The Gaming Den

virgileso wrote:The alcohol weakness for lycanthropes seems weird, especially when it shrinks them down from their giant sized war form. I can imagine them wanting to fight near bodies of water to wash it off quickly.

That does bring up one idea, learn Fire Walker if you're a witch or a lycanthrope so you can engulf yourself in flame to dry off quickly; or Fire Starter preemptively to make it more difficult.

Heh, as currently written it also only works if the Lycanthrope actually activated it without going into frenzy first (because War Form doesn't cost Power Points if it's the first thing you do after frenzying, and the weaknesses apply to disciplines which you activated with power points).

FrankTrollman wrote:First pass of Healing up.

Any thrown weaponry people gotta have other than the hunga munga and the folding chair?

-Username17

Nets would be good, but not essential.

The Fey/Demon split is deeply weird.

Both fey and demons are Infernal-powered nonhuman sentient being from hell. Besides having the same power source, they're both weakened by water. They seem to have similar motivations and so with all that put together they serve basically identical roles and are fought the same way. The only difference is that some need iron to kill and some need silver, which is confusing for the players and kind of arbitrary. Nobody would bat an eyelash if demons were weak to iron and fey to silver.

Demons walk in with Akuma, Sidhe, and Ifrt, all totally workable creatures. meanwhile, the fey give us:

Trolls, which are *almost exactly the same* as akuma, but more powerful. Seriously, a troll is just an akuma with Fortitude and some sorcery. Just add a line to the akuma writeup saying some of them have more disciplines.

Spriggans, meanwhile, have essentially no fluff text, and again, are a little redundant. What do they add that you don't get from just giving a mirror goblin a War Form? Nothing I can tell, unless it's critically important that they *can't* disguise themselves.

Finally, mirror goblins. These guys are the only fey which add something crucial to hell, small guys you can kick around. But there's nothing especially complicated or interesting about the write-up. Don't get me wrong, I like it, but we can live without it.

My Proposal: Axe Fey as a category for redundancy. The new kick-around extras of Hell are Transhuman spawn, pathetic and tortured humans who hide their twisted, horrifying forms behind the Mask of a Thousand Faces they get from their time in hell.

This necessitates adding Aetherspawn and Rebornspawn for symmetry, but there you have it.

I suppose reborn spawn would simply be zombies or ghouls. Aetherspawn would be random people who created something they can't control, body weaponry maybe? I don't remember what level of discipline that is...

So wait... the only difference between Trolls and Akuma is that Trolls:

• Are more powerful.
• Are more mentally stable.
• Don't have tentacles.
• Have a different power schedule.
• Don't have to eat people.
• Don't get summoned by demon conjuration circles.

So because those are the "only differences" they should be merged? Have you noticed how similar Children of Ether and Golems are? Should I merge them too?

-Username17

Orion wrote:The Fey/Demon split is deeply weird.

Both fey and demons are Infernal-powered nonhuman sentient being from hell. Besides having the same power source, they're both weakened by water. They seem to have similar motivations and so with all that put together they serve basically identical roles and are fought the same way. The only difference is that some need iron to kill and some need silver, which is confusing for the players and kind of arbitrary. Nobody would bat an eyelash if demons were weak to iron and fey to silver.

I know that I would. As would a few people at my gaming table.

Silver kills monsters. Iron kills forests, and those who dwell in them.

When in the Shallows, how visible/interactable is the Mortal world and its inhabitants?

Judging__Eagle wrote: I know that I would. As would a few people at my gaming table.

Silver kills monsters. Iron kills forests, and those who dwell in them.

Okay, I admit that a game which contained both silver-vulnerable fey AND iron-vulnerable demons wouldn't make sense. But either on it's own does.

For Fey: "Iron kills forests," but there's nothing foresty about this games' "fey." They come from the Dark Reflection. There are no trees.

Silver is traditionally a good luck charm and a holy substance that repels evil. There's no reason ti can't apply to "faeries."

For Demons: Cold Iron was their weakness in D&D. Also, if the demons are, as they seem to be, *atavistic* -- they appeal to the id, and are not connected to modern technology in any way I can see-- then iron as a mark of progress should work against them.

FrankTrollman wrote:So wait... the only difference between Trolls and Akuma is that Trolls:

[*] Are more powerful.
--The main difference is that trolls have fortitude. Adding more combat disciplines to a combat threat to make a more challenging combat is not rocket surgery. Pods and Ifrit add more to the game, even though a Sidhe with the Ifrit's disciplines tacked on could do most of the same shit, because it's harder to think up those powers and applications for them.
[*] Are more mentally stable.
--I actually didn't notice that trolls have no master passion, or if I did I took it as an oversight. Given their description, it seems like they should be getting rage frenzies. And they're still capped at 3 Logic.
[*] Don't have tentacles.
--both come in crazy colors, with parts people don't have (tusks and rocky hide for the trolls). Sure, trolls are capable of looking more human than akumas do, but I don't see the relevance. They both have Giant size, they're not passing for human, and they're both equipped with enough "monster" traits to make them ugly monsters and not "big people."
[*] Have a different power schedule.
--the default Akuma might as well be continuous. He has enough power points to Gigor up for FOUR scenes without eating a dude, and no other way to spend power. The Default troll does, admittedly, benefit greatly from combining his Continuous schedule with Fortitude. So greatly in fact you really should define how often he gets more power points, since he gets back up every time. I guess the best solution would be to put Akuma on a continuous schedule.
[*] Don't have to eat people.
--Both are NPCs, so the question of whether they "have" to eat people is sort of moot. Trolls DO eat people, which puts them in the same KOS camp as Akuma.
[*] Don't get summoned by demon conjuration circles
--But, you wouldn't allow Planar Binding to summon a demon with class levels, would you? Obviously if trolls are "advanced akuma" they're going to be unsummonable as a generic summon. If players need the discipline list statted out, put it in the Limbo sourcebook. I guess this distinction would matter if there was an important BBEG Troll, sicne he'd be immune to summoning, but, again, Logic 3.
.

So because those are the "only differences" they should be merged? Have you noticed how similar Children of Ether and Golems are? Should I merge them too?

This comparison makes me believe you are on crack. Golems have FIVE disciplines Children of Aether don't. Children of Aether have FIVE disciplines Golems don't. These 5 are spread over multiple disciplines, including sorceries.

Meanwhile, Akuma have ONE discipline trolls don't, and they get something that mimics some of its functions. Trolls do have FIVE disciplines Akuma don't, three of which come from the same physical discipline which Akuma would most obviously want.

It's true that Children of Aether share a recharge schedule, but unlike Akuma and Trolls, they are weakened by different substances. That's a HUGE deal, since weakeners tend to be more interesting that wounding substances.

Finally, they have vastly different roles in mortal society. One is an ex-human, the other isn't. One can pass for human, the other can't. By contrast, trolls and akuma are both big scary monsters from another world.

Fallen spawn get Mask of a Thousand Faces; Aetherspawn *probably* get that as well for parellellism.

You could take on patience of mountains for fallen if you wanted, in which case aetherspawn would probably be on hide from notice/clinging. Cite Renfield as your example: He's somehow able to escape and sneak around all the time, he's creepy, and he's being studied by a dubious psychologist.

Reborn spawn are you garden-variety psychics. They're aware of reincarnation and thus "see dead people" but weren't anyone powerful in their past lives. They get Aura Perception and nothing else, or, if you're willing to give out an Advanced, Spirit's Touch (with the restriction that it only reveals information which forces a Depsair frenzy check).

Traditionally:

Silver kills "evil" things. Vampires, werewolves, fiends.

B/c it's 'pure' (it's actually not, but it's shiny, and more importantly commonly available), it's assumed that it will kill 'unpure' things. Like monsters.

Iron kills fairies. In some cases, people believe that just touching iron will burn and sear the flesh of a "supernatural" creature, like an Elf or Unicorn, and act like a blow torch against actual fairy creatures.

I've never once heard of a story, myth, game or other source of media that said "fairy people use iron, and are allergic to silver".

This goes way, way, way, back, to when people were developing iron tools, and people who didn't have iron age tools were seriously very capable hunter-gatherers who lived in forests. When the two would clash, the forest people were at a technological disadvantage, but at an environmental/terrain advantage. Meaning that early iron age peoples actually thought they were facing supernatural creatures; or at least told everyone so, in order to save face when telling how they killed a village of 'elves', 'dwarves', or other types of 'fairies'; just so that they could get a forest where they could hunt without competition from the native hunters.

Ever since then, iron kills forests, and 'fey'.

Judging:

Your tirade about iron killing forests is charming but totally irrelevant. aWoD fey *do not live in forests*. Nor is there anything to suggest that they have ever lived in forests.

Plus, when celtic and germanic folklore got christianized, fey became morefundamentally, malevolent, otherworldly creatures. Once you stop thinking of fey as other *peoples* and start thinking of them as evil spirits, there's no reason silver can't protect you from them as effectively as it does against demons.

In fact, that whole conflation is what I'm proposing. Christian writers basically made fey indistinguishable from demons: look at the whole satyr/devil issue. Or any story featuring "elves" from hell. And guess what: aWoD fey aren't distinguishable from demons. They have similar abilities, live in the same places and behave in similar ways.

Orion wrote:--The main difference is that trolls have fortitude. Adding more combat disciplines to a combat threat to make a more challenging combat is not rocket surgery. Pods and Ifrit add more to the game, even though a Sidhe with the Ifrit's disciplines tacked on could do most of the same shit, because it's harder to think up those powers and applications for them.

--the default Akuma might as well be continuous. He has enough power points to Gigor up for FOUR scenes without eating a dude, and no other way to spend power. The Default troll does, admittedly, benefit greatly from combining his Continuous schedule with Fortitude. So greatly in fact you really should define how often he gets more power points, since he gets back up every time. I guess the best solution would be to put Akuma on a continuous schedule.

These two together are a huge difference. Fighting a bog-standard troll is vastly different from fighting a bog-standard Akuma, and even an advanced Akuma with all the Fortitude disciplines. The Troll is dumping all necessary points into Revive the Flesh every round, which means you have to deal aggravated damage or heap enough damage in one round to kill it. The Akuma is just big, and you can wear it down like pretty much any other supernatural creature so long as it doesn't keep gulping down mirror goblin snacky-treats.

--I actually didn't notice that trolls have no master passion, or if I did I took it as an oversight. Given their description, it seems like they should be getting rage frenzies. And they're still capped at 3 Logic.

(emphasis mine)

--Both are NPCs, so the question of whether they "have" to eat people is sort of moot. Trolls DO eat people, which puts them in the same KOS camp as Akuma.

Trolls are just as dumb, sure, but Akuma are actually insane. They have *three* Master Passions. Trolls are just big monstrous people who like to torture and then eat people for fun.

Really, the difference here is that Trolls can have better intuitions and can be convinced that it isn't in their best interests to eat people for now and can be potentially reconciled with supernatural society; Akuma are seriously stark raving mad and need to be kept on a tight leash or they'll pretty much run around terrified, enraged, and/or eating people all the time.

--both come in crazy colors, with parts people don't have (tusks and rocky hide for the trolls). Sure, trolls are capable of looking more human than akumas do, but I don't see the relevance. They both have Giant size, they're not passing for human, and they're both equipped with enough "monster" traits to make them ugly monsters and not "big people."

I'm not seeing anything in the Troll description that depicts them as "crazy colors". They're described as "anything from oversized humans to lumpy stone skinned Oni", whereas Akuma are actually crazy primary/secondary/white/black colors that are obviously not even possibly natural creatures. A troll could easily look no less "human" than, say, nephilim or jotun (Goliath and D&D Frost Giants), and some look exactly that much human. They're not passing for human only because they're *huge*. You could easily tell the difference between a Troll and an Akuma in-world at a glance.

--But, you wouldn't allow Planar Binding to summon a demon with class levels, would you? Obviously if trolls are "advanced akuma" they're going to be unsummonable as a generic summon. If players need the discipline list statted out, put it in the Limbo sourcebook. I guess this distinction would matter if there was an important BBEG Troll, sicne he'd be immune to summoning, but, again, Logic 3.

...except that Planar Binding in D&D and the Demon summoning skill in aWoD both explicitly allow you to do that. And Frank actually wrote a modification to the Calling spell rules that allows you to bind named creatures. And with the whole Continuous Power Schedule thing, you definitely don't want people summoning Trolls.

QuantumBoost, Continuous power schedule refills every *scene* not every *round*, so putting a troll down isn't *that* hard. Once it's down you have to sink it in the ocean or, if you're in hell, drive a bunch of iron spikes through it if you want it to stay dead. Or just plan on doing your business and going before it gets up. That's admittedly kind of important.

However, you can just Akuma on the continuous schedule, which has no effect whatsoever on the standard akuma and lets them grow up to be trolls.

Orion wrote:QuantumBoost, Continuous power schedule refills every *scene* not every *round*, so putting a troll down isn't *that* hard. Once it's down you have to sink it in the ocean or, if you're in hell, drive a bunch of iron spikes through it if you want it to stay dead. Or just plan on doing your business and going before it gets up. That's admittedly kind of important.

Okay, missed that. They apparently also don't get that much power either. Point to you.

However, you can just Akuma on the continuous schedule, which has no effect whatsoever on the standard akuma and lets them grow up to be trolls.

Yes, you could modify them in that way. But removing one of the things that makes them distinct monsters isn't in any way helpful unless you're already resigned to folding them together.

Well, I'm sorta playing devil's advocate here.

I *do* think the distinction between fey and demons is, at present, kinda stupid. I'm arguing that they are collapsable in order to show that we currently aren't getting much bang for our conceptual space.

What I actually want to have happen is to have some revision done, probably to fey, to make them significantly different from what demons already do for us.

Hm... Demons give us the classic "your greatest desire... at a cost" bargain, masters of temptation and personality, and big dumb insane bullies.

Fey give us minions, unhealthy inhuman things, and giant brutes who're ridiculously tough to completely kill and infect people with distrust.

Demons are kind of like incarnations of emotion or desire; fey are more cthonic, ancient things that used to be the masters of humanity (actual backstory). It also seems like the Akuma/Troll difference is the biggest concept-space intrusion; Spriggans are weird, but they're also pretty distinctive from everything else.

Maybe giving Akuma some more distinctive low-tier sorcerous powers would help? Hand of Flame would be a suitably "demonic" power that isn't subtle enough to be completely out of character - though their low maximum Logic would make it meaningless for actually hurting people. Alternatively, Dread Gaze might add something meaningful to their depiction, since it would mean they go around scaring people into giving them stuff. The big question in my mind is whether those abilities would drastically impact the power of Unleash the Dark Soul.

Orion wrote:In fact, that whole conflation is what I'm proposing. Christian writers basically made fey indistinguishable from demons: look at the whole satyr/devil issue. Or any story featuring "elves" from hell. And guess what: aWoD fey aren't distinguishable from demons. They have similar abilities, live in the same places and behave in similar ways.

Christian thought on Fey is that they were angels who didn't "sin" bad enough to warrent Hell, so they fell to earth. I think, IIRC, they couldn't decide what side to be on in the war.

Just putting that out there, not arguing one side or the other.

First, saw something in the Sidhe section.

Fixed. Also: caved to pressure and made Transhuman Spawn.

-Username17

In the Power section of Kuala Lumpur, there is this:

All the metropolitan area outside of the federal districts is The head of state and the judiciary meet in the other federal district of Putrajaya which is an aggressively Islamic area whose recent architecture marks it as being something from the Middle East and not in Malaysia at all.

Emphasis mine, that's probably the end of a thought fragment Frank forgot to finish or remove.

Your tirade about iron killing forests is charming but totally irrelevant. aWoD fey *do not live in forests*. Nor is there anything to suggest that they have ever lived in forests.

Plus, when celtic and germanic folklore got christianized, fey became morefundamentally, malevolent, otherworldly creatures. Once you stop thinking of fey as other *peoples* and start thinking of them as evil spirits, there's no reason silver can't protect you from them as effectively as it does against demons.

In fact, that whole conflation is what I'm proposing. Christian writers basically made fey indistinguishable from demons: look at the whole satyr/devil issue. Or any story featuring "elves" from hell. And guess what: aWoD fey aren't distinguishable from demons. They have similar abilities, live in the same places and behave in similar ways.

Then, it's perfect.

The conflation is what people believe, and obfuscation and confusion and lack of clarity about Masquerade-related things is exactly what the forces that enforce the Masquerade want.

Remember, the Catholic church is influenced and run by Supernaturals. Fey are used by Supernaturals, and some Fey-like things are actually PCs (the transhumans/changelings). Demons are most certainly not liked or commonly used except as pawns or enemies. With Fey, you can make deals with, with Demons, its a matter of time before they hurt someone.

Having them spread lies, and false myths, to confuse people is exactly what they want to have happen.

First, because it encourages people to "use silver" on anything strange, and that 'iron' is pretty much only good for killing people.

[Note: The Witcher makes a really good point about this; people in the game setting are uneducated for the most part, and seriously think that a Witcher's Steel Sword is their "man-killer" sword. While their silver sword if their "monster killer" sword. Except that they're wrong, and that the iron sword is used against things that are weak versus iron. Seriously, video games make fun of this falsely believed, and taught, assumption]

Sidhe, Trolls, and other Sidhe might even know about this, and could seriously play along. A silver knife cuts your skin with lethal damage, which looks exactly the same as Aggrevated damage, but isn't as bad to recover from.

Running away if people have sufficient amounts of silver and aggression; so that when the Sidhe do have to kill someone, their enemies will reach for a silver weapon (lethal damage max), but not an iron one (actually aggravated damage). Meaning that they can escape if injured too much; and regen fast enough to keep being a threat.

A silver knife can still kill a troll; it just can't be allowed to run away and regen. The iron knife will make a troll be more defensive, or something.

Gelare wrote:In the Power section of Kuala Lumpur, there is this:

All the metropolitan area outside of the federal districts is The head of state and the judiciary meet in the other federal district of Putrajaya which is an aggressively Islamic area whose recent architecture marks it as being something from the Middle East and not in Malaysia at all.

Emphasis mine, that's probably the end of a thought fragment Frank forgot to finish or remove.

Thanks. Fixed.

-Username17

Ciudad de Mexico.

It is up.

-Username17

Awesome!

The metropolis is about 8000 kilometers across

I think this should be "square kilometers"

they are not allowed to deliberately kill luchadores

What is the official position on turning them into a Vampire/Lycanthrope ?