The Gaming Den

http://theonyxpath.com/welcome-to-my-ni ... t-teasers/

Kickstarter for a game called Beast: The Primordial. You get to play a human who dreams that they're a dragon or a gryphon and can appear in the dreams of humans as a scary dragon or gryphon. Freaking people out with bad dreams is somehow considered "feeding" and it replenishes your power points, although it's unclear what you would spend points on because you are, again, not an actual dragon.

Onyx Path went meta, and soon we'll have a game where you play people who play Vampire the Masquerade.

That would seem to be really obviously some person's otherkin fantasy.

angelfromanotherpin wrote:That would seem to be really obviously some person's otherkin fantasy.

Yep.

All this move gives is an upper bound of how much money Richard Thomas would have to be promised in order to certify someone's Otherkin Wank Fantasy as a "totally real and not at all made up World of Darkness line."

-Username17

Headmates come in the next book I figure

Sounds kind of like After Sundown Leviathans, just with an inevitably terrible execution.

Prak wrote:Sounds kind of like After Sundown Leviathans, just with an inevitably terrible execution.

OPP was bound to IP scrub sometime to make another cash cow they won't support.

Every year, they shovelin'~

angelfromanotherpin wrote:That would seem to be really obviously some person's otherkin fantasy.

Doesn't WoD already have a pattern of magic souls fusing with normal people? That's the core conceit of otherkinism(?) right there.

It seems almost interesting in that it's like every other WOD game except that you play as classical fantasy monsters instead of Universal horror monsters.

The otherkinning is more a conceit to throw dragons and shit into an urban fantasy horror masquerade setting where giant fire-breathing dragons and shit would be incredibly obvious.

It isn't the method I would have chosen. I'd have gone with actual firebreathing dragons, who just happen to be able to shapeshift, personally.

The idea that being a dragon means that somewhere there's a medieval knight or Norse king or greek demigod who will try to slay you is also interesting.


But really, this is an idea that pretty much demands shape-shifting. If you're a giant monster trapped in human form, then there must come a point where you shed your mortal guise and start Godzillaing.

The Leviathans are a shout-out to some very specific source material, which itself draws upon various resonant myth themes. Beast seems to draw upon someone's personal fantasy about identifying as a fantastic creature while simultaneously having no specific measurable physical manifestations of that identity. It's such a shitty power fantasy that I'm not sure it even qualifies, except to the author who has presumably built an elaborate fantasy life around trying to figure out how they can in any way be validated in their own myth-identity without specific measurable physical manifestations.

I think you could absolutely do a WoD-style game about being a mythological beast who has taken on human form for one reason or another. It could be like in Feng Shui where the dragons die if they assume their true form when the mana level is too low, creating a tension where busting out obvious draconic whupass has a cost in damage taken. It could be like that Watt-Evans series where dragons reproduce by slowly metamorphing human subjects, and you have to hide your condition from monster-hating enemies. There's a lot of directions you could go with it that would provide a satisfying narrative and an actual power fantasy.

But that was clearly not the goal. The goal was for Richard Thomas to get paid, and for the author to put their fetish on public display. Mission-fucking-accomplished.

So....what do you do in this game? I mean, besides fantasize about being a dragon? Cause I can do that without paying for a game.

According to the intro fic, apparently they can also use their fantasizing about being a dragon to telekinetically bite people who annoy them. I think you could go places with that.

Because it needs to be in this thread:

Cynic wrote:

schpeelah wrote:

schpeelah wrote:

angelfromanotherpin wrote:That would seem to be really obviously some person's otherkin fantasy.

Doesn't WoD already have a pattern of magic souls fusing with normal people? That's the core conceit of otherkinism(?) right there.

Yes, but you fuse with dead people (Geist) or abstract animistic spirits (Purified, I think). The first are immortal necromancers who become transformers if built correctly. The second are immortal spirit talkers who bend space. Neither are particularly otherkinish.

I've literally played the "dragon trapped in human form" character. It was pretty cool but pretty bog standard, I think, sealed power in a can sort of thing, in FATE. He ran around as a human, but could breath firesteam*, and was kind of bulletproof, and all that.

The concept has legs, but I think they need to work on the nature of the Beast a bit.

*eastern dragon, because I'm the most weeaboo non-weeaboo one might ever meet. Oh. And I think it was a workaround for playing a dragon in Dresden-verse, since western dragons are like lovecraftian elder ones, or something in DF.

There's also Demons, Hunters, Mummies, and Mages, all of whom are basically regular people with an extra bonus soul shard stuck in wherever a bonus soul shard goes.

-Username17

That should be an item slot in D&D- soul shard.

Prak wrote:That should be an item slot in D&D- soul shard.

Does it make your comment better or worse that in Magic of Incarnum you actually do have a soul chakra to stick magic items to?

-Username17

FrankTrollman wrote:There's also Demons, Hunters, Mummies, and Mages, all of whom are basically regular people with an extra bonus soul shard stuck in wherever a bonus soul shard goes.

-Username17

I don't think the soulshard thing works very well, personally. At least, not in this instance. It makes things less epic.

If I were writing a dragon splat, they wouldn't be humans at all. Rather, they'd be actual dragons, the last surviving members of a near extinct race. And then you get into interesting stuff.

So, thousands of years ago dragons ruled the world. There were masters of all they surveyed, and they surveyed a lot. They were the biggest, toughest, smartest, meanest, and all around best at everything. They didn't really pay any attention to the humans, because the humans were so far beneeth them, and not particularly tasty.

But the thing is, dragons are solitary creatures, and territorial. Back then, they al respected the territory of the others, and all claimed great tracts of it. Huge distances seperated the Dragons, and they were vulnerable to those social creatures that were beneeth their notice. It's kind of like a human being overthrown by cockroaches. It's embrassing.


So you're a young dragon. You were born recently, within the last few centuries, or decades. or even years. You might have grown up in a cave, but you probably grew up among humans. Your mindset is very different from that of your elders, which is okay, because your elders are mostly dead.

And then there's some metaplot things, conflict between young an old dragons about methods and lifestyle, conflict between those who want to overthrow humanity to regain their stature and those who want to work within the system.

That would have been interesting. Because, at their core, Dragons shouldn't be humans.

Humans with an extra soulshard are great concepts for many things, but in the end, some monsters work best if they were never human at all.

FrankTrollman wrote:

Prak wrote:That should be an item slot in D&D- soul shard.

Does it make your comment better or worse that in Magic of Incarnum you actually do have a soul chakra to stick magic items to?

-Username17

I'm more envisioning something that everyone has that they can stick magic items in, rather than special slots you get for having levels in a certain class.

FrankTrollman wrote:There's also Demons, Hunters, Mummies, and Mages, all of whom are basically regular people with an extra bonus soul shard stuck in wherever a bonus soul shard goes.

-Username17

oWoD had changelings too.

FrankTrollman wrote:There's also Demons, Hunters, Mummies, and Mages, all of whom are basically regular people with an extra bonus soul shard stuck in wherever a bonus soul shard goes.

-Username17

Right, I was talking about nWoD, in which Demons are the Matrix Programs, Hunters are just dudes, Mummies don't exist (I think), and Mages are high on cosmological drugs, but don't have extra soul bits. True for the oWoD. Vampires also had the Beast, who may or may not be an extra bonus soul shard.

Longes wrote:Onyx Path went meta, and soon we'll have a game where you play people who play Vampire the Masquerade.

I sort of did that once with nWoD & Mage: The Awakening. To this day it remains the favorite of my usual gaming group.

Longes wrote:

FrankTrollman wrote:There's also Demons, Hunters, Mummies, and Mages, all of whom are basically regular people with an extra bonus soul shard stuck in wherever a bonus soul shard goes.

-Username17

Right, I was talking about nWoD, in which Demons are the Matrix Programs, Hunters are just dudes, Mummies don't exist (I think), and Mages are high on cosmological drugs, but don't have extra soul bits. True for the oWoD. Vampires also had the Beast, who may or may not be an extra bonus soul shard.

nWoD Mummies are pretty dope, and are on par with mages

I was once in a game that started as Demon: the Fallen, and then the BBEG from the game turned out not to be an actor doing a favor for the GM and EnNobled us. We played the people running the character in a Nobilis game, and it was neat.