Quote from: BoxCrayonTales;1130726Anyway, here are a few ideas for possible settings because I feel like being constructive:

The Masquerade: The world resembles contemporary Earth, but there is a secret paranormal underground. (e.g. the X of Darkness games)

The Unmasked World: Previously identical to The Masquerade setting, this world has revealed the paranormal to the muggle public. (e.g. the works written by Patricia Briggs, Blades in the Dark)

The Magic Comes Back: The paranormal creatures left Earth sometime during the Renaissance or Age of Reason. In the contemporary period, they are slowly returning from their extraterrestrial and extraplanar realms. (e.g. the Dark-Matter game)

Ancient Conspiracy: A variant of The Masquerade world, this setting is full of ancient conspiracies that are constantly operating at cross-purposes. The pileup prevents any single conspiracy from effectively ruling the world. (e.g. the Nephilim game)

Weirdness Magnet: the party lives in a town that attracts paranormal activity to a much greater degree than the rest of the world. (e.g. Buffy, Spooksville, Gravity Falls)

The Dark City: The city that the party lives in is actually an artificial simulation (e.g. Dark City, The Matrix)

Or a mix off 2 or more of those:

An Ancient Conspiracy that maintains The Masquerade because if the muggles knew the truth panic would ensue making more difficult the efforts of world domination/feeding and the ones by the secret organization that fights the monsters.

Quote from: BoxCrayonTales;1130726Anyway, here are a few ideas for possible settings because I feel like being constructive:

The Masquerade: The world resembles contemporary Earth, but there is a secret paranormal underground. (e.g. the X of Darkness games)

The Unmasked World: Previously identical to The Masquerade setting, this world has revealed the paranormal to the muggle public. (e.g. the works written by Patricia Briggs, Blades in the Dark)

The Magic Comes Back: The paranormal creatures left Earth sometime during the Renaissance or Age of Reason. In the contemporary period, they are slowly returning from their extraterrestrial and extraplanar realms. (e.g. the Dark-Matter game)

Ancient Conspiracy: A variant of The Masquerade world, this setting is full of ancient conspiracies that are constantly operating at cross-purposes. The pileup prevents any single conspiracy from effectively ruling the world. (e.g. the Nephilim game)

Weirdness Magnet: the party lives in a town that attracts paranormal activity to a much greater degree than the rest of the world. (e.g. Buffy, Spooksville, Gravity Falls)

The Dark City: The city that the party lives in is actually an artificial simulation (e.g. Dark City, The Matrix)

I like Ancient Conspiracies, which is the model I hope to use for my Vampire game. The Magic Comes Back would be great for an Urban Fantasy game. Another one for the list is The Shadow Wave, where the Earth periodically experiences some sort of dark energy wave that turns people into shadow creatures (Shadowrun?)

Quote from: GeekyBugle;1130785Or a mix off 2 or more of those:

An Ancient Conspiracy that maintains The Masquerade because if the muggles knew the truth panic would ensue making more difficult the efforts of world domination/feeding and the ones by the secret organization that fights the monsters.

Alternately, muggles generally either can't or won't notice the paranormal (at least not correctly). Any weird events in public are either dismissed or rationalized by spin doctors. That's the Weirdness Censor trope.

Aside, I don't think huge conspiracies make sense due to the logistics involved. If you have magic that lets you ignore logistics, then you might as well be playing Nobilis or a similar game. What I liked about Nephilim (the English adaptation) was that it didn't have a monolithic globe-spanning conspiracy: it had many conspiracies fighting each other. Aside from the nephilim, all of them were human.

Quote from: Aglondir;1130791I like Ancient Conspiracies, which is the model I hope to use for my Vampire game. The Magic Comes Back would be great for an Urban Fantasy game. Another one for the list is The Shadow Wave, where the Earth periodically experiences some sort of dark energy wave that turns people into shadow creatures (Shadowrun?)

As you can see, pretty much every idea I posted is a trope that was used before.

Quote from: korwin;1130213Well, like I said it's open source. So anyone is welcome to steal the things they like.
Personally I like the snark. My problem is more with the layout (looking at char generation).

After Sundown was revised there?
https://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3758962
https://projects.inklesspen.com/fatal-and-friends/
Not finding it in the list.

For a guy who likes to brag about be a "game designer", Frank really that his sweet time to do anything. It's almost ten years and he only wrote worser background stuff and almost no rules.

Anyway, here's a link to Jared Sorensen's Vampires from two decades ago. It's basically an OSR alternative for the LARP. It introduces three new disciplines: Morpheus (powers related to sleep and dreams), Psychogenesis (psychic powers like telekinesis, telepathy, and astral projection), and Translocation (supernatural modes of movement well-established in vampire fiction like wall crawling, phase door, and levitation/flight).

Here are a few ideas for vampire settings specifically, given their special diets (and popularity):

Vampire Society: this setting is similar to Being Human, Kindred: The Embraced, Blade: The Series, etc. In this setting, vampires have secret societies that live within human society. Every major city has enough vampires to form a tribe with a hierarchy. On the other hand, you have a bunch of blood-crazed monsters living in close proximity to each other and many innocent human beings. (Vampires may or may not have a global hierarchy, but at that point you start running into a lot of logistical difficulties.)

Forever Alone: this setting is similar to Interview with the Vampire, Bloodsucking Fiends: A Love Story, Forever Knight, and most vampire horror fiction. In this setting, vampires are relatively rare and don't really have any society to speak of beyond a few isolated covens in select areas around the world.

Vampires are monsters: this setting is similar to Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Sonja Blue, Liminal, 30 Days of Night, Blade, most vampire b-movies, and most vampire horror fiction. The majority of vampires are evil, with the transformation resulting in a demon taking over their body and possibly retaining their memories and aspects of their personality. A tiny minority of vampires retain their humanity, but are cursed to struggle eternally with their hunger for human blood. The latter are likely to become vampire hunters, as they are able to use vampire powers. Sometimes, they may be distinguished by other features like special names (e.g. half-vampire, daywalker, dhampir, devilman, etc) and reduced sensitivity to typical vampire weaknesses (which allows them to use these weaknesses against other vampires).

Quote from: BoxCrayonTales;1130822Alternately, muggles generally either can't or won't notice the paranormal (at least not correctly). Any weird events in public are either dismissed or rationalized by spin doctors. That's the Weirdness Censor trope.

Aside, I don't think huge conspiracies make sense due to the logistics involved. If you have magic that lets you ignore logistics, then you might as well be playing Nobilis or a similar game. What I liked about Nephilim (the English adaptation) was that it didn't have a monolithic globe-spanning conspiracy: it had many conspiracies fighting each other. Aside from the nephilim, all of them were human.



As you can see, pretty much every idea I posted is a trope that was used before.

Thing is, you don't need a huge conspiracy, several groups that happen to have a common goal (even if they all want to kill each other) and are working independently to achieve that goal will give the appearance of a conspiracy anyway.

So, you have vampires fighting each other for power, werewolves fighting the vampires for the hunting ground, and so on each one has one common interest, the muggles don't finding out the legends are true. They don't need to work in unison towards that goal to give the appearance of a huge conspiracy to the uninitiated onlooker.

Quote from: GeekyBugle;1130842Thing is, you don't need a huge conspiracy, several groups that happen to have a common goal (even if they all want to kill each other) and are working independently to achieve that goal will give the appearance of a conspiracy anyway.

So, you have vampires fighting each other for power, werewolves fighting the vampires for the hunting ground, and so on each one has one common interest, the muggles don't finding out the legends are true. They don't need to work in unison towards that goal to give the appearance of a huge conspiracy to the uninitiated onlooker.

Fair enough.

What kinds of campaign settings do you guys like building?

Somebody elsewhere suggested to me that I world build a variation of the "magic comes back" setting option (similar to McWoD, but without the obvious alien invasion). It's technically a multiverse as each splat originates from a particular other world, each of which may link to further other worlds.

What do you think?

Quote from: BoxCrayonTales;1130899What kinds of campaign settings do you guys like building?

Somebody elsewhere suggested to me that I world build a variation of the "magic comes back" setting option (similar to McWoD, but without the obvious alien invasion). It's technically a multiverse as each splat originates from a particular other world, each of which may link to further other worlds.

What do you think?

One of my possible takes for a Urban Fantasy game was just that, would be interested on reading your take since I discarded mine for a mix of:

The Masquerade + The Unmasked World + Ancient Conspiracy

Quote from: GeekyBugle;1130901One of my possible takes for a Urban Fantasy game was just that, would be interested on reading your take since I discarded mine for a mix of:

The Masquerade + The Unmasked World + Ancient Conspiracy

The utility of a setting where magical creatures are slowly entering/returning to earth is that you don't have to figure out overmuch how the paranormal entwines with real history or how the population dynamics work. You don't need to world build ancient conspiracy histories when the paranormal is only recently entering the criminal underworld. This also lends itself more easily to a monster of week format, with the party being able to scope out and deal with local incursions.

You can, of course, world build the histories of the other worlds. Those are not limited by the history of Earth. You could have a medieval fantasy world where vampires and wizards war openly. Maybe the Order of the Dragon and the House of Magnus are at war because Magnus conducted experiments on vampires of the Order to create an elixir of immortality. Maybe one world is post-apocalyptic, full of crumbling cities in archaic styles and infested with vampiric monsters and treasure-hunters.

As you can probably tell, I'm biased towards the adventure genre.

Quote from: BoxCrayonTales;1130909The utility of a setting where magical creatures are slowly entering/returning to earth is that you don't have to figure out overmuch how the paranormal entwines with real history or how the population dynamics work. You don't need to world build ancient conspiracy histories when the paranormal is only recently entering the criminal underworld. This also lends itself more easily to a monster of week format, with the party being able to scope out and deal with local incursions.

You can, of course, world build the histories of the other worlds. Those are not limited by the history of Earth. You could have a medieval fantasy world where vampires and wizards war openly. Maybe the Order of the Dragon and the House of Magnus are at war because Magnus conducted experiments on vampires of the Order to create an elixir of immortality. Maybe one world is post-apocalyptic, full of crumbling cities in archaic styles and infested with vampiric monsters and treasure-hunters.

As you can probably tell, I'm biased towards the adventure genre.

It's my favorite genre too, not sure my game can work with magic returns tho. Will think about it but not sure how all I've done (not much at the moment) would work within that concept.

Quote from: GeekyBugle;1130920It's my favorite genre too, not sure my game can work with magic returns tho. Will think about it but not sure how all I've done (not much at the moment) would work within that concept.

That's why I decided there would be multiple parallel Earths. Each can explore different setting options, but still draw from various setting-agnostic rules and fluff.

So, for example, the Kemetic Order of Seth-Ka would still exist across multiple Earths as Egyptian-descended demon hunters.

Design Notes: Classes

Here's the current lineup of classes so far. They are based on the B/X concept that a class is a combination of both What You Do and What You Are.  Comparisons to V:TM are inevitable, and that's fine; it should be fairly obvious where things are intersecting. However, the classes are not clans. If a Warrior turns a mortal into a vampire, the new vampire choose to be a warrior or any other class. Also, the goal with the classes is to capture general archetypes, not a one-to-one mapping with the V;TM clans.

Let me know what you think.


The Ruler

You are obsessed with control and power, either commanding from the throne or pulling the leader's strings from the shadows. You have vast resources, possibly amassed over centuries, as well as status in vampire society and influence over mortal institutions.


The Sorcerer

Many other classes have abilities that mortals would consider supernatural, but you command powers beyond comprehension. Magic is the mastery of otherworldly energy; the raw energy of shadow, dreams, and blood; unparalleled in both power and versatility.


The Warrior

You are skilled in all manner of physical combat, honed over lifetimes of training and conflict. You might focus on a single weapon or style, or prefer an arsenal of weapons. You might dedicate yourself to a code of honor, or prefer unrefined rage and fury. Regardless, when it comes to combat you have no equal.


The Hunter

You are the ultimate predator, either relentlessly stalking your prey, or waiting in the shadows for the moment to strike. Unlike the warrior, you prefer ambushing your prey rather than direct conflict. Hunters often feel a connection to the natural world and animal behavior, and are the least likely to follow the rules of vampire society.


The Deceiver

You see the hunt through the lens of social interactions, albeit the darker and more exploitative aspects. Deception, manipulation, and seduction are your weapons; secrets and favors are your armor. Of all the vampires, Seducers are the most likely to be a part of mortal society and develop personal relationships with mortals. Some even masquerade as mortals, holding down jobs or roles in mortal society.


The Mystic

No one knows where vampires came from or who the first vampire was. There are numerous myths, a questionable mix of oral history and fragments of scrolls, tomes, and artifacts. Over time, these myths have grown into mystery cults, each which claims a monopoly on the truth. Mystics have access to secrets and rituals that provide supernatural powers, usually focused on the nature of vampirism, death, and prophecy.


The Outcast

No one knows why, but on rare occasions a vampire is created with some sort of deformity that mars their appearance. Over time, things get worse. Their skin turns deathly pale, gray like stone, or black as obsidian. Their face and body hideously twist and morph into something inhuman. At the first sign of the process, these unfortunates are cast out of vampire society, finding refuge in the sewers, tunnels, and forgotten places beneath the city where they form a culture of their own.

Interesting. Your writing is both flavorful and concise. I like it. Much better than WoD/CoD taking forever to describe very simple concepts.