World of Darkness -- Alternative Settings
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@thenomain said in World of Darkness -- Alternative Settings:
My core problem with WoD is the players play the monsters, but rarely monstrously.
I will hit on this a second time, because holy balls. Between no Left Handed Legacies, Pure/Bale Hounds, VII/Belial's Brood, and/or Fae Loyalist PCs on nWoD games, and oWoD games either disallowing Sab/Wyrm/Technocracy outright or only allowing STAFF to be bad (other players may make an attempt, but they'll get PK'd for trying)? Takes a bit of the sting out.
True, you do not NEED these antagonists to be PCs. But if they are only allowed for plots as cannon fodder, and the rest of the time you just sit in a bar or your house sipping tea or whatever... what is the point again? They are not a persistent threat (unless the plot calls for them to be), but rather, they are often only a speed bump to further the PCs goals.
And while I DO acknowledge that they are not needed for there to be some sort of antagonism to be a thing, it also most certainly won't be a thing if MUs continue along with the trend of super friends, as it has.
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@Jennkryst At the risk of derailing the thread(part of me wants to make a 'too soon' quip), my experience with Antagonist PCs generally leads to one thing:
Holy Shit Sphere Implosion.
That or an even worse flavor of Super Friends. You -are- often playing a monster in the first place. The Antagonists are intended to be so evil that even the monsters are disturbed. Without that? Hell, might as well put on capes and start a secret handshake with your fellow super friends.
All this, of course, depends on how the atmosphere is toward straight up killin' a bad guy. All this assuming they even survived the Facebook-Twitter war of 2073.
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@royal You are killin' me here. The husband just bought Demolition Man on blu-ray and is hiding it from me until Xmas. Damn thing is eerily prescient; something new every dang time. Last watch, it was the appearance of a 'Scott Peterson' in the list of cryo-criminals right in the midst of that case while it was on the news...
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This thread, y'all.
How many times have I pitched to a not-small number of you different scenarios? OMGGGG.
I love it.
Also, dangers for supernaturals on Mars?
MARTIAN SUPERNATURALS.
Shit, Mars, symbolically speaking, is WAR. Do you have any idea how FUCKED UP the spirits of Mars would be once human influence seeped into the martian dirt and gave it that bellicose essence? Hold on toy our fucking hats, folks.
You can make an XXX-rated sister game on Venus for all the people who really just wanna TS.
Just sayin'.
I would actually LOVE a system-wide nWoD game with wormhole technology where each planet has been colonized and different ones are ruled in different ways. Maybe Earth is a husk of a planet--or has been largely left behind to flourish naturally again--and, like, you got weird terraforming on the moons of Jupiter and Saturn--players can feel free to create entire cultures, Pluto is a planet again because all the fucking Vampires love it there.
Also, I mean, space marine werewolves.
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Honestly....
....I really just want to WoD by Night my city. Because Philadelphia is full of truly amazing and weird shit that you might not ever know about, even if you actually live here.
The Comcast Center is the tallest building in the city, run by an absolutely massive telecom giant that has extended its creepy monopoly tentacles into so many areas of the city. It claimed responsibility for lifting the Curse of Billy Penn. It has massive, massive video screens all throughout its lobby and hosts public events there, from concerts to sporting event-viewing, and so on. The screens are so large, they're a tourist attraction. People come into the building just to look at the giant TV-screens. You legit want to tell me the Technocracy DOESN'T run that shit?
Or South Street -- South Street that's home to Tattooed Mom's, and the Digital Ferret (basically the physical manifestation of Metropolis records), and was home to Zipperhead (punk shop of Dead Milkmen fame), and Harry's Occult shop (which was a creepy occult shop in the 'Leave It to Beaver' days, and that's just weird and amazing), and the super weird condom store that has a dick fountain, and the Wiccan store that's been there forever, and the home that Larry Fine of the Three Stooges was born in, and god knows how many skeevy tattoo shops, and head shops, and weird little bodegas. South Street is bounded by a neighborhood full of Federal-era houses that some of the richest people in the city live in, and South Street is a solid nine blocks of where they shoved all the 'freaks' into a self-contained neighborhood. It's like there's literally a barrier of containment around the place.
Or the Mutter Museum -- a museum of medical oddities founded in 1858, which was once the center of biomedical research in the city during the 19th century. The building is all Victorian gorgeousness, and yet houses the death cast of Chang and Eng, the original 'Siamese' twins, and the world's largest colon (it's super gross!), and Grover Cleveland's tumor, and jars full of organs, and wax models of syphilitic skin infections. I'm, like, 99% sure that the Ordo Dracul sleeps in the basement.
The Skulls fraternity they made that shitty movie about? It's a real thing. It was founded at UPenn in 1850. It's had wrongful death suits in recent years. What are they doing in there?!?
Eastern State Penitentiary -- the first true 'penitentiary' in history. It was abandoned by the city in 1971. It's been turned into a massive haunted house every Halloween since the 90s. It is supposedly truly haunted, and as someone who has worked there, I can verify that the place is eery and terrifying, even when you know it well. Ghost Hunters did an episode there.
The Mummers. They're Changelings. I just can't decide if they're Spring, or Summer, or both given their penchant for grand, ecstatic display -- and violent, drunken racism run amok.
The Pagans MC -- an outlaw, 1%-er motorcycle club located mostly in the mid-Atlantic. They generally fight with the Hell's Angels for territory, and their headquarters is in Delaware County -- just outside Philadelphia. They are so hyperviolent that they've run the Hell's Angels entirely out of town, and firebombed one of their bars.
You want to do gritty and ugly and violent and corrupt buried under a veneer of colonial beauty and respectability and history? You do Philadelphia. It's a weird, wonderful town.
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@aria said in World of Darkness -- Alternative Settings:
Honestly....
....I really just want to WoD by Night my city. Because Philadelphia is full of truly amazing and weird shit that you might not ever know about, even if you actually live here.
As mentioned somewhere before, if you can tolerate X20 and the CoH staff, Let Freedom Ring is a Philadelphia by Night game. Bonus points because I am snek there.
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@jennkryst Nobody can tolerate Honey Badger and Whooping Crane anymore really.
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@jennkryst I checked it out, briefly.
From my conversations with staff, it seems that..... there's no setting, no real moderation, no NPCs, and no plot. It just exists as a sandbox for players to do whatever they want, and staff does.... IDEFK? Needless to say, I didn't find that particularly appealing. Less so when I logged onto CoH thinking maybe it was just that the staff hadn't had time to really develop their second site and was immediately asked what I was making by some random stranger who promptly decided that we were going to dual-app siblings!!!!
I did not log back in.
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I still like my idea for an Escape from New York style prison city-based WoD game.
Supernaturals are all thrown into a giant prison city and monitored by Mages, who have taken over the world. Because wizards are dicks.
Also criminals are thrown in there too. And other undesirables.
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@aria What's really interesting about this? ...the old maps from oooooooooooooooooold oWoD had Philly as a Sabbat stronghold right standing out in the midst of woof country (to the west) and Camarilla Like Whoa (DE state line and down) territory, while NJ immediately across the river may as well have just been named Pentexville.
I thus have a long-standing case of the sads that there was never a regional game more or less planted smack dab in the middle of that region, with Chester as neutral ground (aka 'occasionally the DMZ') with radiating regions as their respective strongholds.
Edit: P. S. If I ever do the parody game, I'm basing the 'May as well be Vampire Diaries North'-ville on Westchester, around the college. Because.. oh, god, it just is.
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@surreality I hate (not really) to say that the CW format works for me, I loved the Vampire Diaries for like the first 5 seasons, I haven't caught up but... those hips of hers... mmph.
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Doo eet. Make the thing. We can New Prospect LFR, just like CoH!
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@jennkryst Some day, I may do the parody game. Some day. Take a look at this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/West_Chester,_Pennsylvania and tell me that isn't 'the NOT southern Vampire Diaries town'. It barely requires a tweak. Random street faires? Check. Old timey pretty buildings and upscale cafes running up and down all the main streets?
Check. Sprawl of ZOMG expensive mcMansions (and real mansions) dotting the hillsides? CHECK. It's... kinda perfect. Lived there a little over a year, and... yeeeeeeeeeah. It's almost funny.This is not the same as the Chester mentioned above for a more serious oWoD setting. Not... even hardly close.
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@surreality I may or may not live in Delaware, and drive up to Swarthmore semi-regularly for nerd sales/auctions. I have hit West Chester on accident before.
Also on purpose, when they used to have Drum Corps there.
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@jennkryst Oh, dear gods. There are two of us in Dull...uh...where? (I'm there now... born here, flitted about for college, landed here again and am planted. This place is a vortex, no lie. NO ESCAPING!)
I sortakinda loved parts of living in WC. It's lovely. It is. (I lucked into a crazy wonderful apartment complete with low rent due to a WTF history.) Parking? Not so much. Fuck parking there a wholllllllle lot.
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Van Helsing has an interesting premise of 'the vampires blacked out the sun' and are spreading. They have footsoldiers who aren't super intelligent (more along the lines of zombies, to an extent, from what I've seen in the bit I've watched of the first season), but there are intelligent ones who are primarily the leaders. It could be some neat inspiration.
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@bobotron Pretty sure some kind of variant ghoul or thrall could be worked up for the footsoldier type without too much trouble, really.
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Right. Like, the footsoldier-type thing was an inspiration for the Feral thin bloods near the end of the Masquerade LARP I was running.
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@coin said in World of Darkness -- Alternative Settings:
Also, I mean, space marine werewolves.
Give me a different RPG system than CoD and we can go to town.
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@thenomain said in World of Darkness -- Alternative Settings:
@coin said in World of Darkness -- Alternative Settings:
Also, I mean, space marine werewolves.
Give me a different RPG system than CoD and we can go to town.
Ask and you shall recieve: