Quote from: phydeaux on January 17, 2023, 10:36:00 AM

Quote from: BoxCrayonTales on January 17, 2023, 09:48:05 AM
Found it!
https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/354689/M20-Technocracy-Reloaded

QuoteWelcome to the Future

As the third decade of the 21st century dawns, the Technocratic Union stands on the cutting edge of a future imperiled. As science and technology draw humanity closer than ever before, certain factions within the Masses display gross negligence, undermining the Union's work and endangering the world for shortsighted gains. Despite global telecommunications, new frontiers in virtually every field of study, and an understanding of the universe only dreamed of by earlier generations, humanity faces threats on all sides.

Can You Save It?

Climate change threatens to destroy life as we know it. Religious fundamentalism breeds terror around the globe. Diseases, once eradicated in the developed world through vaccination, have returned due to antivaxxer movements. Totalitarian, nationalist governments rise as the Masses succumb to fear of the other. The world stands on the brink of destruction, and it is up to the agents and operatives of the Technocratic Union to save it...or be its ultimate destruction.

OMG, they're actually trying to make the factions morally gray now? That's just completely antithetical to the original themes of the game when it first started. The technos were originally supposed to be the villains. Sure, individual agents might be good people. Most of them might be good people. But they're misguided at best and don't know it.

It feels like they're trying to ape the moral grayness from Awakening, but here it's really obnoxious because they tie it into modern Western politics when it's clear they think the left is perfectly right.

Mage was my JAM back in the day. It hit me at just the right age, gave me a lot to think about, and left a lasting impression in how I view things. I probably spent more time considering the ideas and implications of MtA when I was a kid than was strictly healthy. Between tabletop and the MUSH/MUX scene, I was probably tuned in to Mage about 7 days a week. Ridiculous looking back, but hey.

I'm actually alright with them trying to present each faction from a, "Everyone thinks they're the hero." perspective. That's fine and I prefer that to having one dimensional moustache-twirlers in a game about subjectivity. The irony is their description of the Technocracy is virtually indistinguishable from a typical lefty NPC talking point. At least in some part, this is due to the impossible task of trying to write an MtA game in an era where they "Fucking Love Science!" and are treating it like a religion. It's actually interesting to think about, because it boils down to the new left trying to update a game written by the old left, and they've changed so much in the last 30 years that their views are both completely incompatible and rigid.

The modern leftist's viewpoint is entirely too rigid to competently operate in an environment like Mage, where literally everything is subjective. Mages seek truth, but there is no truth save for the truth they invent. That was always the core message I took from Mage, and while that matched up well enough with a 90s liberal mindset, it's completely incompatible with the new breed of left-leaning thought which engages in fucking purity purges.

I find it a little distressing that no one involved seems to have the self-awareness to realize something is wrong when their modern viewpoints absolutely align with the villains of their own game. Then again, this is the same crowd who thinks Orcs are good, so siding with the bad guys is nothing new.

That entire Technocracy book is born of the cognitive dissonance in the left nowadays of "trust the science" "listen to official sources only" "Do what you're told to by the government." but also "we are edgy rebel anarchists who hate corporations and want real communism." The modern left are supposed to worship a group like the Technocracy as morally right and justified in everything they do.  They resembled real world corporations and conspiracies in a time where people thought they were the baddies. Now they resemble real world corporations and conspiracies in a time where you are supposed to think they are good guys. When they haven't actually changed anything about what they do. But still have to reconcile old lore saying everything they did was literally Hitler 2.

This goes into what I have said many times before. SJWs are hypocrites who don't actually believe in a god damn thing. They know how shaky making the Technocracy into a morally justified globalist group is. They just want to be SEEN as "spreading the message". It's so facetious and dishonest. There's no way it's being done unintentionally. It'd be great if that was all in lore and it was just "their perspective" but it's not. It's a mirror of the writer's own shaky and shallow virtue signalling for brownie points disguised as beliefs.

Personally I'd continue making out the Technocracy are evil globalists, but they basically reveal themselves to the world. And use social media to manipulate the world into thinking that the Technocracy are heckin valid and hunting the Traditions because they are "gross fascists." Whilst still shaping belief in "the science" and using shallow SJW beliefs in pseudo science for their own ends. That would be an actual "modernization" of Mage to me at least.

Quote from: Stephen Tannhauser on January 17, 2023, 04:33:31 PM

Quote from: BoxCrayonTales on January 17, 2023, 04:16:49 PMWhatever they've become now is a Warhammer chaos daemon, not something recognizable as having once been human.

Which makes total sense as a possible effect of becoming god of your own reality -- which, I have to admit, I always found horrifying as an idea too, especially on finding out that the "End Times" MAGE book Ascension explicitly describes this as one of the possible resolutions for the World of Darkness: every single living human being Ascends to become god of their own reality.

But even the Chaos gods of Warhammer eventually wanted back into the mortal plane. The problem, of course, was that if they ever actually succeeded that was basically the end of the game, so the people the PCs had to fight were the servants, cultists and summoners rather than the actual greater-scope villain.

It sounds like in your world, ironically, magic would only be part of covert power structures insofar as the people using it still valued magic itself more as a means than an end, and if the nature of magic is itself to be a fundamentally addictive power that eventually becomes its own end, the paradox is that the people really in charge of the Conspiracy pyramids would be the Muggles who knew how to manipulate wizards through purely non-magical means, and how to eliminate them when they were becoming uncontrollable.

That reminds me. Back in the 90s there was another magician rpg called Nephilim that was originally published in French and then adapted to an American release by Chaosium. In that game, magicians were a persecuted minority while the villains were the muggle-run illuminati. The illuminati hunted down magicians so they could be drained of blood and their blood used to power the illuminati's spells, among other things. The American version only included blood rituals and turning magicians into homunculus slaves, but the French version apparently had the illuminati dismembering the magicians for magical body parts.

Quote from: BoxCrayonTales on January 18, 2023, 10:34:33 AMBack in the 90s there was another magician rpg called Nephilim that was originally published in French and then adapted to an American release by Chaosium. In that game, magicians were a persecuted minority while the villains were the muggle-run illuminati. The illuminati hunted down magicians so they could be drained of blood and their blood used to power the illuminati's spells, among other things. The American version only included blood rituals and turning magicians into homunculus slaves, but the French version apparently had the illuminati dismembering the magicians for magical body parts.

Yoiks! That might be a bit much for me solely on personal taste levels. I had seen copies of the game before, but had never read through it deeply enough to understand that part of the setting background.

Interestingly, though I generally try to avoid "Woke" style responses to things as a policy these days, that might be one of the few game ideas where I can see myself saying, "You know, that's awfully close to the classic anti-Semitic 'blood libel' myth in a lot of ways . . . could we maybe find a slightly less on-the-nose atrocity to attribute to the evil conspiracy, here? Just as a matter of taste and common decency, if nothing else."

Quote from: Stephen Tannhauser on January 18, 2023, 06:46:42 PM

Quote from: BoxCrayonTales on January 18, 2023, 10:34:33 AMBack in the 90s there was another magician rpg called Nephilim that was originally published in French and then adapted to an American release by Chaosium. In that game, magicians were a persecuted minority while the villains were the muggle-run illuminati. The illuminati hunted down magicians so they could be drained of blood and their blood used to power the illuminati's spells, among other things. The American version only included blood rituals and turning magicians into homunculus slaves, but the French version apparently had the illuminati dismembering the magicians for magical body parts.

Yoiks! That might be a bit much for me solely on personal taste levels. I had seen copies of the game before, but had never read through it deeply enough to understand that part of the setting background.

Interestingly, though I generally try to avoid "Woke" style responses to things as a policy these days, that might be one of the few game ideas where I can see myself saying, "You know, that's awfully close to the classic anti-Semitic 'blood libel' myth in a lot of ways . . . could we maybe find a slightly less on-the-nose atrocity to attribute to the evil conspiracy, here? Just as a matter of taste and common decency, if nothing else."

The magicians practice Kabbalah (called so in the French version, renamed to Summoning in the American version but still uses Kabbalistic lore) and, at least in the American version, the Holocaust was orchestrated as deliberate mass human sacrifice. Magicians were harvested for their magic, and the innocent muggles were drained of blood that could be used in other magical workings such as creating antimagic weapons (for extra evil points, antimagic in this setting is environmentally destructive, because nature runs on magic). Blood contains the energy of the soul, and human souls hold unimaginable potential. So I think it actually avoids the blood libel trap that other urban fantasy falls into: the magicians are innocent of any wrongdoing and millions of innocent people were deliberately murdered so their souls could be harvested. The illuminati are knowingly evil and perform atrocities all the time.

So it's more like the magicians are Jewish and the villains are cannibal nazis. Or the craziest wiccan burning times myth propaganda. "Not only were the innocent women burned by the inquisition actual (good) witches, but the inquisition was actually a vast satanic conspiracy the whole time that deliberately murdered millions of non-magical innocents in order to harvest their souls for Satan!"

Quote from: Stephen Tannhauser on January 17, 2023, 05:24:08 PM

Quote from: jhkim on January 17, 2023, 05:10:01 PMThe Traditions wanted *themselves* to matter to the universe, but they weren't interested in empowering or enlightening others. The Technocracy likewise only wanted power for themselves, and weren't really trying to protect or care for the masses.

I think we were certainly meant to take away, as an ongoing realization, that neither faction was as altruistic as it presented itself, true. But that doesn't mean either group's altruism was entirely a lie, either. The Order of Reason's declaration of war at Mistridge was never presented as anything other than a conscious and sincere intent to improve the lot of humanity in general, and the Scientific and Industrial Revolutions are usually depicted as having been wildly successful in at least one dimension of that goal. Similarly, however real the self-interest the Traditions have in not being exterminated and regaining their power from the "old days", there is a real and valid case for their fundamental claim: that the technological and material comfort of the Technocracy's world, and its rigid, organizational complexity, have left many humans feeling purposeless, impotent and irrelevant, and that Awakened enlightenment and magick is a birthright which was forcefully and unjustly denied them.

I agree that there was a partial truth in there. It is just that in the portrayals of 1st edition, those technicalities didn't come across as motivation. Even the good guy Traditions seemed to regard the mass of humanity as an obstacle rather than oppressed people to be freed. I've only played two one-shots, though - so maybe further books gave a different impression.

By comparison, I feel urban fantasy works like Buffy the Vampire Slayer, GURPS Voodoo, and similar have heroes who take seriously protecting the masses.

Quote from: Stephen Tannhauser on January 17, 2023, 05:24:08 PM
It occurs to me now that both sides in that conflict, due to the very nature of magick in the game, exemplify a particular feature of Woke critical discourse, which is: There is no point trying to engage with a system so definitionally rigged against you that it will not even admit your desired goals are valid. So that is one way in which Mage was very definitely a precursor of Woke attitudes; Mage magic is the ultimate form of "when you aren't allowed to win the game, flip the table" protest.

I think that's common with almost all revolutionaries, woke or not. Even non-violent resistance movements have often defied the law as part of their protests, even though their ultimate goal wasn't armed overthrow of the government.

Most RPGs have a very individualist ethos, emphasizing lone heroes fighting, rather than incremental collective action within the system. Obviously, that's because it's about action heroes.

Quote from: jhkim on January 19, 2023, 09:08:32 PMI agree that there was a partial truth in there. It is just that in the portrayals of 1st edition, those technicalities didn't come across as motivation. Even the good guy Traditions seemed to regard the mass of humanity as an obstacle rather than oppressed people to be freed. I've only played two one-shots, though - so maybe further books gave a different impression.

Yes, starting from 2nd edition and going forward the Mage worldbooks paid a lot more attention to the fact that however much people hated the Technocracy, in practice the vast majority of players weren't down for an "Ascension" that required giving up electrification, mass transit and public sanitation, so the conflict got a little bit more shades-of-grey.

Quote

Quote from: Stephen Tannhauser on January 17, 2023, 05:24:08 PMSo that is one way in which Mage was very definitely a precursor of Woke attitudes; Mage magic is the ultimate form of "when you aren't allowed to win the game, flip the table" protest.

I think that's common with almost all revolutionaries, woke or not. Even non-violent resistance movements have often defied the law as part of their protests, even though their ultimate goal wasn't armed overthrow of the government.

Most RPGs have a very individualist ethos, emphasizing lone heroes fighting, rather than incremental collective action within the system. Obviously, that's because it's about action heroes.

This is true, and it was one of the things I among other fans of the game sometimes griped about: For all the in-fluff emphasis of the game on "shifting the Consensus paradigm", there wasn't a whole lot written down (in any of the rulebooks I saw, anyway) about how one was actually supposed to do this, or track the effects of it being done, in either fluff or crunch ways (even something as simple as "Gauntlet difficulty drops by 1 for every 10,000 people in an area who start believing in magic again").

That was another precursor element of Wokeness in WW games: the conflicts in every version of the game were always stacked so firmly on the side of the Establishment that it was generally obvious the only way for the PCs to "win" was to either adopt the methods of their oppressors (and thus become them) or to bring down the entire rotten house of cards and blindly hope something better would emerge from the ruins.

Quote from: Stephen Tannhauser on January 21, 2023, 05:54:06 PMThat was another precursor element of Wokeness in WW games: the conflicts in every version of the game were always stacked so firmly on the side of the Establishment that it was generally obvious the only way for the PCs to "win" was to either adopt the methods of their oppressors (and thus become them) or to bring down the entire rotten house of cards and blindly hope something better would emerge from the ruins.

Exactly. You see this especially in the vampire game: characters start with a fixed "generation" trait at character creation that places a cap on their abilities (basically a magical glass ceiling), and the only way to increase it during play is through illegal murder-cannibalism. This has encouraged players to buy up the max amount they can during character creation, even for non-munchkins. While this mechanic is supposed to play into the intended themes of the game, in practice it just forces everyone to become a munchkin. V5 could've removed it and replaced it with blood-potency imported from VtR using some magical in-universe explanation, but didn't (presumably because it's "tradition", not that they consistently adhere to this).

WW games are probably the worst example of "games we only play because of cliquism, nostalgia and tradition rather than any measured analysis." I'm not gonna say that Chronicles is much better (initially the devs tried streamlining the rules and setting design, but by 2e they gave up and made it as unwieldy and inconsistent as they could), but 99% of the dislikes are baseless hatred for it being different from and being released during a hiatus of its parent/sister IP rather than any kind of pros/cons analysis. Pretty much everyone who weighs in on the subject agrees Lost is better than Dreaming, but Dreaming is the only version still being supported by the company and the fandom simply because it came out first and this industry is stagnant and appeal to tradition fallacy af.

You know how wokies love to accuse their opponents of arbitrarily hating change and difference? In this industry, it's painfully accurate. That's why I've given up on ever trying to make my own games.

But I digress.

Quote from: Stephen Tannhauser on January 21, 2023, 05:54:06 PMThis is true, and it was one of the things I among other fans of the game sometimes griped about: For all the in-fluff emphasis of the game on "shifting the Consensus paradigm", there wasn't a whole lot written down (in any of the rulebooks I saw, anyway) about how one was actually supposed to do this, or track the effects of it being done, in either fluff or crunch ways (even something as simple as "Gauntlet difficulty drops by 1 for every 10,000 people in an area who start believing in magic again").

The IP has hardly been consistent in its rules. In 3e and earlier, it was common for the books to use "results-based determinism" (this phrase was coined during internet arguments, natch), meaning that the process which brought about the effect of a spell wasn't related to the intended effect. One example from either the core or the storyteller guide/handbook was creating lightning to ward enemies by a nearby powerline spontaneously breaking and falling between them. The Technocracy book uses the example of an agent causing architecture to collapse behind him, with him causing this by putting on goggles that let him see that the collapse was going to happen anyway (i.e. he's in denial that he caused it and rationalizes it as something that was already happening). This is what was meant by all those times in various books where it mentions that mages disguise their spells as mundane coincidences. In 4e (and in spin-off game Awakening), the rules instead use "process-based determinism," where the process and effect of the spell are determined by the caster and cannot be disguised as mundane coincidences (or at least trying to do so is a lot harder). The mage waves their wand or whatever they're using, and the spell happens. Lightning comes out of their fingertips, or objects they point to spontaneously rot, etc.

If WW can't even be consistent about something as basic as how their magic system works, then how can you expect rigorous consistency anywhere else? In fact, I don't think most groups even use the RAW, do they?

As you said, I don't think the players were ever expected to succeed. So rules for doing so were never devised. That's pretty much the case for all the games.

Also, the consensus never made sense to begin with. Mythcreants pointed this out.

Quote1. No One Believes in Magic Anymore
A diverse group of people wielding magic
The RPG Mage: The Ascension explains the masquerade with the idea of consensual reality – magic goes against what people believe in. This has problems, but at least the game has a weak explanation for why people stopped believing in magic.
Like most explanations, this one comes in a variety of flavors. Usually, it's part of some belief mechanic in which magical things are hidden because people don't believe in them. An example of this is the consensual reality in the RPG Mage: The Ascension. In Mage, casting magic out in the open does damage to the caster because onlookers don't believe it's real. In other stories, the lack of belief has pushed magical things out of the world, or most people can't see magic just because they're too stubborn to believe in it. Everyone's into science these days, so there's no room for fairies and unicorns!

Yeah, no. First of all, are you really going to tell your fantasy audience that people won't believe in magic? Maybe you could've made that case back when people looked down on speculative fiction, but now that Amazon is spending a billion dollars on a fantasy TV show, that's not going to fly. Plenty of people are ready to believe in magic with even the slightest rumor, much less solid evidence.

Assuming you can overcome that obstacle, there's another issue. These worlds come with the assumption that people believed in magic long ago; that's why we've heard of it at all. But then why did people stop believing in it? It would be like everyone deciding they don't believe in electricity or raccoons anymore.

Speaking of which, why is only magic affected by belief? How did Nicolaus Copernicus prove that the earth rotates around the sun when everyone believed otherwise? If belief changed reality or even just our sensory perception of it, we would still think the Earth is the center of our solar system. If we all decided raccoons were a myth, would they disappear?

At best, this explanation doesn't stand up to scrutiny. At worst, it feels like an insult to fans who would like to see some magic, please.

A lot of people believe in magic but that doesn't affect the consensus even locally, while they can still contribute to the consensus without believing it. Really? It's wishy-washy, inconsistent, and obviously wasn't intended to be challenged.

In one of my urban fantasy settings, where monsters and magic and otherworlds are linked to human imagination, I point out that the relationship is poorly understood and inconsistent in-universe in order to cover my ass. I even make a joke out of it by pointing out that real psychics who speak truth are always disbelieved while fake ones who spout lies are always believed. Does this make sense? Not really, but the psychics hate it.

Why did people stop believing in magic when it actually exists? Don't know!

Why are vampires harmed by belief in religion, but aren't poofed out of existence by disbelief in them? Don't know!

It's magic. It doesn't make sense. Anything that isn't realistic fiction or hard scifi is going to break down under scrutiny. And even hard scifi is going to age.

Quote from: jhkim on January 19, 2023, 09:08:32 PM
Most RPGs have a very individualist ethos, emphasizing lone heroes fighting, rather than incremental collective action within the system. Obviously, that's because it's about action heroes.

This format may work the best with the emergent and group play nature of rpgs compared to other options. Roleplaying a real activist engaging in incremental action is probably going to be extremely boring compared to fighting crime. Creating a long-running and coherent "story" is probably impossible without railroading, which has its own problems. (e.g. The Vox Machina tv show is quite frankly a mess, and it was heavily edited from the original plays.)

Quote from: BoxCrayonTales on January 21, 2023, 07:14:48 PMYou know how wokies love to accuse their opponents of arbitrarily hating change and difference? In this industry, it's painfully accurate. That's why I've given up on ever trying to make my own games.

I'm sorry to hear that last bit -- I would have loved to see the final result of your Storyteller hack that you were working on a while ago. But I understand the frustration.

I think the problem with nerd fandom of any stripe is that we are all prone to the strenuously self-contradictory tensions of wanting to preserve forever, or recapture exactly as we first experienced it, our first biggest thrill in discovering these dreamworlds, while at the same time being desperate for novel additions to them that make sure we don't get bored. If there's a reliable way to resolve that tension, I'm not sure I know it, but acknowledging it exists is probably the biggest first step.

(This is another through-line straight into Wokist thought, which always holds the new as superior to the old simply by virtue of being new.)

QuoteIn one of my urban fantasy settings, where monsters and magic and otherworlds are linked to human imagination, I point out that the relationship is poorly understood and inconsistent in-universe in order to cover my ass. I even make a joke out of it by pointing out that real psychics who speak truth are always disbelieved while fake ones who spout lies are always believed. Does this make sense? Not really, but the psychics hate it.

Paging Cassandra Atreides, Cassandra Atreides to the house telephone, please.... 

The question of how a world can look like ours and still have magic working somewhere in it is the single biggest thing all urban fantasy stories/games have to answer, and part of the problem is that in a story you can establish relatively static or customized rules permitting just what fantasticness the author wishes and no more. In a game, thanks to (as you point out) the nostalgia-driven influence of D&D, the problem is that the PCs are always going to want to get better and more powerful, and to have more of an effect, until it doesn't matter what explanation supports the Masquerade, the PCs' actions are eventually going to bust it open.

That's why one of my favourite game ideas has always been about developing a world that exists after the Masquerade has fallen, or even better, deliberately embracing the idea that the game is going to be about the Masquerade coming down, and what the PCs do to make the transition less (or more!) destructive. The World of Darkness games always flirted tragically close to the Great Revelation without ever doing this, because they were all about the Y2K-millennial dread of waiting for that moment, not about thinking what was actually on the other side.

Quote from: Stephen Tannhauser on January 21, 2023, 10:57:22 PM

Quote from: BoxCrayonTales on January 21, 2023, 07:14:48 PMYou know how wokies love to accuse their opponents of arbitrarily hating change and difference? In this industry, it's painfully accurate. That's why I've given up on ever trying to make my own games.

I'm sorry to hear that last bit -- I would have loved to see the final result of your Storyteller hack that you were working on a while ago. But I understand the frustration.

I think the problem with nerd fandom of any stripe is that we are all prone to the strenuously self-contradictory tensions of wanting to preserve forever, or recapture exactly as we first experienced it, our first biggest thrill in discovering these dreamworlds, while at the same time being desperate for novel additions to them that make sure we don't get bored. If there's a reliable way to resolve that tension, I'm not sure I know it, but acknowledging it exists is probably the biggest first step.

(This is another through-line straight into Wokist thought, which always holds the new as superior to the old simply by virtue of being new.)

Ah yes, the appeal to novelty fallacy. It's the logical opposite, but equally irrational.

You hit the nail on the head with the inconsistent desires. Gamers are basically holding both the appeal to tradition and appeal to novelty fallacies in their heads at the same time, causing cognitive dissonance that seeps into their work to produce inconsistent irrational results.

I think one of the ways to avoid this is simply to not limit yourself to a single campaign setting but adopt a toolkit approach for replicating an entire genre, like what All Flesh Must Be Eaten or Night's Black Agents do. The problem for me has always been the arbitrary restrictions and the square peg round hole problem. No single game can do everything and it's pointless to try: you can make a game that does one specific thing very well or does a bunch of things okayish or poorly. Stuff like the rules complexity and where it sits on the GNS triangle affect its efficacy.

For example, something like lightside/darkside mechanics probably work best with more abstract systems where characters have a fixed number of traits that can switch between lightside and darkside versions, as opposed to the traditional design where characters can accumulate any number of traits. A good example of what I mean comes directly from WW: in the vampire games you can achieve humanity 10, blood-potency 10, and all other traits at 10 (the max possible value under the game rules) without any internal conflict in the rules because the complex rules track all of these separately. VtR 2e tries to make increasing vampire-related traits a humanity violation, but that's a band-aid fix since they cannot rewrite the way characters are built. To fix this you'd need to build a new system from the ground up, such as Feed. I consider that game to be the best implementation of a humanity mechanic in all of ttrpg history, but nobody is going to play it because it didn't come out in 1990 and attract goth gamers.

I think the solution is to deliberately avoid the logical fallacies. You should figure out what your goal is for the game, take the most efficient route towards accomplishing that goal, and don't bite off more than you can chew. Easier said than done, tho.

And I think this same problem is true for a lot of media in general. There's this obsession with a handful of huge kitchen sink franchises rather than a plethora of franchises that can play to their own strengths. Right now we've reached the inevitable bottleneck problem where those franchises can no longer stay solvent, and once they collapse then there's nothing to take their place. Can you name any space fantasy franchises beyond Star Wars? Any idealistic space opera franchises beyond Star Trek?

Quote from: Stephen Tannhauser on January 21, 2023, 10:57:22 PM

QuoteIn one of my urban fantasy settings, where monsters and magic and otherworlds are linked to human imagination, I point out that the relationship is poorly understood and inconsistent in-universe in order to cover my ass. I even make a joke out of it by pointing out that real psychics who speak truth are always disbelieved while fake ones who spout lies are always believed. Does this make sense? Not really, but the psychics hate it.

Paging Cassandra Atreides, Cassandra Atreides to the house telephone, please.... 

The question of how a world can look like ours and still have magic working somewhere in it is the single biggest thing all urban fantasy stories/games have to answer, and part of the problem is that in a story you can establish relatively static or customized rules permitting just what fantasticness the author wishes and no more. In a game, thanks to (as you point out) the nostalgia-driven influence of D&D, the problem is that the PCs are always going to want to get better and more powerful, and to have more of an effect, until it doesn't matter what explanation supports the Masquerade, the PCs' actions are eventually going to bust it open.

That's why one of my favourite game ideas has always been about developing a world that exists after the Masquerade has fallen, or even better, deliberately embracing the idea that the game is going to be about the Masquerade coming down, and what the PCs do to make the transition less (or more!) destructive. The World of Darkness games always flirted tragically close to the Great Revelation without ever doing this, because they were all about the Y2K-millennial dread of waiting for that moment, not about thinking what was actually on the other side.

That is the appeal of games like Torg, Shadowrun or Rifts. I haven't tried those because I feel they lose the main strength of urban fantasy (no, romance does not count): it is anchored in our world and specifically our present.

Damage control sounds like an interesting premise, but by its very nature it doesn't lend itself to long-running campaigns. Eventually it will transition into post-revelation/post-apocalypse secondary world. But it certainly sounds interesting enough to justify a mini-setting supplement or something.

God, I miss the days when Polyhedron gave you a new mini-setting every other month during WotC's "let's try to compete with GURPS" phase. I'd never previously considered playing a game centered around off-road racing tournaments, tour bands with pet orangutans, Crichton-style technothrillers, or being trapped in a VR combat sim, but Polyhedron got me interested in these ideas. That's the sort of creativity I miss in the tabletop scene. If I want to see those sorts of premises nowadays, then I have to scour the oversaturated indie video game scene and those are always limited by their programming.

I'm probably in the minority here in that I actually started playing rpgs with Masquerade, I'm not American so most of the political messages in the games eluded me back then, still, if you can somehow manage to separate the art from the artist (something that seems to have become almost impossible these days) the setting is incredibly original and full of great roleplaying possibilities despite the many flaws of the game itself, the system in particular was always shit.

Regarding the authors, well, even the staunchest fanboys will readily admit that they were colossal cunts, they never had problems disrespecting people and especially fans, always thought they were the hot shit and their self righteousness was unbearable even back then, the whole woke thing was mostly an excuse for them to keep acting like assholes while claiming moral superiority over anyone they didn't like which is hilarious considering the fact that they had a number of pedos, groomers and other shitbags in their ranks, Onyx Path in particular which is basically what remains of White Wolf, are the absolute worse in this, one of their lead writers on the Chronicles of Darkness line turned out to be a pedo whose new line was about monsters who had to survive by abusing people to teach them "lessons", talk about hidden messages.

Honestly, the writing is just bad. It's pretentious af and anytime they discuss real locations or cultures the research is garbage. Much of this is precisely because of the unsubtle political messaging.

I could've ignored that and I certainly tried to. I only grew to absolutely despise the settings after constantly being told "no you can't do that, it's against the lore!" That stupid bullying instilled me with a perpetual hatred for default campaign settings and an obsession with toolkits.

These aren't original either: Nightlife had a similar premise the year before. The books loved to list inspirations too, so even the writers admit it. Some of it crosses over into blatant ripoff territory, particularly with several of the vampire classes being blatant ripoffs of very specific 70s and 80s vampire novels like Interview with the Vampire and Necroscope, or even non-vampire anime like Sazan Eyes.

Yeah, the writing was always shit and the community is full of fucking dipshits yet the setting was virtually unheard of back then, I heard of nightlife only in my adulthood since it wasn't very successful and went down after a while, still gotta give it a read someday.

In my opinion Chronicles of Darkness (the 2nd edition line of what was colloquially known as new world of darkness) is the best line so far, completely devoid of metaplot so you can the tell the cunts who start yapping about you changing shit to eat a dick, total toolkit approach, take what you like and ditch the rest, the system itself is also a great improvement over the mess that the original storyteller system was, the writing is as pretentious as ever and extremely vague to boot although that is an advantage in a way since you are supposed to come up with a lot of the setting yourself so it makes it easier to be creative.

I feel like the writers lost their focus and drive as the line continued. The initial games were messy and suffered from contradictory design goals, but they hit their stride around Promethean (which I think is colorful and extremely well constructed around its themes compared to other WW games, but it didn't get very popular because it was focused around going on a literal pilgrimage to become human and the prior games had trained the fandom to do local politics indefinitely). Vigil and Lost were nice peaks when they released, easily the most creative games WW has ever produced and ever will produce. Afterward things felt very forced and trying too hard to be different from cWoD. The overdesigned rules in 2e were not a welcome addition for me and contributed to me losing interest completely after all the bullshit that happened before that. The GMC was just an attempt to ape Cthulhu that didn't make sense because the writers were high on their own farts by this point. "All the miscellaneous paranormal bullshit in the setting was part of the God-Machine the whole time! The God-Machine wants humanity to mine more uranium... or does it? We don't know!" Oh for fucks sake, these dipshits don't know what the fuck they're doing.

I read Midnight World recently and, unsurprisingly, the world building does what GMC tried and failed to do. Rather than trying to incompetently pretend "oh we're so mysterious because we're high on our own farts", the world building is actually concrete. Rather than just making up incoherent bullshit, the setting describes several "corpse universes" in exacting detail, explaining their aesthetics and motivation, as well as providing guidelines to make your own. This is what GMC should have done.

I don't actually appreciate the vague wishy-washing world building. It suffers from having contradictory incoherent design goals. It tries to be a toolkit, but fails. It tries to provide a concrete setting, but fails. It tries to provide examples, and fails. It tries to avoid multibook references, and fails. It tries to include multibook references, and fails. It tries to have a monomyth, and fails. It tries to avoid monomyths, and fails. Oh for fucks sake! It tries to do too many contradictory things and predictably falls apart. What they should have done was emulate actual toolkits like All Flesh Must Be Eaten or Night's Black Agents, not this wishy-washy offbrand WoD bullshit.

They really should've focused more on adventures and adventure paths. That's probably one of the most useful products an rpg can have.

First off, thanks for mentioning Midnight World, this completely flew under my radar and I have to check it out.

Regarding CofD, I totally get what you mean, the excessive vagueness of the setting turned me off in the beginning too but if you get into the mindset that none of that actually matter into your games, it becomes a lot easier, the god machine is complete and utter bullshit but, aside from Demon, none of the games has it as an active influence in their plots, most fans just pretend it don't exist and just tell their stories, it's not optimal but I think it's still better than oWoD and it sure as fuck is better than V5.

There's a big difference between modularity and vagueness. The problem with CoD is that it refuses to give you a true toolkit with multiple settings from the start, but then wants to poorly ape that flexibility by making itself so vague that the default setting is mostly useless. It doesn't actually give you any tools for making your own settings like Night's Black Agents does in spades, but pretends it does anyway. I don't find this any improvement over WoD's straightjacket metaplot lore baggage.

Compare this to All Flesh Must Be Eaten. It is a genuine toolkit with a plethora of campaign settings or "deadworlds." These are all wildly diverse, but each is still very concretely defined. Some of them are small scale enough that they could even be combined in the same campaign without contradicting. One deadworld in particular, Rise of the Zombie Masters, is actually designed as an addon for other deadworlds.

A lot of groups aren't creative and need an existing structure. I can make my own settings, but the main problem is that it is time consuming.