Mecha vs. flying carpets duking it out in the moons of Jupiter.

I liked Demon.

oMage: Had the Technocracy and an awesome super-epic battle for all reality. Beats nWoD fluff out of the park. I mean, seriously, you had a group that hunted fucking "Reality Deviants," that is just fucking BADASS.

oVampire: Except for a few of the really dumb Sabbat clans(Ahrimanes and Kiasyd, really?) most of the clans were generally cool and fun if you ignored the ANGST ANGST or POLITICS POLITICS sections. People complain a lot about the metaplot, but you can ignore 99% of it and just use the parts you DO like.

oWraith: Immensely epic concept and possibilities, but I doubt anyone ever actually played a game of it. In fact, I refuse to believe it until I see filmed evidence of it.

Generally, those three games were awesome because they beat their nWoD equivalents on fluff. Systematically, though, they have little advantage and were generally messy systems.

>>6764056
I too enjoyed Demon, though I never actually got to play it. I tried to read everything about it I could though. Hunter too, I especially loved how 9/10ths of the stories about hunters meeting other supernaturals involved the hunters dying in a horrible fashion.

>>6764073
oh hai purple

This book. It's really amazing.

It basically is a Revised Freak Legion, with less stupid splatterpunk, and a lot more general character and gameplay options. It gives guides on how to play Fomori (humans possessed by Banes), Drones (humans *upgraded* by the Weaver), Gorgons (Wyld-mutated creatures...can easily be used to create stuff like Chimeras or Gorgons), etc.

What makes it really fun is the huge list of powers, the extensive customization, and the ease of adapting the rules to represent anything else from spirit heritages, to cyborgs, to mythic creatures, to demonically possessed.

>>6764073
I'm playing a wraith in a crossover game, so I'm not sure if that counts...

I've run Changeling before, and loved how you could do pretty much anything you wanted in it. Wraith probably has the best (if nastiest) setting.

>>6764073

couldnt agree more. the oWoD had many flaws but seriously: every book told you to leave the fluff you dont like. And the metaplot was a good opportunity to start chronicles, and if you already had an idea, then you could just disregard that.

tl:dr; oWoD not perfect but awesome

>>6764073
I like the Kiasyd. Our storyteller once played one. It lasted all of thirty seconds. He kicked us out of his library and then read for 50 years.

A link to chaos factor maybe ?

Everything >>6764073 said with the inclusion of Hunter.

Hunter made mortals fun to play, and a good Hunter game could easily be compared to a street level game of Unknown Armies. A lot of the grittier games I were in required a lot of forethought and team-work, especially since Hunter PCs don't get the awesome Disciplines of Vampires and such.

Dreaming: the melancholy and the rallying against the night and the loss of your dreams. Shit, when I played that game, it was fucking depressing, even when it was epic. The world is fucking dying and there is nothing you can do about it.

That doesn't mean you can't set the world on fire while saying 'Fuck That Shit.'

>>6764173

nHunter kind of plays up the Mortal Hunter thing a bit more, though. I do like what oHunter tried to do, but oh God, some of the BAD DECISIONS in that book. It was meant to be YOU ARE SCARED, YOU ARE HUMAN, YOU ARE VULNERABLE.

And then you have a female Hunter beating down a zombie with a cyborg sword arm on the next fucking page. Great job.

>>6764149

One thing I particularly loved about the oWoD books were the examples of play that accompanied EVERY FUCKING SKILL and background. It was honestly REALLY damn helpful both for inspiration and for helping you understand EXACTLY when a slightly hard-to-grasp skill was important and usable.

>>6764209


Welcome to the 90s.

>>6764231

Welcome to an age where gangsta rap is no longer "fresh" and black people do not get sitcoms just for being "wacky."

OH SHIT, THAT'S RIGHT, THAT'S RIGHT NOW.

>>6764173
Hunter can be fun. My other favorite books include:

Mage: The Sorcerer's Crusade. Mage set in the Renaissance! Lots of swashbuckling adventure abounds, The Traditions vs Order of Reason fight is still evenly matched.

Sorcerer Revised: Sometimes you want to play a low-powered magic game, or use Psionics. This book has a lot of options for those who want magic but didn't like the spheres system. Plus it's useful for making monks, inquisitors, low level mad scientists, etc. Really, its sort of a prototypical Second Sight.

Mokole: Lizard-sexings (they're all bi) aside, its nice having a metaplot where some shifters are willing to play nice with each other. The actual character creation, with mix-and-matching your warform, is also fun.

>>6764154
The Kiasyd are awesome. I have one living downstairs in an aging Etherite's rocket ship in the game I DM. It's like the odd couple with Victorian curse words.

Is wraith old world of darkness and Orpheus new world of darkness.

We're in your MtA, combining the forces of Statis and Dynamism...

>>6764273
Orpheus is toward the end of oWoD.

Geist is nWoD.

>>6764203
Old Changeling suffered from Canon bloat, and some *questionable* (very cutesy) artwork and writing (Using Hopscotch to wedgie other Changelings as an example in the corebook).

That said, the Cantrip system was really cool, because a clever player could think of a LOT of uses for different Art/Realm combo. (Standard celerity, throwing a football really fast, causing a car chasing you to speed up RIGHT before it hit a curve, etc). The idea of them existing behind the scenes, inspiring mortals to do better work like classical Muses was cool. The idea of Ravaging in particular, gives me as a GM a lot of twisted ideas. (In particular, I considered running a Redcap game in the style of Kill Puppies for Satan, or Kobolds Ate My Baby).

>>6764015
>Op's Picture
>Wraith

Yeah that's about right. I liked Demon though.

What I love about oVampire is the incredibly rich history. Unlike with all of the other creatures that go bump that were playable in the oWoD, the vampires were able to tell their history with much more "emotion", IMO, because, in most cases, the teller of that portion of history probably lived through it. It made the whole setting much more believable.

>>6764073
>
oVampire: Except for a few of the really dumb Sabbat clans(Ahrimanes and Kiasyd, really?) most of the clans were generally cool and fun if you ignored the ANGST ANGST or POLITICS POLITICS sections. People complain a lot about the metaplot, but you can ignore 99% of it and just use the parts you DO like.

The Ventrue were all Gordon Gekko until the revised clanbook, the Giovanni never stopped being the god damn Giovanni, the Ravnos were retarded until revised came out, and countless other issues. It was all one giant turd basket, it was just up to you to make something awesome with it.

>>6764273

>>6764290
>The idea of them existing behind the scenes, inspiring mortals to do better work like classical Muses was cool.

I thought that was one of the more retarded ideas about them, really. Banality was inherit with science, and thus all of these really creative games, online stories, and all that good stuff were driving them away.

Give me Bonegnawers and Unbound any day of the week. Keep your Luddites.

>>6764392
What was this one about?

>>6764399
>Keep your Luddites.
I got a nasty Luddite vibe in general from Werewolf, Mage, and Changeling.

>>6764209
Not to mention the writing. Jesus, but nHunter gets the point that you are fighting a scary battle with all odds against you much better and with not nearly half the preachyness of oHunter.

Still, can't blame the game itself for it: it was the '90s.

>>6764399
The nockers took some of that away at least with their Steampunk-ish stuff, but that point got really laboured. I usually ignored it when I was running it.

This book was also a fun one. Basically, in oWOD, the FBI had a Special Affairs Division that *knows* there are supers out there, but have very shaky info. They've been infiltrated by everyone as well. So as a tool used to enforce masquerade stalemates, etc. one could have a field day with them.

>>6764411
Wraith after they nuked Wraith basically.

The metaplot for this involved asking Oblivion to pretty please not eat everything and go back to sleep.

>>6764422
When you peeled away the Space Jew stereotypes...Nockers were kind of fun to play. Magnetic Monopoles, lightning guns, steampunk walkers etc.

The Sons of Ether were a riot as well.

>>6764417
The Bonegnawers were at least able to adapt to new situations (they had a system where they could do rites and the like without the usual components, and if they did a good enough job the spirits liked it more then the original way). Mage really did suffer from Ludditism, I'll admit, but then I mostly played either cutting-edge Sons of Ether (inspired by Carl Sagan!) or transhumanist Virtual Adepts. Fuck the other Traditions.

>>6764423
Picture related.

>>6764460

Yeah, I have to bring up the SoE's and VA's, as well as the 'techy' factions of most other traditions (except those Verbena fags, but no one cares about them anyway)

old Hunter/Project Twilight
i was an fbi agent in the know, another guy was a regular cop, and our third was a fanatic hunter. possibly the best campaign i was ever in.

and we tried to play wraith, but after a couple sessions we gave up.

>>6764460
Bone Gnawers, Glass Walkers, and Children of Gaia were all rather tech-oriented. The Gnawers were more *survive at all costs* than anything, while the Glass Walkers went for cutting-edge computers, cybernetics, etc.

Honestly...if I were to ever run old changeling, I would probably treat Banality more like Clarity in Lost. Low Clarity and you enter Bedlam. Seems simple enough.

My favourites were

oWoD mage for reasons already stated(battle for reality, marauders, fucking MIB)

Werewolf The apocalypse(in b4 lolfurry), where wolves dug their own graves by being blood thirsty retarded assholes, and are gonna go down fighting. I really enjoyed the fact that essentially the werewolf's role in WoD was to fuck up everything else except maybe mummies. The only thing that bothered me about it was that werewolves are stuck in willing retardation and stagnating tradition, but in this day and age is a great time for the pups of the new generation to face the new challenges.

Finally, I loved mummy, never gotten a chance to actually play it though. Mind you mummies are best as side charactors or 1 player, a group of mummies is just too much, wrath of fucking god powers and a lay back and chill attitude.

>>6764545
Children of Gaia were less tech-oriented and more "HARMONY! PEACE! ANAL SEX!". And I was always amused when people trying to play more serious Children of Gaia (they are warriors, after all) were pissed off by that.

>>6764592
"we get along or we remove your face"

>>6764563
I actually run old werewolf where the PCs are very aware that werewolf society is derp. It's worth quite a few laughs. Why hit Pentex with a bunch of fur and fangs, when a lawsuit is more expensive in the long run? (Especially when combined with DDoS attacks on their money-making holding companies?)

>>6764613
I always imagined their warriors either being a mix of GI Joe Public Service Announcements "And knowing is half the battle", Lawful Good Paladins dedicated to defending the helpless, or "civilized" adherents to H.G. Wells views that perfect war is the type which produces the least casualties (Like in The Land Trains).

>>6764622
One of the guy's in my group inadvertantly made the most buffed up munchkin character ever, but he played him well.

A fucking Silver Fang ahroune with max dots in pedagry and 5 leadership, we were on our way to uniting the fucking tribes under his banner but we never finished that campaign. He also had the seer werewolf buffed up to ungodly levels so interest was kind of lost when the other mediocre charactors couldnt accomplish shit while his ate wyrm and shit newly opened cearns.

>>6764622
The argument against that is that Pentex owns so much shit that trying to sue them is a waste of time and if you do stand a chance of winning you get BSD'd to death. That and attempting to DDoS their system only invites pissed off Weaver and Wyrm spirits to leap out of your fucking computer and devour you.

But, yeah, seriously. I played a Bonegnawer philodox on a reservation that belonged to AIM and was constantly getting in trouble for arguing that, hey, maybe giving up the old ways so that the kinfolk can eat was a SMART THING to do. He ended up being executed.

>>6764668
The thing is historically...Garou have always been derps. With Apocalypse, they are *supposed* to be realizing "Wow, we derped up."

A lot of players still play them for derpiness...it gets a bit annoying after awhile. (Ultraultraultra authoritarian GMPCs to the point that playing the game is no longer fun...if I wanted railroading I'd be a train conductor)

>>6764743
Make a werefox, troll dm, win.

Thats also something werewolf added that never gets mentioned, a fucking dozen other wereraces.

Foxes were trolls by nature and could disguise themselves as the other races for the sole purpose to troll them.

>>6764767
Or you could play a coyote and do the same.

Even better? Play a Ratkin. Put pain spirits inside chainsaws. Go to town, at least until the mama rats get upset with the noise you're making and tell you to quiet down you'll wake up the children.

>>6764783
Werebears

>>6764796
Play a Mokole, with nothing but ranks in Huge Size. Weregodzilla! Stomp Tokyo to tiny bits.

>>6764743
A big reason i'm glad the owod's gone.

What is the Ritual of the Red Sign? And how would one perform said ritual?

>>6764154
>>6764257
>>6764302
Doing Kiasyd right.

>>6764767
>>6764783
Wererats were awesome


Also I liked Demon.

book download links ???

>>6764284
Orpheus is rare.

I played a Wraith game once. I got derped into becoming my own Shadow's arm chair.

I haven't played it since. It's really cool but don't expect to get ANYWHERE in the game.

>>6765008
Wererats were pretty much wereskaven. So they were fuckwin in so many ways.

Running a Ravaging game of Changeling looks like it could be fun, as the players devise really creative ways to destroy the wills of mortals to live, as they gain lulz from it. Basically, Troll: The An Heroing.

>>6765296
The Changers equivalent of Malkavians. Look in your heart, you know it to be true.

>>6764767
What, stupid in the wrong hands but abjectly amazing in the right ones?

This book was absolutely amazing, even if the layout was screwed up. It'sgreat for playing anything from low-powered mortal games, to making Inquisitor-type characters. The Psionics section, and the merits, were pretty good

>>6765906
It's funny that Sorcerers get paired with Mages as the "most alike" in the oWoD.

On a scale of 1 to 10 in terms of power, Sorcerers are like a 3 or 4 and mages are rated conservatively as God.

>>6766735
I'm curious as to how your entire ranking list goes, if Sorcerer's are a 4.

Wraith was fucking amazing. Too bad no one bought it.

Didn't the Mage book talk about sorcerers? Explaining that they had very similar powers just were crippled because they weren't awakened?

Didn't some book say if a sorcerer reached the sixth level of one of their paths (or whatever they were called) he awakened?

i liked playing right on the apocalypse. when i played oWoD we'd each use a different character from a different system. i'd be the werewolf, another guy would be a mage, and another guy a vampire. then the story teller would kick off the end of the world. good times.

when the story teller got freak legion:a player's guide to fomorii we all wanted to run one so we did a side quest where we rolled up ridiculously powered fomors and ran them bitches straight to hell. lol.

The settings for oWoD games were a lot more poignant. You had a bunch of mages fighting not just to keep magic alive, but dynamicism and freedom. At the same time, the force they were fighting didn't really set out to be some oppressive force, and a lot of the people in the system still don't intend for it to be. It's just become a victim of its own inertia and precedent, taking orders from a central command that doesn't really exist at all, merely a figment created by the collective belief that there ought to be and probably is someone running the show. The heroes of the chronicles were either run-down idealists who could still, sometimes, work miracles, even at great personal cost and still struggled to bring about that utopia that their predecessors taught of, or people who weren't sure what, exactly, what all their orders were about, and were just hoping that they were working for the greater good.

>>6767162
Apocalypse worked way better when players weren't expecting it. It was a hell of a lot more fun to inform players the world was ending about four games into the apocalypse.

>>6764399
Science seems like it gets a bad rap in oWoD, but from what I understand it was mostly because the "science" in oWoD was as shitty and evil as everything else. It was skewed to destroy dreams and encourage surrender, and there were a couple examples of good scientists that were more like the kind we see in the real world. Sure, new technological entertainment could inspire kids to think and wonder and all that, but more than likely it would be engineered to turn their brains into mush, moreso than the games we have in real life.

>>6767994
It all depends. Glass Walker werewolves liked science. Vampires didn't give two shits. Mages were mainly concerned with the difference between science and SCIENCE!.

>>6768127
I was talking specifically in terms of glamour vs. banality and dynamicism vs. stasis. That's another good thing about oWoD, it has a mostly-coherent cosmology that you get to see interpreted through different points of view (the whole Dynamicism-Stasis-Entropy thing syncing up with the Wyld-Weaver-Wyrm, banality and paradox often being caused by the same thing, but through different implications, the theory that sunlight was harmful to vampires because the Weaver, who was often associated with the sun, saw them as snags in its web.) It allowed for interesting interactions between the different supernaturals societies.

>>6767994
Also, science allowed regular people to use mage magic, if only a little bit and it broke down quickly, but for a little bit, at the cost of some paradox you can have your regular mortal buddies running around with blasters.

>>6768327
THIS.

>>6768911
Yeah, in some ways working for the Technocracy allowed for the same level of excitement and wonder that the mages experienced. Scientific breakthroughs, discovering the secrets of the universe and all that. It's just that the kinds of people who did that weren't the same people accessing intelligence and sending out orders.

The only mage character I've ever had was a very disturbed psychopath. Turned into a ghoul because he actively hunted vampires to 'give them a taste of their own medicine.'

The game didn't last long. Is there anyone who feel like running oWoD mage on IRC or some such out there? I never god to experience much whitewolf.

>>6768327
Very much this. Not avoiding possibly stupid things like the plague allowed for White Wolf to put out incredibly awesome stuff.

>>6769087
Easily replicable by working with Sons of Ether or Virtual Adepts. Granted, VA's were generally asshole loners, but still.

I really wished that the Utopians in the Union teamed up with the Sons of Ether and Adepts to go off and have awesome SCIENCE! adventures.

Challenge: Most mixed oWoD or nWoD game people here have had, eg. mages, changelings, in the same party.

Hard mode: It didn't turn into a shitstorm.

>>6769173
I played on the official chat, which means that my ratkin ran in to everything from BSD to vampires to mages to mummies and onwards (I was, in fact, a moron when I played on there) so I think anyone who played on New Bremen wins this challenge.

Granted, it was all shitstorm all the time...

>>6767994
theres SCIENCE! for zany mad scientists, hardly evil

and regular science which was originally to give power to the common man who was unawakened. it eventually was perverted into the current form but even then the technocracy is still attempting to protect man by solidifying the barriers between the real world and the umbra, especially since the fomori are closing in.

>>6769194
One of the more creative WoD campaign concepts I've heard of recently is Changeling in space. The idea being that the Hedge extends into the void of space and that a space station or craft is likely to have dozens of the appropriate alcoves necessary for a transition. The gentry in such regions would be somewhat different to their terrestrial counterparts and hence there would be several new kiths and possibly a seeming related to the fact that BITCHEZ BE IN SPAAAAAACE.

I sort of miss old Changeling. I mean, sure, the system itself sucked and the only people you could find to play it were pedophiles struggling to hold onto an already wasted youth, but the whole glamour versus banality thing resonated something fierce with me.

>>6769314
For that (not pedophile) reason alone Changeling is the best of the series.

The whole book comes across as more art than RPG book and something of a bittersweet acknowledgment of age.

I played an ananasi with a high level of crafts in silk spinning and tailoring. I believe he were an Orderly Questioner (if that means anything to anybody.)

He managed to eek out partnerships amongst Bone Gnawer Garou. He'd provide them nice, durable silk armor tailored out of his spider silk, and they'd go mangle things that needed mangling. "Were-wolves in light, dense fabric that stops silver bullets!? Oh shit!" Guarding Caerns around rural America by armoring the assorted friendly Garou that needed them. All the while, growing in strength and rank as he taxed blood from them for his webs and projects.

During an Apocalypse campaign, 'Until the Queen Arrives' (as he asked the Garou to call him- mostly in ironic hipster fashion, since the Spiders don't take faux-tribal names) made use of his existing Gifts he'd acquired over the years. Plus a few that had been developed.

Blood of Strength; the Ananasi can convert blood points to Strength points for the duration of the scene.
Tick Body; the Ananasi gains +5 blood per rank, starting at rank 3.
Blood Pump; the Ananasi can use as many blood points in a turn as they please.
Blood of Dexterity; a Gift bought at higher cost that functions the same as Blood of Strength. Convert blood points to Dex.
Blood of Stamina; Same as above.
Claws of the Mantis; The Ananasi's melee strikes now do Strength +4 damage.

The Caern was being sieged by a Pentex strike force with overkill in their weaponry. Basically they brought along bulldozers and cranes. Holed up inside, my Ananasi knew that there was just no way less than a dozen wolves were going to deal with the numbers of fomor humans armed with silver buckshot. So. He formulated a plan. He explained if he could just get enough blood, he'd be able to provide an artillery card of his own. So they permitted him to feed on themselves and the kinfolk. Every blood point went to boosting the primary physical attributes to absolutely absurd levels.

So the door flies open and, holy fuck, my were-spider comes flying out like something from a horror film. Bullets come a'flying, they do nothing; stamina in the teens means hilariously ineffective bullets on reflexive actions. Mr. Spider heads straight for the trio of Black Spirals, and the extra-actions go flying like something out of DBZ. Rage-turns Vs. blood turns. Not even a competition; cubes of rancid werewolf meat and red mist wafts by the mutants. And then the steam crane is thrown on its side.

The Garou have since left the protection of the armored hut to do their thing. The Storyteller then says we hear a helicopter overhead, the sort that rained holy hell down on Charlie in 'Nam. Before Mr. Spider can react, one of the Gnawers just disappears into a pile of meat and bloody silk. Which just pisses the rest of them off, so they do the berserker thing.

Mr. Spider knows the caern is pretty much fucked if they retreat, and they will be too. So, he activates the gift Jump. Strength multiplier for determining height of a normal jump. With strength up around 15, yes, this is pretty hilarious. The Arachnid Tank leaps up and physically *smashes* into the Pentex choopper from beneath, ripping the bottom open like a fat kid unwraps fruit rollups and dicing apart the gunmen and pilots.

All in all, twenty fomor, five Spirals, two comandeered demolition machines, a surplus military helicopter + vulcan gun team and one very shitless neighbor later, the caern is still intact, losses on the Gaian front are minimal and the Gnawers can't believe they aren't all dead. So they celebrate for awhile.

The next month, the storyteller informs us that the caern has been carpet bombed in "a freak military accident." Our Player Characters die. Ffffffff.

>>6772214
Your storyteller basically rocks fall'd you for winning? Sorry, but he's just the kind of asshole that ensures that I avoid DnD.

>>6772214
And that's why Glasswalker caerns are most secure of all.

>>6772249
It's Werewolf. The Apocalypse.
If you aren't playing it to the fullest frustrating nihilistic "row row, fight the pointless battle," then you're not playing it right.
It's a game about trying to choke the boogyman to death with your bare clawed hands before it can finish chewing out your brains, and before it can sink its jaws into anything else. And if you fail, going peacably, knowing that just maybe you managed to damage its throat well enough that whoever it goes after next can finish the job you started. Because that's the second best outcome you can ever hope for.

Plus, in all honesty, that were-spider of mine *was* honed to twinkish perfection. There was technically nothing wrong with the Blood of Dexterity and Stamina gifts he devised, since he developed them himself at a higher experience cost, but if you think about the kind of imbalanced shit that caused with enough blood, it *is* logical that Rocks would Fall.
The WoD be tough, yo.

>>6764592
This remind me a Werewolf campaign which my Glass walker ragabash was almost raped by an entire pack of Children of Gaia who get to much enthusiastic with a caern ritual.
"Is okay, is just sex. Sure you like to have fun with strangers sometimes".
"Yeah, but not being filled with hotdogs!".

>>6772496
And did you ragabash escaped from the Children's orgy?.

>>6772555
Yes...well, no, in fact the GM was a dick and my poor ragabash ended cream filled.

>>6772566
I guess your character was rank 1, because an angry sodomized rank 2 or 3 ragabash Glass walker can be consider as Malfeas unleashed.

>>6772566
I loled.

>>6772566
CREAM FILLED? KRISPY KREAM? DONUTS?

>>6771808
Banality needs a lot of sorting out if you're going to use it. Really, it's a lot like Clarity, part of it being refusing your past. What people who make fun of the "Step in a bank" aspect tend to forget is that having TOO low banality results in Bedlam, which is a very very bad thing...

Oddly enough, these people didn't utterly laugh at Losts' Clarity Loss system ("I got promoted? This shatters my worldview!" *drools* Or "Marge is pregnant?" *runs around shrieking*)

>>6772267
The ever-so fun level 2 Gift: Jam Technology, works wonders against helicopters.

"Black Hawk Down! Black Hawk..."

Mage is good.

Exhalted is tolerable

The rest are shit. THERE, I SAID IT!

>>6774613
Fuck youOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!

>>6767103
Basically, Sorcerers are those without avatars (or unawakened ones) that can work some sorts of magic. This is because while Mages are rewriting reality so to speak, the Sorcerers are using mystic loopholes in the reality. So instead of one learning as their avatar grows stronger, that they can alter everything around them subconsciously, one would learn Alchemy based on treaties of Hermes Trismestigus/Cornelius Agrippa, or classical fortune-telling, among other things.

The thing is that some Changing Breeds can use Sorcery (Tengu, several Bastet Breeds, Uktena Garou), and its paradox-free; instead you have lots of difficulty modifiers, and nasty botches based on spells. Honestly, they work a bit like Attainments in Awakening, or magic in Second Sight.

When I use Sorcerer though, I make it a point to define "How" players have paths. For example, we have Fascination, which allows for social modifiers. So one may use Fascination as "Psychoanalysis" using Freudian Psychology as a focus to alter a person's will. Another person may use music as a focus, being a Bard in essence. Likewise, alchemy can mean "Potions and brews," or "Nuclear particle transmutation", and depending on how you define Alchemy, you use a different skill (Medicine vs. Science, as an example).

> Pic related - it's my favourite setting along with Changeling.

Are you Ernest Suarez?
I bet you're Ernest Suarez.
In fact, I don't care what you say to this. You're Ernest Suarez.

>>6774694
The other thing (and this is something I found entertaining) was that rather than using Quintessence, Sorcerers used a defined subset of it called Mana. Basically, you had to define where you were drawing your power from, so a technosorcerer could have an internal nanite factory, while a Monk would have Ki, or a miracle-working priest would use Worship. Being used to lower spell difficulty, there were other merits that let one use Mana to lower non-magic difficulties. (Force of Ki in particular stands out: Spend Mana to lower the difficulty of physical actions).

Combine with one particular Path: Mana Manipulation, and this leads to a lot of potential variants for this ability. Be it a the technomancer building a recharger for his internal nanofacory, a Geomancer practicing Feng Shui, or a priest consecrating an area, the mana system I think was well-done.

>>6774712
This.

>>6764073
That was ALWAYS the thing about the metaplot -- while there was a lot of shit in there, there was some good stuff in there too, and there was nothing to keep you from cherry-picking.
Also, I've played Wraith. It's the most absurdly delicate balance ever -- every player needs to be really, really good, and a single bad session can fuck the entire chronicle. But when you have a good session, it's pretty fucking sweet.

>>6764149
You, sir, are a gentleman and a scholar.

I love the oMage setting. Rules were broken as fuck in places, but I do love the struggle. I always find the "science BAD" complaints to be rather silly, since the whole point of the Technocracy is that they're really not completely evil. Most of the Trads have at least one dedicated technomagic group (Lhaksmits and House Thig / Verditus were personal favorites).

Hunter was great. Yeah, the art was terrible, but I had a lot of fun with the game. The whole "unseen hand rips the scales from your eyes, now do something about your shitty world" theme made for good stories. nHunter is fine too, but it's got a more "I will take up this torch willingly (mostly)" feel so it isn't as desperate.

I liked the idea of Demon and the background fluff was fun, but never quite figured out the point. What do you exactly do in the game? Build a power base? Survive when the Earthbound come a calling? Some of the powers were silly (what do you mean I can start with aggravated damage via touch attack? And start with 4 Pacts, so I gain 4 Faith a day?).

>>what did people like about oWoD, the stuff you thought weas really awesome and well done?

As a Wt:A player, I was always really, really fond of the Glasswalkers and Bone Gnawers. None of that stupid tribal shit - instead of feathers and bones it was license plates, circuit boards, bits of cabling and wires.

Techy ad urban werewolves appeal to me - it's an interesting combination of the natural and the artificial.

Their powers only magnified it. A Glasswalker might not be able to punch you through the Internet but he could crawl through the connect and suddenly there's 9 feet and several hundred pounds of snarling werrewolf about to fuck your shit up hardcore.

I also liked that - once you strip away the ecological hippy bullshit - Werewolf was essentially a Viking Blood Opera at the End of The World.

It was Ragnarok - there was no winning, there was only dying and doing so upon hundred upon hundreds of corpses of your foes.

>>6774796
>Hunter was great.

You know they were Solars, right?
When they brought out first edition Exalted, they'd linked up all the World of Darkness races to things from exalted. Changing breeds from the Lunars' beastmen... vampires from Abyssal half-castes... mages from Siderial half-castes...
and then, the Imbued, were the Solars. Not Solar half-castes... the Imbuing was Exaltation. Unless you were combining Hunter with Demon, the Heralds were the Unconquered Sun.

How the mighty had fallen.

Why is it that anytime someone says their favorite tribe is the Glass Walkers, I am able to instantly know that they are shitty players?

Puzzling.

>>6774796
Demon was a little wonky -- buying your last point permanent faith, for instance, cost the same amount of experience as buying -- I shit you not -- an out-of-clan, antediluvian-level discipline.
The high-torment powers were inconsistent as hell. For some powers, they were much, much better than the normal versions, while for others, they were ungodly awful.
If you ever ran out of faith, you were well and truly fucked, and while this could easily be remedied with Pacts, it basically made certain character types nearly unplayable.

That said, Demon was a wild ride. The fluff was actually a little more like new world of darkness: here's a supernatural type, their story, and their antagonists. GO!
But, as with new world, a good ST can make something of it.

>>6774841

>>6774841

I dunno. I allways preferred bone gnawers for my urban werewolves, anyway. Fond memories of my Bone Gnawer Theurge. The party was protecting a Caern in Atlanta, and he (since he was homeless) normally stayed there to protect it. He sat outside it, playing a flute on the corner for money. His favoraite thing was playing for kids--he had quite a collection of neighborhood kids that'd come to listen to him play pretty often, called him Uncle John.

DM had them all forcibly converted by Pentex into wyrm-tained super soldiers. Ol' Johnny Boy never raged so hard.

What I liked in oWoD, was how there were so many entrenched stereotypes: (All Children of Gaia are hippies. All Toreador are angsty art-gallery hoppers), that it gave you something to go against. I don't mean anti-stereotyping (Drizzt Syndrome: Durr, I'm acually a Chaotic Good Black Spiral), but say a permutation of the original stereotypes.

For instance, Stargazers seek enlightenment. The game stereotypes them as kung fu mystics, spouting Koans and Haiku in the middle of battle. I said "Screw that, White Wolf is being Weeaboo." There *are* western stargazers out there, and one trying to seek enlightenment through a mix of Garou history, tempered with 18th century Enlightenment thinkers, (To steal from Voltaire: In the absence of the Weaver, mankind will create it) both is still Stargazer but not grossly stereotypical...

My other favorite is the "Videogames as art" Toreador...go figure.

>>6774830
If the changing breeds were the Lunars beast men, then what were the beast men who revered the Sun?
The Mokole and Corax worshipped Katanka Sonnak. Of course Mokole were weak to both silver AND gold, while Corax are only weak to gold.

>>6775015
Seconded so hard.
White-Wolf really took a big soggy soupy diabetic shit on itself with anything remotely eastern. From the gifts, to the playability of kuei-jin in hengeyokai chronicles and vice-versa, to the disciplines. And to make matters worse, the Star Gazers went to go hang in GRORIOUS NIPPON!

>>6774796
My personal favorite of the techno camps, was the Spirit Smiths under the dreamspeakers (Oddly enough, The Craftmasons originated from them). If only because their view was "We build it better than the rest, custommade for you the consumer. Respect our products and they will respect you" so they enchant sports cars, guns and everything else, hoping to recreate the awe items like Excalibur or Durandal held, in modern items.

>>6775053
Presumably beastmen that bred with solar half-castes. Alternatively, with whatever happened to the actual exalted, the UCS lended his favor to some of the beastmen, if Luna had grown weaker... or something similarly retarded.

The 1st edition Exalted - Old World of Darkness link was pretty fucking wonky, which is why they pretended it hadn't happened in 2nd edition.

>>6764422
I fucking love nockers. They were just oWoD dwarves.

>buildan
>cursan
>drinkan

Played an irish nocker mechanic/janitor with a chimeric gun that shot banality or some crap. Shit was so FUCK YE WITH A RAKE.

>>6775220
Their book said specifically science and technology by itself was not banal. It's using it to instill mind-numbness that IS. So sitting slack-jawed in front of a TV is bad, but making an MST3K affair out of it isn't.

But between the mad science (Lightning pistols. Plasma cannons. War walkers!), crazy swearing, and the fact that they are miners, yes its very easy to Dorf them up.

Mokele are in many ways similar to the Dragonkings. They have memory of a time before history, where they worshiped the Sun and everything was pure and right.

My estimation was that the Dragonkings survived into the modern area by somehow becoming partially Lunar.

>>6775252
Which is why it was so weird that Technocrats had banality 9 and 10. At the end of the day, they weren't saying "Reality is limited," just that can be understood with science. It's why the calcification of reality was upsetting to them; why their spaceships weren't working and their plasma rifles weren't shooting -- but they believed that anything was possible with science, and that there were endless frontiers to be discovered.

>>6775270
It...varied from Convention to Convention. The Void Engineers, yeah what you said makes perfect sense (for Discovery!). For the NWO or Syndicate though? Flights of fancy are good but if they threaten the Bottom Line or aren't cost-effective and profitable, you can take your cure for cancer elsewhere. Likewise, Iteration X's name pretty much gives it away. ("Everything is built off the things preceding it."), so its science.

Etherites though...are SCIENCE! personified. Some Glass Walkers too (Especially the Umbral Pilots, the Glass Walker camp that dedicates itself to exploring the Umbra in what are basically Spelljammers).

Yeah, I know that sounds apologist. Really though, I probably would treat banality as clarity though, and keep Technocrats high-clarity ("We have our worldview we wish to espouse. Everything else is a Reality Deviant. Eradicate")

I always wanted to play an Exalted game but never got the chance, the powers were just so cool.

I liked Demon, but having a party of them was a little ridiculous. One of our twinks would always, always always take Fundament. If he needed a fast escape, he'd intentionally torment it just to fuck up gravity and blanket his route. He would also always, always always carry a pocket full of loose change and marbles. I think it was the third level of Fundament that let you fuck up momentum and thereby turn /anything/ into a bullet?

>>6775403
One thing I never understood was the relationship between the Demons in Demon, and the Demons used by Infernalists. (The entire Infernal section from Book of Madness, which I thought was an excellent book btw).

Anyone care to help sort them out?

>>6775446

similar to all gaming overlap in oWoD, some of it just doesn't make sense. However, as has been stated the best part of oWoD was you could take or leave as much of it as you wanted, and there was really epic storyling if you wanted to use it. However, if you didn't, your entire game could just be a coterie of vampire's trying to get by in a normal city.

>>6775446

Demons like the Succubus found in Chicago by Night are called the Earthbound. They're demons called from the infinite boredom of the Abyss and set loose on earth. They have no human soul that they're bound to giving them any sense of conscience, which is what you are when you play a character in Demon. Part of you wants to fucking tear everything apart due to countless milennia of torment in a plane of absolute boredom and part of you is still human, if weak-willed and broken--but even that little smidgen of humanity keeps your demon half from wreaking havock. At least until your Torment meter hits max.

>>6775589

Also, human-bound Demons are scared shitless of Earthbound, because they aren't limited in the same ways by human form and have been free to roam the world for some time. Earthbound usually attempt to subjugate lesser demons and make them work toward whatever their goals are. Which usually comes down to spreading misery among humanity out of a mix of envy, rage and madness.

>>6775655
So in other words, the demons one calls up for Soul Pacts in Book of Madness, are actually Earthbound and not something else entirely? Did I get that right? That...might actually make sense.

Geez, between Earthbound, Djinn, Spectres and Fomori, there are really a LOT of extraplanar entities one can Faustian bargain with. This is pretty cool in terms of allowing cults to infilirate the mass of human society...(like a modern-day Dark Heresy. :D)

>>6775909

Yeah, more or less. Although Demon is far more watered-down generic than Mage.

Mage treats those things as either a) beings from beyond the Horizon or b) things given shape by human imagination, dreams and myth. Since Abrahamic religion is a big thing, you might think of the Demons as having taken on those trappings over time. They weren't really like that originally, but now they were always like that. Make sense? Reality being a consensual thing in WoD.

But yeah, Earthbound are demons that were brought to the earth via pacts and rituals, free of needing any anchor in a human soul.

>>6775909
Trying to reconcile the spiritual Mythos of two oWoD games is a losing proposition. Consider Werewolf, where the creator, calcifier, and destroyer of everything are certifiably the Triat, and if you don't like it you can take it up with the acid-vomiting Wyrm abomination over there, versus Demon, where many of the older Demons had actually physically met God, the creator of all, and heard His voice.

Mage is the only real exception, because with a few minor tweaks it goes with anything. Mostly because deep down, Mage is a game about everyone being right, and then raging about everyone else being wrong.

>>6778342
I've found it best to think of Mage as a group of Aspies sitting around a table and shouting at one another about how wrong everyone else is.

>>6778342

I basically it see it like this:

First, Demon happens. The whole god making shit and all that, the rebellion, rebels getting sealed away.

Then in that period where the rebels are all in Hell and before God vanishes along with his Host, he creates the Triat to self-regulate his planet.

And eventually Gaia makes the Garou and Changing Breeds, which is why the Demons never saw them and there was no mention of them whatsoever. They're just something Gaia patterned off humanity and other critters.

The deep background that used lots of folklore in interesting ways.
Mage was open ended enough to be able to accommodate any concept of "magic" yet still had a distinctive setting.
Newmage is way too bland and videogamy.

>>6778531
Yeah, that's how I see it too.

Demons, of course, not knowing about the Triat, assume that God doesn't give two shits about creation and wants them to all die.

The Werewolves, not knowing about God, assume there's no one to bring balance to the dissonance of the Triat, and assume it's up to them to fix things.

Basically everyone's fucked, up to and including the end.

>>6775091
what are they from ? spirit smiths under the dreamspeakers ?

>>6779511
... the Spirit Smiths are a subfaction within the Dreamspeakers; the shaman/animists of the Traditions. It's like how the Utopian League is a subfaction of the Sons of Ether.

My favorite one, in fact.

>>6779887
so it's a mage thing ?

>>6780047
Yes.

>>6780058
ok, thank you

>>6778701
Most Garou don't question, and assume Gaia did it, and shoehorn everything that doesn't make sense (Vampires, etc) into the triatic cosmology. There is one small heresy among the Glass Walkers (Go figure) that states that Gaia was a servant of God...

>>6780391
No werewolf, no matter how heretical, would consider Gaia to be a servant of anything, besides maybe the Wyld, and even then only in the most abstract sense.

The heresy was that Gaia and God were one and the same. It was popular among the mafioso Glass Walkers, to whom Christian religion had much import.

>>6780448
*rereads book*. Yeah, you're right. Damn, I misread. Mafia werewolves were a fun concept too though; in the game I'm running, they're resurgent among the Russian Mafia and Tijuana drug lords.

>>6779887
what book are the spirit smiths in ?

>>6778575

Stop reposting this shit in every WW thread. We get it, you like Exalted Modern, that's totally okay and we respect your opinion.

Meanwhile, the rest of us who have an Exalted game going already want a change of pace from "YOUR MISGUIDED FORMER COLLEAGUES ARE FUCKING UP YOUR CULTS AND TAKING AWAY YOUR POWER, ARE YOU AWESOME ENOUGH TO BURN THEM ALIVE/RAPE THEIR MINDS/ACTUALLY PROVE THEY ARE WRONG?" get that change of pace they want.

>>6782222

By Exalted Modern you mean oMage, right?

>>6782222

Holy shit it just occurred to me how much of oMage is cribbed from Exalted.

>>6781644
Spirit smiths can be found in Dreamspeakers Revised. Here is the link.

http://rapidshare.com/files/16566147/WOD_-_Mage_-_The_Ascension_-_Tradition_Book_-_Dreamspeakers__Re
vised_Edition_.pdf

>>6783031
Thank you, and thanks for all the other links, thanks to everyone who posted links

>>6778701
Hrm: Other issues (yeah, wallbanger metaplot)

Mokole existed before humanity, and endured their own apocalypse. They claim to have guided humanity to sentience by selectively eating the stupid ones, stating they were the metaphorical serpent in Eden. The Changelings in turn claim to have done the same, teaching humans silversmthing and firemaking among other arts. The Talons argue it was the Wyrm that taught fire (Go figure...Talon), while the Technocrats say there were always Enlightened among the ranks of humanity, pulling them out of mud huts.

I think a saner idea would be to assume that Avatars are a concept completely alien to the Triat or celestial hierarchies. A sort of Swiss army reality/history rewrite. Book of Madness does state that if you're running Mage, the Wyrm is just one of many many bad things (as opposed to the ultimate big-bad), and Dreamspeakers Revised states the Shapechangers, being made to relegate the triat, try to say everything belongs to it, even when in the case of stuff like vampires, it doesn't really make sense...("durr, they're an elaborate mix of weaverwyrm fomori"). By that logic (They frenzy, therefore they have Beast of War in them and are of the wyrm), all werewolves are too...

Hrm...other books I liked? I liked the Corax breedbook (Wereravens), the whole "Gaia's Messangers and deadpan snarkers." It doesn't hurt that Richard Dansky (the guy who wrote Wraith of course) was the author.

Link here: http://rapidshare.com/files/16579775/WOD_-_Werewolf_-_The_Apocalypse_-_Corax.pdf

>>6775909
Actually, a lot of the Demons WERE dreams-fragments of the sleeping Neverborn in the Labyrinth from Wraith. But most of the Infernalist Nephandi found themselves fucked over after 1999 when the Sixth Great Maelstrom happened and the Neverborn started to wake up. The K'llasha had it even worse, almost all of them lost their powers. But the ones that are left are probably Earthbound.

nMage was here.

oMage needs to start returning my calls.

I mean, are we not campy enough? We have evil screwdrivers from beyond time and space.

>>6786980
One of the heresies in WtA is the fact that, yes, maybe, the Rage that the werewolves used was actually of the Wyrm. Hence why you might enter the Thrall and all that.

>>6789576
I remember that from Book of Auspices, and it makes perfect sense. The argument was "If Rage is Gaia's wrath made manifest, why do naturae (plant-spirits, which are about as Gaian as one gets), normal animals, and humans, shun those with Rage. Also Thrall..."

Really, werewoof seems to work better when its about playing the role of the heretic or questioner, seeing as the orthodox is derpy as all-get.

The whole Neverborn setup makes more sense. Wow, plots within plots.