Quote from: Brand55;1105697Dresden Files is a fantastic setting, but like the others I think Fate isn't the greatest system. The last time I ran it, I used Mutants and Masterminds and that worked really well. I could see Cinematic Unisystem being a good fit, too.

Yeah, I'm not a Fate fan at all although some people seem to really like the DFRPG (both the "old" Fate version and the newer FAE version).

I've thought about running a DF game using GURPS as it has several magic systems that I think emulate DF's casting frameworks nicely, but honestly I haven't read much of the series anyway so I'd be stretching the limits of my knowledge trying to simulate its universe.

The Supernatural universe, on the other hand, I know very well having watched the entire series through several times (save the very last season). I'd call it a guilty pleasure, but I don't feel particularly guilty about it...:cool: It would make GREAT fodder for a GURPS Monster Hunters game. I mean, along with shows like Buffy it's pretty much exactly what the line is meant to do. It's such a kitchen sink-style monster of the week show that it would be trivially easy to justify adding, removing or editing material as desired. Hell, they do it in the show all the time (though some may consider that a flaw...).

I would like to explore cliques. World of Darkness' popularity seems to revolve largely around its cliques. Vampire bloodlines, werewolf tribes, wizard orders, etc. Seems like you could do a lot with cliques.

Quote from: Snowman0147;1105652I actually been trying to make a fork to Chronicles of Darkness and World of Darkness with my own game.  I can give you guys a link to my discord if your interested.

Count me in too. I've considered hacking the Opening the Dark retroclone rules to create something that emulates World of Darkness, The Everlasting, WitchCraft, etc.

Quote from: BoxCrayonTales;1105763I would like to explore cliques. World of Darkness' popularity seems to revolve largely around its cliques. Vampire bloodlines, werewolf tribes, wizard orders, etc. Seems like you could do a lot with cliques.

Combine urban fantasy with high school (like buffy) and ther cliques bit can go crazy.

Quote from: BoxCrayonTales;1105763I would like to explore cliques. World of Darkness' popularity seems to revolve largely around its cliques. Vampire bloodlines, werewolf tribes, wizard orders, etc. Seems like you could do a lot with cliques.

In Night's Black Agents Ken Hite wrote that he thinks a player group can generally handle (in terms of paying enough attention to keep track of and care about) three to five factions invested in any one adventure.

The WoD games usually had from nine to thirteen major group options by player type, often subdivided by operating mode focus (Werewolf the Apocalypse had thirteen tribes, three breeds and five auspices, for a total of 195 possible combinations).  The new CoD games all have a five by five "clique grid", for 25 options each per game.  Conversely, antagonist factions were usually always presented in a much simpler and more unified fashion.

Quote from: Snowman0147;1105652I actually been trying to make a fork to Chronicles of Darkness and World of Darkness with my own game.  I can give you guys a link to my discord if your interested.

Sure, I'd take a link too, at your own convenience.

Quote from: Stephen Tannhauser;1105819In Night's Black Agents Ken Hite wrote that he thinks a player group can generally handle (in terms of paying enough attention to keep track of and care about) three to five factions invested in any one adventure.

The WoD games usually had from nine to thirteen major group options by player type, often subdivided by operating mode focus (Werewolf the Apocalypse had thirteen tribes, three breeds and five auspices, for a total of 195 possible combinations).  The new CoD games all have a five by five "clique grid", for 25 options each per game.  Conversely, antagonist factions were usually always presented in a much simpler and more unified fashion.

The appeal of cliques seems to be similar to that of character classes, or houses in Game of Thrones. They determine your beliefs, personality, and your superpowers if any.

The vampire cliques in particular had several liberally ripped from various works of fiction like Nosferatu, Necroscope, and Conan the Barbarian. Similar ideas for bloodlines appeared in Warhammer Fantasy, Elder Scrolls, Legacy of Kain, and American Vampire.

The LoK vamps had bloodline-specific physical transformations. One turned into bug-like monsters, another into giant bat-like monsters.

Warhammer had vampires turn into bat-like monsters as they lost control of their hunger, but this happened to all bloodlines.

In American Vampire, traits could vary quite dramatically between bloodlines. New bloodlines could mutate from existing ones.

In an RPG, you want members of every group to work together.  In Vampire, you can think of each clan as a 'class'.  You don't want a group of 4 fighters or 4 wizards; if you have one player of each class you're 'optimal'.  But Vampire never really anticipated that.  

If you want people from different cliques to work together, you can't make them all at war.  If you want all the players to be from the same clique, you can't make the clique rigidly define their appearance and character options.

Quote from: deadDMwalking;1105855In an RPG, you want members of every group to work together.  In Vampire, you can think of each clan as a 'class'.  You don't want a group of 4 fighters or 4 wizards; if you have one player of each class you're 'optimal'.  But Vampire never really anticipated that.  

If you want people from different cliques to work together, you can't make them all at war.  If you want all the players to be from the same clique, you can't make the clique rigidly define their appearance and character options.

I agree with you.  There has to be a common cause why everyone would be working with each other.

Quote from: Snowman0147;1105857I agree with you.  There has to be a common cause why everyone would be working with each other.

I believe Liminal included a section devoted to explaining why the party works together.

An idea I had as an alternative to global monster-hiding conspiracies is that supernatural creatures generally live in other worlds and only rarely come to Earth.

Quote from: BoxCrayonTales;1105915An idea I had as an alternative to global monster-hiding conspiracies is that supernatural creatures generally live in other worlds and only rarely come to Earth.

That's a plausible explanation, but one possible downside is that it may make it too easy to "offload" the consequences of the game's events. If the supernatural PCs don't live in the same setting as the non-supernatural PCs, or can freely travel back and forth, it may be hard to give them a sufficiently common set of shared stakes. (Unless the supernatural worlds are explicitly defined as depending on the mundane one in some way, perhaps.)

Conversely, if the reason the supernatural PCs do spend most of their time in the mundane world is that they're exiles from their own, the logical implications have to be thought through -- they will probably be quite rare examples of their kind, they're unlikely to have support from others like them, they may be disproportionately powerful in-game due to their rarity, etc.

And it should be borne in mind that most players find conspiracies and secret societies far more interesting for their basic coolness than for their supposed plausibility.

Quote from: Stephen Tannhauser;1105928That's a plausible explanation, but one possible downside is that it may make it too easy to "offload" the consequences of the game's events. If the supernatural PCs don't live in the same setting as the non-supernatural PCs, or can freely travel back and forth, it may be hard to give them a sufficiently common set of shared stakes. (Unless the supernatural worlds are explicitly defined as depending on the mundane one in some way, perhaps.)

Conversely, if the reason the supernatural PCs do spend most of their time in the mundane world is that they're exiles from their own, the logical implications have to be thought through -- they will probably be quite rare examples of their kind, they're unlikely to have support from others like them, they may be disproportionately powerful in-game due to their rarity, etc.

The PCs could be liminal beings, still invested in human affairs and unwilling to leave Earth entirely.

Quote from: Stephen Tannhauser;1105928And it should be borne in mind that most players find conspiracies and secret societies far more interesting for their basic coolness than for their supposed plausibility.

It's more the globe-spanning secret societies with many thousands of secret members, and no apparent system of bureaucracy, that break my suspension of disbelief. Not small scale societies limited to local reach, those seem fairly plausible to me. It's also much easier for me to wrap my head around small scale organizations because they don't have anywhere near the bureaucracy needed to keep larger organizations running.

Plausibility is a flexible thing. If most people are simply unable to observe/recognize the paranormal, then it becomes a lot more plausible for secret societies to keep their paranormal nature hidden. Criminal activities, on the other hand... If you drop the supernatural aspects, then a lot of these conspiracies are clearly organized criminal syndicates. The more people who are aware of the conspiracy, then the harder it is to keep secret.

If the tone of the setting leans more toward campy than pretentious, then I can more easily accept extremely implausible things.

Ok, so this is how I did it. I took the rules from Witchcraft/AFMBE, the playstyle of Cthulhu/X-Files of mortal investigators, I kinda stole the Werewolf the Forsaken mythology of dark animism and the Hisil (basically bad stuff over here leave an imprint in the spirit world and that attracts bad spirits who in turn do bad stuff, which leads to more bad imprints etc.) and I use a lot of random tables from Silent Legions and Dark Streets and Darker Secrets for setting creation. I use Chicago as a setting, but I think any (former) industrial city would work. The city is haunted, shit gets worse over time. The game seems to be mostly split between the spirits, the mortals who hunt or investigate and the mortals who use magic or worship supernatural beings. So in three broad factions. It's geared towards investigation, because I don't give a toss about politics. For things I got rid of in this setting were cliques (because hardly any politics) and vampires and werewolves, because I felt they were overdone. The rest of the setting is pretty stock.

Quote from: jan paparazzi;1105998Ok, so this is how I did it. I took the rules from Witchcraft/AFMBE, the playstyle of Cthulhu/X-Files of mortal investigators, I kinda stole the Werewolf the Forsaken mythology of dark animism and the Hisil (basically bad stuff over here leave an imprint in the spirit world and that attracts bad spirits who in turn do bad stuff, which leads to more bad imprints etc.) and I use a lot of random tables from Silent Legions and Dark Streets and Darker Secrets for setting creation. I use Chicago as a setting, but I think any (former) industrial city would work. The city is haunted, shit gets worse over time. The game seems to be mostly split between the spirits, the mortals who hunt or investigate and the mortals who use magic or worship supernatural beings. So in three broad factions. It's geared towards investigation, because I don't give a toss about politics. For things I got rid of in this setting were cliques (because hardly any politics) and vampires and werewolves, because I felt they were overdone. The rest of the setting is pretty stock.

It's for a potential Storytelling System retroclone based on Opening the Dark, but I had an idea for a monster PC setting inspired primarily by Nightlife, World of Darkness, The Everlasting, and WitchCraft.

(Aside: if I wanted to play investigators, then I would go with one of the many investigation games that already exist like Call of Cthulhu, Cryptworld, Monster of the Week, and so forth. There's no shortage of them.)

It's still in the planning stages, but right now I had several ideas for character options:

• Vampires, but more diverse a la Nightlife. You aren't limited to a quasi-Ricean chassis. This includes concepts like corpse-eating ghouls and youth-sucking whatever.
  
• Werewolves and other shapeshifters. How you become a werewolf is variable, and you can have other or additional animal forms a la Exalted's lunars.
  
• Mages and mad scientists and such. All characters can pursue some manner of sorcery, but these guys get additional options based on the Osirians from Everlasting.
  
• Ghosts, projectors, reapers, revenants and such. You can play as dead people trying to finish their unfinished business, a ghost who sells their services as an exorcist or spy, professional ghost busters, a combination of Dead Like Me and Tru Calling and Final Destination, etc.
  
• Fairies and changelings. You can play as an inhuman fair folk toying with mortals, or as a changeling who exists somewhere between human and fairy and perhaps worried about the evil queen's huntsman. I considered making genies their own option, but decided it made more sense to fold them into fairies.
  
• Demons and other fallen divinities. To reflect a less Christian worldview, this includes Greek titans, Norse jotun, Hindu asuras, Persian daevas, etc. It's also agnostic: there's no evidence of what demons were before they escaped "hell" (which may just be the astral plane anyhow) and they have to cobble together their own worldviews, so you can play a demon trying to earn redemption through good deeds or a demon who thinks God put you on Earth to tempt mortals and punish them for sinning.
  
• Hunters. Pretty much the same as Hunter: The Vigil. Hunters are essentially normal people who hunt down paranormal phenomena, and sometimes they have paranormal abilities of their own that blur the boundaries between hunter and hunted. That blurring is why I cover them here rather than ignore them as being part of the opposing investigation subgenre.
  
• Mummies. You can play as a mummy from any historical period, whether that be the mythical Irem or a celtic bog mummy. I may fold this into the ghosts category.
  
• Animates and re-animates. This includes both prometheans and zombies a la Zombie: The Coil. PCs were created by sorcery or super science to be artificial people, slaves, guardians or whatever, but now they're free and seek their own fate. Any homunculus, golem, or zombie created by the powers of other splats can potentially ascend to this state. This category may include spirits bound into physical vessels, like the gargoyles from The Everlasting.
  
• All-purpose freaks. This includes things like CoD's deviants and similar fansplats like Pathogen: The Infected, Outsider: The Calling, and Hunchback: The Lurching (yes, that was a thing someone tried). I may fold this into the animates and re-animates, since the only difference is (maybe) the presence of a soul. PC freaks may be on the run from whatever evil organization created them (assuming they didn't do this to themselves or contracted it from the woodwork), or created/employed specifically to help the party. Yes, you can play as the Igor (or whatever) to the party's Dracula, Dr. Frankenstein, and Wolf-Man.
  
• Angels. The flipside of demons. Basically, you get to play Touched by an Angel or whitelighters from Charmed. The setting is agnostic, so you don't have to be a literal Christian angel. You could have been born from the astral plane or resurrected by wiccans.
  
• Mythic heroes. Basically Scion, except agnostic. There's huge overlap between this and Hunter, so I may well fold them together.
  
• Generic monsters. They might have survived from ancient times or literally waltzed out of a nightmare. This covers Beast: The Primordial, Levianthan: The Tempest, Dragon: The Whatever, and the Possessed from The Everlasting. You have the option of embracing your monstrous nature and terrorizing humanity, or defying it and becoming a monster hero. Other character types can become this as a result of becoming too evil or whatever.
  

I intend on balancing these using a point buy system of some kind (like this one), so these categories are essentially arbitrary anyway.