The Gaming Den

Not only is hand of flame quite effective in the 'hands' of a bug swarm, flames of panic gets pretty crazy too. With little eyes all over the city, you could literally stampede millions.

FrankTrollman wrote:
I could do Houston next.

-Username17

Please do, they're interesting reads.

CatharzGodfoot wrote: And by the way, I just tried reading that book and it is atrocious. Kudos for making something good out of them.

It's important to note that H.P.Lovecraft is actually a really, really bad author. I don't just mean that the prose is bad, although it is, but that the themes that he actually finds important enough to horrify are in many cases laughable and in others even offensive. Willfully ignorant heroes battle against the twin villainies of racial miscegenation and intercultural tolerance. And that's not even an exaggeration.

The thing is that it's a product of its time. And that time was small minded and racist as fuck. There's seriously a book where the villain is like this medusa hair chick, but the real horror reveal at the end is that it turns out that she's part Black and sexually attractive anyway. What the fuck? That's so offensive that it's hilarious. But importantly, people grabbed that shit and ran with it. And the modern stuff is often pretty same good. When people do Mi-Go today, they draw stuff like this:



And that's awesome. And fairly effectively horrifying. So even though the original literature is laughable and offensive, we talk about Mi-Go and Deep Ones because the secondary literature is exactly the kind of thing we're looking for. The original Creature From the Black Lagoon is actually retarded, but again the secondary literature has made something of the Creature, and he gets a part in Monster Squad.

-Username17

Yeah, I remember Medusa's Coil and its absurd racism ("...for, though in deceitfully slight proportion, Marceline was a negress"). And yeah, it didn't even lower my opinion of HPL, because he was already so obviously a racist douche.

But the 'mi-go of today' is just the false-faced mi-go from The Whisperer in Darkness. There are kernels of inspired material in his stories; otherwise nobody would has taken his mythology as far as they did.

Anyway, the point is that when I think of "mi go" these days, I can't help but thing "What has I done?"

Whereas "The Hollow" reminds me of the eponymous comic segment, and seems to actually describe someone full of bugs pretty well.

What do the covenants think of supernaturals who refuse membership with any covenant, wanting to be unconnected with any while living in the cities? Or even the idea of starting out as a member, then quitting (not joining another)?

virgileso wrote:What do the covenants think of supernaturals who refuse membership with any covenant, wanting to be unconnected with any while living in the cities? Or even the idea of starting out as a member, then quitting (not joining another)?

That's a lot like a person who rejects citizenship to any country. They'll most likely be subject to all the same restrictions as a citizen (quite possibly more), but gain none of the benefits.

How about swapping out the reborn's quicken sight for shifting sands? Just as much an action hero bullet dodging ability, but fits better with remembering the future (or deja vu).

What are the kinds of circumstances that allow for a mirror to be traversable in and out of Limbo? I wouldn't think that a troupe of mirror goblins could enter Earth through every possible reflective surface, or that PCs could escape any mortal prison so long as they have a bathroom with a mirror to use.

virgileso wrote:What are the kinds of circumstances that allow for a mirror to be traversable in and out of Limbo? I wouldn't think that a troupe of mirror goblins could enter Earth through every possible reflective surface, or that PCs could escape any mortal prison so long as they have a bathroom with a mirror to use.

There are a number of abilities that allow the use of arbitrary mirrors as gates. Perhaps such use creates a semipermanent linkage, allowing other creatures to force their way through.

One place that might be especially useful is a glass foundry where panes are made by floating liquid glass on liquid metal. The combination of fire, reflection, and personal danger should be just about perfect even if it is an example of creation.

---

I've been wondering about magic items. An enchanted sword should probably pretty hardcore, considering that you can just spend a few hundred to have someone make an iron banded staff with silver inlay.

Is it the sword of thing where you just brandish it and luminaries are like 'oh shit, Billy has Excalibur, let's do what he says'? Will people from the United Kingdom be looking for him in California? It seems clear how you could use some cryptic prophesies as plot devices (which give the character more screen time), but a weapon seems like either asymmetric power or a liability.

If it's more equivalent to having the perk of owning a gun shop, there should probably be actual stats for a least some sample weapons.

Possible examples:

Mjolnir: This hammer has the same characteristics as a canon, save that it is small sized, has unlimited ammo, and must be wielded in one hand.

The Shamshir-e Zomorrodnegar: This curved blade works as whatever material a creature native to the Dark Reflection is weak to, and can be used to counter and dispel infernal sorceries.

The Taming Sari: This knife bestows flesh of marble upon its wielder.

Vajra: This small (damage 1) weapon is affected by touch of darkness can be used to create a lightning strike.

Could we get any kind of guidelines for what kinds of effects Destinies and ritual magic are supposed to have?

CatharzGodfoot wrote:How about swapping out the reborn's quicken sight for shifting sands? Just as much an action hero bullet dodging ability, but fits better with remembering the future (or deja vu).

Cool. Yeah.

Orion wrote:Could we get any kind of guidelines for what kinds of effects Destinies and ritual magic are supposed to have?

I'm off for a bit, so I'm going to be doing some writing this week.

• Update Reborn Starting Disciplines (done)
• Houston by Night
• Magic Item Guidelines
• High Adventure on the Plane of Water (unrelated).

-Username17

I've got some questions about running monsters (well, monsters other than playable ones). Most of them have attribute arrays listed next to them (Mirror Goblins, Trolls, etc.) so are these the minimum attributes they have? Do most monsters have actual attributes in excess of this? By how much? How much variation is there within Mirror Goblins you expect to fight? Will there be some with way high strength and some with way high agility, for example? And what about skills? How high is the Combat on an average monster? And are they expected to have specializations like Combat (War Form) or Combat (Serrated, Stabby Knife)?

Everything is great, I just have a few things marked for clarification/typo:

Ranged Weapons wrote:Most ranged weapons do an amount of damage that is fixed regardless of how strong the user is. The strength listing on the ranged weaponry table indicates the strength required to use the weapon without penalty in two hands. If the character's actual Strength exceeds that, they may use it without difficulty in one hand, unless it is Large in which case their strength must exceed that by 2 in order to use it successfully in one hand.

What is the penalty when you don't have enough strength to wield a weapon in two hands ? If you don't have the required strength to wield a weapon in one hand, do you confirm there is no penalty, you are just forced to wield in two hands ? What is the required additional strength for wielding a Huge weapon in one hand (Or are you forced to wield it in two hands whatever your Strength is) ?


Typos:

From Dusk til Dawn

Maybe its a valuable painting

The Black Spiral hires out a fair number of agents provacateur.

Rapidd Jog

A Spiggan has an Infernal power source and a Ritual power schedule.

Becoming a cultist requires delving into th dark secrets and learning some magic.

and the massive storm takes form and is unleashed in a direction of the character's choosing.

After that, the Zombe will have to be dealt with normally.

Resurrecting a Revenant retores them to humanity.

and the character can only only rewind a split second of time

3 ... a small buisness

3 ...expose yourself to strangrs.

But beyond that, the fact of the matter is that mos people don't actually care

This can get disrupted by bing moved while they are unconscious

are able to summon all of the eloquence imparted by their Persuasion an Backgrounds in every language that they “speak.”

and includes mem dressing up as jaguars and fighting each other

but it's always kidn of strained

Yes, th entire country is going to have its 100th anniversary

So it should come as no surprise at all the the Shattered Empire

Paris' status as one of the richest and mos powerful cities

And the Carthians took major cities all the way from he Low Countries to the Iberian Peninsula.

Gelare wrote:I've got some questions about running monsters (well, monsters other than playable ones). Most of them have attribute arrays listed next to them (Mirror Goblins, Trolls, etc.) so are these the minimum attributes they have? Do most monsters have actual attributes in excess of this? By how much? How much variation is there within Mirror Goblins you expect to fight? Will there be some with way high strength and some with way high agility, for example? And what about skills? How high is the Combat on an average monster? And are they expected to have specializations like Combat (War Form) or Combat (Serrated, Stabby Knife)?

The x/y means 'The attribute can be as small as x and as great as y'. I don't think that they have potency factored in.

Skill range from 0 to 6 for everyone. Shamblers don't have any skills, Soulless have a Combat skill of 1, but probably no other skills. Most other things have whatever skills you see fit to give them. There's no 'challenge rating' in this game. However, a good guideline is that creatures who have lived long enough will have almost certainly prioritized skills relevant to their disciplines.

Here's a preview of the magical artifacts section. Does this format seem legible?

The Pet Cemetery
You all know the legend of the pet cemetery where if you bury someone “just right”they come back from the dead. And maybe (like, almost every time) it goes horribly wrong and the person or animal comes back as some sort of hideous monster that probably eats people or something. That sort of thing exists in the World of Darkness. It's a kind of Shadow Gate, and the thing that makes it of interest is that they aren't continuously open, so they aren't spraying a horde of poltergeists all over everything, nor does it necessarily come with a giant zombie apocalypse. The idea is that there are things you have to do in order to activate the Shadow Gate, and even then only for brief periods. So while it can be used to transform the corpse of a Luminary into a Revenant, and by extension ca be used to start a zombie outbreak deliberately, it doesn't have to be. And that's great news for supernaturals who want to send people and things back and forth to Mictlan and don't want a never ending ghost storm or zombie tide. These “locked gates” are, while certainly dangerous, highly prized.

• A Locked Shadow Gate requires some “key” to “open.” While open, it can function as a two way passage to The Gloom, and it can manifest Necromancies like a normal Shadowgate would. The one from the King novel opened for one hour the midnight following someone making a stack of rocks in front of it. This was used to raise the dead, with different corpses coming back as per Reanimation, and others coming back as per Resurrection. The very unpredictability of it (and the fact that zombies created in this manner are completely uncontrolled) is why those in the know about supernatural events generally suggest not trying to bring loved ones back with a Locked Gate.

Things
Is that what I think it is? I thought it was only a legend!

The World of Darkness uses roughly the same system of magic item creation as Dwarf Fortress. People periodically get overtaken by strange moods (or macabre or fey moods as the case may be), and then they gather weird materials together, lock themselves in a workshop, and make a perplexing masterpiece. This masterpiece is generally of surpassing quality and thus considerable value as an object of art or history, and also frequently cursed.

The Necronomicon
It's a creepy tome that is filled with demonic magic. Each page is velum with a brown ink that could seriously be blood forming its writings in a mad and tangled hand. Those who read from its dread pages gain dark insight and go mad. Sometimes in that order.

• Magic tomes are pretty common as rare and unique magical objects go. What they basically do is let someone who studies them for extended periods of time learn some sort of evil sorcery. This has the clearest effect of giving a character an excuse to learn a couple of sorcerous disciplines, so that if they are afforded the opportunity to learn a sorcerous discipline, they can choose to pursue one of the sorcerous disciplines described in the pages. Magic tomes have additional effects when they are read by humans. Luminaries can turn into Witches, and Extras become cultists. Generally, a major magic tome will cover two or three sorcerous paths, and convert Luminaries into the most closely associated kind of Witch. The Necronomicon itself covers the Descent of Entropy, the Progress of Glass, and the Song of Swarms. Luminaries who read it become Baali. Other Infernal grimoires include De Vermis Mysteriis, The Bible Black, The Book of Nod, and Unaussprechlichen Kulten; while Orphic grimoires that can change a man into a Khaibit include Secrets of Life and Death, Cultes de Ghoules, Beyond the Setting Sun, and The Book of the Dead; and Astral grimoires that can transform a Luminary into a Verbena include The King in Yellow, Allessehen Auge, The Endless Nightmare, or The Voynich Manuscript.
  Any of these books is a Rating 1 Destiny.

Preah Khan
It's a jewel and pearl encrusted broadsword of clear quality. The blade is a dull and dark gray as heavily tarnished silver, but the blade is sharp enough to shave with and does not appear to need sharpening. Legend has it that the metal was forged out of naga venom somehow and that it is still toxic. But the big thing is that owning it makes you the rightful king of Cambodia. Whoever holds the sword to the banks of the Mekong can make the river shrivel, swell, or even flow backwards. This sort of grotesque displays of magic are generally frowned upon by the World Crime League, and not a few supernatural creatures want the Preah Khan to stay missing.

• Preah Khan is an excellent sword, inflicting a base 3 damage, and every wound it inflicts is aggravated (even to mortal people). Khmer people will treat the holder as if they had the status of a king even if they do not know why. Even if they aren't even Cambodia, the wielder of Preah Khan can get the royal treatment in donut shops all over the Bay Area. And then there's the whole “controlling the Mekong River” thing. If word gets out that someone has Preah Khan, the owner can expect numerous enemies. Preah Khan is a Rating 4 Destiny and comes with Rating 4 Stalkers.

-Username17

When using Shifting Sands to dodge a bullet or an attack, do you completely dodge the attack without a check?

Also, yeah, the format does look legible. I like the indentation for the mechanical parts.

The Things format seems good, although the Pet Cemetery stuff seems a bit too vague to be particularly useful, in my opinion. Also, Re: Monsters, given those broad attribute ranges, can I suggest that each (or some or most) flavor of monster come with a couple ready-made samples that one might expect to come up against? Like, a Mirror Goblin Stabber (who uses Celerity and a knife and is meant to be fought in hordes) and a Mirror Goblin Spy (who uses Mask of a Thousand Faces and mental/social scores above 1)?

On the items it may be handy to just have a bare bones snippet with the base stats if applicable.

Sword base 3 damage
Special ablities below (then onto the meat)

Tome paths (descent of entropy, progress of glass, song of swarms)

Basically something for quick reference. Sadly, I cannot write up a prettier example on my iPod without taxing my sanity.

For the magic tomes, do you need originals or will a copy work? If copies do work, then can you become a verbana by reading the Voynich Manuscript off Wikipedia? If copies do not work, than are there seriously only 15 books which can make someone into a witch?

Also, why is the Necronomicon a book about infernal sorcery? It literally means "book of the names of the dead". Is it just a matter of wanting 5 each?

Grek wrote:Also, why is the Necronomicon a book about infernal sorcery? It literally means "book of the names of the dead". Is it just a matter of wanting 5 each?

That's what the title of the book means, but that's not what it contains. The 'original' name of the book is "Kitab Al-Azif", which to my knowledge means 'Book of the [meaningless]', but has something to do with the sound of nocturnal insects. Might make sense to put Names of the Blasphemies in there, though.

Grek wrote:are there seriously only 15 books which can make someone into a witch?

I'm sure there are many other ways to become a witch other than by getting your hands on a particular book.

As found in literature some of those books are not unique artifacts but were created as mass produced works and they have become rare over time and with a glut of mundane later edition imitations with poor translations and redactions (Unaussprechlichen Kulten comes to mind). Anywho, Frank's wording wasn't that those were the only books, just that those were good examples. One should feel free to create their own.

Grek wrote:For the magic tomes, do you need originals or will a copy work? If copies do work, then can you become a verbana by reading the Voynich Manuscript off Wikipedia?

A copy made by a Verbena using Coil of Thorns-formed pigments and paper in a fit of madness is very much different from an image on your computer screen. The "Aura Sight" power - which, interestingly, every Witch type gets - involves projecting into the Shallows of the otherworlds and is supposed to allow you to notice that something is a magic item. That means that the actual Voynich Manuscript has a real, perceptible presence in The Dreamlands. And a copy of it that turns people into Verbena needs to have that quality too.

Although photos of the Necronomicon turning your computer screen into an active portal to Limbo would be awesome.

Grek wrote:Also, why is the Necronomicon a book about infernal sorcery?

Because H. P. Lovecraft made it so; it's his book and he made up name.

Brief query: Barring the intervention of bullets, do lycanthropes live forever?

Dealing with immortality seems to be a general theme for aWoD, and every other player-friendly group of supernaturals (with the possible exception of Transhumans, and maybe Witches) seems to be immortal. It would therefore seem to be logical that lycanthropes be similarity gifted in longevity, but I've personally never heard of how becoming a werewolf automatically makes you live forever.

Immortality comes from Patience of the Mountains.

It's a Basic Fortitude Discipline, which makes it pretty easy to pick up for superpowers - it's Basic (so you don't have to invest in anything else beforehand) and Universal (so you don't have to get the knowledge from a magical tome or a specific cult).

Currently, Vampires, Prometheans, Leviathans, Fallen Transhumans, and a bunch of nonplayables are all automatically immortal, which is represented by those varieties having Patience of the Mountains in their basic type list. The rest (Witches, Lycanthropes, and the other two Transhuman types) have to intentionally learn the Discipline or pick it as one of their bonus disciplines.

So becoming a Werewolf doesn't make you automatically live forever. But some of them do (as you said, barring intervention of bullets). And it's a pretty good idea to pick it up before your natural lifespan would otherwise end.