Demon: The Descent Post-Apoc Game -- Issues and Concerns

Ganymede

Briefly, no. Demons are not certain as to what happened. There are too many questions. And although "civilization as we know it" may have been destroyed, that does not mean that the God-Machine has any less control over what is going on. The brilliant part of the theme is that it's impossible for players or their PCs to know for certain what's really going on. And that's where staff come into play, running the game.

I would think most Demons would maintain their Covers. There is enough danger from Mortals, as unwitting pawns of the God-Machine, that it is worthwhile to keep them up. On the surface, it would appear that humanity has wrested control from the monsters that used to think they owned it -- the vampires, the mages, the werewolves. Under the surface, it has merely survived.

But the God-Machine isn't destroyed. Like the Reapers (prior to Mass Effect's end), it is always a threat. And if the destruction of human society was part of the Plan, then the God-Machine is still there, the Angels are still hunting Demons, and Demons should still remain undercover to figure out what the fuck really happened. In short, just because there are fewer information networks and computers doesn't mean there aren't other ways to track and find people. At least, if you're the God-Machine.

@darksabrz

To me, Demons are like rogue programs in the Matrix, like the Merovingian. The Architect and the Agents are out to get them, but they are superior to "humanity" because they have their own ways to access and manipulate the Matrix. But they are not human; they are programs that have developed enough self-awareness and free will to break free from the Program.

@Bobotron

I think I have it still; it might still be in my DropBox account. I'll message you.

Bennie

The God-Machine clearly states several things, and repeats them. They're easy when you get into a groove to look for them:

Infrastructure requires an Angel or a human to create it, maintain it, alter it, or shut it down (on purpose).
Typically, Infrastructure is folded into cities, crammed between floors of buildings for example. This is not always the case. If you read the historical setting material, Infrastructure can be folded into anything, inside the tent of a migrant culture, into the barge at a river crossing. Any sign of civilization can have Infrastructure. So logically you could fold it into: the engine block of a Jeep, into a train car, into the International Space Station, into Satellites, and before man settled into spaces, Angels could have been folding it into things we take for granted today as signs of civilization such as oil fields, coal mines, iron deposits, and so forth. It doesn't explicitly take a man. Man has become the labor force, just by population density, and therefore the God-Machine has spread with civilization. That doesn't mean the God-Machine wasn't spreading before man spread so far. It just means the God-Machine had to rely more on Angels for the work force.

In any kind of event that would disrupt access to an easily herded human labor force, such as a zombie virus outbreak, the God-Machine's plans can continue, even in spite of zombies. First, zombie herds can be just as responsible for the creation of new Infrastructure as they can be responsible for its abandonment. The clearing of a building of human life (a zombie outbreak occupies the building) may have just as much to do with the plans of the God-Machine as occupying that building with humans that are unwittingly maintaining or building Infrastructure. Zombies can be cogs too. Not every human who is a cog knows what they are doing. Memories get erased, altered, people get hollowed out, show up dead elsewhere, etc. Zombies aren't necessarily incapable of directed action, either. So subjecting a zombie to a command and having it pull a lever repeatedly could serve the exact same purpose as any God-Machine-touched human doing the same job.

Covers would be harder to maintain in any world win which the God-Machine had more Angels active, and more eyes on a smaller population. One use of Embeds on a zombie attack, rather than guns or pikes, could spell disaster for Covers. So the smaller the human population (and the fewer zombies around to hide amongst), the more difficult it is to pretend you aren't a Demon. A funny alternative would be to allow zombie Covers. If a herd were to swarm, hiding amongst them as one of them, until they passed, would be hilarious. The opposite of this is Angels and similar hiding among the zombies, too. Fair is fair.

At the end of the day, the Cold War operated in war-torn places with survival in question just as often as it did in a downtown city center with brush passes. And the God-Machines Infrastructure existed before major cities and population centers, as easily as it can exist 'today'. If you keep those two items in mind, the question of Covers just becomes about scarcity and creativity.

Finally, there is more to play in a Demon game than just a Demon. There are a whole plethora of subs if you pick up Heirs to Hell. Stigmatics, Latents, Activated Latents, Orphans...

Deleted

So Demon is basically The Matrix?

Bennie

@Admiral That's one of the source materials, actually. It says the world being set in enemy controlled territory is accurate, and the renegade programs demonstrate a lot of Incarnation and Agenda archetypes. And Embeds are visually designed after the Matrix fight sequences.

darksabrz

@Ganymede Funny you should put it that way -- just from reading the first couple of pages of the Introduction (I nabbed the PDF), I came away with, "This is like The Matrix for nWoD." I'm definitely gonna keep reading on it now.

Bennie

@darksabrz Ironically, if you use characters like the werewolves and vampires from The Matrix trilogy (the henchmen), you can use 2e Ghouls, 2e Wolfblooded, 2e Revenants, etc., (not actual 2e Werewolves and Vampires) for a lot of the cultist characters involved in various Agencies. Rather than sticking to just Demon characters.

Wizz

@Ganymede said:

But the God-Machine isn't destroyed. Like the Reapers (prior to Mass Effect's end), it is always a threat. And if the destruction of human society was part of the Plan, then the God-Machine is still there, the Angels are still hunting Demons, and Demons should still remain undercover to figure out what the fuck really happened. In short, just because there are fewer information networks and computers doesn't mean there aren't other ways to track and find people. At least, if you're the God-Machine.

@Bennie said:

Covers would be harder to maintain in any world win which the God-Machine had more Angels active, and more eyes on a smaller population. One use of Embeds on a zombie attack, rather than guns or pikes, could spell disaster for Covers. So the smaller the human population (and the fewer zombies around to hide amongst), the more difficult it is to pretend you aren't a Demon.

That's kind of my point exactly. In the game, for the God-Machine to be an actual threat, the risk of exposure is constant, even in cities of millions-- it doesn't take information networks, computers, whatever to track demons. Just partially changing form or even just using a power pulses your Primum, which is how Angels hunt. The lack of information networks and the comforts and facades of society wouldn't hurt the God-Machine, it'd hurt the Demons. There are fewer places, people, and structure to hide behind; to suggest that the God-Machine could orchestrate this elaborate collapse of society, force populations into small pockets, and then for whatever bumbling reason couldn't tighten the noose just sounds hand-wavey to me.

But at this point I think I've expressed my concern and it's not one you share.

To be a little bluntly honest, I think that with your desire to first play "Zombies AND Changelings" and now "Zombies AND Demons," what comes after the "AND" isn't quite as important as "Zombies" and I'd kind of like to understand why you don't just make a zombie game, or at least include an "AND" that doesn't mean you have to, to me, pretzel the setting and mechanics out of shape. I'd like to see "Demons AND Nazis," "Demons AND Cyberpunk Tokyo," "Demons AND the Renaissance," "Demons AND Noir." I think most anything would be a better fit than Descent and zombies-- but that's extremely personal preference speaking.

ThatOneDude

@Wizz Zombies AND Mage ... wait, Mages would just wipe out the zombies and we'd just be left with Mage >.<

Zombies AND Mortal+ ... That could work.

Bobotron

@ThatOneDude said:

@Wizz Zombies AND Mage ... wait, Mages would just wipe out the zombies and we'd just be left with Mage >.<

Zombies AND Mortal+ ... That could work.

And this is why, in the original treatment Gany had me write, the Mages were the cause of the zombie apocalypse and were wiped out to the last by anti-magic mutating Abyssal zombies.

Ganymede

@Wizz said:

There are fewer places, people, and structure to hide behind; to suggest that the God-Machine could orchestrate this elaborate collapse of society, force populations into small pockets, and then for whatever bumbling reason couldn't tighten the noose just sounds hand-wavey to me.

I'm not sure I'm following your train of thought. You seem to go off the rails at this point. At what point did I say that there wasn't a constant threat? I believe my last post suggested otherwise.

To be a little bluntly honest, I think that with your desire to first play "Zombies AND Changelings" and now "Zombies AND Demons," what comes after the "AND" isn't quite as important as "Zombies" and I'd kind of like to understand why you don't just make a zombie game, or at least include an "AND" that doesn't mean you have to, to me, pretzel the setting and mechanics out of shape. I'd like to see "Demons AND Nazis," "Demons AND Cyberpunk Tokyo," "Demons AND the Renaissance," "Demons AND Noir." I think most anything would be a better fit than Descent and zombies-- but that's extremely personal preference speaking.

The use of the term "zombie" was misleading, in all contexts. The game I was working on with Bobotron and Cobalt was always post-apocalyptic, and the end of civilization as we know it was caused by a virus that turned much of the world's population into mindless, cannibalistic, hyper-aggressive creatures -- which I euphemistically called "zombies." The setting was primarily inspired by The Last of Us, which has its own inspiration. So, if you've played that video game, you'll understand the vision for society.

Yes, I want a "zombie" game like that. Maybe I shouldn't put Demons in there, but I think the game's theme is an interesting backdrop to use. I like it better than the Strix Chronicles, that's for certain.

Sunny

@Ganymede said:

@Wizz said:

There are fewer places, people, and structure to hide behind; to suggest that the God-Machine could orchestrate this elaborate collapse of society, force populations into small pockets, and then for whatever bumbling reason couldn't tighten the noose just sounds hand-wavey to me.

I'm not sure I'm following your train of thought. You seem to go off the rails at this point. At what point did I say that there wasn't a constant threat? I believe my last post suggested otherwise.

That's the point; he's saying that the threat is too big, there's no logical reason that the demons would survive. It's a threat in the books amongst zillions of people for them to hide in. It doesn't just turn off the smoke screen, it dresses them in neon colors, hangs lights all over them, and stands them up in the darkness for everyone to find.

Bennie

If I had a vote, I'll be honest. Demon: The Descent would be most interesting to me in a 1950s-1960s Cold War setting that had Agencies of Demons imbedded in mundane agencies like the CIA, FBI, and armed services of the period, in a war-torn place like East Berlin, or the Eastern Bloc. This is apocalyptic. This is where a lot of the apocalyptic imagery we discovered in Sci Fi came from, honestly. Ravaged places, rampant homelessness, famine, disease, mud, broken families, bullets whizzing outside your walls.

Even as early as 2 years after World War II, the character's Agencies solidify into the organizations we saw rise. Infrastructure is being rampantly worked on in the rebuilding of post-war governments. The space race, espionage, nuclear arms racing, Soviet power consolidation gives you more than enough fertile ground. Plus you have style, you have panache. Look at what the Incredibles and James Bond does with the time period. What comics did. The World of Darkness is just as fertile and interesting as much of the media we enjoy about the period.

And again, it's pretty frightening as a period, to pick your way through the ruble, and not know if your meeting is going to involve being shot by enemy forces you're trying to hide from. Add Angels and their own Agencies.

HelloRaptor

Zombies AND Mage ... wait, Mages would just wipe out the zombies and we'd just be left with Mage >.<

A zombie apocalypse for Mage would probably look like Resident Evil, with the Seers having been wiped out when one of their own fell to the Abyss and used their labs and resources to produce and distribute an Abyssal virus that turns humans into the menagerie we see there. Resident Evil has a pretty full spectrum of zombie-type-creatures, and an Abyssal plague spread in the same fashion would be as much a threat to Mages as to anyone else.

You can run, but you can't really escape. You hide, but they'll eventually find find you. You can try to tamper with them directly with magic, but risk backlash or corruption as you interact with Abyssal forces. You can turtle up and protect yourself for a while, but that's only sending up a flare to attract the attention of bigger, badder things.

So there you go, Zombies AND Mages.

Ganymede

@Sunny

That's actually a very good point. I'll have to think that through a little more.