The lack of IP scrubbing is a big deal actually, but beyond that there are some serious differences. Using vampire cosmology, you have four external worlds: Inferno, Arcadia, the Land of the Dead, and the Astral Plane. That looks a lot like Limbo, Maya, Mictlan, and the Shallows - but since you aren't trying to do Silent Hill or Jumanji there are no Shallows connected to Arcadia or Hell. Also, while the Land of the Dead is fully coterminus with Earth and has an intermediate Astral Plane and thus works almost the same as an After Sundown Nightmare World (the major difference being that Earth-side walls are visible but insubstantial on Vampire's Astral), the Demon World and Faerieland are not. A gateway to Hell goes to the whichever part of the Inferno it goes to, regardless of where you are on Earth.Mask_De_H wrote:So if you were starting from Masquerade, what would be the cosmology you kept? Shade worlds, the Underworld, what else? And more importantly, what would differentiate this from After Sundown outside of the IP scrubbing?
The next big shift is the War of Ages. I opted to purge it from After Sundown because I didn't care about it, but if you're rebooting specifically World of Darkness it is front and center and you have to get people to care. That means that there are Methuselah, Ancillae, and Neonates and their are conflicts between the generations in addition to conflicts within cohorts. White Wolf never made that believable, but a reboot could. It goes like this: we're using nWoD Blood Potency, so you need to drink more powerful blood when your Blood Potency gets high enough. Specifically, vampires in the Ancilla range can only get sustenance from humans if they kill them to drink the heart's blood (a practice which has a chance of creating an unintended vampire a few days later) and if they want to non-fatally feed they need the vitae of lesser vampires. Methuselah can't get sustenance from humans at all, and even neonate vampires can only sustain them when diablerized. If a Methuselah wants to non-fatally feed, they need to drink the vitae of one of the Ancillae.
So vampirism is a worldwide pyramid scheme where elders need younger vampires to recruit even younger vampires so the even younger vampires can feed from humans, the younger vampires can feed from the even younger vampires, and the elder vampires can feed from the younger vampires. And there's basically nothing in it for the vampires sending vitae up the chain, so there's generational conflict. The Ancillae would like there to be less Methuselahs and more Neonates. The Neonates would like there to be less Ancillae, but not enough less Ancillae that the Methuselahs start running around murdering neonates like Queen of the fucking Damned.
And all the sects are set up to figure out means to deal with this problem. In the Camarilla, Ancilae are allowed to just point at Neonates and drink from them so long as they don't murder anyone or send their victims into feeding frenzy. In the Ashirra and Giovanni, every neonate is required to tithe a certain amount of vitae to the common fund every year, but it doesn't have to be theirs so there's a thriving blood economy where neonates trade vitae vials back and forth for favors and take mercenary work outside the sect for vitae payments. In the Kuei-Jin every neonate has a filial duty to give vitae to their clan elders every month. In the Laibon there is an established pecking order and each Ancilla has specific neonates they are allowed to feed from. In the Sabbat, the elders have no right to your blood save what they bargain for or take by force (and the neonates band together in packs to improve their bargaining positions or defend themselves).
Meanwhile, these systems don't really create enough blood sources for everyone who is going to become a Methuselah. It takes way too long for a neonate to become an Ancilla for there to be any kind of food security there. So the Methuselah either take turns sleeping away the centuries like in the original Underworld movies or fight to the death highlander style. And above it all, the clan founders are generally believed to have higher blood potency still, and it seems plausible that the Antedeluvians can only gain sustenance from Ancillae by devouring their heart's blood and vampiric society is preparing for a blood bath.
This is all fairly cosmologically big. There are no Leviathans at all in oWoD of course, but fitting Werewolves and Wizards and Fairies into this system isn't especially simple. Obviously, supernatural creature blood counts as at least the potency of a neonate vampire, so a Werewolf automatically has something in common with a neonate vampire: a common enemy in the form of Ancillae vampires. But everything that you introduce for Werewolves or Fairies has to fit into that model. The Seelie Court has to care about the War of Ages and participate in it somehow. It's not trivial to design. The Wizards and the Werewolves aren't immortal, so they can just stay Neonate flavored their whole lives, but the Demons and Fairies are and are going to want some sort of reason to make common cause with Ancillae and Methuselah at times.
-Username17