… and Mummies, who also need the Underworld/Duat… but due to the shattered nature of reality, they are temporally locked to now, solving their time-travel shenanigans.
This is fair, but also… incredibly easy to shift to nWoD/CoD. It’s very wibbly wobbly. Something something someone fed the God Machine ChatGPT code tried to get the God Machine to divide by Zero, and reality is now extremely fucked up. Ancient Blood Rites for Vampires still valid, Incarna still valid for Shifters, replace Horizon Realms with something something Atlantis Supernal Realm, Fae… I want to somehow merge Dreaming and Lost, because ‘everyone is dealing with PTSD and your memory is fake’ isn’t… the best for everyone?
Also also, we wrote the original idea before Mummy the Curse, so that’s probably a factor why it is mostly oWoD coded.
Don’t we just call them eldritch horrors and assume tentacles?
I mean usually. But in reference to the book, it’s literal ‘another species from an alien planet showed up in our Old God Bubble-World, and they are mostly cool. Except they also brought their God with them, who wants to eat our Gods’.
I keep saying I’ll detail this, and maybe I have before, but I forget, so now I’ll do it for maybe the first time, maybe the ??? time, I still think this has legs for a oWoD setting.
We all know and love Trans-Ally Katherine Applegate’s Animorphs series… the anti-war, anti-authorian tale of teenagers given the power to morph into animals to be child soldiers who commit war crimes to save Earth fight off an invasion of mind controlling brain slugs from outer space.
She just so happened to write another series, titled Everworld.
The premise: All of the Old Gods are real, and they forsaw a time that their people’s faith in them would wane to nothing. To save the faithful from the non-believers or the new religions or whatever, they created Everworld. Which is described, metaphysically, in one book like this:
The Old Gods took all of their most devout followers, and went into Everworld… the balloon inside of the balloon that is reality. But they needed a bridge to connect this world to Everworld, which was a person.
Shit got real when Alien Gods showed up because they eat other Gods, so the Earth Gods start trying to run away to Earth which is where the wacky hijinks of the books comes through, but is unimportant to the MU because the whole thing is just inspiration for the actual setting:
Everworld of Darkness (sometimes called the City of a Thousand Horizon Realms, because its also a mish-mash of things like that one Valerian comic the film was based on) is not terribly different from Ascension Sojurns.
The World Ended. The End Times happened, and all was lost. Reality as we knew it is gone. There were those who fought back and most died. There were those who hid, many of whom died, but not all. Those who ran (distinct from hiding) got far and some made it far enough that Oblivion rising up and eating reality didn’t get them.
Be it through Mages doing Mage, ancient Bloodrites of the vampires, protection of the Incarna in the spirit world, dreamspun realities of the Fae, or [other spheres thematic mechanic], there are chunks of reality that still exist. These are all woven together into a new patchwork existence.
(… this is also how I picture the Matrix being laid out, singular city, specific areas, ‘Neo is in THE MOUNTAINS’, ‘Morpheus said to never get on THE HIGHWAY’, etc)
As this idea partially built out of ‘what if Darkcity WoD?’, we begin with… THE CITY. It can be as small as Manhattan or as large as Megacity 1, how big it looks, and its architecture, depend on the section you’re in. Easy enough to leave and go out to suburbs, but that’s not to say you cant navigate inside the city to other places, too.
There are different parts of the city, of course… you go far enough into China Town and you might wind up in a bit of patchwork mystic Wuxia land just as easily as you can end up in a part of THE CITY that looks like Beijing. Venture out of the city away from suburbia and into the forest and shit drifts into an Amazon zone, the barrier between a chaotic disregard for actual fauna biology. Of course there is a way to the Desert that gets you Persian or Middle Eastern or (dubious ethnicity that Eshu play off of). Somewhere there is Egypt-land, because of course there is.
Rivers can lead different places… the !Nile can get you to Nordic raiding villages just as easy as it can get you to Mesoamerica Aztec Sacrifice Land. Get on a boat and sail the sea to other places, because who doesn’t like boats. It’s all very Horizon Realm and the Dreaming and the Shadow and maybe even the Underworld, all weirdly pushed through the square hole.
While this is all oWoD terminology, but you can sub in nWoD/CoD stuff, too. Or use a clever explanation of ‘oWoD fluff, nWoD/CoD mechanics because reality is fucked’, whatever. Granted there’s less of an End Times plot, but this is a post-apocalyptic setting, so maybe details have been lost to history.
Go forth, coders, and use this idea for your own chicanery! I will probably show up at some point.
Actually, everyone in Small Town knowing about the supernatural enough that the Masq/Veil/whatever is lax, but also somehow forced to not tell outsiders about it… feels like it has legs? Now you can idly chat in the bar about your werewolf’s cool kill and maybe get looks because murder/death is gross, more so than because it’s a horror from beyond reality.
But it’s also not giving ‘reality, but secret monsters’, because the monsters aren’t really secret.
I guess I’m finally finishing that post about one of trans ally and author of Animorphs Katherine Applegate’s other series, Everworld.
Animorphs is one of those Missed Settings things for me. Where are the animorphs mushes!
Child Soldiers being forces to commit war crimes? I thought people didn’t want bad reality to invade their imagination fun times?
ahem
I mean it could be a thing. It’d be a short-lived game depending on where in the timeline you set it (here is in-depth analysis about when, exactly, each book takes place; it’s also 1h 45m long. Good Luck/Have Fun!).
A crossover of Everquest and World of Darkness, where players combine WoD Spheres with Everquest classes in a bizarre gothic punk fantasy world of grindy adventure.
A crossover of Everway and World of Darkness, where players make their WoD characters using image cards and then traverse the planes having weird adventures.
A crossover setting between all three major versions of WoD (OWoD / NWoD / CoD) where the three realities fight to ensure their world is the one that survives an oncoming cataclysm that will leave only one standing.
I guess I’m finally finishing that post about one of trans ally and author of Animorphs Katherine Applegate’s other series, Everworld.
Meanwhile, my pillow-fort is here for cuddles, lewds, lewd-cuddles, planning shenanigans with cool people, and not attacking people, just whining about folks who are mean.
@Jumpscare Aaaaaalaaaaabama, Alaska, Arizona (I almost marked this because I forgot Reno was in Nevada), Arkansas, California (Several), Colorado (Sheltering Skies, Shadowrun Denver, others), Connecticut. ding-ding-ding Delaware, Florida (I played on an oWoD game in Florida before I made it to CoH, but this was years ago), Georgia, Hawaii, Idaho, Illinois(surely there’s been Chicago, right?), Indiana! Ding-ding-ding…
Double Post, but WHAT IF some LAZY PERSON finally got around to explaining the EverWorld of Darkness crossover setting of dumb chaos delightful shenanigans? Would that somehow trick someone into running it magically appear on it’s own, somehow?
When Werewolf: the Forsaken is right there? You don’t need to do any legwork on Gifts (Okay, you might need to do some legwork on Gifts), but the various Apocalypse tribes can just be Lodges, easy peasy.
I’ve spent the better part of the last year utterly gobbling up everything in Brandon Sanderson’s Cosmere (Stormlight Archives, Mistborn, Warbreaker, etc.) catalog, and I am so freaking sad that there don’t seem to be any Cosmere-based games.
Having an already-established world with a well-thought-out magic system that you can do tons of interesting things with?
It would so be my jam, right about now.
There’s an actual RPG for this. I haven’t looked into it cause I’m in the middle of the series and I don’t want spoilers, but this was also on the top of my list for settings/games I’d love to play.
There’s actually two! One that came out after Mistborn Era 1 finished and is kind of FATE-lite (if memory serves, you only get +1 for every aspect you tag, but they are automatically tagged, you don’t have to spend points on them? I haven’t read it in a while because…) and the new Cosmere RPG that the kickstarter will finish delivering to me any day now, I’m sure.
It really really requires you to have a very good working knowledge of the novels or you’re just going to be confused a lot.
I mean, sure, but that’s also the thing with any setting. I tried to dump Shadowrun players on an Astral Quest into the Codex Alera and everyone was also confused. Play Star Wars with any Grey Jedi Enjoyer child whose never seen it, and they will boggle at why Force Lightning is bad if all you’re doing is using it to charge a battery.
There was that Legally Distinct Not-Really Zombies game set in Canada where people got infested with worms instead of your usual virus and/or Last of Us Fungus. But it was tricksy.
