OSSR: Dirty Secrets of the Black Hand

[talozin]

Naturally, when they later nerfed Temporis they made it an "advanced" version incompatible with Celerity - if you have Celerity and learn Temporis, all your Celerity points get automatically translated into Temporis.

Revised Temporis 5 was ... slightly less terrible. Someone must have pointed out how much of a barrel of fail the discipline was compared to Celerity, because the revised 5th dot power was:

- Spend 3 blood points.
- Roll ... I think Stamina + Occult or whatever.
- For a number of turns equal to your Temporis / 2 rounded up (so always at least 3 if you have this power at all), take extra actions as if you had activated Celerity of a rating equal to the number of successes you rolled.
- You can use Disciplines on your extra actions at the cost of one unsoakable health level of damage every time you do so.

It's more expensive than Celerity if you only expect to use it for a turn, and it's not reliable (though if you optimize for use of this power you can probably get yourself to average around 4-5 successes, there's always the chance that you fuck up and get nothing). But the ability to get multiple discipline uses in a turn when you really need to is pretty fvcking quality.

[talozin]

Russia was ruled over by the Baba Yaga, who is in reality a 4th generation Niktuki-bloodline Nosferatu (The Niktuku were the bloodline that was created when Nosferatu looked at his clan, said "Fuck this noise", and started creating children with which to kill his other children.

As far as I know, this was never put forth in any Vampire books.

You are going to fall dead of fvcking shock when I tell you this, but it was later revealed that this is all exactly backward.

Yeah, that's right. They published an adventure book for Vampire Revised where you get shanghaied into helping a little girl travel through Russia to look for her granny. And the end of the adventure you find out that of course the little girl is a Nictuku and her Granny is Baba Yaga who is the one free Nosferatu, and the little girl diablerizes her. Or maybe just kills her. I forget. It's one of those "OOH LOOK SOMETHING IMPORTANT TO THE METAPLOT IS HAPPENING, BE QUIET AND WATCH, NO YOU CAN'T FVCKING HAVE ANY EFFECT ON IT, IT'S A CUTSCENE" fingerquotes adventures fingerquotes that late World of Darkness was absolutely fvcking rife with.

Anyway, it's in "Nights of Prophecy" if your curiosity gets the better of you.

[JigokuBosatsu]

"But... we're in Detroit."

"Fine, you wake up in Russia."

[sake]

My god... this reads like if you locked Grant Morrison and Michael Kirkbride in a room that contained nothing but plies of heroin, acid, and a single word processor

[Username17]

Oh yeah, it's a total mess. On page 11 it reveals that they have four ghoul families, but in the history section it tells you they had 5 and two of them were purged from history for failure or treachery of something (like the Rainbow Warriors and Blood Ravens). The rules only list 3 of them (including one that gets Animalism, Auspex, and Thaumaturgy of all things). So the book literally tells you that there are 3, 4, and 5 ghoul families in different places. That kind of shit has to stop.

The Soul Eater plotline could have been salvageable. But it would have had to have been totally different. There could have been alien parasites that crawl into people and take them over and then give them powers that look like vicissitude. But of course, every other part of it needed to be different. Up to and including the idea that this was in any way secret. Seriously, why would anyone keep it secret that you thought it was a good idea to commit a genocidal war against the shapeshifting alien menace? You could just give that information out and then other vampires would kill some non-zero number of alien invaders for you.

The Black Hand Force Org chart wasn't salvageable. If you really wanted to present conflicting and confusing accounts, present actual different accounts. Have four essays written up by characters who are in different organizations about how far they think the Black Hand conspiracy goes. But the actual rules text needed to be simple, to-the-point, and non-contradictory.

-Username17

[sake]

But the werewolf and mage metaplots already had several alien parasites that crawl into people and take them over and then give them powers that look like vicissitude.

[Username17]

But the werewolf and mage metaplots already had several alien parasites that crawl into people and take them over and then give them powers that look like vicissitude.

Yeah, but it's OWoD, so Werewolf, Mage, and Vampire don't quite use the same system. So you have the aliens have powers that happen to use the Vicissitude mechanics because you're writing a book in the vampire line.

But the core issue is that if the Black Hand secretly knows about shapeshifting alien parasites, then the big reveal has to be that they are working with them, not that they are fighting. If you're fighting a shapeshifting alien menace, you do not keep that fact secret, you get the word out that there are shapeshifting aliens and try to get other people to fight them as well. On the flip side, if you are allied with the aliens, then keeping their secret is reasonable.

So if you wanted the Soul Eaters plot to work even a little bit, the deal would have to be that the Black Hand had people in it that were passing themselves off as Tzimisce, but in reality they were people who'd been taken over by Soul Eaters. Trying to do it the other way was just a litany of fail, and I don't think it could have been anything else. It was like the "Why doesn't the Sabbat break the masquerade in Camarilla territory? And how could the masquerade survive three days if they did?" problem but cranked up to 11 because the existence of shapeshifting aliens can be masquerade broken to other groups of supernaturals and doing so would not harm the position of Black Hand vampires in any way.

-Username17

[sake]

Ugh... right, I forgot that oWoD went through that weird "We must keep the Vampire line the hell away from any Umbra, Wyrm/Weaver, or Technocracy shit for fear of pissing off the goth kiddies that get off on all the vague satanic judeo christian background fluff even though it's suppose to be all one shared universe" phase.

[hyzmarca]

But the werewolf and mage metaplots already had several alien parasites that crawl into people and take them over and then give them powers that look like vicissitude.

Yeah, but it's OWoD, so Werewolf, Mage, and Vampire don't quite use the same system. So you have the aliens have powers that happen to use the Vicissitude mechanics because you're writing a book in the vampire line.

But the core issue is that if the Black Hand secretly knows about shapeshifting alien parasites, then the big reveal has to be that they are working with them, not that they are fighting. If you're fighting a shapeshifting alien menace, you do not keep that fact secret, you get the word out that there are shapeshifting aliens and try to get other people to fight them as well. On the flip side, if you are allied with the aliens, then keeping their secret is reasonable.

So if you wanted the Soul Eaters plot to work even a little bit, the deal would have to be that the Black Hand had people in it that were passing themselves off as Tzimisce, but in reality they were people who'd been taken over by Soul Eaters. Trying to do it the other way was just a litany of fail, and I don't think it could have been anything else. It was like the "Why doesn't the Sabbat break the masquerade in Camarilla territory? And how could the masquerade survive three days if they did?" problem but cranked up to 11 because the existence of shapeshifting aliens can be masquerade broken to other groups of supernaturals and doing so would not harm the position of Black Hand vampires in any way.

-Username17

What if they're memetic alien parasites that can take control of anyone who knows that they exist, thus necessitating a vast cover-up and conspiracy based around mind-wipes and double-tink so that you can fight then without knowing that you're fighting them? That works, right?

It seems like that would be a perfectly reasonable way to frame an utterly insane, paranoid, and contradictory ancient conspiracy.

[Voss]

Problem is, the setting already has literally dozens of those ancient conspiracies, and almost all of them are already utterly insane, paranoid and contradictory. Adding another, with even more layers of stupid (like bringing them to earth in the first, but keeping it only relevant to a secret society buried inside multiple layers of other secret societies was just... baffling.

The paranoia of the WoD works (particularly for vampire) because you wake up empowered, but still the low man on the local totem pole, because for the most part you are surrounded by people older and more powerful than you.

The 'sleeping elders are going to wake up and eat us all' also works, because it gives some insight into some of the crazy shit that other people are doing.

The Baali could have worked, because powerful people wanting more power is something that people can grasp, especially with immortality already factored in, because then the illusion that the bill will never come due is easy. The actual execution lacked in a lot of areas, however.

The Sabbat was... quickly full of plotholes, but people swallowed in because actually playing monsters rather than whiney little shits was fun.

But hanging even more increasingly crazy shit off the crazy-ass framework of the Sabbat was pretty much a bad idea from the start.


And also, fundamentally 'crazy-freaky-evil doppleganger shit' was something vampires could already just _do_, so having yet another way of doing it didn't really add anything.

[Username17]

What if they're memetic alien parasites that can take control of anyone who knows that they exist, thus necessitating a vast cover-up and conspiracy based around mind-wipes and double-tink so that you can fight then without knowing that you're fighting them? That works, right?

It seems like that would be a perfectly reasonable way to frame an utterly insane, paranoid, and contradictory ancient conspiracy.

Ah. The Warhammer postulate. Where people knowing about the aliens turns them into ticking timebombs that eventually transform into demons and run amok eventually. The most obvious objection to that is that doesn't fulfill the author's obvious goal of playing Parasyte in Vampire.

It also brings up the incredibly valid question of why the shapeshifter conspiracy keeps itself secret. It's back to the problems with the actual book: a conspiracy of silence only makes sense if the conspirators benefit in some way from the silence. The classic "benefit" from the conspiracy is that the conspirators are doing something awful and don't want people to find out about it. But there's also good traction for the conspirators openly promising that everything is OK and keeping the bad stuff secret so that the masses don't get angry at them.

The regular Vamprie Masquerade plotline is actually pretty good. Each conspiracy is supposed to keep the existence of all the other conspiracies secret because right now the public does not have anti-supernatural strike teams at all. But none of the conspiracies have any incentive in that format to keep the existence of any other conspiracy secret from any of the other other conspiracies!

-Username17

[endersdouble]

I want to say I remember reading somewhere that True Secrets Of The Black Hand was written by someone to point out how ridiculous things were getting, only for the WW Editors to not get the joke and publish it intact. Like Spock's Brain in ST:TOS. This sound right to anyone else?

Also,

A) what does OSSR stand for?

B) Is there an index of all the Anatomy of Failed Design/Bad Sourcebook Review threads? Because I love them THIS MUCH and want to make sure I've read them all.

[Username17]

The evidence for DSotBH being an elaborate troll is extremely thin. Editing is fucking terrible in that book, but it doesn't read in a way where the author is fucking with you deliberately.

OSSR stands for "Old School Sourcebook Review". We can and should do a lot more of these.

-Username17