As it happens, the nWoD has a quickstart product that can be found for free HERE.

Yesterday we gave it a try, because my regular Traveller game is on hiatus due to people being on holiday and shit. I have been having an itch for some WoD goodness for some time, and this seemed like a good choice. So on Thursday I downloaded, read it and was quite impressed.

Man, the adventure is quite good. Nothing life-changing, but quite good.

To sum it up, it is a haunted house situation, with some nice twists. Basically, the PCs are all tenants at the same apartment building, they hang out together to play poker sometimes, and during one of these games all Hell breaks loose. They are trapped between the 5th and 8th floors of the building and they have to figure out what happens and how to end the haunting. Nothing more, nothing else.

The product includes the rules of the game in a nice and compact format that is really useful for quick reference if you don't want to lug your books around. It brings some pregens I didn't bother to use, my crew likes to do chargen themselves.

The adventure is nicely laid out, without the horrid railroadiness some have come to associate with WW. There are plenty of spaces to either create your own situations or to improvise, and all things considered, it is a nice introduction on how to play a Mortals game. Also, it's going to make for a nice start for a campaign: once the haunting ends, the apartment building is an abbatoir, so probably our PC's lives are fucked up.

How I did it: first, I adapted the adventure to Barcelona. So instead of Hill Manor, it was a modernist building called Casa Bagués. I changed some details of the old owner (whose ghost is fucking shit up now), and linked his curse to an American small town called Silent Hill. Yeah, that Silent Hill. Because there is a fantastic fan supplement about it for nWoD, well worth checking it out.

I told my players (5 of them) that they needed to be all residents at the building. I situated the place downtown, in a quite expensive area, but the rent was cheaper because the place was a bit run down. I changed a few more cosmetic details, and we were good to go.

The session was great, and people got actually scared. We didn't finish the adventure, but I don't think we'll need more than another 3 hour session to do it. The players were all but one new to the nWoD system, and they quite liked it. Combat with two posessed tenants was fast and brutal, leaving one of the PCs on the edge of incapacitation, despite having two PCs adept at hand to hand combat. Conclusion: possessed people who ignore wound penalties are bad news. Also: don't take big wrenches to the head.

Good product, nice introductory adventure.

WW is famous for putting out great quickstarts. Hell, I've seen more than one poster over at RPGnet state his preference for the Exalted Quickstart's super-simplified rules over the abomination that are the actual Charm rules.

And nWoD's supernatural lines are great, but the "core" or "mortals" line is bitchin' and rife with ideas, especially the earlier books. Also segues naturally into Hunter, possibly the best of the supernatural lines.

I am biased, though; late in the oWoD life-cycle, my favorite game was human PCs (with a few toys from the Year of the Hunter books) vs. monsters from the core rulebooks. Believe me, no one would ever complain again about Vampire: The Masquerade neonates being gimped, after a by-the-book neonate single-handedly kills half the party members in a single combat.

Quote from: The Butcher;568256WW is famous for putting out great quickstarts. Hell, I've seen more than one poster over at RPGnet state his preference for the Exalted Quickstart's super-simplified rules over the abomination that are the actual Charm rules.

And nWoD's supernatural lines are great, but the "core" or "mortals" line is bitchin' and rife with ideas, especially the earlier books. Also segues naturally into Hunter, possibly the best of the supernatural lines.

It's one of the best (Promethean, I love you so), no question about it. I hated Hunter: the Reckoning, and love Hunter: the Vigil. It's the versatility of the game, with its tiers of play from small cells of investigators to huge world-spanning conspiracies, and the sheer variety of the groups described in the game, that brings the real value at the game table IMO. You can really build a lot of different campaigns out of this game. It's a winner.

Quote from: The Butcher;568256I am biased, though; late in the oWoD life-cycle, my favorite game was human PCs (with a few toys from the Year of the Hunter books) vs. monsters from the core rulebooks. Believe me, no one would ever complain again about Vampire: The Masquerade neonates being gimped, after a by-the-book neonate single-handedly kills half the party members in a single combat.

Depends on the gizmos you're using. If you're starting play with Templars handling artefact weapons and one of them's got True Faith, your neonate is in big doo-doo.

Quote from: Benoist;568262It's one of the best (Promethean, I love you so), no question about it. I hated Hunter: the Reckoning, and love Hunter: the Vigil. It's the versatility of the game, with its tiers of play from small cells of investigators to huge world-spanning conspiracies, and the sheer variety of the groups described in the game, that brings the real value at the game table IMO. You can really build a lot of different campaigns out of this game. It's a winner.

Better still, you can have a "tiered" campaign, as the small, clueless cell slowly discovers that there are other hunters out there, and that there's more to some of them than it seems; e.g. the kindly old bookseller with a German accent who provided them with mysteriously acquired but pricelessly accurate information being a Loyalist of Thule, or the energetic young pastor who often sheltered them secretly heading a Long Night cell.

As they move up the supernatural food chain, with bigger and badder prey on their crosshairs, the really far-out types from the major Conspiracies start showing up, asking questions or even interfering with hits, as they have to manage their own increased detachment from ordinary society and their absorption into the Vigil (a theme that catches up with almost every WoD supernatural line sooner or later).

It really is my favorite nWoD game... though I have yet to check out Promethean.

Quote from: Benoist;568262Depends on the gizmos you're using. If you're starting play with Templars handling artefact weapons and one of them's got True Faith, your neonate is in big doo-doo.

Which is why I allowed some toys, and why our neonate (not being an idiot) dispatched a ghoul assassin to pick off the one PC with True Faith before openly confronting them. I play for keeps

Incidentally, the sole survivor of the encounter was the Templar with the artifact sword.

Quote from: Benoist;568262It's one of the best (Promethean, I love you so), no question about it. I hated Hunter: the Reckoning, and love Hunter: the Vigil. It's the versatility of the game, with its tiers of play from small cells of investigators to huge world-spanning conspiracies, and the sheer variety of the groups described in the game, that brings the real value at the game table IMO. You can really build a lot of different campaigns out of this game. It's a winner.

Yeah, I just got the quickstart for Hunter: the Vigil. If this game takes a longer life, I feel I will be needing it.

Anyway, the Mortals line has tons of awesome stuff. I love Second Sight, and both Armory books are interesting, as Mysetrious Places, Antagonists and Urban Legends. Tons of good rules and ideas.

I recently ran Nightmare at Hill Manor and it was an excellent session.

Quote from: The Butcher;568256And nWoD's supernatural lines are great, but the "core" or "mortals" line is bitchin' and rife with ideas, especially the earlier books.

I don't think I've seen it mentioned around here yet, but WW's release schedule for the spring of '13 includes a "God Machine Chronicle" book which apparently expands that "Voice of the Angel" vignette from the nWoD core into a "default chronicle" for the mortal line. The same setting mythology also paves way for their next supernatural line: Demon.

Ive always wanted to mix the Geist game in with the Hunter one as they both seem similar and low powered(at least at first) that cross over would make sense.  In fact the hill manor quickstart would be a good way to add a geist into your regular game given how nasty possessed tenants are, also the way geist come into being would fit nicely.

Changeling the Lost is just as good if not better than Promethean.  Hunter the Virgil's suppliments are great as a kind of quick and simple antagonist or monster manual for all the games.

So you would you guys say the main difference between Reckoning and Vigil is:

Reckoning: Very strict groups, subdivisions, powers (the Everything Has a Clan syndrome).

Vigil: More nebulous, mysterious, GM-defined.  Here's a whirlwind of X-Files you could use or not, whichever.

Requiem and Forsaken (Uratha...seriously?) kind of sold me off the nWoD franchise, so I never really delved in too much.  I have skimmed Vigil, but not sure how exactly it fits in with all it's Conspiracy groups.

Quote from: The Butcher;568269As they have to manage their own increased detachment from ordinary society and their absorption into the Vigil (a theme that catches up with almost every WoD supernatural line sooner or later).

Hmm, which Theme?  You mean the little guys getting drawn into their particular Supernatural Society?  Or do you mean "The Vigil" itself affects the other games in the same way that Mage really was the "Main Game" of oWoD, with the others being supplements basically?

Quote from: CRKrueger;568291So you would you guys say the main difference between Reckoning and Vigil is:

Reckoning: Very strict groups, subdivisions, powers (the Everything Has a Clan syndrome).

Vigil: More nebulous, mysterious, GM-defined.  Here's a whirlwind of X-Files you could use or not, whichever.

That's a pretty good summation. Vigil works with the idea of three tiers: the Cell (a small group of people who realize monsters exist, and band together to fight them); the Compact (a network of cells sharing information and tactics, united by a vague purpose); and Conspiracy (a vast organization, global in scope, engaging the war against the supernatural with a very specific, if not always transparent, agenda).

Conspiracy agents get powers, sort of. The Malleus (modern-day Roman Catholic witch hunters) get religious rites. The Lucifuge (essentially Satan's extended Earth-bound family, seeking redemption) get demonic powers. The Cheiron Group (a megacorp which harvests monster parts for science and profit) and Task Force Valkyrie (the American government's clandestine, Delta Green-esque paranormal response agency) get special high-tech monster-hunting toys.

Cell- and Compact-level Hunters don't get powers, but the book includes Tactics -- essentially a "skill challenge", i.e. a series of different skill tests, typically performed by several characters, used to combat monsters -- which can be accessed by all tiers. The archetypal one is Controlled Immolation, in which several hunters engage a fire-vulnerable monster (like a vampire) with makeshift flamethrowers, followed by a colleague with a fire extinguisher handy to avoid setting fire to everything else.

Quote from: CRKrueger;568291Requiem and Forsaken (Uratha...seriously?) kind of sold me off the nWoD franchise, so I never really delved in too
much.  I have skimmed Vigil, but not sure how exactly it fits in with all it's Conspiracy groups.

I am a huge Forsaken fanboy; to me Forsaken is the perfect distillation of  everything I liked about Apocalypse, minus the [strike]ecoterrorism[/strike] tacky and heavy-handed environmental activism. Uratha, like most of the made-up First Tongue vocabulary, is actually Sumerian. Doesn't bother me, and I think it's easily ignored, but to each his own.

Requiem I love because it allows me to recreate nearly any Masquerade scenario without the baggage. No generation, no Antediluvians, no more not standing a snowballs chance in Hell of winning at the Jyhad and having to choose between centuries kissing elder ass, or going anarch (which, I sustain, was the implied default in 1e). You can manually insert back whatever it is about Masquerade that you lied and gleefully ignore what you dislike, and voilà! The vampire game of your dreams.

Quote from: CRKrueger;568292Hmm, which Theme?  You mean the little guys getting drawn into their particular Supernatural Society?

This one, and more specifically, getting drawn into supernatural weirdness in detriment of an ordinary life. The Vigil eats away at a hunter's humanity no less than a vampire's Beast or a mage's hubris.

I agree with what you said Butcher also Mage with the objective reality until archmastery at least makes it much more crossover friendly and far more internally consistent than Ascension was. In fact the hardwired morality schemes for everyone makes the overall setting far more horror than urban fantasy like the OWoD.

I think the tier system out of HtV is the second best thing in the NWoD right behind the blue line and right before taking subjective reality out back and shooting it in head.

One of the best things about HtV is that it has good simplified subsystems for Vampires, Werewolves and Mages. It makes for great cross over games in a way that WoD doesn't otherwise.

Quote from: Skywalker;568368One of the best things about HtV is that it has good simplified subsystems for Vampires, Werewolves and Mages. It makes for great cross over games in a way that WoD doesn't otherwise.

I said that earlier but I wasn't clear about it. I mentioned the suppliments for HtV but didn't clarify.  Witchhunters and others with the simplified antagonist schemes are so totally usuable with EVERY line. Worth getting the game just for that alone.