[OSSR]Monte Cook's World of Darkness

[Ancient History]

OSSR: MC's WoD
Chapter 3: Skills


All sentences including the word “yo” should be read in Jesse Pinkman's voice.

AncientH:

I think we've already established the basics: McWoD is, mechanically, a d20 Modern hack, albeit made so as to be unbalanced to the point of being mostly incompatible with actual d20 Modern; 1st-level Werewolves are equivalent to 4th-level Strong Heroes, except Werewolves go up to Level 20.

Now, you might recall that the skills your character can pour points into is determined not by their type, but by their focus. However, because that would be far too simple, in the Skills chapter we're told that PCs also choose two themes at first level, which are bundles of skills in which they get three ranks each. The themes are directly associated with certain of the foci, but there's no rule that I can see that says your themes have to fall under your focus.

Sample themes:

Criminal (Stealth): Criminal skills require a fine hand for detailed work and a penchant for larceny.
Skills: Demolitions (Int), Disable Device (Int), Forgery (Int), Open Lock (Dex) and Sleight of Hand (Dex)

Magic (Intellect): While academia skills focus on readily available knowledge, magic skills focus on rare lore and the study and use of magic.
Skills: Concentration (Con), Knowledge (Occult), Research (Int) and Spellcraft (Int)

FrankT:

There's not a whole lot to say here. The skills chapter is 36 pages long, but 32 of those pages are just the actual list and descriptions of the skills themselves. If you're familiar with d20 hacks, you're basically familiar with these skills. You could almost skip the chapter entirely. This list is like the d20 Modern list with a few 3.5 tweaks. So there's still Computer Use, Demolitions, and Navigate, but Decipher Script has been removed. No one has really gone through this thing with a fine eye, because Open Lock, Demolitions, and Disable Device are three different skills.


It wouldn't be hard to improve this skill list a bit, but that would be effort instead of copypasta.

The basic problems with this system were made extremely clear by d20 Modern, which is not exactly surprising what with this system being essentially exactly d20 Modern's skill system. So all skills are capped by level and the cap rises quite slowly by level (+1 per hit die). This means that to be a noticeably good [$THING] you have to have a noticeably large number of hit dice, which in turn means that you can bounce bullets off your chest and punch your way through a gang of thugs. It means that any good computer hacker is like automatically Hackerman from Kung Fury.


An emergent, if stupid, facet of the system.

Skills are still handled on a d20, which is a linear RNG and has all the problems that entails (in order to be able to usually succeed at a task another character can't succeed at, your bonus has to be very large compared to the entire RNG, for example). There are various things you could do about these issues, but McWoD chooses to do none of them.

AncientH:

McWoD's approach to Computer Use is somewhere between Call of Cthulhu and Shadowrun. Which is to say, it's needlessly more complicated than a single d20 roll to do <whatever>, and not granular enough to actually bitch about the fine points.

FrankT:

The biggest change in the way things are done is how McWoD handles the skill points at level 1. d20 skills rise at the rate of 1 per level, but the cap at first level is 4. Traditionally, D&D and its derivatives give out four times as many skill points at first level, which causes a lot of problems when multiclassing between classes that give out different amounts of skills per level. Now, McWoD does not allow you to switch classes. Once
you start playing a Werewolf you just keep taking levels of Werewolf until you stop playing the game or roll a new character after realizing how completely terrible Werewolves are. So that particular problem wouldn't have been a big deal in McWoD, which is why they throw out a half-assed solution to it anyway. This “solution” perhaps unsurprisingly, makes the game less user friendly and less balanced.



You pick two “themes” and each one gives you a list of skills that you get 3 ranks in. The different themes do not give you the same number of skills, and the game doesn't even bother telling you what happens if you pick two themes that give the same skill. I can see what they were trying to do here, but this is just obviously a bad idea and more importantly it's a slapdash attempt to fix a common d20 problem that this ruleset didn't even have! This is such blatantly just some old d20 hands reaching into the folder of halfbaked d20 rule ideas that it's hard to even engage with.

AncientH:

Alchemy/Craft (Alchemy) has been replaced with Craft (Chemicals), which lets you make acids and poisons, but not legal drugs or antacids (which would fall under Craft(Pharmaceuticals)); illegal drugs aren't listed at all, so presumably you're on your own if you want to play Vampire Heisenberg.



Craft (Electronics) is a thing too, and we realize that building a computer from scratch is just as difficult as brewing up a batch of sarin gas, but takes four times as long. In the same time as it takes to build a computer, you can build a jet engine using Craft (Mechanical).

I didn't think it was possible, but the Craft sub-skills go down from there. Craft (Structural) lets you put up bookcases (presumably you get a circumstance bonus if it's IKEA). Craft (Visual Art) and Craft (Writing) are things.

FrankT:

Each skill is assigned to one focus, whose names have been pulled out of an ass. You get one focus, and it determines which skills don't cost you double. Some skills are in two groups, but not enough. So if you focus in “Stealth” you don't get easy access to “Bluff.” Honestly, I don't even know what these are for. It's an alternate take on class skills from D&D, but considering that the game went for big customizable classes you couldn't ever leave I don't understand why the whole concept of cross-classed skills wasn't simply dropped.

We haven't gotten to the magic rules yet and we won't this post, but you get a window into madness in this section where they reveal that casting spells is a spellcraft roll with a base DC equal to the number of components used to cast the spell. If you're at all familiar with the terribleness of shit like the Epic Spellcasting rules from D&D, you can sense a great disturbance in the force.

AncientH:

Ironically, the most offensive part of this chapter is a non-mechanical bit of fluff floating in a black halo randomly inserted on the page:

“The coming of the Iconnu may have invigorated the magical sphere, but the key to mastering it is still in the study of the ancient arts. The Egyptians, the Babylonians . . . they knew more of the secrets of the universe than any modern scientist.”
—Nathan Gross, mage

Fuck you. You don't get to make that claim, because you've explicitly fucking avoided any reference to actual magical traditions! Shadowrun can get away with that shit if it wants to, because they make no pretense of referring back to real-life magical systems! Asshats.

Chapter 4: Feats & Abilities


We all wish.

FrankT:

This chapter is 56 pages long and divided into the special abilities that each type gets exclusively. Disciplines for Vampires, Gnosis for Mages, Cants for Demons, and Feats... for everyone. Awakened get more of them, but really everyone gets feats, including the statted up normals later in the book. So, sucks to be an Awakened, I guess. Also the Mages “real” power is their spells, not their Gnosis, and that's an entire chapter to itself.

AncientH:

I would like to take a moment to complain that the art in this book is incredibly bad. Sub-par even by nWoD or random 3rd-party d20 product standard. It's not just that nobody is bring their B-game (the A-game is right out), the fucking faded grayscale pencil drawings with obvious digital touch-up clusterfucking really grinds my gears.

FrankT:

Feats are almost entirely straight copypasta from the d20 Modern SRD, which in turn are mostly the least ambitious feats from Dungeons & Dragons. A lot of these are therefore ultimately sourced in a tactical environment where people would be expected to line up and hit each other with swords. I can't be fucked to count, but a quick eyeballing looks that more than half of these things are specifically relevant for melee combat – something you are quite likely to never participate in because guns exist. The general assumption for what a feat should be worth seems pretty extremely small – +1 on a 20 sided die to saves against magic is offered in all seriousness and isn't even a bad choice. Mages can spend two feats (on “Skill Focus” and “Skilled”) to get +5 to their use magic rolls, which is a lot like being 5 levels higher. So even in the realm of feats, Mages rule and Awakened drool. I have no idea what an Awakened character is supposed to do with all their feats, and seemingly neither do the authors.

Note that even looking right at the feats, you still won't know what a lot of them do until chapter 7, because they reference rules that haven't been explained yet. You can get DR 1/- with a feat (DR works differently in this game than D&D because fuck you), you can get the ability to take the as-yet unexplained “double tap” action without being flatfooted with a feat. And so on. With a solid background in d20 rules (and especially d20 Modern rules), you can pretty much decipher this shit, but technically a lot of stuff remains unsaid.

AncientH:

I'm really not sure what "Armor Proficiency" means in a game set in contemporary times. Presumably it means you don't try to bedazzle your bulletproof vest or something.

Some things we would normally classify as class abilities are re-imagined as feats in McWoD. Case in point is "Sneak Attack," which is normally a Rogue class feature and here is just a feat you can take multiple times. Presumably because everyone knows the old adage about wizards and daggers.

Things that are noticeable by their absence: some of the "General Feats." This is not necessarily a bad thing; the "Skilled" feat gives you a +2 bonus to any two skills and you can take it as many times as you want, applying it to different skills, so you don't need shit like Negotiator and Nimble Fingers. Leadership is gone, though, as is Blind-Fight. More weirdly, I swear they were basing this feat list off the regular OGL d20 SRD and not the d20 Modern SRD because a lot of the Modern d20 feats are...missing.

Which brings us to another point I don't understand: why they didn't...well, plunder more. If you're going to steal some free shit from d20 Modern, you might as well go whole-hog about it. I mean, I'm sure they could have ripped off the psychic feats from Call of Cthulhu d20 to at least give the Awakened something to aspire to beyond "badass normal." There's literally thousands of feats in play when they were making this game, I don't understand why they couldn't have filled this section up with more of them, or at least more interesting ones. As it is, this feels very stripped-out. Like a d20 lite package.


If d20 was a beer, it would be Miller Lite. If WoD was a beer, it would be Coors. If McWoD was a beer, it would be O'Doul's.

FrankT:

Demon Cants are like Tome of Fiends Fiend Feats. You get them like a 3e Fighter gets bonus feats, and they are drawn off a special list of demonic magical and structural powers. I have no idea why they are called “Cants” in that a lot of them are shit like “claws” and not really something that you speak. I mean, it's a suitably black metal word for your demonic magical powers to have, but it implies a bunch of shit about chanting in dog latin that you don't actually do.

Most of these are useless or very very small. The claws are actually a special case in that their obvious use is bullshit worthless (spend anima points to have unexciting weapons for a whole minute!), but the book is actually super vague on how many attacks you actually get. It says that your claws are “each” weapons, and that you can have them grow out of your feet as well if you so desire. So it's an available interpretation that you turn into a modestly impressive cuisinart of death, but you could also interpret it that you just get a modestly OK ax for spending actual power points.



When the book does bother to explain how shit works it is usually wrong even on its own terms. Demon energy blasts are special demonic energy that the book spends page 117 carefully explaining is a special bullshit energy type that there is no defense against. Except that DR in this game does apply to energy, even bullshit energy. So while there's no “demonic energy resistance” on anyone's character sheet, it is actually trivial to get resistance against it. Indeed, the spells that give you energy resistance aren't restricted to the “big five,” so even if spells granting typeless DR weren't a thing, spells to stop demonic energy totally are. It's just... obviously whoever was writing the demon powers had an idea for how Demons were supposed to punch people with unblockable ultima damage, but they didn't tell the people writing the rest of the rules and the end result is that demon lasers suck monkey butt.

Where the actual powers of demons come in is like their ability to go incorporeal as a free action and shit. This is basically d20 Modern, so incorporeality countermeasures do not really exist.

AncientH:

There's no real thought given into how the Demon Cants work in conjunction with...uh...anything. Presumably you can get Weapon Specialization in your Claws. Probably the two most interesting powers are "Imbue Object" (which lets you make minor enchanted items) and "Infernal Pact" (which lets you drain anime Anima from a subject in exchange for providing them a minor bonus). The latter sounds like it should be roleplayed more, since it basically makes you a (highly limited but effective) genie, but the range of effects is pretty impressive:

Not including any roleplaying or monetary resources at your disposal, you can create any one of the following supernatural gifts for a mortal as part of a pact: +4 to one ability score, +10 on checks with one skill, +10 hit points, darkvision, temporarily cure a disease or suspend a physical drawback (such as making a crippled leg fully functional)

Now of course, no one is going to play a game of McWoD, but that ability would actually make a Demon a worthwhile member of the party (note: I haven't read ahead yet to what Anima drain does to other supernaturals, but still, +10 on checks with one skill is like half the RNG.) The only creepy part of the whole thing is the fairly explicit suggestion that PCs can just fuck their clients to gain anima - there's a half-page spread of a woman in lingerie, knee-high hose and heels playing with a dagger to accompany this feat.

FrankT:

Mage Gnosis are like bonus feats that only Mages get. As you might expect, they are not remotely balanced. A bunch of them are “shakti,” which are tiny premade spells that always work but cost you hit points. These are unsurprisingly mostly not worth using. A 1st level Mage probably can't fail to cast a spell with a component cost of 16, so the “automatic casting” effect on shakti cantrips isn't worth very much. Shakti is the Hindu concept of universal divine creative feminine energy, and I have no idea why that term is used for blood magic cantrips.


Superficially, that doesn't seem to have anything to do with hurting yourself to shoot trivial firebolts at people, but I remind you that blatantly misrepresenting words from other cultures and religions is probably about as close to the World of Darkness as this book gets.

There are some gems. There's a feat that increases your Save DCs by five if you don't kill or do damage to the victims of your Save or Lose effects. Working around that limitation is of course extremely easy, and that does push you off the RNG if you were anywhere close to the edge in the first place. Bizarrely, it specifically calls that one out as something that Necromancers wouldn't be interested in, perhaps because SKR has never played a necromancer in D&D. I dunno. The default pick is “Component Focus,” which reduces the number of lego pieces (and thus the casting DC) required for a specific category by 2. The book seems pretty sure that you're going to pick some effect like “Heal,” but obviously you'd start with meta-categories that appear on literally every spell you ever cast like “Range.” Even just looking at these Mage specific feats, it's really obvious that SKR has no idea what the casters he has written are capable of or what they would want to do. It's like looking at the magic system in Iron Heroes.

AncientH:

Mage Gnosis/feats are bizarrely generic. It's not just that they're obviously not specifically referencing anything from WoD, it's that they're obviously not referencing anything. They're more generic than your average d20 feats, because the magic system itself is incredibly generic and open-ended. So it's just a grab-bag of obvious d20 hacks. The closest thing to references to actual WoD crap is stuff like like Blood Magic and Lich Transformation, the former of which lets you use blood to make spells go faster cast easier (Vampire blood is more potent), and the latter of which lets you...uh...be more of a glass ninja, at the expense of needing to eat souls on a weekly basis.

FrankT:

Vampire Disciplines are like bonus feats that only Vampires can take. Often they require you to spend your blood power point to do stuff. They are in chains, like the dot system of World of Darkness, but presented in raw alphabetical order with prerequisites listed like they were feats. This makes it very difficult to find where things go. Things don't have GOTO statements, they have COMEFROM statements like we were programming in fucking INTERCAL. So the only way to figure out what your claws power is leading to is to read the prerequisites of all the other powers and see which ones require your claws.

Anyway, there are winners and losers in here, and even reading them right now I can't tell which is which in all cases. The claws use the same vagaries of language as the demon claws that could lead you to logically conclude that they gave you one mediocre attack or twenty (I personally think the most likely reading is “four”). Clan discipline connections are handled by giving each bloodline a bonus on some arbitrary subset of powers. So if you're a Gangrel, you pop claws for free instead of paying a blood point to do it. Being a Ventrue gives people a -4 save penalty against your mind control, so that's still the best one. Of course, why are we talking about bloodlines when all these people were created yesterday by soul fusion will evil ghosts? I mean seriously, what the fuck?

As a Vampire you are perhaps unsurprisingly, probably about the #2 character. A Mage abusing the system can do everything you can do better, but at least you get to piss on Werewolves, Demons, and especially the Awakened.

AncientH:

Vampires are in the unique position of increasing their physical ability scores on demand as much as they want by spending vitae - and that's before you take disciplines into account - so any of the other physical disciplines are pretty much gravy.

Back in the Vampire class type section, it explained that not all vampires will be able to take all disciplines. This is a lie. In fact, all vampires can take all disciplines, but each vampire clan has an affinity for three discipline groups, which means they get a lower cost and/or bonus effect. I don't know how this matters, since there's nothing I read that says you pick your clan and they just seem to assume you're Unbroken during chargen, so I assume this is a mix-up between the authors as to how the fuck they were going to implement nWoD clans in McWoD, and another stunning example of why you don't get a fucking Canadian mercenary to edit your shit.

In addition to Disciplines, you have Devotions. In Vampire: the Requiem, devotions were the rethought version of combination disciplines in oWoD; the idea being that you could combine powers from different disciplines to create a new, standalone power. Like peanut butter and jelly becoming something greater than the sum of the parts. This is pretty much exactly that, except there are no clan affinities and every now and again some asshole forgets that only vampires can take these things so they don't need to add "vampire" to the prerequisites line.


For reasons I don't understand, the devotions include a picture of a vampire woman with a knife stuck in her boob.

Devotions are mostly useless, particularly given the prerequisites. Who the fuck cares about getting a +12 bonus to Search and Spot checks to see fast-moving objects?

FrankT:

Werewolf rites are the longest section in here. Feats are 10 pages, Vampire Disciplines are 15, but Werewolf Rites get 17 pages. This is because they have long descriptions. For example, there is a power called “Bystander” that lets you fit in with a crowd as long as you don't do anything specifically to draw attention to yourself for 10 minutes by spending a power point. Not that great and the kind of thing that I've basically already explained to you (the big extra rule is that observers who have magic perception get to make a Will save to notice that you are a werewolf and not a waiter). This book takes three hundred and seventy nine words to explain this power. I haven't used half of that wordcount explaining the power and complaining about how much wasted text there is in the book.*

*: The preceding paragraph was 144 words.

Werewolf powers are mostly extremely bad. In general it seems that what you're supposed to do is to have a series of short duration buffs that you activate in sequence and then have very large bonuses to attack and defense. And then you cry tiny tears when you realize that Vampiric mind control doesn't cost power points at all. When they are not that, they tend to be even worse, such as spending power points to do small amounts of fire damage.

AncientH:

In addition, some Rites are restricted by what auspice (moon phase) your werewolf is. Unlike with vampires, where you're basically assumed to be Unbroken, the werewolf equivalent (the Calm) is never mentioned after the first chapter, so you pretty much have to pick one auspice to be for the rest of the game.

The one "advantage" that werewolves have is that their Rites tend to be about twice as large in a mechanical bonus than they should - you see a lot of "+8"'s thrown around - but those are still not as good as Vampire equivalents, though they'd probably tear through Awakened like glass ninjas. For example, "Savage Might" is a 12th-level Werewolf rite that gives them +10 enhancement bonus to Strength per Essence spent for one round. Except vampires could give themselves +4 Str bonus per vitae back at level one, and improve that by taking repeated levels of Vigor. So Werewolves would theoretically be more economical, but even first-level vampires can probably match them, and equivalent-level vampires can exceed them. It really is the "anything you can do I can do better" way of things.

Possibly to help establish some sort of roll for Werewolves, their umbra-walking abilities have been re-imagined to working with Nightmare Wave/Annihilation Zone bullshit. Honestly, I don't see how anyone can possibly care. Which sums up these chapters well.

Next up, Magic.

[Username17]

Apropos of nothing, I just now realized that in McWoD the big bads are called "Iconnu" and not "Inconnu." Inconnu is of course something that means "The Unknown" and is also a reference to the original Vampire, while Iconnu doesn't mean shit and refers to nothing. I'm absolutely positive that this is a spelling error that happened because Monte Cook hasn't picked up a Vampire book in 15 years and just got standardized in this book because the editors in Canada had no idea what was being talked about and picked one of the spellings used at random. However, Benoist has a different theory, because he is terrible and everything he likes and is excited about is also terrible. He's an extremely reliable compass of taste, provided you remember that his arrow points the wrong way.

-Username17

[souran]

The sad thing is that if you could have slapped a white wolf type label on a book about playing vampires, werewolves, and demons in d20 games, especially D&D, you could probably have printed a mint. D&D vamps and werewolves are basically terrible choices for players and difficult to impossible to get DMs to let you play anyway.

Its actually pretty bullshit that there are not decent to good versions of at least werewolves and vampires playable as character classes. Whenever I introduce new people to D&D/Pathfinder there is ALWAYS a person who says that they want to be a vampire or werewolf. The fact that 3.x still doesn't have functioning class versions of these two things is god damn ridiculous.

[Josh_Kablack]

OTOH, the soon-to-be-dominant RPG genre of "Paranoid Rococo Moombahton" isn't going to write itself.

Get AH to write it and I will back the KS at the ~$15/~PDF level.

[Ancient History]

I totally missed this post somehow.

You might as well write your own Tome hack based off fucking Urban Arcana.

To the individual that completes the Farcast review, I will write a full game and setting involving any three keywords of your choosing. This is a limited-time offer.

Does Farcast relate to Urban Arcana somehow?

No.

http://www.tgdmb.com/viewtopic.php?t=55023
of this?
http://www.farcastblog.com/p/blog-page.html

You read the second link and post the review in the first link. Or it gets the hose again.

How soon do you need this?

I've only been trying to get a full review for two years, so I haven't decided what "Limited time only" means yet.

[Prak]

Every time you say limited time offer, I interpret it as meaning "until someone actually finishes the review"

[Ancient History]

OSSR: McWOD
Chapter 5: Magic


Spooky.

AncientH:

We're in uncomfortable territory for a d20 hack: improvised magic. For a level-based, class-centric RPG, that just gives designers the heeby-jeebies and is generally a poor fit.

Now: need it be a poor fit? That's an interesting question. I think you could totally have some form of improvised magic that works at a low enough level to be interesting and useful without being overpowering, but I'm not sure how that wouldn't boil down into "Mother May I" with level limits.



Okay, so this section is inspired by Mage's sphere system, and it involves TNs and a d20 roll, but that's about where the similarities to Mage or any other d20 magic system pretty much end. The "components" that you combine to make Captain Planet spells are Area, Duration, Range, Conjure, Control, Damage, Divination, Energy, Enhance, Heal, Illusion, Metaspell, Movement, New Power, and Protect. I think that actually qualifies as retrogression as far as design goes, because it's demonstrably less useful or thematically appropriate than either Mage Spheres or d20 Schools. I mean for fuck's sake, for the simplest spell you're looking at least four components (Area, Duration, Range + something to make it actually do something). That means your "on the fly" magic involves sitting a maths exam featuring at least four charts and three calculations (#of components, exhaustion rating, and spell save). I feel that Mister Cavern should have a minute hourglass whenever you're trying to put something together during combat.

FrankT:

Mages are so dramatically better than you that they get an extra 44 page chapter just to describing their special abilities that they exclusively get. The basic rules are that you select a series of facets about your spell off a list of attributes that each have costs, and the total eats through your very large pile of daily lego pieces and also sets the basic DC for a Spellcraft check. A first level Mage probably has a Spellcraft modifier of +15 if they simply push all the sliders to the left by not being an idiot, so anything with a total Component set of 16 or less is something you can't fail on. Other bonuses you choose to pick up tend to be quite large, so if you tie your spellcasting to a wand you get +5 while you have it, and any of the spells you've practiced as “rotes” are things that you likewise get +5 on. So it really honestly wouldn't be weird at all for a 1st level Mage to have a spell that had a Component cost of 26 that they successfully cast on a natural 1. Things that increase component cost tend to do so linearly, and adding dice of damage is 1 point per die, so if a 1st level Mage wants to dump a 15 die fireball on your ass, they probably just do that.


Your living space is the same as anyone else's.

This section is written by SKR, and he names one of his sample mages “Luke Johnson,” presumably after one of the other authors of this book “Luke Johnson.” I assume the quotes attributed to him are real. Considering that Monte Cook decided to set the apocalypse in his home town of Watertown, South Dakota, that level of flippantly narcissistic jackassery just doesn't even stand out.

Until you become familiar with creating spells, you may take several minutes looking through the component descriptions before putting together the sort of spell you want. Rather than bringing a combat scene to a screeching halt while you page through this book, it’s a good idea to write down some sample spells in advance so when it’s your turn to act you can do so immediately. (Doing so also keeps the other players from wanting to throttle you for slowing down the game.)

At some level, even SKR seems to acknowledge that these rules are unplayable.

AncientH:

Things not included in this chapter: magic for any other character class. Awakened? Werewolf? Vampire? Demon? No sorcery for you!

A long section is dedicated to sympathetic magic. This is the kind of thing actually based in real-world magic, where you use an image of a person, or a clipping of their hair or nails or some of their blood, and use it to target them with magic even if they aren't within view. Sympathetic magic can dramatically change the flavor of a game's setting - you look at Shadowrun, where "material links" and "sympathetic links" are of considerable concern to magicians, or those who have to deal with magicians. WoD traditionally hasn't gone in for it as much; vampire magics tend to implicitly use some principles of sympathetic magic in some spells, and Mage supplements usually have an optional rule for voodoo dolls or something buried somewhere in there. That said, while they've given quite a lot of thought to the rules behind sympathetic magic here (rarely if ever have I seen Brad Pitt used in an RPG example), they haven't really given it any setting consideration...but then, they haven't really given the setting any consideration. So, fuck it.


Brad Pitt's celebrity status helps protect him from sympathetic magic. I can only imagine that PCs should be able to take advantage of this, possibly involving a Celebrity Modifier Table of some kind.

FrankT:

As you've probably already guessed, the way to real ultimate power is to min/max the hell out of these things. None of the parameters are independently limited by level or much of anything, so if you put all your eggs in any one basket things get flipping insane. The save DCs start at 10 + Stat mod (so 16 for a 1st level Mage), and go up by 1 per component point you invest. So a first level character can dump curses on people with a Save DC of 30. Of course, the real money is casting permanent buffs. Did you know that giving an enhancement bonus to further Spellcraft checks comes in 1 for 1 on components? So you can cast a mighty ritual of being like +30 to spellcraft for a day, and then cash that out for an even mightier ritual of being +15 to spellcraft permanently, and then you can cast whatever you want.



The game tries to restrict you from casting really big spells by giving you an “exhaustion rating” whenever you cast large spells that makes it harder to cast spells later in the day. But that just hyperincentivizes cashing out on titanic spells even more. Since even at 1st level you can ramp up permanent bonuses that make you able to use up a day's components making permanent minions or granting permanent bonuses, Mages take off into crazy town in the first week or so. Basically, these are the Epic Spellcasting rules from the D&D Joke Book, with a lot more fiddly dials. And it is if anything more broken. If you don't use it to hard takeoff singularity... it's still broken. But spending a few days or weeks of downtime giving yourself bonuses to all things bigger and better than what the other PCs get on their everything is simply child's play.

AncientH:

“Magic has always been the true power in the universe. Now it just . . . works better.”
—Dana Flores, mage

Now this really pisses me off.



I get that floating, in-character tidbits spice up otherwise drab mechanical chapters in RPGs. They are a good thing, and have been for many decades, when games like Shadowrun did them very well. But just because you know they should be there doesn't mean you should be the laziest fucktard on the planet when it comes time to actually write them. These things read like SKR had a full frontal lobotomy before he glazed the chapter with what remains of his creative juices.

While we're on it, the sidebars in this chapter are atrocious. They're made to look like bits of paper wedged into the fucking book, and whatever font they're using adds unnecessary spaces in the middle of words, so you have things like "Soni c Damage" and "Noi se Rat i ngs."

Also, a word on Necromancy and Resurrection:

This book gives component costs for raising the dead for GMs who allow it, though the book otherwise makes no assumptions about whether or not it is possible. Certainly, the setting details here do not assume that people returning from the dead is a common occurrence.

See, this is why Shadowrun has fairly strong limitations. It neatly sidesteps problems like this. Also, if there's a fucking component cost given, then fuck your Mister Cavern for not allowing it. If you've given it a cost, the cat's out of the bag, asshole!

FrankT:

The list of pre-built spells goes on for a bit over 21 pages. You would think that the fact that the very first example is “Alarm,” a spell that makes a loud noise if someone walks into a specific 5 foot area sometime in the next day is beyond the exhaustion threshold for a 1st level character would make people radically rethink this bullshit system altogether. And you'd be wrong.

AncientH:

We haven't talked about Mage Paths much, because like choosing your Werewolf Auspice or your Vampire Clan, it doesn't fucking matter much. They're more like guidelines than anything relevant to your character. In this case, your Mage Path (Enchanter, Necromancer, Theurgist, Shaman, Warlock) gives you a +5 bonus on Spellcraft tests with casting "path appropriate" rote spells. If that sounds bullshit to you, congratulations for paying attention.

Most of the spells are straightforward in naming and operation. Some...aren't. Some are just off-the-wall. For example, the "Create Tass" spell lets you "store" 50 components for later use. Say what? I know it's based off a Mage mechanic, but when were they going to mention this as even a possibility?

As you might expect, the spells are gleefully unbalanced; dealing 10d6 fire damage is easier than gaining a +4 Def boost or throwing a temporary +5 bonus on your dagger.



Unnumbered Interlude: Many Faces, One Soul


Makes as much sense as anything.

FrankT:

For no particular reason, there's a chunk of flash fiction between chapters 5 and 6. It's four pages long, but has so much less formatting bullshit that it's actually 50% longer than the opening fiction. Still takes less time to read, because of its relative lack of formatting bullshit. It starts in media res, and is edgy and shit. It's much better than the other two fiction pieces. Most notably because the protagonist is shown being in trouble and then it does a flashback to him helping someone for a friend. So it makes the POV character likeable from the outset, something that the other two pieces disdainfully refused to attempt to do.

I mean, it still calls time for boring exposition after that and doesn't really go anywhere, but it has an opening where you aren't immediately put off the characters. It revolves around a Mage interacting with a Demon and an Awakened. And that means it was specifically written for this “world” and that it wasn't inspired by actual World of Darkness material in the slightest.

AncientH:

Big mistake, demon dude.

I feel this sentence about sums up the totality of my impression of this piece of fiction.

FrankT:

The story more articulately explains what they wanted magic to be like than the actual chapters explaining Mages and Magic. Unsurprisingly, the actual rules are nothing like that. Mages are supposed to be whispering in Enochian, doing covert minor magical tricks interspersed with sleight of hand and shit. Covert magic in this game is actually expensive, exhausting, and shit. What you actually do when confronted by a Demon is to blast it to pieces with a death laser from your face.


The Mages described in this story are actually more interesting than the ones in the actual rules, who just respond to problems like this with SHOOP DA WHOOP!

Chapter 6: Equipment


Spooky.

AncientH:

By now, your character should be an interesting creature with some useful and deadly skills, feats and abilities. The only thing left to do is outfit her so she’s ready to do battle with the Iconnu’s agents
— or whomever she chooses.

Yeah, right. Anyway, this is the gear chapter, which means guns first. Unlike Shaodwrun, which proceeds from the basic assumption and implicit idea that you are a violent criminal in a lawless, post-apocalyptic hellhole (like Detroit, but with elves), this game pretends it's set in something approximating the Real World (albeit with a sizable chunk of the midwest gone having taken the brown acid), with laws restricting the purchase and use of firearms, and that anyway this is supposed to be a game about character development, god damn it, and not focused on the acquisition of wealth.

...yeah, I don't have much to say for that. The thing is, money is a great motivator, and a useful narrative tool. Defeat the dragon, save the princess, get paid. Go on the shadowrun, complete the mission, get paid. Getting paid is a thing that people recognize and understand as a thing their player characters want and strive for. It gives them something they want (money, even fake in-game money) which they can then convert into other things they want (hookers, better equipment, a swinging pad, shares of stock, political appointments, an upgrade in chow at the local orphanage, etc.) Being a hero is fine and all, but it's generally a different narrative - you're substituting the material reward for an immaterial one. Which is a great choice for the PCs, but it's not one you want to force on people at the outset. This gets into the rather complicated question of what the fuck is the point of this game? What, exactly, are the player characters supposed to do, how are they supposed to join up and interact with each other? Is there even enough mechanical diversity to have a game with three vampires and a demon? What do they do together, and why do they do it together?

But, I've gone off topic. We were talking about guns.

FrankT:

The Equipment section is 22 pages long, and the first section of it is about how this game does not have a system for deciding what kind of equipment you have. At all.

Also it turns out that Silver Bullets are pretty much worthless and no one gives a shit. For no particular reason, they do -2 damage. And since silver weapons do up to 5 extra damage against Werewolves, silver weapons aren't even worth investing in if Werewolves are 100% of the opposition.



I have no idea why the authors feel the need to cockblock monster hunters from using silver weapons, but they do. After all the pages and pages of fuckery, laziness, and more fuckery, this might seem like a weird thing to get upset by. But it's a different kind of fuckery. This isn't just bad design or lazy copy pasta or unedited horseshit, this is a conscious decision to make extra double sure that player characters can't have nice things. Fuck this book.

AncientH:

There's no costs given for any of the equipment in this book, or a Purchase DC, or anything like that. A quick comparison shows that they probably started off ripping stuff from d20 Modern equipment lists, but somebody must have dropped a table column or three, because even then the damage codes et al. don't always line up (brass knuckles in McWoD do 1d3 damage, brass knuckles in d20M do 1 damage, etc.)

I think a large part of it is they simply didn't want to get into the details of different types of similar weapons. For example, instead of "Beretta 92F" or "Beretta 93R" you have "pistol" and "autopistol." It's really kind of annoying, because here again you have a point where it would have actually enriched the system and been less work to just rip off material already written for d20 Modern (and included in the SRD!) and instead they give us slightly-warmed off pap.

FrankT:

The charts are poorly formatted, the weapons are arranged by damage such that the Shotgun firing slugs is not adjacent to the same Shotgun firing shot. Seriously. Things are in the wrong columns all over the fucking place, and there's no real logic to any of this shit. It's very clear that no editor actually checked this for game mechanical sense making. The Shotgun slug has a critical threat range of “ballistic” with a damage type of “30 ft.”



Most of this chapter is combat swag, which is not terribly surprising because this game is basically vampire themed fight club for no reason. Armor makes you easier to hit and take less damage. This means that whether it makes sense to wear it or not depends on what kind of enemies you are facing. The more skilled your opponents and the smaller the weapons they brought to the party, the more heavy armor is a good idea. Does that make sense to you? This is one of those things where people pulled some seemingly sensible design concepts out of their ass, put them in a blender, and ended up with gibberish.

There's a list of stuff like duct tape and cell phones. It's not a terrible list, but it does pad itself with bad jokes (Duct Tape is like The Force... you know, there are really a lot of Star Wars references in this fucking book). These aren't copypasta from the d20 Modern SRD, but I don't discount the idea that they are copypasta from something.

AncientH:

Most of the random gear is taken directly from d20 Modern, only made more generic whenever possible. I don't even.

FrankT:

The last 6 pages of this chapter are about Magic items. Magic items happen for no reason and do whatever the MC feels like. Some of them are old stuff that has an interesting history and now has magic powers for no reason, and some of them are just random junk that got imbued with nightmare energy for even less reason. So basically we're looking at the magic items from Unknown Armies, although at least there are more examples than in that piece of shit. One thing I will say in its praise is that at least it doesn't get all upset about magic items being good the way so many 3e derivative products do. The sample magic sword is +4 and does 2d8 base damage and ignores DR. That's an incredibly badass sword, although of course the authors are right to give zero fucks because you can still double tap with an automatic rifle if that's what you want to do.

AncientH:

The supernatural items are badass, but of course none of them make sense in the context of the game, which is that magic just came back - so none of these fucking things should have any sort of enchantment what so fucking ever. "Nightmare Items" are more explicitly created as sort of Iconnu backwash, and can involve a "please consult random tables" rolls. They tend to be more "well, that's useful" than game-breakingly powerful, but they're also another step away from WoD thematically, since a random rock imbued with ineffableness can let your vampire walk around in sunlight without bursting into flames, albeit with the terrible curse of being constantly covered in sticky mucous. Then there are soul-infused items, which have a spirit trapped within that give you a bonus if you do what they want you to do. All in all, these remind me a lot of Unknown Armies items, in that they're all fairly unique and they completely ignore the d20 advantage of actually producing your own.

So, that's magic and equipment. Next up: Playing the Game

[Ancient History]

OSSR: McWoD
Chapter 7: Playing the Game


This is where the rules are.

AncientH:

I wanted to start with something nice for a change. It goes downhill from here.

Someone once told me that d20 was designed to sell miniatures. This part of the ruleset covers movement and positioning, and there are many grids that will convince you of the inherent truth of that statement.

Aside from rules on movement, this chapter is the miscellaneous grab bag for all other rules, including healing, vision, damage, actions, the actual combat procedure, breaking shit, saving throws, grenades, vehicle movement (including, bizarrely, a section on playing "hide and seek" during a car chase), etc.

FrankT:

Monte Cook of course was one of the main authors of 3rd edition D&D, so he is perhaps more confused than anyone alive as to what the rules of D&D actually are. Having been with the system in its concepting and early draft stages, he can vividly remember the rules saying all kinds of shit that the actual public release never did. I have the same problem with some of the shit I wrote. Once you've done up three or seven revisions of a rule, remembering what exactly you decided to go with at the end is sometimes a bit difficult. Further, Monte Cook is a relentless tinkerer, constantly fiddling with things and coming up with new ideas – some of which are even good.



So this 50 page chapter is like a retelling of the saga of the d20 rules. And um... it's variously different in all kinds of minor ways all over the fucking place. Is that because Monte Cook is half-remembering an earlier draft of this system? Is that because Monte Cook had some musings on how to tweak the system sitting around on his desk and he decided to throw them in here as a test balloon? Is it because it's just a fucking misstatement and no one fucking edited this book with an eye for content? Probably all of those things!

AncientH:

For example, movement rates are given as: Walk, Hustle, Run (x3), Run (x4), and Hampered Movement.



"Tactical Movement" includes Burrow, Climb, Swim, and Fly speeds, the latter of which requires a chart and the reappearance of the dread Battle Grid. Also there are "Local Movement" and "Overland Movement" sections which are different from the battle movement, even though they use some of the same terms. It's all a fucking mess.

FrankT:

The d20 system goes into a fair amount of detail about squares on the battle grid. Characters control certain amounts of space with their melee weapons, people have a great deal of freedom of movement when out of arm's reach but once melee has been engaged people can only safely make small movements to press combat in one direction or another. It's actually a pretty great system and there are a lot of ways to engage with it. It's a thing where a character can be a dude with a sword and shield who basically just hits things but still have meaningful tactical choices to make. But all of that stuff is basically meaningless in a modern setting, right? Combat is that you take cover behind a terrain feature and then shoot bullets at your enemy until you win, lose, or run out of bullets to shoot. All of this shit about grids and threatened areas and stuff is just so much wasted space. The diagrams showing how grid movement works and such are actually pretty informative and effective. It's just... I do not know why we are doing any of this. It carries over the 3.5 obsessiveness about squares, corners, and charge-lines. Remember that this is a game where you might never see someone charge at all, so while the example grids are clear, they are pointless.



There's a list of some deliberate changes. A few of them are specifically taken from Monte Cook's Arcana Evolved or some damn thing. There's some fucktarded thing about critical hits doing constitution damage to normal people and causing lost turns to supernatural creatures. Note that with the amount of damage some characters can do, losing some constitution points is a lot not as bad as being stunned next to a cuisinart with sneak attack. So that's one of those ideas that's just stupid and I don't know why it's here. Does this mean that every change not on this list of deliberate changes is an error? Maybe! I have no idea how you'd find out, and I doubt Monte Cook gives enough of a shit to have ever gone over them and told anyone one way or the other.

Humanity Points are re-envisioned as Action Points, more or less. No one knows why.

AncientH:

Because the Awakened need something to feel special. In WoD, Humanity is a moral measuring stick for your character; in McWoD, Humanity is the special attribute the Awakaned have, and which they spend to add +20 to a roll. Of course, other supernaturals can earn Humanity points too, which just reinforces what everyone already knows: the Awakened are shit and useless.

FrankT:

There's a whole chase scale mini-game which is for driving around shooting at people Mad Max style. Like all such systems, it works poorly. In this case, they try to handle it like regular movement with 50 foot squares. So it's incredibly fiddly, doesn't really do anything you want it to do, and was a bad idea from the start. This is a d20 Modern thing, but I'd honestly forgotten about that because no one really tries to use these rules because they are so obviously bad. The vehicle movement rules go on for 8 pages, which is all just wasted space.


Obviously, this is what you want from your vehicle chasing, and equally obviously, these rules aren't going to give that to you.

There's copypasta of all the SRD terrain hazards. I mean, I don't know where you intend to find lava in South Dakota, but it's nice that someone remembered to hit CTRL-C and then CTRL-V in case you needed it.

AncientH:

My eyes are glazing over as these rules hash out invisibility, incorporeability, pinned, prone, paralyzed, and everything else. If you've seen one d20 product, you've seen them all. Which should have been a fucking bonus. Seriously, the whole point of the McWoD exercise is to take a universal system and graft it on to a new setting; how did they fuck it up so badly? Well, a couple dozen weird and unannounced rules tweaks and holdovers are a good start. I'm not complaining that the disease table includes swine flu and hantavirus, it's like...rays. "Some supernatural effects create dangerous rays." That's not actually true, though. Nowhere else in this fucking book are rays even mentioned. It's a holdover from d20 magic where rays are a common form of spell that require a fucking attack roll on top of everything else - and those don't exist in this magic system! It's a fucking vestigial rule, and I am offended by it.


About as useful.

FrankT:

All your old favorites are hear as far as abilities. Fast Healing, Damage Reduction, Energy Resistance, yadda yadda yadda. As I mentioned earlier, the rules for some of these things have changed slightly. DR applies to fire damage, for example. Is this a conscious decision to make armor easier to write up, or a misremembering? I don't know! That is a good question. Some things are changed not by having new rules in the rules text, but by being in a different implied setting. Incorporeality still makes you full stop immune to all physical attacks, which is um... basically everything in this world. So that's a thing.



There's some new abilities too, like Sprint Healing. That's just like Fast Healing, but it only lasts for a short period of time, so it's however meaningful in combat but doesn't translate to virtually limitless between combat hit points. I can see a need for that sort of thing, but I can also see how other d20 games and even 4e just put durations on Fast Healing effects and called it a day.

Petrified appears to be missing from the Conditions list. So someone did check to see if there were conditions that weren't caused by any effects in the game and then edited them out of the list. The fact that someone took the time to do that actually just makes me more pissed off about how half assed everything else is.

AncientH:

Sprint Healing is actually worse than you might think. It's written in the format of X/Y, for example, 4/20. That means you can heal up to 4 hp a round...but only up to 20 hp a day. Sheesh. Sucks to be you, garou!

Bonus Unnumbered Section: Dark is Each Night's Knife

FrankT:

I want to personally apologize to all the readers and state that I hadn't actually noticed that there was a fiction section between chapter 7 and 8 when I tallied up all the chapters earlier. There's also a fiction section between Chapter 10 and the Appendices. I just hit a giant wall on this one because the story is about a guy who dies and comes back to life every single day. That's the kind of character that can be interesting and flavorful in a horror themed urban fantasy story, but we are 290 pages into this fucking book and we've already established that this is not how magic characters work in this fucking setting. So... zero points.

AncientH:

I'm giving it negative points for wasting my precious time.

Chapter 8: Running the Game


I just found out there's a meme of British athlete Mo Farah running from things.

FrankT:

This 26 page chapter is for Game Masters. It's also the chapter they tell you what you're actually supposed to do in this game, which has been decidedly lacking in the rest of the product. But mostly, this is the place where Monte Cook rants about his theory of gamemastering, which is not very much like the Dotmeister inspired rantings that World of Darkness fans are used to. This is more of a Gygaxian concept of Mr. Cavern being a mathematician and improv actor who controls the world and the NPCs with which the player characters interact.

The big question of course is what the fuck do you do? And here's the McWoD answer:

This isn’t a game about amassing wealth or lots of magic items or other “treasure.” Instead, the player characters’ rewards are influence, esteem and power. Money and material goods are more of a byproduct of such things. Just as important, the player characters’ should also learn more about the setting, gaining access to secrets that few others have — although the characters might not necessarily like what they discover.

There's a lot wrong with this. The first is that there are of course no secret societies in this fucking game, and no ancient secrets at all. There's no Camarilla or Sabbat, no Invictus or Carthians. There's nothing to influence, no one whose esteem matters or is for sale. World of Darkness books often suffer from the “President of the Anime Club” problem where the groups you're supposed to be struggling for leadership in are not terribly impressive, but this is even worse. A pack of Werewolves is literally just six guys who ran into each other at a pride parade last month and decided to wear matching shirts.

But the second and perhaps bigger problem is that there are in fact no secrets to learn. There's no big reveal. There's nothing inferable. Nothing to be uncovered. The big bads of the setting are faceless, unknowable, unreachable, and uncaring. And not only was there nothing to be learned about them in this book, but there were never any other books. And never any plans for other books. Monte Cook doesn't have any answers for any questions you might have, and he doesn't care.

AncientH:

It gets worse than that, actually, because Monty fails to address any of the actual pressing issues of a campaign: why are the player characters acting together? What is the overarching theme? In some games, like D&D, your answers are more or less the same - you are adventurers, banded together to go adventure. The setting as such doesn't really matter when you put it like that. In World of Darkness, it's a little bit more complicated because of the setting - you're a supernatural creature, and with your bitchin' powers comes both physical/supernatural needs and a society of peers that you have to interact with. (It's a lot like puberty in that regard; everyone has genitals but you cannot do everything you want to with them, because other people have made up some rules about that.)

McWoD...is worse. It's worse than fucking Ghostwalk. Ghostwalk at least had some semblance of a setting where you could establish some goals and motivations for your character, and operated in fairly generic D&D territory. In McWoD, not only is there no set guideline for how your campaign should be, but the setting is so bland and generic that there's no real goal or motivation for the characters at all. I think it's clear Monty was trying to set up some "Stop the Iconnu!" nonsense, with implications of a shadowy war and maybe some Buffyesque monsters-of-the-week, but we don't actually get any of that.

FrankT:

Reading Monte Cook wax on about the structure of an RPG story is not the worst thing you could do with an afternoon. He is, admittedly, very experienced in DMing D&D. It's not up to the high standards of a Robin Laws rant or anything, but it's pretty solid stuff. The thing is, it doesn't really seem to be about this game. He's basically talking about D&D story structure. Which pretty much also worked back when he was writing for Champions, but if you don't have a “party of adventuring heroes” motif that your players have already signed on for, all of this is kind of gibberish.


What if we don't want to get given a quest by a Mage who wants us to track down an ancient artifact? And how the fuck are there any ancient artifacts anyway if all this bullshit started less than a year ago?

Getting the group together is a pretty big problem, what with the fact that the characters have no real reason to prioritize anything in particular, there are no group loyalties to exploit, all this bullshit started a year ago and no one has any particular history with any of this shit, and the player characters are all the kinds of creatures that player characters are supposed to kill on sight. Monte Cook just falls back on D&D-style handwaving of “you gotta hang together because you're the party,” but this is a world with 7 billion people in it, planes, and cell phones. We can pick our friends and pick our noses. We needed more than that, and didn't get it.

AncientH:

Monty does talk about "the Incursion Campaign" where you go into the Conflagration/Annihilation Zones. This is not an inherently great idea. Imagine playing Fallout as a vampire while tripping on acid. Your GM is encouraging you to do a survival campaign in Alice and Wonderland on mescaline, where they might decide it's a great laugh for the sky to rain fire and Andy Warhol to descended and kill you all.


What did you do, Ray?

The problem isn't the fantasy post-apocalyptic nonsense itself, it's that Monty steadfastly refuses to provide absolutely anything set in concrete about entering the Chaos Wastes Zones. It's all "whatever horrible shit you can dream up" and random changes of scenery. Also, vampires, sucks to be you.

FrankT:

There’s an obvious foe in the Intrusion campaign: the Iconnu and their servants. But if it’s not clear at the beginning to the players, it should become clear very soon that the Iconnu can’t be confronted. It’s out of the scope of any campaign to defeat the Iconnu or to undo the effects of the Intrusion. It’s just not that kind of game.

Uh... fuck you? There is fucking nothing to do in this game.

The list of “adventure seeds” is just painfully tone deaf. Here's an example:

A reputedly haunted house is in fact the lair of rats that have been granted intelligence and telekinetic powers by the Nightmare Wave.

That is not an adventure seed! There is no reason to go poking into a fucking haunted house full of telekinetic rats. Telekinetic rats aren't even one of the magic things in this game, so it's just a Steve. You don't get anything for poking your dick into rat holes full of Steve monsters. There's no treasure in abandoned mansions full of monsters, it's just a condemned building. The players have zero reason to give even one milli-fuck.

It may be a strange thing to read in a rulebook, but when dealing with the Nightmare Wave, play fast and loose with the rules.

Fuck you so much!

AncientH:

I need to go over one sidebar in full. Bear with me.

Other Campaign Ideas
There are other possible campaigns that the GM could run using this
setting as well:

1. The All-____ Campaign. All the player characters are of the same
character type. This campaign style is many people’s favorite, as it
makes the group more cohesive and makes adventures easier to plan.

Does it really? I'm not even entirely sure there's enough options to make four or five characters really distinct in their abilities if they're all the same type. I mean, five Awakened is just a pretty shitty Scooby Gang where everybody looks like Fred with different colored ascots.

2. The Police Campaign. All of the player characters are members
of the police force interested in fighting crime. While most are Awakened,
a few could secretly be supernatural creatures.

Lots of games suggest this, but in practice it's hard. Cops have rules they have to follow, standardized training and equipment which cuts down on character differences, and they don't tend to follow adventurer-type narratives. Seriously, it's very rare to see five cops get together to go check out the shady-looking mortuary...especially if they can't convince the judge to give them a warrant. Now, if this were a small-town sheriff's office and everybody was a deputy or something, that might be a bit more plausible and interesting...but we're far, far from the Gothic punk mentality here.

3. The Hunter Campaign. None of the player characters is one chosen
character type. Instead, they specialize in finding and slaying that
character type.

I...what? This makes no sense. So you're not a werewolf, but you specialize in hunting werewolves? So, are you a vampire hunter or an Awakened hunter or...fuck it, I dunno.

4. The Investigators Campaign. The player characters are all Awakened, and begin the game not aware of that fact or that supernatural
creatures exist. This is all discovered over time, as they investigate strange occurrences and places.

That's going to be a hard sell, but I guess you could convince the players that you're actually playing d20 Modern or Modern Age Call of Cthulhu and then they find out that they're actually playing McWoD and feel betrayed and dirty.

5. The Fugitive Campaign. The player characters are all on the
run. From the law, from the government, or from some powerful organization (or all three). They take part in various adventures as
normal, but always with the threat of being discovered by whomever is
after them.

While I'm not against the "A-Team with werewolves" concept, the lack of any real organized entities in this setting makes this difficult to pull off.

FrankT:

The rules for XP and level gaining are in here. They are offset some, such that 1st level counts as fourth level for some purposes vs. normal d20 rules. I have no idea why. No one does.

There are also stats for some animals (including lions, crocodiles, and gorillas, which is an odd selection for a game taking place in the American Midwest). Humans get the same treatment, which is to say that we get sample stats for a couple of humans in various archetypes but we don't get human levels. So the thing at the beginning of the book where it said you could play human monster hunters is just totally a lie. There flat are no playable rules in this book for making non-magical characters as PCs or NPCs.

the exact values are usually not particularly important, and you don’t need to spend hours crunching numbers just to create a particular human by following the rules to the letter. If you like, you can simply assign numbers for skills, base attack bonus and the like as you see fit.

Fuck you!

AncientH:

"Minions" are sort of important, if you're at all magically inclined, because one of the major things that supernatural entities can do in this setting are summon minions. Mechanically, a minion is built from templates, a bit like astral constructs from the Expanded Psionics Handbook. This does not tend to produce very good NPCs, but it is relatively fast and painless. So if you want a Superior Air Demon Minion, you apply the Air and Demon templates to the Superior Minion and you're fucking done.

FrankT:

At this point I'm typing one handed because my left hand is just flipping this book off continuously. It's so amazingly bad. And it's so cavalierly dickish about being awful. It's amazing. And insulting.

AncientH:

The final part of the chapter are some samples of 1st-level characters of each type. These aren't fleshed-out characters by any means, just generic NPC fodder. They add insult to injury by leaving the last half of the page blank.

Jesus wept, can you believe we've been through 321 pages of this crap already? We're not even done yet.


This is not the finger I was aiming for.

[Prak]

A pack of Werewolves is literally just six guys who ran into each other at a pride parade last month and decided to wear matching shirts.

Next time I get a chance to play Werewolf, I'm going to have to try to convince people to play a pack of gay polyamourous garou who have giant gay origes because they can't produce metis.

Does it really? I'm not even entirely sure there's enough options to make four or five characters really distinct in their abilities if they're all the same type. I mean, five Awakened is just a pretty shitty Scooby Gang where everybody looks like Fred with different colored ascots.

"Hey Daphne, ready for the gangbang?"

"A-Team with werewolves"

That is generally how I sum up what people wanted WoD to be.

[RelentlessImp]

Now, if this were a small-town sheriff's office and everybody was a deputy or something, that might be a bit more plausible and interesting...but we're far, far from the Gothic punk mentality here.

I don't know, I think the concept has teeth, but you'd have to warp the entire fucking world to do it - and look, McWoD did that. Even so that sort of thing is more Call of Cthulhu than WoD as we know it, though - even the WoD this book is presenting. It could be done, though, is all I'm saying.

[Prak]

Well, it's been successfully tackled with the show Grimm. The main character, Nick Burkhardt finds he is a descendant of the legendary brothers Grimm who hunt fantasy creatures that inspired the Brothers Grimm Fairy Tales. The problem is that he's a detective, so he has to do a lot of things that would get him fired and thrown in jail if it were ever discovered. It's one of the interesting things, especially seeing how he tries to keep things above board, deal with the things that can't be, and sometimes toss his badge in the truck because it's personal and he's taking no prisoners.

[RelentlessImp]

And here I thought we'd gotten past the "Cops doing things that they shouldn't" with Dexter. Is it at least as good as Dexter, though?

[Prak]

Never watched Dexter. I like Grimm. The protags try to do things inside the law, and it's basically a crime procedural with some friction going on in the background as various antagonists who aren't bound by the law fuck with his life. It seems they're doing more "no prisoners" events this last season, but it's still, like, two- a big bad wolf supremacist group that disapproves of the protag BBWolf marrying a fox person, and Nick's live in girlfriend being turned into a witch with some brainwashed-by-power-and-rejection on the side because the witches in Grimm look like Liches and xenophiles are sadly rare.

---

The whole South Dakota thing in McWod is just... well, obviously dumb. It's so obviously dumb that I thought of a better incursion plot as I read about the South Dakota thing.

If we assume that the Hell Plane wants to begin an incursion on Earth, and can choose where to start it, it would make sense to start with the least inhabited areas. Deep seas, antarctica and deserts are the automatic choices. If the Hell Plane needs people to possess in their incursion zone, then they would be better off starting their incursion in Siberia and Iceland. These are some of the least inhabited regions, and could reasonably have high possession rates, while also giving the Hell Plane a remote base of operations. With mages and vampire magic and such, the demons can overcome the remoteness of their base of operations far better than potential enemies.

Of course, I'm not aware of anything saying these demonic spirits can't possess non-humans. So starting their incursions in sea trenches is not a bad thing, necessarily. A demon spirit could do worse than using a whale shark as a vessel and then beefing it up before flying topside to wreck Tokyo. Or a giant squid that they can use to snatch a fishing boat so demons can possess the crew.

Basically, the only explanation for the whole Dakota thing is that the Iconnu used Monte as their point of entry..

[Whipstitch]

I don't know, I think the concept has teeth, but you'd have to warp the entire fucking world to do it - and look, McWoD did that.

Cook warped the setting, but not in any way that really lends itself to running a party of police officer PCs. The issue isn't that running cop campaigns is utterly impossible, the issue is that Cook treated the idea like it's a self-explanatory shortcut when the reality is that it requires as much work and forethought as any other conceit you come up with.

[hyzmarca]

I mean, I don't know where you intend to find lava in South Dakota, but it's nice that someone remembered to hit CTRL-C and then CTRL-V in case you needed it.

Bear Butte, possibly. It's a laccolith, rather than a volcano, though. Magma intruded upon some sedimentary layers, pushed them up without breaching the surface,, and cooled into a huge igneous rock. Then, over time, the sediment eroded away. But, IO wouldn't put it past something called a nightmare wave to do something with that.

There's a lot wrong with this. The first is that there are of course no secret societies in this fucking game, and no ancient secrets at all. There's no Camarilla or Sabbat, no Invictus or Carthians. There's nothing to influence, no one whose esteem matters or is for sale.

They still have countries, don't they? How hard would it be for a Vamp with Presence 5 to secure the Democratic Presidential Nomination? Considering that all this is new and everything and there aren't several super-powered giant ancient conspiracies that would kill you if you tried that.

[Prak]

Yeah, the most obvious thing to do is to start using your new found supernatural power to pursue temporal power. Which is really sad. I mean, when I played Lucifer in OWoD, it was awesome to walk into a church and convert a whole mass worth of people into my servants, but that was, like, a session, not a chronicle.

[Smirnoffico]

Next time I get a chance to play Werewolf, I'm going to have to try to convince people to play a pack of gay polyamourous garou who have giant gay origes because they can't produce metis.

Basically, you're going to play a regular Black Furies game.

[Ancient History]

OSSR: McWoD
Chapter Nine: Chicago, City of Darkness


There is an entire subgenre of vampire-wank set in Chicago. The above pictured Chicagoland Vampires series has 11 books in it and counting.

AncientH:

The old World of Darkness, particularly the Vampire supplements, were initially set in Chicago by Night, or sometimes its terrible satellite communities. NWoD revisited this concept with it's own World of Darkness: Chicago. So the fact that Monte chose to introduce Chicago as the standard setting for his McWoD can be attributed either to garbled fifteen-year-old memories of playing Vampire or an ability to stare at a literal wall of gaming products and spot two books with almost the same title. In the end, of course, it doesn't matter.

Why Chicago? I imagine many people have asked that of the Windy City, including a few of us that haven't lived there. Basically, it's the 3rd largest city in the United States. It has twice the population of Rhode Island, and a long and inglorious history of political corruption, racial tension, pollution, Civil Rights protest, Blues, etc. As default choices go, it is not bad. Fewer monuments than New York City, less stereotyped than Los Angeles, not as obscure as Seatle (was in the early 1990s), and a hell of a lot more popular than Seacouver.

Of course, this is before Monte declared it was now bordering on the outskirts of Hell.

FrankT:

Chicago gets 26 pages. It starts by reminding you that Chicago is inside the Haunted Lands, which as I touched on earlier is just twenty miles not true according to the numbers presented earlier. But whatevs! The goal here is to present a defaultish starting location to use to do a quickstart adventure. Like ya do. But as we've already complained about a few times, this book isn't D&D. There aren't dungeons full of treasure to run off and explore, and even if there were the players would not be under any social contract obligation to explore them. You need more than a starting location, you need a social contract that presents players with a reason to tell cooperative stories together, and the earlier chapters of the book did not do that. So even if they wrote up a compelling Chicago, my hypothetical Vampire character wouldn't have any special reason to team up with a werewolf and go have adventures. I'd like... live in Chicago... maybe get a job.


Remember how Vampire Academy was kind of pointless and didn't go anywhere? Kinda like that.

This chapter has a 565 word rant on “the purpose of the setting” and it totally looks like Monte is thinking with his D&D penis in addition to phoning it in. See, Monte Cook seems to think that a setting only has to provide resources and opposition, which is true if and only if you already have motivation covered. D&D characters meet in a bar and run off to fight monsters and acquire treasures because that's the social contract minimum buy-in to play the game at all. All you need a setting to provide to D&D characters is a price list at the smithy and directions to the nearest Trolls. But if you're playing a game that does not have that conceit, then you need more than that. And this book doesn't deliver. And bizarrely, Monte Cook appears to say in so many words that he has no idea this is even a problem.

Over his life, Monte Cook has mostly worked with Champions and D&D. And both of them have the core group loyalty and commitment to go fight the bad guys as part of the player's buy-in to the cooperative storytelling game. In Champions you play a superhero, and you team up with other superheroes and you go fight supervillains because what the fuck did you think you were going to do? In D&D, you're an adventurer and you team up with other adventurers and go dispossess monsters of treasure because it is Dungeons & Dragons and that is how it works. But other games don't work that way. Paranoia makes provisions for constant party betrayal, Shadowrun has an assumption of characters going on specific missions for negotiated mercenary payments, Werewolf the Apocalypse has the party as a pack who are tasked with defending a node of hippie energy from Captain Planet villains. If you aren't writing D&D or Champions, you have to actually write something. You can't just assume that players have seen D&D before so they know about parties and adventures, because other games don't work like that!

AncientH:

Several paragraphs are pissed away talking about the history of Chicago. I've said this before, but I have come around to the idea that in large part how we got here with regards to a setting location, while interesting to the writers, is not actual interesting or useful to the players when playing the game unless you tie it in somehow. Walking around Italy today, the fact that the Muslims had a couple of Islamic states on the peninsula several centuries ago is touristy bullshit that doesn't really matter today. It's a super difficult point to get across to game designers, because history is relatively easy to write, and equally as easy to pick apart. Everyone wants a carefully crafted world on par with Tolkien, and yet nobody actually wants to do the work, and that's why nobody cares that Chicago hosted the World's Columbian Exposition in 1903, because none of your fucking PCs or NPCs are old enough to remember that shit. Probably not even the ones that came back from the dead.

FrankT:

I've certainly complained about wikifacts in RPGs before. Back in the 90s, these could kinda be justified. It's not like people could just open up a wikipedia article about Chicago or New York. But um... in 2007 they totally fucking could. The only reason for bringing up the 1871 fire in a World of Darkness book is if you intend to tie it into your secret history or magic system somehow. Maybe the Great Fire was a human sacrifice intended to break the great seal on some demon lord or another. Maybe it was an extreme reaction to a hard-to-explain masquerade breach. Or whatever. But McWoD has no secret history. So mentioning any events in 1871 is a priori pointless.


This event, like everything before 2006, is something which the book is aggressively wasting your fucking time by mentioning at all. Because this setup is shit.

There is a half-assed attempt to create some new organizations that you might have politics or conflict or something with, but we've already established that these groups are like 10 months old or less. The Nine Choirs hasn't had to file a single tax return, so who really gives a shit what their election platform is? How entrenched can the Information Syndicate really be if it doesn't have any information older than the expiry dates in their fridge? How serious can we take “The Strangers” if their religion hasn't yet celebrated each of their holidays once? Why would we care what the “Prince of Vampires” has to say when he hasn't had time to even win a single election or even hold his own coronation?

This whole setup is just so fucking stupid that even this late game attempt to add some content can only serve to remind us how little room they've left for content to be added.

AncientH:

I mentioned before, but the writing style bugs me:

The Loop is Chicago’s downtown, where the really tall buildings are. It is the rich, gray urban core of the city, the center to which all other neighborhoods orient themselves. The area is called the Loop because the el tracks make a big loop around the downtown area, effectively wrapping it in
a rusty iron ribbon.

It's not just that's it is extremely conversational, but it's really, really simplistic. There's no attempt to sell the writing, it doesn't inform very well, and it's aimed at an 8th grade reading level, like a fucking Danielle Steel novel. The whole book is like that. Say what you will about OD&D, but Gary Gygax would expand your vocabulary in new and exciting ways.

Also, the map is straight-out unreadable and useless. It's like a bad scan of a bad photocopy of a digital streetmap with no distinguishing characteristics. You could seriously just drop it into a random chapter of Bug City and no-one would blink.

FrankT:

The entire bit about The Pentagram is like the author flipping off Goths. At this point, I kinda want to know what Monte's fucking problem is. He's already admitted that he has looked into Goth culture so little that he still doesn't know that it was a striving, living, growing thing when he was in grade school. But he still feels safe in portraying them as parent-murdering satanists. Is he still resentful that once he left Watertown, South Dakota he stopped being “the vampire guy” because there was actually a whole underground scene of people who knew more about vampires than he did that he wasn't cool enough to join? I dunno.

In any case, in the 21st century White Wolf easily and often reached for flippantly offensive things to say about non-Christians, which I personally feel is a considerable contributor to the fact that no one likes them anymore. White Wolf traditionally had a lot of neo-pagan fans and shit, and the fact that post-2003 White Wolf kept shitting Christianity into their mouths while post-2003 White Wolf also couldn't find people to buy their products can't have been a coincidence.


Your audience listens to Blutengel unironically. They do not want to hear about your fucking Christian normative values.

AncientH:

To be more specific:

When the Iconnu Intruded into Earth’s reality, some wannabe “mages” found that their spells actually worked. The old rituals of the Australian aborigines, the nature-based Wiccan rites and complicated Houdon curses actually bore fruit. In Chicago, most people attempting to practice “magic” were Satanists. When they discovered that they actually could cast spells, many of them fl ed back to their homes, shivering. Others quietly put their blasphemous tomes away and pretended as if nothing had
happened. Many, though, embraced this new power. Not until after they discovered that other mages could also cast spells did they realize their success was due to some outside influence, rather than their faith or skill.

Many of these Satanists have joined forces and formed a group called the Pentagram, with membership at just over 100. Most of these mages have the same backgrounds as other Satanists; the only change is that they can actually accomplish spells. Most are young — many in their teens — and come from troubled pasts. For a good dozen of them, the fi rst thing they did
when they realized their power was to kill their parents. Most dress in Goth or punk attire, with black clothing, eye shadow, cloaks, chrome jewelry and the like.

To call this "tone deaf" would be generous; we're not far from Pulling Report territory.

I mentioned this before, but White Wolf and its games walked a very fine line. One of the major draws of the game was that it deliberately appealed to Protestant Christian taboos, while subtly or unsubtly re-affirming the fundamental tenets of Christian doctrine. So it was a world of darkness and supernatural evil, just like the preacher said, and science really was a lie; all gods were ultimately revealed as false mockeries except the one true God (mostly in Vampire, Wraith, and, later, Demon, but you get more-or-less hints of it in the other games too). The text was written so that the characters got off on "safely" exploring behaviors that would send their parents into hives - blood drinking, cannibalism, devil worship, serial killers, Nazism, necrophilia, heavy metal, throwing up the horns, piercings and tattoos, violence, sex, being a "creature of darkness" or dead - it's the same basic appeal that sold hundreds of thousands of copies of 50 Shades of Gray. The fact that the material presented wasn't authentic, realistic, or well-thought out didn't matter because, like a Chick tract, it directly spoke to the inner truth of what people wanted to believe. Hell, if you look at the original Humanity mechanic, it's basically expressing slave morality versus the Master Morality expressed by the Sabbat.

But it was a fine line, because WoD crossed a bunch of lines as far as cultural insensitivity goes. Demon: the Fallen, Time of Judgment, and Gehenna really rubbed players' noses in the whole "Christian Mythos rulez!" bit, but we've also talked about how Kindred of the East and Kindred of the Ebony Kingdom were hallmarks in sloppy exoticness and cultural browbeating for no real reason.

The thing is, there is a point in your teenage years when you start to experiment. It's pretty much pre-programmed into everybody, no matter what your background is. You push the boundaries, whatever they are. It's what moves generational change. It's what conservative societies dread, and work to suppress, control, or channel in a number of ways. And roleplaying games are one of those outlets, just like dressing in strange clothes and listening to music your parents don't get. Some people grow out of it, in time; they put the black eyeliner away because they have to go get a job where they're expected to conform to a given appearance. Some even turn against it. But, some people embrace it. There are plenty of people that just had enough fucking Christianity growing up, and now they're some flavor of Wiccan or pagan. It doesn't mean they're idiots or dupes any more than most people - the majority of people in every era have believed in magic in some form, be it astrology to the miracle of transubstantiation to Scientology "going Clear." And part of those people were White Wolf's target audience; if you insult and misrepresent them, you're cutting them out of your market.

And in McWoD, with The Pentacle, Monty Cook is just shitting directly on players. I can't even tell if he's doing it deliberately to insult them, or if he just hasn't gotten the joke yet.

FrankT:

The big agency we're supposed to care about is the IDA. The Intrusion Defense Agency. It's like the ATF except that instead of being in charge of protecting us from rednecks, it is in charge of protecting us from Vampires. However, I personally am flat incredulous that this thing even exists. Homeland Security was created in response to 9/11 and was formed in November of 2002. That is a 14 month turnaround for an agency that Dick Cheney already wanted to make. The intrusion has been around for less than 12 months, so even if the funding has somehow made its way through the senate, it''s difficult for me to imagine them being at the stage of having actual personnel. At this stage, I would expect there to be ad hoc working groups in different alphabet soup agencies all dedicated to working on the problem in some capacity and some of them having successfully printed business cards or convinced other working groups to agree in principle to share intel or something.

I'm a big old communist doctor who runs around giving people communist medical care and doesn't even charge them for it, and I can't imagine the government being this efficient. I'm really quite in favor of government action and large scale collective action and all that liberal shit, but who really thinks that the government could create and staff an agency this quickly? It's the biggest plothole in the setting, mostly because it's about the only thing in the game that could properly be called a plot event. And it sucks.

AncientH:

All of the numbers for the supernatural population are a) pulled right out of Monte's ass, and b) at least an order of magnitude higher than in any flavor of WoD. There are supposed to be 40,000 vampires in the city of Chicago, which is a city of ~2-3 million people. I'm pretty sure there's not supposed to be more than 30k vampires in the world in oWoD. And these things have to fucking eat; does Monte really think that people aren't going to notice a decent-sized town full of blood-drained corpses every couple of weeks? Even one vampire that doesn't cover his tracks is going to make bloody footprints like the worst serial killer in history. He has put zero thought and zero fucks into this.

FrankT:

There are various NPCs written up all over this chapter, mostly to remind you how shitty this all is. None of these numbers means anything. Nothing is balanced to anything. There are no guidelines for what these things should be ordered or how high they should go. But it also underscores how shitty these power delivery systems are.



Look, if there's one major problem with the way White Wolf handled vampires it was the whole fire and daylight thing which meant that they couldn't fucking read without electricity and that meant the whole Dark Ages thing was bullshit. And the generations from Caine thing was just hopelessly unbalanced. But amongst the issues with the White Wolf Vampire is that they just don't get enough powers. A starting Vampire gets three fucking discipline dots, and that isn't a lot. Dracula ends up having a shit tonne more dots than you'll ever have and has restricted disciplines from several different clans. It's fucked. This book shows us the “Prince of Vampires” and he's CR 12, and his best discipline group tops out at Mesmerism (Dominate 2). Fuck you Monte. If you found yourself writing that down, you should have scrapped your system and started over.

AncientH:

The rest of the chapter doesn't get any better. We're given some bullshit write-ups for some supernatural locations with "lol, Steve" rules, and try to act impressed by the Lord of Vampires owning a nightclub. Yawn.

Chapter Ten: The Edge of Nightmare


Before picking this book up, I did not expect to find myself saying “I wish this book was more like Nightmare On Elm Street 3.” And yet, here we are.

FrankT:

The last numbered chapter is basically a 24 page WTF. It's a diatribe about Minneapolis, the city of ruin. Now, Minneapolis is actually the city we used as an example back in the Two Tirs review of a city that was as big as a country, provided your country was as bullshit tiny as Tir na nOg. Point is: this book claimed the Nightmare Wave killed a million people. Now obviously you aren't killing a million people by nuking Watertown, South Dakota, but you aren't killing only a million people if Minneapolis was a field of rubble. Numbers just don't work out in this book no matter how generous you try to be to the author. It's just hyperbole, all the time. And while hyperbole is literally the greatest thing in the entire history of mankind and definitely the best thing the universe currently has on offer, it's not enough to make a setting or a cooperative storytelling game go.

This chapter also has a GM's note on the “purpose” of this setting. It's only 305 words and doesn't actually seem to have a good idea on purpose at all. Shit's crazy, stuff's on fire, but there's no reason why you'd want to be here or what you'd want to accomplish. This ain't Parlainth, it's not a chaotic new frontier to adventure in with perils unknown and treasures unimaginable... it's just a really shitty place that you should leave. Again and still, Monte Cook doesn't seem to understand that once you step away from the extremely specific and actually quite weird genre conceits of Dungeons & Dragons, that telling people that there is a ruin full of monsters down the road is not enough to get the story started. And it's really weird that no one who worked with him ever fucking explained this. How did White Wolf crawl so far up its own asshole that their own creative director couldn't explain the simple minimum requirements of a White Wolf story structure to a writer? I mean, understanding that he could not, I can see how White Wolf went out of business, but how does a failure of core competency like that even happen?

AncientH:

It's Hellgate: Milwaukee. I'm rapidly running out of fucks to give here. It's the exact same errors as Chicago, just scratched down more quickly and sloppily. More history we don't care about because it doesn't matter. It's an effort to get a postapocalyptic mystical metropolis a la Bug City, but without even the pretense of giving a fuck about logistics, geography, or anything else.

Page 361 insults me. It's supposed to be a headshot of one of the guys in command of the military forces in control of post-cosmic buttfuck Milwaukee. And he's wearing about six goddamned sets of dog tags. It's really frustrating to see the artist couldn't get one simple fucking detail that means anything right.

FrankT:

I don't have a whole lot to say about this chapter. The basic premise is flawed, and I don't understand why anything is happening. I complained mightily and hard about Bug City, but it was basically the same concept done better in every way. I can't think of a single reason to go scavenging in the ruins of St. Paul instead of not doing that. Everything I said in Bug City about areas with monsters but no treasures, but like turn the apathy up to 11.

There's a thing where the soldiers have been sent in to abuse civilians for some reason. And while they dump a lot more word count on it than Bug City did on the containment, it's actually more stupid. I genuinely don't understand why people think they want to have “oppressive martial law” in their post-apocalypse cities in RPGs. It really just comes off as someone making all the bad design decisions from FASA's Bug City and doing a half assed job of it.

AncientH:

Plus, just to complete the "let's steal what we can from Shadowrun," the include a bunch of gangs along the lines of The Warriors. We're seriously talking Baseball Furies level of wretchedness here.

FrankT:

The Mississippi is cursed.

OK, I LOLed at that. Seriously though, fuck this book. I do not care about your haunted car lot, I do not care about your Ghost House. I do not care about you putting zombies in the Mall of America. I get that you are making a reference to Dawn of the Dead, and I also get that you didn't make a zombie apocalypse game and should fuck off with movie references until you have a fucking story.


A solid monster horror element, and one which has absolutely fuckall to do with World of Darkness of any edition or form. Including this one, fuck you very much.

AncientH:

I am too deprived of fucks to really even raise any steam. This section of the book wasn't wasted potential, because there was no potential to waste. The phase space for this game is so fucking undefined that there's barely anything to comment on, good, bad, or indifferent. Yes, Monty shit on the hearts of goths everywhere, and yes the numbers are stupid and bullshit, all of them and throughout the book, and yes two major Midwestern cities were reduced to really crappy haunted houses with Stephen King film-of-the-novel level special effects. Who cares? Nobody's going to place this, because nobody can play this. What would you even do in Chicago? I don't know! There are fewer Demons than Vampires? Why? I don't know! Do the demons have any collective goals? I don't know! Do they have any individual goals? Fuck you!

We're going to wrap this up next post.

[Prak]

Actually, one of the really annoying things is that even the "500 miles around Watertown is now Hell on Earth" would give you an automatic hook if timescales were different.

"In McWoD, Watertown, South Dakota was chosen as the center of an incursion by Hell. This happened last night. Watertown is now at the center of a 1,000 mile diameter zone of literal Hell on Earth.

Many people were possessed by spirits- some succumbed to these otherworldly forces, some resisted the control. Both are now possessed of power the likes of which most only imagined existing in books and games.

You were in Watertown when this happened, whether a resident or a visitor.

It's time to leave."

And then you don't shit on the possibility of secrets and societies and allegiances by saying having npc speculation in the book about such incursions possibly having happened in the past, which might explain [insert historical weirdness], and that various factions exist in Hell, and often the allegiances and grudges carryover to Earth, and one of your campaign models is Doomguy, where you're soldiers from outside an Incursion Zone that have to go in and try to stop it. And to keep the classes meaningful, you highly recommend starting such a campaign with the soldiers waking up after possession, having beaten the control that the spirits immediately try to exert.

[Chamomile]

You could also increase the "this has happened before" elements by having the military response team roll up before the incursion hits, so the Doomguy campaign starts in the immediate aftermath of the Hellgate opening. Presumably the government is not only aware that this has happened before, but knew it was going to happen here. Were they badly misinformed as to how it works, or did they intentionally give the invaders lots of physically fit and heavily armed bodies to possess? In honor of the McWoD tradition, I'm going to walk away without exploring or explaining any of these possibilities.

[deaddmwalking]

I could see 'this happens regularly' being a thing. With a Super Volcano in the region, you could hook it into some natural geography. Rather than look it up, I think they estimate the volcano erupts every 60,000 years.

But I still think not having Vlad the Impaler attached to an unbroken line of vampires is a critical failure.

One appeal of such a game would be the ability to play it in different times and places. Cthulu by Gaslight has legs. So, too, would WoD in Jack the Ripper era London - heck, that's not too far from Bram Stoker's Dracula. So, yeah, having everything happening in the last year is bad on so many levels it blows my mind.

Hell, in four sentences I could make a premise that is literally 4,000 times better. Here goes: In addition to preying on humanity, vampires have also served to protect the flock like a shepherd. For thousands of years they have kept forces of evil at bay. Humanity has found a way to identify and hunt vampires almost to the edge of extinction. But what they didn't realize is that without the protective wards the vampires maintained, a hellish incursion could not be held in abeyance.

[Ancient History]

OSSR: McWoD: Final Post
Extro Fiction: In The Ruins


This would be better. Or at least, more honest.

AncientH:

Our suffering is near the end. Characters you don't know or care about are in Milwaukee, probably. Words are capitalized when they should not be, game terms only irregularly, because the mercenary editors were near the end of their bitter struggle. There is no pay out at the end, no reward, no insight, no inspiration into playing the game, or coming this far. This piece of fiction could have been placed anywhere in the book. There is no purpose to it, it demonstrates nothing, adds no value, illustrates no group or character or principle except to hold a mirror to how hollow and soulless this game is.

FrankT:

At four pages, In The Ruins is the longest of the mini-fiction pieces in this book. This is a story about people scavenging in the ruins, dodging soldiers, vampires, and rival scavenger gangs. Or whatever it is that cool kids do when they are in ruined cities after a disaster. One of them is a werewolf, they walk into a trap, and have to fight their way through some vampires. This is actually not even the first time the plot of the story has been “the main characters walk into a trap laid by vampires” and I'm sick of it.

More to the point, I don't know why any of this shit is supposed to happen. Why are people in a ruined city hiding from the military? I was fucking in the cleanup for Katrina and Rita. And Gustav. There were of course people who chose to hide from the authorities, but those people were “crazy people” not people we were expected to sympathize with. The whole problem with this “only parts of the country are blowed up” deal is that there's no reason for people to go all “warrior of the wastes.” People should go to the fucking FEMA camps like not-insane people and get canned beans out of the strategic food reserve. And not hide from military patrols in order to stab people over scavenging rights.


I'm not saying it doesn't look cool. I'm saying that if you're doing this instead of standing in line for peas that you have problems.

This book failed to explain why the post apocalypse scavenger aesthetic was a thing that was happening. Generally in setups like 28 Days Later, the apocalypse is either everywhere or the people in the disaster zone are also quarantined. Neither of these things is true in this setting, so fuck it.

AncientH:

I think Monte Cook has fundamentally misunderstood the Rule of Cool.


It is relatively easy to look cool in black.

The thing about Rule of Cool is that it is a very specific suspension of disbelief; you want something to exist hard enough you are willing to believe, just for a moment, that it is possible despite the rest of your brain screaming it isn't. Rule of Cool in roleplaying requires extending that moment out indefinitely.


I want to believe.

And if the image is cool enough, if the concept is awesome enough, and if the world is built just right...you can skate on that image. Vampires in longcoats with katanas, werewolves with six-shooters and cowboy hats, Tengu hockey players...the world of your imagination is a strange and awesome place. But it has to be awesome enough to grab you. If the world is just a bleak shithole where you're picking over grocery stores for beans or waiting for Kevin Costner dressed as a cut-rate Namor to save you, you need more than that. Grim & gritty survivalism needs to be realistic to be believable, and you need a sufficient hook to get people interested. I can go roleplay living on the street being homeless whenever I want.

Monte Cook has fundamentally misunderstood this, because McWoD is absent basically every aspect of the WoD setting or d20 system that could be defined as cool. The system isn't compatible to anything else, and doesn't have enough fiddly bits to be interesting. The character types as presented are boring, and absent of all the really cool concepts from any edition of WoD - you can't even angst properly when being a vampire means you've just been shackled to a bloodthirsty ghost for the last eight months. There are no secrets in this setting to discover or be initiated in, there is no promised end to take part in, there are no centuries spreading out before and after you, there is no real conflict to take part in, there is nowhere to come from and nothing to aspire to. All people really want are supernaturals as part of a secret society that dwell among us unseen and Monte can't even deliver that. Fuck this game.

Appendix: Recommended Reading and Viewing


Neil Gaiman is overrated and very good.

FrankT:

Monte Cook's suggested reading and watching list is... disappointing. Nothing in here is really surprising, and it's all just sort of “nerd stuff” rather than having any Gothic Punk influences per se. He wants you to read Lovecraft and Gaiman, but mostly because he's a nerd and nerds want you to read those authors as a badge of tribal loyalty. The movie bucket list seems to include Akira and The Road Warrior for much the same reason. The artiest suggestion in this whole fucking thing is that Monte wants you to see Nosferatu and Shadow of the Vampire. Other than that, he wants to make sure you had your mind appropriately blown by The Sixth Sense. For serious.


Or you could watch the original Are You Afraid of the Dark episode on which it was based on (Tale of the Dream Girl).

I don't doubt that Monte Cook found inspiration in various things here, but none of them are things that were or are research for this topic. Monte Cook just read the same kind of miscellaneous nerd stuff that he always reads and watched the same kinds of miscellaneous nerd stuff that he always watches. There was no attempt to step out of his comfort zone and really investigate the fucking subculture he was writing for. He reads and watches the same stuff when writing D&D material, and it shows.

AncientH:

Cook shows his failure of nerd credentials (or possibly the ignorance of the editors) by failing to capitalize "The Shadow over Innsmouth" correctly and praising August Derleth, whose contributions to the Mythos were...less than stellar.

Also, I have no time for anyone that actually likes Miéville's Perdido Street Station.

Nerd superiority aside, as Frank said what is glaring about all this is the absence of any real Gothic Punk source material - hell, the bulk of this isn't even horror. It's a very weird WoD book that doesn't mention Anne Rice or Interview with the Vampire as seminal influences. Also missing: anything on werewolves. Hell, anything involving demons except for Hellboy ("The movie is based on a series of comic books, which are also
worth reading." - FUCK YOU, MONTE.) Heck, Monte doesn't even cite Demon: the Fallen as an influence.

The thing is, I can see where you would cite all this post-apocalyptic stuff if your end goal was Dark Sun d20. But WoD d20? Fucking hell.

FrankT:

The section on World of Darkness books is actually just ad copy for the top four selling books. It's not even in the same authorial voice as the other book teasers. It's blatantly edited in by someone else after the rest of the list was finished and I feel dirty.

Also, I want to say that China Mieville is not actually a very good author and is a really terrible author for RPG authors to try to squeeze inspiration out of. Shit happens for no reason and it's all Steves all the way down. Fuck that guy.

AncientH:

Look, GURPS includes reading lists and bibliographies to show their work and give the readers an idea of where they can go from here; WoD included reading lists to help readers establish the proper mood and mindset, even if it was a bizarre Acid Western like Dead Man. This is...this is just crap. It's like the top of Monte's non-RPG reading pile.


This was an interesting and bizarre film. Not a film to make you think, understand. It's something where you go find the soundtrack on vinyl and randomly find yourself William Blake, while years later instinctively looking for Johnny Depp's hat.

Appendix: Conversion Notes


Convert or die!

FrankT:

The final appendix offers a short and half baked idea of how to convert nWoD characters to McWoD and how to convert other d20 stuff to McWoD. It's incomplete and doesn't make sense and the characters you get don't actually work in any of the three games. Also, despite what Wieck and Thomas might have told people, no one gives a single shit about new World of Darkness, the thing everyone wanted a reboot of was old World of Darkness. Like, obviously.

AncientH:

According to this abortion, 102-107 XP in nWoD is about "16th Level" in d20 terms. I don't think they've done the math. That's...all there is to say about that, really. Even just randomly eyeballing this stuff and being generous, the math doesn't look right. I mean, when you're looking at the WoD -> McWoD conversion, they sometimes have three WoD attributes as listed equivalent to a McWoD attribute, and sometimes one. I get that you're going from 9 attributes (WoD) down to six (McWoD), but how is that supposed to work? Do you take the average? Highest rating? "Charisma in particular invites some discussion — see the sidebar." - Fuck you and your sidebars! I'm done with this.

FrankT:

And that's the book! That was way more painful than I thought it would be.

Final Thoughts


This book is equal parts angering and exhausting.

AncientH:

We knew going in that this book was going to be bad. I mean, we knew. Even in the money-whoring period when this came out, it stood out as a blatant shill that no one actually bought. Part of the reason we decided to review this book is because we knew it would be bad. How could it not be bad? I mean, we bitch at Monte Cook & co. for their manifold failures, but the joke is that the World of Darkess and d20 are not really compatible or comparable at the system level. Something had to give - as it did in GURPS:V:tM, where the setting was distilled and made more sane, and chunks of the distinctive mechanics were largely discarded as unworkable. That's pretty much what we were expecting here. A bad conversion adapted to a bare-bones WoD setting that would let us make some jokes and poke fun and maybe give some insight about why game design is harder than it looks.

But it was so much worse.

FrankT:

One can easily imagine all the things this book could have been that would have been awesome, or at least worthy of existence. D20 is a bad system for modern world roleplaying, but it's a better system than World of Darkness ever got. The Storyteller System was rewritten cold in every edition of every single main splat book, meaning that it got revised something like two dozen times. And every one of those versions is hot garbage. We all know this! Making a revision of the d20 system that handled modern era adventures where the main characters were expected to be nigh-bullet-immune vampires and werewolves and shit that was better than the system that existed would not have been difficult. Just run through the WoD books and everywhere you find a subsystem that doesn't work, steal chunks of d20 DNA until it does. It would have taken some time, but it would not have been difficult. But even such low hanging fruit was not even attempted.

The simple and repeated failure to meet any of the simplest and easiest design goals. Even bars so low that you wouldn't think that they'd need to be articulated like “Don't call your readers a bunch of basement dwelling patricidal devil worshipers” managed to not be reached. Like seriously, did that even need to be said? Does “don't use extremely unflattering stereotypes of your target demographic” need to be an unlockable achievement? How much do you have to suck at this to not even achieve that?



We could have gotten a pack of rules for bringing WoD vampire clans into Ravenloft. I know that people would be basically happier if D&D vampires could be Brujah or Malkavians. We could have gotten a genuine reboot of the World of Darkness. We could have gotten the actual World of Darkness set in a different setting like post apocalypse or in space.

AncientH:

Somebody approved this. That's what is amazing to me. It's not just that Cook fucked up; it's that someone up the chain at White Wolf said "let's publish it anyway." It really is a case where you have to wonder how much contempt they held for their target audience, where they expected them to buy this. I know we joke that you could write "Games Workshop" on a piece of paper and sell it for two pounds, but this is a whole 'nother level of expecting your customers to choke down shit.

I suppose, if I have to give this book any sort of backhanded compliment, it's that it's not as completely incompetent as some of the really rough d20 supplements out there...but that's damning with faint praise. It's a hardback with digital layout and some art that is only passable because we no longer have any sort of standards for WoD artwork. But it's not even comparable to the other d20 books White Wolf was producing at the time. It's worse than fucking Ravenloft d20. How fucked up is that?

FrankT:

The people ultimately responsible for this book aren't really Monte Cook, Luke Johnson, and SKR. Those guys are just freelance writers filling time and text boxes for a pay check. The people responsible are Wieck and Thomas. Those guys had run once proud White Wolf into the ground, and after they got it saved and purchased by Icelanders they were allowed to run it into the ground again. Considering how fucking feckless their leadership was and how bad all their core decisions turned out to be... it's actually still surprising how bad and how weaksauce this book is. Even understanding that it's a shallow cash grab and a soulless piece of shovelware the depth of its terribleness is still impressive. Hell, it's hard to believe.

This book is worthless and terrible beyond belief or understanding, even once you understand and believe that the book is worthless and terrible beyond belief or understanding.

AncientH:

I just want to add, as a final fuck you, that the index in the back does not properly capitalize shit.

FrankT:

As a change of pace, next time we might review a good book.

AncientH:

That would be a nice change of pace. Suggestions?

[DrPraetor]

If you want to review the original Powers & Perils, there's a brick of black tar Heroin in it for you.

http://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/117 ... nd-Edition <- I've been told this is good, and it is WoD-like and uses the OGL, so it seems like a logical point of comparison (actually it is a lot more Night Watch, I think?).

[erik]

Hrm, suggestions of gooder things to review.

Hollow Earth Expedition. There's some lack of finesse to be expected in a first edition, but also novelty and much fun and goodness.

Champions? I suggest this not having ever cracked any of its editions. A gaping hole in my RPG edumacation.

Rogue Trader isn't goooood per se but it's better than McWoD, hey! Most all of the rants I've found on this forum addressing it were instead largely referencing Dark Heresy or even WHFRP, despite Rogue Trader being in the thread title in some cases. Seems like it hasn't gotten a fair shake thanks to the sins of the father.

[Prak]

Actually, I'm curious now, given this thread, and my own d20 WoD adaptation thread (started because "I'm bored")

AH and Frank specifically, but anyone, really- Imagine you were at the head of McWoD, not necessarily designing, but you had the stick to beat people so they did the game you want.
What would you have wanted d20 WoD to actually be?

Edit: Also, I would love to see a review of "Fantasy Imperium." All 440 pages of it.