The Gaming Den

In reading about the Dark Reflection I am reminded of the old mirror people horror stories kids talk about in elementary and secondary school. These entities could be servants of the King of Three Shadows, perhaps nobility from his mortal kingdom that coupled with fairies to achieve immortality in his service. Whenever someone chants their name three times alone in the dark in front of a mirror then Bloody Mary or Candyman appears and bad things happen.

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Also, as far as the history within the aWoD, is it just Earth's history with added supernaturals or will we be editting the past in other ways?

Like "World War II ended in 1946 after the atomic bomb was dropped on Berlin" kinda stuff.

I think editting normal history like that is a bit too disruptive.

However, Hellboy's "Oh, by the way, Hitler died in 1946, not 1943, and it was because of supernatural bumps in the night, not suicide" is more fitting, and less disruptive.

The general rule for history is that all changes in history should be able to remain a secret. This serves several purposes, most directly it allows players to come into the game and have it be reasonable that they do not know stuff. But also, if it's all secret magical events that the history differs from real Earth history then the storyteller has a lot more freedom. Perhaps chief amongst those is the freedom to run the game without reading all the supplemental material.

In general, things should be set up so that a player can be "eased" into the game as much as possible. If the rabbit hole starts at ground level, it can go on as deeply as you'd want. If players can dig deeply into the setting from within the setting the whole thing can be a satisfying mystery game. If the players feel that they can't know what their character would know about the setting it makes everyone float around groundless. It makes everything into Unintentional Screwball Comedy.

The cutoff I think is that if something is weird and puzzling to the player it should be weird and puzzling to the character as well. Player and character should be alienated together.

-Username17

Real history is stranger than anything we can invent, anyway.

Also, having everything be a conspiracy driven by vampires or Jews is boring. Obvously, there should be conspiracies, many conspiracies - but they should succeed about as often as real ones - that is, most should fail, and even those that do win should bring about unanticipated results.

For example, Masons did a lot to bring about the Revolution in France and to create the Enlightened secular state. Do you think Philip Egalite imagined the modern France and their problems with Arabs? He didn't even foresee his own beheading.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Louis_Phil ... l%C3%A9ans

As supernaturals are very long-lived they would certainly tend to certain rigidity in thinking. They should not so much direct history according to a premade, perfect plan, as be trying to keep their influence in the rapidly changing world.

Question: Why are the Sabbat lead by an anti-pope and not by the real pope?

Or, to put it another way, what does the Church have that's so special that a human-led organization could acquire such far-reaching influence?

Or are we to believe that most popes have been supernatural, but only due to the opportunism of individual vamps and sorcerers, and the church as a whole is not part of a covenant?

The Sabbat are a parallel organization to the Church, founded on the same organizational principals some fifteen hundred years ago. An "Anti-Pope" is a pope who exists while someone else is recognized as the bishop of Rome. Since the Sabbat aren't part of the "regular" Catholic hierarchy, their leader is always definitionally an Anti-Pope rather than a Pope. Technically the Queen of England is an Anti-Pope, for example (in the real world even).

This ties in with the secret history thing. The line of regular popes is totally unchanged. The Sabbat has their own set of popes that they never told mortals about. So secretly there has never been an unchallenged pope, even before the Anglican split and the declaration of the Pope of London.

-Username17

What would an Anti-Inquisition look like?

virgileso wrote:What would an Anti-Inquisition look like?

The Sabbat specifically don't excommunicate people for heresy. So probably they'd be rounding up people weakening the organization from within to benefit some ideological goal, if they held an Inquisition at all.

As for why the church is independent of them, the higher-ups in the church might actually be on the other side of the Masquerade and maintain teams of monster-hunters. It's pretty much the only way that they can't secretly be controlled by monsters. Every powerful mortal organization should probably be either aware of the Masquerade or under its control, or both (the mafia don knows that he's working for a vampire, and maybe is vaguely aware of a World Crime League of some kind, but doesn't know more). Also, the church may have spread its influence with the help of the Sabbat; its land-grabs are facilitated by Sabbat land-grabs for the same place at the same time.

Although, of course, mortal hunters have no reason not to break the Masquerade inherent to themselves. So either the supernaturals have a whole mess of masquerade-breaking dirt on any hunter organization, or there aren't any hunter organizations.

You could certainly tell good stories about the church fighting vampires in a secret war, while both sides are mutually dependent on eachother, and have blackmail information that could completely destroy the other.

IGTN wrote:Although, of course, mortal hunters have no reason not to break the Masquerade inherent to themselves. So either the supernaturals have a whole mess of masquerade-breaking dirt on any hunter organization, or there aren't any hunter organizations.

Or the mortals hunters do not have any way to say "Vampires exist" without being laughed out of the room because they, personally, do not have supernatural powers that they can demonstrate and they are unable to capture supernaturals alive force them to do supernatural stuff without other supernaturals busting them loose.

Yeah, but if there are vampire hunting arms of powerful organizations (like, say, the catholic church), having the Pope say "Vampires exist, and we've been fighting a shadow war against them for the entire existence of the church" might sway a lot of people. Same if, for instance, the NSA was actually created to combat supernatural influence, and everything else was just a cover for it, and the president came out and declassified the NSA's records of killing werewolves and their involvement at Devil Reef.

Admittedly, the supernaturals, acting together, could make him seem crazy by just going into hiding. But they won't act together, and having some blackmail material too couldn't hurt.

The Watcher's Council has no ability to break the Masquerade unless they have magic users, and in aWoD they either wouldn't, or they'd basically be the Marduk Society. Major churches and governments might.

so, I was thinking about revised history on my way to class today and thought of something that could be a cool "let's kill some crazy nazi occultists" hook.


So Hitler was safely ensconced in Berlin by January 15, 1945, along with Eva Braun. Berlin was then fire bombed February 3rd, 1945. the heavy bombing and fiery air created a temporary portal to the Dark Reflection, through which Hitler and Eva were sucked. Upon his disappearance, the Nazi party put into place a body double, so as not to appear weakened, who held sway as a puppet ruler for three months, Eva is also replaced, but is, ultimately, of little importance. On April 30th, Hitler and Eva commit suicide. In reality the suicide was a human sacrifice to the Dark Reflection. The SS performed a massive summoning ritual with a specially prepared mirror to bring forth their true ruler, Herr Hitler, now a demonic native of the fiery pits of the Dark Reflection. This is all kept highly secretive, in hopes of throwing off allied assassination plots. However, Hitler's new power came far too late, the Nazi Party was forced by circumstance to surrender to the Allied forces on May 7th, 1945, in Rheims, France at 1:41 am.

Hitler was not done, however. During his time in the Dark Reflection, he found an artifact widely acknowledged to be The Spear of Destiny. He believed in it's alleged power to make the holder invincible, and so left with a small band of Nazi disciples for Japan, where he took a personal interest in their continuing war until the atomic bombing of Hiroshima August 6th, 1945. The massive blast and high death toll, coupled with the inventive new way to kill, created the strongest bleed into the Dark Reflection the world has ever seen, once again sucking Hitler into the Dark Reflection, along with the resurrected Eva and his Nazi disciples.

The world has yet to tremble once again under the burnt jack boot of Herr Hitler, as no one has ever quite been able to successfully perform the exacting summoning rite since the day of "his suicide."


Each time Hitler is banished to the Dark Reflection, he takes ever growing numbers with him, the last time he and Eva dragged 12 highly trained soldiers into the undying flames in their cosmic wake.
This fact is a key factor in the summoning of him, as those dragged to the Dark Reflection in his wake must be summoned as well. Each person to be summoned requires their own mirror, of at least man size, though Hitler's must be the largest, and Eva's the second. Also, as part of the summoning process, each mirror must be polished with the blood of a sacrificial victim who spent three months or more living as a duplicate of that person. This means that the next time Hitler is to be summoned, a total of fourteen mirrors, twelve of which must be man sized or better, and another two of which must be larger than even those must be acquired. In addition, fourteen people, including one woman, must be gathered after taking on the lives of Hitler, Eva, and the twelve Nazi disciples completely for three months or more. This is often the most difficult part, in all honestly, as the identities of the twelve soldiers is uncertain, and even the most psychotically devoted neo-nazi has trouble playing the part of Hitler competently enough.
Finally, the fourteen must be willing sacrifices. They may not be duped, and any spark of rebellious thought, in any of them, will sabotage the ritual. The fourteen must perform the task for the express purpose of returning Hitler to his rightful position of power in the Nazi philosophy in this world once more, to crush the bones of all who would resist him beneath his boot.

It is believed by some who know the true history that the massive jewish massacre played a part in making this all possible, that the spiritual energy of so many people killed by fire and acid was the first sacrifice, which made all later sacrifices and summonings possible.
These people are correct, actually. Hitler was deeply interested in the occult, and, while his hatred drove him to kill the numbers and people that he did, it was his knowledge of the Dark Reflection and his desire to draw power from it that dictated the method. Contrary to popular belief, the powers of darkness and evil don't care what motivates you to kill, just that they're in your mind when you do.

[picture here when I get around to scanning it]

When you use Hitler as a villain you run the risk of being silly. This is not to say the Holocaust was anything less than horrific, but inevitably people will start thinking of things like The Producers, Castle Wolfenstein, Looney Toons and every other bit of media that made him out to be the fool. You'd be better off using less well known historical figures to avoid a lot of the baggage that comes inherent with using folks virtually everyone has heard about.

You could possibly use Otto Skorzeny, who is a total badass. Perhaps just the few remaining operatives trained by the Paladin Group, who believe that Skorzeny is trapped in the Dark Reflection and are attempting to rescue him.

That gives you room for a group of aging (50ish) paramilitary types that know next to nothing about the supernatural but are trying nonetheless. They probably don't know exactly what will happen if they succeeded - but it's likely to be bad for the world in general.

TheNotSoEvilNecromancer wrote:When you use Hitler as a villain you run the risk of being silly. This is not to say the Holocaust was anything less than horrific, but inevitably people will start thinking of things like The Producers, Castle Wolfenstein, Looney Toons and every other bit of media that made him out to be the fool. You'd be better off using less well known historical figures to avoid a lot of the baggage that comes inherent with using folks virtually everyone has heard about.

It was just an idea that came to mind as an example of what you could do with revising history for AWoD. Real events are taken into account, and kept in chronological order, but given a hidden sinister meaning.

Prak: The first time Hitler went to hell was clearly when Stauffenberg bombed him.

Plenty of hunter organizations probably have supernaturals pulling the strings (or directly in charge: Marduk Society), so the fact that they respect the masquerade shouldn't be that surprising. Supernaturals have had a very long time to subvert their human enemies and turn them against their nonhuman ones.

Monsters and the Carthians

Vampires: Daevas are the vamps most predisposed to do well under Carthian rule, but geographically most of them end up under Camarilla law. This causes a fair number to attempt defections which is a major cause of tensions between Camarilla and Carthia. Other vampires don't tend to approve of the Carthian agenda, and Carthians disapprove of them right back as old world bourgeois and aristocrats.

Lycanthropes: Lycanthropes get the join or die treatment from the Carthians as well, but are treated with more respect since their lack of link to an ancient lineage is a plus not a minus.

Transhumans: Returned don't get any special status based on their past lives, but if they can subdue their egos they soon find that everything old is new again. Carthians LOVE children of aether, man of whom hail from Korea, although some children resent the masquerade and defect to the Shattered Empire.

--- more later

Other notes:

Verbena don't seem horrifying enough. I mean, I can definitely see how an evil/antagonist Verbena could be fucking scary, but playing a verbena seems too happytimes.





Prometheans:

Boolean wrote:Verbena don't seem horrifying enough. I mean, I can definitely see how an evil/antagonist Verbena could be fucking scary, but playing a verbena seems too happytimes.

Ravel Puzzelewell is a good example of a Verbena, and I think that she really does fit the tone of WoD. Although I do worry that they might overlap a bit much with the Hollow. In fact, there's enough overlap that some restructuring (again!) could probably be done to fold the Hollow into the Verbena, leaving a leviathan slot open yet again.

For what it's worth, the Verbena in the oWoD amped up the horror factor on their side once everyone realized they were a little too plushie by emphasizing the fact that they aren't just hippie pagans, they practice blood magic, and if something magical is going to happen from a Verbena something's gotta bleed, and it's going to hurt, and the more magic you want the more painful it gets. While not necessarily horrifying, it certainly is discomforting.

... but, that's really stepping on vampire toes here, and not entirely appropriate to the sap thing. So I don't know.

That said, blood watering the roots...

CatharzGodfoot wrote:

Boolean wrote:Verbena don't seem horrifying enough. I mean, I can definitely see how an evil/antagonist Verbena could be fucking scary, but playing a verbena seems too happytimes.

Ravel Puzzelewell is a good example of a Verbena, and I think that she really does fit the tone of WoD. Although I do worry that they might overlap a bit much with the Hollow. In fact, there's enough overlap that some restructuring (again!) could probably be done to fold the Hollow into the Verbena, leaving a leviathan slot open yet again.

I am totally with you on Ravel being Verbena. But I am not really feeling you on the similarity between Verbena and Mi Go. I mean yes, they are both poisonous, but so are Venture. And all of them do so in a manner which at least to me feels very different.

TA wrote:For what it's worth, the Verbena in the oWoD amped up the horror factor on their side once everyone realized they were a little too plushie by emphasizing the fact that they aren't just hippie pagans, they practice blood magic, and if something magical is going to happen from a Verbena something's gotta bleed, and it's going to hurt, and the more magic you want the more painful it gets. While not necessarily horrifying, it certainly is discomforting.

... but, that's really stepping on vampire toes here, and not entirely appropriate to the sap thing. So I don't know.

Yeah, blood magic is really a vampire thing. Even a Khaibit necromancer thing for that matter. It probably should not spill over into Verbena. Which leaves them doing more of the evil psychic plant thing than the evil carnivorous plant thing. More Yellow Musk Creeper and less Audrey.

In a tangential revelation: it turns out that there is Yellow Musk Creeper sexual fanfic. Rule 34 will not be denied.

-Username17

What if the Verbena drew upon more Celtic origins? You could use things like Slaine and The Wicker Man as inspiration sources and focus on the human sacrifice to power the magic angle. Let's face it, many supernatural creatures are going to want/need to kill people, and that's ok.

Wickerman, tying people out for fire ants (or seeds) to feed on.

and let's not forget the best drug idea ever from Jodorowsky's The Incal; Carnivorous Marijuana.

So, I'm using Carthaz's "Bigby Wolf" character sheet to create Needleteeth, the Ravenous.

Needleteeth the Ravenous, supposedly gained his powers because of starvation. Crashed on a remote island in the beginning of winter via an airplane with few survivors, the person who later became Needleteeth began to carefully butcher the already dead passengers once it became apparent that the island had no native population of animals for the survivors to eat. Eventually Needleteeth gained supernatural strength by eating the inner organs of the dead passengers. This terrible feasting on roasted liver with legumes and juice squeezed from fruit, or fried kidneys with tubers native to the island, allowed Needleteeth to survive without as great a degradation of strength, as the other survivors suffered. After nearly a month on the island, the survivors were rescued, however the man that had began to eat his fellow humans on the island was no more. Only Needleteeth the Ravenous remained.

Needleteeth prefers the company of other predators such as Vampires or Lycanthropes. Needleteeth has realized that the consumption of non-humans tends to weaken him. However he considers himself a gourmet and wishes to sample all sorts of meals, the more unusual, the better. Sometimes this leads to him engaging in deals with other extremely resilient Supernaturals that are willing to have parts of their bodies removed for consumption, in exchange for either extracted blood, cut-off muscles, or other services or goods. Usually Vampires or Werewolves are capable or willing to make such agreements. Other creatures are either inedible (Golems, Androids) or are unable to suffer the damage that occurs when the muscles on your arm are removed. Needleteeth's fascination with bodies and their regenerative properties has given him an unusual focus for most Troglodytes, his desire to eat has led him to also develop the ability to repair. Needleteeth the Ravenous gets his name based on his sharpened teeth, and his willingness to at least taste the cooked or raw flesh of most creatures.

[Basically, the creepiest healer ever. He wants to heal you, but he also wants to cut away part of you, and eat you; and is willing to fix you back to normal afterward if you let him.]

Ok, how do you do stats for this?

Attributes
Agility:
Strength:
Intuition:
Logic:
Charisma:
Willpower:

Special Attributes
Edge:
Power:
Potency:

Also, how do you do Powers? Catharz got the basic ones, and then added 2 basic powers; and one advanced power.

Powers
- Core Discipline: Auspex -
[*] Aura Perception (Basic Auspex)
[*] Second Senses (Basic Auspex)

- Basic Disciplines -
[*] Touch of Darkness (Basic Lure of Destruction)
[*] Vigor (Basic Potence)
[*] Shadow Play (Basic Obtenebration)
[*] Hide From Notice (Basic Obfuscation)
[*] Revive the Flesh (Basic Fortitude)
[*] Dread Gaze (Basic Presence)

-Advanced Disciplines -
[*] Spirit's Touch (Advanced Auspex)
[*] Earth Meld (Obfuscation / Potence Devotion)
[*] Cleanse the Body (Fortitude and Presence)


Is this right so far?

FrankTrollman wrote:

CatharzGodfoot wrote:

Boolean wrote:Verbena don't seem horrifying enough. I mean, I can definitely see how an evil/antagonist Verbena could be fucking scary, but playing a verbena seems too happytimes.

Ravel Puzzelewell is a good example of a Verbena, and I think that she really does fit the tone of WoD. Although I do worry that they might overlap a bit much with the Hollow. In fact, there's enough overlap that some restructuring (again!) could probably be done to fold the Hollow into the Verbena, leaving a leviathan slot open yet again.

I am totally with you on Ravel being Verbena. But I am not really feeling you on the similarity between Verbena and Mi Go. I mean yes, they are both poisonous, but so are Venture. And all of them do so in a manner which at least to me feels very different.

I was thinking of Mi Go in terms of Hungry Sally:

And the Verbena in terms of people slowly being replaced from within by a growing plant. Both of which get back to Cordyceps.

FrankTrollman wrote:In a tangential revelation: it turns out that there is Yellow Musk Creeper sexual fanfic. Rule 34 will not be denied.

Well, I'm impressed.

Hollow Sally is a great Mi Go. Verbena I see as more like Steve. You know, Dryads. They aren't so much "being eaten from the inside" as having had their hearts replaced with wood.

And yeah, that looks like a viable list of powers for a starting character.

As for skills and stats, I'm honestly point juggling on that.

-Username17