Prak_Anima wrote: Angel being told by The Powers That Be that he has to help people to atone for getting some nookie and slipping back into Angelus.
Well... technically speaking, that was actually the opposite. Getting laid freed the human soul from the 'gypsy curse,' allowing it pass on to the afterlife again, leaving the demon possessing his corpse free to do whatever it wanted. At least until Willow stuffed the human soul back into the corpse so it could be tortured by the demon again. So, huzzah, victory for Joss' warped sensed of morality and for necrophiliacs everywhere, I guess. But it always struck me as somewhat backwards that 'being happy' was the out that let the demon go on to do the kinds of things they cursed Angel for in the first place.
I like fomori comparison, though in the case of Buffy vamps, I've always been a little confused where the new demon comes from. The demon possessing the sire vampire doesn't change bodies, so is it a child, budding, or just summoning a new demon from... wherever?
I meant specifically in the Angel series. There's a lot of talk about how he's helping people at the behest of TPTB to atone, which I take to mean for the stuff he did between schtupping Buffy and having a soul shoved back in his body, since it wasn't mentioned much before that (outside of a demon exhorting him to be a force for good instead of just marking time and feeling sorry for himself).
The "perfect happiness" escape clause always struck me as odd as well, but I basically understand the curse to be guilt-fueled. The idea being that it's sustained through him feeling terrible for every single life he took, every moment of the day, and that it fails if he's ever able to forget about that. ...which suggests that he could have kinky BDSM sex if his dominant beats him for said evil, but... I'm honestly not sure if that'd work for anyone, and I somehow doubt that he's that masochistic.
I haven't thought about the demon propagation, but I'd guess it's either making room for demonlings that are pretty much always around vamps/drawn by exsanguination, or budding/demonic asexual reproduction.
Cuz apparently I gotta break this down for you dense motherfuckers- I'm trans feminine nonbinary. My pronouns are they/them.
Winnah wrote:No, No. 'Prak' is actually a Thri Kreen impersonating a human and roleplaying himself as a D&D character. All hail our hidden insect overlords.
FrankTrollman wrote:In Soviet Russia, cosmic horror is the default state.
You should gain sanity for finding out that the problems of a region are because there are fucking monsters there.
I never understood the problem so fans many seem to have with Angel's curse. to me it always seemed obvious.
Curses always have some end condition or escape clause, it's a genre staple for any subdivision of horror where curses appear.
having the curse end only when it no longer bothers the victim, when it no longer performed the function of a "curse" seems like a blindingly obvious loophole if you want a curse to last forever
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After all, when you climb Mt. Kon Foo Sing to fight Grand Master Hung Lo and prove that your "Squirrel Chases the Jam-Coated Tiger" style is better than his "Dead Cockroach Flails Legs" style, you unleash a bunch of your SCtJCT moves, not wait for him to launch DCFL attacks and then just sit there and parry all day. And you certainly don't, having been kicked about, then say "Well you served me shitty tea before our battle" and go home.
It makes a lot more sense if you stop looking at 'curse' as 'geas to do good' and start looking at it as 'horrific retribution'. Knowing what will happen, he's driven by his own guilt to avoid happiness. It's approximately, "I've cursed you with depression. There are meds for it right here, but taking them will kill everyone you've ever loved." Yeah, that's pretty fucked up, but remember, it was put in place by a group of people who hated him and wanted him to be unhappy.
Vebyast wrote:Here's a fun target for Major Creation: hydrazine. One casting every six seconds at CL9 gives you a bit more than 40 liters per second, which is comparable to the flow rates of some small, but serious, rocket engines. Six items running at full blast through a well-engineered engine will put you, and something like 50 tons of cargo, into space. Alternatively, if you thrust sideways, you will briefly be a fireball screaming across the sky at mach 14 before you melt from atmospheric friction.
norms29 wrote:I never understood the problem so fans many seem to have with Angel's curse. to me it always seemed obvious.
The problem is the curse does very little to the entity that actually killed the 'gypsy princess' or whatever. (Apart from deal with Angel's sniveling, but everyone in universe and watching at home has to deal with that shit) What the curse does is call up the soul of the human who was killed by a vampire and forces it to share space with the demon inhabiting his corpse, and be tormented by all the horrible things the demon has done, which the dead human is explicitly not guilty of. Because he was dead, and not even in the body anymore, let alone in control of it.
The specific problem with the escape clause is it is essentially what both entities actually _want_. The human soul gets an orgasm so strong it is freed back to whatever afterlife it came from, and the demon gets an mindblowing orgasm and is also then free to do whatever it likes. The escape clause essentially has no downside. It isn't like WoD Golconda, where the supposed escape from the 'curse' of vampirism is, essentially, to overcome the urges of the beast. (or maybe stop feeling guilty about it depending on the interpretation being sold). But either way, it involves considerable cost and sacrifice upon the part of the individual trying to escape the curse, and getting out of the curse doesn't mean a sudden return to the exact behavior that brought the curse to begin with.
@fectin- the problem with that is that for most of the curse's existence, he didn't know that. The 'happy clause' was entirely a surprise, after a century or so of lurking in sewers, eating rats and occasionally stalking teenage girls. The guilt came from him, not the curse, and the retribution is incredibly mistargeted. Spike's chip is a far more effective torment for the vampire, when you get right down to it. As it actually bothers the vampire, not the soul of a dead human.
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When Angel made a vampire while he had a soul, that vampire ended up being a vampire who didn't seem to enjoy being a vampire like every other vampire.
This makes me believe that all the curse does is cut the pleasure the vampire gets from being a vampire. Like a cocaine addict, the constant rush of pleasure and confidence turns you into an amoral douche pretty quickly. The guilt is just a natural reaction to getting clean and being able to think clearly (also something that happens to junkies).
This is why Angelus is so damned cheery and Angel is so moody. "Having a soul" is just a metaphor for not being hopped up on opiate substitutes all the time.
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Voss wrote:@fectin- the problem with that is that for most of the curse's existence, he didn't know that.
Alternately, the gypsies aren't very good at what they do?
His soul seems to act more like drugs than like a separate consciousness, in that it colors and distorts his perceptions. Angelus refers to Angel like he's a separate being, but I can't think of anything that indicates he's any more separate than those people who personify themselves separately when drunk.
Vebyast wrote:Here's a fun target for Major Creation: hydrazine. One casting every six seconds at CL9 gives you a bit more than 40 liters per second, which is comparable to the flow rates of some small, but serious, rocket engines. Six items running at full blast through a well-engineered engine will put you, and something like 50 tons of cargo, into space. Alternatively, if you thrust sideways, you will briefly be a fireball screaming across the sky at mach 14 before you melt from atmospheric friction.
Angel explicitly had a human boy who was born without a soul, so a soul isn't explicitly you. A soul is more like your appendix. It serves a very useful function, but you can live without it. It might also contain a backup of your memories, though that's kind of fuzzy (Buffy remembers her afterlife but Angel doesn't remember his and neither does Spike after he gets his soul back, ghosts usually retain their memories but sometimes don't).
The impression given by that episode with the soulless boy is that humans are, in fact, innately evil and that the soul was created by the powers that be or whomever to serve as a morality circuit that doubles as a memory backup.
This is further supported by the episode where Buffy's roommate stole her soul bit by bit. Buffy became less moral and less sane but there were no other negative consequences to having chunks of her soul removed.
The Gypsies knew very well what they were doing. They weren't trying to punish the demon or the soul, they were trying to punish the brain. And that worked out quite well. The fact of the matter was they never cared about collateral damage. Ultimately it was Liam's mind, unrestrained by a soul, that drove all of Angelus's actions.
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Yeah, watching Angel now, it seems to imply that the soul is really used more to give him a conscience, rather than an entirely different personality, and Angelus views it as a sort of Multiple Personalities deal. On the other hand, a lot of people will refer to parts of themselves they dislike as if they are separate people, and that's really all Angelus does.
Cuz apparently I gotta break this down for you dense motherfuckers- I'm trans feminine nonbinary. My pronouns are they/them.
Winnah wrote:No, No. 'Prak' is actually a Thri Kreen impersonating a human and roleplaying himself as a D&D character. All hail our hidden insect overlords.
FrankTrollman wrote:In Soviet Russia, cosmic horror is the default state.
You should gain sanity for finding out that the problems of a region are because there are fucking monsters there.
As long as you ignore the episode where they had to keep Angel de-souled so they could get information from Angelus (and you should), that explanation holds water.
It's worth noting that Angel and Angelus being separate entities was a flanderisation that didn't really set in until after he got his own spin-off. The first 3 seasons of Buffy they/he consistently referred to "each other" in the first person.
after the third-person terminology crept in it was never consistent.
even that episode that we should ignore could potentially be explained as perfectly mundane psychological phenomena, dissociative... stuff... things like that (can you tell I don't have much background in that field?)
After all, when you climb Mt. Kon Foo Sing to fight Grand Master Hung Lo and prove that your "Squirrel Chases the Jam-Coated Tiger" style is better than his "Dead Cockroach Flails Legs" style, you unleash a bunch of your SCtJCT moves, not wait for him to launch DCFL attacks and then just sit there and parry all day. And you certainly don't, having been kicked about, then say "Well you served me shitty tea before our battle" and go home.
Sashi wrote:As long as you ignore the episode where they had to keep Angel de-souled so they could get information from Angelus (and you should), that explanation holds water.
If you remember that episode, they needed Angelus because of a spell that was suppressing everyone's memories of an evil entity.
So according to the logic of magic, Angelus is a different person.
But it might go no farther than the logic of magic.... the spell only affects "people" that existed at the time it was cast and the parameters of what constitutes a person are fudged when you go through radical personality change (which is why there was a prophecy about Angel "killing" his son even though he made a deal for a spell that wiped his son's memory and gave him a new personality).
The parameters of spells is a recurring theme in the Whedon-verse because on several occasions they get information from other worlds because it was magically wiped from our world.
But to get back on track, there is one episode where Angel talks about how becoming a vampire doesn't actually change someone fundamentally, but then the other characters express disgust and he wisely shuts up. I suspect the subtext is that he talks about Angelus as a separate person because it keeps people from being pissed at him for things he does when he goes off the wagon.
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Willow: It's horrible. That's me as a vampire? I'm so evil, and skanky... and I think I'm kinda gay.
Buffy: Willow, just remember, a vampire's personality has nothing to do with the person it was.
Angel: Well, actually...
[pauses as Willow and Buffy look at him]
Angel: That's a good point.
It's weird. Going back to WoD, Demon the Fallen had a similar thing. In it, a demon possesses a human at the moment of the human soul leaving, whether through death or spiritual eviction. The demon, though having their own personality, supposedly not only had access to, but also was bonded with the person's memories, which meant that some weak demons (which the vampirism demon is in Whedonverse) actually forgot they were demons and thought they were the person. Others remembered that they were a demon wearing a people suit but could mimic the person enough that others couldn't tell that much was different, beyond their brother acting strange ever since the car accident.
But, this is why bane possession actually makes a good model for Whedonverse Vamps, because most banes don't have anything like a personality, so they just take the inhabiting personality and amp up the bad stuff, which is basically what Whedonverse vamps do. If you were an asshole in life, you'll be even more of an asshole when a vamp turns you.
Cuz apparently I gotta break this down for you dense motherfuckers- I'm trans feminine nonbinary. My pronouns are they/them.
Winnah wrote:No, No. 'Prak' is actually a Thri Kreen impersonating a human and roleplaying himself as a D&D character. All hail our hidden insect overlords.
FrankTrollman wrote:In Soviet Russia, cosmic horror is the default state.
You should gain sanity for finding out that the problems of a region are because there are fucking monsters there.
FrankTrollman wrote: "Mysterious Places" may not be about anything or provide any real information, but it is literally five times longer in terms of actual text than a first edition oWoD book.
Josh Kablack wrote:Your freedom to make rulings up on the fly is in direct conflict with my freedom to interact with an internally consistent narrative. Your freedom to run/play a game without needing to understand a complex rule system is in direct conflict with my freedom to play a character whose abilities and flaws function as I intended within that ruleset. Your freedom to add and change rules in the middle of the game is in direct conflict with my ability to understand that rules system before I decided whether or not to join your game.
In short, your entire post is dismissive of not merely my intelligence, but my agency. And I don't mean agency as a player within one of your games, I mean my agency as a person. You do not want me to be informed when I make the fundamental decisions of deciding whether to join your game or buying your rules system.
Apparently Wolfram and Hart, or at least Darla, were under the impression that simple nookie would get rid of Angel's soul, and Episode 02-15/16 certainly plays this angle for a good 4 minutes or so after Angel has a Heroic BSoD from being told that LA is the Hell Plane Home Office of Wr&H and fucks Darla. Fortunately it really is "perfect happiness" that boots the soul, and it just so happened that he tasted that while schtupping Buffy. I suppose one can ameliorate his lack of losing the soul again anytime he sees her because all the damned relationship drama makes it bittersweet rather than perfect.
Of course it also means that he can go out and get laid and stop being so damned mopey, so long as he doesn't fall in fucking love with the person. Again.
Cuz apparently I gotta break this down for you dense motherfuckers- I'm trans feminine nonbinary. My pronouns are they/them.
Winnah wrote:No, No. 'Prak' is actually a Thri Kreen impersonating a human and roleplaying himself as a D&D character. All hail our hidden insect overlords.
FrankTrollman wrote:In Soviet Russia, cosmic horror is the default state.
You should gain sanity for finding out that the problems of a region are because there are fucking monsters there.
Got asked some Baali questions, figured I might as well post my answer here.
The Baali are the natural result of White Wolf's "villain creep" problem. The core premise of the game is that you play monsters who are traditionally thought of as "bad guys." But despite the fact that the players are being villains, it's specifically not supposed to be a comedy game, so you aren't supposed to be running around making good is bad and bad is good jokes like in King's Bounty Darkside or Dungeon Keeper. That doesn't leave a lot of options: there's sit around and moan about your fate, rant about how misunderstood you are, tell really darkfic grimderp stories, and fight even worse villains. That's about it, right?
And since all this shit is supposed to be playable, these operate at cross purposes. In the original writeup, an "Osiris" was a vampire who kept a cult of mortals around and under themselves so that they always has food within reach. When they revealed that Osirians were actual fucking white hat good guys instead, that left a lot less space to find even worse villains. When the Sabbat and the Setites were announced to just be misunderstood, that left even less space.
So WhiteWolf was constantly forcing itself to go out and find worse villains and this was in no small part hampered by the fact that many of the authors didn't have terribly good grasps on any kind of moral theory. So you've got bullshit like how the Red Talons are the "good guys" even though they are incestuous dog fucking cannibal rapists. So villains for those guys to fight ended up being tentacle dicked cannibal rape monsters who were also the villains from Captain Planet. And that seriously undermined the whole idea that this shit was supposed to be "serious business."
Demon worshipers was always pretty much the last refuge of acceptable villainy. I mean... they worship demons. Which in the excessively Christian paradigm most of the writers wrote in, meant that they were the ultimate evil by definition no matter what else it was that they did. So some of the Infernalist evil plans that were trotted out at various points did not, by any independently verifiable standards, make them any worse than any of the other factions. But in most cases, whatever it was they were actually doing, the intent was that the Infernalists were doing the worst things the author could imagine. It's just that some of the authors couldn't actually imagine worse things than some of the other authors got up to with their guro darkfics for the "normal" factions.
And of course, over the years there were a number of attempts by various authors to rehabilitate the infernalists into being a gray hat faction. Because some of the goths in Atlanta like to wear their corsses upside down to feel edgy. This always came off as pretty lame, since mostly the people who attempted to write misunderstood infernalism were doing it from the perspective of being very boring people who listen to devil music in order to scare their parents.
So if you want to come up with in-game justification for the Baali being "not all bad" or even "better than many of the factions they are opposed by," this is not terribly difficult. It is, however, kind of dumb. These justifications are mostly created by bad writing. The intentional justifications for infernalists being not-all-bad are poorly written, and the unintentional justifications for infernalists being a lot less bad than some of the other factions only exist in the first place because of bad writing.
The Baali have a kind of neat model where they can adopt people into their bloodline and then they get the clan discipline and drawback. Honestly, that is how things should work. It's mostly the nWoD bloodline model, but it's much cleaner. It does exactly what you want it to do, no more and no less. All of the in-world factions should work basically like that. Joining the Setites should make you swap out for Serpentis. Joining the Sabbat should make you swap out for Obtenebration. And so on. The problem of course, is that Daimonion (or however you spell that) is actually quite terrible. White Wolf has a shit tonne of different ways to shoot magic fire at people, and Baali fire blasts are like the second shittiest in the game. So while the Baali basically work the way you'd want joining the dark side to work, the correct choice as a player character is just to do dark thaum and bargain for investments - which is a game mechanics catastrophe but at least there are some powers at the end you might actually want.
It wasn't helped by the fact that as the edition(s) wore on, White Wolf had a tendency to walk back Dark Thaumaturgy as being too "overpowered" (this actually had its origins in Wraith, where every Arcanoi you knew actually had a physical manifestation on your corpus; in Vampire 3rd it meant that Disciplines were supposed to have drawbacks that you got just from learning them, which was taken up to the Nth degree with Dark Thaumaturgy because it's supposed to be power with a price).
It also wasn't helped by the fact that White Wolf was unwilling to commit to...much of anything when it came to Ultimate Evil, at least until it got to Exalted and gave us terrible pedophile-bait comic art. Really, the whole deal with the Baali and Daimonion is that they should have been just Dark Thaumatury except you were also able to just buy Investments without the accompanying cost of "X/tenths of your soul." Buy a dot in Daimonion, get a one-dot Investment, bham, done.
Ancient History wrote: when it came to Ultimate Evil, at least until it got to Exalted and gave us terrible pedophile-bait comic art.
Um... what? I know they produced a million source books but I remember the art being pretty good (and not, generally speaking, focused on sexualized images of children).
There's one of some teen(?) sorceress in some skimpy white gogo-wear surrounded by magic butterflies, in a crowd of people.
Edit: I'm too lazy to link, just google image search for "Exalted Sorceress"
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He jumps like a damned dragoon, and charges into battle fighting rather insane monsters with little more than his bare hands and rather nasty spell effects conjured up solely through knowledge and the local plantlife. He unerringly knows where his goal lies, he breathes underwater and is untroubled by space travel, seems to have no limits to his actual endurance and favors killing his enemies by driving both boots square into their skull. His agility is unmatched, and his strength legendary, able to fling about a turtle shell big enough to contain a man with enough force to barrel down a near endless path of unfortunates.
--The horror of Mario
Zak S, Zak Smith, Dndwithpornstars, Zak Sabbath. He is a terrible person and a hack at writing and art. His cultural contributions are less than Justin Bieber's, and he's a shitmuffin. Go go gadget Googlebomb!
Ancient History wrote: when it came to Ultimate Evil, at least until it got to Exalted and gave us terrible pedophile-bait comic art.
Um... what? I know they produced a million source books but I remember the art being pretty good (and not, generally speaking, focused on sexualized images of children).
Oh dear god you're really going to invoke the image of a spider raping a little girl aren't you?
Really, I'm disappointed. This would have been THE logical book to do Infernalism for Vampire: the Dark Ages - fuck, Vampire period. They could have reprinted all the crap about Demonic Investments and Daimonion and Dark Thaumaturgy in this one book and it would have been an okay start, but to have nothing attractive or fucked up or powerful about the Baali insults my inner power-gaming munchkin character-creator. I'd have to go and buy a fucking Mage supplement to get anything worthwhile out of making deals with demons in 1998.
Speaking of which. What is this Mage supplement, and what are the oWoD sources on infernalism?
DrPraetor wrote:Um... what? I know they produced a million source books but I remember the art being pretty good (and not, generally speaking, focused on sexualized images of children).
