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

Just use hedge magicians and sorcerers instead if you don't want the mages to be OP.

How do I create a bread golem in Awakening 2e?

>How would I bring Mage down to Vampire/Werewolf levels in owod and nwod respectively?
>nwod
>nwod

There's omage 1e, 2e, revised (3e), then there is Mage - The Dark Ages, Mage - The Dark Ages - (Revised), then there is nWoD Mage (2005), and is nWOD Mage 2e (2016), which they're calling CofD Mage 2e.

If playing nWoD Mage (2005), then respect the flowchart.
If playing Mage 2e, the back of the book has the tables.
All the books have their respective tables.

>How do I create a bread golem in Awakening 2e?

I'd cheat and look for the highly specific golem spell in Mage 1e core, then I'd look into Tome of the Mysteries for that one spell for binding ephemeral beings into battle automa, and then work out the details with the ST as a research undertaking, also looking into info on making golems in AD&D books, and earning additional good boy points for coming to the game table with stacks of info on golems and a book on Kabbalah.

The trouble you'd find is convincing your ST in the utility of a bread golem. I mean, magic is perilous and not to be taken lightly. Why didn't you make a golem out of something that could blend into the scenery for purposes of surveillance and other covert undertakings? A justification you can give is: "If it all goes wrong, being attacked by my bread creation wouldn't be so bad if I tried cement blocks and steel bars. This is meant to be practice."

Then again, no one would suspect being attacked at a bakery. Coking on a muffin won't trigger Paradox.

Not what I asked but thanks for the references?

Step 1: Bake a bread golem using skills, or magic
Step 2: Learn Matter 4
Step 3: Cast the Golem spell on your golem
Step 4 (optional): Use Conjunctive Mind 5 to give it a mind

Option 1: Get yourself a good Mage PC who knows how to play nice with a group

Option 2: Spend a ludicrous amount of time going through the book and making a massive list of changes that nobody wants to read to try and tone down a splat which is entirely about thinking creatively with Magic and dealing with the consequences of your hubristic recklessness

Option 3: Ban things on the fly, making life a living hell for your Mage player as his Magic becomes "mother may I"

Option 4: Ignore Ascension and Awakening altogether, and use some other form of Magic user, such a the CofD Second Sight book with Hedge Mages, or perhaps Sorcerers from oWoD

There's something to be said for actually understanding how the spellcasting system works and how that limits Mages, but by and large that's hardly a major limiter.

I meant to say that a new player who follows the rules won't recognise how to gank the system, so long that they clung consistently to the rules, and the ST played ball on keeping things paced. A veteran would be looking to do crazy shit like exploiting Matter and Forces with their degree in either Chemistry or Physics.

Let's make our hero's three five-dot Arcana Forces, Matter, and Space. Space 5 means that, given a sympathetic connection (like a hair clipping, some blood, or a photo), he can be on the other side of the planet from a Werewolf and still cast a spell on him (albeit not one that's full-out offensive). Or, in this case, just open a Scrying window and cast through that. The Mage Your Mage Could Cast Like is definitely going to want to be at least one county away for this one.

With his fifteen dice roll for the rote, our hero casts the Matter 4 spell, Lesser Transmogrification. With his average of five successes, he is able to affect an "olympic swimming pool"'s worth of one kind of matter and transform it into one kind of liquid, and vice versa. The only real limitation is that you can't make impossible things, like liquid wood.

Our hero busts out his chemistry textbook, and settles on turning a 29x29x29 meter chunk of the ground below the Werewolf into liquid chlorine triflouride. (If you count this as an exotic substance, this technically requires Archmastery to do sympathetically.)

This stuff oxidizes more than oxygen itself does, meaning it can burn things you probably think are impossible to burn, like ashes, sand, water, solid asbestos, concrete, bricks, and probably the human soul. As mentioned in the article, a one ton spill of this -- which translates to about 512 liters -- burned through a foot of concrete and at least a meter of sand and gravel before guttering out, while burning off hydroflouric acid fumes, an acid that gives you a fucking heart attack as it burns your skin off.

That was 512 liters. An olympic swimming pool has 2,500,000 liters.

That, my friends, is a whole lot of burning.

Also, if the ambient temperature where the spell is cast is about 13 Celsius or 55 Fahrenheit, the liquid will immediately turn into a gaseous state, probably explosively. If the area is even remotely wooded, or otherwise full of things that burn well to begin with, expect to be able to see the fire from space.

Suffice to say, I don't think you even need to figure out how many dice are rolled to burn up the Werewolf before saying "Fuck it, he's dead. And so is a good portion of the county."

Paradox does not negate the devistation.

I'm playing a Caucasian mummy and none of you can stop me!

>Someone, somewhere casts so enormous, so mind-bogglingly vulgar that the world can't help but notice. We're talking "visible from space" kind of magic. The original caster is almost certainly long since dead or deranged from the ensuing Paradox -- but the damage is done. Whether the various governments of the world attempt to cover it up or not, the truth is out there to be found. The Guardians seek to stop the water from rising, while reality terrorists look to blow the hole open wider. What of the Sleepers who witnessed the event more or less directly, having their collective minds blown right before the black helicopters come in full of gentlemen who want to tell them they saw the planet Venus.

What would the Paradox roll be on this?

In oWoD? Arbitrarily large.

In CofD? Pretty darn small.

Are you playing M20? What is the mage's Arete and Spheres? Depending on those you needn't even weaken them as they'd already be weak enough.

Does Life 2 counteract Pattern Bleeding by simply changing the Mage's actual pattern to reflect new Life 3 permanent changes?

Life 3 cannot alter patterns permanently

How should an ST deal with the wisdom outcome of what amounts to a massive chemical weapons attack on a country? Does he get away with one roll for his omnicidal actions, or do you make the player role for each senseless death until he hits zero and has to hand over the sheet?

>In oWoD? Arbitrarily large.
"Being meguca is suffering."

>In CofD? Pretty darn small.
It's time to order WoD Mirrors WW55210. Enjoy all kinds of post-apocalyptic scenarios. Being mage WILL have consequence. And magic will have survival utility.

>I'm playing a Caucasian mummy and none of you can stop me!

>Stop the White-Mare!

And the only way to make these changes permanently true without being left as a deformed mass of flesh with a smiling lump-tumor called Johnny (or Permanent paradox) is by spending Experience to buy off the alterations, at least on M20

Life 4 can alter complex patterns. Whether or not is permanent is based on successes.

Thus, you get Pattern Bleed free strength 6, but still incur permanent Paradox

>Should I make him hand over the character sheet?

Keep playing. Come up with a scenario, like spirits crossing over en mass as a consequence of the post-mage chem attack. Let him degenerate as he witnesses the effects of his actions first hand. Let his character even die in the crossfire of what he had conjoured up.

One of the major themes, the central tenent of mage, is hubris.

Let him fall on his own sword.

(cont.)

You're making it a horror story for a Mage character if you can make the player say something along the lines of "I'm in control / I know what I'm doing / I can fix this."

They're not.
They don't.
They can't.

And that's what makes it oh so beautiful.

If they're not inflicting horror on themselves, then they're not being mages.

>Stop the White-Mare!

Fuck Phil!

try actually using the rules.

But a wise and cautious mages CAN do those things IF they tread carefully. But grace and humility are qualities that, while emphasied, are seldom practised when needed most.

Be honest with me. Will Deviant turn into Beast 2.0?

Would it be fishmalk to become violent whenever you hear anyone say swear words around you?

Its being deved by Dave B. So expect lots of power creep and a toxic fanbase composed of dickwavers

>Thus, you get Pattern Bleed free strength 6, but still incur permanent Paradox
Page 22 of M20 HDYDT, you still get pattern bleeding for permanent modifications that need to be bought off with Experience points and a dot of Permanent Paradox for every dot of Attribute above the natural human range (alobgside a bunch of deformities)

>M20
I'm using Revised Rules. M20 is far too much of a slog for me to get through.

Is it in Revised that any mage with Life 3 can get +30 traits in all their Attributes?

It's in revised that Mages can alter their attributes, but it's said that it inflicts pattern bleed if you don't remove it or alter the Mage's pattern to accommodate.

Life 4 is Altering Complex patterns. So you can avoid the Pattern Bleed.

pastebin.com/CFVXz6s0
thank me later

what is exactly the problem? all social systems look terrible

mind you, my main experience with social rules are Exalted's "sap the enemy's will until they suck your dick and are a broken husk"

Why are you having so much trouble with girls man?

The balance problems with mage are PRIMARILY shit like correspondence/space-fucking, by which any mage can effortlessly slaughter anything, mage or not, that does not also have correspondence/space fucking.

Whereas problems like how mages are overall better than other splats are wholly subjective, spacefucking is something that basically shits on the whole setting.

So I would simply ramp up the difficulty for offensive sympathetic casting in various ways, like you need some serious sympathetic yantras (you might need to have someone's family, AND their true name, AND some personal effects reflecting their supernatural splat to space fuck someone, whereas by default you need a crayola drawing and can otherwise kill any mage by casting a fuck you spell through any of their spell effects).

Amazing.

owod: 1 paradox. paradox doesn't work *anything* like it does to the fan community -- the whole "sleepers staring at your vulgar spells" thing might vaguely do something like make it slowly fall apart, but no rules are provided.

nwod: sleepers add oomph and 1-2 dice and dice tricks to existing paradox, but it can be ablated by mana. Still gets *closer* to how fans view paradox (that is, a huge crowd of witnesses makes it more problematic) but not quite there.

nwod 2e paradox comes slightly closer to the meme of "paradox punishes mages for overtaxing themselves" or otherwise being a balancing factor but paradox cannot even 1% be relied upon to keep them in line.

It should simply be a sin against Falling wisdom. Same for vampires and humanity, etc. Even if you did roll separately per death, after the first dot of Wisdom loss, the mage could Inure him to the Wisdom loss, and then be able to use that matter to nuke orphanages at will.

Personally, because Matter is so limited and narrow in scope (golems and wierd chemistry tricks) I would have no problem with a player doing this. ALL arcana are crazy go nuts at 4 dots, and they are mostly much more versatile than Matter (Spirit 4 nets almost limitless familiars, fetishes both for influences and essence storage, and becoming invisible and invincible due to twilight *EVEN IN PLACES WHERE SPIRIT TWILIGHT IS INACCESSIBLE*, with the fact that there are spirits for everything).

I wish the fuckwit on the mage thread earlier would read awakening 2e.

Entering the spirit realm or the underworld via an iris or similar spell that transports you across does not turn you into ephermera.

Its only mentioned that becoming twilight via ghost gate & Twilit Body spell turns you into ephemera.

The reaching spell and create averian gate makes no mention of it.

This is what I would do. I wouldn't punish the player per se, but there'd be tons of storylines that result from this. Upset ghosts and hangry spirits for example.

In Awakening 2e, Paradox doesn't so much punish mages as just contain them, preventing them from fucking with reality too badly in a narratively consistent manner.

>Same for vampires

Meh, killing vampires is a public service and should be rewarded with beats and XP. Besides, they're already dead; the mage is simply "equalizing and updating" reality when it concerns the undead.

>This message brought to you by your friendly neighborhood Obrimos.

In Awakening Space isn't the sole culprit behind balance disparity

yep, People seem to think paradox is shit in 2e but try multiple castings in front of sleepers and it ramps up quickly, over reaching on top and its a recipe for disaster.

1e books on the Shadow mention that you get transformed into spiritual matter (ephemera) when you enter.

So if you stay there for a while, and eat food and water while in there, when you transition back into reality, you're desperately hungry as all that gunk in your stomach just turns right back into ephemera.

Any Arcana at 4 or 5 breaks any semblance of power balance among splats.

Prime less so.

Prime is more a complimentary Arcana, I find. As it should be.

>Prime less so.

What? You freakin' Mage Green Lantern.

Wait, if you enter the shadow with food and it becomes ephermera along with youself, you then eat that food it'll be fine as your both ephermera. If when you leave everything reverts back to material matter then the food will also revert back.

What you describe would only happen if ate native spirit food inside the shadow and then left. However the idea sounds really stupid, once you've eaten it it becomes part of you and you cant take any nourishment already acquired from it back.

Really so booty blasted about an argument with a random internet person you just can't let it go huh? I mean thats what most of this entire general is at this point obviously, but still

This is actually good. DaveB is an exquisite writer and makes exquisite rules.

The thing about nmage 2e that I adore is that the arcana have oompf for different levels, and say 4-5 dots FEEL consequential. So in that respect, I would say nmage is well balanced WITHIN ITSELF.

This isn't to say Dave is good at designing a game that won't obliterate the setting and itself under the weight of its gross overpoweredness, but he's good at making a setting that fully explains WHY adept, mastery, etc. is so great, whereas in omage, the system is shitted upon by a need for 101 conjunctional spheres, Forces 2 static shocking doing vastly more damage than Forces 5, etc. etc.

Dave has brought up before that Deviant will be one of the weaker splats.

Furthermore, the oomphiness of Mage was always by intent.

Nobody is allowed to be wrong on the internet.

>This is actually good. DaveB is an exquisite writer and makes exquisite rules.

Imbued item rules for 2e proves you wrong.

>Imbued item rules for 2e proves you wrong.

>TFW Dave broke his promise and will never release the Mage FAQ

He doesn't release it because you nards keep complaining

OH MY GOD THANK YOU I THOUGHT I'D HAVE TO WAIT EIGHT YEARS FOR THIS TO CIRCULATE

But user! I've been wrong on the internet!

If you take food with you, it's real food which has been converted into an ephemeral state temporarily, so it'll be fine when it comes back.

But if you eat spirit food (which is more likely if you're unaware and in the Shadow for more than a short while), until it's (presumably) fully digested and a part of your pattern, it won't turn physical when you transition back.

Thats exactly what i said. Thanks Parrotanon.

There is an argument that any food native to the underworld wont even provide nourishment in the first place.

Hence the qualifier of "shit like." The stuff that is distasteful in Mage falls under the category of "sure, there's a way to not be obliterated by this... if you have the exact same arcana at a higher level) like Space or Time.

The stuff that is relatively well balanced are things that can be opposed to some degree from multiple arcana. For example, mind powers, though largely BS in terms of overflexibility, can be countered not just by mind, but by fate (also a fairly BS arcanum, but whatever) and prime as well. Similarly, twilight is another thing that is extremely strong and versatile, but can be countered both by its native arcanum and by prime attacks.

Nah. "shit is strong, yo" doesn't mean it wrecks balance. The shit that does wreck balance, usually isn't centered around high levels. For example, the power to kill anyone from a mile away isn't a high level power, nor is the power to undo/redo everything that happens until you win forever.

Mage Green Lantern is firmly "eh, okay" tier stuff in a book full of crazy-go-nuts shit. Prime in general is never going to wreck a campaign.

Not really.
Though then again I haven't really read the Underworld book recently.

lel

You can't win em all, and all encompassing, universal item creation systems are essentially always fucked up.

Imbued items are fucked up in a way that is fairly unnecessary, though.

The fact that Dave makes exquisite rules does not mean he doesn't make stinkers, or that he's always right.

This is why Proctors are the poor cousins of the Puppetteers.

...

I feel like this makes me less able to understand mage spellcasting and I literally play a mage and do this shit in my head weekly.

Who made that chart? It is some kind of accursed Abyssal shard of un-knowledge.

>It is some kind of accursed Abyssal shard of un-knowledge.
You can't prove anything.

wonderful!
Now lets talk about Wraith instead of constantly wanking off Mages.

Risen rules. They better not be pish!

risen looks pretty awesome. Plus the fluff for becoming risen looks cool and evocative (I say this as somebody who was never into risen originally)
more interestingly, it looks like you can have Risen, Wraiths Hues and Orpheus Projectors all in one party. 'S awesome.

>Wraith
Geist needs love.

"After a near-death experience, the character has proven themself worthy of the Lord's love -- and his power. Inviting the grace of the Lord into his body isn't even an act of faith; it's his duty, one that has been thrust upon him by his closeness to God."

>Geist

>Possession by a ghost (or spirit, goetia, etc) is most definitely by "inviting the Grace of the Lord into your body." If fact, it sounds pretty darn ungodly.

Now, Awakening as an Obrimos, that's about as Heavenly as one can hope for.

>This fag can't even identify the best path

wow, that post chain lasted three posts before going back to mage
can mage get a seperate general, pls?

>Defiling the very Earth with their presence while seeking to undermine the commandments of the Holy Ghost with that blasphemous tongue of theirs.

Accursed malefactor, you will burn for your treachery.

Huh? What more "godly" in the traditional Western sense than Awakening as an Obrimost?

This is practically the Mage general, user

lurk more

>Accursed malefactor, you will burn for your treachery.

Are you a member of one of those religious Hunter Conspiracies? How adornable, user!

Better stock-up on holy water and prayer beads, it's going to be a bumpy ride.

yeah, well. I'm ensaddened by that. I don't normally post, but wraith20 just dropped and I thought there'd be discussion about it.
AH well.

>that post chain lasted three posts before going back to mage

*Everything* comes back to Mage. It's the Golden Rule of both WOD and CofD.

Didn't say godly, just said best.

You witches are vile, debased creatures, beset by demons of your own conjurations. Let your devil-gifted sorcery be the end of you!

Give it a week. Let people read it, user.

Has Wraith20 been shared?

yes

I'm surprises there's been so little discussion of the new Geist spoilers.

theonyxpath.com/one-foot-in-the-grave-geist-2e.

I never got into Geist, but it seems the big issue is that now sin eaters are dead (undead?), rather than being given a second chance at life.

Also, who or what are Reapers?

Probably the ferrymen/grim reaper types as a new antagonist.

nobody cares about ghosts