World of Darkness Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines 2 from Hardsuit Labs

[lightbane]

You can read it here: https://thegamingden.github.io/after-sundow

Can I get a summary of the most offending points? That's a long one.

Characters could move and attack, but had to sacrifice their attack action to move twice as fast or to do an all-out defense. It's the same as in d20.

Here's a recap of some problems if you're interested.

Old one as the Godmachine Chronicle updated this slightly. Still, I swear you couldn't move much in the first edition of NWOD and OWOD.

This is a problem with all the splats, honestly. The population dynamics have never made sense in the three decades the IP has existed. Whenever the books do deign to give specific numbers, the calculations result in each faction having less than a dozen members each. That's not a secret society: that's a club house. Not to mention the ongoing issue that all the secret societies are written using high school clique dynamics rather than secret societies or political parties.

Blame the writers not knowing anything else. Also, at least in OWoD you had global conspiracies. In NWoD, you have local conspiracies, which makes it even more ridiculous as you can have a powerful and rich Ventrue... That "only" owns a vineyard.
I thinkt hat was fixed in 2nd Ed.

Like their head literally exploding Scanners-style or just being really distracted? Either way, that sounds hilariously weird.

It's quite elaborate and it shouldn't be limited to vamps. It became the precedent for the Godmachine non-sense.

https://whitewolf.fandom.com/wiki/Holy_Engineers

Spoiler

The Holy Engineers or "God-Talkers" are a vampire cult that worships the God-Machine. They aspire to recover Packet Theta and return it to the Moon.

Overview​

The Holy Engineers were founded in 1964, when their first member received a message from the God-Machine. They believe these message are answers to questions they transmit towards the constellation Orion, but with a catch: the answers usually arrive a few days before the question is asked, creating a peculiar time loop.

According to the Holy Engineers, the Angel of Death is the patron of vampires, while a being in the heart of the Sun called The Unvoiced Name is their enemy. In 1972, the Apollo 17 mission breached the temple of Death and stole its corpse, transferring it to Earth as "Packet Theta," but Death's mind remains on the Moon and sends messages to its faithful via the God-Machine. Their stated goal is to recover Packet Theta and return it to the hidden temple on the Moon, where Death will be made whole; as a reward, all vampires will be transformed into living immortals and the sun will hold no more power over them.

Holy Engineers work hard to interpret the messages from the God-Machine, and obey any directions without hesitation. However, the God-Machine being what it is, messages rarely contain clear directions, and there may be conflict within the group over how to interpret the signal. The Holy Engineers are perhaps the most altruistic covenant of vampires, as they believe themselves to be working towards the good of both Kindred and kine and are willing to make substantial sacrifices to achieve their goals.

Radio Sickness​

A broadcast from the God-Machine is accompanied by all manner of electromagnetic interference, from flickering lights to malfunctioning computers. Analog media can record the signal, but not digital. The vampire who receives the broadcast, called the Holy Sufferer, has a window of a few days in which to analyze the message and work out what the question is meant to be. If the correct question is not determined within three days, they begin to suffer from Radio Sickness: it begins with internal hemorrhaging that gradually becomes more severe, along with a resumption of the electrical effects on their surroundings. If the question still is not broadcast, the hemorrhages begin to deal aggravated damage until the victim falls into torpor, and then Final Death.

Members of the Holy Engineers take broadcasts seriously, and are quite willing to help a Holy Sufferer interpret a prophecy up to a point. Ideally, a God Talker who recognizes a broadcast coming on alerts other members of the covenant, and they meet in a secure Elysium to observe the clues together. A member who shares a broadcast this way, and who regularly helps others with their questions, is more likely to receive help in return than a peripheral member with no record or corroborating witnesses to their message.

The rabbit hole goes real deep. I did some research and it turns out most of the authors who wrote the original gothic vampires like Ruthven, Vardalek and Dracula were gay men working through their issues in their writing… which depicted vampires as monsters who killed everyone they came into contact with. And I found two gothic vampire stories that used vampires to handle race relations… by depicting them as bringing ruination and death to everyone they encountered. I don’t think using vampires this way is remotely progressive or even makes logical sense. The unifying thread of all these stories is that vampires by their nature kill everyone around them, whether they want to or not. Gothic vampires are either deliberate villains who kill the heroes (for darker endings) or are slain by the heroes (for more conventional happy endings), or tragic victims of their own curse who kill everyone they love before their own suffering finally ends via their own demise (for really dark endings). Not what you would call uplifting material.

I cannot for the life of me understand why so many people fetishize this stuff. Vampires kill everyone around them. Abusive boyfriends are assholes. None of that is remotely sexy.

Funny that, considering Dracula is one of the few, if not the only one straight vampire ever. As for gloryfing evil... Well, you see what kind of society we have ended up with nowadays, for not to mention there's a reason of why the saying "nice guys finish last" exist (worse, I read discussions that vilifies nice guys by demonizing their actions, so the whole thing is arbitrary).

 

[Demo.Graph]

This is a problem with all the splats, honestly. The population dynamics have never made sense in the three decades the IP has existed. Whenever the books do deign to give specific numbers, the calculations result in each faction having less than a dozen members each. That's not a secret society: that's a club house. Not to mention the ongoing issue that all the secret societies are written using high school clique dynamics rather than secret societies or political parties.

Blame the writers not knowing anything else. Also, at least in OWoD you had global conspiracies. In NWoD, you have local conspiracies, which makes it even more ridiculous as you can have a powerful and rich Ventrue... That "only" owns a vineyard.
I thinkt hat was fixed in 2nd Ed.

There's the same issue with Order of Hermes (OOH) in Ars Magica. IIRC, there're ~1200 mages in rules, spread out through 12 houses ("schools of thought") with one specific house having ~200-300 mages. So with 90 mages on average per house and about 10-12 tribunals (modern country-sized geographic divisions), there're about 6-10 mages per house per tribunal. And OOH is described as being the most populous than ever in its history, so it usually should've had about 3-5 mages per house per tribunal. Mages are sedentary by nature - they tend to sit in their labs for decades researching stuff and don't migrate that much.
Despite it all, the rules overflow with super secret sects and bloodline-like magic styles that "keep existing for generations". And an annual "cool new spells" magazine that can't possibly be maintained by such a small population.

 

[lightbane]

Despite it all, the rules overflow with super secret sects and bloodline-like magic styles that "keep existing for generations". And an annual "cool new spells" magazine that can't possibly be maintained by such a small population.

I know, but NWoD made the situation worse by changing global conspiracies to local ones, so you have immortal all-powerful vampires... That never moved away from their city and has little possessions outside of it.

 

[RaggleFraggle]

Can I get a summary of the most offending points? That's a long one.

Here's the first couple paragraphs:

To write a story together, everyone must be on the same page.

One of the primary purposes of a cooperative storytelling game is to provide a foundation upon which stories can be told. The other is to provide a framework by which disagreements about how a story should progress can be worked out in an acceptably impartial fashion.

The setting of After Sundown is a world like our own would be if horror fiction had an element of truth to it. There really are monsters in the night and other worlds full of nightmarish horrors that bleed into the mortal world. But it is also set in a world which is decidedly modern, and that means modern sensibilities. The game's backstory sees history and mythology through a modern interpretation, and adopts horror tropes that resonate with modern audiences. Many horror tropes are timeless - blood speckled claws in the dark is pretty much always going to be scary - but many other horror elements are merely puzzling, and are going to be downplayed. The modern audience is not particularly worried about miscegenation or communist invasion, and those elements of old horror fiction are deliberately excluded from their appropriation into After Sundown.

The tone is talking down to the reader and explaining things that are either obvious, don't need to be explained in so much detail, or redundant and irrelevant. Pretty much 90% of this passage can be cut out without losing anything of value. It gets worse from there. I believe there was a Something Awful thread which did a let's read of this years ago.

I visited Gaming Den years ago to see some of their let's reads. There are moderately decent observations here and there (such as D&D rules and cosmology being an incoherent mess at the best of times), but there's a lot of hate and arrogance getting in the way of impartial judgment.

Old one as the Godmachine Chronicle updated this slightly.

GMC didn't fix anything because, as we've established, these writers don't know how to design shit. The changes were either arbitrary or made an already iffy system worse. They bolted on FATE-style aspects onto a 90s game chassis because it was trendy at the time without realizing all the problems this creates. None of the problems pointed out at the link I shared were ever addressed, and some of the link's suggestion outright involve discarding some of the system's simplifications like reducing the number of difficulty sliders. This is why I got turned off by dice pools as a method of task resolution: they're overly complicated drek when you can just use 2d10, 3d6 or whatever if d20's lack of bell curve really upsets you and True20 provides a combat system where you don't need to roll several different types of dice if you prefer that.

Blame the writers not knowing anything else. Also, at least in OWoD you had global conspiracies. In NWoD, you have local conspiracies, which makes it even more ridiculous as you can have a powerful and rich Ventrue... That "only" owns a vineyard.
I thinkt hat was fixed in 2nd Ed.

I know, but NWoD made the situation worse by changing global conspiracies to local ones, so you have immortal all-powerful vampires... That never moved away from their city and has little possessions outside of it.

I don't have a problem with local conspiracies. I can't buy monolithic global conspiracies because the logistics don't make sense and I don't buy that vamps could put aside their egos long enough to build a global conspiracy, much less maintain it for centuries before the advent of modern telecommunications technology. Maybe it doesn't make sense for vampire lords not to have some assets outside of their immediate territory (Eurovamps do obviously have to move in order to build their populations in the New World), but they still have centuries in which to accumulate wealth.

More importantly, I don't see the need for monolithic global conspiracies from a design perspective. Especially if the campaign is set in one place for its entirety. What do they add to the game? Do they ever come up during play? If Bloodlines is any indication, then you don't actually need any of that stuff to tell engaging stories.

In my world building, I don't have unified monolithic global conspiracies but I do have magical beings moving around from time to time. Anytime that magical beings try to form monolithic global conspiracies, and it's only ever the evil ones who do because the good ones spend all their time fighting evil and don't have time for that petty political bullshit, they don't get very far before their innate evil pettiness causes it to collapse. There's dozens of self-styled "global vampiric council" groups that have absolutely no power and only exist for vanity's sake.

Despite it all, the rules overflow with super secret sects and bloodline-like magic styles that "keep existing for generations". And an annual "cool new spells" magazine that can't possibly be maintained by such a small population.

One way I address this is by giving all magical beings some form of immortality. Reincarnation, eternal youth, body snatching, eating children, etc. The average age is around a millennium or two. Also, they lie about this stuff to give the illusion that they're more impressive than they actually are. Their periodicals are typically vapid and any real knowledge is usually ruthlessly hoarded. Their magical crafts don't actually have continuity across the ages, they're the same crafts from millennia ago practiced by the same immortals. There's also tons and tons of charlatans who publish hoards of paperbacks where they claim to practice "real majiq" (yes, that's how they spell it). A minority do have genuine magical ability, but it's mostly indistinguishable from chance or limited to highly specific effects.

Or whatever. It doesn't matter until I actually write plots and I'll change my mind if it makes for a better story.

 

[Harthwain]

You mean how they’ve been co-opted into sex symbols (often abusive boyfriends who treat the heroine like dirt) and all the vampire genre fans I can find are either straight women or “queer folx”?

Yes, when it comes to writing vampires are either scary or sexy. Women prefer sexy. Men prefer scary/supernatural side of it (with a pinch of sexy, when it comes to female vampires. Because why the hell not). I don't think there is much point considering "queer folx" (I am guessing you mean LGBT by that). Let's face it - gay vampires exist mostly for women when they want something more spicy than a straight couple, just as lesbians exist mostly as male fantasy for exactly the same reason. Why? Because straight men and women are the overwhelming majority. It is that simple.

The reason why you might think that "all the vampire genre fans are either straight women" is because men are less inclined to write such fantasies and more likely to sit at the RPG table or watch a movie instead, where sexy takes backseat in favour of heavy ambience inherent to the setting. On some level playing as a vampire is a bit of a power fantasy, too (considering your character is essentially an apex predator).

Superheroes are awful on a conceptual level. It's magic for atheists. It's magic for atheists. There's no quest, only mundane people with mundane hopes and dreams who happen to have been bitten by a radioactive mosquito. It isn't scientific, but it adopts a vague shell of anti-fantasy for the terminally unimaginative.

I don't agree with "magic for atheists". Sure the Iron Man would suit that description, but then there are characters such as Doctor Strange, who is a literal mage. Superheroes are modern heroes, usually transformed from an average person. That's the main draw. An ancient hero wouldn't suit the modern times as much (even Captain America has issues, and he is not that old). Since we're on this topic, what's your opinion on Watchmen?

 

[lightbane]

he tone is talking down to the reader and explaining things that are either obvious, don't need to be explained in so much detail, or redundant and irrelevant. Pretty much 90% of this passage can be cut out without losing anything of value. It gets worse from there. I believe there was a Something Awful thread which did a let's read of this years ago.

Uh, okay. I don't notice much other than being overtly verbose and that strange bit about "miscenegation not being modern enough" (what about Lovecraftian's inbred mutants? They're always relevant if you write them right), but I'm no English native.

I visited Gaming Den years ago to see some of their let's reads. There are moderately decent observations here and there (such as D&D rules and cosmology being an incoherent mess at the best of times), but there's a lot of hate and arrogance getting in the way of impartial judgment.

I think the vitriol is exaggerated and they waste time putting too many images and such.

They bolted on FATE-style aspects onto a 90s game chassis because it was trendy at the time without realizing all the problems this creates.

You mean the Conditions that are pretty much everywhere and make combat too elaborate?
At least they "fixed" Dramatic Failures by making them optional in the sense players can take them for some exp, but it results in smart players avoiding them most of the them anyway.
In Bloodlines 2, if a sequel is ever made, I wonder if they would include something about these as a joke.

I don't have a problem with local conspiracies. I can't buy monolithic global conspiracies because the logistics don't make sense and I don't buy that vamps could put aside their egos long enough to build a global conspiracy, much less maintain it for centuries before the advent of modern telecommunications technology. Maybe it doesn't make sense for vampire lords not to have some assets outside of their immediate territory (Eurovamps do obviously have to move in order to build their populations in the New World), but they still have centuries in which to accumulate wealth.

I like global conspiracies because it makes the world feel bigger. See Deus Ex's ones.

One way I address this is by giving all magical beings some form of immortality.

They do have that in most cases in WoD already. The issue is that in the case of vamps for example, newcomers such as the players have little room for growth as everyone is stronger than them and will not hesitate to crush them to avoid competition. That's why Bloodlines 1 took some liberties so that you're allowed to do stuff.

 

[hello friend]

Superheroes are awful on a conceptual level. It's magic for atheists. It's magic for atheists. There's no quest, only mundane people with mundane hopes and dreams who happen to have been bitten by a radioactive mosquito. It isn't scientific, but it adopts a vague shell of anti-fantasy for the terminally unimaginative.

I don't agree with "magic for atheists". Sure the Iron Man would suit that description, but then there are characters such as Doctor Strange, who is a literal mage. Superheroes are modern heroes, usually transformed from an average person. That's the main draw. An ancient hero wouldn't suit the modern times as much (even Captain America has issues, and he is not that old). Since we're on this topic, what's your opinion on Watchmen?

If Doctor Strange is a literal mage, then what makes him a superhero? Wouldn't that just make it urban fantasy? I'll admit I'm not deeply versed in comics. I don't particularly care for superheroes - I enjoyed the Blade films and have a vague feeling of having enjoyed another incidence of a superhero on film but I can't think of it right now. I haven't read the Watchmen comics, but I did watch the film which, while decently made, is not my cup of tea. It wasn't painful to watch but it just isn't interesting to me on a conceptual level.

Actually the Tick was funny, but I wouldn't be able to take such a character seriously in a non comedic setting.

 

[Hammer Of The Heretics]

It's common for superhero universes to mix science and magic. There are plenty of characters in both Marvel and DC with magical or divine backgrounds: Doctor Strange, Doctor Fate, Zatanna, Raven, Etrigan, Felix Faust... Wonder Woman has Greek gods and demigods in her rogue's gallery. Thor is a literal Norse god.

What you don't see as much is stuff from the Abrahamic religions. My guess is that the overt monotheism makes it harder to mix with all the other fantastic elements.

 

[GhostCow]

Or maybe because comics are made by kikes and kikes hate Christianity

 

[NecroLord]

I never get tired of edgelords like Garth Ennis with their overused "hurr durr christianity is bad, fuck religion" shit.
Nigga, at least bother to explain WHY, in your author's opinion, religion is so bad, but, nope, they just like to insert their prejudices and baggage into their dumb stories with no explanation.
Religion is not bad. Mankind is.

 

[RaggleFraggle]

I don't think there is much point considering "queer folx" (I am guessing you mean LGBT by that)

I mean a lot of the people I meet when I frequent those sorts of venues label themselves “queer.” They’re mostly straight women with a minority of bisexuals and lesbians, but they call themselves “queer”, “nonbinary” and so on. Also, I get the impression a lot are zoomers.

At least they "fixed" Dramatic Failures by making them optional in the sense players can take them for some exp, but it results in smart players avoiding them most of the them anyway.

Fumbles have been a thing in BRP since the 80s. Every roll always had a chance of fumbling. I don’t see BRP players complaining. What kind of wimps are you playing with?

They do have that in most cases in WoD already. The issue is that in the case of vamps for example, newcomers such as the players have little room for growth as everyone is stronger than them and will not hesitate to crush them to avoid competition. That's why Bloodlines 1 took some liberties so that you're allowed to do stuff.

Yeah, I think that ageist bullshit can fuck off and die in a fire. It was never fun, the writers were just projecting their GenXer anxieties into the game. I’m too old for that bullshit. If I wrote a game, then I’d let players play thousand year old vampires or whatever.

It’s stupid bullshit like that which makes me appreciate D&D even more.

men are less inclined to write such fantasies

They do write other fantasies tho. I’m reading Fall of Night’s Blood by Al Hawkins and he’s clearly a man.

I just checked and the series has vanished from stores. Oh well.

 

[lightbane]

Fumbles have been a thing in BRP since the 80s. Every roll always had a chance of fumbling. I don’t see BRP players complaining. What kind of wimps are you playing with?

I never had a chance to play with people NWoD games, only read the sourcebooks, probably for the best. I'm not sure if you would call it fumbling, as you have to willingly take the bullet, as the mechanic is to turn a regular failure into a crit-failure.

 

[RaggleFraggle]

I like global conspiracies because it makes the world feel bigger. See Deus Ex's ones.

I think the opposite. If everything is connected then the world feels smaller. There’s less room for things to exist, especially mysteries. I’ve seen so many writers write themselves into corners this way.

Without a monolithic global conspiracy running everything, then you have a setting where anything could pop up out of nowhere without prior explanation and then vanish just as mysteriously. You don’t have to shoehorn it into a space where it doesn’t fit.

I never had a chance to play with people NWoD games, only read the sourcebooks, probably for the best.

Reading rpg books is no substitute for playing the game and seeing how it actually works in practice. Why are you even discussing a game you’ve never played?

 

[Harthwain]

If Doctor Strange is a literal mage, then what makes him a superhero?

Depends on what your definition of a superhero is. If it's "a fictional hero having extraordinary or superhuman powers", then I would say that magic counts as an extraordinary power and being a hero with that kind of power is fairly easy.

Wouldn't that just make it urban fantasy?

I don't think so. Magic does exist in superhero setting(s), but it tends to be very rare and there isn't much to follow it (You're more likely to encounter aliens than fantasy creatures, for example). Then again, if we disregard the pseudo sci-fi label and treat it as fantasy, then I guess the vast majority of superhero stuff would flip into urban fantasy.

They’re mostly straight women with a minority of bisexuals and lesbians, but they call themselves “queer”, “nonbinary” and so on.

Sounds like a fad to me.

They do write other fantasies tho. I’m reading Fall of Night’s Blood by Al Hawkins and he’s clearly a man.

I didn't say they don't write fantasies. But it's much less common compared to women. Women are more expressive about these things than men.

 

[Wesp5]

I like global conspiracies because it makes the world feel bigger. See Deus Ex's ones.

I think the opposite. If everything is connected then the world feels smaller.

I completely agree. Also using all conspiracies at once in Deus Ex was just ridiculous!

 

[hello friend]

It's common for superhero universes to mix science and magic. There are plenty of characters in both Marvel and DC with magical or divine backgrounds: Doctor Strange, Doctor Fate, Zatanna, Raven, Etrigan, Felix Faust... Wonder Woman has Greek gods and demigods in her rogue's gallery. Thor is a literal Norse god.

What you don't see as much is stuff from the Abrahamic religions. My guess is that the overt monotheism makes it harder to mix with all the other fantastic elements.

Despite lifting characters and locations whole sale from Norse mythology, comic book rehashings of them completely lack any kind of mythological weight, and are as far from what they're imitating as mass effect: andromeda is from a real rpg. Superheroes namechecking greek gods is like an alien attempt to create music thinking it's just an arrangement of sounds. It's hollow.

 

[NecroLord]

I mean a lot of the people I meet when I frequent those sorts of venues label themselves “queer.” They’re mostly straight women with a minority of bisexuals and lesbians, but they call themselves “queer”, “nonbinary” and so on. Also, I get the impression a lot are zoomers.

That's what Western woke education does to kids. They constantly push that shit on them, to the point where you get stuff like "trans kid" or "non binary kid".
Just sick, evil stuff.
Women do not necessarily only like vampires because they are seductive creatures of the night or some Twilight shit. You would be surprised at the number of women who read good horror books. Fuck the modern era of slasher/blood galore movies. Horror needs a return to tension, psychological degradation, evil spirits, self-destruction, insanity, etc.

 

[Heroic Liberator]

What you don't see as much is stuff from the Abrahamic religions. My guess is that the overt monotheism makes it harder to mix with all the other fantastic elements.

I'd wager that it has more to do with playing it safe since your typical superhero comic book is aimed at a mass audience and you wouldn't want to alienate potential customers due to an offensive (or lame) portrayal of their faith. I'm sure that there are plenty of niche comic books and graphic novels that do integrate such themes though (and plenty of manga since the Japanese don't have the same sorts of sensibilities).

 

[lightbane]

I never get tired of edgelords like Garth Ennis with their overused "hurr durr christianity is bad, fuck religion" shit.
Nigga, at least bother to explain WHY, in your author's opinion, religion is so bad, but, nope, they just like to insert their prejudices and baggage into their dumb stories with no explanation.
Religion is not bad. Mankind is.

He's not the only one, most comic book writers are like him, but they got worse since 2018 with the rise of Trump. I remember that Bats' Dark Knight sequel where the Joker and Darkseid team up for... Ensuring that Trump wins the elections. Legally.

Then there was Grant Morrison having Animal Man meeting up a parody of Wily E. Coyote to make an unsubtle dig at Christianity.

WoD writers are just edgelords.

There’s less room for things to exist, especially mysteries. I’ve seen so many writers write themselves into corners this way.

If you want that to happen, you can still do it. Bloodlines had that mansion with ghosts that was barely explained. Or how outside of cities roam wwolves ready to hunt vampires.
The issue is having all of the other splats' conspiracies running at the same time. Then there's pure chaos.

Without a monolithic global conspiracy running everything, then you have a setting where anything could pop up out of nowhere without prior explanation and then vanish just as mysteriously. You don’t have to shoehorn it into a space where it doesn’t fit.

You can always have lovecraftian abominations showing up. The fact global conspiracies exist doesn't mean they are around every corner.

Reading rpg books is no substitute for playing the game and seeing how it actually works in practice. Why are you even discussing a game you’ve never played?

I DID play pnps such as WH40k ones, and some of NWoD, but the latter was for a crossover with Call of Cthulhu done online that didn't last long. Probably for the best as the QM was infected by the toxic behaviour that OWoD encouraged: Having the QM tell a story at the players' expense, which explains why there are so many god-npcs running around.
I tried running a CTLost game online but couldn't do it, I found the game too complex (or perhaps the rules too shit and didn't realize it so at the time).

Sounds like a fad to me.

A fad that has been going on for nearly a decade and growing stronger.

I completely agree. Also using all conspiracies at once in Deus Ex was just ridiculous!

All of them at once (plus Bob Page being part of like 3 conspiracies at once + his own) was ridiculous yes, but in cyberpunk having a worldwide conspiracy doesn't sound that different from corpos controlling the entire world.
It gave DE1 a B-Movie quality that was charming.

 

[Harthwain]

A fad that has been going on for nearly a decade and growing stronger.

I am not talking about LGBT. I am talking about the whole "queer" thing specifically. This started gaining popularity fairly recently.

 

[NecroLord]

I never get tired of edgelords like Garth Ennis with their overused "hurr durr christianity is bad, fuck religion" shit.
Nigga, at least bother to explain WHY, in your author's opinion, religion is so bad, but, nope, they just like to insert their prejudices and baggage into their dumb stories with no explanation.
Religion is not bad. Mankind is.

He's not the only one, most comic book writers are like him, but they got worse since 2018 with the rise of Trump. I remember that Bats' Dark Knight sequel where the Joker and Darkseid team up for... Ensuring that Trump wins the elections. Legally.

Then there was Grant Morrison having Animal Man meeting up a parody of Wily E. Coyote to make an unsubtle dig at Christianity.

WoD writers are just edgelords.

There’s less room for things to exist, especially mysteries. I’ve seen so many writers write themselves into corners this way.

If you want that to happen, you can still do it. Bloodlines had that mansion with ghosts that was barely explained. Or how outside of cities roam wwolves ready to hunt vampires.
The issue is having all of the other splats' conspiracies running at the same time. Then there's pure chaos.

Without a monolithic global conspiracy running everything, then you have a setting where anything could pop up out of nowhere without prior explanation and then vanish just as mysteriously. You don’t have to shoehorn it into a space where it doesn’t fit.

You can always have lovecraftian abominations showing up. The fact global conspiracies exist doesn't mean they are around every corner.

Reading rpg books is no substitute for playing the game and seeing how it actually works in practice. Why are you even discussing a game you’ve never played?

I DID play pnps such as WH40k ones, and some of NWoD, but the latter was for a crossover with Call of Cthulhu done online that didn't last long. Probably for the best as the QM was infected by the toxic behaviour that OWoD encouraged: Having the QM tell a story at the players' expense, which explains why there are so many god-npcs running around.
I tried running a CTLost game online but couldn't do it, I found the game too complex (or perhaps the rules too shit and didn't realize it so at the time).

Sounds like a fad to me.

A fad that has been going on for nearly a decade and growing stronger.

I completely agree. Also using all conspiracies at once in Deus Ex was just ridiculous!

All of them at once (plus Bob Page being part of like 3 conspiracies at once + his own) was ridiculous yes, but in cyberpunk having a worldwide conspiracy doesn't sound that different from corpos controlling the entire world.
It gave DE1 a B-Movie quality that was charming.

Deus Ex managed to get all those conspiracies thrown in and make them work smoothly.
Also, if you factor the current state of the world, many of those "conspiracies" in Deus Ex have proven to be true.

 

[Delterius]

It's common for superhero universes to mix science and magic. There are plenty of characters in both Marvel and DC with magical or divine backgrounds: Doctor Strange, Doctor Fate, Zatanna, Raven, Etrigan, Felix Faust... Wonder Woman has Greek gods and demigods in her rogue's gallery. Thor is a literal Norse god.

What you don't see as much is stuff from the Abrahamic religions. My guess is that the overt monotheism makes it harder to mix with all the other fantastic elements.

i think god exists in the marvel universe. as in yahweh literally is the creator god of the multiverse. or one of its infinite parts. i don't actually read comics but i think i remember some page of spiderman talking to god and he looked straight out of the michelangelo painting.

 

[Dave the Druid]

I never get tired of edgelords like Garth Ennis with their overused "hurr durr christianity is bad, fuck religion" shit.
Nigga, at least bother to explain WHY, in your author's opinion, religion is so bad, but, nope, they just like to insert their prejudices and baggage into their dumb stories with no explanation.
Religion is not bad. Mankind is.

He's not the only one, most comic book writers are like him, but they got worse since 2018 with the rise of Trump. I remember that Bats' Dark Knight sequel where the Joker and Darkseid team up for... Ensuring that Trump wins the elections. Legally.

That sounded too fucking stupid that I had to look it up for myself to make sure it was real. Turns out it is. Good lord. What are you doing Frank?

I can't believe I'm saying this but can we get early 2000s, ultra-conservative, alcoholic, schizophrenic Frank Miller back? Cause at least he was funny. This is just cringe-worthy

 

[Roguey]

This is just cringe-worthy

It was fucking hilarious. I loved it.

 

[Tyranicon]

It's common for superhero universes to mix science and magic. There are plenty of characters in both Marvel and DC with magical or divine backgrounds: Doctor Strange, Doctor Fate, Zatanna, Raven, Etrigan, Felix Faust... Wonder Woman has Greek gods and demigods in her rogue's gallery. Thor is a literal Norse god.

What you don't see as much is stuff from the Abrahamic religions. My guess is that the overt monotheism makes it harder to mix with all the other fantastic elements.

i think god exists in the marvel universe. as in yahweh literally is the creator god of the multiverse. or one of its infinite parts. i don't actually read comics but i think i remember some page of spiderman talking to god and he looked straight out of the michelangelo painting.

I think both Yahweh (christian god) and the One Above All exists in Marvel's multiverse.

Abrahamic God is present in a lot more media than you'd imagine. After all, even Tolkien's LoTR has Eru Iluvatar, which is a direct embodiment of Christian God according to the author.

Christian "lore" is endlessly fascinating.