The Gaming Den

The problem comes in with who gets it. In order to rock the True Faith, you need to have a high humanity rating. So you have to be reasonably sinless. Which probably sounds reasonable to people who are of a generally religious bent. But what that means is that the people who have True Faith are innocents, not people who go out and fight vampires by choice. Even choosing to go fight anything means your Humanity is too low to qualify for True Faith. But White Wolf authors were consistently incapable of wrapping their minds around that, and kept wanting to give True Faith (and the high humanity values it required) to “Witch Hunters” and other people who took the fight to the vampires. Which made for a somewhat interesting tactical encounter, but made no sense in world. To maintain a Humanity of 8 or more, you'd need to avoid accidental injury to others. Which obviously you couldn't maintain if you hunted fucking anything. Witches or otherwise.

Vampires aren't others, they're vampires. There is no rule that says you lose humanity from harming vampires. There is nothing immoral or inhuman about killing monsters.


I mean, if you look at official White World characters with absurdly high humanity and True Faith, then it's pretty obvious that you only lose humanity for crimes against mundane humans, and you can do anything you want to supernaturals, except diablerie.

Yeah, we've discussed this earlier in the thread, but Humanity rules don't interact with anything anywhere in WoD. Fucking Ferox has Humanity 9 and True Faith 9, and he's a racist (against Nosferatu) serial killer who is on Camarilla's Most Wanted list for being a serial killer who hunts vampires. True Faith's description in DA:V20 says that you should high five your storyteller and advance in True Faith when you kill the Prince.

I wonder if Frank and AH have spent more thought and time reviewing this PoS book than the "writers" did creating this priceless work of art?

It seems like the authors were creative people that didn't have a good filter and didn't have a good editor to tell them their ideas aren't as good as they thought.

Have WW products *ever* had good editors? I can think of a handful of products that were dominated by one author who had good individual filters, and so didn't need good editors. Can you name even a single example of a work where the editors made the difference?

I acknowledge the difficulty of knowing whether this was the case. I grant that successful instances are hard to perceive while failures are obvious. But still: one case?

(edit to add word)

No. Granted, my experience is mostly with Traditionalist Mages, and I can't say anything about Vampires and/or the Technocracy books. But I'm pretty sure the answer is no.

No silly item lists in this one? Was hoping for a double handful of dice blunderbuss or something.

Silly item lists are in Victorian Age Companion. From Derringer, to Peacemaker to Gatling Gun to coach chase rules.

Occluded Sun wrote:Have WW products *ever* had good editors?

The early 90s saw editing so bad that rather than admit they fucked up, they put a "Page XX" in Clanbook Malkavian to troll people in 1993. I think they might have done that again a decade later in Exalted, because they were a bunch of immature assholes.

That being said, in the days of nWoD (at least before they started outsourcing editing duties to a Canadian website) they had very strong editorial control. Now it was definitely a case of garbage in / garbage out because rigidly forcing every single thing in every single gameline to fit the same set of guidelines is only a good idea if the guidelines themselves are good.

But they managed to make like five games with multiple expansions and literally millions of words of text without screwing up their skill system. Their skill system wasn't great to begin with (dramatic failures that literally could not happen, no success thresholds, extraordinary success defined by absolute rather than relative hits, and so on), but you notice how they didn't shit all over it by making shitty extra skills that no one had because they didn't even fucking exist when they made their character? I mean, I fought tooth and nail to have Shadowrun not shit all over its skill system with Arcana, and I was fucking over ruled. But the editors of nWoD managed to successfully nix every single new skill suggestion for like four years. It's kind of impressive.

If they'd been doing that with a core mechanic and story that wasn't shit, it would have been laudable.

-Username17

Longes wrote:Silly item lists are in Victorian Age Companion. From Derringer, to Peacemaker to Gatling Gun to coach chase rules.

Okay, now that gives me an actual idea.

Bad Company.

A group of Confederate Bushwackers who were running on insane troll morality long before they became vampires. When the war ended, they fled south of the border, because their activities went far beyond anything that could be considered honorable service and well into the territory of war crimes that they'd be executed for if they were ever caught.

They end up setting up shop in an abandoned Mayan temple, which was also home to a number of Sabbat elders in Torpor, which worked out about as well as you'd expect. Their visciousness and sadism thouroughly impressed those elders, leading to the group being induced into the Sabbat. They were tasked with performing various atrocities in Northern Mexico and the American Southwest, including genocide against the local Garou.


The group would include a huge muscular Bruja who carried a gattling gun and a huge belt of ammo wrapped around his torso.

And, of course, there's be an adventure where they have to go to London for some reason, which includes the absolute hilarity of these uncouth and heavily armed hick vampires interacting with prim and proper gentleman Draculas.

Isn't that the From Dusk Til Dawn series?

-Username17

I'm surprised that White Wolf never made a WWII setting. I mean, it's perfect. You have a crack team of Allied supernaturals going deep into enemy territory to destroy nazi malkavian madness machines and black spiral dancer run concentration camps. Bloodsucking communists! Werewolves with stars and stripes painted on the fur! Tea-drinking mages!
But WWII is pretty much a gaping hole in oWoD setting.

Never a setting book, but they did refer to it occasionally. Part of the problem is that the entire WoD setting is founded on playing terrible people, many of whom, in WWII, would be nazis. They actually mention that in WWII, Get of Fenris were commonly part of the Nazi party, and non-German national GoF who weren't Nazis or sympathizers were pretty rare.

White-Wolf was deeply committed to the idea that the Nazis were a representation of human evil by itself, as opposed to supernaturally caused evil. They felt it would look bad if they attributed the atrocities of the Holocaust to say, the Nephandi, as it would imply that the worst horror familiar to most modern persons was not a product of solely human agency. There's something to that conviction, but they had to wrap themselves in circles to try and enforce it.

MtA is at least willing to admit that both the Tech and Trads supported both sides, before realizing that the Nephandi absolutely did have an inside line to the Axis powers and actually teaming up to beat the crap out of a major Nephandic alliance before they managed to end the world (and The Atrocity Archives by Charles Stross essentially covers what this plot entailed).

Prak's right though, there's not a good way to organize the existing WoD factions to run WWII in a non-stupid way, especially the Pacific Theater.

WWII (or any other war really) is perfect to advance the War of Ages plotline though. Elder vampires wouldn't want a war. It disrupts their herds and established political ties, it puts them at risk of being blown up during the day, it surrounds them with a large number of angry armed people willing to attack on sight. Plus, Elder vampires have no real ties to the nation they currently live in - vampire embraced in 15th century is probably not in touch with ideals and desires of Napoleonic France. Meanwhile, the young vampires don't have established herds, are more likely to be patriotic enough to participate in the national agenda, or use the chaos to get a jump on the Elders.

Longes wrote:I'm surprised that White Wolf never made a WWII setting. I mean, it's perfect. You have a crack team of Allied supernaturals going deep into enemy territory to destroy nazi malkavian madness machines and black spiral dancer run concentration camps. Bloodsucking communists! Werewolves with stars and stripes painted on the fur! Tea-drinking mages!
But WWII is pretty much a gaping hole in oWoD setting.

They did Charnel Houses of Europe: The Shoah for Wraith.

Ancient History wrote:

Longes wrote:I'm surprised that White Wolf never made a WWII setting. I mean, it's perfect. You have a crack team of Allied supernaturals going deep into enemy territory to destroy nazi malkavian madness machines and black spiral dancer run concentration camps. Bloodsucking communists! Werewolves with stars and stripes painted on the fur! Tea-drinking mages!
But WWII is pretty much a gaping hole in oWoD setting.

They did Charnel Houses of Europe: The Shoah for Wraith.

Wasn't that horribly offensive?

FrankTrollman wrote:Isn't that the From Dusk Til Dawn series?

-Username17

Partially. From Dusk till dawn has a modern setting. Really a lot of things, from Tarantino movies to anime.

Oh yes.

The best way to do Vampires vs Nazis is to go full camp.

I don't think that White Wolf is willing to go full camp, though they should.


This is concept art from an actual video game.


Dino D-Day is actually pretty terrible from a gameplay perspective, but you can forgive it because Nazi Dinosaurs.



This pretty awesome, too


Nazi Vampires.


Also Nazi Vampires.


More Nazi Vampires


Millenium even shows how to do it right without making the Nazis controlled by ancient vampire conspiracies. They were humans who kidnapped a vampire and performed horrific medical experiments on her until they were able to reverse engineer a process for turning people into vampires.

In V:TM, that's easy enough to explain that they grabbed a 13th gen who was straight off the turnip truck, chained him up, and harvested his blood for mass embrace of SS troops. So you end up with thousands of thin-blood caitiffs with Swastika's on their arms marching into London. Which is probably a Masquerade breach, but its fun enough that no one would care.

harvested his blood for mass embrace of SS troops

Doesn't work Published adventures had a tendency to give the players a pack of 3rd-4th gen blood for various purposes, which allowed enterprising players to do a proxy embrace of a few fools and then immediately diablerize them, massively increasing your own generation. That annoyed some people and lead to a rule that vitae loses power as soon as it leaves the vampire, which of course created some plotholes: embrace of Giovanni being done via blood pot delivered form Cappadocius, and Nosferatu using pools of blood to ghoul vermin being the major ones.

Longes wrote:

harvested his blood for mass embrace of SS troops

Doesn't work Published adventures had a tendency to give the players a pack of 3rd-4th gen blood for various purposes, which allowed enterprising players to do a proxy embrace of a few fools and then immediately diablerize them, massively increasing your own generation. That annoyed some people and lead to a rule that vitae loses power as soon as it leaves the vampire, which of course created some plotholes: embrace of Giovanni being done via blood pot delivered form Cappadocius, and Nosferatu using pools of blood to ghoul vermin being the major ones.

That just means that the recruits have to be in the same room as the source. It doesn't prevent you from industrializing the process.

You keep the donor vampire is chained down and mostly encased in in concrete, immobilized. His mouth is permanently sealed with concrete. He's force-fed through an NG tube to keep his blood supply up. A flame hanging right above his eyes keeps him in a constant state of Rötschreck so that he can't use disciplines, while the encasement prevents him from moving so much as an inch.

Candidates are wheeled in 10 at a time, strapped to gurneys, and drained of blood using a hypodermic needle. The blood is saved to feed the donor and the new inductees.

Once a recruit has been drained of blood, they're wheeled into the room with the donor, in a trench that placed them slightly below his exposed and shaved head. The back of the donor's scalp is opened with a blade designed for that specific purpose and vitae allowed to drip directly into the recruit's mouth. This is repeated for all ten recruits. Each inductee is then fed a few pints of blood (usually his own) via NG tube and released when the doctors are sure that they're not going to frenzy.

By using multiple teams and assembly-line efficiency, they're able to induct 50-100 recruits an hour.

There's also some Thaumaturgy 1 and 2 rituals that store vitae for later use. Hell, the Assamites even had a ritual to increase generation without diablerie.

I guess my whole thing with Vampire is that it sounds a lot more fun to play vampire superheroes than whining about your existence and how your life is terribad.

You get a ton of superpowers (by normal dude standards) just by signing up and can get crazy shit like magic or mind control or shapeshifting. Modern day you can just befriend a cattle farmer and buy his cattle and drink their blood or something, so the horror of killing to live can mostly go away. Hell, if you really want human blood you can set up a fake blood drive or something.

On an unrelated note, has any game where the DM gives you bonuses/penalties by how they think you roleplay actually worked or had that system be beneficial at all?

hyzmarca wrote:

Ancient History wrote:

Longes wrote:I'm surprised that White Wolf never made a WWII setting. I mean, it's perfect. You have a crack team of Allied supernaturals going deep into enemy territory to destroy nazi malkavian madness machines and black spiral dancer run concentration camps. Bloodsucking communists! Werewolves with stars and stripes painted on the fur! Tea-drinking mages!
But WWII is pretty much a gaping hole in oWoD setting.

They did Charnel Houses of Europe: The Shoah for Wraith.

Wasn't that horribly offensive?

Yep.

FrankTrollman wrote:Isn't that the From Dusk Til Dawn series?

-Username17

Partially. From Dusk till dawn has a modern setting. Really a lot of things, from Tarantino movies to anime.

I meant the prequels Dusk Til Dawn 2 and Dusk Til Dawn 3, which take place in the past.

-Username17

FrankTrollman wrote:
I meant the prequels Dusk Til Dawn 2 and Dusk Til Dawn 3, which take place in the past.

-Username17

I've never actually seen either of those.