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

So a friend has asked me to help him set up some VtR game stuff, because I'm somewhat more read up on the subject.

I basically borrowed that one idea that some user posted about a week or so ago (maybe more), have him get his players start out as humans, write up their characters the way they want them to be, and then get them embraced by whichever Clan/bloodline is most appropriate. Which has worked out fucking great. Not all of them were embraced at the same time, obviously, nor did they start out playing together, but the group is coming along slowly.

But now he's conspiring with one of the other players some mild scheming stuff, like having one of the players characters be a distant cousin of some other player, who arranged for that other player to get embraced by someone else, so that they'd have some form of family going for them in unlife.

How likely is this shit to happen and even more importantly how likely can it blow up in their faces? I haven't been told all the details, but the GM is kind of playing it off as being some kind of twisted familial love that got warped by the players vampire condition.

I only have a passing familiarity with Requiem. But my friends want a vampire crossover.

If a reliable source mentions a rumor about a coffin with Dracula himself in torpor has been shipped to town. How would the local kindred react?

Probably the same scoffing way we would, honestly.

This isn't breaking any traditions and It would run hand in hand with vampire craziness I think.

Starting a dynasty using bunch of mortal relatives is something you wouldn't be discouraged from doing.

There are 3 vampires running around having a good claim to being Dracula and yet they still provoke eye rolling and snickering behind their backs.

Rumor about coffin is kinda meh from the perspective of local kindred unless there is huge Ordo Dracul presence

What if the eldar has an absurd level of power?

Thanks, I was worried there for a second it might have been getting too much hand-wavey just to make shit happen the way they want it.

Ech then it really depends on a local setting. Biggest disruption you could cause if the city has large Circle of Crone and Lancea Sanctum population and elder in question is a long missing Saint(Dawid for example). Then everyone would flip their shit

In general no one would bat an eye if vampire has mortal relative that is his touchstone and then decides to embrace it. This is similar situation

Get a mage to kill it.

>Get a mage to kill it.

>You can always depend on your friendly neighborhood Obrimos for all your undead killing needs... prices very reasonable...

>tfw you will never play a Hero, enter the cave, slay the hideous gorgon Beast, and free your father from the underworld

Why not? While playing Hero probably lacks depth for a long campaign this is fine idea for one shot

You just described a fairly banal mage Astral excursion.

I have a question.

Do the Magefags enjoy cucking these threads?

I'm sure they do Billy, I'm sure they do.

>Spongemage Squarewizard

love 'em, or hate 'em. They do help keep these threads somewhat populated and not just 3 anons chatting about the same 3 topics. Plus, they help unite like... literally every other cWoD and CofD faction against them

But a thread full of shot isn't much better.

Speaking of the three Dracula pretenders, where can I find their profiles? I remember a potential childe of the Count in a Night Horrors book, but I have no idea where to find the others.

So, when STing Changeling, is it wise to start your players out with their escape? Running my first game soon, when I've looked up sample adventures and such they always seem to start with the Changelings already in the Freehold. Also, if I do it this way, how should they be given a chance to join the Courts?

Generally speaking, you start the game with everyone having escaped already.

Some people have a hardon for preludes.

But doing it as a group would just put unhealthy pressure to have them all be from the same Keeper/escaping at the same time or whatever, which is never a good idea.

Covenant book for Ordo Dracul in Allies and Antagonists section.

Just remeber you have to tweek some details since fog of ages is not a thing in second edition

My plan was to have them all break out of a Goblin Market together after some captive hedge-beast gets loose and causes a scene. Is that a bad idea?

Well, all issues of removing the opportunity for any of the players to have their own ideas on how they escaped/etc aside, and the question of just how common it is for the Gentry to take their slaves to the Markets (or how common the Gentry being in the Markets at all, if they were, why would free Changelings ever go there?)?

It would probably make them look REALLY SUSPICIOUS to any potential freehold or courts that tookt hem in, with a huge likelihood of their being secret Loyalists who all "just happened" to escape together at the same time by coincidence and chance? This isn't necessarily a terrible thing, lots of plothooks there, but think it over.

I was intending for the courts to be suspicious of them at first. First act of the chronicle would basically just be them trying to integrate themselves into the Freehold.

Also, while we're talking about losing opportunities for player ideas, it might be worth noting that the players don't actually know it'll be a Changeling game. I've asked them to make human characters, then I'll run solo prelude sessions going over their capture and durance, then I'll help them stat out the Changeling parts. They're new to the system, and the ones who aren't I've spoken to about characters already since there's no point trying to surprise them.

>the question of just how common it is for the Gentry to take their slaves to the Markets (or how common the Gentry being in the Markets at all, if they were, why would free Changelings ever go there?)?
Goblin Markets does suggest that slave traders visit the Markets.
>One of the most obvious risks of a Goblin Market is that the characters may wind up as merchandise themselves. The Gentry sometimes go slumming in a Market, after all. More importantly, a Market usually involves traders that will go to the gates of Arcadia to hock their wares. If a particular changeling looks as though he or she might fetch a particularly nice price back in Faerie, the goblins may risk trying to capture the poor soul. Rumor has it some vile privateers haunt the shadows of the Markets for just this reason.

Yeah, I know, I just meant "multiple keepers at the same time all with their own slaves ready to escape at the first opportunity".

Of course, if it's just one keeper, their having multiple slaves ready to escape seems rather unlikely as well, I know there's slave-trading at the Markets (including shanghi-ing potential customers from time to time), I know Gentry sometimes show up there, it's just the numerous changelings involved that makes things complicated.

's all I'm saying.

If there's several goblin merchants trading in slaves at this particular market, he wouldn't necessarily have all his wares bought from one supplier.

*they wouldn't necessarily have all their
Sorry, I was talking about a singular goblin when I started writing that

W:tA fag here
This is my favorite game in the line, I think Vampire and Mage would be better but non one plays them like they are intended to and the others are just not quite there.
I know Werewolf gets a bad rap and its fanboys a wose one, so ask me anything and let's dispel some misconceptions, eh?

Ok CpfD fag here. Why is history of werewolf genocide after genocide with fera, native tribes, humans and so on falling victim to bad decision after bad decision made by garou? This kinda makes werewolfs look like vile morons

Vampire sucks unwashed ballsack

Werewolf is alright, but kinda gay

Mage is enlightening and you become a better person for playing it

This triggers me.

>I know Werewolf gets a bad rap and its fanboys a wose one, so ask me anything and let's dispel some misconceptions, eh?

How bad is the furry scene?

>This triggers me.

>Beast fan

Doesn't it? But that's one of the points about the game. You play this furry killing machine prone to get into a killing frenzy from an argument. Would be pretty unrealistic if a society of these people didn't fuck up, regularly, because of anger and pride.
So when your werewolf character is about to tear some face off he can do that or he can reflect on that one time where werewolves got angry and nearly exterminated all their allies and made the world shit forever.
The Impergium and the War of Rage serve to give the setting an underlying theme of "Don't repeat the mistakes from the past and try to make amends before everything is irreedemably fucked" which is totally an engagig story you can tell in this game.
>What's CpfD?

According to the peopke that usually troll these threads, very bad.
I can see how Werewolf would appeal to furries, but I'm not one and I never met anyone admitting to be one, online or in person, so I really can't say.

Mage is a splendid game by the book I've never found a way to play it that doesn't devolve into urban superheroes or superspies. No questing, musing over Paradigms, none of those things that look good in the corebook but are by large found boring/silly by the majority of RPlayers.

>What's CpfD?
Typo. CofD is what I ment to underline the fact I have limited knowledge of oWoD setting. I see your point but all those years passed and wolfs in WtA seem to still be at each other throats. I guess it's also in character but one has to wonder how Wyrm didn't win yet?

The Wyrm can't act directly, it has to puppet humans. And humans being able to make much of an impact for the Wyrm's agenda is a really recent development.
But with the oil spills, fracking, nuclear power, diffusion of harmful chemicals in the food, water, air and the lives packed with ennui, hopelessness and despair the Wyrm is near the finish line already. Like in recent Vampire (3rd Edition and V20) the Apocalypse isn't some shit that is going to happen in some sort of Mad Max future. In Werewolf you are playing it and you are not winning.

And yeah if werewolves have stopped bickering and started doinmg shit the situation would be far better. Tragic, really.

NMage 2e has a setting predicated on the idea of alternate realities.

It's deeper and more symbolic than that. Retroactive sweeps of reality.

I see. Tell me how much ecology/humans ruining it for everyone is there really in WtA. It does not bother me by itself but if I don't want to play captain planet is there a lot of trimming I would have to do?

The Wyrm is fucking it up for everyone and using humans to do it, that's kinda the point. That doesn't mean that every session must be about mutants shoveling nuclear waste in the rainforest. You could play up the urban aspect of the war, where it's more about the oppressive atmosphere making humans go crazy and open to corruption. Corporate evils, homelessness, organized crime, vampires, shit like that are just as good manifestations of the Wyrm.
You could also play Garou politics, or run the more spiritual side and run Umbral stories. You can kind of play Planescape with the Deep Umbra and it's got setting for years of play without ever touchig the material world. Or tell a story about purging vampires, Dancers, nests of spirits or anything else that needs killing.

The environmentalist thing, you see, it's from the '90s, and the ridicolous excesses and preaching are pretty intrinsic to any White Wolf game, especially this. They can be downplayed and ignored but I fear not taken away completely without scrapping the game.

Very, very much so.

Some of the material unsubtly comes close to advocating for eco-terrorism

See, i've always interperted magic in both games as being about imagination. Symbols and belief are more like letters and words, the media rather than the message. Probably why I missed that.

I recall the time our Glass Walkers and a Son of Ether set up a Thorium Plant to monkeywrench Pentex's coal stocks and had to convince everyone else they weren't wyrm-bait because "NO NUKES, MAAAAN".

The 'Walkers plan was to use the plant to drive down the cost of Pentex shares and use it to sabotage from within where as the SoE wanted to set up the plant as a Proof of Concept after his dad died from Black Lung.

The Buyout attempt led to us fighting off kill teams in our shape-changing power armor with Klaivesaws while the SoE backed us up in a VTOL.

This of course mandated bloody retribution against Pentex "clean coal" projects.

In the end, we had to bail, but managed to do enough damage to Pentex that one of the Mirrorshades actually thanked us. OWoD could get really over the top, which I kinda miss in the new games.

>fog of ages is not a thing in second edition

Booooooo.

I actually have some notes on making Heroes into a full splat somewhere.

Basically Integrity is replaced with Determination, which works kind of like a mix of Harmony and Sekhem. The higher it is the more powerful you are but you get more fixated on killing monsters. At 10 you become a beast-obsessed slasher, at 0 you give into despair and are an easy target for any beast.

X-Splat is your calling, Sage(Mental), Paladin(Physical) or Noble(Social). Your Calling gives you a lesser and greater Declaration, which allows you to state truths about a subject(sage), make an action almost impossible to stop(paladin) or inspire a crowd to action(noble)

Y splat is your Creed, sort of like in OHunter.

Heros and Beasts are still linked, but the question of whose story it is becomes more open.

Hmm that sounds like a start for Hero game. How would you gain and lose Determination?

Basically you gain it through heroic deeds and lose it through refusal. Spairing a beast is a break towards Despair at high levels, killing one at low levels is a break towards Alhambra. Yes, I am borrowing elements from Princess, which really has some interesting ideas for fleshing out Heroes. Even if it is overfocused on "magical girls"

So I'm looking at Necromancy in Dark Ages 20, and holy shit is the Bone Path better there. The fifth and sixth dots are the same (and still kinda inappropriate for a path about raising the dead)

Let's run down the differences.

1 dot
>V20: You can made a dead body twitch, which is spooky. No mechanical effect.
>DVA20: You can animate a group of corpses to fulfill a non-combat task.

2 dots
>V20: Exactly the Dark Ages 1 dot power.
>DVA20: You can create a homoculus, which obeys you perfectly but must remain within 100 yards and is very small.

3 dots
>V20: Roll Wits+Occult diff 8- for every success, you can spend 1 blood point to raise one bog standard zombie. They follow one command relentlessly.
>DVA20: Same roll, but you get 2 zombies per bloodpoint/success, and can additionally spend blood points to increase the zombies' physical attributes to make them deadlier. Don't want a small horde? Create one super zombie.

Man, I'm gonna try and convince my Storyteller to use the DVA20 version. Wonder if the other paths are similarly improved here.

Does anyone have the Revised Guide to the Sabbat in pdf? All I can find are unseeded torrents and low quality scans with missing pages

Are you planning to expand on Heroes relation to Primordial Dream or whatnot?

>Clan Bane (The Wanton Curse): You
taste the romance in all things, but none so
much as blood. Mortals are not just food. They
are your obsession, and that fixation grows
with every sip. Drink more than once, from
any mortal, and you risk becoming emotionally
dependent on your prey.

Wait, what? So basically, a form of blood-bond, even with mortals?

Can Veeky Forums recommend a good Necromancy starting path? Sepulchre is decent, but seems designed to get you fucked by ghosts with no way to retaliate- Ash has some really neat powers, but again, buttraped by ghosts, though with it you can at least fight back- if you have other powers. Bone is great if you want to break the masquerade by having a Brujah rip a few weak zombies apart, Vitreous is really neat but... not super coherent? I mean, "can see death dates, break stuff (eventually), eat ghosts (but it can't sustain you and you can't summon ghosts)" are odd powers. Fifth and fourth dots are great, but, well, capstone powers, not the building blocks. Cenotaph is only useful if you've made Sepulchre or Ash your main. And Grave and Corpse are both dead paths basically.

I'm downplaying them, but I really want to go full necromancy because it's cool as fuck and has lots of interesting ideas, but it feels like if I want to get good use out of Necromancy, I need at least 3 dots or more, and at least 2 dots in a secondary path just to start- and then I'm going to die to a ghost because if I go full necromancy then I've got no other Disciplines- so I'm barely stronger than a mortal, so a ghost will wreck me. Not to mention that the books are super vague on what ghosts can do.

So far, I'm thinking main Sepulchre or Ash, with whatever I don't chose as secondary, or Vitreous (because those capstones are very, very sexy), maybe bone path as a 2nd or 3rd path later because while it may be a bit garbage, a necromancer who can't make zombies sucks. Also it means you get disposable fleshy robots/rewards for wraiths via Daemonic Possession.

tldr Trying to make a necromancer at chargen, can't seem to do it, help

I'm a Sepulcher fag, so I'm a bit biased, but I think it's pretty useful even at 2-3 dots. What clan are you?

Nagaraja, though I've not heard back from the GM, so it'll be Giovanni if they're not allowed.

This mega has the Humble Bundle version, which is an OCR PDF, not a scan. In fact, if you sort by name, anything marked Revised - is from the Humble Bundle version, all are really good OCR PDFs that don't seem recreated from scans at all. The 13 Clan Books, 3 Sect Books, Book of Nod and Revised Core are all there. Enjoy.

mega.nz/#F!pBE1hYSK!DQKqkQgl8vs5mV9qaIWDnw!xNkURTZD

I was planning on being focused on occult, medicine, and social skills, in that order. Social/mental/physical for attributes.

>mega.nz/#F!pBE1hYSK!DQKqkQgl8vs5mV9qaIWDnw!xNkURTZD

hell yeah my dude.

When making a character for VtR, do you have to pick a Covenant?

Where's Hurt Locker and Chronicler's Guide? They're not in the pastebin.

Unaligned is a thing.

Hurt Locker is in the mega here. Which Chronicler's Guide though? I'd check the Requiem and Mage sections of the mega for those.

Thinking about it, but i haven't really familiarized myself with Beast too much because there's so much cringeworthy shit that reading it is a chore. There's a good game buried in there somewhere, but I have to remind myself that the writers have swallowed the beast propaganda rather than remaining objective.

Especially when it comes to depicting becoming Incarnate as a good thing. I have a Hero (N)PC idea whose quest is to stop Beasts from Incarnating. Preferable without killing, but if they force the issue...

My Vision for the "Beast Revised Fanwork" is that of Two Games in one, inextricably bound to each other.

I like the idea of heroes often coming from greatness denied(whether or not it's perceived or real is irrelevant).

Hero gifts need to be expanded to work on other monsters (though not as well) and allow for a variety of new options like familiars based on slain beasts, henshin transformation, and other "fun" heroic concepts.

Good, because none of them interest me.

Carthians remind me of the Anarchs, except even more retarded.

Crone-shits are the kind of shit I just don't like incorporating into any characters I play.

Invictus have the vibe of scheming Methuselahs from VtM, so I'm staying clear of that.

Ordo Dracul are wannabe Tzimisce.

And LeT are some kind of odd mix between the Sabbat and Camarilla, more Lasombra-like in how they go "I must torment the mortals" than anything else.

what would a win scenario for WtA apocalypse chronicle look like?

Depends on which tribe you ask

>Implying OD aren't wannabe mages

Every magefag I know wants to roll OD when we play a straight Vampire game, myself included.

Oh so there's more than one? Well I found the one I was looking for, for Mage.
Also I heard that some elegan/tg/entleman was translating 1e Mage stuff into 2e, like legacies. Does anyone have a link to his work?

Hmm interesting. You could give hero his own Incarnation(Ideal for example) when he actually managed to convey the perceived lesson to the masses as it was supposed to be or something like that.

You shouldn't like any of these assholes, they're vampires. You probably still want to join a gang so you don't look like you can be fucked for free. Besides, losing faith in the movement and finding a way out for you and the one other good one you're still trying to convince is worth XP.

>The Serpent bites his lip, and you barely notice the copper in the kiss.

Wait what? Is that enough?

>The Haunt spits bloody phlegm in your eye, inexplicably, as you pass on the midnight road. Now you sit in your apartment feeling more afraid than you think you ought to, wondering
if you should go get tested for some disease.

That can't possibly be achievable.

>You reach for your expensive coffee, but it tastes weird. A Shadow smiles in front of your face, but you cannot see her.

Again, how much is enough here? A drop or two? If more, how the fuck does it not get spat out right away?

>You drank from a chalice when a Lord commanded you to. And now you…no…you don’t quite remember what happened.

Okay, this one is actually believable.

>The Savage cuts you and then herself, pressing the open wounds together. Something wild surges between.

This is just bullshit again.

I get that this is someone trying to be somewhat original in the creation of a ghoul, but there should be something believable about it.

Comparatively speaking, Invictus look like the least of fucked up choices, but those fuckers aren't likely to let you go once they get their hooks in you.

>I have literally never read anything

Here you go. I honestly prefer my Echo Walkers more morally grey, and am not sure if Badges should be able to dodge paradox from overreaching.

Maybe, but that would require the Hero to accept the Beast's narrative, which is ultimately the conflict between the two splats.

Beast/Hero should be, at it's core, about two conflicting Narratives and Disagreement. The Truth of either side's claim is irrelevant. Beast and Hero are driven to subvert each other's stories.

They're stuck with each other like siameese twins, no matter how hard they strain against it.

Because let's be honest, the game has no real direction or story potential right now. Sin-Eaters has more direction and way more story potential.

W:tA is very emphatically written in such a way that you cannot imagine ever achieving any more than a Phyrric victory. Either that or the End Times are actually the new status quo and there's no big battle, only the world getting progressively shittier.

Even Apocalypse left those scenarios that ended with a big battle up to ST fiat. I ran Apocalypse and I decided that it would end with Garou managing to banish the greater manifestation of the Wyrm back into the Deep Umbra through some mystical gate they built on the Plain of Apocalypse. The world was already pretty fucked over but it could heal over a lot of time. Garou became guardians of said gate, lest the Wyrm come back.

Das it mane. Thank you.

Maybe you should look into the Dark Hero from the mirrors book. It would help you with ideas & powers.

The only stupid one is the second one, since the blood has to actually enter your bloodstream for the bond to be set.

As for amount of blood it has never been specified, so a few drops should be enough

Thanks, will do.

Still need there to be stuff for beasts and heroes to do besides shit on each other, bother humans, and try and buddy up/wreck other splats.

Me personally I love the whole teaching humanity aspect of beast. So hero's could guide humanity to greater heights, to try and encourage them into creating new Ideas so the Astral can grow.

anyone?

i'm drawing quite a bit of inspiration from Princess already for Heroes (making it more WoD-friendly) and i'm not sure how I didn't think of that.

Heroes and beasts have a different Narrative about what the other's purpose was, and of course they suborn the other to them.

So here's what I got. Heroes claim beasts were meant to test a Hero so they could become what they were really meant to be, but Beasts decided they wanted Alhambra for themselves, ultimately casting it adrift into the primordial dream and stranding humanity in the current world.

>How does medicine apply to animals

If you're one of the magefags from last thread who thought my "the rite of return is a cosmological constant" bit was retarded, please hit yourself in the face right now.

Yeah pretty much.

So I'm thinking the "Power Stat" Will be Arete, covering the Hero's Masteries, but all the other stuff the Power stat usually covers falls under the Morality Stat, Determination. Juice Pool is called "Verve." Low Determination gives penalties to use of Gifts and Masteries, High Determination gives penalties to trying to be a normal person or go unnoticed.

Verve is going to probably be a relatively small "juice pool" because it's basically superhuman will to power.

So if a Daeva feeds off of one mortal more than a several times, does that also increase their desire to turn said mortal into a vampire like themselves, and does the embrace nullify that weird blood bond?

Goddamn it, Harmony should be the Gold Standard for how morality stats work.

Imagine if Mages had to thread the Needle between Hubris (low wisdom) and Detachment (high wisdom) through in-game effort rather than just being "Integrity rewritten to include magic stuff."

I'm not sure how to reflect that mechanically but at high levels it would be Apathy towards the fallen world as you are consumed by the mysteries, while hubris would be getting so involved with the fallen world that you consume the mysteries for your own purposes.

They could maybe want to embrace the mortal, but the blood bond goes away when the mortal dies. To me, being embraced counts as dying.

...

>Ascension
>grown up

I just want to find my bliss through metaphoric self-annihilation & slay some monster bitches along the way
youtube.com/watch?v=xxrEdH1Evik

The entire Chronicles of the World of Darkness were written by emotionally stunted manchildren for emotionally stunted manchildren, like all TTRPGS. None of them are grown up because none of us are grown ups.

Here's your (you)

If you are not completely allergic to manga and you're still not reading Soil, I strongly recommend reordering your priorities. It's the most WoD manga out there.

Even the art vaguely reminds me of some of the artists from the golden years.