Quote from: jan paparazzi;846823I am a fan of these. I particularly like Witchcraft and Conspiracy X. I like the writing style. It's no-nonsense and practical in setup. Only drawback I can think off is maybe the somewhat generic setting material. I know GURPS Cabal as well. Both Unisystem and Cabal support different styles of play and different scopes as well. But to be honest they felt a bit like WoD clones tens years too late. And they are now over ten years old and unsupported. That doesn't help either.

Witchcraft was 1999.
I think the unsupported thing is a bit over blown. Do you want to play the games or *buy* stuff?
You can buy the books, they're on the shelves, they still sell well from what my various FLGS managers tell me.
I did a great AFMBE/Terra Primate crossover campaign that my friends enjoyed.

Quote from: Ronin;846858Wasn't there a Chill source book back in the day for playing monsters? I could see either using Cryptworld as is, or adding from that source book. Granted it would be pretty old school (so to speak) rules wise. Which wouldn't bother me, but others maybe not so much.

Quote from: sniderman;846911So many folks have requested to "play as THINGs" in Cryptworld, an appendix with a set of rules for playing as monsters was added to the new Monsters Macabre sourcebook.
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1895361773/monsters-macabre-a-sourcebook-for-cryptworld/description

Sniderman beat me to it. Like Ghostories, Cryptworld + Monsters Macabre could probably be used to build your own faux-WoD urban fantasy setting.

Quote from: Just Another Snake Cult;846760Ever listen to an amateur punk album on cassette and it sounded rough and awesome, then you replaced it with the CD and on CD it just sounded tinny and fake?

I think Nightlife might be like that. That gleam comes from the light hitting the jagged edges, not the facets.

I think you're right.
Of course I have that reaction to CDs in general.

jg

Well it was actually a question - it is weird that there's only one game in town. Of course anyone can play an old game if you can get a copy of it. But that's different from revisions, errata, great communities with lots of people still talking about it it and tinkering with it, etc. I'm sure Witchcraft is great, but none of those things are really happening with it.

Quote from: James Gillen;846743I'd buy it too.

jg

Count me in on the Nightlife love.  I own what I think is all the Nightlife books, including the elusive Game Master Screen.

We are mostly posting about the monster settings (vampire, werewolf, changeling) in the wod. What do people think of the nwod blue books line? The mortal books about ordinary humans who by accident run into the supernatural. I mean books like Urban Legends, Mysterious Places and Midnight Roads. I always liked some of the ideas these books presented, but never knew what to do with it.

Quote from: jan paparazzi;847133We are mostly posting about the monster settings (vampire, werewolf, changeling) in the wod. What do people think of the nwod blue books line? The mortal books about ordinary humans who by accident run into the supernatural. I mean books like Urban Legends, Mysterious Places and Midnight Roads. I always liked some of the ideas these books presented, but never knew what to do with it.

I love the Mortal Nwod books. I ended up making a hell of a mortals game based off of material from Mysterious places (The college that was a living thing, my players absolutely loved it).

Midnight Roads, Urban Legends, Relics, Second Sight, Slashers... You can really run one helluva of a Mortals mixed up with the supernatural game. It's actually one of my preferred systems for running something like Call of Cthulu with..

Particularly with Nwod Second edition "The God Machine Chronicle".

For me... I liked Anne Rice's original trilogy, plus the Witching Hour and Mummy. White Wolf tastefully stole all of that and made it playable and fun.

I never even really looked at anything else.

Quote from: Orphan81;847169I love the Mortal Nwod books. I ended up making a hell of a mortals game based off of material from Mysterious places (The college that was a living thing, my players absolutely loved it).

Midnight Roads, Urban Legends, Relics, Second Sight, Slashers... You can really run one helluva of a Mortals mixed up with the supernatural game. It's actually one of my preferred systems for running something like Call of Cthulu with..

Particularly with Nwod Second edition "The God Machine Chronicle".

Didn't you have to put your players in some sort of mind pretzel? Because you have to come up with a reason how they come into contact with the supernatural and why do would investigate it further. And then you still have to fill in all the blanks in the setting material that is sort of vague. It's not Miskatonic university in there. No explanation to what that living thing is. Just a lot of random ideas.

For what it's worth, Blood Games II is focused on humans, both magically powered and not, versus supernatural creatures. It can be set anywhere between the renaissance and now, though the emphasis is on now.

-clash

Quote from: jan paparazzi;847293Didn't you have to put your players in some sort of mind pretzel? Because you have to come up with a reason how they come into contact with the supernatural and why do would investigate it further. And then you still have to fill in all the blanks in the setting material that is sort of vague. It's not Miskatonic university in there. No explanation to what that living thing is. Just a lot of random ideas.

The College scenario was just really cool to me. I had to fill in a few details, such as WHY the college was alive, and what was going on with it.

Getting the Player Characters involved was easy. They were all students who lived on campus, and began to experience the "Haunting" style events which were going on. The College had taken a special interest in them, particularly when they noticed it had as well.

I ended up using the origin where it was a group of Professors who enacted a power ritual and awoke the school. It's going on 10 years ago since I ran that campaign though, so a few things are fuzzy.

It started with a student they all knew who had been missing for a week killing themselves in the Library, leaving a note that read "It won't let me go...It won't let me go..."

Lots of creepy things happen, the characters uncover the secret faculty occult group which had woken the school up. They uncover some secret rituals, some more of their friends die...and it ends with a show down in the boiler room conducting a banishing ritual while being assaulted by the college's medical cadavers..

After that, the characters got to go on Spring Break, and decided to take a road trip...They end up going through the Appalachian Mountains, and encounter killer redneck Vampires...The Requiem bloodline the "Oberlocks" (Who were creepy Vampires who still physically aged but stayed immortal) kidnapped them and several other tourists from a nearby rest stop...

The Oberloch family put them through several torturous blood sport games against the other captives for amusement. Gladiatorial combat the first night...followed by an endurance contest where two characters were thrown into a deep pool whose side and bottom was lined with nails...after all of that... the next night's game was suppose to be "Nail Gun Tag". The characters decided they'd try to escape before having to play that...

I had all of the characters awaken during the escape attempt and become Mages. This helped them escape. Deciding they wanted to put as much distance between them and the redneck vampires as they could, they drove in their stolen vehicles until breaking down in the wilderness a few states further.

Encountering a Church, the PC's actually teamed up with some Banishers who were under assault from a local pack of Pure Tribe vampires. The characters helped out as much as they could, and after several harrowing events, with the help of the Parishioners and the Banishers they managed to take out most of the Pure Pack.

As a thank you, they were given plane tickets home. Upon the plane, a survivor of the Pure Pack had tracked them, and caused the Plane to break apart over New Orleans...

Thanks to magic the characters were able to survive the fall. They found themselves in New Orleans Post Katrina (I was running this back in 2005). I made New Orleans far more post apocalpytic and water logged, with various gangs fighting over it. Also a cult of Lovecraftian Mages was attempting to change reality by summoning the Abyssal version of New Orleans into it's place..

After teaming up with the local mages, and several battles, they survived New Orleans, defeated the Cult...and finally...finally managed to get home.

Suffice to say it was an epic campaign.

What do you think of East Texas University and the Pinebox campaign setting? That more or less does the same, only seems to be a little bit more focused and cohesive in design.

I've been recently digging out and pouring over the NWoD material again. It reminded me how awesome it is at its best and how much I'd like to have really solid urban fantasy game, but also how glaring the flaws I see and the disagreements I have with White Wolf design are to me.

This in turn got thinking, as thought experiment mostly, how the World of Darkness lines could be tackled, so this thread really got my attention.

As others have said, between two lines of the World of Darkness and some other materials (Scion, for one), White Wolf covers an awful lot of ground in the modern horror and urban fantasy genre. You work on such a RPG, you will be operating under the Shadow of the WoD lines. Not to forget the Cthulhu Mythos games, that cover a lot of the ground WW didn't trod out over and over.

I feel some things that could work are:

- Imitate WW in one aspect: get out a basic system, covering normal mortals facing the supernatural first, as was done with the NWoD

- Define the basics of your setting from the start, including the place of various tropes, myths and monsters. The WoD had some major compatibility issues between lines, but people will cross over and you want them to as well, to sell that Vampire book even though everyone is happily playing Werewolves.

- Speaking of Werewolves, if you want to go into playing monsters gamelines (and if you want to tackle the legacy of White Wolf, you do), Werewolves have massive appeal and it is the Monster where people can be consistently found to say "WW lost me on those".

- Keep the political angle, but do it differently. Setting political structures up in their gameline is a major appeal of the WoD games. On the other hand, I find that WW had an awful tendency to keep repeating the same structures and dynamics. Design some different constellations from the WW go to and you're golden.

- Be honest about the action and drop pretenses. I get that WW got a lot of attention and following with the whole "This is a Storygame and not a Dungeon Delve" spiel, but really, sometimes having a session that is all about a bunch of Werewolves with paramilitary equipment having a great Melee or a pack of Werewolves fighting an even bigger monster-that-should-not-be is fun, so an urban fantasy should be accommodating of that. This doesn't mean playing D&D with guns, just some more attention on the inevitable superpowered havoc that will erupt sooner or later wouldn't be bad.

Similarly, yes, sometimes it's really nice to see that the writers have done their work researching sources and have some academic education. But I also often find myself thinking with WW books "Yes, yes, you read a lot of books written by people smarter than all of us and understood a good amount of it, but just get to the point and present me with actual material and not a fourth page of some faux-philosophical waxing on how your game is really deep shit?"

. Mix it up with some OSR sensibilities. I'm no OSR gamer myself, but I certainly see the appeal of many common elements in OSR design. WW is always about set pieces and pre-written scenes, they call it storytelling games, it comes with the territory. Meanwhile the whole political angle and playing monsters with active needs is very conductive to a far more sandboxy game. I mean, playing territorial packs of Monsters? If there was ever a better gaming related reason to slap a hex grid on a modern city map, I certainly haven't come across it. And random tables, so many random tables. Vampire needs to feed, massive Bystander table, here we come. Random Tables for rifling through a jacket pocket, random tables for the house you burst into, random supernatural events. You could fill books with that stuff for an urban fantasy game and it still wouldn't be enough.

Quote from: jan paparazzi;847624What do you think of East Texas University and the Pinebox campaign setting? That more or less does the same, only seems to be a little bit more focused and cohesive in design.

I think it's awesome. East Texas is one of the best settings in terms of giving a GM a lot of tools to play with. I haven't read the plot point yet, but the core book which goes into details of the setting, character creation, and contains the "Random Weirdness and Demons" chart is very cool.

I will say, however, that I don't know if I find Savage Worlds to be the best system for investigative style games. Much as I love it, (I mean, I really do love it, I wrote for it) Investigation and Mystery style games tend to be very dependent upon PC's having the right skills.

East Texas encourages this, by down playing combat, and not having Arcane Backgrounds work like normal, but the way Savage Worlds works...A player given a choice between being more bad ass at combat, or getting a single die raise to say "Knowledge: Latin", or "Knowledge: Occult" (Unless that Occult skill is powering an Arcane Background) They'll tend to take a combat edge or boost a combat or more active use skill.

It's a conundrum that's always stuck with me about Savage Worlds. Unless you start getting very liberal with "Common Knowledge" checks for the PC's.

It's one of the places I find Whitewolf, particularly Nwod to be very strong. Playing a more investigative style horror game.

Quote from: Gold Roger;847772I
- Speaking of Werewolves, if you want to go into playing monsters gamelines (and if you want to tackle the legacy of White Wolf, you do), Werewolves have massive appeal and it is the Monster where people can be consistently found to say "WW lost me on those".

- Keep the political angle, but do it differently. Setting political structures up in their gameline is a major appeal of the WoD games. On the other hand, I find that WW had an awful tendency to keep repeating the same structures and dynamics. Design some different constellations from the WW go to and you're golden.

Hence I announce my new gameline: Lycanthrope: The Libertarianism