The project is also being periodically updated into a pdf, which is being hosted on Google Code, Here.
As yet, there is no art, but if someone has some idea of how to get some, that would be great.
Some people have made character sheets for other players to use. There is a version Here and another version Here.
So I think we had some sort of rift open up and swallow the last thread, so let's take off where we left off. First off, what aWoD is:
AWoD: Alternate World of Darkness
A Complete Overhaul of World of Darkness material using many SR4 rules.
The 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; but 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 at that point, 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.
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” Alice, Shelly, or Sheila if they get transformed into the living dead. There's literally nothing you can do for the rest of the people except shoot them in the face.
The Four Worlds
“Things are crawling in all over the place these days.”
A very common trope in horror is the inclusion of additional worlds that are full of terror and danger. This is very useful, since of course having an extra world around allows you to fit things into the narrative that would be otherwise very difficult to fit into the Earth. Demon armies, forgotten cities, and strange and deadly plants can be piled to the sky and beyond without otherwise upsetting the world provided that they were never in the world in the first place. Furthermore, the idea that monsters can come in sideways is by itself a wonderfully useful notion for the horror genre, because it severely undermines the concept of safety in a fortress or locked room.
That being said, it is also true that there are a lot of alternate worlds to be had in various stories. Too many alternate worlds to be anything vaguely approaching something workable. And so it is that as a compromise we have cut things down to three alternate realities:
- Limbo: The Dark Reflection The best rendition of the Dark Reflection is probably in Silent Hill. It's a world very much like our own but scoured with demonic powers. Ash falls from the sky like rain and everything looks abandoned or scorched. Demons prowl the Dark Reflection.
- Mictlan: The Gloom The best rendition of the Gloom is of course in Nightwatch, which even calls the place that. It's a cold and oppressive world where darkness presses insistently upon the light and heat of travelers. Powers of death leak in from every crevice and extinguish fires and the lives of small animals. Blood hungering insects and ghosts scour the Gloom.
- Maya: The Dreamlands Think of a combination of the deadly dreamworlds of Nightmare on Elm Street and the fantastic realms of Narnia. This is where dreams and fairies go, but since this is the World of Darkness the dreams are often as not inspired by Freddy and the fairies are more likely to be Warwick Davis than Tumnus.
Basic Attributes: Physical, Mental, and Social
- Physical Attributes:
- Strength: Strength determines how physically strong and tough you are.
- Agility: Agility is a combination of precision and speed.
Mental Attributes - Intuition: Intuition is a combination of empathic and physical perception.
- Logic: Logic is a combination of scientific know-how and logical intelligence.
Social Attributes - Charisma: Charisma is one's ability to convince and ingratiate.
- Willpower: Willpower is a combination of determination and domination.
- Why no Body or Reaction? Those familiar with the SR4 system will be quick to note that the attributes of Body and Reaction have been omitted. That is not an accident. Those attributes are used by almost no skills and primarily exist to add extra granularity to combat. Combat is hopefully not the point of most World of Darkness games, and in any case the granularity of “normal humans” in combat isn't even especially desirable. Folding Body into Strength and Reaction into Agility makes for a simpler system while losing relatively little. After all, granularity is being added back into the system with the physical disciplines that are in the hands of many player characters.
Edge in AWoD is structurally similar to Edge in SR4. You can spend it to reroll dice that fail or to purchase a number of dice equal to your Edge attribute to improve any test. Edge refreshes between sessions.
Power in AWoD is a parallel attribute similar to Edge. Rather than being spent on any test, Power is spent to activate specific supernatural abilities that a character might have. Power by itself doesn't do anything and does not refresh. Characters will have things to do with their Power and ways to refresh it if they are a supernatural creature.
- For example: Genevra is a vampire with the discipline of Celerity. As a vampire, she can spend Power points to increase her Strength for a scene. In addition, she can spend a Power point to take extra actions during a scene with her Celerity discipline. Because she is a vampire, she can refresh her power points by drinking blood from other people through their necks.
Potency When a character's powers increase they may get a special attribute called Potency. This works similarly to SR4 Initiation Grades or nWoD Blood Potency, save that Grade is added to the limits of every attribute, basic and special (including Power).
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 equally 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?
So where we left off was discussing what exactly the playable types were going to be. Most of them were fairly set:
- 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 the magic of Death, which is evil. There is Devil magic, which is evil. And finally there is the twisted sorceries of the Fairies, 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”), and we hearken to that slightly by leaving all traditions of magic as variations of the basic three. While a character may well be a voodoo death magician or an Aztec or Egyptian death magician, the magical set is all the same. Death magic is death magic whether you call upon bones with Chinese runes or African chants.
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, Chandu
- 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 scientific 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 the subsequent 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 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 Tiamat's spawn in their ancestry or are cursed with the taint during their lives are both hunted and feared. They are destructive, and eating their flesh can make you live forever. Of course, eating their flesh makes you like them, and puts you into the same danger. But hey, immortality.
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, Moth Man
Are our bug people skin bags full of bugs like the Worm that Walks or are they giant bugs that take the forms of humans like Metamorphosis and Meet the Applegates? Or humans with bug traits like Genestealers and Spiderman? And what part of the world are we hearkening our bug folk too? No easy answers there.
-Username17