The Gaming Den

I'm playing Persona 5 on hard completely blind. I haven't had trouble yet (baton pass>you) but I do feel like I've spent a 1/3rd of my play time checking the vending machines for new drinks. Rank up Death Arcana. You can buy items that restore SP each turn from rank 5 (though they are expensive). O...

Tolkien was a professor who studied, taught, and translated early British literature. Linguistics was a professional responsibility for him, so of course it became a huge part of his work, but there's nothing that says his methodology was any sort of essential method for storytelling, just that it w...

Actual quantities of blood just can't factor into this. At all. Feeding just can't work like that, or anything remotely like that. You want people to drink blood, but the blood drinking has to be effectively symbolic or everything falls apart. It sounds like it would be better to have something in ...

So if you just have a magically-invisible abandoned ruin of a steam punk moon, which modern cyborg types have colonized, that would be pretty cool. That is, personally, I like autocthonia if you can have it absent all the other crap from Exalted. Autochthonia could potentially represent a fun place...

Chapter 5: The Conventions So, this is a oWoD game. That means factions split into sub-factions with their own sub-factions and occasionally sub-factions of sub-factions of sub-factions. http://i1.ebayimg.com/thumbs/images/g/GPEAAOSwdrRXG6yK/s-l225.jpg White Wolf inevitability The Technocracy indul...

Demographics is going to play out across a range. The 1 in 10,000 and 1 in 100,000 numbers are useful because the variance between them is a single order of magnitude. It is extremely likely that the overall number varies by that much. So even if the global number is, for the sake of argument, 1 in ...

We already have CR 1/2 and below. That's not a new concept that anyone needs to invent. Have PCs start out at level 1, give them CON score bonus to health or just flat-out give them like 10-15 HP on top of their first hit die or whatever, so long as lucky crits from a bog-standard orc falchion will...

Personally, I think aiming for somewhere in the neighborhood of 10 Million vampires in the world is the sweet spot. While that's 1 per 800 people, that's not a lot for most people. That'd be like 2 vampires in my high school, and considering there were probably at least 20 goths, they wouldn't have...

Chapter Four: Protocols This is an important chapter - it's the one that describes what the Technocratic Union is, how it works, and what it does. This is probably the most important chapter in terms of differentiating the Technocracy from the other oWoD games. This chapter begins by stating that t...

Well, the whole anthromorphic concept comes into play. Are you fighting a *concept* like death, or are you fighting some anthromophic personfication of said abstract concept? I believe in the oWoD you're doing both those things at the same time. Witness the grand overarching plot of Voormas, Grand ...

I almost feel like WWII can't have involved mages in Hitler's circle. With the whole consensual reality thing going on in Mage, it's kind of a lot more effective to just convince billions of people that [demographic you hate] doesn't exist than it would be to actually physically slaughter them. Esp...

This cover sucks. The drawing tells me nothing about what's going on, the metallic grey is ugly. It's just weird. All technocratic convention books got very ugly covers, and that's just unfortunate. All the convention books use chapter header art from Guide to the Technocracy for their cover art. I...

WWII is a messy conundrum regarding Mage history. The problem is that, if Hitler is not a mage or doesn't have magical support it becomes trivial for almost any mage to assassinate him once people realize where things are going - and the information resources of mages make it almost impossible for t...

400 vampires in a city of 400,000 is insanely high. It's also way more than you need. You have 7 core clans and everyone else should be reduced to random scattered bloodlines, deviants, unique that collectively add up to clan 8. A stable political dynamic would be 5-10 vampires per clan - giving a c...

Chapter Three: History Lessons So, all White Wolf games are obligated to have history chapters, and those histories inevitably stretch back to the dawn of time because reasons. This is stupid. This is particularly stupid in Mage, where reality is consensual and the past constantly changes based on ...

I always saw the trait as supposedly to be Maker, Shaper, Breaker. The Wyld makes raw stuff - it'just spewing elemental energy (and in Mage, Prime energy) all over the place. The Weaver takes the raw materials and forms it into functionally everything of importance. The Wyrm tears down constructs th...

Chapter Two: Enlightened Science Guess which Arthur c. Clarke quote opens this chapter? https://i.kinja-img.com/gawker-media/image/upload/s--Sx_s-e3t--/wq7oben8eg8xqylmbb7f.jpg kneel before Clarke! Anyway this is the chapter about how Technocrats do the voodoo that they don't do. This means describ...

Effectively, ebola and hookworm, and bubonic plauge only exist as microscopic organisms because of the belief in the the worldview of the technocracy. Without the germ theory of disease the default state of the universe is that disease is an abstract concept that depending on your viewpoint you can...

The problem with puppy-kicking is that the regular game was already so grimdark that it usually came across as comical, or at least not exceptional. If you read the initial run of Technocracy splat books - they are indeed comically grimdark to the point that makes no sense because they describe som...

Chapter One: Indoctrination So this chapter is about what the Technocracy is and what it is currently up to and goes from page 22 to 35. Now, because this book is contractually obligated to present Technocrats as villains even as they humanize them, they periodically kick the puppies. Ergo, this ch...

Introduction The introduction supposedly runs from page 14 to page 21. However the first page of this 'chapter' and all other chapters is actually a full-page art piece. It, like all the others, is a sort of futuristic vaguely-dystopian high tech bit - this particular one involves a girl hovering? ...

OSSR: Guide to the Technocracy [/size] Okay, so let's jump into this shall we. This is an OSSR of Guide to the Technocracy, a supplement for Mage: The Ascension. As such, anyone who's made it here should read the Mage vs. Mage OSSR by Ancient History and FrankTrollman first, to get an idea of where...

However, that specific state of affairs should not be extrapolated to the general idea that the world, or at least people that reach prominence in it, operate on a different scale from our mundane reality. Which, I should remind, is an idea that naturally arises from the fact that there are people ...

Spheres as we known them are a game-mechanic abstraction. When Mages in game refer to Sphere's, they're really referring to broad bodies of academic knowledge that apply to certain facets of reality. Spheres are referred to explicitly in-setting. The explanation is that the Order of Hermes codified...

My experience with Spirit is that it goes almost straight from sucking to "do all the things" when it hits a tipping point. This is true of any sphere, and the location of the tipping point depends on the GM, the player, and the specific campaign. The general rule of thumb is that, with a...