The Gaming Den

Prak wrote:Sorry, I meant in-character moral greyness. If you can actually go see the Wyrm thrashing around, it's hard to argue smashing shit and wrecking face doesn't bolster it, but if no one's really sure the triat exists, it's a little more gray whether killing Wyrm-cultists hinders or helps the Wyrm.

The problem with being opposed to the metaphysical embodiment of entropy is that eating and shitting is helping the Wyrm.

It's fine for your enemy to be a place ("We battle the Shadow World"), or a people ("We fight the Cockroach People"), or a group ("We must stop the Cult of the Dragon"). But if your enemy is just a fundamental force of the universe, you have nothing to hang your hat on.

If your enemy is fucking Gravity, are you helping or hindering it by putting things on high shelves? I don't fucking know! That's not even a thing. Your enemy can't be Gravity, because that's stupid. And every conversation about what it means to be opposed to or in alliance with Gravity is also stupid. And the exact same applies to Entropy. You cannot meaningfully fight or ally with a universal force. The whole idea is retarded.

-Username17

Would it be better or even worse if technically the thing the Garou were opposing was the Wyrm not doing it's job, ie perverting death with zombies, corrupting things that should die, etc. In that case, killing and purifying shit (with rock salt in a shotgun, possibly) is hindering the corrupted Wyrm by helping what the Wyrm is supposed to be.

FrankTrollman wrote:

Prak wrote:Sorry, I meant in-character moral greyness. If you can actually go see the Wyrm thrashing around, it's hard to argue smashing shit and wrecking face doesn't bolster it, but if no one's really sure the triat exists, it's a little more gray whether killing Wyrm-cultists hinders or helps the Wyrm.

The problem with being opposed to the metaphysical embodiment of entropy is that eating and shitting is helping the Wyrm.

It's fine for your enemy to be a place ("We battle the Shadow World"), or a people ("We fight the Cockroach People"), or a group ("We must stop the Cult of the Dragon"). But if your enemy is just a fundamental force of the universe, you have nothing to hang your hat on.

If your enemy is fucking Gravity, are you helping or hindering it by putting things on high shelves? I don't fucking know! That's not even a thing. Your enemy can't be Gravity, because that's stupid. And every conversation about what it means to be opposed to or in alliance with Gravity is also stupid. And the exact same applies to Entropy. You cannot meaningfully fight or ally with a universal force. The whole idea is retarded.

-Username17

Thanks for a new quote for my sig.

FrankTrollman wrote: If your enemy is fucking Gravity, are you helping or hindering it by putting things on high shelves? I don't fucking know! That's not even a thing. Your enemy can't be Gravity, because that's stupid. And every conversation about what it means to be opposed to or in alliance with Gravity is also stupid. And the exact same applies to Entropy. You cannot meaningfully fight or ally with a universal force. The whole idea is retarded.

-Username17

That's actually the plot of Androdema. Gravity got tired of the constant cycle of Big Crunch and Big Bang, and just decided to create a race of genetically engineered killing machines to eat everyone in the universe. Entropy opposed them because they liked blowing stuff up, and they couldn't blow stuff up if Gravity won completely.

The answer, of course, is that both sides are wrong, but the one that knows its wrong and wants to maintain a working balance at least has the right idea.

So, in that context, the conflict is not "we must destroy gravity completely" because no one is stupid enough to think that everything exploding at the speed of light forever is a good thing. It's "We must stop the anthropomorphic personification of gravity from shooting black holes at us right now."


In context of Werewolf, the goal isn't to destroy the Wyrm, which is suicidal as it would result in the destruction of the world, anyway. It's to force him to do his fucking job properly, instead of being a total asshole about it.

The Werewolves have reduced this to "Combat the Wyrm Wherever it Dwells and Whenever it Breeds." because they're violent, savage, idiots who don't understand subtlety or nuance. This is not supposed to be a good thing.

You can totally be opposed to some of the shit that someone gets up to, while supporting other parts of their agenda, and therefore fight them only on the stuff that you disagree with.

Well, the whole anthromorphic concept comes into play. Are you fighting a *concept* like death, or are you fighting some anthromophic personfication of said abstract concept?

Ancient History wrote:Well, the whole anthromorphic concept comes into play. Are you fighting a *concept* like death, or are you fighting some anthromophic personfication of said abstract concept?

Well. the concept isn't sitting in Snake Mountain devising plots to kill He-Man.

A game about fighting the concept of Entropy would have very little combat and a lot of lobbying for extra funding for energy efficient appliances and renewable power generation.

No, but you might want to fuck it.



Putting a face and a name to a concept is older than dirt; it's why we have myths of a descent to the underworld, a snack on pomegranate seeds, and now six months of winter.

Ancient History wrote:Well, the whole anthromorphic concept comes into play. Are you fighting a *concept* like death, or are you fighting some anthromophic personfication of said abstract concept?

I believe in the oWoD you're doing both those things at the same time.

Witness the grand overarching plot of Voormas, Grand Harvester of Souls. He ate the essence of Tou Mu and thereby gained divinity of the self and some kind of metaphysical link to the very nature of destruction because Tou Mu represented a shadow of the goddess Kali (ie. the Wyrm in Voormas' understanding of such things). Likewise the Red Star was a physical object in the skies of the Umbra and also a manifestation of death itself and Voormas intended to destroy it and thereby claim the portfolio of death for his own and eliminate it as a concept from the multiverse essentially slaying the Wyrm and taking on the full role himself. this would supposedly lead to an endlessly unchanging universe with the side effect that no one could ever die - which was the part Voormas actually wanted.

This also demonstrates another fun failure of the werewolf triad: werewolves totally got the shaft compared to mages. The entirety of werewolf existence is supposed to be some kind of desperate holding action against the onslaught of the Wyrm, but one mage and his not especially large cult can gather the resources together to completely destroy the thing when the stars align.

Well, Mage very specifically worked to piss on every other campaign setting, so that's not hugely surprising.

Think about it: In Vampire, you can never be as powerful as an antediluvian, even if you super-cheat. And those assholes are never going to be as powerful as Caine. And the Tremere are explicitly suckier than their Hermetic counterparts.

In Werewolf, you have supremely powerful spirits/gods. Which Mages can bind or fight directly. Your cairns are just piggy banks of magic that Mages can crack open. Your umbra is just one small aspect of their grand cosmology.

In Wraith, you're the bitch of every necromancer, and the Mages are necromancers limited only by their oral sex skills. Your afterlife is just one small aspect of their grand cosmology.

In Changeling, nobody gives a fuck about you enough to care about crossovers, but your mythical Arcadia is just a small subset of Mage's grand cosmology anyway.

Mage exists explicitly to shit on WoD's other settings.

FrankTrollman wrote:If your enemy is fucking Gravity, are you helping or hindering it by putting things on high shelves? I don't fucking know! That's not even a thing.

My shadowrun character has a wiki entry in German:
http://www.shadowhelix.de/Glenn_Swayne

We agreed that Glenn Octavio Arroyo Swayne's enemy was truth, and that his character goal was to increase the value of ħ, thus reducing the total amount of truth.

Anyway, with sufficient contortions, you can play Werewolf with the Triat - I mean, people do it. Whether your enemy is entropy or the entropy God or even those spirit minions of the entropy God who are counterproductive in the current milieu isn't the point, though - the point is, the Creator/Preserver/Destroyer Triat doesn't support good story-telling among the antagonistic forces.

For one thing, in the obvious source material (which periodically gets namechecked when people fail to grok that this is culturally insensitive), Wyrm=Shiva / Weaver=Vishnu / Wyld=Brahma.

Thing is, Shiva, Vishnu and Brahma are all on the same team. They fight various demons and Rakshasa and junk as destroyer, preserver or creator depending on which is circumstantially appropriate.

You can contort that into three opposing teams but you shouldn't because the result is stupid. The Nephandi / Marauder / Technocrat split is also stupid, for a whole host of additional reasons but starting with having Dark Kantians who do evil for it's own sake is boring, and lacks either good storytelling potential or dramatic resonance.

Ancient History wrote: In Changeling, nobody gives a fuck about you enough to care about crossovers, but your mythical Arcadia is just a small subset of Mage's grand cosmology anyway.

Mage exists explicitly to shit on WoD's other settings.

Although if a Changeling calls on the Wyrd (God I hate these "y" instead of "i" words) all Mage magic becomes coincidental.

So if you need to fucking throw down as a mage and don't want to explode, go tickle a pookah.