/CofD/ &/wodg/ Chronicles of Darkness and World of Darkness General

Whatre good reasons for different supernatural characters to go adventuring?

They met a Beast and all lover her now

Filename thread: WoD edition?

Or am I getting mixed up?

...

I'm behind on Uber, did replacement skinchanging Hitler get outed publicly or is that just some Nazis in the know talking there?

They like each other and don't buy into the contradictory pseudomythical bullshit required to be upstanding members of their local hobo shaman ring, goth get-togethers at the public library, furry convention or whatever the fuck mummies do.

I don't want to spoil too much,but those two are very much in the know of things hidden from general public.

Katjuscha best girl!

Does anyone have an idea where to acquire some sort of image of the 1997 VtM character CD reference guide? Damn thing is so out of print that the original CD-ROMs start dying.

From what I've seen Beasts are like the friend that enables you to do hard drugs, because they find it hilarious but can't do all the more crazy shit. They hold their own, but you only keep them around because they've actually got a car and bus you around.

tfw you realize Beasts are basically the Bard of Cod

-Getting paid by a Doctor Doom NPC to work on the same project
-A mystery is pulling at the cords of several splat communities
-Common enemy
-Both fish out of water in a strange new world
-Previous History

Why do we work together?

Take the "be a unique weird thing based on whatever idea you've got" of Changeling, but without the in-depth Kith character creation, mix it with a bit of Prometheans "I'm such an outsider" themes, but Vampire's "I'm the best stop trying to kill me for being a jerk" theme, and give it the trappings of a bit of Mind based reality from Mage (but only the spooky parts). Then learn nothing from Geist and give it no society or goals beyond the day-to-day.
That's Beast.

It's a lot of good ideas, some middling to annoying tone, and a lot of things to do that are all contradictory.

As a Beast, you're a nightmare monster. Thematically, you're treated as a reincarnation of ancient monsters like the Hydra or Medusa, though the fluff also indicates that you're more of a *dream* of the real thing. A Mage in a crossover fiction outright tells the Beast that he's just a Goetia. And frankly, that's the best way to look at them. They're Geist but with mind-forms instead of ghosts. It's pretty neat, but could use something like Kiths.

I'm wasting my 2000 characters, though.

Beast is about feeding your Hunger. Your desire to do shitty things because it sates the spooky nightmare that replaced your soul.

Beast is also about forming your own communities and families. Family is a big theme for Beast, and as a primordial nightmare creature, you are a dream of the real monsters, and you can learn from them and gain new powers (to better replicate the fears they represent). You can also feed your Hunger by watching them feed theirs--that is, a vampire drinking blood, a changeling supping on Glamour, or even a Mage delving into a Mystery. Which means you can ignore your own Hunger...

Beasts being goalless means that in crossover they're essentially there because of the power of friendship.

If you want to get your D&D players in and slowly wean them off of the D&D style "kill everything" attitude, you might want to start with Werewolf: The Forsaken 2e. (and everyone is just assuming your players are murderhobos and you aren't correcting them, so I guess that's accurate)

Werewolf is a game about being a supernatural hunter. Once every few months you're compelled to pick a target and go hunt it. It's kind of more Shadowrun, often, and you don't always need to kill, but it's definitely encouraged. Done right, Werewolf is also a game where the things you hunt down require you to work as a team, and take down terrifying things that can kill even people with hyper regeneration.

But it's still in the Chronicles of Darkness, where social interaction is necessary and research, planning, and managing your networks is all a large part of the game. I mean, the Pack stuff is basically keeping everyone happy, and keeping people from fucking over your territory (if all else fails they become the target of the next Hunt)

I'll have to wait for a storytime on /co/ like I usually do. I know it can't be that far ahead of where I'm up to, but the long publishing gaps make it hard to know when to start looking for new issues.

Second half of Uber should be starting next year, they did a Kickstarter for it and everything.

You think if Beasts had the power to transform into their monster in the physical world, as well as actual rules to make a monster, it wouldn't be so bad, and maybe if they werent so condescending towards heroes, it wouldnt be that bad?

That still doesn't give them a whole lot to do, though it'd certainly make them more palatable. You'd think that there'd be more mechanical weight to "go look for the weird shit in the World of the Chronicles of Darkness to learn how to be a better monster, however you interpret that to be". Social philosophies as a splat sure would have helped. Shit, have that be a Z-Splat you can join from chargen if you REALLY need a Family/Hunger axis. The rules to make a new Chamber are ALMOST enough to justify seeking out the weird stuff, there just needs to be a mini-GMC type set of campaign seeds about really weird, fringe CofD places and events.

Apparently the whole thing about Family Dinner, Kinship, Kin Nightmares, etc... were supposed to be incentives to stick your nose in everyone's business

>Do your games feature time travel?
Mage? Absolutely.
Other lines?
Not so much.

And those aren't completely terrible (Family Dinner's quashing of one of the Beast Problems aside), but there's not a whole lot there if you're playing Beast proper, which the game wants you to do as much as playing a Beast in some other game. Playing Beast proper is essentially just feeding and doing unspecified things while playing Whack-A-Hero, and maybe doing Beast Wars, if you're lucky enough to live in a town with a large enough Hive.

There's also the matter of this things ultimately being dives into chartered territory, both OOC and occasionally IC. You can't really explore the fringes and the weird things of the Chronicles of Darkness with the material presented to you in the core. You can't really get across the theme of "no small boxes" if you mostly hang out with creatures who are more or less defined by the boxes they live in. I think the real issue is that they just assumed that power boosts and custom powers would be good enough to satisfy STs and players, but there's got to be more meat than that.

Worst Thing About Beast: The Fandom
Second Worst Thing About Beast: The Haters
Just ignore it and move on like other shitty games. You don't see anyone asking about how to fix Geist or Mummy the Resurrection because anyone with a brain has moved on.

>You don't see anyone asking about how to fix Geist

I assume that's the people getting paid to write Geist 2e.

Develop it. And they know how to fix it.
Throw it out and make a new game.

>>Question
>Do your games feature time travel?

Only if a True Brujah/Caitiff with the Temporis disipline makes an appearance. If not, then no.

>Beast: The Fandom
That makes Beast sound awesome, like a weird meta game where you're playing the entity where all the obsessive madness and focused psychic power of a fandom goes.

>If you bought it, you should go to your Drivethru library and download it again, as it will have updated.
Oh, that worked. I tried downloading it from the product page which told me I'd already bought this product and gave me a link. My drivethru library had the final download version though.

I work for Onyx Path/white wolf. Pitch me your chronicles/world of darkness setting idea.

Swampthing: The Moist

dicks everywhere

Hey start a world of darkness game here soon and wanted to know is there any good modern city generator software out there.

License Metalocalypse to make an RPG set in that universe. You play Kloketeers

>modern city generator software

As in, you want it to take place in a fictional city generated by some software?

Yea

Sauce?

>V5 will be like MET

At least for vampire it won't. Vampire MET is much different than anything they've announced as their plans for V5.

Do an update of Dark Colony for V:tM and figure in revised canon such as Boston being under a Giovanni prince who is (nominally) loyal to the Camarilla.

A combined setting book for oWoD San Francisco that gathers together all of the different game lines under one cover. (Vampire, Werewolf, Mage, Changeling, etc.)

>oWoD San Francisco that gathers together all of the different game lines under one cover.
i'd buy that. as long as it was actually all of them.

they definitely want to update the setting a bit but pay no attention to what BNS did. their setting update blows.

Why do people act like WoD is 100% angst all the time?

Of the line of games, I've only ever played VtM, but I played a punk Brujah who dreamed of turning NYC into New Carthage, and at the end of the campaign I shoulder-checked the city's Prince off a skyscraper then made a joke.

Because a sizable (and loud) fraction of the fandom will insist that what you just described is completely missing the point of WoD and "playing the game wrong", and WoD is supposed to be all about mature adult angst and drama, not like those escapist fantasy loving D&D fags.

Hell, given some of the things that our new White Wolf overlord has said about where oWoD "went wrong", he might be one of those people.

I didn't play it like a superhero campaign. There was intrigue, my character had to make tough moral choices, and so on. But life is complicated. Monolithic depressing dreariness would get old after twenty minutes.

TRIPS DEMAND THAT YOU ELABORATE ON THESE STATEMENTS ABOUT THE NEW CREATIVE DIRECTION!

>Where did White Wolf “get it wrong” last time around? What are your least favorite parts of the IP?
>Anything that smells of Fantasy. The attempt to create a deep mythology by linking the setting to Exalted was the worst choice ever. That was the last step in WoD’d death-march from being an artistic horror-IP to full on immature, escapist Urban Fantasy. The inability to deal with and integrate real-world events in the setting. If you can write about the Holocaust, you can write about 9/11. Fear is the death of creativity. The game was always best in the hands of storytellers who dared to place the story close to reality, often in their own cities, featuring real places and people.

>The inability to deal with and integrate real-world events in the setting. If you can write about the Holocaust, you can write about 9/11.
This part is pretty fucking spectacular.

>How dare you not integrate the biggest tragedy on American soil in deccades into your game about badass trenchcoat vampires that ended in 2003, you fucking pussies!

If this shit turns into a thread-eating argument, it's your fault,

>A combined setting book for oWoD San Francisco that gathers together all of the different game lines under one cover. (Vampire, Werewolf, Mage, Changeling, etc.)

What a clusterfuck

Enjoy the ride user, We can always get a new one. just like your puppy that 'ran away'

Our group has a very strict ban on time travel. If you introduce it, everyone gets to smack you in the head for it.

For Frisco, it makes sense. We call it the land of a thousand cults in our world.

The place is a weirdness magnet in addition to being one of the most iconic American cities as it is and would be great for a high power setting.

Wait...
Bards have buff abilities built in. Beasts have Buff abilities built in.

...Crap he's right!

Oh yay! Oh yay!

The council of reasonable Fiends shall now come to order. The first order of business shall concern our proposed tattoo and piercing parlor!

The local homeowners association has opened a challenge to our application for a business license upon the grounds that it would draw the criminal element to the neighborhood and, thus, lower property values. In response, we have sent them a politely worded letter!

Eh, it's no so bad.
Just remember that people with Temporal Shielding (Time 2), and Archmasters, will notice differences, and attempt to correct whatever you change.

So if you're going to use it, minimise the butterfly effect.
The shorter the distance of time, the lower the chance of your "ripples" attracting their attention is.

So going back to your childhood to save your mother from being murdered? That's going to fuck with the world so much an Archmaster will likely go back, and personally murder your mother himself.

Stopping your Dog getting run over the day before yesterday? Likely nobody will notice.

Tell me more

Okay, check it out. On the west coast, San Francisco occupies the same niche as New York; a cultural mecca. The culture is extremely Bohemian and it's been a thriving cultural, artistic, musical and intellectual hub for at least a century. It's also been a place that oddballs can thrive, leading to the development of the gay culture, hippy culture, punk scene etc. That includes alternative religions. Charles Manson and Jim Jones got there start there.

It's also been touched on by all of the game lines to a greater or lesser extent. It's the setting for the Changeling signature characters, Penny Dreadful the signature Hollow One hangs her hat. The Children of Gaia have a huge carry there and Vampire has given the city no less than three incarnations in three supplements and one novel (V20 has it as an anarch barony, previous incarnations have had the prince as variously Sarah Winder, Vannevar Thomas, Joachen Van Nuys and Sebastian Melmoth who is actually Oscar Wilde) with revised splitting the city between Kindred and Kuei-Jin.

There is great stuff there but the Old WWGS never seemed to know what to do with it and it is badly in need of standardization.

Could somebody give me a dot breakdown for a high level supernatural character?

Doesn't matter if it's a Mage, werewolf, vampire, changeling, or demon.

5 is damn good, 6 is exceptional, 7 is crazy, 8 is ludicrous, 9 is insane, 10 is superlative

>Sebastian Melmoth who is actually Oscar Wilde

all of my yes

The problem with the incentives is that they're kind of just... there. Like the other user says, the Family Dinner ruins one of your themes (it doesn't need to remove it completely, but it makes it more hollow), although I suppose you could play it like friends helping you get over your addiction.
Beast should basically be run like Hunter or Mage, except with befriending. It also kind of hits a peak where you don't really need to keep searching, unlike Hunter or Mage.

Tons of people ask that. Don't you remember my shitty project to fix it?

I've never been able to find a good one.

I don't mind things not being angst. I just don't like completely ignoring the tone.
I want the game to feel like any number of dramatic action shows on television right now. The Marvel Netflix shows. Sons of Anarchy. Game of Thrones. Breaking Bad. That kind of thing.
But a lot of what people seem to want to play and complain about other people not liking is anime bullshit games.

All this Beast talk reminds me, did we ever get to see those Ready Made Beast Characters?

Clearly the only solution is for someone to buy back the BESM rights from White Wolf. That is how we will contain the anime.

>Rereading my review of [the first three chapters of] World of Darkness: Gypsies
Oh my God I forgot how terrible this book is. It's so dumb and doesn't work on any level.

Has anyone ever even played a Gypsy? I don't even think the book is technically playable.

No, it's offensive and triggering

What's your overall favorite official game line White Wolf has ever done?

strawpoll.me/11514746

It's dumb.
It's dumb even if you ignore that it's meant to represent a real life ethnicity.
Oh my God it's so dumb.
It tries to do stupid crossover bullshit and handles it worse than Beast.

So you'll be happy to know that it might get revisited in 5e, right?

Daily reminder that this is the future Dracula wants.

Well, for most that's obviously going to be Vampire, whether oWoD or CofD.

But fuck that, I went for Demon the Fallen. It has a special place in my heart.

>Changeling
>Mummy. MUMMY, by all that is unholy.
>No Demon

Fuck this shit. Demon has a fanbase too, dammit.

>On the upside, Bloodlines is almost certainly getting a sequel, even if lightning is unlikely to strike twice.

There's like at least two different versions of old Mummy, how are they even going to deal with that?

Are there? What's the difference?

>oWoD
>artistic horror-IP
Dracula seems to be a very funny guy.

i'd so be down for this

I was going to say that one could see 1e oWoD as artistic horror, but one of the first adventures has a d10 hunt table, so...

Geist has 9/11 and living in the aftermath as part of the focus of The Modern Gomorrah, the New York City based setting.
There's even a sample Sin-eater and Krewe made up of people who died at Ground Zero trying to save people from the wreckage.

Really? Nobody I thought said they were murderhobos. One or two have tendencies but the other four prefer talking 90℅ of the time so I dont think its too bad. Problem is everyone I ask doesn't want to do cWoD o CoD. Im really annoyed people just want the same flavour including some guys who actually do play other systems but the D&D mentality is so heavily entrenched. I guess the devil you know and all that but my players arw cool dudes I thought they'd be more open

Well the D&D mentality is "murder people and take their stuff".

Yeah, I kind of got that impression.

I guess just "World of Darkness: San Francisco" then.

You sure like getting offended in other people's stead Aspel.

Useless words. Just say the book's bad. It's just bad. That's why people hate it. A book being offensive is fine, good literature should offend, and 'triggering' is just tumblr misapplying the real nature of PTSD to anything that mildly discomforts them.

Good work at being problematic shitlords

I've searched extensively and had no luck. No-one ever thought to rip it and upload it.

That wasn't even me.

No, saying "it's bad" is useless. Explaining why it's bad is meaningful and provides no context or justification. Children say something is "bad". Adults explain why.

More to the point, saying that "good literature should offend" is equally meaningless. There's plenty of good literature that doesn't offend, and being offensive is not the path to being good literature. There's also a difference between the "offensive" of radical new philosophies and the "offensive" of Othering and fetishizing the exotic. Gypsies is Song of the South, not Uncle Tom's Cabin.

>Good literature should offend

This is literally the mindset that is giving us One World of Darkness. This is why we're probably getting "Nosferatu Did 9/11" or some shit.

Why was Dracula think individual Storytellers didn't have the capacity to make those decisions and tell stories about those things? I don't want a sourcebook telling me 9/11 was an Inconnu plot, I don't want another appalingly researched "City by Night" book; I want sourcebooks on lost bloodlines, books like New Wave Requiem or Mage Noir that show what a different time or place or style might look like with the subject matter. But we can't do that, can we? WE CANNOT GO AGAINST THE DOGMA OF THE MOTHER CHURCH, screams His Holiness Ericsson the Dracula!

Please stop giving them ideas. oWod is already stupid enough.

wasnt it malkavians?

It's always the Nosferatu, user. Always.

>good literature should offend
Trashy provocative literature should offend, good literature doesn't care who it offends. That's an important difference.