Revising the World of Darkness

[Iaimeki]

As I mentioned in my last post containing my remaining material for 3e D&D, I'm not really an enthusiastic D&D player. I started with 3rd edition so I don't have any nostalgia for earlier versions of the game, and the setting does nothing for me: it looks like a set of disparate fantasy tropes glued together with chewing gum and twine, because that's a more or less what it is. Reading Frank and K's material has given me a better appreciation for why people do play D&D, and while I have an appreciation for more Homeric settings, it's still not something that excites me.

I have lately turned my interest back to the first roleplaying system that captured my interest, the World of Darkness. I'll be upfront: the World of Darkness has serious problems on multiple levels, ones at least as serious as those facing 3e D&D. They fall into roughly three categories. As a skills-based system, mechanical balance issues tend to revolve around specific overpowered abilities, though intersplat balance isn't that good, either. Probably the worst problem is that the mechanics don't always support the flavor of the world, so that the actions of the various characters don't make a whole lot of sense. Finally, neither the cosmologies nor the mechanics of the various game lines play nice with each other, and even though they cross over in the canon plot, in many cases the setting and rules ignore the other games.

What I'm looking at right now is a rewrite, to some degree, of the WoD rules. There are two basic approaches I could take: the first would be to focus on the parts of the rules that don't work well and replace them in pieces, similar to the Tomes; the other is to write what the new World of Darkness should have been. Why don't I like the new World of Darkness? More or less, the revision stripped out all the elements that made the setting interesting in the first place.

What I'm looking for here are more suggestions to identify the problems rather than fixes for them. I have a good idea of *some* problems, but I'm trying to make a comprehensive list. What follows are a discussion of some problems, as well as my take on a variety of aspects of the setting.

WW Glossary

Discipline: vampire supernatural ability
D:tF: Demon: the Fallen
H:tR: Hunter: the Reckoning
KotE: Kindred of the East
nSTS: new Story*telling* system
oSTS: old (revised) Story*teller* system
nWoD: new World of Darkness (M:tAw, V:tR, W:tF)
oWoD: old World of Darkness (M:tA, V:tM, W:tA)
M:tA: Mage: the Ascension
M:tAw: Mage: the Awakening
M:tR: Mummy: the Resurrection
Sphere: mage domain of knowledge
Umbra: General term for all of the nonphysical places.
V:tM: Vampire: the Masquerade
V:tR: Vampire: the Requiem
W:tA: Werewolf: the Apocalypse
W:tF: Werewolf: the Forsaken
W:tO: Wraith: the Oblivion
WW: White Wolf

[Iaimeki]

Passive Defense Fails

In the oWoD, passive defense fails, because of the structure of the combat system itself and because of characteristics of the abilities the rest of the system grants. First, almost all characters in the oWoD, no matter how powerful, have seven health levels--powers that grant extra health levels are few and far between except for mages, and mages are otherwise the most fragile of all WoD characters. Second, for an attack that a defender doesn't dodge or parry using an action, the attack will usually roll .4*(Dex+Skill)+Str+Weapon-1 dice and the defender will subtract from that with just Sta+Armor; if they're unlucky enough to face an enemy using their special weakness, they won't even get to soak with Sta. As if this wasn't bad enough, almost all supernatural powers are much stronger on offense than defense: vampires get Potence and Flower of Death, werewolves get many Gifts that add extra dice to attacks, and so forth, whereas the contrasting defensive powers like Fortitude aren't half as strong. Third, characters can spend a limited resource (Willpower) to make sure that any attack not actively defended hits. Finally, there are a lot of save-or-die-like powers where the defender can force, at most, a 50-50 chance of failing with the attack, and active defenses aren't even allowed. Thus, when all is said and done, defending is a sucker's game in the oWoD: winning initiative, maxing out offensive skills, and hitting enemies with difficult-to-defend attacks is the only way to protect yourself.

The nSTS's major accomplishment is to improve this situation. There are no attacks in the nWoD, to my knowledge, that allow no passive defense at all, and characters get a second layer of passive defense based on their Dex and Wits. While this doesn't solve the systemic problems, it reduces their magnitude.

Extra Actions

Most of the WW game lines have abilities that grant extra actions in combat, but these extra actions are, to say the least, problematic from a number of perspectives.

Though most people ignore it, the oSTS system uses a double-pass initiative system, where the characters announce their actions from slowest to fastest, then resolve them fastest to slowest; this helps prevent situations where characters want to act later in the initiative order so they can see what other characters do first. (The nSTS system allows delayed actions, which present their own set of problems.) With multiple actions under the oSTS, though, you have to pass through each set of actions in initiative order twice, which becomes unwieldy even with two actions much less five.

Besides increasing the complexity of turns and making them take forever to resolve, there are huge disparities in the availability of extra actions between the game lines. To compare the three main game lines, V:tM, W:tA, and Mt:A, vampires can easily get up to five bonus physical actions, get the first with a 1st-level power, and obscure sourcebooks make available powers that give even more extra actions, as well as nonphysical extra actions; werewolves have to spend a limited resource for extra actions, have limits on how much they can spend per turn, and risk both frenzy and sacrifice the opportunity to use other classes of abilities in that same turn; and mages need a level-3 power to even open access to extra physical actions, in general, at the limit of their power would only expect to manage four extra physical actions after spending one action on getting the extra actions in the first place, and have no way to get extra nonphysical actions at all.

Another aspect of the mechanical imbalance of extra actions relates to the problems of passive defense, i.e. you have to spend actions to defend or you die to the first attack. This has several ramifications. The first is that the value of extra actions are quite discontinuous: in particular, for a duel, having one more action than a single opponent means you get a free attack on them that will probably be fatal. It's worth noting that *all* characters under the oSTS can "split" actions, but the penalties are huge: -1 die/extra action, applied to all actions, and an additional penalty -n dice for being the (n+1)th action in a round, so even taking two actions is -2 dice to the first and -3 to the second; in a game where -3 is half a typical dice pool, 10 is the maximum dice most characters can roll on most actions, and 20 is close to the theoretical maximum, characters with extra actions tend to destroy those who have to split. But since you can't further split extra actions, once you have extra actions, the discontinuity emerges. In situations with multiple combatants, the analysis is more complicated, but essentially since each attack takes out a character, you want to have enough actions to exhaust your opponents' defenses and kill each one, with the obvious implications for investing in extra actions. The second ramification is that as numbers of attacks increase, combat degenerates to an initiative check: the character who wins initiative attacks, forcing the character they attack to use their next action to defend, which in turn allows the same character to attack again, and with enough attacks even active defense fails, a hit gets through, and the defender dies, regardless of how many actions the two had left. The third ramification is that even "weak" threats are dangerous in numbers sufficient to burn through your actions, because even some mortal punk with a tire iron can often take out a 2000-year-old vampire if the vampire can't actively dodge.

Finally, each turn in oSTS takes three seconds. From my observations about passive defense and extra actions, it should be obvious that the amount of time in the game world a high-power combat takes is measured in seconds. On one hand, this is quite realistic: wars and battles have gotten shorter, in general, as technology has improved. On the other, like most people, WW's writers' dramatic instincts suggest to them that high-power battles should take *longer* than low-power battles: the best example is the week of Nightmares, where the Ravnos Antediluvian went out a rampage for seven days, with at least twenty-four hours of that consisting of actual battle against three other creatures almost as powerful as it, not the three seconds the rules suggest. In other words, stories suggest the combat system should degenerate to padded sumo, but it actually degenerates to rocket-launcher tag; of course, degenerating to padded sumo has its own set of problems, and from the point of view of a game, rocket-launcher tag is *probably* more playable.

The choices of the nWoD with respect to extra actions are hilarious, if you find poorly designed RPG rules as amusing as I do. The supernatural abilities that grant extra actions aren't present, to my knowledge, as they were in the oWoD. However, they created Merits in the nSTS that allow extra attacks, and the way the offense and defense works out, it's still plausible to sacrifice one's own defense to unload a series of attacks that should take out opponents before they get to act.

Absolute Immunities and Attacks

The oWoD has too many ways to become immune to other abilities. The worst offenders tend to focus on physical abilities: in the V:tM core book, for instance, there are at least three ways to become immune to physical attack, as well one way to fly, while still using mental Disciplines to attack your enemies. Other powers tend to have fewer immunities against them available, but the immunities still exist, and battles between high-powered characters often depend critically on which powers the two sides have and which powers they're immune to.

A contrasting problem is the existence of too many attacks with few good defenses available. WW designed, it's clear, with "supernaturals should get to own mortals because the former are special" in mind. Unfortunately, there's a lot of leakage from "mortals" to "supernaturals," both because the games weren't designed to work with each other, so the protagonist of one game is the butt of anther's joke, and because of plain sloppiness. These lead to the situations where there's no defense against a power better than 50-50 luck without a specialized counter, usually an immunity.

The nWoD reduces these problems, though I'm not convinced it has eliminated them altogether.


Skill-Based Systems and Specialization

I have, I will admit, a strong bias for skill-based systems, because I have an aesthetic distaste for class-based systems. Class-based systems may be a good way for WotC to sell books, because every archetype, or even blend thereof, needs its own class lest it be underpowered compared to the archetypes with mechanical support, but for the same reason they're a pain for GMs because if a player has a novel idea, they want (with reason!) a class for it. Sometimes people try to patch this inherent inflexibility with selectable abilities (D&D's feats and skills) or multiclassing, but I've yet to see an example of mechanics for these things that work: the usual result, as in D&D, are characters over- or underpowered, or both at the same time in different areas, with unnecessary complexity to boot. Worse, some people internalize the inflexibility: players will refuse to play any character of a class that doesn't follow the stereotypes, and GMs will enforce the stereotypes on their players.

That said, skill-based systems have their own issues, the biggest two of which are that it's difficult to know what an appropriate challenge for a given group of characters is, and rewarding overspecialization. Even in class-based systems, though, the former is a difficult problem: 3e D&D attempted a solution with at most what I would call limited success, as there are still many factors that have to be eyeballed. Thus, while this is a definite weakness of skill-based systems, I don't think it's a fatal one.

Skill-based systems reward overspecialization because of the basic way that roleplaying games tend to favor offense over defense, since you as a player choose when and how to attack, but your enemies choose when you use your defenses. Class-based systems, because of their inflexibility, can force players to buy defense along with offense, but a typical skill-based system creates more defense- and offense-oriented skills, biasing the game to the latter. In the oWoD, this does create a noticeable bias towards eggshells with hammers, because it's quite easy to make a character who wins almost all combats with high initiative and a save-or-die or equivalent ability, but dies if taken by surprise or if one of the elements of the combination fails.

I know of two fundamental solutions to this problem, both of which both the oWoD and nWoD partially implement, but neither in a rigorous fashion. The first approach is to scale the costs, which both systems do by making higher-level offensive abilities more expensive than lower level ones, thus getting some defense becomes cheaper relative to more offense; another possible way to do this is to make defensive abilities cheaper relative to offensive ones. The second approach is to make some defensive abilities prerequisites for improved offensive abilities.

Death and Dying

In the oSTS, the margin between dying and dead is too small: more or less any hit that takes a character out of the fight will be lethal, and this applies even for supernaturals because aggravated damage is so easy to get. In fact, at high power levels, it's not hard for a single blow to take a character from full health to thoroughly dead. Of course, this also relates to other example of absolute attacks: in general, there are too few gradations between "in trouble" and "hopeless." The nSTS improves this situation, on the whole, by making aggravated damage harder to get and the other forms of damage less lethal, even to mortals. It still has a few too many ways to lose quite fast, but its partial solution is at least a good starting point.

[Iaimeki]

The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly

This section is an overview of the WoD games, or rather, selected games I know something about. I start by establishing some general characteristics of the game and what I like about it, or why I don't like at all, and follow by enumerating problems in need of revision.

Vampire

Besides my general interest in vampires, V:tM captured my interest with three other big themes: the idea of a price for power, the consequences of immortality on a human society, and secret history. For the second, there's lots of potential in the idea that without old people dying off, society would never change because the same old brains carrying the same old ideas would always have the power. For the third, the Antediluvians represent one of the few takes on the "insane elder gods coming to devour the world" trope that I enjoy. What I don't like about the setting is the attitude, which some players and STs take, that focusing on the personal horror elements to the exclusion of all else is the "right" way to play the game. V:tR is, in many respects, a good revision of the system, but it refocused the game on the personal horror elements, in the process stripping out most of what I found interesting about the setting.

That said, V:tM has its fair share of issues.

• Embracing is too easy: while the Ravnos and the Sabbat used mass-Embrace tactics, it's not clear why *all* vampires just don't Embrace swarms of mortals to overwhelm their enemies or maintain armies of ghouls. nWoD resolves this issue by making the Embrace cost permanent Willpower and ghouling cost temporary Willpower.
• The game's history impacts the setting for the worse. The original design only included the seven Camarilla clans, and it shows, both in terms of mechanics (all of the non-Camarilla clans have unique Disciplines, only two Camarilla clans do) and setting (until around the time of the revised edition the game ignored most of the world).
• The Sabbat makes no sense. The early writers introduced it to serve as enemy for Camarilla vampires, but as it evolved into something more than cardboard-cutout evil, it had trouble leaving behind the more nonsensical elements of its early history, such as the idea of mass-Embraces in mass graves, and required new elements to make Sabbat vampires playable, such as Paths to explain why all the Sabbat hadn't fallen to the Beast. The Sabbat has some salvageable ideas, but also a lot of nonsense that needs replacing.
• The clans aren't balanced. This is less of a problem than it might be because the designers don't lie about it (one stated the Nosferatu got screwed in public without prompting) and the structure of the game doesn't expect or require multiclan groups with some people playing weak clans and others strong; but still, closer balance is probably better.
• Lots of bad and stupid mythology and stereotypes appear in the game. (This theme will appear again in future discussion.) The independent clans are the worst offenders: the Ravnos originated as Gypsy vampires, in the period when the WoD was treating that culture in rather racist ways, the Setite abilities confused Set with Apep, and the Assamites were an Islamic stereotype.
• The original history for Vampire is Judeo-Christian: the first vampire is supposed to be Cain, from the Biblical Genesis account. Because the Bible drew on stories common in the Middle East at the time it was written, Cain is of course not a unique figure in mythology, but instead of choosing a sensible solution and making the obvious identifications, positing vampire migration, or so forth, the writers at WW invented a new type of vampire to occupy parts of India, China, and other East Asian nations. What this means is that vampires with different mechanics, closer to W:tO than V:tM, and tone occupy a huge slice of the world. These conflicts produce problems.
• The Baali are a part of the history of the setting, though they're more or less wiped out in the modern setting. They're an entire clan or bloodline of vampires that it's ok to destroy because every last one of them is evil to the core and traffics with demons. They're the equivalent of D&D's evil races, have all the same problems, and don't belong to the setting.
• While V:tM is the most cosmology-neutral of the main game lines, it still has several elements that enlarge the cosmology, bring in other games, or both. The Giovanni and several more obscure bloodlines have necromantic abilities whose primary purpose is to manipulate wraiths; wraiths have their own game, W:tO and a quite complicated background if one chooses to get into that. Several canon elements of the history, such as the Tzimisce and their relationship to a demon called Kupala, the early version of the Sabbat, and the Baali, presume the existence of demons, often in their standard Judeo-Christian forms. Neither of these groups of entities are detailed in the game, so one can either use the other games to represent them or invent more material to cover them, but either way, they come with additional baggage.

Werewolf

W:tA might be termed "Captain Planet by way of werewolves." They're agents of the Wyld (a force of creation and chaos) against the Weaver (a force of order, associated with humans and technology) and especially the Wyrm (a force of destruction and evil); the resemblance to the Hindu trinity should be obvious, but there the similarities between the game cosmology and any real-world mythology end. More or less, the entire game is built around an anachronistic conception of nature, which the werewolves anthropomorphize as "Gaia," that the werewolves defend against humans and various forms of supernatural evil. The werewolves believe in an animistic cosmology, so according to them, *everything*, including planets, material objects, concepts, and even technologies, has a spirit and consciousness. My view of W:tA is almost an inverse of my view of V:tM: the core idea, of primitives fighting a secret war in the modern age, is interesting, but most everything else about the setting is stupid and it has lots of special badness aside.

• Pentex is a corporation in the setting that's *actually evil*, no joke. It goes out of its way to destroy the environment with oil spills, evil spirit technologies, and so forth. Such direct insertion of stupid politics (large corporations = evil, environment = good) as objective evil in a game bothers me to say the least.
• The Fera, because it's not enough to have werewolves, the setting also needs weredinosaurs, werespiders, and weresharks. (I'm not kidding.) As if that wasn't enough, the game posits that e.g. the weredinosaurs and the weresharks had something resembling cultures that existed in geologic time, tens or hundreds of millions of years ago.
• Even though the setting supposedly precedes the evolution of humans by millions of years and sets up humanity as a possible antagonist, it's *still* designed so that humans are the measure of all things. Even vaguely plausible weres like were-elephant/dolphins don't exist, all the Fera are human-animal combinations. Spirits are anthropomorphic for the most part. Werewolf society tends to resemble human society. And so forth. The setting contradicts itself with a human-centered, Earth-centered perspective while telling a story that's theoretically not about that.
• While none of the games play smoothly with each other, because W:tA's cosmology is so expansive and, I suspect, favoritism on the part of the authors, when cosmologies clash the werewolves tend to win because it's easier and more copacetic to modern American liberal politics. I will discuss this in more detail in the Mt:A and crossover sections.

I could go on, but as I'm not interested in further exploring a game I don't like and don't know much about, I will stop there. W:tF keeps the animistic elements and proposes that the major battle the werewolves fight is against the spirit world, with other werewolves on the same side. This is rather disconnected from the mythological roots of werewolves, but at least removes a lot of the stupid; it is not, however, the game I would write, and I think it is rather more bland than the first game.

[Iaimeki]

Mage

Of the games in the oWoD, I like M:tA the most, but I also find it the most problematic. The game has awesome potential, with the ability to bring in real-world mysticism and philosophy, and putting forward something resembling a working system for flexible magic, rather than a codified set of spells subject to all the issues that brings. That said, the authors often didn't have the background on philosophy, science, or mysticism they needed to make the game make sense, and the first edition introduced many ideas that played off real-world stereotypes without grounding them well in the real-world sources. It also suffers from the same occasional bouts of insanity that seem to plague all WW material.

• Science doesn't work that way. The basic conflict in Mage's setting is the so-called Ascension War, between mystic mages who believe in various unscientific ideas and others whose magic *is* science. This presents two big issues: first, what about history, i.e., what was the world like when humans believed weird things about it or didn't even exist; and second, are all scientists insane, deluded, or evil, for trying to "impose" their beliefs? For some simple example of the former, when most humans believed the Earth was flat several thousand years ago, where was Asia located relative to the Americas? If there was a divide, where was it? Was the Solar System actually geocentric before Copernicus convinced everyone it was heliocentric, and if so, how'd he manage that trick? Where did humans even come from if their belief creates reality? The authors bought into postmodern criticisms of science without understanding what it is or why it works, and so they failed to do the philosophical heavy-lifting to make the setting sensible. The scientific mages, called the "Technocracy" in the setting, meanwhile suffered an evolution analogous to that of the Sabbat: they were first written as cardboard villains, and in that role it was safe to assume that they were all evil because they knew the truth about magic and kept it from people to make the world "safe." However, they're genuinely interesting in their own right, and as this happened it became harder and harder to understand how mages could believe in science and technology as the only possibilities when confronted with the powers of the mystics, not to mention other supernaturals, on a regular basis. Later writers created a variety of ways around this, none of them satisfying.
• The Traditions are not well-thought-out stereotypes. I mean, the sole representative of China, one of the most ancient and powerful cultures in the entire world, with mysticism quite as complicated as that of Europe's, is the Akashic Brotherhood, bunch of meditative martial artists. The Euthanatos are the sole representative of India, another one of the most powerful cultures in Asia. One might argue this European bias as an effect of the Europeans' conquest of the world, except that in Mage there's no reason the Europeans should have succeeded, because technology and magic are on an equal footing! Some of the mystic groups, like the Cultists of Ecstasy, don't reflect particular cultures in the real world as much as general trends in human mysticism and consequently have thin histories and weak characters. Many of the stereotypes don't have much to do with the core of what the historical mystics they're based on considered most important or worthy, such as the Celestial Chorus and its failure to bring in any of the possible branches of mysticism in the monotheistic religions. Sometimes, later writers have managed to work around these problems, but they aren't solved.
• The game has a lot of dumb ideas. The Technocracy suffers worst, including for instance being supposed to possess a Dyson sphere (there's no way the writers knew what a Dyson sphere is), the Syndicate's SPD division that is controlled by Pentex (yes, the W:tA one), Autochthonia as a planet counterrotating with the Earth (the Technocrats are the *scientific* mages!), the constant use of mind control effects on lower-ranked technocrats, and technology invented much too early, but the Traditions have their own examples, just none quite as egregious.
• Despite the writers' sometimes-correct admonitions that crossing one WW game with another could interfere with the games themes, M:tA imported the W:tA cosmology wholesale. No one, apparently, thought about the consequences of using an animistic cosmology in a setting where reality is subject to belief. One obvious consequence is that the Technocracy is wrong and they have to somehow explain away an enormous part of the setting. Another is that there's leakage between W:tA's moral gloss on entities like the Wyrm, the Weaver, the Wyld, and Gaia, and it imports a lot of entities with insane levels of power, like the spirits of the planets, into M:tA, even though human belief about the planets has varied in time and space, and humans didn't even discover Uranus or Neptune until modern times! Having animism, modern science, and belief affecting reality in the same setting doesn't work well at all and magnifies some of the other problems, like the issues with what, if anything, existed before humans did.
• The Umbra is huge. It's somewhat ambiguous how large, and it's sometimes implied that any imaginable reality exists in the Umbra somewhere. Even just the places that are detailed in the M:tA and W:tA, though, offer so much weirdness it's hard to summarize. Around the time WW revised M:tA, they realized that the Umbra was so huge it could overwhelm the physical Earth, so they created an artificial and stupid hack to destroy all the older mages, or at least exile them far from the main setting, and make it difficult to travel from Earth to the Umbra and back, called the Avatar Storm. The Avatar Storm is arbitrary and unmotivated on several levels, but the problems it addresses are real: if M:tA is not to be like V:tM with immortal archmages dominating the setting, there has to be a mechanism to eliminate them; and because M:tA imported W:tA's cosmology, it ended up focusing on elements inessential to the main ideas.
• The Spheres aren't well-balanced, on any of several different measures. Mechanically, some spheres seem to respect few limits, such as the way Entropy covers probability, fate, and death, and can be bent into altering almost anything by a sufficiently creative player; or Spirit, which can do anything in an animistic setting because everything has a spirit, or is contrariwise crippled once the Avatar Storm cuts off mages from the spirit worlds. Others, like Matter and Time, are well-defined and suffer because of it. For Matter, STs tend to think of it using modern scientific concepts, and there's only so much gross matter can do anyways; while for Time, all the best uses are outstandingly broken have been nerfed to prevent weaker PCs from abusing them to do ridiculous things.
• The Nephandi are a group of mages who seek complete annihilation of all existence. Philosophically, they form a nice counterpart to ordinary mages, who seek enlightenment and transcendence; but as actual characters, they are incomprehensible and so require a lot of special pleading. In addition, they take the "evil race" problem to a new level, as Nephandi's "souls" (technically Avatars, but soul means most of what the M:tA term means) can be reincarnated in new bodies, only to have the resulting person be evil from birth. To kill them you have to destroy their soul before killing them the normal way. Oh, and they also serve bizarre extraplanar entities. Needless to say, they make the Baali look unproblematic in comparison.

V:tR and W:tF have a lot of similarities to V:tM and W:tA. The Vampire games conserved most of the Disciplines, many of the clan concepts, and many of the general mechanics for vampires. The Werewolf games lost the most interesting overarching idea, but conserved many of the same mechanics, the same possible forms, and the same concept of werewolves as dual spirit-physical beings. M:tAw, on the other hand, took almost nothing from M:tA except some names: the cosmology, the history, the nature of the factions, and quite a bit of the mechanics aren't even similar. In particular, they stripped all the things that made the original game interesting to me; while the other games might at least serve as inspiration, M:tAw isn't much good even for that.

Crossovers

The oWoD games weren't designed to work together, and they don't. Aside from theme and tone issues that are almost inevitable, there are a great diversity of other issues. The biggest mechanics problem is that powers in one game will refer to statistics that characters in another don't even have; while in most cases there are acceptable analogs, sometimes it's not clear how to do it. I've alluded to another problem already, that powers balanced in one game may become imbalanced in another as they apply to targets beyond those they were designed to affect.

The mechanics problems present fewer issues than the setting problems, though. While oWoD doesn't endorse crossovers in theory, in practice the games cross over between one another so many times it's easy to generate a laundry list. Consider the example of the metaplot for just the transition from the 2nd. ed. to the revised edition of the games. The biggest disaster involved a triple crossover between V:tM (the Ravnos clan and its Antediluvian), M:tA (the Technocracy), and Kindred of the East, with guest appearances from werewolves at the epicenter. Meanwhile, in the Lower Umbra, that part concerned with the dead, two more events involved double crossovers: M:tA (the Technocracy, again) and V:tM (a sect called the Tal'Mahe'Ra) crossed over with W:tO in independent events that coincided; and in turn these events reset the Mummy game and formed the background for three new games, Orpheus, D:tF, and H:tR. In other words, for the oWoD WW is a bunch of big fat hypocrites about not crossing over the games, a situation they at least rectify in the nWoD. Given this, the following is a list of major contact points between the games; this includes some of the other games I haven't mentioned much until now.

• The Tremere were a subgroup of one of the Traditions, the Order of Hermes, before they became a vampire clan.
• The Giovanni clan and some other V:tM bloodlines all manipulate, summon, control, or hurt W:tO wraiths, as distinct from more general spirits.
• The Tal'Mahe'Ra, though destroyed by the aforementioned metaplot events, was a cult including vampires and mages, located in the Lower Umbra of where W:tO is set; one group of mages became a vampire bloodline.
• Many of the demons that infernalists deal with in V:tM could be from D:tF, likewise for the entities the Baali worship. Aside from their general evil and natures, though, they could also be powerful evil spirits of some kind.
• M:tA, as noted above, borrowed W:tA's cosmology lock, stock, and barrel, though there are some differences in the places they tend to go.
• The Nephandi serve the dreams of beings who live in a specific location in W:tO geography and serve as sort of ultimate adversaries for wraiths, representing Oblivion incarnate.
• M:tA also mention infernalists, and the entities they serve could be demons from D:tF or, again, other kinds of evil spirits.
• M:tA is in general the most ecumenical of the games: it has the most plausible and often-mentioned connections with any of the other games, even if those connections aren't well-explored in the canon.
• The Lower Umbra, containing all of W:tO's geography, is a specific location in the W:tA/M:tA cosmology. Werewolves don't go there much, though they can; mages are more frequent visitors, at least before the Avatar Storm.
• M:tR, KotE, and W:tO are all based on Wraith: they all share different parts of the same underworld and have the possibility to move back and forth between their wraith forms and physical bodies in the real world, through various different mechanisms.
• Some of the eastern werewolves and other Fera believe in the cyclical view of time espoused by the KotE.
• The KotE represent an earlier, failed incarnation of the hunters in H:tR, created by the same entities that created the East Asian vampires. D:tF identifies those entities as angels.

The contradictions, in contrast, are more subtle, and relate more or less to beliefs about the nature of the universe. V:tM's Judeo-Christian perspective, while it works quite well with D:tF, is not consistent with W:tA's anachronistic combination of ecoterrorism with animism. W:tO's attitude about life and death isn't that consistent with any of the real-world mythologies about death and doesn't resolve what happens with, mage's souls when they die. Mage is riddled with internal paradoxes because of its schizophrenic split between W:tA's cosmology, the occasional V:tM and W:tO influences and interactions, and its own internal problems.

Conclusion

If the above didn't make that clear, my favorite game of the setting is M:tA, because of its themes and the big ideas it encompasses, and my least favorite game is W:tA, because of the way WW's authors tend to treat it as right and the political biases built into its cosmology. As M:tA is my favorite game and also the one most compatible with uniting the oWoD under one aegis, I want to start with it as the center and then build what other interesting elements deserve addition around it. What I don't know at this point is to what extent I want to make changes; what games and elements thereof, exactly, I want to include; and how I want to handle the mechanics.

[Username17]

I've been thinking about WoD some lately as well. There's a lot I'm super unhappy about. And I genuinely think that we should basically scrap the WoD, and keep the basic idea that vampires run around biting people.

World of Darkness is Overcrowded
You can't have been Rasputin, our guys were Rasputin!

Let's face it: the World of Darkness is cluttered. oWoD has way too many secret groups and supernaturals, and the nWoD is no better. With each group having their own sub-groups and politics and multiple groups of antagonist supernaturals it gets explosively, exponentially more complicated with the addition of every book, and no one knows how it works. That's not good for a political game. The players need to know at least enough of what's going on that they can advance agendas and make plans – otherwise there aren't any political maneuverings; it all devolves rapidly into hack-n-slash or just plain slash.

The concept is that you are a classic Universal Studios Monster and you engage in narrative driven dramatic role playing of both horror and intrigue. This is essentially impossible when there are too many world running conspiracies to keep track of or when people are going all Dragon Ball Z on things right next to you.

So we're paring things down. A lot. We don't have, need, or even want a bajillion clans of vampires, or fifteen tribes of werewolves. There should be few enough flavors of things that all the players can remember what the differences between them are. Ideally, people should be able to play whatever supernatural guys they want, sort of like the League of Extraordinary Gentleman, in practice you have to put explicit limitations on what is part of the story or things get all weird. Like with martian invasions and stuff. A story that doesn't have specific exclusions does not truly have any specific inclusions. It's not really a story at all, it's a mess.

It is important to note that you can't take everything from myth and legend and cram it into a story. I'm not saying that your story will be completely incoherent, although of course it will be. I'm saying that you are literally incapable of doing that. The Vampire Book is an encyclopedia of just vampire lore from various cultures and it is literally over nine hundred pages long. And we're not talking about character backgrounds or rules text or any of the other crap that we know eats up word count like you wouldn't believe. We're talking about just a bare list of facts by mythical origin. So it is imperative not only that you acknowledge that you're going to have to cut things down to a manageable amount, but also that you establish specifically what is off limits and what's fair game.

A Life in Horror: The Good and The Bad
“Interesting fact: The Final Girl trope emerged shortly after young women became a major component of horror movie attendees.”

Life in the World of Darkness is actually pretty horrible, and extremely dangerous. Life in the World of Darkness is life in a horror movie. Or rather, it is a world where all the horror movies are real. This means that body counts are extremely high, and it is very difficult to get help. This is good news if you happen to be a vampire, but really bad for anyone looking for a life of vaguely normal properties. Here are some important things to remember:

• The Police are no help at all. Heavily infiltrated by cultists and secret societies, the police in the World of Darkness are astoundingly ineffective. Sure they will occasionally bring down a killer, but the vast majority of crimes go unsolved. Many crimes don't even get investigated, especially if something supernatural is afoot.
• Telecommunications are Shoddy Sat Phones aren't available in the World of Darkness. Cellphone coverage cuts out constantly at inopportune moments. Regular telecommunication wires go down frequently and are out for days at a time. The inability to get a call out of a building or town isn't unusual, that kind of thing happens a lot in the World of Darkness.
• People Don't Travel Much It's not weird for people to not know what goes on in the next town over in the World of Darkness. Things are just more dangerous, and people keep to themselves more.

Keep this in mind when you're planning your nights in the World of Darkness. Life is less connected to other life in the World of Darkness and it is much easier for dangerous elements to thrive in such an environment.

People in Horror: Extras and Luminaries
“Do not run upstairs! There is no exit upstairs!”

Remember that in horror movies there are a lot of people who serve no real purpose save to be eaten by the monsters. We call them Extras even if they happen to get some lines. These people may be strong, or smart, or beautiful, but ultimately they are doomed. If they get bitten by a zombie they will turn into one of the shambling hordes that our heroes must eventually chop through with a chain saw. They will not get cured and will not turn into leaders of the walking dead. Game mechanically, these people have no Edge score. If they turn into a supernatural creature of some kind they will become a Spawn. These hapless victims will not become the next Dracula, they will always be the horde vampires in From Dusk til Dawn. They will not become Shelly Winters or Sheila, they will join the hordes of deadites and get cleaved through with fire.

On the other side of the coin, there are people in the horror genre who rise to the occasion. Whether they are introduced as bad ass adventurers like Van Helsing or Rick O'Connell, or are “normal people” who rise to the occasion like Meg Penny or Ash, these people have a certain spark of bad assery in them regardless of what they happen to be doing. They are Luminaries, and they have Edge. If they become Supernaturals they become the real deal. They may turn evil but they will still have lines and character development.

This is why characters will occasionally fight their way through a horde of zombies (who are of course all ex-humans) just to try to get a cure for one woman who happens to have been turned into a zombie. It isn't that they've completely lost perspective, it's that the transformation into a monster is a one way trip for absolutely everyone except a reasonably small number of luminaries. You actually can “save” the Alice or the Sheila if they get transformed into the living dead. There's really nothing you can do for the rest of the people.

--

The Playable Types

The Universal Monsters have a lot of stuff in there which is not really appropriate. Sure, Lon Chaney is full of awesome and I have no problem watching his movies, but neither the Phantom of the Opera nor the Hunchback of Notre Dame is especially supernatural. They are both just really creepy guys. On the other end of the spectrum, the existence of space aliens really harms the whole eldritch intrigue thing. So while This Island Earth is a good movie and part of the official pantheon, the Metalunans and Zagons are not going to be part of this. At all.

Which leaves Dracula, Frankenstein's Monster, Gillman, the Mummy, and the Wolfman – who all appear in the classic The Monster Squad, and the Evil Wizard, the Invisible Man and the Mole Man who don't. It is of note however that Dracula, Frankenstein's Monster, the Wolfman, and the Invisible Man all appear in the mandatory movie Abbot and Costello Meet Frankenstein, and there is of course Evil Wizard and Mummy in the substantially less mandatory Abbot and Costello Meet the Mummy. It seems clear that life would go on without Mole Men; but what heck?

• Vampires
  An eternity of melancholy and betrayal is, after all, an eternity.
  The Vampire is a rockstar of the living dead. They drink blood, live forever, and look great in black. Vampires are emotionally attenuated individuals who have to consume metaphorical life in the form of actual human blood. They are parasites whose very existence is a powerful metaphor for the consumptive and conflict-torn nature of the world.
  Exemplars: Dracula. Did we mention Dracula? I mean sure, we can talk about the vampires from Blade or Buffy, and we will even. But all Vampire mythos in the modern world always comes back to Dracula, because he is that awesome.

• Prometheans
  Once created, a work has a life of its own.
  A Promethean is an artificial person. Created by unwise science, magic, or both, each Promethean is a race of one. They have no peers and no possibility of children. Every Promethean is created knowing that their entire people dies with them. It is a lonely and frightening existence.
  Exemplars: Frankenstein's Monster, Rotwang's Robot, Loew's Golem

• Lycanthropes
  Even a man who is pure in heart and says his prayers by night...
  may become a wolf when the wolfbane blooms and the autumn moon is bright
  A Lycanthrope is someone who is cursed to transform into a rampaging beast when the moon is full or they get excited. There is plenty of mythological basis for shapeshifters who are born with the ability to turn into animals or who have attained the magic powers to do so to protect mankind, but they aren't normally figures from horror stories, and have no place in the World of Darkness.
  Being a Lycanthrope means that you are a danger to people you love and the furniture around you. You can unleash the beast to rip things to pieces, but lycanthropy is a curse and it is not generally very fun.
  Exemplars: John Talbot, Irena Dubrovna, Yuki Sohma

• Witches
  Bubble Bubble.
  Witches are people who have learned Magic. In a horror setting, magic is in almost all cases bad. The genre is pretty light on Glinda the Goods and Merlins. Magicians are generally vindictive cackling gypsies, satanic sorcerers, mysterious strangers, and a myriad of other titles both hackneyed and terrifying. They spend a lot more time sacrificing people to gods ancient and evil and a lot less time preparing good children to go to the ball than magicians in other genres.
  
  Magic that humans can use comes from three sources in the World of Darkness. There is ancient Egyptian magic, which is evil. There is devil worshiping pagan magic, which is evil. And finally there is the twisted Yogi sorceries of the East, and that's evil as well. It's not that you can't do good as a magician, you totally can. It's just that the magic itself is evil and using it is dangerous even if you are the virtuous Chandu. The horror movies of the 30s didn't distinguish particularly between people from India and China (both were in “The East”), which can actually be reconciled by determining that the tradition of wicked Rishi magic started in India and spread to China with the scrolls of Buddhism.
  
  An important thing to realize is that The Mummy is actually a Witch. That's just how they do immortality. Sometimes it's an immortality where you do evil magic and you look like a normal person (see the 1933 or 1999 The Mummy) and sometimes you look like a crazy corpse in special bandages (like in Bubba Hotep). It really depends. Either way, if you want to be a leftover from Egypt or Aztlan you are a Witch (or a Vampire of course). However, and this is important, the Mummies from the middle Mummy movies such as The Mummy's Ghost and... sigh... The Mummy's Curse where the Mummy lurches around and smashes things – that Mummy is a Promethean instead, so pick a schtick and go with it.
  Exemplars: Imhotep, Roxor, Hjalmar Poelzig

• Transhuman
  Just a scientific experiment. To do something no other man in the world had done.
  Humans do not, in general, have supernatural powers. However, in the horror genre there are a number of people who experience an event which changes them irrevocably into something different. Something more. These people generally go stark raving mad, and in not very long. The certainty that they are no longer human causes them to lose sight of human priorities, human morality. While they have become something more, they are also something less.
  
  The transformational event can be mystical or magical. Or a bit of both. A Transhuman always has an “origin story” which is to some degree unique. The Invisible Man took scientific chemicals. Anck Su Namun simply woke up one day and realized that she is the reincarnation of an Egyptian princess. Ayesha stepped into the mystical flame of life. Whatever the event was, it was the last thing that he or she did as a human, and the reality of that fact is as destructive to the self as subsequent the revelations of the magical world and the horrors which inhabit it.
  
  Exemplars: The Invisible Man, Mr. Hyde, Anck Su Namun, Ayesha

• Leviathan
  His face was fish-like.
  Supposedly in pre-Sumerian times there was a great mother of monsters. Her name was Echidna. Or Tiamat. Or Vritra. It's not really that important what her name was, because she was killed by a powerful human sorcerer about 4000 BCE. And most of her monstrous brood is gone as well, but not all of it. Some of them interbred with humans and hid their lineage in the darkest corners of the world. They hid from the world of men for millennia, some lurking in darkness and plotting revenge and others merely living their own lives – the ancient conflict long forgotten.
  
  But that's not really possible now. Things are modern, and there is nowhere to hide. Those who carry the taint of Echidna's spawn in their ancestry are both hunted and feared. They are destructive, and eating their flesh can make you live forever.
  
  In the World of Darkness these creatures often hang out at the edges of society – places which while nominally explored aren't actually watched very carefully.
  Exemplars: The Creature from the Black Lagoon, Mole Man, Robert Olmstead

The Non-Playable Types

Not only must we make explicit what appears on the player's side, we also need to decide ahead of time what is around, supernaturally speaking in the world. Many people protest this. If they want to have unicorns show up for a storyline, why shouldn't they, as the storyteller, just do that? The answer is that in a cooperative storytelling game, the players need some sort of ground state to tell their own back stories and to make plans for future intrigue. Whether the character knows that such and such a creature exists or such and such a world spanning organization is up to its evil schemes, the player needs to at the very least have access to that information. And while it may seem like that wold spoil surprises – and it does sometimes – in a much more important way it prevents narrative dissonance. Narrative dissonance appears in cooperative storytelling games much the way continuity errors appear in horror films. And while it is certainly jarring to watch the part in Leprechaun where they drive off in the second car despite the fact that they had earlier lamented being stranded when the first car wouldn't start – it is still a movie and thus the plot (such as it is) just keeps rolling along whether you notice the discrepancy or not. In a cooperative storytelling game however, such an event would just crash everything to a halt. The players and the storyteller would have to sit down and work something out, because they are all imagining the world together and there is no “next scene” until everyone gets their imaginations working together.

• Zombies
  Brains!
  Zombies are the result of evil magic or super science which transforms dead bodies into lurching, brain eating monsters. Zombies hunger for the living and have a tendency to rampage constantly. Some zombies are fast, some are slow. Some can figure out doorknobs and others can't. But they hunger for the living. Zombie spawn can create new zombie spawn just by killing extras, so zombie outbreaks can get really big, really fast.
  Exemplars: Shelly Winters, Sheila, Ed

• Fey
  Ha! Ha!
  The wilds have portals to fairy realms where horrible blood drinking nature spirits languish. They come to Earth to steal children and
  Exemplars: The Leprechaun, Rumplestiltskin, Pan

• Demons
  My God!
  Not yet, human. Soon... very soon I will be.
  Made entirely of evil magic, the demons are a strange force that seeks to hurt humans and steal souls.
  Exemplars: Wishmaster, Pyramidhead, Azazel

• Ghosts
  Boo!
  When Luminaries die and they are super pissed about something, they will occasionally linger on after death and become a ghost. Ghosts don't interact properly with physical objects and other people, and in any case are fed only by strong human emotions. So they gradually lose themselves and go batshit crazy, becoming a force that is more and more destructive.
  Exemplars: Slimer, Patrick Swayze

• Giant Animals
  Rar!
  The wilderness of the World of Darkness is a dangerous place with a spectacularly large array of things that can kill you. Man eating beasts of tremendous size roam the woods, the lakes, the swamps, and probably the mountains. Being eaten by sharks, crocodiles, tigers, or whatever is a severe threat. And yes, these super charged zoo rejects have magic powers.
  Exemplars: Jaws, Joe Young, Boa, Python

• Evil Plants
  Hiss!
  The evil plants grow out of the ground in weird pods that make the soundtrack want to bust out theremin tracks. They grow out of humans an often have mind control and other weird powers. These things might actually be from Space. But since they don't have a civilization or space ships (that we know of), it's not super important.
  Exemplars: Body Snatchers, The Thing, Swamp Thing

-Username17

[CatharzGodfoot]

So Buffy and the bunnyphobe are both transhumans? Or are former demons considered Leviathans? Or does that sort of thing just not happen?

[Prak]

Werewolf

W:tA might be termed "Captain Planet by way of werewolves." They're agents of the Wyld (a force of creation and chaos) against the Weaver (a force of order, associated with humans and technology) and especially the Wyrm (a force of destruction and evil); the resemblance to the Hindu trinity should be obvious, but there the similarities between the game cosmology and any real-world mythology end. More or less, the entire game is built around an anachronistic conception of nature, which the werewolves anthropomorphize as "Gaia," that the werewolves defend against humans and various forms of supernatural evil. The werewolves believe in an animistic cosmology, so according to them, *everything*, including planets, material objects, concepts, and even technologies, has a spirit and consciousness. My view of W:tA is almost an inverse of my view of V:tM: the core idea, of primitives fighting a secret war in the modern age, is interesting, but most everything else about the setting is stupid and it has lots of special badness aside.

Actually Werewolves are creatures of Gaia, who is an actual entity like the gods in D&D are actual entities, and very powerful thuerges(the shaman caste) can seriously summon her up and invite her out for coffee at Seattles Best, or whatever. The Wyld, Wyrm and Weaver are Gaia's children and aspects of her, which, idealy, are in balance. However, as the Triat are sentient entities that have free will, they can totally decide to screw that up. The Wyld is creation, pure and simple, think of her as a more purposed version of Delirium from Sandman. The Weaver is stasis, she is what allows the world to exist in any vaguely constant form, basically it's what keeps everything in the world from being those aliens in HitchHiker's Guide to the Galaxy that evolve everytime they need to do something, and evolving uselessly long arms rather than walking over and picking something up. The Wyrm is destruction, death and entropy, and, in the limited view of self centered idiots, like, unfortunately, most of the heros in the game, is thus evil. The thing is, all three of these entities must exist in balance with one another for the world to work right. The problem is that the Wyrm's function(basically making room for new life) is anathema to the Weaver's and the Weaver's function is anathema to the Wyld. Really, the Wyld doesn't care, nor is her function anathema to the Wyrm, really, it's kinda anathema to the Weaver. So two people in this three people relationship have jobs that are opposed to the Weaver, while her job's opposed to only one. This pisses the Weaver off, so she decides that she will ensnare the Wyrm to stop him from doing his job. Which she does. Ensnare him, I mean. It's not like the rules of mortality no longer work, now things are just perverted, and the Wyrm's thrashings in the Weaver's web cause things like Fomori to happen. This is where the werewolves come in. They are often summed up as antibodies for Gaia because they're supposed to be troubleshooters. They really aren't. They just see the Wyrm destroying things, like the environment, and get pissed and go off to destroy the wyrmspawn. The game is supposed to be a save the world from the Apocalypse in the face of insurmountable odds game. Not exactly an Environment vrs. Humanity game, but that's how it often plays out, which it shouldn't because most tribes don't reject humanity, and one actually embraces it. The thing to remember is that Garou(the werewolves) are "spirit and flesh", "man and wolf." They are supposed to combine the best parts of tribal, nature based creatures, and modern man, and the best parts of the spirit world and the flesh world. The Red Talens are the only tribe that reject humanity, and are often tainted by the Wyld. They have no human-born members(homids), and only grudgingly accept garou-born(metises) members because their numbers, like the american wolf population, are dwindling. They also are mistrustful of human technology, but when every member of your pack is packing high powered firearms that fire shells the size of your dick, you either be damned good with your spear or you begin to assimilate. The Glass-walkers are a tribe which embraces technology and always has, they are always the first tribe to take up new technology, and they are often tainted by the Weaver. They are almost entirely human-born, because homids are born into human society and grow up around technology, and are more inclined to trust it, while wolf-born(lupus) garou have to learn about it. Meanwhile the Children of Gaia tribe is running around saying "Can't we all just get along?" and plaing the hippy game. The rest are all pretty much the same as far as outlook on human society.
Notably, there are also the Black Spiral Dancers, a tribe that has fallen to the wyrm, wyrm tainted to the last member, and wholely insane and evil. They are also, often, Metis, because they don't care about the standard litany which says you're not supposed to breed with another werewolf* In fact, Charles Manson was stated to be a Spiral kin-folk(non-werewolf family members of werewolves**). These are the real cardboard villians for this gameline, not pentex, really, though pentex exists for the purpose also. But that's not the point, the point is that there are three tribes that represent a member of the triat each, and it's preferred breed. Ironically the Wyrm's favoured breed s the best at combatting the wyrm because they get Sense Wyrm as a starting gift choice for their breed gift.

• Pentex is a corporation in the setting that's *actually evil*, no joke. It goes out of its way to destroy the environment with oil spills, evil spirit technologies, and so forth. Such direct insertion of stupid politics (large corporations = evil, environment = good) as objective evil in a game bothers me to say the least.

I've never seen Pentex as a direct insertion of politics. But I also like Pentex in the game. The thing is that it's not some random human corporation that just happens to be Evil, it's a corporation that is OWNED BY THE WYRM. So really it's basically doing the job of it's owner, destroying things, but in the twisted methodology of his new mentality. The evil employees are merely the logical group of people attracted to such a company.

• The Fera, because it's not enough to have werewolves, the setting also needs weredinosaurs, werespiders, and weresharks. (I'm not kidding.) As if that wasn't enough, the game posits that e.g. the weredinosaurs and the weresharks had something resembling cultures that existed in geologic time, tens or hundreds of millions of years ago.

Actually, the idea is that there used to be a were' for each kind of creature, and that most have died out, mostly through the actions of the garou and their arrogance. The prehistoric cultures thing is nothing new, look at the cthulhu mythos.

• Even though the setting supposedly precedes the evolution of humans by millions of years and sets up humanity as a possible antagonist, it's *still* designed so that humans are the measure of all things. Even vaguely plausible weres like were-elephant/dolphins don't exist, all the Fera are human-animal combinations. Spirits are anthropomorphic for the most part. Werewolf society tends to resemble human society. And so forth. The setting contradicts itself with a human-centered, Earth-centered perspective while telling a story that's theoretically not about that.

Humans are technically creations of and children of gaia as well, though they have, since their evolutionary break with the apes(or maybe as their evolutionary break with the apes) been carefully tended by the Weaver. This, however, goes against the idea that the Garou once owned humans as cattle, unless one posits a de-evolution between those stories, or possible that the weaver took humans under her spindly arms and allowed them to break free of the garou control. Also, animal-animal weres would be covered as gorgons or kami, creatures possessed by Wyld or Gaian spirits, respectively.

• While none of the games play smoothly with each other, because W:tA's cosmology is so expansive and, I suspect, favoritism on the part of the authors, when cosmologies clash the werewolves tend to win because it's easier and more copacetic to modern American liberal politics. I will discuss this in more detail in the Mt:A and crossover sections.

I've never seen any canon crossovers, so I have no knowledge of this, however it could also be that the W:tA cosmology is the only cosmology that allows the other cosmologies to work together and make a vague amount of sense, other than maybe the Demon: the Fallen cosmology.

I could go on, but as I'm not interested in further exploring a game I don't like and don't know much about, I will stop there. W:tF keeps the animistic elements and proposes that the major battle the werewolves fight is against the spirit world, with other werewolves on the same side. This is rather disconnected from the mythological roots of werewolves, but at least removes a lot of the stupid; it is not, however, the game I would write, and I think it is rather more bland than the first game.

I, too, am rather dissatisfied with W:tF, though I do like the system for making your own changers.


*Yes, your only socially acceptable options for mating as a werewolf is to get freaky in the woods, or go bar crawling. Either way you're dragging someone into the society that probably isn't anywhere near ready for it. You actually have a third option, which is mating with kinfolk, ideally, someone elses. If you find a kinfolk who know's their shit, then you two can have a happy little family that prepares it's children for the first change, or lack there of**, in such a way as to have vaguely well-adjusted next-gen wolfies.
**because only about 1/4 of the children of a garou will be garou, but the "garou gene" can also surface way down the line of kin-folk, resulting in huge WTF!? moments if no one's been keeping up on their great grandpappy

• The Police are no help at all. Heavily infiltrated by cultists and secret societies, the police in the World of Darkness are astoundingly ineffective. Sure they will occasionally bring down a killer, but the vast majority of crimes go unsolved. Many crimes don't even get investigated, especially if something supernatural is afoot.

actually things are quite often investigated, especially supernatural things, but only by supernatural pcs that just happen to be cops.

• Telecommunications are Shoddy Sat Phones aren't available in the World of Darkness. Cellphone coverage cuts out constantly at inopportune moments. Regular telecommunication wires go down frequently and are out for days at a time. The inability to get a call out of a building or town isn't unusual, that kind of thing happens a lot in the World of Darkness.
• People Don't Travel Much It's not weird for people to not know what goes on in the next town over in the World of Darkness. Things are just more dangerous, and people keep to themselves more.

seriously? I don't know about you, but in the five year spanning WoD game I played in, it might as well have been a travel show every month, we trekked incredible distances, and I still remember one character killing a gun store owner in Australia with abajillion proof whiskey and stealing merch, and then later dying in antarctica in a blaze of glory a ways down the line.
I also remember people using telecommunications to great advantage, especially glass walkers, like when one of my characters used a traffic system hack and constant cell coverage to help his pack run down the truck carrying another kidnapped packmate, or when another character used his satellite(yes, we had some real high-roller characters) to disseminate a pirate rebellion signal when the country had, subsequent to WW3, been taken over by canada and france.

[Username17]

Based on her actual abilities I think I would classify Anya as a witch, like Willow.

-Username17

[Bigode]

I've never seen Pentex as a direct insertion of politics. But I also like Pentex in the game. The thing is that it's not some random human corporation that just happens to be Evil, it's a corporation that is OWNED BY THE WYRM. So really it's basically doing the job of it's owner, destroying things, but in the twisted methodology of his new mentality. The evil employees are merely the logical group of people attracted to such a company.

Would you say this absolutely couldn't be a metaphor?

[Prak]

I wouldn't say that it absolutely isn't, but I've never seen it, and I don't know how many people have. I have to call into question whether it's intentional, as well as how successful a metaphor it is. Especially given that Shadow Lords and Glass Walkers are rather known for being corporate CEOs and power behind such and so forth, so I don't think the metaphor is intended. just imo.

[Username17]

I don't know anyone who doesn't think that the Werewolf plotline of "the wyld" vs. the "the villains of Captain Planet" was a very thinly veiled political metaphor.

-Username17

[Bigode]

You know now (unless you meant specifically in person). I didn't either.

[Username17]

The conceits of things being isolated is an important horror necessity. The less technology and social norms have shrunk the world, the more space is left over for Leviathan to frolic in.

-Username17

[Voss]

Uh... Its Pentex... Its the evil international corporation thats poisoning the earth. Thats literally the only point of it. Its a stand-in for every WrongBadEvil corporation ever. It was 3/4s of the point of the original game- the Super!Nature Furries defeat the Evil Corporate Culture that is Destroying Us All.

Hell, I think they used the capital letters.

[Prak]

Apparently I played in a very unusual game, and frank, regarding tech, now I understand what you're saying.

[Bigode]

Iaimeki, would you be interested in a summary similar to yours of another game (namely, W:tO)? As for other stuff, my rusty reminding of oWoD isn't helping right now; maybe I get better after taking a look at Wraith.

[Calibron]

I like the new Werewolf storyline. As I see it it's actually about simple survival in almost universally hostile world. Nothing more noble or deep than trying to balance your human/wolf aspects and your physical/spirit self. Beyond that the game is nothing more than you make it, and I like that kind of freedom whether I run or play.

I also think they kept most of the more interesting aspects of the old cosmology while discarding most of the more, how should i say this, confusing or outright stupid ones.

[Harlune]

Around the time WW revised M:tA, they realized that the Umbra was so huge it could overwhelm the physical Earth, so they created an artificial and stupid hack to destroy all the older mages, or at least exile them far from the main setting, and make it difficult to travel from Earth to the Umbra and back, called the Avatar Storm. The Avatar Storm is arbitrary and unmotivated on several levels,

Yeah... that was about the point I started to lose interest in Mage:tA.

Besides that poorly designed umbra travel change that was like using a nuke to clear out a molehill, it seemed like the Revised Edition was more interested in nerfing the game's fluff than fixing up the actual rules.

"Sorry, but we've decided that a magic philosophical battle over the transcendence of humanity was too bright and hopeful, so from now on you going to be Grimmy Dark VonAngststein, a poor street magician just trying to survive in a bleak world where everything wants to kill, rape, and/or eat you. Also all that stuff about 'true magick' and mages altering reality in a way no one else can? Yeah, that's gone too, your cool powers are no longer actually 'better' than everyone else’s... but you’re still far weaker physically and still have to deal with paradox, just because."

"In addition, We're scrapping Wraith, it's selling poorly since we keep trying to market as a serious, bleak, grim and dark ghost rpg instead of what it really is: Beetlejuice: The Frighteners and finally we just noticed that the little Mummy game we made a while back has an interesting and unique flavor to it, so we're scrapping it completely so we can make yet another game where you play as a low-level just-transformed peon supernatural who's just a pawn in a vast game run by thousand year old demigods."

“And please buy our new book: Hunter: the Reckoning, we swear it’s not going to just be one big advertisement for the new fantasy line we’re working on”

[Iaimeki]

I've added two new sections to the Mechanics post on the first page, covering the death/dying rules and some issues with skill-based systems.

Frank, as always, you have a lot of great ideas. However, you're taking things in a different direction than I envisioned, to be honest. Fundamentally, both V:tR and your concept of the WoD are about horror, which I will admit is not my favorite genre. I tend to prefer, and when making my revision intend to create, modern fantasy with horror elements: there are so many examples in books, like Stephen King's Dark Tower series, that it's almost easier to cite fantasy books without horror influences than those with. That said, I'm envisioning the core themes of my game to be closer to the original M:tA themes rather than horror themes: enlightenment, transcendence, human potential (or the lack thereof), mystery, and belief, along with the idea that the supernatural world is a dark and dangerous place.

Of course, there's enough overlap so I don't see that even if we take things in different directions, we can't share some ideas. (Or, at least, I hope you don't mind my borrowing the things that work best in my setting!) I have some specific things I'd like to draw out. The overpopulation of supernaturals in the WoD is a real problem. I should go back and write up something about population numbers in the oWoD, but if you believe WW's numbers at all there are either too many supernaturals or too few. Of course, it's possible to view some of them as, "ST options," and in the nWoD that's explicit: they assume rather fewer instances of things, e.g. five vampire clans with all the bloodlines as optional. However, I don't quite agree that having many supernaturals is intrinsically bad for the game I want to make. While it's important to define all the known players and not to have so many factions no one can keep track of what's going on, I think there's also value in knowing that below the highest echelons of knowledge, there's most likely something out there that some faction doesn't know about. Thus, I don't think I'll go quite as far as Frank in cutting down the groups, particularly the internal divisions.

At the moment, I envision four major playable groups of supernaturals, two of whom have quite close relationships to humans, and each of which have some internal factions; two playable groups of supernaturals, in the sense that each group has common characteristics, but no common culture or defining attributes; and around four unplayable groups. This is a rough draft, but:

Mages

Mages are ordinary people who can change reality with their minds. Most of them don't realize that's what they're doing and think it's the amulets with angels' names carved on them or the special mixtures of herbs or the meditative states they achieve, but it's not and in the hands of a normal person those implements are useless. A mage's power over reality, as well as how much they understand about what they're actually doing, comes from mystical enlightenment that's quite difficult to convey even to other mages, much less mundane humans; and even though Buddhists and Gnostics have been telling everyone that reality is a lie for thousands of years, it's still not a common viewpoint among mages or mundanes. Mages can do anything if they have the requisite enlightenment, and are responsible for a lot of the weirder things that populate the world. Of course, they're restricted by their ability to overcome the collected beliefs of ordinary humans, and because they can do anything, thus are the things that happen when something goes wrong altogether unpredictable.

Vampires

As far as undead go, vampires have it good: immortality, lots of cool powers, and even the ability to pretend to be human as long as no one's checking pulses, with only a few minor disadvantages like an inability to tan and inconvenient dietary restrictions. The more melancholic feel really bad about being blood-sucking fiends, though that doesn't stop them from sucking blood, and the rest focus on the advantages of their condition and not getting bored, a challenging task for a centuries-old walking corpse. Of course, one thing that makes vampires quite special compared to other undead is that only vampires make other vampires, so theoretically all vampires are united in one big pseudofamily tree; some spend time researching vampire history to stave off ennui, but there's nothing resembling a consensus on where vampires came from or how long they've been around, much less any other aspects of the genealogy.

Others

The Others have a lot of different names, though Europeans tend to think of them as "fae." They have in common three key traits: they're roughly humanoid, at least in some forms, though not even remotely human; they're all hunter-gatherer cultures of ancient provenance; and they're all very, very bitter about the way humanity has taken over the planet. Mind you, they don't respect nature or anything like that, they just think that all the lands that humans have ought to belong to them. They have a variety of powers, inherited within individual tribes, but for the most part they all resemble nature spirits or shapeshifters; luckily for mundanes, they're weakened, more vulnerable to their traditional banes or with their more flagrant abilities limited, in places with lots of humans like cities, thus constraining them to remote locations. While they cooperate with each other, they don't even talk to other supernaturals, and in general the only possible interactions with them consist of killing them, or dying trying.

Anachronists

Anachronists are humans with powers, but unlike magic, these powers are quite limited in nature if not magnitude, and don't have any of the intellectual character of mage abilities; signature and bizarre weaknesses accompany most of them. Some anachronists think of themselves as throwbacks to a previous golden age or primitive human ancestors, while others believe they're the next step in human evolution and still others think they're just freaks. Some abilities display strong heritability and others none at all. In the past, lucky Anachronists achieved reputations as demigods or great heroes like Hercules and unlucky ones got stoned from their villages; in the present, they become badass secret agents like James Bond, if they're lucky, or sideshow attractions on Jerry Springer if they're not.

Prometheans

Prometheans are artificial creations, made, usually, by mages. While they're just as alive as anyone else, most of them have no means of reproducing, and of course have no culture to inherit. They take lonely, if unique, paths through the world.

Transhumans

Like Anachronists, they have powers; unlike Anachronists, they usually know where their powers come from. Like the Prometheans, the usual agents responsible for Transhumans are mages. Transhumans usually come about one of two ways: someone tries to gain superhuman powers with magic, but discovers the powers have a downside; or someone receives a supernatural curse with an unexpected upside. Either way, they find the effects profoundly alienating, as they have little in common with either their former fellow humans or even other supernaturals, leaving them in much the same situation as the Prometheans.

As for the unplayables, there may be zombies and other sorts of unsociable undead, giant animals, evil plants, and ghosts, all similar to Frank's suggestions.

As I'm not going for horror per se, I don't see the need for telecommunications to be unreliable, and making them so would undercut the technomages to some extent. On the other hand, the police in this version of the WoD are quite ineffective at investigating crimes that have anything to do with the supernatural, again because they've been infiltrated by secret societies, but also because they're way out of their depth and most of them even recognize that. I also think that while travel may not be difficult, human populations shouldn't be as large or as distributed, so there are more places for creatures on the edge of civilization to survive.

Likewise, while assuming that some people are special works well for horror, can work for fantasy, and is even a default assumption of most of the oWoD settings (you don't become a mage or a werewolf, you are one) I don't think it's one that fits with some of the ideas I'd like to establish: ordinary people create an important part of the setting in M:tA, and while individually they might be weaker, collectively they have more power than all the other factions.

This is all a rough draft, and I welcome comments on any aspects of these ideas.

Bigode, if you want to write up something for W:tO, I wouldn't mind? I know some of the basic ideas, but I don't know the ins or outs of the setting even as well as W:tA, much less V:tM or M:tA.

Harlune: I don't know anything really about the earlier edition of Mummy. I don't think mummies are that interesting, but I'm curious what you thought it had that was different?

[Username17]

Honestly, I hate Mage. I hate it with a blinding passion and don't want anything to come from it at all. I find the setting annoying and the game unplayable. The World of Darkness is and always will be about Vampire for me. Because that's the part of the system that ends up with black clad goth women on my lap. The horror elements are firmly ingrained into modern fantasy. Even adventure movies of modern fantasy (like Underworld[/i] and Buffy the Vampire Slayer) have strong horror elements.

Basically the long and the short of it is that the game system is really supposed to model Interview with a Vampire and The Crow. And if you want to do things which are less depressing than that you should cut the crap and admit that you are playing Superheroes and just play Champions. There's no real advantage to setting a game about having super powers and fighting villains who also have super powers in New York in the "world of darkness" - at that point it's just a senseless restriction to try to have the various costumed heroes and villains being Universal Horror Monsters. They are so out of genre that putting any character into the situation described is as much work as any other "origin story."

In any case, here's what I've been thinking:

Organization of the Damned

“There's evil stuff going on in here. And I want in.”
Coteries
“Go Team Venture!”
I honestly don't care if you call your team a “team” or a “coterie” or a “pack” or “coven” or “herd” or “Fred.” It's not important. What is important is that the player characters are a Scooby gang that works together and shares screen time. They'll be in the same areas a lot, working towards the same goals, and so on and so forth. These bands of supernaturals are pretty common, because of the whole thing where there are six billion humans and only about sixty thousand supernaturals. These guys are possibly your only friends, the only people you have shared experience potential with, and so on and so forth.

Loyalty to these small groups is assumed to be greater than loyalty to any world spanning clubs. The Camarilla does not expect that you will betray your friends for them, because it seriously isn't like you can go out and get new friends.

Covenants
“New plan: we don't cut each other's head off in an attempt to gain asymmetric power.”

Whether they like it or not, supernatural characters in the World of Darkness are subject to the rules and judgments of one or more of the Covenants. Acting as defacto nation states, covenants provide a Hobbesian mandate of behavior that is difficult to ignore. Characters may indeed be a member of one of them, which provides benefits comparable to those of being the citizen of an archaic empire. However, breaking the edicts of any covenant is punishable by that covenant if it catches you (subject to possible negotiations if you are a well placed member of another).

The covenants are as a whole not called that. In fact, they aren't called anything as a whole in-game, because they don't belong to any over organizations. Each is kind of like a mafia, with some sort of shady leadership hierarchy and elaborate titles to convey subtle differences in duties and status. In reality all the covenants exist to fulfill essentially the same task, so while they spend a fair amount of time insulting one another, it is profoundly unusual for them to actually come to blows. Each covenant provides the following:

• Preserves the Masquerade – each group calls it something different, but everyone is keenly aware that sufficient numbers of peasants with torches have slain supernatural creatures in the past and will do so again if the lid isn't kept on pretty tight.
• Facilitates Social Interaction – for all the nosferatu babble about how they prefer the life of the hermit, they really don't. Normal humans are incapable of really understanding what it is like to be a supernatural creature and really the only peers a Leviathan has is other Leviathans, or at least other supernatural creatures.
• Acts as a framework to work out differences – supernatural creatures exist outside and in many ways above normal human societies, and live their life very much like a Hobbesian battle of All against All. And while it is true that their power and mystery does make them well qualified to do that, they have no unique advantages over other supernatural creatures. And thus it is in true Hobbes fashion the creatures have put together over organizations to keep each other in check. Arguing things out with an Archon is slow, but many supernatural creatures have a lot of time.

Camarilla
“Lack of loyalty is one of the major causes of failure in every walk of life.”

The Camarilla is, according to its own history, an ancient truce declared between various supernatural creatures long ago in Babylon. It was apparently put together in the face of some grave threat which is no longer talked about. Members of the Camarilla are called “Kindred,” and the regional leadership is divided into “cities,” “domains,” and “kingdoms” of which terms are all used interchangeably. Regional leadership is held by a Primogen Council, which powerful kindred are apointed to for life, and this council is led by a Prince or Aval (both are unisex terms which predate their use in royalty). How much influence the prince actually has varies from region to region. A primogen or prince who travels to another domain is automatically a member of the primogen council wherever they happen to be.

Laws of the Camarilla are hopelessly baroque, and most of the old ones are shockingly specific and draconian and inscribed into clay tablets. They have by and large been repealed and replaced with ones which are easier for everyone to get along with. Still, there are some hangers on, as it is widely reported that it is still technically a death sentence for the perpetrator and their three closest friends to steal an aurochs from a member of the kindred.

Probably Established: 8th century BCE, Persia



Carthians
“Tradition is but the illusion of permanence, freedom is but the illusion of chaos. Change is not just inevitable, it is good.”

Supernatural societies have with necessity been extremely conservative over the generations. And such it was that when the age of enlightenment hit the human world, the supernatural world found itself falling behind. The Carthian movement was founded as a reform movement for the supernatural world to take advantage of the new ideas and opportunities found in human science. Arranged in a “cell structure”, the Carthian Movement nominally holds that all of their membership is equal, save for the Revolutionary Committee members themselves who are substantially more equal.

The Carthians hold that advancements in human strength and society are, or at least can be, for the good of the supernaturals. Rather than viewing the world as shrinking, leaving them with less and less space in which to hide, the Carthians view the world as growing with more and more humans and cities with which to obscure themselves. The Carthian masquerade is one based largely upon anonymity rather than invisibility.

The Carthian Movement appeals to the young (which in supernatural terms means the last 400 years or so), and campaigns for the removal of traditional privileges for the ancient and established monsters of the world. The Carthians favor change and a new way of doing things modeled upon human reforms, but that's about as far as they go in agreeing with one another. It is easy to get the distributed Carthian apparatus to help tear down something or turn upon a criminal, but relatively difficult to pass effective resolutions. The ideological divides amongst the Revolutionary Committee are fierce and hard drawn, so the group as a whole acts rarely and with much debate on matters of anything but immediate survival.

Probably Established: 18th century CE, France.



The Sabbat
“A bishop of the Sabbat can believe anything, but most of us don't.”

The effect of the Roman Catholic Church on human history is hard to over estimate. As Rome itself was coming crashing down, Europe was largely cut off from the Middle East, Africa, and points further in Asia. Europe became isolated, and the influence of the Camarilla all but vanished. It was at this time that the supernatural creatures of the European region created a new organization modeled on the fledgling Roman Catholic Church.

The Sabbat has extremely confused theology and you are specifically not allowed to be excommunicated for heresy. After all, the Sabbat's primary role is to facilitate social interaction and conflict resolution between members rather than to advance any specific theological agenda. The Sabbat is led by an Anti-Pope who wears a mask and whose identity is nominally secret. The Anti-Pope leads the council of Cardinals, from whom he or she is nominated, and does so for an unspecified amount of time before being replaced – occasionally by themselves in a different mask. Below the cardinals are bishops, below bishops are priests, and everyone else is referred to as “Flock.” Other organizations refer to Sabbat members derisively as “Sheep.”

The Sabbat maintains a number of parallel hierarchies in addition to the primary one. Rather than being a bishop or priest (which is regional), one could be Apostolic Exarch (which governs a region that is not under Sabbat Control), a Military Ordinal (which handles defense of the order regardless of location), or a Personal Prelate (which is organizational and has personnel but no fixed territory). All of these titles carry approximately the same weight as Bishop.

Probably Established: 5th century CE, Rome.



World Crime League
“Don't tell me that you're innocent. Because it insults my intelligence and it makes me very angry.”

With the encroachment of the Mongols into South and Southeast Asia, the kingdoms remaining outside the Khan's grasp were cut off from trade with the outside world. The supernatural creatures of the region were forced to make their own way, without influence from the old power structures. A pirate navy formed in Southeast Asia, which preyed upon naval traffic and helped fight the Mongol Empire. Keeping themselves on a military, outlaw footing kept the Mongols out of their lands and waters for as long as the Ming dynasty stood, but by the time they had reestablished connections with other Covenants, the Viet Shadow Kingdom had power of its own and its membership had no real desire to rejoin the Camarilla. They instead took their criminal activities world wide and became the League of Pirates, and eventually the World Crime League.

Because of their piratical roots, the World Crime League has a vaguely naval structure at the top. There is a council of Captains who discuss world issues and update the guidelines. Locally, WCL members infiltrate what ever criminal groups happen to be there and modify themselves appropriately. WCL members have risen to high ranks in Triads, Vory, Mafia, and Ghost Cartels.

The WCL values money as well as mystical power, and one can literally purchase their way up in the ranks of the Covenant. The group holds that breaking the laws of man and corrupting the values of human society is a goal in and of itself, and undermining the rule of law and morality is seen as a powerful and respectable achievement by the League.

Probably Established: 13th century CE, Dai Viet.

-Username17

[Username17]

Antagonistic Organizations

“Actually, those guys are just bastards. We fight them.”


What makes an antagonist organization different from a “normal” organization in the World of Darkness is not that they are “the bad guys” – after all it is abundantly clear that a substantial number of people in all the supernatural societies are bad guys. These organizations are filled with blood drinking monsters. No, the salient thing about the Antagonists in this setting is that they are not willing to live and let live with the members of other covenants and cults. So while it is entirely possible to have a story in which one character is from the Camarilla and another is from the Carthians, it is basically impossible to have a cogent story in which one character is in the Marduk Society and the other characters are not.

The assumption then is that the antagonist organizations will be NPC only. The player characters will be members of the standard covenants or independents and such as the warriors of the Shattered Empire show up at all it will be as enemies. It is entirely possible to play a campaign in which every character is a member of the Marduk society, and that's fine. If you weren't OK with playing a game that skated closely to the edge of evil you wouldn't be playing a game about vampires and werewolves.

The Marduk Society
“We've slain the monsters of the world until they skulk in darkness like rats. Did you really think the darkness would protect you?”

In ages past the mighty sky wizard Marduk fought with the great Tiamat and slew her, saving humanity from her dark tyranny. As the savior of humanity, Marduk became a wise and just king who ruled over Sumeria thousands of years ago. He passed his magic down to disciples, and in classic fashion they perverted everything Marduk stood for and are now a terrifying edifice.

The Marduk Society retains the ancient magics of Marduk himself and continue to hunt supernaturals, nominally to save humanity from the oppression of supernatural influences. However, the leadership of the Marduk Society actually are supernatural creatures. After ruthlessly hunting down the spawn of Tiamat for generations they found that they were able to grant themselves immortality by eating the flesh of Leviathans, a practice which in reality transforms their elite membership into Leviathans. The sorceries left behind by Marduk are in truth no different from the sorceries of any Witch, and thus it is that the core membership of the Marduk Society are no different from other supernaturals save for the hat they wear and their intense desire to not get along.

Marduk's magic draws heavily upon human fear and suffering to use as power. However, while the historical Marduk apparently used this as justification to wander the lands righting wrongs and saving the endangered, the modern incarnation conspires to make mortal governments oppressive and ruin the lives of children. Ideally they claim that once their war is won they will make all human society utopic, but there is no particular reason to believe this is true.

The King of Three Shadows
“How nice of you to join us. You can share the same fate they are going to suffer.”

Long ago a powerful mortal king married a queen of the fairies. Abandoning his kingdom of men to wither and die, he took a new name and attained everlasting life with a grim bargain with Demons. The King of Three Shadows has become as the fairy are, and he lives forever without changing. He is now their dark king, and commands the mirror goblins – an army of fairies and demons which do his dark bidding. He is supported in his endeavors by three powerful Fairies – The Three Shadows of the King.

Fairies and Demons have a difficult time getting to the world of man at all, and must pass through a reflective surface to do so. More powerful fairies and demons need more specific mirrors through which to pass, and thus usually require that these doorways be custom built to draw them through. While a minor mirror goblin might be able to come through a pool of water or a pain of glass, powerful demons need a mirrored surface of exacting specifications – for example one might require a mirror at least 2 meters across made of bronze and polished with olive oil, lemon juice, and human blood.

The King of Three Shadows himself requires a titanic and exacting mirror to again trod upon the Earth, and it is thus that he is forced to send minions through the portals to acquire the strange materials and specific events they need to allow him to march across the threshold with his demonic army to conquer the human world.

The Shattered Empire
“They have learned nothing, and they have forgotten nothing.”

According to the Shattered Empire there was once a mighty nation which ruled over all of humanity with magician kings. Where this kingdom actually was, when it existed, who the people were who ran it, and what the cultural traits of it were like are all lost to time. The Shattered Empire calls itself a dozen names: Ur, Atlantis, and Golgatha to name just a few. And while their stories of their glorious days of world ownership are somewhat conflictory, and quite possibly exaggerations or just plain lies, they are nonetheless willing to kill people over their world conquest plans. And that makes them dangerous.

The very top of the Empire is called either the Rain King, the Masked Prophet, or the Once and Future Emperor. Whether these are three different people having a power struggle or one man with a variety of titles is not clear. Cells of the Shattered Empire hide in cave systems, deep in jungles, and on top of forbidding mountains. They collect powerful magics and threaten the world with them.



-Username17

[Harlune]

Basically the long and the short of it is that the game system is really supposed to model Interview with a Vampire and The Crow. And if you want to do things which are less depressing than that you should cut the crap and admit that you are playing Superheroes and just play Champions. There's no real advantage to setting a game about having super powers and fighting villains who also have super powers in New York in the "world of darkness" - at that point it's just a senseless restriction to try to have the various costumed heroes and villains being Universal Horror Monsters. They are so out of genre that putting any character into the situation described is as much work as any other "origin story."

If you don't mind me asking, what were your feelings towards WW's attempt at a superhero rpg, Aberrant?

[Username17]

If you don't mind me asking, what were your feelings towards WW's attempt at a superhero rpg, Aberrant?

Thumbs down. Electric Blasts were completely game mechanically different from fire blasts for one thing. For another thing despite having a quite complicated set of powers and power interactions, it was basically locked into an X-Men rip off subculture thing that I didn't much care for.

It used the Stats/Super Stats paradigm which is just all kinds of bad. I genuinely don't understand why you would do that. A character with Super Strength 2 and Strength 3 is stronger than someone with Super Strength 1 and Strength 5. It's really unfortunate.

-Username17

[Orion]

I honestly don't think you want anachronists and vampires in the same game at all, at least not as PCs.

The World fo Darkness is about more than grimdark. You can have a completely shitty D&D setting withmonsters and murderers around every corner. But in D&D, power makes your life better. Anachronists are playing D&D.

Vampires are horror rather than fantasy because being a vampire makes you powerful but makes your life suck. THis is imcompatible with other power systems. If you allow vampires side by side with anachronists, then either:

Vampires are equally powerful with anachronists, but their lives suck. Thus, any power-gamer players go anachronist to avoid the drawbacks. This is maybe workable in that the suck is something people may willingly accept, because they want to play a game about suffering. But if so, why does pain-free power need to be on the table at all?

Or

Vampires are more powerful than anachronists. Players who just want the power play them, then whine about the inconvenience of what's supposed to eb tragedy.

[Voss]

Except WoD vampire lives don't really suck. The have power and immortality and their big 'problem' is they can't see the sun for very long without getting slightly burnt. They don't even have to kill people, so they really isn't even tragedy or horror unless you go out of your way to ham it up.

You can whine about the minor inconveniences, or you can get on with being a slightly schizo demi-god in a land of meat-puppets. But the wah-wah angst fest is only there if people stick it in.