OSSR: World of Darkness: Mirrors

[Anon_issue]

Mirrors was the “options” book for the New World of Darkness with a focus on changing up the rules and setting. It came out in 2010 and was the last nwod book published before Richard Thomas took over and did the “Chronicles of Darkness” rebranding, as well as the shit-show of V5 years later.

The book promises:

• An unholy host of alternate systems for you to option into your characters and games, including (but not limited to!) Morality, Virtue/Vice, Merits, character creation.

• Brand new systems for you to incorporate: social and mental combat, miniatures combat, relationships and Rapport, Conviction, Insanity, and don't forget to check out the Extraordinary Mortals template (with built-in Skill Tricks).

• Three new "what-if setting hacks" for the World of Darkness. The World of Darkness Revealed, wherein the monsters stand exposed for all humanity to see; The World of Darkness Destroyed, which gives you the option of playing out the global apocalypse; and The World of Dark Fantasy, a fantastical spin on the system and setting.

• A handful of essays from the writers and developer of the book, bringing you their own personal "house rules" and hacks for you to consider.

I also love how “house rules” is in scare quotes, like it is this strange weird concept the readers wouldn’t be familiar with.

For what it’s worth, I think that the New World of Darkness was a decent idea, at least in some ways. There was a consensus that The World of Darkness needed some kind of reboot, and I completely agreed with the way they went about doing it: modularity. With the exception of the blue core book, every single nwod book was optional, and you could combine the official lines with anything you’d made up yourself in any combination. No more arguments about who really killed Rasputin or if Christianity is the One True Religion or what you are supposed to roll for unarmed combat: just unified mechanics, and the books are suggestions (with some of the “suggestions” being a hell of a lot more developed than others) but the Storyteller has final say on what is or isn’t canon. Done.

Dumping all canon and metaplot was certain to offend a lot of people (because there is no a longer a single definite world of darkness setting anymore), but I think it was the right choice. Tabletop games benefit from creativity and a certain DIY aesthetic that is hard to find anywhere else. Giving more freedom to their customers and keeping their options open just seemed like the obvious smart thing to do from White Wolf’s perspective. At the very least, it would buy them some more time if they couldn’t find a new generation of fans.


And, let’s face it, “The real world but with various horror/fantasy/sci-fi elements” is an incredibly broad and versatile genre. On paper, having a single, unified nwod system to run anything even vaguely like that sounds amazing. You could port Call of Cthulhu or Kult or Unknown Armies. You could do a tabletop version of True Blood or X-Files or John Wick. You could have endless freedom to customize the tone and setting and the assumed power-levels. If you wanted to do a Vampire: The Masquerade game set in the actual historical 1990’s (for extra nostalgia points) you could do that. If you wanted to a crossover between Changeling: The Lost and Netflix’s Money Heist you could do that, and if you wanted to do a straight adaptation of Anne Rice’s Vampire Chronicles you could do that as well. The possibilities were endless.

There were just three problems with the way they did things, in ascending order of importance:

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1. A lot of the basic rules were just stupid. Did you know that in the New World of Darkness a normal human can survive 16 days without water? The rules for combat and moral degeneration/sanity were by far the most hated, and for good reason.

2. Word bloat! Too many books that were pointlessly long. Too many cookie-cutter game lines. Too many freelance writers trying to meet the quota by talking in circles and rendering the finished product practically unreadable. Conciseness was seen as bad for some reason, and it drove the company into the fucking ground by publishing too many books no one cared enough to buy.

3. They never tell you that the setting is meant to be modular. By 2004 the World of Darkness had a huge fan base that was invested in more than a decade of continuity. People loved Vampire: The Masquerade. They still do. And nwod just refused to acknowledge the existence of anything owod related for years. Masquerade was the most successful thing White Wolf ever made, and the designers were trying to get away from it as quickly as possible. They plopped down the nwod lines as generically and uniformly as they could, and they expected everyone to just accept them without question. It was an incredibly authoritarian and tone-deaf approach to game design. All the passion and imagination died, and the advantages of any reboot were squandered. Just saying clearly from the beginning “hey, you can still keep running your owod stuff or just change things if you want to” could have made all the difference.

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So really, Mirrors should have been the first book that came out, not the last. This thing and the Masquerade conversion guide should have been fully released in 2004, not six years later when the money and fans and goodwill were all long gone. But no, bad management pushes yet another once-profitable company into ruin.



For this book, they actually went over word count, and isn’t that the most damning thing of all? White Wolf asks the writers how they would like to change things and there’s a deafening chorus of suggestions. The incredibly prolific Chuck Wendig worked on this thing as well and he talked about it extensively on his on his old blog (https://web.archive.org/web/20141027083 ... mortem-qa/). They had so much content that two sections were cut and repackaged as stand-alone pdfs (“Shards”), which were released in 2011 to get what little extra money they could:

To head off one question I suspect I’ll get: yes, the mighty Stephen Herron did write a Sci-Fi “Shard” for the book. And yes, I went ahead and cut it out of the book. I had two reasons for doing so. The first and biggest reason is that the book ran way over word count. Bursting at the seams like a microwaved baby hot dog. For example, the space allotted to the Shards section was 60,000 words, and with the Sci-Fi section in, that section’s final draft tallied to a big ol’ 70k. And that was just that one goddamn section. All the areas of the book ran over count. Normally, hey, writers should write to spec — but what, I’m going to complain because everyone delivered a little extra awesome-sauce? (For future record, though: writers, write to spec, or I’ll punch you in your respective gender-specific genital regions. You don’t write to spec and you make Santa cry, you make angels kick babies, and you make me cut word count from other people’s sections. Don’t make me get nut-punchy. Or labia-slappy.)

The second reason was that the Sci-Fi section was a great sampling of lots of awesome ideas, but it ended up a little too scattershot — science fiction being as broad a subject as it is, well, it’s hard to say, “Here’s the entire genre of sci-fi crammed into a World of Darkness can in 15,000 words.” Pretty tough job. And Stephen did it with aplomb — I blame myself for not seeing that problem ahead of time and planning for it in the outline. Stephen’s section was solid, and in a perfect world I could’ve thrown him another 10,000 words (or even 100,000 words) and said, “Hey, keep going with this, because I want to see more, more, more.”
(So, to reiterate — he did his job. I didn’t do mine so well.)

Unfortunately, yeah. Way over word count. Which means I either needed to pick through the little-bitty sections and start clipping (which then creates the worry of, “Can this system stand reliably on three legs instead of four?), or I needed to find a big honking section that could undergo the brutal swipe of the developer’s machete. Hence how the sci-fi section, while good, ended up on the cutting room floor.

I’m going to go over the main book first, then the two shard pdfs, and then the final chapter of mirrors to wrap things up. I’m also going to try and take more of a high-level approach and get to the good/interesting ideas (and there actually are some!) fairly quickly. Partially this is due to personal laziness, but also because nwod books have bad wordcount to useful information ratios (even this one, though it is not even close to being the worst offender) and if you are familiar with game design concepts or just other tabletop RPGs a lot of their suggestions will seem familiar.

[pragma]

Fun! I only brushed up against WoD tangentially, but I love the post-mortems on it. It failed in fascinating ways.

[Anon_issue]

We begin with the usual White Wolf intro fiction. The story is about some woman who is being chased by unknown figures. She ducks into an abandoned amusement park hall of mirrors and hallucinates (dreams? Imagines? It’s incredibly vague) that she is every kind of nwod splat (changeling, mage, promethean, hunter, etc.). Then she exits and gives herself up to the people who were chasing her at the start. The end.

Glad to see the intro fiction is as useless as usual: Taking up space and making it harder to find the table of contents.

The real start of the book is the intro, which explains that this is the official options and house rules book and goes over all the chapters. The first two chapters are changes to character creation/The Storytelling System and they take up the first 135 pages, the third chapter (“Shards”, 70 pages) is about changing up the setting. Finally, there is an appendix filled with house rules and personal essays by the writers.

[Thaluikhain]

So, it's not particularly about magic mirrors or a mirror realm or whatever, despite the name and the picture? I hope that was made clear to people before they bought it.

[Anon_issue]

Chapter One: Breaking the Mirror


Chapter One starts off well with suggested changes to chargen and the character sheet.

They offer a way to get rid of that stupid primary/secondary/tertiary system for character creation and just let you assign the points wherever you want. They also offer a super slimmed-down option where instead of having nine attributes and 24 skills you just get six numbers overall (mental/physical/social and then attribute/skill). I think that might be too simple, even for a one-shot game, but it is a something. They also give a table listing skill substitutions you might want to consider if you change up the setting from modern day. Most of these are sensible enough, but the one that really sticks out to me is substituting “Enigmas” for “Computer” in fantasy/historical settings. How the fuck “Enigmas” is distinct from “Investigation” (which is already used for solving mysteries and enigmas) is anyone’s guess.

Then there is a rule for buying skill specializations multiple times. So instead of having just a +1 bonus you can get up to +3 and have the specialists actually feel decently specialized. This is the sort of obvious, no-brainer good idea that really should have been in the core book. We also get semi-passable rules for human aging: every five years past 30, you can choose to lower the limit by one for any of your physical attributes in exchange for XP that can only be spent on social stuff. I would have personally preferred a more simulationist system (“roll to determine the exact year your hairline starts receding”), but these could still be useful for long-running campaigns.

Then we get to merits. There’s three broad ideas all competing for space:

• Let players make up their own merits! Disallow anything that seems overpowered! … That’s it.

• A more narrative system where a merit can be evoked once per game session to get access to a standardized set of effects (i.e. Skill Bonus, Narrative Advantage, Trait Bonus, etc.). Has the obvious disadvantage that a character who is wealthy/sexy only gets to use those advantages once per session for no in-universe reason.

• A system to put all merits into three broad categories (Background traits, Expanded traits, and Specialized traits) depending on how the merit works mechanically… and then let players make up their own merits! Disallow anything that seems overpowered!

… I was not very impressed with this section.



Then we get a bunch of ways to change up morality and the virtue/vice system. To make a long story short, their suggestions are:

1. Just don’t include morality at all. Do everything through roleplaying. You get willpower back either through doing impressive things or just the passage of time. There is an extremely helpful table that tells you what to role in place of morality for every single nwod roll that references the morality stat (Fantastic!).

2. Reintroduce the old nature/demeanor system either alongside or in place of virtue/vice.

3. Instead of virtue/vice pick three arbitrary goals. You get willpower back whenever you advance towards your goal or definitively resolve it.

4. Keep virtue and vice, but instead of having to pick from two arbitrary lists from Christian morality you just make up a personality trait that sounds positive (“Is kind to children”) and a personality trait that sounds negative (“Never tips”). This was such an obviously good idea they put it in the god-machine rules update.

5. Dump morality and replace it with a “forbidden lore” system (this is meant for Lovecraft/Clive Barker pastiches, and I don’t really care for it). Whenever your sanity drops too much you get arbitrary penalties to social actions but you get bonuses to the occult skill and eventually at the very lowest levels you get superpowers.

6. Dump morality and replace it with either “Spiritual Purity” or “Conscience”. These are both mostly like morality. Spiritual Purity has a very new age-y flavor and is supposed to measure “the purity of the soul” (whatever the fuck that means). Conscience is even more similar to morality but focuses more on the character’s intent and psychology as well as adherence to religious belief systems. I’m not really crazy about either of them, but at least they each give you a different hierarchy of sins if you are tired of the default one.

Most of these are great. This is what I was fucking talking about: options. You cannot make a rational actor worse off by expanding their choice set. It is 100% worth dumpster-diving through 3-4 bad suggestions for every good one you get, and having at least the acknowledgement of backwards compatibility could have made a lot of difference back in the Bush junior years.

Next up we get a list of changes you could potentially make to how willpower works. Many of these suggestions are bad and some are okay, but the one that really sticks out is a system to give human characters their own powerstat in the range of 1 – 10 (“Conviction”/willpower points instead of Blood Potency/vitae). Having higher conviction lets you spend more willpower points pet turn and resist supernatural mind control more easily. I do see the appeal (particularly for mixed-splat games if someone just wants to play a normal human and still contribute), but I’m against it just because I’m 80% sure that willpower is overpowered in the base game, and it breaks immersion as well. People laugh at DnD because going up a level always results in the character gaining more HP, no matter how little sense it makes, but with conviction the writers are implicitly claiming that it is impossible to be high-level without maxing out willpower.

And of course, a human with conviction 10 gets to spend 4 willpower points per turn and gets 6 extra dice to resist mind control… and a mage with Gnosis 10 gets time travel and the ability to summon their own zombie army. It’s not really fair is what I’m saying.



The final section in the chapter is on “Skill Tricks”, and I want to separate that into a new post, just because the idea is kind of interesting and my hands are tired.

[Roog]

This is what I was fucking talking about: options. You cannot make a rational actor worse off by expanding their choice set.

Sure you can. Adding options can set up a prisoners dilemma.

[Anon_issue]

This is what I was fucking talking about: options. You cannot make a rational actor worse off by expanding their choice set.

Sure you can. Adding options can set up a prisoners dilemma.

No, not even then. There are times when it is better to be irrational in certain problems, but that is not the same thing. Game theory gets really mind-melty the more you get into it.

But anyway.

Skill Tricks


“Skill Tricks” are the writers’ idea of how you should model really badass people (Indiana Jones, James Bond, Bryan Mills, etc.) who are still normal human beings. Each skill tricks lets you do something unusual/badass that’s still semi-plausible. It’s things like being the global expert on some topic or being able to take apart an opponent’s gun in the middle of combat or being able to drink a crapload of liquor without passing out or even appearing drunk. Also included are parkour, being extremely good at lying to people/detecting lies, or being a super-hacker.

There’s a lot of words wasted on how and why you might give a character a skill trick, but here are the main justifications that I could make out:

1. Skill Tricks are another way for ordinary humans to keep up with the supernaturals (right, sure…)

2. Skill Tricks are just another character option/thing to spend XP on. Potentially even vampires and werewolves can buy them in this case, but they recommend that you maybe arbitrarily limit how many people can buy for the sake of balance.

3. A way to show that something is really unusual/supernatural by having the Skill Trick fail, even in cases where it would normally succeed automatically. Someone was really in love with this idea, because they keep harping on about it and every single skill trick has a little flash-fiction blurb where they demonstrate this.

In the previous paragraph you may have noticed the phrase “succeed automatically.” That’s because certain Skill Tricks just let you modify dicepools (typically by the skill rating) but others are designated as “Time Saver” or “Story Advancement” and just let you do things automatically with no cost or roll to activate. Here’s an example of a really bad one (maybe even the worst one) that’s paired with the Investigation skill:

• Incisive Mind (Time Saver or Story Advancement): The character glances around a scene and immediately knows everything that it has to offer. At a crime scene, the character can flawlessly recreate the crime based on the evidence at hand. Plot Hook: According to your read of the crime scene, the killer vanished into thin air just after committing the crime. There’s odd condensation on the windowsill, as though the room got suddenly colder or a fog arose… indoors. You can’t figure it out.

Yes, that’s right, “the character knows everything automatically with zero time, cost, or risk”. That’s a great way to run a thrilling mystery adventure.

On the one hand, having mother-may-I bullshit like this is a blatant insult to the reader. Why even have a game if you never roll anything important? It’s an enormous invitation to railroading as well. The player who bought up investigation probably wants to roll dice and take time to figure things out, and of course any other player who wants to help solve the mystery gets to sit around feeling useless. Saying “you win” is not a game: it’s masturbation.

On the other hand, nwod is already filled with useless rolls. For a lot of important things, you probably have at least six dice (over 88% chance of success) before positive modifiers kick in, and if you fail you can often just try again next round at no cost. Just cutting out the pretense and letting the story advance saves a lot of time compared to rolling endless dicepools for what are basically foregone conclusions anyway. Framed this way, automatic success is both good and appropriate. It’s like buying hits in Shadowrun or After Sundown; a (limited) reward for specializing your character and an incentive to help speed the story along through the boring parts. And no one likes having the plot grind to a halt because a player unexpectedly failed some crucial roll.



So I’m of two minds on skill tricks. The basic concept is great, but the execution is unworkable. What these things really needed was a nice beating with the Nerf stick. They’re already too cheap (just 15 XP and you need only a single dot in the relevant skill) but they also needed something more to keep the story-advancement ones in check (a roll to activate? XP cost to activate? Limit of one activation per session?). It’s a shame because a lot of the skill tricks are good and could really help differentiate the characters and add flavor to a campaign. Honestly, the section on skill tricks is a much better section on Merits than the actual section on Merits.


Next up, Chapter Two: Picking Up The Pieces

[Omegonthesane]

quote tags.

[Anon_issue]

Fixed. Sorry.

[Thaluikhain]

It’s things like being the global expert on some topic or being able to take apart an opponent’s gun in the middle of combat

Erm...would that not lead to you taking the opponents gun apart every combat? Cause you'd want to use your skills, but if that's all that skill does, it'd get repetitive.

Like, Jet Li did it in the 4th Lethal Weapon movie, but only once, cause doing every time would get old really fast.

[Anon_issue]

It’s things like being the global expert on some topic or being able to take apart an opponent’s gun in the middle of combat

Erm...would that not lead to you taking the opponents gun apart every combat? Cause you'd want to use your skills, but if that's all that skill does, it'd get repetitive.

Like, Jet Li did it in the 4th Lethal Weapon movie, but only once, cause doing every time would get old really fast.

The exact rules are:

• Dismantle (Combat): The character can take a
gun apart with one deft move. He can’t completely disassemble
a gun in the heat of combat, but removing the
slide is enough to render it inoperable. The player rolls
Dexterity + Firearms and must be within arm’s reach of
the gun in question. If the roll succeeds, the gun is useless
until reassembled. Plot Hook: You grab the gun, and it
electrocutes you. Did that weirdo wire up a battery to
it? Does gunmetal even conduct electricity? No time to
worry about that, now — you’re in pain, your hand is
numb, and he’s still armed.

So it's basically a standard attack roll for it to work. Depending on the circumstances it could either be very useful or not at all.

[Thaluikhain]

"with one deft move" is referencing Lethal Weapon 4.

And...so there's no mention of what type of gun it is, whether the slide comes off nicely, or whether it even has a slide to remove? K.

Just thinking out loud, but I might prefer to see a skill that lets you roll on a table where dismantling the gun and other comparable options are, so you get some variety, and don't go into the action knowing you're likely to dismantle the gun.

[Roog]

This is what I was fucking talking about: options. You cannot make a rational actor worse off by expanding their choice set.

Sure you can. Adding options can set up a prisoners dilemma.

No, not even then. There are times when it is better to be irrational in certain problems, but that is not the same thing. Game theory gets really mind-melty the more you get into it.

Take a scenario of a one round of forced cooperation for two rational actors. Tthen change the scenario by giving each a defection option, creating a one round prisoners delemma. Giving both actors additional options had now made them worse off.

You can consider the giving the additional options as two steps, with each step giving an additional option to one of the actors. From that point of view, at the step where each actor gains the additional option they are better off.

However, this is actually not relevant to your comment about adding extra rules options to an RPG. Generally, when a rules book adds extra options for a game, it adds extra options for multiple players (including the GM as a player). This means that it can potentially make them all worse off, if it creates defection options for more than one participant. It's easy to imagine example rules that obviously have this effect - for example a rules that offers advantage to one player in exchange for game-disruptive behavior.

[TiaC]

Sure you can. Adding options can set up a prisoners dilemma.

No, not even then. There are times when it is better to be irrational in certain problems, but that is not the same thing. Game theory gets really mind-melty the more you get into it.

Take a scenario of a one round of forced cooperation for two rational actors. Tthen change the scenario by giving each a defection option, creating a one round prisoners delemma. Giving both actors additional options had now made them worse off.

You can consider the giving the additional options as two steps, with each step giving an additional option to one of the actors. From that point of view, at the step where each actor gains the additional option they are better off.

However, this is actually not relevant to your comment about adding extra rules options to an RPG. Generally, when a rules book adds extra options for a game, it adds extra options for multiple players (including the GM as a player). This means that it can potentially make them all worse off, if it creates defection options for more than one participant. It's easy to imagine example rules that obviously have this effect - for example a rules that offers advantage to one player in exchange for game-disruptive behavior.

You're kind of talking past each other here. What Anon_issue said was "You cannot make a rational actor worse off by expanding their choice set." Obviously, you can make someone worse off by giving their opponent more options. Giving a player a defection option is going to make things easier for them and harder for the other players.

Talking in terms of game theory with perfectly rational actors doesn't seem particularly useful for RPGs, since they lack the well-defined win states of most games studied in game theory and are far too complicated for any real analysis.

[Anon_issue]

You're kind of talking past each other here. What Anon_issue said was "You cannot make a rational actor worse off by expanding their choice set." Obviously, you can make someone worse off by giving their opponent more options. Giving a player a defection option is going to make things easier for them and harder for the other players.

Talking in terms of game theory with perfectly rational actors doesn't seem particularly useful for RPGs, since they lack the well-defined win states of most games studied in game theory and are far too complicated for any real analysis.

My thoughts exactly. Thank you TiaC. And this is a good a segue as any into:

Chapter Two: Picking Up the Pieces

More systems hacks and additional mechanical options. This chapter is broken up into three sections:

1. Combat
2. Health and Injuries
3. Mental/Social Combat.


Combat


The usual criticisms of the nwod combat system have been exhaustively covered on this board and I’m not going to repeat them. I do want to point out however that a lot of the failings boil down to the basic math of the Storyteller system they decided to go with. Here are the probabilities of getting at least one success (the minimum needed for the vast majority of rolls) per dicepool size in nwod:

• 0 or less 10%

• 1 die 30%

• 2 51%

• 3 65.7%

• 4 75.99%

• 5 83.2%

• 6 88.24%

• 7 91.76%

• 8 94.24 %

Even if you are just playing a mortals game your combat dicepool is very likely to be above 4. The range of best uncertainty in a die roll is somewhere around 20 – 80% or 10 – 90%. Anything above or below that and it gets too boring over the long run, particularly for combat. The difference between “you are generally competent and quite likely to hit” and “you succeed so often it’s actually boring” is only 2 – 4 dice. The difference between “it’s a toss-up” and “you are so unlikely to hit you may as well give up/do something else” is even narrower at only 2 dice.

So nwod doesn’t have enough granularity/uncertainty to really keep players engaged. Unless they’re really bad at combat or the storyteller layers on penalties the players are probably not going to be in the range of best uncertainty and while the designers did give you some tactical options (going prone, dodging, taking aim, etc.) the system is so chunky that you can’t really feel much of an intuitive difference unless your dicepool is below 5 or 6.

And remember, the average human only has seven hitboxes and someone who is as tough as humanly possible only has three more than that. The differences between bashing, lethal, and aggravated damage are also not nearly as important as the designers believed, so everyone pretty much goes down in the same amount of time. owod combat really wasn’t much better, but with four rolls per attack (to-hit, dodge, damage, and soak) and three ways to change the difficulty (dicepool size, difficulty number, and number of successes) it was at least less transparently broken; you couldn’t just sum up the entire system in a bar chart.


So yes, the combat section. The writers recommend you check out Armory and Armory: Reloaded. The writers also put some useful information about dropped ideas for the nwod system in a sidebar, which I am just going to quote in full:

From the Cutting Room Floor
Here are two rules that existed during various playtests of the World of Darkness Rulebook. Every group is different, so you may find them worth reviving.

Grazing and Significant Shots: Originally, two successes were required to completely succeed at any task, including striking someone in combat. A single successes inflicted one point of damage, just like it does now but it was considered a “grazing hit” because at that stage in the playtest we rolled damage separately.
You can adapt this rule by rolling Strength (for close combat) and a ranged weapon’s Damage rating (for ranged combat) as additional damage any time you score two or more successes. Characters will inflict more damage whenever they score more than a token hit, making combat more dangerous. In playtest, this extra damage was not allowed whenever characters used the Fighting Finesse Merit. You might want to let all characters use Fighting Finesse in exchange for this penalty.

Pushing It: Spend one point of Willpower and mark a point of bashing damage to give your character the ability to perform an extra instant action: an option that anyone could use in early playtests. This might slow down combat or interact strangely with nonhuman characters (how does a vampire get tired?) but it reflects a certain desperate ferocity.

The first suggestion they give is to use “aspects”. This is where you have a list of generic descriptors that have positive/negative values and you combine them in various ways. There are “action aspects” to modify attacks (so you can describe your attack as Defensive (+2) and Risky (-2) and then modify your attack by the relevant descriptors because the sum is 0 or less) and condition aspects to represent being wounded (Deafened is + 1, Blinded is +4, etc). I don’t have much to say about it other than after two minutes of reading I already found an exploit: Stunned (+1) causes the opponent to lose their next turn and if you are at all min-maxed for combat you can pretty much just stun lock any individual enemy to death, regardless of which of the two rules variants you are choosing to use. Lame.

Next up is diceless combat. I don’t really have any opinion on it, just because I don’t have much experience with diceless combat in general, but the three pages we get seem weird and clunky enough that I’m guessing the rules were never play tested. These rules might be a hidden gem, but I don’t really know or care enough to find out.

Then we get to rules for miniatures combat, that sweet, sweet money stream Games Workshop and Wizards of the Coast have been milking for forty years. There’s a crapload of stuff here. Seriously, an utter fuckton. There’s stuff for concealment and line-of-sight and visibility and grid based movement. There’s stuff for alternate initiative and attacks of opportunity (here called “threat zones”) and the option for converting to one-second turns for doing second-by-second stuff. They recommend, completely serious, that you check out Scion and Exalted for the one-second rules … so that should tell you everything you need to know about their quality.


The best example of a well-balanced combat engine!


We also get rules for simultaneous actions and phased actions. The first one is where players don’t have initiative and “everything happens at the same.” The rules are extremely confusing and I’m pretty sure the designers actually contradict themselves a couple of times. I honestly have no idea of what the advantages of using these rules might be, or even what the intended advantage was. Phased actions are similarly worthless. The rule is that actions are broken up into distinct phases that progress in a set order (attacks, movement, supernatural actions, etc.) and everyone can only do the actions that correspond to the given phase during that phase. What the possible benefit is of doing combat like this is, I don’t know.

To finish off the section, they offer two options for streamlining combat “collective combat” and “scene-based combat.” Both of them are so terrible it boggles the mind. Collective combat is basically just the card game war where the side with the biggest dicepool wins, and scene based combat is just “what if the fight was represented by a series of extended rolls”?

So that’s combat: Some sturdy miniatures rules, a few rules variants in the realm of “Maybe I can talk the group into trying this during the next one-shot”, and a lot of shit. The miniatures rules are easily the most useful, but that’s not really that difficult when you are mostly copying DnD 3.X. I mean that sort of grid-based combat really became the industry standard in fantasy games for a reason: It fucking works (most of the time). They still clutter things up by constantly offering alternate rules for everything, but it boils down to the familiar tropes of that system.

Basically, they tried everything they could think of and none of it really gets at the core problems from 2004: Having just one roll for damage and accuracy, not enough granularity, a complete lack of consistency in how abstract combat is meant to be, etc. They might have fixed the one-roll problem in one of the Armory supplements (I read through part of the first Armory books some years ago.), but I doubt it. As it is, they tried to overhaul the combat system three times and nwod combat is still a mess.



Going to post the other two sections soon-ish.

[Anon_issue]

Health

As previously mentioned, I really don’t like health boxes in the storyteller system, and this goes beyond unbalanced combat. The world of darkness games pitch themselves as gritty gothic-punk horror, but no one is allowed to really get hurt: If you aren’t killed outright, you will be fully healed after a few weeks at most with no lasting repercussions.

Really health boxes are not much better than just vanilla hitpoints, and they make the system needlessly hard for new players to learn. So I was personally looking forward to anything that would inject them with a dose of gritty realism.

Sadly, we don’t get that. The “realistic injuries” rules here (copy-pasted from some Mage supplement) are too thinly sketched to be playable with several unanswered questions as to how basic things resolve. There’s the potential framework for a gory permanent injuries system where people deal with amputated fingers and scaring and chronic pain and mobility issues, but the whole thing is a huge letdown.

We also get rules reintroducing soak rolls (with three different rules variants, none of them that great) as well as a bunch of really scattered rules for making fights more “cinematic”, mostly by cranking up the amount of health characters get to have through various arbitrary means.

Mental and Social Combat


“Social combat” is one of those things I might potentially like, but I don’t understand. In every game that I’ve ever seen the GM signposts pretty clearly when you can use your social skills on NPCs and what the effects of success/failure will be. Once the GM sets up the groundwork of what you can do by fiat, you make your skill roll, you succeed/fail, and the game moves on.

So you can’t use Persuasion to get someone to give up their entire way of life after a 30 second conversation with a stranger, and the reason you can’t is that everyone at the table knows that that sort of thing just doesn’t happen in the real-world, and the reason they know is just through intuition and life experience. The subject has been covered extensively on this board (sometimes getting very heated), but when any social system gets more complicated than “roll bluff to distract the guards” I just start to lose the thread of understanding.

Humans and human social relations are incredibly complicated, and there’s a good reason that such things are often just left to roleplaying. The Influencing NPC Attitudes table in DnD 3.5 is a constant target of mockery for reducing all human relationships to a single like/dislike meter. The fact that the meter is very easy to abuse for a properly min-maxed character is just icing on the cake.

Just from basic principles, it seems like it would be really hard to make a social influence system that is balanced and interesting and realistic and still lets people roleplay their characters the way they want to. I have heard good things about social combat in A Song of Ice and Fire roleplaying, but I’ve haven’t really looked that far into it.


So, yeah, I was very wary of this section. The social combat system the designers of this book came up with is called “sway” (stupid name!) and how it works is that … stuff happens. The rules text is as nearly as dense as the stuff for combat. Everyone get three different influence tracks (casual, intimate, and unnatural) with different limitations and you fill them up by making successful social rolls. There are time penalties if you try to rush things and you can spend your already accumulated points to get an effect (such as forcing a confession or getting a favor) or make the effects last longer or just save the points for later … except everyone has a limit of 10 points per track and the points fade away at different rates depending on the type but you can also make some points last permanently if you score an exceptional success in certain situations.

And there are (I think) hard limits on how often you can try to increase your influence per day. Also some stuff like torture or orders from authority also call for additional morality rolls that modify other social rolls. And the designers also included some custom merits for the system that modify things to add an extra layer of complication.

Like I said, these rules are really complicated, but unless you are running a game where everyone is some variety of conman/spy or you are infiltrating a cult I fail to see the advantage of just rolling Attribute + Skill and moving on. The whole thing is a bookkeeping nightmare (especially with multiple people), and there are also big unanswered questions about how unnatural sway (mind control) is supposed to work. Nwod has at least a dozen different kinds of mind control powers, all with different rules and clauses and modifiers, and I’m nearly certain that there must be undefined interactions somewhere in the system.

So yeah, these rules don’t really do it for me.

---

Moving on, mental combat is meant to simulate elaborate planning and gambits in the vein of Death Note or Rian Johnson’s Brick. It’s called Anticipation (much better name!) and how it works is that you roll an appropriate mental attribute + mental skill with a limit of 1 per session (or more than once if you spend a point of willpower, but this rule is bullshit). If you succeed you can retcon part of the scene and declare that you already prepared for something like this all along (like having a double agent or having a secret weapon hidden in your office or declaring that the copy of the Necronomicon the villains stole is actually a forgery put there by the PCs last week).

It’s pretty nifty, though the designers seem to realize that it is overpowered (which it is). So we get admonitions not to let the players do it too often just through storyteller fiat. There are also rules variants like having to succeed during a mini-flashback where you do the thing you said you did, or just having each additional Anticipation role take a penalty or being able to cancel out Anticipation by having another character make their own Anticipation roll (i.e. we bugged the hotel room but they realized this and had a fake conversation to throw us off). Also included are ways to refluff the mechanic as representing prophecy or divination, which is a nice touch. All in all, the mental combat rules are very rough, but with a little sprucing up they could make a really nice addition to a game. At minimum, they are a lot more workable than the social stuff.


Finally, we get some really out-there rules for making narrative declarations and establishing character webs complete with (sigh…) integration with the social combat mechanics. We also get a bunch of merits for supporting the new systems. At this point I just fully gave up and my eyes glazed over, skimming until the end of the chapter.




So yeah, this chapter was a real mixed bag, and it is probably the worst chapter of the book. I think part of the problem is that most of the new mechanics make things more complicated and White Wolf always sold their RPGs as rules-lite, so that alone is a turn-off for a lot of readers. I also think that if you were going to make your own World of Darkness overhaul project (which this chapter is kind of gesturing at) you would want to start with higher level principles like what the focus of the game should be and then determine the mechanics based off of that. Still, this chapter might be useful for experimentation or getting inspiration for house rules, which already puts it ahead of like 85% of nwod content.



Next up is the settings chapter. Might take a while for me to post that as I’m getting a little busy with personal stuff.

[Orion]

Thank you for doing this review! I think it covers things is just about the right level of depth, and I found it interesting.

In a multiplayer game, you can definitely make one player worse off by giving them more choices, even if you hold everyone else's choices constant. Imagine, for example, a round robin tournament where a bunch of playersdo one on one iterated prisoner's dilemmas against a bunch of other players. The payoff matrixes are set up such that successful players do often get to cooperate/cooperate for most of a match. Then imagine that you give one player a new "super-defect" move which is catastrophically bad for anyone who cooperates into it even once. That player is probably screwed because nobody can now justify the risk of trying to cooperate with them.

[Anon_issue]

Thank you for doing this review! I think it covers things is just about the right level of depth, and I found it interesting.

You're welcome. I've been meaning to get a lot of this stuff off my chest for a while now.

In a multiplayer game, you can definitely make one player worse off by giving them more choices, even if you hold everyone else's choices constant. Imagine, for example, a round robin tournament where a bunch of playersdo one on one iterated prisoner's dilemmas against a bunch of other players. The payoff matrixes are set up such that successful players do often get to cooperate/cooperate for most of a match. Then imagine that you give one player a new "super-defect" move which is catastrophically bad for anyone who cooperates into it even once. That player is probably screwed because nobody can now justify the risk of trying to cooperate with them.

Not true. The three-option guy is still in the best position. It just doesn't seem that way because of the additional players.

The problem with rational agents is that, assuming they have perfect information (which is usually the case in thought experiments), their strategies will be infinitely self-recursive. (i.e. "He knows that I know that he knows so he'll use strategy X and but since I know that I'll use strategy Y but since he knows that I'll use another strategy...."). Your actions depend on what you think they will do, and what they think they will do depends on what they think you will do.

If the three-option guy knows the others will never trust him if he ever super-defects, he can always cooperate and only use the super-defection option in the rare event it is in his interest (such as in a one-off prisoner's dilemma). And since the other players know that it is irrational for him to ever super-defect they will cooperate most of the time (or at least until the end of the game). So the three-option guy will be no worse off than the other players.

[Anon_issue]

Shards

This is the chapter for mixing up the extremely formulaic nwod setting. Once again, there are three sections:

1. The World of Darkness Revealed (the masqureade fails)
2. The World of Darkness Destroyed (post-apocalyptic scenarios)
3. The World of Dark Fantasy (completely alternate settings/gonzo stuff)

If sections 1 and 2 don’t really seem mutually exclusive …. give yourself a gold star. You could easily imagine a scenario where the masquerade fails and this causes the world to end OR the world ends and then there is no longer any point in keeping up the masquerade. So they both kind of run together. Also in this chapter there is zero mention of Gehenna/time judgement, which seems like a real missed opportunity. On a more positive note we also get zero mention of Monte Cook’s World of Darkness.


Mini rant

---

In all of the plot hooks and story ideas in this section the writers mention all of the nwod lines (Vampire, Werewolf, Promethean, Mage, etc.) with equal frequency and equal word count. This is how it was with all of the “stand-alone” nwod books. Even if you had a concept that was really really obviously suited to just one of the lines the designers would give all of the main lines equal mention. The best example of this was the blood bathers from the Immortals sourcebook. The designers give two plot hooks for combining vampires with blood bathers and how the first blood bathers in ancient times may have gotten their powers from vampires …… and then they do the exact same thing for werewolves, mages, Prometheans, hunters, sin-eaters, and changelings. It was even dumber then I’m making it sound.

The “equal screen time” rule always seemed baffling to me because in the nwod popularity contest Vampire: The Requiem was the clear winner, Mage was a respectable second, and Werewolf was face down in a dumpster somewhere. When the first version of Mummy bombed all the way back in 1992 White Wolf quickly dropped that concept and pivoted to other more profitable games (namely classic Vampire and Werewolf). They didn’t feel the need to publish a bunch of Mummy books anyway and they didn’t feel the need to keep mentioning Mummy alongside Vampire: The Masqureade for six years as though the two were somehow “equal.”

But by 2004 White Wolf stopped doing that. They refused to admit that practically no one liked the new Werewolf, or that the New World of Darkness wasn’t nearly as popular as the old stuff had been. Responding to customer feedback would be admitting defeat! We have to pretend like everything is fine and keep publishing books! Symmetry! Mad-libs Design! Beatings will continue until morale improves!

It didn’t work for 4e DnD and it worked even less well here.

---

Back to sanity.


The “masquerade fails” section is a mess of subheadings with very little obvious flow or sense progression. We do get a couple of good broad ideas for what the post-Masquerade might look like:


1. The supernaturals defend humanity from the unambiguous bad guys (True Fae, Demons, evil-er vampires, etc.). At this point you’ve basically got one of those dreaded vampions games everyone used to harp on about, but what the hell.

2. The supernaturals openly rule over humanity. Think House of M or Daybreakers.

3. All the different supernaturals declare war on each other and have huge battles like in the Underworld movies.

4. The supernaturals are hunted by humanity and have to hide from police and soldiers (also like the Underworld movies.)

Though badly presented, these all seem like decent enough starting points, especially when they mention just how difficult it is to keep supernatural stuff hidden in a world with YouTube and iPhones. Unfortunately, this section only gets 20 pages, so there’s a lot of “here’s an idea you could potentially base an entire campaign around, and we’re going to give it thirty words worth of consideration before we move on to the next topic. Have fun.”, but there’s still some decently interesting nuggets:

• If vampires rule over/protect humanity they will get their blood through volunteers or mandatory blood drives.

• If mages go public there will be an absolute flood of crazy people claiming they are some kind of magical being/they have Awakened, so finding actual new mages will be a difficult, tedious, full-time job.

• If mages are hunted by normal humans there will a lot of knock-on cultural effects (no one wants to see stage magic anymore, normal people who have new age/occult/”spiritualist” leanings will be persecuted, etc.)

• If Prometheans go public and are accepted they will develop new norms and rules to manage the effects of disquiet (forming Promethean-only communities, video-conferencing, mandatory moving around, attending seminars on how best to complete your Pilgrimage, etc.)

• Changeling: The Lost will have a lot of the deeper emotional themes removed because you can speak openly about how you were kidnapped/tortured and you can still get your legal identity back and even hang out with your old friends/family. In other words, you CAN go home again.

• If the masquerade falls, Hunters will set up militarized police states all over the world with themselves in charge, and all of humanity will enter a state of total war to try and kill most or all of the supernaturals.

…. But ultimately it’s just not enough. The good ideas are too scattered. The useful information to word count ratio here is dangerously low, and there’s a lot of vague suggestions and sweeping claims that are entirely unhelpful. We also get a some of the “entire paragraph full of questions” thing you may have noticed in other White Wolf books where they give you a single bare plot hook and fill up the rest of the space with useless speculation:

The God-King Rises: Archaeologists and anthropologists the world over are constantly poking and prodding the forgotten recesses looking for the next Tutankhamen’s tomb or lost civilization. Finding a lost burial chamber and uncovering a centuries-old torpid vampire would certainly stir up the possibility: if such an immortal creature survived this long, isn’t it likely that more of these creatures exist? When the ancient monster wakes up, speaking long dead languages and hungry, will it have the world’s sympathy or be seen as a threat? What, if anything, might it tell us of the ancient world? Does this creature even have a concept of the Masquerade? Does it predate the Covenants and what kind of position does it put exemplars of these institutions? What if it is mysteriously free of the Fog of Eternity, perhaps even predating such a condition? Does it herald from a time before clan or covenant or is it indeed the forefather of such conventions? Do the Mekhet the world over suddenly feel a distinct unnamable pull to suddenly travel to the shadowless sands of the Sahara? Is this creature just the tip of the iceberg?

For why this did this shit, I can think of only two explanations:

Charitable explanation: The writers are pressed for space and can’t develop anything properly, so they’re going to suggest some directions you might decide to go in so you can get the most value from the content.

More likely explanation: Asking the reader a bunch of asinine questions is a lot faster and easier than doing actual design work.

Bottom line: this section is pretty mediocre, and if you want to run a “the masquerade has ended/is going to end” game, you are going to have to do almost all of the work yourself. A couple of really fleshed-out example scenarios could have made all the difference, but we never got that.


Next up is the apocalyptic stuff. I don’t have as much to say just because this section is much better organized and more competently put-together. They start off with a list of apocalyptic scenarios (asteroid impact, nuclear war, biblical/theological apocalypse, ……. global pandemic) and for each one they give a list of considerations and plot-hooks as well as some reworked mechanics in sidebars.


So for example, one of the apocalyptic scenarios is “alien invasion.” We get a list of fiction for inspiration, a brief discussion of alien invasions, some practical considerations (Maybe the aliens start terraforming the earth? Maybe they’ve been here for thousands of years and are only emerging now?), some supernatural considerations (do the aliens have souls/spirits? If yes, do they have any kind of magic/psychic powers?) and as a bonus we also get a sample roll in a sidebar (trying to decode the alien language is an extended roll of Intelligence + Academics). It’s all just so straightforward and to the point and good. If anything I just wish there was more of it. Like if every scenario in this section got five pages instead of one I would be 100% willing to read it.

Also, I haven’t mentioned it until now but most of the artwork in this book is very forgettable. That said, this section has a pretty badass picture of a Nosferatu leading his human slaves through a post-apocalyptic wasteland, so props to whoever did this:





Then there’s a bunch of new rules for post-apocalyptic survival, though they’re of uneven quality. We get stuff for scavenging supplies, farming, withstanding hunger/dehydration (to replace the utterly shit hunger/dehydration rules that came in the core book), angry mobs, radiation poisoning, making your own ammunition, etc. The section ends with considerations on how different supernaturals might survive the apocalypse. Generally, they have it easier than baseline humans, but Mages will almost certainly have it easiest because they can just summon food and water in addition to having magical healing. The writers also mention that Hunter: The Vigil could really easily be adapted to post-apocalyptic scenarios if you just ignore the monster-hunting rules, which is a nice touch.

So the apocalyptic stuff is a solid B+, and it is a good resource if you want run your own post-apocalyptic version of the World of Darkness. There’s more quality here in 25 pages than in the entirety of Monte Cook’s World of Darkness.

[Thaluikhain]

So for example, one of the apocalyptic scenarios is “alien invasion.” We get a list of fiction for inspiration, a brief discussion of alien invasions, some practical considerations (Maybe the aliens start terraforming the earth? Maybe they’ve been here for thousands of years and are only emerging now?), some supernatural considerations (do the aliens have souls/spirits? If yes, do they have any kind of magic/psychic powers?) and as a bonus we also get a sample roll in a sidebar (trying to decode the alien language is an extended roll of Intelligence + Academics). It’s all just so straightforward and to the point and good. If anything I just wish there was more of it. Like if every scenario in this section got five pages instead of one I would be 100% willing to read it.

But you still have to create your own aliens and stuff? That seems like a lot of work, and obviously of quite some importance.

[Anon_issue]

So for example, one of the apocalyptic scenarios is “alien invasion.” We get a list of fiction for inspiration, a brief discussion of alien invasions, some practical considerations (Maybe the aliens start terraforming the earth? Maybe they’ve been here for thousands of years and are only emerging now?), some supernatural considerations (do the aliens have souls/spirits? If yes, do they have any kind of magic/psychic powers?) and as a bonus we also get a sample roll in a sidebar (trying to decode the alien language is an extended roll of Intelligence + Academics). It’s all just so straightforward and to the point and good. If anything I just wish there was more of it. Like if every scenario in this section got five pages instead of one I would be 100% willing to read it.

But you still have to create your own aliens and stuff? That seems like a lot of work, and obviously of quite some importance.

Funny enough, this book actually does have rules for creating aliens (kind of/sort of). But we are not quite there yet.

World of Dark Fantasy

This is the part where they tell you how to adapt the nwod ruleset towards running a game set in a sword-and-sorcery style fantasy world, though fuck knows why you’d want to.

As previously mentioned, any version of The World of Darkness tends to have terrible combat and fantasy games tend to be much more combat heavy than games set in the real world just by default. Also in either version of the World of Darkness a full third of your character sheet is given over to “mental” skills and attributes, and the vast majority of fantasy worlds have no computers, power tools, or vehicles. Science and medicine, if they even exist at all, tend to be very primitive. So if you want to play as a “mundane smart guy” the niche for that is incredibly small. Yes, fantasy stories do have people who “live by their wits”, but that usually takes the form of talking, which is the entire social side of the character sheet.

For me the entire “world of dark fantasy” concept is pretty much dead on arrival. Unless you’ve got some brilliant polymath Storyteller who has endless free time and is willing to make their own setting AND overhaul huge chunks of the ruleset the entire thing is just unworkable. But words were written anyway, so let’s have a look.

The designers go over all the basic fantasy subgenres, some considerations for designing your own fantasy world, and quick and dirty rules for making your own magic system(s), which basically boils down to: take one of the existing nwod magic systems and just use it straight or convert the currency costs to willpower/bashing damage.

We also get (accurate) commentary on how a lot of early fantasy stories had a lot of racist undertones and implicitly/explicitly racialist worldviews and how you should probably try to avoid that because such terrible attitudes have no place in the 21st century ……. right before they give out three sample fantasy races, one of which is a race of large hairy brutes who are prone to violence. Oh well.




The section finishes out with a “dark heroes” system. It is basically an attempt to work in a DnD style free-form class system with nwod rules. As you level up, you get bonuses to health and mind-control resistance and you can also purchase “masteries” (DnD feats, but tied to skills). The masteries don’t seem well thought-out or well balanced (one of them is literally just “you gain a skill trick from the skill tricks section”) and there’s only 13 of them total, but at least they tried.


Woundgate

Welcome to crazy town.


We aren’t quite in Florida Man territory. But we’re close.

Woundgate is a setting. Specifically, it is supposed to be some kind of ultimate crossover kitchen-sink setting where all nwod content exists in a single coherent over-cosmology. The writers explicitly mention MMORPG zoning as an inspiration where each realm in the shatter (read: each zone in the magic alternate world) has its own themes and challenge levels and some are technology-free zones.


Judging by the sheer number of Capitalized Terms that are being densely thrown about in just 10 pages, this thing was someone’s baby. Just take a look at some of this exposition:

It all began with the Elding, the Coming of the Light Creation erupted from primordial chaos — but didn’t leave that chaos completely behind. The Elding was an age of beast-people and gods in the Earth; monsters and demon-songs that wrought the world into shape like an unruly bar of white-hot iron.

Geography was fluid; new species arose when any two creatures mated, or even touched a mutating power. There was no safety or certainty except beyond what old heroes could steal from the young world, and wrestle into fixed form with a name. Some entities preferred to remain malleable and fought the first humans, beasts, and lesser spirits.

The Elding ended when all sides reached the Acccord: the treaty that encoded the order of things into Creation’s heart. Written on the Ompahlos (something that now lies deep in primordial dreams), the treaty ruled that Above, raw, divine potential would rest with the gods and their homes — what people call the Heavens, the Realms Supernal, or the Empyrean. Below, there would be Death, the Underworld, and the law that it claims all, so that all things would cycle between fixed and dynamic forms, never starving on one side or the other. In Midrealm, humans, beasts, and spirits would enjoy natural law, and the power to manipulate it to their own ends. So began the Age of the Accord, of might and vibrant life, that saw the rise of Atlantis (if that was its name), the spirit choirs, and the walls the separated all life from the powers that hate it.

I think the stuff about chaos and beast-people is supposed to leave the door open for an Exalted cross-over just to add an extra layer of insanity. Either that or whoever was writing this section wasn’t really invested in the backstory and just grabbed a bunch of White Wolf tropes/names at random.

The presentation in this section isn’t really that good (when I first skimmed this I thought it was like 3-4 different mini settings), but here’s the long and short of it:

Corpse = Normal Earth. Has a Masquerade.

Woundgates = Magic Portals.

The Shatter = Magic Alternate World. All of the nwod supernaturals can get here through the portals and they hang out and build settlements and do stuff.

Realms = MMORPG zones in the Magic Alternate World. They exist in an unlimited number and contain anything the ST can think of.

The introductory parts of the Shatter are supposed to be run by “The Occult Republic of America”, a secret branch of the US government with two cities and a wild-west area under their control. They also do the Star Wars cantina thing where you walk through one of the magic cities and are supposedly amazed by all the diversity (Hobgoblin bartenders! Vampire tattoo artists! Weird creatures that only appear in this one scene!), which I’ve always found to be somewhat tiresome.

The Shatter is also supposed to contain the three races from the “World of Dark Fantasy” section and something called “suicide trees” which can be used to feed vampires (but are not the same thing as Mandragora because shut up) and a super-rare material called “Worldblood” that can be used to fuel magic (but which is not the same thing as Mana from Mage the Awakening because shut up). And there are also magical masquerade enforcers called Incarnadine. And any Steve Monsters the ST can think of also exist. And all the alternate magical realms from every other White Wolf game also exist but are NOT in The Shatter (I think).

I give shit, but Woundgate isn’t bad exactly, it’s just kind of irrelevant. The “what are we supposed to do?” problem that seemingly plagues all White Wolf RPGs is here as well if that bothers you, but there’s more to it than that. Being told that the multi-universe is infinite is inherently disempowering, but the real problem for me is that the core conceit of “The Shatter contains anything you can imagine!” is no different from “Any setting you make up yourself contains anything you can imagine!” If you want to play a game set in an alternate Victorian London with magitech and vampires you aren’t going to make up your own zone in woundgate for that: you are just going to make your own setting and drop all the thematically dissonant stuff. You don't need an elaborate framework and the writers' permission to make shit up and have little mini-zones that appeal to the PC's: that's just called "having a sense of imagination".

In short, unless you are really determined to use the nwod cosmology or you want to play genre roulette (We're bored of being cowboys! Let's go to the pirate level now!) there’s no advantage to using Woundgate at all. You might as well use any well-known urban fantasy kitchen-sink setting (Night Watch, Dresden Files, Hellboy, Mortal Instruments, etc.) If you want to run the “hidden society with open magic” conceit, because at least those have decent wikis and you get to avoid being buried in exposition during the first session.



Next up is the content that was cut out of the main book: World of Darkness Sci-Fi.

[Thaluikhain]

The introductory parts of the Shatter are supposed to be run by “The Occult Republic of America”, a secret branch of the US government

The "republic" is a secret part of the government of another republic?

[Anon_issue]

The introductory parts of the Shatter are supposed to be run by “The Occult Republic of America”, a secret branch of the US government

The "republic" is a secret part of the government of another republic?

....Not even sure what you're trying to ask. Hope this clears it up though:

For generations, the US government has hidden
a secret population: thousands of citizens who live in
Shatter parallels of American regions and their adjacent
realms. They pay taxes and receive government services
under the auspices of the Department of the Interior’s
Office of Insular Affairs.

It’s unofficially administered as a US territory and
doesn’t have an official name — and can’t, because it’s
too secret to appear on balance sheets, minutes, e-mail,
or policy statements. In the Shatter they call it the Occult
Republic of America (ORA): a name born from
early revolutionaries who claimed realms as their own,
and set up a government before the United States itself
had formed. That’s why it has its own currency (the denarius,
pegged to the dollar), a peculiar title for its leader
(Viceroy — the founders anticipated a Hamiltonian,
monarch-like President) as well as distinct military, legal,
and political institutions.

The ORA is a frontier government whose laws focus
on the basics: killing, stealing, and other obvious forms of
victimization. The Constitution applies to the ORA, but its
Supreme Court sometimes interprets things a bit differently
than the Corpse’s America — and given that it’s illegal to
appeal an ORA case to the US Supreme Court for national
security reasons, that’s not going to change any time soon.
Policing is handled through the Republic’s autonomous
arm of the US Postal Service. In the ORA, long-distance
deliveries require tough, trained individuals.

For brave individuals, the best opportunities lie
with the ORA’s all-volunteer Exploratory Militia. It’s
chronically understaffed and erratically paid, but the
ORA still issues letters of marque and grants taxation
powers to groups assigned to govern new territories,
giving EM units free reign to profit from mayhem at the
Republic’s fringes.

[Thaluikhain]

I meant that the US is a republic, and branches of the US government can't really be smaller republics inside that, but if it's not officially called a republic that's fair enough.

[Anon_issue]

Okay. I thought you maybe meant to type "or another republic." (As in they're a completely independent country separate from the regular US).