Another WoD question: Banes

Prak · Post by **Prak** » Sat Oct 16, 2010 10:22 pm

What the fuck were banes like before the Wyrm went insane? Or are they a creation of the Wyrm going insane? What were wyrm spirits like before it became corrupt?

TheFlatline · Post by **TheFlatline** » Sun Oct 17, 2010 1:24 am

They were entropy, decay, and corruption. Not corruption in a negative sense, but in a rust/rot sense. You could also approach them conceptually as the predators of the spirit world: They took out the weak, ill, and malformed spirits that had lived too long.

I approached them like hybrid carrion feeders and predators of the spiritual world. When something became too patterned, or too wild, the wyrm spirits would pick them off and cull them from the herd. Things and spirits long forgotten were consumed and destroyed, leaving space for the cult of the new.

Prak · Post by **Prak** » Sun Oct 17, 2010 6:48 am

huh, ok, well that works, I guess. Except for the part where my group will probably still see that as grimdark...

Username17 · Post by **Username17** » Sun Oct 17, 2010 8:00 am

Three quarters of a billion people would not consider that grimdark.

-Username17

Prak · Post by **Prak** » Sun Oct 17, 2010 8:05 am

unfortunately I have to worry about three quarters of my group. Hopefully it's only one quarter that still is considering it grimdark, but if it becomes a big enough problem that he won't play, well, there goes the game.

Username17 · Post by **Username17** » Sun Oct 17, 2010 8:09 am

The Wyrm plotline is incredibly grimdark, if you want to reduce the grimdark quotient of your games, high level White Wolf cosmology is not where you want to go. The more "street level" stuff like Vampire is much better for that sort of thing.

-Username17

Prak · Post by **Prak** » Sun Oct 17, 2010 8:52 am

I'm not introducing the plotline, I just like the idea of reworking the metarealms as the (original, non-crazy, non-corrupt) triat.

The plotline was going to focus on demonic invasion, but.... yeah, that's pretty out.... I might work something like it back in, though possibly using the Gloom inhabitants rather than demons.

Username17 · Post by **Username17** » Sun Oct 17, 2010 9:06 am

All the high-end plot of WoD is incredibly grimdark. Incredibly. To an extent tha is completely ridiculous. If your players are at all put off by grimdarkiness, then introducing them, even portraying them in a more positive light, is going to put people off. Because sooner or later they are going to read anything at all from the original continuity to try to learn more about this Triat shit they are dealing with, and they are going to open a book to find tirades about guro porn and ultimate doom destiny and shit.

You don't include stuff from the original books unless you want the players introducing elements from the books about those things that were actually published. So, using the "Ventrue" title is fine, because if players dumpster dive through Ventrue clanbooks (old or new) and get the idea that their character thinks of themselves as aristocratic or something, that's fine. You would not include "The Wyrm" because if one of the players picked up
"The Book of The Wyrm" they would fucking slap you.

-Username17

Prak · Post by **Prak** » Sun Oct 17, 2010 8:17 pm

then what the hell should I do with the three worlds to make them not GRIMDARK?

Username17 · Post by **Username17** » Sun Oct 17, 2010 8:36 pm

Prak_Anima wrote:then what the hell should I do with the three worlds to make them not GRIMDARK?

Just leave them as is? I mean, they are magical locations in horror fiction, so they kind of suck. But there are like cities in them and shit, there's very little grimdark cosmic futility in any of them. Have a trip to Mictlan get all Chinese Ghost Story, or a trip to The Dark Reflection be Pan's Labyrinthish. Maya is the worst one, but Jumanji is already kind of upbeat even in its terrifyingness.

-Username17

Prak · Post by **Prak** » Sun Oct 17, 2010 8:50 pm

I can't just leave them as is, that's one of the things to which my players objected.

Username17 · Post by **Username17** » Sun Oct 17, 2010 8:52 pm

Prak_Anima wrote:I can't just leave them as is, that's one of the things to which my players objected.

What was their actual objection? Because so far you have said "I want to make this less grimdark, so I will ADD GRIMDARK ELEMENTS." I suggest instead that you find out whatever element is actually tweaking some squick factor and remove it.

-Username17

Maxus · Post by **Maxus** » Sun Oct 17, 2010 9:00 pm

The best approach I've found for that sort of thing is try to make a tone of "There's a big world out there, and it's not exactly a picnic, but it's still awesome so let's go exploring!"

It's an attitude of making sure there's enough stuff to make the players -want- to explore. And making sure not everything in the setting is against them. I've been in games where the DM purposely and intentionally looked for ways to screw the players when they worked with the system. So a run-around-and-meet-people beginning adventure started with "Go find this person and bring him back to talk to me" and ended in "Person is shot dead with crossbows, the quest-giver shouts at party and tells them to get out of town or be hanged". That game was depressing as hell.

Having the whole setting and everyone in it against the players will make grimdark happen quicker than anything.

So, for your purposes, let them meet the locals and make contacts and the occasional ally and find neat things that aren't inherently hazardous and pique their interest.

The game I'm going to run tonight has a river up in the mountains originate from a permanent rift which opens up in the tropics--possibly the tropics of another Prime world altogether. So the river runs hot year-round, has weird fish it in, and you can actually swing through the rift (it's a little above the ground) to go visit the people on the otherside, who're mostly Yuan-Ti and Lizardfolk. I mentioned the lizard beasts-of-burden seen around (I took a deinonychus and modified it to Large size and small size and other features to come up with varieties, such as those found in Quest for Glory) were in all likelihood from that said with unlucky lizards who fell through the rift and can't get back and are by and large domesticated on this side.

When I mentioned that last session, a couple of the players immediately declared a trip upriver was going to happen and are already speculating about what they'll find that way.

baduin · Post by **baduin** » Mon Oct 18, 2010 11:21 pm

I always thought that Dunsany wrote the best descriptions of Dreamlands.

Dunsany, Idle Days on Yann

http://www.gutenberg.org/dirs/1/1/4/4/11440/11440-8.txt

"Then I entered
Perdóndaris and found all the people dancing, clad in brilliant silks,
and playing on the tam-bang as they danced. For a fearful thunderstorm
had terrified them while I slept, and the fires of death, they said,
had danced over Perdóndaris, and now the thunder had gone leaping away
large and black and hideous, they said, over the distant hills, and
had turned round snarling at them, showing his gleaming teeth, and had
stamped, as he went, upon the hilltops until they rang as though they
had been bronze. (...) And from the market-place I
came to a silver temple and then to a palace of onyx, and there were
many wonders in Perdóndaris, and I would have stayed and seen them
all, but as I came to the outer wall of the city I suddenly saw in it
a huge ivory gate. For a while I paused and admired it, then I came
nearer and perceived the dreadful truth. The gate was carved out of
one solid piece!

I fled at once through the gateway and down to the ship, and even as I
ran I thought that I heard far off on the hills behind me the tramp of
the fearful beast by whom that mass of ivory was shed, who was perhaps
even then looking for his other tusk."

CatharzGodfoot · Post by **CatharzGodfoot** » Tue Oct 19, 2010 2:35 am

If you use Lord Dunsany's Dreamlands, you've got to use Hodgson's Night Lands as Gloom.

TheFlatline · Post by **TheFlatline** » Tue Oct 19, 2010 3:40 am

I don't get how vultures and other carrion feeders are grimdark. They are part of nature. That's the entire point of the Wyrm before it went psycho. There's an end to everything. That's just a fact of life.

If your players complain that's grimdark, they're fucking pussies. Assure them that one day they're going to stop breathing, curl up, and die, and the world will move on and fill the void that they've left, and while they cry to themselves, find someone who will actually play the game.

Or perhaps, if someone is bitching about GrimDark, you should point to the setting title: World of Darkness, and ask them where the fucking happy fuzzy teddy bears come in? (Answer: Changeling, but in that game, if a kid is a powerful enough dreamer, the teddy bear comes alive and bites his head off).

Sashi · Post by **Sashi** » Tue Oct 19, 2010 8:27 pm

vultures and carrion feeders get grimdark once you make them incredibly powerful inscrutable beings that consider the world to be carrion and suck souls off of it like a cosmic dustbuster.

Being just powerful enough to be aware you're being fed on, but not powerful enough to stop it or even be considered "alive" by the carrion feeder is incredibly grimdark.

Username17 · Post by **Username17** » Tue Oct 19, 2010 8:44 pm

There is nothing inherently grimdark about a Creator/Destroyer/Preserver split. That's the foundation of Hinduism, and it's a lot less creepy than salvationism. You could even just call them that: The Creator, the Preserver, and the Destroyer. But the Old World of Darkness reskins of that - Gaia/Weaver/Wyrm comes with a lot of baggage.

You can't really use that terminology without calling up images of this.

-Username17

TheFlatline · Post by **TheFlatline** » Tue Oct 19, 2010 9:40 pm

Yeah, I have the book of the wyrm. It's crazysauce.

But he was asking what banes and spirits of the wyrm were like before it became corrupted. I replied that it was an awful lot like nature, where you had predators and carrion feeders feeding off of spirits and shit in the spirit world. I got back "wow, that's grimdark".

It's not. It's fucking nature. It's amoral, and brutal, but it's not grimdark. If the way nature is supposed to operate is grimdark to people, they're wimps.

Right now you can go out and get eaten/killed by some kind of predator. Hell I could either drive up into the mountains right now and go walking, and some kind of predator cat could attack me and kill me. I could go swimming off the coast here and get attacked by a great white shark. If I got killed on land, the ants and crows and possibly even vultures depending on where I died would come and clean my corpse down to the bones. In the ocean other critters would do it. That's just how these things *work*. It's also the job of the Wyrm spiritually before it went insane. It didn't actually have bane creatures and formori running around murdering people wholesale, that's what happened *after* it went insane. Mostly, from the cosmology I read, it stuck to the spirit world, and didn't fuck with the material world quite so much (even though there wasn't much of a barrier between the two, yadda yadda yadda).

It's only after the wyrm is trapped by the weaver and goes batshit that the grimdark stuff happens. In fact, at the time, there was a group of werewolf fans that more or less saw the weaver as the real "enemy" in the cosmological setting. Yeah, you killed BSD and formori and shit, but the wyrm was a victim that was driven insane.

Prak · Post by **Prak** » Wed Oct 20, 2010 3:29 am

Frank, I was literally concerned about following that link. I know how grimdark and disgusting the old Wyrm stuff can be.

However, I was just thinking about that book earlier, specifically remembering the frankly awesome (in a munchkin way) build of "Balefire Immunity, Balefire Mutation, Spiral Dancer Gift: Create (Wyrm) Element"

TheFlatline wrote:Yeah, I have the book of the wyrm. It's crazysauce.

But he was asking what banes and spirits of the wyrm were like before it became corrupted. I replied that it was an awful lot like nature, where you had predators and carrion feeders feeding off of spirits and shit in the spirit world. I got back "wow, that's grimdark".

Not really, what I said was "One of my players is being a pussy and thinks that's grimdark the way I put it last. This may be a problem in a game with three players"

It's not. It's fucking nature. It's amoral, and brutal, but it's not grimdark. If the way nature is supposed to operate is grimdark to people, they're wimps.

Right now you can go out and get eaten/killed by some kind of predator. Hell I could either drive up into the mountains right now and go walking, and some kind of predator cat could attack me and kill me. I could go swimming off the coast here and get attacked by a great white shark. If I got killed on land, the ants and crows and possibly even vultures depending on where I died would come and clean my corpse down to the bones. In the ocean other critters would do it. That's just how these things *work*. It's also the job of the Wyrm spiritually before it went insane. It didn't actually have bane creatures and formori running around murdering people wholesale, that's what happened *after* it went insane. Mostly, from the cosmology I read, it stuck to the spirit world, and didn't fuck with the material world quite so much (even though there wasn't much of a barrier between the two, yadda yadda yadda).

Yep, that's what I'm getting from that player

It's only after the wyrm is trapped by the weaver and goes batshit that the grimdark stuff happens. In fact, at the time, there was a group of werewolf fans that more or less saw the weaver as the real "enemy" in the cosmological setting. Yeah, you killed BSD and formori and shit, but the wyrm was a victim that was driven insane.

*was one of said players*

TheFlatline · Post by **TheFlatline** » Wed Oct 20, 2010 7:35 am

Prak_Anima wrote: Not really, what I said was "One of my players is being a pussy and thinks that's grimdark the way I put it last. This may be a problem in a game with three players"

Gotcha. My apologies.

I fail to see how the concept of carrion feeders and nature's cycle is grimdark, while playing a 9 foot tall frenzying wolf/man tank with claws like razors that can rip people in half and bathe in their blood (which is usually how someone's first change happens) *isn't* grimdark.

Prak · Post by **Prak** » Wed Oct 20, 2010 7:57 am

He doesn't really play werewolves. In OWoD, he seems to have played maybe a vampire or two, and lots of mages.

In my... AWoD inspired(?) game, he basically wants to play this:

or at worst, this:

TheFlatline · Post by **TheFlatline** » Wed Oct 20, 2010 9:11 pm

Prak_Anima wrote:He doesn't really play werewolves. In OWoD, he seems to have played maybe a vampire or two, and lots of mages.

Yeah good luck with that.

And really, wanting to play f*cking iron man in a monster game? Oie...

You need to have him run a game, and do your damnest to break and destroy it, just so he knows what it feels like.

angelfromanotherpin · Post by **angelfromanotherpin** » Wed Oct 20, 2010 9:55 pm

TheFlatline wrote:And really, wanting to play f*cking iron man in a monster game? Oie...

Seems like a perfectly reasonable Posthuman with War Form to me.

A Man In Black · Post by **A Man In Black** » Wed Oct 20, 2010 10:18 pm

TheFlatline wrote:Yeah good luck with that.

And really, wanting to play f*cking iron man in a monster game? Oie...

You need to have him run a game, and do your damnest to break and destroy it, just so he knows what it feels like.

Yeah, everyone knows superheroes and horror don't mix.

WOD has always been "You play a superpowered characters with powers from a source which makes your life suck ass."