PyReach
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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.
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Gosh, this whole thing is exciting. I dunno why CofD games are out of fashion at the moment but I’m also in that space of ‘if I had the time I’d totally do one’. I’d love a Vampire The Requiem game out there. (I do prefer the 2nd edition for basically all of CofD tbh).
Anyway this isn’t really that much of a contribution I’m just excited for chatter about cofd games hurray.
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I’ve always thought though, that sometimes running single sphere games would be the way to go rather than worrying about all the crossover. It either becomes a lot of hiding or a lot of sharing. Both of which are fine I guess, depending on what you want.
Sometimes I want to take the cross sphere to the next level, I had the idea once of running a changeling + vampire game but treat it as basically just a single sphere game, and the vampires like they’re an extra court. So you’d have the usual Changeling courts and the vampires would be the … night court, or something. But this mostly came about because of the Oaths of Night and Day merit in the Dark Eras book that let a Notary notarize an oath with a Changeling and I thought that was interesting.
Any Vampire game I made these days though would be allowing the Dhampir template from Half-Damned as an option. I think this would be a good thing to see as it would allow people to get that ‘dip’ into vampire with the partial template like a Wolf-blooded or Fae-touched, without needing to do the whole blood-slavery thing that comes with being a ghoul. Though I’d still allow ghouls too.
I’d probably do something like Vampire/Changeling/Deviant? Maybe throw werewolf in too. The truth is there’s too much of CofD that I like and want to see represented. I always thought it would also be neat to allow the Absent as a mortal+ option, the ghost template from Geist that could be used for PCs.
I do agree with being generally sad about the pledge system in Lost 2e. That and there’s a few statemtns that the idea that a promise is ‘part of the changeling forever, even if broken’ and stuff that always makes people hesitant to actually promise things. And yeah, I agree that Lost can and should often be cagey with their words, actually making deals and agreements should also be something they shouldn’t be so hesitant to do maybe.
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@Livia I’m idly wondering how much my Everworld idea would work with nWoD. It was conceived for oWoD post-EotW, but it might work with nWoD. HMMMMM…
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Sometimes I want to take the cross sphere to the next level, I had the idea once of running a changeling + vampire game but treat it as basically just a single sphere game, and the vampires like they’re an extra court. So you’d have the usual Changeling courts and the vampires would be the … night court, or something. But this mostly came about because of the Oaths of Night and Day merit in the Dark Eras book that let a Notary notarize an oath with a Changeling and I thought that was interesting.
This also has strong Jim Butcher/Dresden Files vibes and I’m here for it!
Any Vampire game I made these days though would be allowing the Dhampir template from Half-Damned as an option. I think this would be a good thing to see as it would allow people to get that ‘dip’ into vampire with the partial template like a Wolf-blooded or Fae-touched, without needing to do the whole blood-slavery thing that comes with being a ghoul. Though I’d still allow ghouls too.
I really liked the Dhampir template. It is one of the better minor templates I’ve seen and feels way cooler than the previous dhampyr/dhampir templates from older editions.
The truth is there’s too much of CofD that I like and want to see represented. I always thought it would also be neat to allow the Absent as a mortal+ option, the ghost template from Geist that could be used for PCs.
I personally tend to appreciate this perspective more than how the big multi-sphere games sometimes tend to be, which is as a way to compete with other big multisphere games. It’s always cooler to be enthusiastic and exuberant about things that you want to see rather than doing it out of a shrewd sense of wanting to be the next big thing in the WoD/CofD world.
On PyReach I’m mostly including things to allow people to have it if they end up using the system. Here’s what I have:
These are all very optional and designed to be added or removed based on the type of game that you want to run. I personally don’t think that the old multisphere format really works that well anymore (edit: if it ever did, tbh) and tends to lead to staff burnout and not being able to put enough time and energy into the core groups, but if someone wants to do it, more power to them. I would probably stick with that Changeling-and-probably-Geist idea if I were to make a new game myself.
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@somasatori said in PyReach:
This also has strong Jim Butcher/Dresden Files vibes and I’m here for it!
One of the NOLA games did this, too. Everyone could tell everyone else was a super, and there were Accords to keep cross-sphere from going ballistic. It was neat.
Something something Dhamphir
Were these the ones that had the blood magic to help make the babies? Because it’s silly enough I approve.
@somasatori said in PyReach:
On PyReach I’m mostly including things to allow people to have it if they end up using the system. Here’s what I have
MUMMY
Mummy Pun? MUMMY PUN!
She/her -
@Jennkryst said in PyReach:
Were these the ones that had the blood magic to help make the babies? Because it’s silly enough I approve.
Yeah! There’s a Lancea et Sanctum ritual that lets you … bless? … a human and vampire couple with a little demon vampire baby.
@somasatori said in PyReach:
On PyReach I’m mostly including things to allow people to have it if they end up using the system. Here’s what I have
MUMMY
I was kind of wondering when you or MisterBoring would notice Mummy in the screenshots I’ve been posting.
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@somasatori said in PyReach:
Yeah! There’s a Lancea et Sanctum ritual that lets you … bless? … a human and vampire couple with a little demon vampire baby.
I believe the Lancea version was to punish Vampires for being too ‘human’. Also made anyone the ‘father’, independent of physical sex or genitalia. This does mean that M|M, F|F can produce a baby, as well as a cis female impregnate a cis male. Also it was ‘the first person you have sex with in the next month’.
The Crone version was the opposite, making the target the ‘mother’ of the baby, possibly not as punishment, but in celebration of motherhood, I forget.
Ordo was very ‘You have normal functioning reproductive biology, good luck’. And maybe there was a Devotion, also?
@somasatori said in PyReach:
Mummy in the screenshots
You specifically DM’d me questions about how things worked, I knew it was happening!
Mummy Pun? MUMMY PUN!
She/her -
@Jennkryst said in PyReach:
This does mean that M|M, F|F can produce a baby, as well as a cis female impregnate a cis male. Also it was ‘the first person you have sex with in the next month’.
This is the kind of quality MUSH experience we’re missing these days.
@somasatori said in PyReach:
Mummy in the screenshots
You specifically DM’d me questions about how things worked, I knew it was happening!
That’s true XD I’ve got some kind of respiratory thing that has required me to live in a haze of dayquil, hence all the posting today
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If anyone is interested in being a coder for a Hunter or Mortal(+) game, I’m happy to provide the story.
Like I said earlier, I suck at coding and like Ares.
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If anyone is interested in being a coder for a Hunter or Mortal(+) game, I’m happy to provide the story.
Like I said earlier, I suck at coding and like Ares.
So the good thing about this is that a lot of your work for Mortal+ is already done! You just need to find someone who’s able to Ruby their way to Hunter and then you’re all set.
And they would need to update it for Ares 2.x, unless you went with an older version! -
@somasatori said in PyReach:
If anyone is interested in being a coder for a Hunter or Mortal(+) game, I’m happy to provide the story.
Like I said earlier, I suck at coding and like Ares.
So the good thing about this is that a lot of your work for Mortal+ is already done! You just need to find someone who’s able to Ruby their way to Hunter and then you’re all set.
I did try doing that for like… 2-3 months (whatever the free trial of digitalocean is) and I barely go past the Ares tutorial
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@catzilla I mostly got it up on a droplet, but there were some issues I ran into with npm. I think this may have been due to updating Ares after installing the plugin, but for a blissful moment it looked like it was working. I can try it again and give you a holler!
