Mostly Not Broken: After Sundown

[Whipstitch]

FWIW, Pain Drops is awful against anyone with Indomitability since it's non-lethal virtual damage and such characters are not incapacitated by any injury short of death. It's a very strong ability but if it's your primary offense you can expect to lose to Strigoi, Revenants and Will based characters who dip into Revive the Flesh for survivability and pack a big gun or a nuke of their own. I actually like Curse of Failure better, for the most part. It's way more versatile and you can use it to fuck with people's defense tests and murder them way more permanently if you like. At the very least I think the number of Curses you can have lying dormant at any one time should be capped by Potency--I'm always tempted to bog down the game by Cursing everyone all the damn time just in case I later feel like winning an argument.

Telekinesis is another conversation entirely since it's mostly just a utility power that lets the Empty Bodied fuck with things or people while intangible. Putting it on anyone else is basically doing it wrong.

[Lokathor]

Pain Drops is awful against anyone with Indomitability since it's non-lethal virtual damage and such characters are not incapacitated by any injury short of death.

Interesting idea, however when you review the text...

Incapacitating Wounds: An incapacitating wound is called that because it incapacitates the victim. They may or may not lose consciousness, but they will be unable to stand even if they are able to keep their eyes open.

Indomitability Wounds do not hamper the character. The character suffers no wound penalties and does not go unconscious from injury before they die.

...It's not so clear to me. Indomitability says that you don't go unconscious, but Incapacitating says that even if you're consciousness you're unable to stand.

Without further clarification it's too ambiguous to me to call it for sure either way. Which was actually my complaint of the power when I went over it.

Telekinesis is another conversation entirely since it's mostly just a utility power that lets the Empty Bodied fuck with things or people while intangible.

A player in my Month of Halloween After Sundown game is a Dryad with Empty Body and silver lined gloves so that he can still pick things up. He doesn't have Telekinesis, and instead spent his other ability selections on Celerity effects.

Incidentally, I want to come up with a version of the Celerity group that doesn't have any bonus Initiative Pass stuff in it, so that Initiative Passes can just be dropped from the game entirely. There are some obvious possibilities I think, it's more like one of those "you have to just sit down and do it when you have the time" deals.

Magic: Supplemental

It's worth noting that, though we were told early in the book that ways to get to the various hell planes are found among the sorceries associated with that hell plane, the spells in question to actually do that with Maya (Astral Projection) and Mictlan (Shadow Gate) are Elder level, so they're largely out of the realm of the player characters. With Limbo it's far easier of course, since Banishment is only an Advanced spell. You can simply cast it on yourself instead of someone else. Or if you need to take your squad you just banish each of them in turn and then banish yourself last.

[DSMatticus]

What do you think of the attribute+skill combo of different spells

I don't think I've ever seen that done in any game and not hated it. It always ends up being incredibly restricting. You're going to invest in the things that maximize your important power rolls and you're going to buy powers that you have good rolls for and the playable character space ends up a lot smaller for no particular reason. I'd honestly rather just have the die pool based on potency, rank (basic/advanced/elder) achieved, and maybe some kind of new specialization mechanic (separate from, but similar to, skill specialization) that lets characters grab some extra dice or other bonuses in a few signature powers.

[Username17]

Boy howdy I don't even know how to fix the whole rocket tag thing, but we can at least fix the damage on magic effects by having them all key off of Edge. That locks them into the same 0 to 6 scale that most other weapons in the game exist within, and all players will start with Damage 3 magic.

This is a good idea. I mean, it will have the reverse situation where magical attacks rapidly become pretty much useless against werewolves because Strength scales so much easier than Willpower. But putting the asskicking boot squarely on the foot of the physical characters and having all high end Jedi fights go to sword play seems completely reasonable.

...It's not so clear to me. Indomitability says that you don't go unconscious, but Incapacitating says that even if you're consciousness you're unable to stand.

That's really tortuous. If you have Indominability you don't get impeded at all by Pain Drops. Seems pretty obvious.

What do you think of the attribute+skill combo of different spells

I don't think I've ever seen that done in any game and not hated it. It always ends up being incredibly restricting. You're going to invest in the things that maximize your important power rolls and you're going to buy powers that you have good rolls for and the playable character space ends up a lot smaller for no particular reason. I'd honestly rather just have the die pool based on potency, rank (basic/advanced/elder) achieved, and maybe some kind of new specialization mechanic (separate from, but similar to, skill specialization) that lets characters grab some extra dice or other bonuses in a few signature powers.

Unsurprisingly, I think you're completely wrong. There are of course lots of games where you cast all spells with the same pool. From D&D's Intelligence Casting to Shadowrun's Spellcasting Skill. And all of those lead to pretty extremely genericism among casters. Which is fine if you have an explicit or defacto class system in which the casters are forcibly differentiated from the other characters. The fact that every SR2 Mage ever has a Sorcery of 6 (unless they powergame it to concentrate 7/5 in Spellcasting) isn't an oppressive fact because there are only one or two Mages on the team.

Every game needs a means to stereotype and differentiate characters. In D&D it's as simple as the fact that characters are different classes and get different power lists. In World of Darkness, you have the various clans and shit. Even in Shadowrun you have team roles with mandatory enhancements and skills that are often at loggerheads (the Datajack you want to be a good Hacker reduces your Magic if you are also trying to be a Mage, over and above the fact that Hacking and Witchery come with mandates for several non-overlapping skills). In After Sundown, the fact that doing well with a spell requires you to tweak your character to have high levels in specific attributes and skills which will defacto make you good at various specific other spells while shitty at the rest is entirely intentional.

After Sundown uses a form of soft classes. Each spell you could have has two different Attribute + Skill specs it could work for, and every character has enough points to throw around that they can have specialists levels in a couple of attributes and skills. There are therefore no combinations of creature type and magic power that you are not allowed to play with specialist level dicepools and there are no combinations of two magical powers that you cannot make a character who uses both well. However, every character is still able to effectively use a strict minority of the powers on the list and thus there is always room for a new creature at the table who can bring different abilities to the group.

Your suggestion of "Why not just give every character a bigness value and have no classes at all?" is bad. Characters would all be the same and become more all the same as the game continued. New characters would have nowhere to slot in to established groups because every character would be a Dwarven Adventurer named Carlos with only the bigness number slowly going up.

-Username17

[Grek]

Insofar as Attribute + Skill for spells needs any reform, the only changes should be that:
-No ability should offer option to use Strength + Skill or Something Else + Skill, due to the fact Clout exists.
-Numerical bonuses for having particular ability groups need to stop existing.
-Specializations should be explicitly forbidden from applying to magical powers.

[Lokathor]

If you have Indominability you don't get impeded at all by Pain Drops.

Cool. I'll even adjust the gitbook version to add that clarification.

Insofar as Attribute + Skill for spells needs any reform...

A simple "base stat + base skill only, no magical modifiers on your magic dice pool" rule is what our group uses. No Protean, no Clout, no none of that. So far none of the players have tried to apply a specialization to magic use, but of course that is also a sensible prevention.

Today I was tinkering a bit with a way to have the "Mother May I" oWod/nWod style improvised spell casting stuff fitted into After Sundown. I picked the 10 Arcana of nMage and then assigned each Arcana two different skills. None of them got Combat, and I was careful to make sure that no Arcana got two skills from the same skill category. Then I scribbled some stuff about how you'd cast with Arcana+Skill as if the Arcana was your stat in question. I wasn't sure how mixing in a second arcana on a spell should work, if you'd want to encourage it by letting players pick the highest arcana and highest skill of all that are involved, or discourage it by having them use the lowest available dice pool, or what. So my first draft answer was that secondary arcanas just don't affect the dice pool at all, they're simply a binary situation that allow you to cast the spell or not.

[Whipstitch]

A player in my Month of Halloween After Sundown game is a Dryad with Empty Body and silver lined gloves so that he can still pick things up. He doesn't have Telekinesis, and instead spent his other ability selections on Celerity effects.

Yeah, I remember in the old BPRD thread Frank mentioned that in AS terms Johann Kraus is a character with Empty Body and an iron suit played by a power gamer. Still, if you're only harmed by a material as exotic as silver there's a case to be made for combining HIPS, Telekinesis and Empty Body to get things done rather than dragging around a material you're vulnerable to.

[DSMatticus]

Characters naturally converge towards one another when either 1) there are not enough choices relative to the number of abilities they get to take, or 2) sorting choices by utility is trivial. Softclassing with attribute+skill diepools does not actually change these fundamentals. If there aren't enough powers, then characters will still spill into eachother's softclass because there is literally nothing else to do. If the powers aren't well balanced, then characters will be samey from the word go because only certain softclasses give the powers that are any good. Softclassing just does not do what you say it does. It encourages players to choose powers from a sphere of those with related dependencies, but it does nothing to increase the number of options available or encourage players to avoid eachother's toes. Think about it in terms of D&D spellcasters; would tying different schools of spells to different stat modifiers (i.e. soft-subclassing the wizard) actually change anything? Would it make less people take sleep and more people take magic missile? No, if anything it'd do the opposite; by making spell selections dependent on one another you punish deviation with additional MAD, compounding the existing "some spells are awesome, some spells aren't" balance problems even further.

Getting players to choose different powers from one another is about giving players enough good options to differentiate themselves. Softclassing doesn't do that; it just makes power choice A dependent on power choice B; nothing more, nothing less. I am not opposed to class-based systems by any means (pseudo- or otherwise), but I never really saw what it added to After Sundown beyond annoyance. After Sundown has 150+ powers, and an in media res character starts with 12; 8 of which are chosen for them (i.e. if there's not enough variety between the various monster types then that's not exactly the player's fault, is it?) and 4 of which are (mostly) free picks. Four! If characters in After Sundown would end up looking samey without attribute+skill dependencies (and I don't particularly think they would), then the problem would very clearly be with the power balance.

[Judging__Eagle]

Whether by intent, or simply player bias towards differentiating themselves from each other, it's likely that as soon as a 2nd PC picks up the same power as an other, there's going to be problems.

Empty Body is pretty notable; I'm pretty sure that any Witch can pick it up and run around with a silver lined glove. The story of a Dryad doing it reminded me of a fellow player's Exorcist "ghost" in the latest campaign I was in; their silver lined glove; and their use of Song of Silence to 1HKO basic Kaiju also comes to mind. They used SoS to "kill" almost anything, and then use Cleanse the Flesh to return people from near death.

[OgreBattle]

For you folks who have actually played some AS games, which skills did you wind up using, not use, find to be really useful/underpowered?

[Grek]

Skills that got used constantly: Combat, Perception, Stealth, Expression, Persuasion, Medicine, Research, Intimidation.
Skills I remember using at least once: Athletics, Survival, Animal Ken, Bureaucracy, Empathy, Artisan, Sabotage.
Skills only used for magic: Electronics, Tactics, Larceny.
Skills literally nobody ever used: Rigging

[Lokathor]

Character Options & Motivations
I usually get nervous when I have to check on rules from this chapter. It always feels a little more like a grab bag than is comfortable.

Resources and Obligations
Oh boy. So, Resources are things external to your character that they can call upon in one way or another to arbitrarily "solve"... "situations". They're rated 1 to 6, and also sorted into categories. The inverse is Obligations, which are external factors that hamper your character. They are also rated 1 to 6 and come in categories.

Resources
Resources are rated higher if they're the kind of thing that one might assume would be more helpful in a wider variety of situations.

The starting amount of resources are talked about a bit, but that actually varies based on your campaign setup. The important part is that the initial Resources you're assigned by the campaign mode are supposed to be "free", and you can "pay" for more by taking an Obligation of equal rank if you want additional Resources (if your GM allows it).

Assets are combat backup, basically. They're rated based on how well they can fight and also how much you can tell them the truth about monsters. It's very easy to understand this resource.

Contacts are anyone who provides goods and services that aren't just publicly available. Contacts are higher rated if they are better connected and/or shadier. Simple enough.

Destiny is "magical methods of problem solving", which mostly means magical items, but also means ownership of (or at least free access to) magical places. Now, there's some examples here (two per rank), and there's some writeups in a later chapter (six items from ratings 1 to 4; three places at ratings 3, 4, and 6), but you would be forgiven if you quickly got stumped about what to take with this resource that fits well into the After Sundown universe. More so than any other Resource, this one can do with more examples.

Finances is mortal world money and/or money analog. Bank accounts, land, gold, drugs, that sort of stuff. Another obvious and easy one.

Languages lets you speak additional languages. It's pretty stingy on the amounts, and Daniel Jackson's "I speak 23 languages" would basically never work. Most Europeans are actually kinda boned by these rules. Which strikes me as odd because this game is often otherwise quite international compared to most TTRPGs.

Science as a resource lets you work for the CSI and stuff like that. Fun fact, a friend of mine went to Hamburger University, one of the examples on this list, just last week.

Secrets is described as currency for the monster world. It's... not entirely clear what you'd do with this stuff. Presumably you'd buy supernatural goods and services, but there's not much mention anywhere of what the supernatural market is like, so other than "more is better", it's actually the vaguest of all the Resource categories.

Obligations
Obligations are not handed out by default in an Origin Story game, but with an In Media Res game you are told to take one Resource from 1 to 3 and an Obligation to match. The rating of an obligation reflects how much it restricts your actions.

Addiction is for any compulsive action, not just drugs. Drugs, gambling, drugs, gaming, drugs, drinking, and drugs are all potential addictions. They're rated by how much it prevents other goals, rather than by strict health impact.

Debts is when you owe someone something. Probably money, but maybe not. They're rated based on how intrusive the collectors are, rather than the amount you owe. One might assume that you owe a sufficient amount though, because you'd rather put up with the collectors than pay off the debt.

Duty is any time people are counting on you. It's worth more when it interferes more with your unrelated goals. Some players will cleverly realize that if they decide to not have any unrelated goals it's a lot like they're not taking an Obligation at all.

Enemies are for when Team Rocket is after your Pikachu. There's some person/group, they show up with some sort of frequency, and they try to ruin whatever you're working on. The more they do this, and the more effectively, the higher rating the enemy. Maybe they don't even want to kill you though. They probably want to kill you though.

Stalkers are people who gather information about you but don't do anything specific about it (though they'll presumably do something with it eventually). The intensity of the Stalkers affects both how well they're able to collect the info and how much you want them to not ever have that info.

The Problems
I think there's a few issues here worth talking about.

First of all, obviously, a lot of these categories are actually pretty nebulous about the specifics despite having a strong theme. At the levels that players are supposed to be selecting on a regular basis (1 to 3) there should be like ten examples (or more) to give people a better idea of what they might pick, not just two.

Another thing is that Status is a positive thing that you can have which is external to your character but which is not actually a Resource category. The Advancement section later in this chapter gives it that name, so I'll use the same name. What I mean is that there's no actual Resource that lets your character legitimately say "My name is Fox Mulder I'm with the FBI.", or be a licensed Lawyer, or a licensed Doctor, or a tenured Professor, or anything of that nature. Or any supernatural equivalent such as a Covenant Glossator or a World Crime League Minister. And that wouldn't really be a problem, except we're already trying to codify so many other things in this abstract why, so why aren't we putting that as a category your character might have? I think I might know part of the answer, and that's the next problem.

One thing is that I've read it several times and I still don't quite know how these Resource things specifically work. The more times I read them the less I'm sure how they work. Some categories imply that you get particular groups of people or things to hold on a selection by selection basis (eg: Destiny 1 is a magic sword, and if you get a second magic sword you should maybe write down another line of Destiny 1) and some groups imply that you'd only ever have one entry per category and then you'd abstractly be able to "do stuff" by calling upon that category using your rating (in an unspecified way). Finances says that it's only your biggest ticket item. Contacts implies that it's only your "main" contact you list. Secrets says it's like shadow Finances. Languages says that you "should be allowed" to take it more than once, which heavily implies that in Frank's mind you are normally not allowed to take the other categories more than once.

Now, After Sundown is a "serial numbers filed off" version of "Alternate World of Darkness", which was itself a "serial numbers left on" iteration on World of Darkness, but particularly Old World of Darkness. I never played oWOD, only nWOD, so maybe Resources were some mechanic in oWOD that's totally obvious to people that have played it. In nWOD, Resources is just a trait that gives you normal person money. There wasn't any of this category stuff. If this is all somehow totally obvious to oWOD players, that's great. That needs to be explained here though. I've walked two groups through the character creation process, and this is always the biggest pain point of the whole thing. Of course, this is exacerbated by the fact that the example characters given later in the book don't even have resources listed. They just have specific equipment like "shotgun with sand shells" and stuff. There's a "creating a character" explanation much later in the book, and it does have Destiny being picked twice, but none of the other sections that I'm wondering if you're supposed to be allowed to pick twice get picked twice, which could just be because that's how the chips fell or it could be because you can't. The Finances selection taken is just "she has a big trust fund", without even a mention of a particular "big ticket" item.

What I want to see are specific rules about how Contacts are better or worse than a Background. Finances are something you could maybe figure out on your own with web searches in terms of values and prices, but what does one begin to use Secrets on? What happens if you eliminate an obligation that was the balance to a resource? Do you arbitrarily get a new obligation or have you "earned" the ability to have the resource as obligation-less? Can you pick a resource category other than languages more than once? These are important things to know.

Motivations & Passions
This section starts off with a frankly bizarre and unexpectedly sizable paragraph about how this is all just a game, and that bad things that happen to your character in the game don't actually happen to you in real life. Also about how pronouns might be used.

Then we hear about how everyone has Passions, Ethics, and Ideologies. Except that NPCs that come up unexpectedly might not have them established. Which makes sense, since they came up suddenly and all that.

Losing Control talks about the mechanical effects of a Frenzy, and how you resist it and all that. It's not completely clear but I think that humans don't get Master Passions and don't normally have any chance to go into a Frenzy unless you use an ability on them that forces a check against a specific Frenzy type. Notably, life among mortals causes supernaturals to have a check each month, with an increasing threshold each month, until they do eventually flip out, which resets the counter. So, gives an explanation for a lot of those random murders going on despite everyone supposedly subscribing to the Vow of Silence.

Then we get walked through the Master Passion types one at a time. There's not much design here and so there's not much to say. It's well done descriptions and all. Some of them mention "despondency" as being a separate thing from a "frenzy", but there's only rules for Frenzy, so I don't know what went on there. They probably use identical rules and different themes is all. Notably, each Master Passion has three skills you can use to resist or end it, and there's 6 MPs and 21 skills in the game, which means that three skills aren't spoken for yet. We could theoretically come up with one additional Master Passion and just give it the last three skills, but most of the big emotions are taken anyway.

Driving Passions is fine and all, but it sorta sucks that the word "Passion" is shared between both Master Passion and Driving Passion. You can't just put "Passion" on your sheet, and you can't really just put "Master" and "Driving" either. I feel like that naming issue can be cleaned up with a thesaurus and a little time. Anyway, a Driving Passion is a medium term goal, and if you do something in service to your Driving Passion you get a point of Edge back. If you accomplish your Driving Passion then you can pick a new one. Also you can pick a new one if circumstances change a whole lot on you suddenly.

Ethical Taboos talks about Ethics, which are things that you don't want to personally ever do. If someone tries to mind control you into doing them then you get +1 or +2 hits to resist it. Many examples are given, and you can pick more than one, or come up with your own. It can be as complex as you want, because people are complicated and all that.

Ideologies are things your character likes and dislikes very strongly, to the point where it affects the thresholds to influence them. They might or might not contradict with your Ethics and Passions, and if they do it's all sorta fine because that's honestly how some people work. They're ranked like 1 to 6 (or more I guess) on the "honor" and "despise" list, though the particular ordering might never matter. I assume it's just so that you know what to favor if two picks accidentally come into conflict somehow. Also sometimes your ideology can change around if you go through, say, some sort of horrible magical transformation/realization.

Character Advancement
We're told that advancement is cool, but that too much advancement can make you run out of things to have as challenges. This is all true.

Acquisitive Advancement is when you pick up new Resources, Status, and Obligation at the ends of Chapters and Chronicles. The term Chapter seems to mean "game session" and Chronicle seems to mean "adventure". This section actually says something that I consider to be shocking, which is that if you get something clear like "a stack of 100,000 dollars", that you should take the time to turn it into the less clear description "Finance 2 (Cash)" later on. I guess that can come down to style, but that sounds crazy to me.

Transformative Advancement mostly describes the whole process of applying a supernatural template to an existing human character. However, it also says that you can get Potency points and Elder powers for existing for centuries. If you're not up for that, you can just "skip ahead" by killing someone with the Potency or Ability that you want to steal and then eating their soul to get the power. Of course, the one thing that kings can agree on is that you shouldn't be allowed to kill the king, so it's viewed as being a borderline sociopathic thing to do, very frowned upon by other supernaturals, and all that.

Karmic Advancement is the thing that we really all want to hear about. Players get 2 karma each session, and can hand out a karma token to anyone other than themselves as well. Also you might have banked karma. Then tarot cards are drawn, and each card has some sort of advancement on it, and you go around bidding on cards until all the cards are gone. No card can go for less than 1 karma.

So, first of all, randomized advancement is cool. Big props to Frank for going in that route, and I just want to say that I do like it before I tell you that I don't like it.

The first problem with this is that actually having a tarot deck is not particularly common. Using a website is often ornery, and when I had to do an end of session the other day I ended up doing a 52 card deck and ignoring the Page results. For the Major Arcana picks I had a player roll a d30 and reroll when they got too high a result. Not terrible, but maybe include that in the table next time or something.

The question becomes how the sorcery things work. You're supposed to have to have a book or whatever to learn a sorcery, so do you get the book and then later get the card, or can you just hold on to a card result until you find a book, or what? I'd like clarity on this issue, because I know how I'd run it, but I'm a sucker for having an official word to compare my own opinion against.

And there's no cards to gain Elder abilities of any sort, so if you Titan yourself by killing someone with an Elder ability do you learn that new ability without having to get a specific card for it? One might assume. If so, do Basic and Advanced abilities also fall out of the corpse for you to learn without needing a karma card for it?

Notably, there are cards to teach you new languages, but no card to gain or improve any other type of resource.

Advantages and Disadvantages
This section has a big grab bag of benefits you might want to have, and drawbacks you can take to get them. You can also get an advantage via a karma card, so you might have some without any drawbacks. They're each generally smaller than the effect of a magic ability, though a few are cool enough that you'd actually want them alongside your magic abilities, which is nice.

[CatharzGodfoot]

Thanks, Lokathor; you've highlighted a lot of important issues. I never noticed the overlap and lack of focus in Lure of Destruction and Descent of Entropy, but it would be a good thing to tighten up.

It's also bizarre that the golem of Prague can't always be made of clay. Forget about game balance; for flavor alone most powers that dramatically alter the user's form should be permanent if the user wants. The trade-off of trying to maintain the Masquerade when you have 12' wings might be enough for balance, but on a fundamental level I don't really care.

[Lokathor]

Well, this is pretty much it. There's more chapters to go, but not much more mechanically to talk about.

The World at Night
This chapter presents major 7 cities from around the world. Each city has some stats, some history trivia, a blurb on the local political power sources, some hotspots that you might want to check out, and a mention of what horror movies the city has been connected to.

It's great, I guess my only "complaint" here is that none of the hell planes get an example city, which I'd have really liked to see. Other than that, nothing much mechanically to talk about.

Persona non Grata
This is a bit of a grab-bag chapter but it's the one with the most to talk about.

First we've got a lot of examples of stuff.

• There's six example NPCs, some of which I can easily identify as being based on Fictional works, some I don't recognize. They could very well all be references to things I'm just not familiar with. Either way, they're a nice mix of things and you get a feel for what an NPC is "supposed" to be like within this game.
• Seven example animals, though sadly there's no entry for "horse" so you can't do a headless horseman out of the box. We finally learn that an average human has a stat of 1 or 2. Some animals get Strength 0 because they're so physically weak compared to humans.
• Three example places, all of which could also be described as "modes of travel".
• Seven example magic items, most of which are kinda normal enough. The sword that lets lets you be king of Cambodia has never been impressive to me, but I've never been to southeast asia.

Next we've got a section called Standardizing Nonstandard Magic. It's summed up simply as "hey if you're going to add more things don't be an idiot about it". Which seems obvious but is actually a really good section to have in the book so that you can point to it when the players ask for things that are too crazy, and also so that the players can point to when the MC does something that's too crazy.

Ritual Magic is that catch-all term for when you have to speak the magic words from the book at the rising of the full moon on friday the 13th or something. It's defined as "the magic that lets you use powers that aren't written on your character sheet", which sounds good, but there's not even a limit that it has to activate a power that normally exists within the game at all, so you can have rituals as the answer to all sorts of things. The best part of this little section is that you can also use a ritual to justify any sort of weird thing that an NPC does, if they can claim special context. This is where a lot of the "magic" in horror movies comes from, so don't be afraid to have rituals in the game. Use a book's magic words, as read by a virgin, to trap Dracula in Limbo for a thousand years. Use hacking and a a goofy chant with candles and bras on your head to turn a barbie into a real life woman. Use the inherent spooky power of Friday the 13th to pour a pillar of skeletonizing acid blood "out of the moon" onto a town like the sky is just some crystal sphere. Whatever the hell you want. Go nuts. Be exciting!

Items of Great Power talks about magic items. Basically they can't be so good that history as it is doesn't make sense in the context of the item existing, or you'd have to play in some sort of alternate history version of things. Which actually might be fun, but that's kinda way beyond the scope of a subsection of a single chapter of the book.

In addition to the upper bound on magic item power, they have a lower(ish) bound in that they need to be good enough that people want them and they're not outshone by just "modern technology". There might be magic items that are super weak, but they're definitionally super weak so you probably don't care. Also, they need to not be mass producible or they'll probably reshape the globe after a while. As with the "they can't have changed history" part above, this is also negotiable, if that's like the point of the campaign and such.

Also, there's already all sorts of bonuses and abilities, so items should probably avoid doing any of that, unless they can do it in some sort of new and unique way. This part is actually the bit that hits hardest. Most games tend to give us items that are "bonus items", but with this directive we have to actually think about things we're adding to the game. And thinking is hard. I kid, but it's actually good advice.

Of note, a "Daniel Colt" is mentioned, and as much as I like folks named Daniel, I think Samuel Colt is probably who was meant.

Getting Items of Power is a three paragraph long description of the fact that items should be valued based on how much they can affect the story, and how much story you had to do to get them, rather than on some sort of abstract and absolute scale (like a market value in GP or whatever).

Additional Abilities in Powers talks about adding new abilities to the game. It's first brought up that you should keep new abilities close enough to the existing abilities that they're grouped with so that you can keep track of it all. The claim is made that "there's currently no ability to let you go to the dark side of the moon", but there actually is one that lets you teleport to any shadow "that you can perceive" so there's really no reason to not have moon adventures. The moon is cool, and half the playable types the game offers don't even need to breathe by default. Come on, Frank, embrace the weird!

No, but I get what he's saying, we can all understand what he's saying. If there's some new weird power that does a thing, suddenly everyone needs to have a weird power to join the adventure, it becomes a "you must be this tall to ride" sign. You might even call it a power tax in some sense. Which can totally suck for the PCs and all, but it can also totally rock for the exact reason that I just gave. By saying that normal people can't go there, you can put whatever sort of insanity that you want there, and you don't even have to wonder "how did this never show up in the newspapers?" or anything. Sure, I guess it can be a problem to have too many alternate places to be and having them each have their own way to get there... but that's why in star wars you can go anywhere with "a spaceship", and in dnd you can go (basically) anywhere with "the Planeshift spell". It's just one travel method and it lets you go all sorts of wild places.

It's said that the game gets "cluttered and confusing" if there's to many places to go, but really there's a lot of places on Earth already, and we usually generalize that to "earth" and only focus on a few places per story, so I don't see what the big deal is that prevents you from extending that in a non-euclidean direction instead of just in 3 directions. With a comic book eventually you have to reboot the universe, but since TTRPGs already do that all the time when you start and end campaigns, it doesn't seem like anything to worry over.

New Powers and Sorceries is a similar warning as the above against adding new groups of abilities to the game. I want to call out the fact that "for reasons base or noble" is an excellent phrase to use in nearly any context and I'm happy that it's here. Anyway, you're strongly urged to never add new power collections, no matter what, ever, and then immediately given some guidelines for how to add new power collections because Frank is a realistic guy and he knows that people will obviously do it despite any warning.

Basically, unless you're going to start adjusting major parts of the game you have to keep your magic stuff to being either Universal, Astral, Infernal, or Orphic. It should have at least two powers at each level, or you probably don't have a good enough concept for a new grouping. Things like that. All solid advice.

Subtypes tells you that you might be inclined to do weird things to make a group feel "unique", but that what you're really looking for is "identity". So, don't give them special powers that only they have, and don't swap any of their "default" powers for different powers, just make them all pick up the same power with their optional selections. Also there's a bunch of example names for groups of similar-powered creatures of the various types (Bloodline, Strain, etc).

This part... I dunno. Sure, I don't want to see special, exclusive powers being added to the game all over. Some powers on some creatures are also sorta "mandatory" for that creature to behave like it is. It's hard to claim to have a werewolf that doesn't turn into a wolf, and strange to imagine a vampire that dies of old age. The default power lists are kinda big though... and a lot of the powers aren't so vital to a concept. If there was a Baali that couldn't use Learn the Heart's Pain I wouldn't really be put off. I also wouldn't be upset if a Golem could be burned to death.

I Fought the Law is a section that outlines societal response to things mundane and magical. It talks about the fact that basically anyone will lose to society's response to a situation if society can respond to it. Except New York city has 40,000 cops trying to manage 8 million people, so things slip through the cracks all the time. Most cities aren't too much better off, in fact some are even worse than that. I watch crime dramas all the time, and I just eat this sort of stuff up, but I'm sure plenty of players are interested in advice on proper police evasion as well. Their characters probably are too.

Syndicate Law explains that vampire laws and stuff are basically the same as normal laws: They preserve society and they preserve themselves. Except the difference here is that "society" is half formed of people that are hundreds of years old, and that expect to live for hundreds years more at least. So the laws and stuff generally don't care about infractions against humans.

Also, we're given a number on the WCL worldwide membership: 150k. This may seem trivial to know, but then if we multiply that by five (four player covenants plus the marduk society) then we get about 750k. That's about 1 monster per ten thousand people. That's the important number we want to know. It's also about a hundred times less than I thought it'd be, so that's a thing.

The actual Syndicate rules are pretty easy: Don't talk about fight club, don't murder other people in fight club, and there's a members only section of the fight club hall. Which is fair and whatever. I've run three-ish After Sundown games, none too long, but at no point did the players particularly want to actually interact with a Syndicate in any particular way. Well, in two they never interacted with them at all, and in the third they talked with a lady enough to try and get paid for doing a job like it was some sort of Shadowrunner / Ms. Johnson sort of situation.

Points of View
This chapter vaguely explains what the difference between 1st, 2nd, and 3rd person perspective is by giving a narrative blurb in each of said perspectives.

When it gets to 4 it instead shifts out past "the fourth wall" and gives advice on how to start a game of After Sundown, including a very detailed breakdown of the character creation steps. It's thematic as fuck to have a chapter with sections one through four and the "four" is the fourth wall break, but this explanation needs to be earlier in the book. "Organizational Issues" is kinda the broken record at this point.


Final Thoughts
When you're watching a movie about human protagonists being attacked by a monster it's a lot different from when you're watching a movie with monster protagonists. There's a huge sort of tonal change. The game doesn't seem to acknowledge that difference much. Or perhaps it does and I missed it, which means that it at least doesn't do it very well.

The biggest thing that I want to go back to is that combat usually feels sorta bad in this game. Almost top to bottom. I don't like the health system at all. Like, I called it rocket launcher tag before, but there's also an issue of scaling differences. So, in my current game, one player is a werewolf with the whole War Form, Giant Size, all the stuff to get his strength to nearly 20 or whatever. There's nothing that he is much threatened by, and he kills anything in one hit. Things fighting in his scale would be themselves just as "you die in one hit" to any other player on the team is the problem though. I mean it's my fault as a GM in some sense for allowing it or whatever (they're all just normal Clout powers though), but it really makes you miss big bags of hit points when weaker stuff can't even wear down the tough stuff at all given enough time. Sure, it's fine in some sorts of movies for a big bad to knock aside sweeps of mooks, but when even an effectively unlimited number of them don't have a chance to scratch him before you get bored of rolling the dice, it deflates the situation a whole lot. Makes the "you will be worn down by too many of them so be careful" thing not really work. Speaking of which, Damage Over Time is also... lacking a little. The Terminator, we might assume, has 8 dice on Soak (Strength 3, Edge 3, Basic Fortitude +2), so then you lower him into the molten metal, and he has to roll Soak on a 0 delay DOT, then he can buy 2 hits (or roll, doesn't much matter), which moves it to a 2 delay DOT (1 box per 2 rounds). Now he can last for 20 rounds (4 minutes) in the molten metal. That's just like... not impressive. I mean it's cool that he can survive that long, but it makes the molten metal sorta crap. I had a Witch player get covered in acid blood, he rolled his peasley Str1/Edge3 and got a hit, which gave him enough time to (almost casually) dispel the evil skeletonizing effect in the blood and then make his way to a hotel kitchen and wash it off.

On the other end of things from giant monsters being too tough, mooks somehow aren't quite frail enough. What I mean is that resolving horde battles takes too long because there's too much involved in sweeping them away. Like if there's 40 monsters in a small horde it just takes too long to roll all those dice. We did one fight where we resolved it "by the book" (all the passes, multi-attack with devastation, the whole bit), and after that I just had each player make a Combat check (plus weapon damage) to eliminate that many mooks from the horde as a complex action if they wanted to kill things, and the horde made one attack against each player back. It was fine enough in action, but in a game where you're supposed to be able to fight a zombie horde, I feel like there should be some better rules for fighting said horde than "what one guy came up with on the spot".

Now, I love the dice pool system for skill checks, it's great. Half the time with skill checks the results are just kinda MC improv anyway, and it's easy to wrap your brain around a sliding scale from 1 to 6. I'm just not convinced that an LMSD system is a good fit for supernatural monsters punching each other, because those are supposed to be big brawls that last a while, not a thing where one guy accidentally rolls low and is suddenly instantly out of the fight. Because you're also getting hit twice per pass, and also there's like 2 or 3 passes per round easily. Oh, and healing is super slow so that essentially doesn't help.

I mean it's a fun universe to have some wacky adventures in, you just probably can't have very dramatic fights in it. And I don't watch horror movies to hear vampires talk at each other, I watch them to see monsters fight and stuff.

---

Finally done. People are invited to discuss further and so forth. I'll try to answer any lingering questions you might have and such. There was one question about "how often do the different skills get used?", and the answers that I saw given by others largely match up with my own experience.

According to google docs this whole deal ended up being around 30,900 words (62 pages).

[OgreBattle]

Skills that got used constantly: Combat, Perception, Stealth, Expression, Persuasion, Medicine, Research, Intimidation.
Skills I remember using at least once: Athletics, Survival, Animal Ken, Bureaucracy, Empathy, Artisan, Sabotage.
Skills only used for magic: Electronics, Tactics, Larceny.
Skills literally nobody ever used: Rigging

Operations and Drive wasn't popular enough to even make the 'never used' list'... there was also a SMT: Persona based game on TGD though I don't recall the replays mentioning specific skills.

I mean it's a fun universe to have some wacky adventures in, you just probably can't have very dramatic fights in it. And I don't watch horror movies to hear vampires talk at each other, I watch them to see monsters fight and stuff.

Movement is up next. It offends my DnD sensibilities that movement is described after attacks and not before, though it's not technically wrong or anything. Anyway so you pick a movement mode and then you pick a movement route and that's all at the start of the round, then you get to resolve everyone's passes in order, and you count as being at all points in the route during your whole turn. This, like all those "declare shit at the top of the round" systems (ADnD, Earthdawn, etc) is maybe more bookkeeping than you need. However, it functions. Players are often upset mid-round that they can't do a thing because they already routed their movement at the top of the round, but perhaps that's just life.

I like the idea of "declare movement in reverse initiative order and actions in initiative order in so faster dudes can get the jump", I feel like AS's combat game could take it more into account to to give us all pleasant tactical tingles. Removing the multi-initiative pass system and make initiative manipulation more important. Maybe even do something like initiative crashes so when the scary monster is all tangled up/debuffed down the heroes can stake 'em, the T-1000 can get frozen, and so on.

[Judging__Eagle]

For you folks who have actually played some AS games, which skills did you wind up using, not use, find to be really useful/underpowered?

It varies... widely.

Skills that got used constantly: Combat, Perception, Stealth, Expression, Persuasion, Medicine, Research, Intimidation.
Skills I remember using at least once: Athletics, Survival, Animal Ken, Bureaucracy, Empathy, Artisan, Sabotage.
Skills only used for magic: Electronics, Tactics, Larceny.
Skills literally nobody ever used: Rigging

For every game that "no one" uses Driving or Rigging in... there are games where every session involves Driving checks; or a PC who makes Rigging checks for what seems like 30% of their dice rolls.

A lot of it has to do with which Supernatural type the PC is; and which 1/2 of their Sorceries' relevant skills they decided to max out. As well as the "concept" that the player has for the character. If they're a "survivalist", then Survival checks to scrounge up useful stuff might get used more than Perception, Artisan, or Bureaucracy. If they're a Bureaucrat, they might ignore Persuasion/Intimidation. Player creativity is also a large factor. I've seen players attempt to combine existing powers with successful skillchecks in order to give themselves putatively multiplications of their existing powers (e.g. attempting to travel intercontinentally by jury-rigging a pressure suit for a character with Flying (close, but it wasn't likely to be air safe, and they didn't have PoTM)).

Personally, I've found that like every other part of Sonshi, building an army out of former enemies healed via Cleanse the Flesh, or converting NPCs via Pain Drops; and subjecting such to very high diplomacy checks, is a great way to keep ramping up the parties leverage in future encounters. The only way to destroy your enemies is making them your friends, and all that. Friendship is magic.