence when combined in a cosmopolitan setting? It's like making a cake with chalk dust instead of flour, a jpeg of a bowl of milk, and a wooden plank with the word "EGGS" written on it with a sharpie. Those things are nonsensical representatives of the things they are meant to embody, so when you put them together you just get a divide by zero error.

There's an additional problem: you actually are compelled to combine these books in some cases. For a significant portion of VtM's heyday, the Lupines were the reason why you didn't leave the city as a vampire, and using this threat in a game required you to explore werewolves. . . which immediately bluescreens the game because the generic stat writeup in the core book is pathetically inadequate for this task. But the kick in the nads is that if you bought WtA in order to address this, the book takes a dump on your hard-earned money and doesn't even try to harmonize the factions.

Even better, if you really wanted a wizard-vampire interaction going and bought MtA, you end up with a world that makes the vampire conspiracy utterly impossible-as-written as it runs smack-dab into the Technocracy. And no, saying that they're allies doesn't make sense either, and even if it did, it would be impossible for each organization to not address the other.

This isn't a metaphysical problem. The magic systems are garbage because WW writes garbage mechanics, but that's the lesser issue. The politics and cultures in the base setting conceits cannot harmonize at all. The only reason some seem to work is because players mindcaulk by throwing out the parts that don't depending upon what core books are on the table. In a vampire-werewolf-mage game I ran, the Technocracy implicitly didn't have the worldwide influence described in the core books, for example, because otherwise the vampire parts would have to be utterly rewritten from scratch. This meant I had to, effectively, re-write the Technocracy.

So, yeah. Gnosis and Avatar and Arcanoi don't play nice with each other, but that's tiny 'taters considering that the more fundamental question of "what supernatural entities are using their powers on the mayor of Chicago?" cannot be even addressed without the questioner resolving to writing a WW splatbook.