aWoD: Continued

[TarkisFlux]

But I'm not feeling you on the Androids and Golems. The primary source material on Androids is Metropolis, and the image of a blighted city covered in soot, smashed glass, and little scraps of paper blowing in a dry hot wind is just about perfect. On the Golem end, they can also be Pinocchio so having them have access to a nightmare dreamscape is a very good fit on that end as well.

The line seems to be whether they were created to be a person or to perform a task, with the former being androids and the latter being golems. I think Boolean's characterizations of androids and golems is easier to work with actually, though it does saddle golems with a problem.

For androids, Metropolis mostly works for that characterization but Blade Runner works better. The time of the setting is a bit off, but they don't know that they're androids or only come to that realization during the film. Implanted memories and dreams (of bullshit unicorns no less) suggest the wilds more than the reflection to me. The only things that suggest the reflection in either movie is the physical background setting, which doesn't necessarily motivate the characters at all and seems to be at odds with them on occasion. Lowe's golem, on the other hand, was created to defend and grew increasingly violent and darker as he went about that task, which suggests the reflection more than the wilds to me.

Even if you're not sold on that, using that dividing line makes it easier to determine which camp a character belongs to. It also sets Pinocchio firmly into the android camp, since he was created to be a person, not to endlessly perform a task or for defense. If you're not using that line, I actually have no idea what you're using to divide the two camps.

The problem it gives to golems is that they were built to perform a task and would know it, and as such they just don't get the "I'm not a Human?" moment that the other playables generally have. Lowe's golem could instead have a "I'm not a mindless automaton" moment instead where it acquired or recognized its sentience, but I don't know if that covers the same ground that you seem to want on the first page.

[Orion]

I figured it was the same distinction as between Fallen and Aether Children, namely whether their life-giving event was powered by Science! or magick (not to be confused with magic)

[Prak]

Are Frankensteins and golems really going to be acceptable PC characters? It seems to me they'd be like playing a 3E fighter in a social campaign.

That's a good question. I think the answer is yes. People have managed to play Nosferatu for years, and they labor under basically the same limitation: they don't look especially human.

Not to mention the Gangrel, ie, furry vamps.

[TavishArtair]

This is one of those minor things that people like to argue about rather than accomplish real work, but I have to disagree. The Dark Reflection is a very quiet, empty, and repetitive sort of burning wasteland. Pandemonium seems more apt to describe the chaos of the dreamlands. Tartarus, Makai, and so forth are more evocative of specific locations than Limbo, which is a state of being. Remember that Limbo is the portion of hell nearest to the living.

No, it's not quiet, it's not empty, and it's not repetitive, because if we want all of those traits, we can go to the Gloom. If you insist on those, then I will just tell you you have succeeded in killing any kind of distinction between it and the Gloom in themes and mood. Seriously. Our Hell is Hiroshima, it is Nagasaki, it is Dresden and it is Vietnam. Figuratively if not literally. I'm not seeing the ashes of war and terror being quiet.

"Evil... is an abstract. It's a human construct. But true to his irresponsible nature, Man won't own up to being its engineer, so he blames his dark deeds on my ilk. But it's not enough to shadow his own existence, no, he turned Hell into a suffering pit! And why? Because it is beyond your abilities to simply make personal recompense for the sins you commit. No, you choose rather to create a psychodrama, and dwell in a foundless belief that God could never forgive your grievious offenses. So you bring your guilt, and your inner decay, with you to Hell! Where the horrid imaginations of so many gluttons for punishment gave birth to the sickness that has infected the Abyss since the first one of your kind arrived there, begging to be punished! And in doing so they have transformed the cold and solitude to pain and misery! I've spent eons, privy to the flames, inhaling the decay, hearing the wail of the damned. I know what effect such horrors have on the delicate psyche of an ANGELIC BEING! ... I'd rather not exist than go back to that."
-Azrael, Dogma

To step it up a bit:

The Gloom is depressing.
The Dark Reflection is desensitizing.
The Dreamscape is insane.

[Grek]

In order to separate Limbo, Gloom and Celephais thematically, we need to decide how these places work from a thematic standpoint and what exactly is in there.

Limbo:
-Full of burnt ruins, ashes, broken glass and human suffering.
-No plants, few open flames, just starved people and animals.
-Can be entered through mirrors, magic or through fire.
-Strongly related to fire and burning things.
-Unreasonably hot compared to Earth.
-Three major groups of people live here:

• - The Damned. Humans who are trapped in Limbo. They are often violent, territorial, mutated, feverish and cannibalistic men who would like to make you into suasages so they have something to eat while they struggle to escape this living hell. No matter who they used to be, they are all dangerous and hardened individuals who represent the very worst in humanity. They're also sometimes infected with Hell-Fever, which is exactly as bad as it sounds like it would be.
  - Mirror goblins. Natives to the plane, able to enter Earth through mirrors or magic. Also includes major faerie folks like the King with Three Shadows and his homies. These guys are the only limboites who are not explicity hostile to you. These are the guys you are trying to summon most of the time.
  - Demons. The other natives here. They're made out of fire and they want to kill you and burn you into a small pile of greasy ashes. They do it because they enjoy killing and the smell of burnt human flesh. These are not nice people and if you summon them, you cannot control them. They just burn whatever your magic doesn't prevent them from burning with magic hellfire for as long as they are able before you banish them back to Limbo.

Gloom
-Cold and Dark. There is no sun, fires that would last for ours on Earth burn out in minutes here and there's an unnatural element to the shadows and the chilly wind.
-Hungry. Nothing you eat here and nothing from here fills you up. You just get hungrier and hungrier.
- I have no idea how you get in here.
-Quiet. You can't hear anything further than about 10 feet away except for the wind, which is always whispering terrifying sounds.
-Parasitic. The things here don't hate you, they just want to suck out your bodily fluids and drink them. Again, three groups:

• - Ghosts. Insubstancial dead people who want to drain the warmth from your bones and the joy and happiness from your quasi-living person. They're afraid of fire, so if you can make a quick burst of flame, you can scare them off for a bit.
  - Zombies. Dead corpses that want to eat your meat and brains. If you're killed by one, you turn into one. Also includes skeletons and any other sort of undead thing that isn't a ghost or a PC class.
  - Wildlife. Gloom has giant animals and giant plants, just like Celephais. They're gloomish, though, so they want to eat you. There are also swarms of blood-sucking and flesh-eating insects that want the same thing.

Celephais
-Entered through dreaming or meditation. Dreamy or nightmarish depending on what part you're in.
-Proabily other ways to get in as well.
-Highly morphic. Stuff changes if you think about it too much and is sort of fuzzy.
-Natural. There are no man made buildings here, except for dream cities.
-Dream cities exist. When certain people dream, they change what the Dreamlands look like for "miles" around. So palaces and houses can appear out of nothing and it doesn't seem strange.
- Three main groups:

• -Wildlife. It's full of all sorts of giant animals and strange plants. There's also rocks that move around and other strange things.
  -Fey. They live here too. Sort of like the ones from Limbo, except less like cenobites and more like the elves from Discword.
  -Dreamers. People having dreams is a big deal here, because you will see strange things happening that aren't under your control. Like giant houses appearing where you are trying to stand or giant sissors chasing people around. It's all rather surreal.

[MartinHarper]

I thought mirrors were a gateway to dreamscapes more than hellworlds.

Do we really need to have three subtypes of each type of monster? So far, only the vampire subtypes seem both distinctive and coherent to me. In particular, Prometheans and Transhumans are unique snowflakes, so I don't see the point in subtypes, though they might work as subtypes.

[Username17]

I thought mirrors were a gateway to dreamscapes more than hellworlds.

Do we really need to have three subtypes of each type of monster? So far, only the vampire subtypes seem both distinctive and coherent to me. In particular, Prometheans and Transhumans are unique snowflakes, so I don't see the point in subtypes, though they might work as subtypes.

Mirrors can be justified as entering all three worlds. However, when Limbo's long form is The Dark Reflection and their symbol is an obsidian mirror spewing smoke - they definitely get to come in through mirrors. It might be that mirrors can go anywhere, which would explain people having them around. Certainly the ghosts in Beetlejuice (and The Eye, for that matter) and the dream killers in Nightmare on Elmstreet can come in through mirrors.

As for Transhumans, The Returned are on incredibly firm ground. They are a tribe that is well established in source material and extremely distinct from other groups. They aren't really unique snowflakes, every time someone reincarnates they get pretty predictable levels of sorcery and all-around bad assery. And frankly, when you crack open She or Ayesha, The Fallen look pretty distinct and pretty different from The Returned. And of course, Dr. Jekyll and The Invisible Man are clearly the same and clearly different from both The Returned and The Fallen.

I mean, you could make The Fallen and the Children of Aether the same thing and just say that some of them have Science! backgrounds and others have Magic backgrounds. But that seems to be completely missing the point of World of Darkness altogether. It isn't that you can't make a point based expression of Hollywood or Gothic Horror - it's that World of Darkness is not that game. It's a game where things are ideally hammered down into distinct enough packets of conceptual space that each supernatural character is something rather than just being Steve.

-Username17

[MartinHarper]

In that case, the Returned should all be reincarnations from a particular theology/cosmology, and all other reincarnation beliefs should be delusional. That way they can have similarities in terms of looks and powers and weaknesses, rather than slaying a reborn bodhisattva one weak and a reincarnated Egyptian goddess the next week, and the Word made Flesh the week after, and not realising that these are supposedly the same monster subtype.

Also, I don't know whether the Invisible Man is the result of science or magic, or being a wind golem, or being the (re)incarnation of Gah, deity of subtelty. How can you tell? He's invisible. He's a man. His name is Steve. If there's more than one of him, it's purely a coincidence.

[Username17]

In that case, the Returned should all be reincarnations from a particular theology/cosmology, and all other reincarnation beliefs should be delusional. That way they can have similarities in terms of looks and powers and weaknesses, rather than slaying a reborn bodhisattva one weak and a reincarnated Egyptian goddess the next week, and the Word made Flesh the week after, and not realising that these are supposedly the same monster subtype.

Completely disagree. Past Lives are past lives. We don't ask every Troglodyte to be a black guy. We don't ask every Daeva to be Mexican. We don't even require every member of the Giovanni cult to be Italian. The conceptual space hacked out for each White Wolf category is real and consistent even though the actual members of them come from every walk of life and every ethnic group.

So while the mechanics of the reincarnation are actually just going to universally be the same pop-Hinduism that permeates every movie in this genre (for a modern take, watch The Mummy Returns), actual Returned people are going to be born into every culture and they are going to remember lives from all over history and the world.

Also, I don't know whether the Invisible Man is the result of science or magic, or being a wind golem, or being the (re)incarnation of Gah, deity of subtelty. How can you tell? He's invisible. He's a man. His name is Steve. If there's more than one of him, it's purely a coincidence.

The Invisible Man is Griffin. He's a medical student who gave himself a concoction that made him both more and less than human. Same as Dr. Jekyll. And while you can't tell simply by the fact that you aren't seeing him right now (he could just as easily be an invisible Nosferatu that you aren't seeing when you lack any other information), the character itself is not mistakable for a Nosferatu.

Every category is distinguishable by a couple of core pieces of information:

• The origin story.
• The weaknesses.
• Their power schedule.
• Their power source and how you detect them.
• A few key abilities that everyone in that type has.

So yeah, you don't have to be a wererat to turn into a rat. Dracula can do that too. Because he has magic that he knows on top of his core disciplines. But a wererat infects new wererats by flipping out and biting the fuck out of them. A wererat is vulnerable to silver. A wererat can be detected by the fact that they befoul clean water that is brought near them. A wererat gets power points when the sun goes down and when the moon comes up. And you know a wererat can turn into a rat and order animals around because all of them can.

Think of the scenes in Buffy where they are doing research. They can do a differential diagnosis on what kind of monster they are dealing with based on what it did and how it did it. That is why you have monster types. So the players can feel like they belong to something. And so that the players can feel like the puzzle monsters they are fighting actually have a solvable solution.

So here's another speed bump: how about making one of the witches beetle sacks (like the mummy) instead of snakes, and then making the third leviathan a straight-up snake person?

Certainly a possibility. I mean let's face it: if we were just writing Leviathan: the Tempest we wouldn't be short on Leviathan concept groups. We'd have Deep Ones, Troglodytes, Naga, Kheperu, Mi Go, Anakim, Anansi, and Athaqui. Or maybe a different set of groups. Maybe more. The challenge is not writing enough groups. The challenge is limiting ourselves to the confines of the conceptual space we have allocated ourselves.

And the sad fact is that snake people (the Naga), snake vampires (the Setites), and snake magicians (the Khaibit) are all awesome. But they all tread on each others' toes somewhat. Same with bug people really. I'd love to have a mantis lady, a spider woman, a bee queen, an ant mistress, a locust carrier, a butterfly lady, and a beetle person. I could write an entire setting just about people who had some kind of deep personal connection with bugs - and it could be pretty cool. But yeah, things have to hit the cutting room floor to make space.

So here's the deal: you can either have snake magicians (like Thulsa Doom, Jafar, or your favorite Houngan) or you can have insect magicians (like Imhotep or th Worm that Walks). Same deal for Snake vs. Insect Leviathan. Even though a swarm-host schtick is very different from a solitary insect schtick, I think there's really only space for one or the other.

"Great holes are digged where earth's pores ought to suffice, and things have learnt to walk that ought to crawl."

"A weapon you don't have in your hand will not kill a snake."

-Username17

[TavishArtair]

I think snake mages and insect-people have more resonance. I mean "Disney makes a movie that includes one" is pretty much the litmus test for that kind of thing, and Jafar is there. You also have all sorts of mystical snake-based imagery. Less so for bug-wizards. As for insect-people, you've got the Fly, Kafka's Metamorphosis, so on. I'm seeing less snake-people things. So yeah.

[Amra]

"Im-ho-tep! Im-ho-tep!"

Epic Bug-Filled Death Magician is Epic

[CatharzGodfoot]

The Fly is arguably transhuman.

[TarkisFlux]

I figured it was the same distinction as between Fallen and Aether Children, namely whether their life-giving event was powered by Science! or magick (not to be confused with magic)

Well, if that's the line, then the current world ties work out and I've got to retract my defense of your suggestion Boolean. Science! helped create and expand the dark reflection, what with its interesting new ways to destroy things, and seems more tied to it than the other ones. You can just take that dystopian, twisted progress to be the theme of Science! and then anything arising from it would be more inclined to the reflection than the others. It's harder to do the same thing with magick, but the only place left to put it is the wilds so I'm not going to worry about it. Since I agree that Pinocchio should be tied to the wilds anyway, whatever his tag, it works out. That setup also ties in nicely to the other groups and provides a bit more thematic stability to the reflection and wilds, which may or may not be a good thing as they get more developed.

[Orion]

Tarkis--

I hear you on tying science to the dark reflection and magick to the dreamlands, if we want that consistency. This does mean that children of aether have to trade places with the Fallen. the hell-based Science! transhumans work out just fine -- focus on the horrific cost of the procedures that transform them, costs not just in their personal humnity but in psychic, economic, and environmental devastation to the community.

Now, distinguished magickal dream-based transhumans from dream witches gets tricky. Which is probably because conceptually Witches don't have their own niche, they're just a special case of transhumans.

Actually, this is kind of a big problem. Both Witches and Transhumans were once ordinary humans who then did something that gave them inhuman powers, and both recharge their powers by rituals in the last proposal I saw. What really is the difference? (Of course, if you really stretch the point you can lump vampires in as well)

---

But bracketing that problem, I accept your proposal but feel it demands a change of nomenclature.

See, Rabbi Loew's Golem goes in the Dark Reflection. That's NOT optional. He was created by legitimate abrahamic magick involving conjured demons. He was created among other things for the defense of the community before running amok as demonic powers are wont to do and inflicting grievous harm on the community. Rabbi Loew's story IS the story of Hiroshima.

So if Pinocchio belongs with dreamlands and Loew's golem belongs with hell, either one of them has to be cut form the game or "golem" is dead as a category. We could potentially go with "robot" (which means forced worker) from hell, since hell is already associated with exploitation and degradation and "android" (pseudo-person) form dreamland, since the dream creatures are least connected to humanity but yet more like people with dreams and desires. As long as people are okay with clay Robots, that has some promise.
---

PS

I think my gloss on Rabbi Loew's tale illustrates where abrahamic folklore fits into aWoD, in whatever amount we're comfortable using it-- it's tied to the dark reflection. And it goes there not just because demons and fire are associated with christianity, but because the abrahamic God is a god who cares about purity, nationality, and ideology -- the same things which created Hell in the first place. He pursues a literal scorched-earth policy towards Sodom and Gomorrah, and in the second coming is supposed to scour the earth and set the continents flying around because he's displeased. It's the exact same apocalyptic madness that drives nuclear apocalypses. The story of Hiroshima is the story of Sodom.

Unfortunately we still have the problem that actual abrahamic practitioners are not going to see it that way, so I do NOT suggest putting the actual abrahamic God in. But any time we draw on semitic folklore, as with loew's golem, I think we should tie it to the dark reflection and to ruthles, apocalyptic ideology.

[Judging__Eagle]

So here's another speed bump: how about making one of the witches beetle sacks (like the mummy) instead of snakes, and then making the third leviathan a straight-up snake person?

Then we'd have 2/3 Scaly Leviathans, and that's bad, and makes most Leviathans look like Scalies.

Potentially 3/3 depending on what version of Troglodyte is being used, the D&D Trog is a lizard cave-man that smells like a ferret with disgusting musk glands.

Leviathans as Water-based Scalies; Human-controlling Brain Worms (a la Parasyte) and.... something, something somthings.

What do we want Troglodytes to be?

Neanderthalic, Simian Ape Men from the jungles of deepest Africa? (a la "Congo" or any Tarzan book where he fights in an ancient gold temple against apes or ape men, or men that look like apes, or men that bred with apes, or apes that worship men ((seriously, Tarzan and apes as allies and enemies is almost a trope; heck, he has regular fights with apes of his native tribe to the death at some points, so even his allies can be his enemies)).

Or are they out and out lizard toads that smell like puke, blood and hideous musk?

or are they tiney hobbit men from Polynesia that can hide from anyone in their caves? (seriously, they've found bodies of hyper-pygmies out there; it was in a National Geographic about a few years ago)

http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news ... ensis.html


Edit: Trogs could also be people that began eating human flesh.

Wendigos, Men from the Mountains (that wear polar bear hides), Ghouls (Lovecraftian), Cannibals, the guy who eats human livers in the X-Files, the movie Ravenous; the super fast person-eating boy in "Sin City" etc.

they were human.... but then.... they got an inescapable craving.

Now, they may look human, but inside, they're absolutely not.

They may not care at all for eating meat, and maybe are otherwise strict vegetatians, or maybe even vegans, but human flesh makes them abosuletly slavering.

they also live forever, are stronger, faster yadda yadda yadda, from eating the bodies and 'souls' of other humans.

Their weaknesses? The meat of other creatures returns them to their human abilities, as it makes them temporarily "human" again. So most of them tend to either starve, or cope by being very strict vegans.

Unless someone else already wrote a powers and mythos up for Trogs?

Catharz, the "bugs take over babies bodies" idea works great. I was leery of the "implant" route since it means that the host body gets killed, but the host body being transformed and sharing space with an insectile mind symbiote doesn't sound so bad.... sound.

That would be an interesting weakness for a Parasyte Leviathan; the insect in their skull extends feelers and stuff through the brain and out of the head, giving them things like "eyes in the back of their head".

The downside is that extreme sensations put them in a catatonc state, loud blasts, bright lights, lurid colours, too much UV light (even clouds don't stop UV light), extreme smells all put a damper on the Leviathan's speed of action and thought.

[Orion]

The more I think about it, more I say fuck transhumans as a category.

According to the bare definition of the word, Vampires are transhuman. Werewolves are transhuman, and witches are transhuman.

Now, Transhuman power replenishment was supposed to be on the "ritual" schedule, meaning they do some special thing to recharge, like take their drugs, or plug into a socket, or bathe in the energies of the Hellmouth. Well guess what, not only is that the same deal you gave witches, it's ALSO the same deal Vampires get. The "feeding" power schedule is just a ritual power schedule which entails more risk but costs less time.

So Transhumans really don't have anything special going for them. I say, make Children of Aether into a Mage category. We didn't have dreamland mages yet anyway. The distinction between Fallen, who have magickal hell powers from radiation, and the Baali, who have magickal hell powers through burning up their souls is... nonexistant. Seriously, some people set fire to their own souls, some get them burned by an outside force, whatever.

That just leaves the Returned. They can either fuck off as a concept, or gets worked into the Vodoun deal somehow. Or hell, shove them off into Leviathans. Maybe Bug People or Mole people start off looking AND FEELING like humans before their powers manifest at the same moment they tap into the racial consciousness and inherit the memories of their ancestors.

EDIT: Or to Prometheans of one category or another who are made to house the memories of a dead human.

[TarkisFlux]

See, Rabbi Loew's Golem goes in the Dark Reflection. That's NOT optional. He was created by legitimate abrahamic magick involving conjured demons. He was created among other things for the defense of the community before running amok as demonic powers are wont to do and inflicting grievous harm on the community. Rabbi Loew's story IS the story of Hiroshima.

So if Pinocchio belongs with dreamlands and Loew's golem belongs with hell, either one of them has to be cut form the game or "golem" is dead as a category. We could potentially go with "robot" (which means forced worker) from hell, since hell is already associated with exploitation and degradation and "android" (pseudo-person) form dreamland, since the dream creatures are least connected to humanity but yet more like people with dreams and desires. As long as people are okay with clay Robots, that has some promise.

Boolean, I earlier agreed with all that stuff... you can't accept the rejection of that stuff and then also accept it.... that's neither helpful nor productive.

I earlier said that 1) pinocchio was really supposed to be a person, which was (I thought) the defining characteristic of androids as written, so the whole group belongs with the dreamland because it's thematically closer to people (in spite of the background trappings of the source films) and 2) that golems who were created to do something and then perverted that task and ran amok were closer to the spirit of the dark reflection. I even still agree with it, but it was dependent on the world connection being based on the motivation behind their creation and not on the specific creation mechanic, which you suggested was wrong. If you're going to assign titles based on creation mechanic and not motivation then you're going to get some things that stick out like Lowe's golem (though we can sorta sidestep it with the alternate version of the story, where he fell in love and was scorned prompting a fall into madness, which is a better fit with the wilds) and you just have to pay that price for the extra conceptual simplicity.

Personally I like the motivation assignment more, and I don't think that assigning a standard creation method to the different worlds is significantly helpful. The worlds are already limited by motivation and emotion, limiting them to specific creation mechanics doesn't add much to the game for all of the conceptual reduction that comes with it. But I'm also not strongly invested in the thread, and if the major voices vote it down so be it.

[Orion]

Tarkis -- Sorry, I see that I explained poorly. I was trying to present alternative choices, but if I didn't make that clear I can see how it would come of as contradictory. To clarify:

Schema A:

PROMETHEAN

Reflection: Robots: beings created by Science!
Wild: Golems: beings created by magick
Gloom: Frankensteins: beings created from the remnants of life

TRANSHUMANS

Reflection: Aether Children
Wild: Fallen

---

Schema B

Reflection: Robots: beings created to be tools, which have escaped control
Wild: Androids: beings created to be people, who are flawed

Transhumans

don't exist, or as Frank originally proposed

---

Either schema is acceptable to me. My point is merely that if we go with schema A, rabbi Loew's golem doesn't exist in the setting. Which is fine, we're not running short of source material by any means.

[Manxome]

I would also like to say that I think the "Dark Reflection" zone should be called Pandemonium, as opposed to Limbo, because Limbo evokes a zone of emptiness, whereas while the Dark Reflection is barren ash it is full of barenness and the wasteland and the suffering and so on. Whereas Pandemonium implies a sort of disjointed chaos. Hell is right out either way. There's also Tartarus, Makai, and so on.

I would like to remind you that the entire reason Frank started calling it Limbo is because I pointed out that "The Dark Reflection" was too long and he decided to give each place a short name and a long name. So regardless of what's in the world or whether "Limbo" is a good name, "Pandemonium" cannot be a name replacement for "Limbo," just on the ground that it's five syllables long.

[MartinHarper]

I didn't fully read the other thread before it died, so I may have missed this. How come every category of monster needs three subtypes, which in turn must be mapped to an alternate world? Is it just symmetry? It seems to be causing awkward choices.

Also, what makes The Dark Reflection particularly reflective? As I read the initial post, Gloom, Maya, and Limbo each have a tier that has elements both of the real world and their alternate world, like a distorted reflection, and each have a tier that is alien and has little in common with the real world.

[Crissa]

What about the lost or touched people ala Neverwhere or Beauty and the Beast under new york or...

It seems workable to me on how to get alot of otherwise mundane people into the underworld/monster side.

-Crissa

[Orion]

My understanding:

The Wilds are filled with stuff that is foreign -- it's home to the fae and to the Lovecraft gods, it's the source of wrongnesses that do not belong

The Gloom is filled with emptiness -- all its "creatures" are really just extrusions of darkness designed to consume

Reflection is filed with stuff that is familiar, which was created by humans or which shaped human society. Hence why it's the reflection, it's the most human of the other worlds.

[Username17]

I didn't fully read the other thread before it died, so I may have missed this. How come every category of monster needs three subtypes, which in turn must be mapped to an alternate world? Is it just symmetry? It seems to be causing awkward choices.

Procedurally generated conceptual space is larger than unique conceptual space. By keeping things symmetrical, we can actually have more total stuff than if we let everything drift around being unique. It is substantially more difficult to remember the contents of an unordered list of 13 than it is to remember the contents of a 6x3 matrix. That's a direct result of how human memory works.

As to making awkward choices, yes it is. The awkward choices are basically in all cases the same: there's more stuff that wants a place at the table than there is room at the table. By a lot. The Vampire Book is 960 pages long. There are more than forty distinct groups of magicians just in the World of Darkness (once you count nWoD and oWoD together). Now, lots of that stuff can be thrown away without shedding a tear. No one wants to play a vampire melon that sits there and drinks the blood and health of those who try to eat it. No one wants to be a member of a mage group called The Adamantine Arrow - because that's a shitty name. But the fact is that there are more than a dozen distinctly different versions of any gothic monster out there in modern folklore that you might want to use. Many more than a dozen.

And we're cutting it down to three. And that causes strife. Imhotep is cool. Thulsa Doom is cool. Not having both is a painful cut to make actually.

-Username17

[Crissa]

I see no reason the lists could not be limited to two right now, if the third had not been chosen. Empty sets are better than larger.

-Crissa

[TavishArtair]

I would like to remind you that the entire reason Frank started calling it Limbo is because I pointed out that "The Dark Reflection" was too long and he decided to give each place a short name and a long name. So regardless of what's in the world or whether "Limbo" is a good name, "Pandemonium" cannot be a name replacement for "Limbo," just on the ground that it's five syllables long.

I'll grant you that although I will note Pandemonium is a single word and has a bit more of a cadence to its syllables relative to The Dark Reflection. Yes this is a nitpicky detail only a poet cares about but it has to do with how these things sound. Also, you can call things from it "pandemonic." Regardless, I will relent. I just think Limbo has the wrong implications. When I think of places with the name Limbo I think far more of the imagery we have for the Gloom.

Losing Imhotep is indeed mournful, but when people tell me about snake-people, I usually think of D&D lizardmen stuff. Snake people just don't have resonance for me as a horrific aspect. They're almost too Conan. And turning into a bug is so much more freaky for the Leviathans, so I don't think we should pass it up.