PyReach
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Also honestly I would love to see a non modern setting. What I would give for the To the Strongest Hellenistic setting, plunked down in Alexandria Aegyptus or Bactria or something. Variety, and bronze age crushing brutality.
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@somasatori When I look at NWoD & CoD, I have different opinions on the versions of the various spheres. I prefer Requiem and Forsaken 1st Edition, but Awakening and Lost 2nd. Geist I’m still undecided on, while I prefer Hunter 1st Edition and Promethean 2nd. My Mummy preference is also to 1st Edition because to me it feels like they phoned in 2nd Edition MtC to avoid people asking about it. Of the other three CoD games (Demon, Beast, and Deviant), I can honestly say I enjoy Demon, I wasn’t that impressed with Beast (even before all the stuff about McFarland came to light), and I haven’t actually looked at Deviant yet, though I suspect I will enjoy it as I’m here for some good body horror.
@labsunlimited There are a bunch of really neat historical settings in the two (or is it three) Dark Eras books.
Proud Member of the Pro-Mummy Alliance
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Only the biggest dorks need apply because of how much history is in there, but I want to make the cultures and faiths of the Hellenistic world come to life with wizards. There is no equivalent to Orders, just Schools, which leaves a huge blank spot to fill in with cultures from Syrian to Shakyan, and faiths from Abrahamic to Zoroastrian. But if you’re into that, it’s the game for you.
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@MisterBoring said in PyReach:
I prefer Requiem and Forsaken 1st Edition
For those of us who are about to (in the next decade or three) embark upon running a Requiem game, can you articulate why?
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For those of us who are about to (in the next decade or three) embark upon running a Requiem game, can you articulate why?
Mostly because the revamps of the Covenants don’t grab me as well as the originals did. Covenant is a really tough choice for me playing 1st Edition, where as when I look at them in 2nd, I just go:
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@labsunlimited said in PyReach:
Only the biggest dorks need apply…
It is me, I am dorks
Honestly I would love to see a Hellenistic setting that isn’t Lords and Ladies and would be very down to play a Seleucid sage who seeks the mysteries.
@MisterBoring said in PyReach:
@somasatori When I look at NWoD & CoD, I have different opinions on the versions of the various spheres. I prefer Requiem and Forsaken 1st Edition, but Awakening and Lost 2nd. Geist I’m still undecided on, while I prefer Hunter 1st Edition and Promethean 2nd.
I do agree with several of these! I also think Hunter and Werewolf 1st edition tend to play better, largely because those games have the same social groups at the core level. They facilitated the pack and the cell better in 1e I think. I’m not sold on Awakening 2e but I think that’s mostly because I don’t straight up understand the lingo behind spells. A friend of mine broke it down and showed me that spellcasting tool, which made it make more sense. Lost 2e, to me, feels like it fulfills the original ideas behind Lost, as you can kinda make whatever fae creature you want. Turning contracts into single use powers you buy individually instead of a track that you have to follow really went a long way towards that, imo.
My Mummy preference … avoid people asking about it.
When games imitate the MUSH dynamic
I haven’t actually looked at Deviant yet, though I suspect I will enjoy it as I’m here for some good body horror.
Deviants is squarely fine. There are some good ideas there, as well as some things that seem to replicate Promethean. For instance you could be a Remade who had previously died and was resurrected by some strange power or weird science, and your maker is referred to as your “Progenitor,” which does make me wonder why you wouldn’t just play Promethean.
There’s an indie game called PsiRun that emulates the genre that Deviants is trying to do, being escaped supers on the run from a shadowy organization who made them what they are (an easy example of this in fiction would be Eleven from Stranger Things). PsiRun does this better in my opinion, but I am also probably biased since it’s a Meguey Baker story game and that’s been my tabletop jam for the last 10 years.
@labsunlimited There are a bunch of really neat historical settings in the two (or is it three) Dark Eras books.
I’d love to see an Islamic Golden Age setting or someone do that Three Kingdoms of Darkness three kingdoms/post-Han empire setting.
One of the other inspirations for doing this particular thing was talking to people who had all these ideas of different nwod games that were single sphere (or maybe 2 sphere) set in different eras and times, actually! Someone pitched me a cool idea about Geist set in 1920s Paris, another talked about werewolves in pre-Spain Mesoamerica.
I had an idea about doing Changeling and Werewolf set in and around the Bangkok suburb of Sathon, which is a pretty expansive expatriate community (getting around the likelihood that everyone’s going to play Americans by making it a reasonable assumption). My idea behind that was using the Others to hold a mirror up to how the West tends to treat the Thai people as a country of servants for whatever tourist whims they have, and to show werewolves as attempting to desperately hang on in a place where the spirit world has run amok due to runaway industrialization and attempts by Western countries to westernize the country.
Anyway, the point being I think there are a lot of “little games” out there that people would make it they had the tools, and a lot of them would probably be pretty cool to play on, like labsunlimited’s To The Strongest one.
"And the Fool says, pointing to the invertebrate fauna feeding in the graves: 'Here a monarchy reigns, mightier than you: His Majesty the Worm.'"
Italo Calvino, The Castle of Crossed Destines -
@somasatori I’d be down to play a game set in Caliph Al-Mamun’s reign in Samarra while the First Mihna is going on. Persia is in flux but the Byzantine Empire is still creaking along. The Abbasid Caliphs and their politics were highly esoteric, and while we are before the rise of the Fatimids, there may be no more mysterious conspiracy than what the Ismailis were trying to pull.
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@somasatori said in PyReach:
Meguey Baker story game
A bit off topic, but I’m currently prepping Under Hollow Hills for my home tabletop group. I’m super excited.
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@somasatori said in PyReach:
1e
To help aleviate this, ask people if they want a Firan-style +ts tracker for Gauru, so you know they’ve been bad/yiffed eachother/need to take a harmony hit/have a doom
metisspooky spirit baby.For serious, I never want to play an Auspice with the same Renown as Tribe in 1e. 2e I have no problem with that.
@somasatori said in PyReach:
Changeling Kiths and Seemings no longer being attached to one another
Kind of fair, but everyone always took Dual Kith to get what they really wanted, so shrug?
@somasatori said in PyReach:
turns off beats,
Plz turn back on ‘turn a fail into a crit fail, gain xp’, it was the best one. Aspirations were also neat, admittedly a lot of paperwork though.
@labsunlimited said in PyReach:
Also honestly I would love to see a non modern setting. What I would give for the To the Strongest Hellenistic setting, plunked down in Alexandria Aegyptus or Bactria or something. Variety, and bronze age crushing brutality.
Really any of the before times. Pre-cell phone. Use your supernatural communication spells!
@MisterBoring said in PyReach:
Mummy preference is also to 1st Edition because to me it feels like they phoned in 2nd Edition MtC
It was honestly wild of them to make a 1e Mummy game after Demon had already dropped as 2e, and I think Vampire and Werewolf and Mage had all had 2e drops, too.
@somasatori said in PyReach:
the lingo
The lingo is dumb, they decided to invent a bunch of words for things to make them sound more mystical, its fine.
@somasatori said in PyReach:
My Mummy preference … avoid people asking about it.
When games imitate the MUSH dynamic
RUDE
Mummy Pun? MUMMY PUN!
She/her -
@labsunlimited I pre-emptively claim Shohreh Aghdashloo as a played by.
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@Jennkryst said in PyReach:
It was honestly wild of them to make a 1e Mummy game after Demon had already dropped as 2e
The Mummy & Demon releases were definitely part of why I stopped backing Onyx Path crowd funds. Those guys are terrible at keeping their schedules. If they had maintained it, Mummy 1st Edition would have been out in 2012, instead of getting delivered in 2014 alongside the first wave of CoD. It also didn’t help that I started considering a lawyer when it came to getting my Wraith 20th rewards.
Proud Member of the Pro-Mummy Alliance
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@MisterBoring laughs in 3e Exalted fulfillment time They scrapped what they originally wrote and started over like, a year in.
Mummy Pun? MUMMY PUN!
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@Jennkryst said in PyReach:
laughs in 3e Exalted fulfillment time They scrapped what they originally wrote and started over like, a year in.
I was trying to repress that memory.
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@labsunlimited said in PyReach:
@somasatori I’d be down to play a game set in Caliph Al-Mamun’s reign in Samarra while the First Mihna is going on. Persia is in flux but the Byzantine Empire is still creaking along. The Abbasid Caliphs and their politics were highly esoteric, and while we are before the rise of the Fatimids, there may be no more mysterious conspiracy than what the Ismailis were trying to pull.
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@MisterBoring said in PyReach:
@Jennkryst said in PyReach:
It was honestly wild of them to make a 1e Mummy game after Demon had already dropped as 2e
The Mummy & Demon releases were definitely part of why I stopped backing Onyx Path crowd funds. Those guys are terrible at keeping their schedules. If they had maintained it, Mummy 1st Edition would have been out in 2012, instead of getting delivered in 2014 alongside the first wave of CoD. It also didn’t help that I started considering a lawyer when it came to getting my Wraith 20th rewards.
I feel extra spicy about this topic as someone who has been running a game in the Trinity/Aeon universe off and on since undergrad
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@somasatori oh man, I had a Upeo wa Macho concept for a game, I’ve always wanted to revisit, since the game only went two sessions. I’ve never seen anyone run the game since.
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@somasatori oh man, I had a Upeo wa Macho concept for a game, I’ve always wanted to revisit, since the game only went two sessions. I’ve never seen anyone run the game since.
I always thought that universe was really well done, but I’ve not met too many other people who have played Adventure, Aberrant, or Aeon. I usually played Aesculapians when I wasn’t the ST.
When we started back in the early 2000s, we were doing Aberrant and played those characters biweekly for like 3 years, then took a break and came back to Aeon, where the Aberrant characters were now adversaries! Most recently we did another Aberrant game that was laying the groundwork for this Chromatic plotline. You know what my schedule is and has been like, so it’s been like 2 1/2 years since my group has met up again
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@somasatori said in PyReach:
@somasatori oh man, I had a Upeo wa Macho concept for a game, I’ve always wanted to revisit, since the game only went two sessions. I’ve never seen anyone run the game since.
I always thought that universe was really well done, but I’ve not met too many other people who have played Adventure, Aberrant, or Aeon. I usually played Aesculapians when I wasn’t the ST.
i love OG Aberrant so much
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@somasatori said in PyReach:
@somasatori said in PyReach:
The one I hear the most is Changeling Kiths and Seemings no longer being attached to one another.
sidebar obvs but, why? from my (admittedly fairly limited) experience with Changeling it seems like most peeps in MU-land were basically doing that anyway, just with a kind of pricey Merit that existed in the first edition?
Your guess is as good as mine! I think the detached system tends to simulate the Make-Your-Own-Dark-Faerie-Tale emulator that Changeling is trying to do, but I’ve personally never gotten an answer beyond “I don’t like it”
Ohh, man, do I have opinions on why I preferred the first edition of C:tL and the disconnect of Seemings and Kiths is one of them, though for a very particular reason. The update allows you to mix and match your Seeming (broad theme) with your Kith (pointed narrative), but doesn’t allow you to mix Kiths. This was incredibly frustrating for me when making my last PC because it was billed as “more flexibility”, but didn’t actually allow me to mechanically do the thing I would’ve preferred where none of the Seemings seemed to fit quite right but multiple Kiths did. It felt like settling on something I had to take but being locked out of something I wanted, with no obvious reason as to why this should be an issue if their goal was for me to be able to custom make my own dark fairy tale. You can fully customize your character! Except… not the way you actually want to. Sorry!
I also really disliked what they did with the Pledge system. In the previous edition, Pledges had to be mechanically balanced. This didn’t always make them fair, mind you. It’s is Changeling after all, and fairies are jerks. But it did make the rules for them, from an OOC standpoint, consistent and clear. The new version of Pledges seems to operate on a sliding scale of “much more open-ended depending on Pledge type”, with the examples of consequences given both very broad in scope and fairly limited in how many were presented. This is particularly true for Bargains, which have almost no mechanics attached to them whatsoever. That flexibility is great for TT but terrible for a MU* where, as noted elsethread, players hate to lose and are likely to react poorly to suffering consequences that can have such broad interpretations of what counts as fair. In the first edition systems, and frankly even in the oWoD Pledge system, which had a limited list of what Oaths you could swear, the consequences for breaking it were obvious and clear. “If you do this, you get X benefit but if you do this, you face Y consequence” is harder to argue with when that’s explicitly what someone signed up for, right here on the dotted line of their request.
Finally, and this is less about mechanics, I hate how the book is laid out. It drops you right into Seemings and Kiths without explaining the society that they’re living in. You might think that’s because they wanted to get all the CGen stuff lumped together first, since players reference that so often, but nope! The CGen chapter is then the THIRD chapter in the book, with the theme and society information sandwiched in between. But wait, wait! The explanation of Attributes and Skills is then listed in the FOURTH chapter, along with… combat mechanics, Pledges, and Tokens. If you’ve been playing WoD/CoD for twenty-some odd years and know what you’re looking for, this is a mildly irritating inconvenience. If you’ve never played these games before and know nothing about how this works? You’re getting a slew of character creation mechanics thrown at your face with zero context, get the context in the next section of the book, and now need to flip back and forth between three different chapters to actually make a character. I… what? No. No, that’s just bad design and I want to give their editor a stern look and a solid, “I’m not mad. I’m just disappointed.”
I will note that there’s also a lot of really good things about the 2nd edition that I thoroughly enjoyed, as well as few other, nitpicky things I didn’t like. But those are top three things that I found actively difficult to deal with in game play as opposed to being a minor quirk or hiccup, like all systems have.
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While I vastly prefer 2nd Edition Lost in 90% of everything…the complaints about pledges are absolutely valid.
There’s some good things: bargains with mortals are better in that they serve a specific purpose that mechanically explains HOW they hide you from the Gentry and how that can be useful.
Likewise, Seasonal bargains are better (but badly organized - it is a badly organized book overall, with a lot of weird things hidden throughout).
But I really miss being able to strike mechanically detailed pledges with other characters outside of the few defined bits in the core book. YES, the pledge mechanics were overly complicated and desperately needed some streamlining, but they threw the baby out with the bathwater.
