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

No. He must be a mage/Nosferatu/demon/sin-eater!

Why are we ignoring Aspel?

>Why are we ignoring Aspel?

If you know who Aspel is and are still asking the question, you are part of the problem.

Yeah, but what if he's just some guy?

I assume it's because no one, even the person mentioned in the OP, wants to take my advice: youtu.be/SlKao_Pox5A

A really crafty serial killer, off his rocker with crazy

That Santa Fight was horrifying

>I feel that some of this is unnecessary. and not worth the causality rates
Welcome to Beasts.

This is even Mummies' opinion on them, and Mummies are ALL ABOUT being beholden to ancient, out-of-date value systems.

Is it even possible to rape a werewolf(Uratha or Garou)?

>Someone is trying to rape.
>Death Rage
>Lots of gore

>s it even possible to rape a werewolf(Uratha or Garou)?

Even Thyrsus mages would find the idea "ill-advised."

Because not doing so results in the entire thread drowning under Aspel arguing with anyone and everyone who'll talk to him.

Depends on what Gifts the werewolf has access to. If they have the Cunning facet of the Gift of Strength, for example, it is impossible to restrain the werewolf. It works exactly as well on iron chains as it does on completely isolated pocket dimensions.

I M20 any good? Or any Mage game, that is.

>M20
>good

Ignore all posters.

M20 is having to swim in a sea of shit for the good parts.

As a rulebook mage revised or 2nd is better.

You can't rape the willing. >:-3

Need something inspirational or just crazy?

Behold the old Time of Judgement Newsticker!

web.archive.org/web/20060821180345/http://timeofjudgment.com/newsticker.html

Is it possible for someone to find nosferatu attractive? Is it possible for a toreador? I mean, if you remember Imalia from Bloodlines, she's actually beautiful in a creepy sort of way. Or if you look at fan art such as pic related.

From what I understand, it's more of a possibility in Requiem than in Masquerade.

If you managed to get your hands on some incendiary rounds they'd completely fuck up a vamps shit right?

The ToJ ticker is maybe one of the best "shit's getting real" things that I've read in a long while.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_and_Lorena_Bobbitt

The cover up

Depends on the version, and in said version, how much Fortitude/Resilience/other damage reduction power they have.

Well let me rephrase, they'd be a lot better than regular bullets right? I mean shit packing tracers to go up against them would be better.

Yes actually there is a cannon Nos in Requiem New Wave that uses her physical beauty with her fearsome gaze to become a dominatrix. Nothing stops Nos from taking Striking looks. Basically you're having to constantly combat an inborn curse

Imalia is fucking hot

>read the entire thing in the voice of the PT radio announcer
>it immediately gets 10 times creepier

They'd be better than regular bullets yes, in the sense they do aggravated damage. So definitely better.

having blanket damage type replacement feels like a bad idea.

A dice pool of 5 lethal dam becomes 5 agg dam. And this can keep scaling upwards into insanity.

The science behind tracers rounds is a flare trail. If I were making the call I'd just say every hit causes an additional level of agg damage, and might catch the vamp on fire, if the dice gods will it.

Still pretty good but not dragon rounds level of BS

i saw some pretty cute nos art once in a long lost corner of deviantart, and we're talking masquerade here
sure she had no hair and elf ears and vaguely green skin but her face and body were really cute
i figure unless you had a very lenient st you couldn't actually make a nos character like that though

Here's another probably unrealistically cute nos

>dragon rounds vs vampires

Fuck me I'd be terrified if I was a fangface.

>Dragon's Breath
simplest analog

DnD Dragonborn Breath weapon. Shotgun range, but fuck you fire cone. and easily derails stories in which it appears. Just stick to swords at close range and don't bother with these unless you start to hate your players

>"Oh thats cute he thinks a gun will be able to hurt m-"

I actually think their OWoD damage rate is like an 8?

Reasons to buy Fort

Is Beast actually bad? I haven't read the rulebook yet but the concept sounds interesting enough, especially if it was in a mixed chronicle.

Beast's core problem is the fact that beasts are murder-rapists who actively abuse and torture people by their very nature, and the entire gameline spends all of its trying desperately to convince you that they aren't villain protagonists.

Also the fact that the book goes out of its way to make their main antagonist an MRA caricature who barely even register as a threat

Here is some reading material
reddit.com/r/rpg/comments/38m7wm/beast_the_primordial/

projects.inklesspen.com/fatal-and-friends/kurieg/beast-the-primordial/

Lets not have a huge thread fight over this. Largely it is mechanically simple which is good for new players or playing off splats in a mostly one splat game. But its themes and writing have a lot of unfortunate implications

If run well you could have yourself a really interesting idea. but I find it's whole thrwoing the narrative upside down. silly when I can just do that in any other game without needed a new splat with baggage

>a threat
to be fair. He did run over a beast with his car. which says more for the lethality of car collisions than for his wit, but its something at least

The idea behind Beast isn't a bad one. You could do cool things with it. As-written, it's a splat that assumes primacy over every other splat and is written with a layer of immense smugness smeared across the top. It takes itself too seriously, asserts its themes over the themes of other nWoD games, and does its damnedest to make the splat Objectively Right.

>Is it even possible to rape a werewolf(Uratha or Garou)?

Garou werewolves? Yeah, the Black Spiral Dancers in particular have been known to torture their fellow Garou, and one of those ways of torture is rape, unfortunately.

I've had the weirdest dream tonight. It was about how Batman's parents were killed not on the orders of Falcones, but rather Giovanni, so he swore revenge against the supernatural and became a hunter, who kept Gotham safe.
I wonder if it could work.

Great review. Thanks. Won't burn my money on this shit.

Frenzy/Death Rage doesn't actually make you stronger, so why would that be a counter? Just because the werewolf gets very angry (as someone being raped usually is) doesn't mean their situation has improved at all.

>Frenzy/Death Rage doesn't actually make you stronger
...
...
Traits: Strength +3, Dexterity +1, Stamina +2, Size +2

There is also the fact that Beasts have a mystical "all other supernaturals love me" field. Which turns them into grade A Mary Sue's.

The biggest problem however is that Beast lacks an internal conflict. Heroes aren't conflict, they are obstacles. Beasts don't have any large-scale enemies to work against.

Frenzy is a vampire thing, and that sure makes you stronger.

Death Rage doesn't INHERENTLY make you stronger (apart from the killing form), but they use many of their powers for free when they are in it. And that makes them terrifying.

A strange, sexy creature

I think it could be cool. Could it support an entire Justice League of Darkness though?

There's some dude who is using DC And Batman stuff whole cloth, complete with a game set in Gotham, using NWoD supernaturals and system. Perhaps you could ask him about whatever changes he's made to the setting.

It never actually got off the ground.

I didn't get to develop it much, but I gave my players a set up that used familiar elements.
No Man's Land basically happened years ago, and it was Thomas Wayne who kept the city together, and he got involved in politics after the city's order was restored. He and Martha were killed because of their political aspirations, and Bruce was sent away. The story basically started back up when Bruce was coming back to the city.

The player pack's Totem was The Detective On Leather Wings, which was a spirit that came into being because of young Bruce obsessing, and would be what eventually lead to him being Batman.

The pack's first threat was going to be a version of Solomon Grundy that was an Extempore of sorts. I also had plans for using that whole Wonder City part of Arkham City.
But I could only find three people who were remotely interested in Werewolf, a fourth that really wasn't, and when stress got to one player (and me) I basically had no game.

>IGNORE X

Has anyone met the Unholy in game? I'm looking for inspiration for when I drop her on my players' plate.

Technically speaking from a theoretical perspective, it is possible.
Other garou in WoD do that constantly, in both ends.
Back in the 1st / early 2nd edition days, a good percentage of BSDs were rape cub rejects, who couldn't be adopted even by Bone Gnawers.

When I was part of the Mind's Eye Society LARP group, I met her a couple of times at conventions (it helped that my lineage was descended from her, an Ordo bloodline that clung to the belief that she was Anoushka given over to a failed, or successful depending on how you look, Coil that mitigated the effects of Diablerie).

I also knew the player who portrayed her well. But she was portrayed in the LARPs as a very soft-spoken individual who had a very 'actions speak louder than words' mentality, but when she spoke, and it was a big deal when she would actually converse, she was... eloquent isn't the right word. She was rough and abrasive, but intensely inisghtful and direct and to the point. She was also leaning very much into the Gangrel flaw as a roleplay aspect, and so her insights were viewed through a very visceral intellect.

Freude!

So, she didn't lay waste to the domain, is what you're saying?

She didn't lay waste to the hosting domain, no. She wasn't social; it was more of a 'seek her out if you dare' kind of situation. She was there to kill a powerful Invictus who was trying to bring the Prima Invicta from the Danse Macabre book into existence (and it turned out the guy was Strix-possessed, so we thought she was there for that primarily). She did kill some PCs and NPCs, but the majority of the game treated her as an insane boogeyman that didn't warrant fucking with. The main people that interacted with her were a few Invictus who tried to bring her in for diablerie, the lineage I was part of (and even then some of us got our asses kicked just sky of final death) and a few others who poked at the bear.

They presented her as a boogeyman, but she had an underlying mission there.

Hm. Alright. Thanks for sharing. Seems she was there with a quite specifically political mission then. I think I prefer her more as an apocalyptic force of nature.

I'd say less political and more motivation for the strix (at least that's how I took it, after she killed the guy and the Strix leapt out of his and a couple of other big mover-and-shaker bodies). I always took it that she had some grudge against the Strix and were trying to eliminate them, though I left the MES shortly after that convention.

This version was also somewhat tailored for the MES LARP setup, in which 'being there with the sole goal to kill PCs and roll a domain' is not really something that generates good plot.

Fair enough. So how did she murder them, the guy and the strix?

I remember there being a fairly short combat for a LARP, only about 6 rounds. I was far enough away that I didn't see what chops were thrown, but I would assume she used claws, combo with vigor and probably some crazy high BP attributes due to her diablerie. She and all of our lineage had the big huge claws that were full on bird talons from the elbows down, and we got Vigor as an in-clan Discipline from her lineage. I don't recall if she killed the Strix, I just recall them abandoning their possessed bodies.

Good job solider. The quarantines must hold

Freude!

theonyxpath.com/2016-year-in-review-matthew-dawkins/

I think this is our first actual text look at Half-Damned, right? First look at its fiction, at least.

I hope the new dhampir rules will be better than the old ones. I also wouldn't mind seeing other forms of vampires like weakling daywalkers.

>Is it possible for someone to find nosferatu attractive?

There's always going to be people with out-of-the-ordinary fetishes. Somewhere out there there's probably quite a few who'd want to bang a Nossie.

But, it depends heavily on the Nossie in question.

If the Nossie just has chalk-white skin, baldness, some scars, extra long fingers, a really raspy voice, that sort of thing? Yeah, I could buy it.

If the Nossie's face is actually like melted cheese, a mouth shaped like a lamprey, their body absoutely infested with leeches and ticks, has constantly-open sores that spew out pus, an inability to control their flatulence and other similarly "fun" social problems... then I doubt it. I mean, sure, there's gonna be that one guy/gal that enjoys that sort of thing no matter how fuked up you look, but it goes without saying that they'd be part of a very exclusive club.

bump

So, what would an Acanthus do with Space?

You know how that witch can be tracked down comparatively easily, and needs to actually see or touch you to curse your ass?

Not any fucking more.

Fuck up people's social skills, know where people are all the fucking time, curse people from the safety of your home, hide your home from discovery, teleport about without a single fuck, trap people in spatial bubbles, hide ludicrous amounts of crap in your pockets, and hide in the little cottage you excised from the Fallen world.

Phil Brucatto utterly ruined M20. The book is a hard to read phonebook full of conflicting and confusing rules. Ignore it and collect Revised or 2e era books.

Become Santa Claus

From a narrative point of view, is Resilience 'preventative' or 'postoperative'

A vampire with 5 dots of resilience gets his arm caught in a wheat thresher, upon which he activates Resilience:

Does his arm get torn off, causing an amount of damage that could possibly be fully soaked via resilience, meaning its a cosmetic wound that can be healed for 1 vitae?

Does the thresher fail to dismember his arm for a purely narrative reason?

Does the actual action of having your arm removed mean that the thresher did such a high amount of damage that you couldn't actually soak it all?

It's like the first episode of Smallville, where CLark shoves his arm in the thresher. It doesn't do damage as Resilience is reflexive, activating BEFORE the damage is done, and hardening the flesh to resist the damage; anything aboe the resilience reduction is then damage, so if it's a lot it may be more than cosmetic.

I think we're supposed to get Dhampirs, expanded Revenants, and at least one more minor template, but don't quote me on that.

"Subtract his Resilience dots plus one from all non-bane sources of damage. Mechanically this is similar to armor, but does nothing to reduce the visual and superficial signs of injury."

Regardless of whether you decrease the damage or not, if the effect would have torn off your limb or turned it into a bloody wreck without it, then that's exactly what it does.

You first decrease actual damage as normal per Resilience.

Then spend Vitae, either to take you back to your health before that injury, regenerating your arm in the process, or spend 1 point of Vitae to heal the cosmetic wound (if you took not actual damage after reduction) and get your limb back anyway.

What can the mages and werewolves do to spectacularly attack someone else's turf?

So I have a session coming up, players want to play Vampire Requiem, and one of the players will only be here for a week. There's some new players who have never heard of WoD, and I want to show them around. They are kind of murder hobos.

I'm trying to show them the cooler aspects of Mages, Werewolves, and Hunter in a story that can be wrapped up in 3-5 sessions. I'd like to show them the cooler aspects of those games that could be achieved as a player, and maybe encourage them to come back.

So my thought was just to have them protect the Prince's domain from mages, werewolves, and uppity hunters. Problem is, I don't very much about Mage or Werewolf. Thoughts?

If you put Vampires up in a direct conflict against Mages (which is likely considering you described them as Murder-Hobos) then you're either going to need to sell those Mages short, or get prepared for a whole load of those Vampires getting burnt to ash.

Mages mostly care about their Obsessions, supernatural aspects of the world they investigate to learn more, and enhance the power of their souls, so they can eventually ascend to what is essentially Godhood.

Similar story with Werewolves, but that's easier. Excess Vampire feeding is fucking with local Resonance, or giving death/blood/pain/lust spirits a nice place to hang. Which is fucking with the local Uratha's carefully cultivated Spirit ecosystem.

Don't do mages. It's always a headache.

>mage superiority

Do blood sorcery if you're not willing to read up on mages. They cause frustration when they're play overpowered. Mostly from the misconceived perspective of DnD wiztards. Up close and personal mages are kind of fucked, yeah they can do some cool tricks, but they're still fleshy humans who die to bullets. Where they shine is when they have time and planning on their side. If they have fore knowledge, or good guess work, they can prep shielding, environment and sight spells to level the playing field. Like putting up a flame shield before going into the dragon's lair but then finding out it's an ice dragon instead.

They're the investigation and ritual splat. A surprise shotgun to the back of the head takes them out. And the mechanics actually reinforce that theme. kind of like glass cannons. Grapples take them out. So in actuality any conflict with mages turns into a spy thriller of deceit, ambush, and cover up.

So unless you're really dedicated to learning mage, just use blood sorcery and fake it. Note of advice for scaling effects. The longer the sorcerer has time to charge and prep their props the nastier the spell will be.

AS for werewolves. they're murdermachines less of an extent in nwod but the quickest solutions is still run it over with the car. so learn the big numbers and combat weapons if you want to include them

Dhampir, Revenants, and Ghouls. Maybe something on the Pjiavica, Jiang Shi, and whatever other not-quite kindred thats out there. I really want something on the mandragora/mandrakes. Vampire winery when.

I don't see how they could protect the domain from mages, unless you want the mages to be severely underpowered, which would defeat the purpose of showcasing them. Even at just a disciple level, any mage from any of the paths would be a pain in the ass to defend something from. Maybe just make it one mage who wants to steal a grimoire or something else magical from the Prince. Have him be the wild card in your story, while the werewolves and hunters provide more direct conflict.

>mage superiority
It's cute you think saying that disproves anything I said.

k don't read then no skin off my back you don't like nwod

Individually, mages are quite formidable, yet hardly insurmountable, adversaries.

Mage *cabals* with even a modicum of Arcana spread and experience, no less if backed by the local Consilium, Assembly or Ministry, are a DEFCON 1 level threat to most other supernaturals if played to their potential. They tend to be sleeping bears that you do not want to poke with a stick. It's also best if mages never find you "interesting." Remember, the primary theme of Mage is just what people are capable of when given vast cosmic power.

Nevertheless, it's true that mages are indeed squishy humans, and if *totally* surprised and met with *overwhelming* numbers and force, might fall. However, most mages not only have significant offensive and shielding capabilities, but also a number of immediate "get the hell out of Dodge" powers like flight, teleportation entering other dimensions, etc. Once the element of surprise is lost, and the mages know the identity and nature of the threat, it's basically game over. No other splat has the capability to deal death and destruction at a great distance over a wide area without even being present.

More importantly, surprising mages, particularly if any Acanthus are around, is also far easier said than done.

A good explanation of the threat that mages may present is discussed in the Demon Storyteller's Guide, p.130-32.

Thats a numbers game kid, you're applying all possible powers of a splat to one character. It's not a might fall. It's a coin flip. and we have a system to play out the conflicting counter powers clash of wills.

and you can't just get around the sympathy mechanics by just knowing the enemy. and the Withstand mechanic actually makes these situations way less one sided.

Each iteration of mage has been stabilizing their quadratic curve of power. They have power yes, and they do have a lot of it. but to bring it to bear they need time and prep.The tighter their constraints the less they can death star and the more they have to laser pistol. unless you want to say fuck it and take off all the safety locks. and the mage is just as likely to get blow back or just fuck up.

At the end of the day its conflict without a clear winner. which makes for the story

Any 2nd or revised books you'd say are "must haves"?

The Guide to the Technocracy and all of the Convention books. I'm also a huge fan of what I think was Bitter Road, and then the Dark Ages and Sorcerer's Crusade stuff is very neat.

Are any of those in particular helpful for really getting players into the idea of paradigm? M20 seemed super weak on it.