People wanted setting. So here’s our biggest share yet. Chapter One: A Place in Time. This one comes courtesy Filamena Young. This is just off the hook, it’s not been through editing yet, so don’t bother noting typos and things. This is all about content and world building.
From a design perspective, we figure most everyone that reads this book has already read one of the many editions of Vampire: The Masquerade, or Vampire: The Dark Ages. It’d be a waste of your time to just make you set through the same scene setting material, telling you “this is the World of Darkness”. But then again, some new people will be coming to the World of Darkness through this book, so we have to include it. Our answer to this is, we’re providing ideas, alternatives, and examples. Biased narration and alternative translations give you an opportunity to build your own truths within the setting.
Of particular interest in this is the Traditions section. Each Tradition offers an alternative translation of a Book of Nod passage from a translation different than The Book of Nod and The Erciyes Fragments, as well as other material supporting the Tradition from entirely new sources. Over the years, we’ve seen plenty of reference to alternative translations of the Book of Nod. Filamena and I really wanted to hit home with that idea, instead of using a “default translation” from past material.
And hey, wouldn’t a new artifact book -an alternative book of Noddist Lore- be a cool stretch goal for a Kickstarter?
What would you all like to see next? Tell me in the comments.
Comments
29 responses to “V20 Dark Ages: Chapter One”
What would I like? Roads!
Roads and Paths of Enlightenment are one of my favourite topics. The improvement of the Roads on Dark Ages: Vampire was amazing, but unfortunately the sins were too easy for some (most notably Beast and Sin), which weren’t much challenging. I would love to see Paths that are challenging, but still true to the spirit (in Masquerade they introduced the killing sin in some paths that didn’t make sense).
I know we have seen Road of Heaven, but still my vote is more Paths.
Awesome. Roads are a place we’re not QUITE where we need to be for completion. But I know I have a few of them in close to final draft form. Let’s see what I can make happen.
Sin was mine, and it was previewed before. Should be easy to find!
Beast wasn’t previewed but I personally love it. Cold comfort this side of publication, I know.
I missed it, I don’t know how. I’ll try to search, thanks.
Did anyone manage to find this? The google document is long gone and it’s the one piece of DA I’ve been looking for forever… 🙂
Having written quite a few nod apocryphas and posted it on the forums in the past I am all for the idea of a new Nod-book as a stretchgoal. Particularily if it would focus on getting away from the judeochristian legacy and cappadocius/saulot bias. The old books already covered that.
That would be a huge goal for us. We’re really moving away from such heavy judeochristian focus in V20 Dark Ages, in an attempt to make it a more globaly aware game.
I’m all about a new Noddist text, particularly if it aims to show something written in the A.D. era, as opposed to just *notes* of texts written in an undetermined time.
That having been said, I’m wary of a text that aims at “getting away from the judeochristian legacy”. They are “Cainites” for a reason, and the mythology of the setting is set squarely in line with Genesis. What is achieved by reinventing the wheel where this is concerned?
That’s not a rhetorical question, by the way. My initial disagreement with you does not constitute a lack of interest in what you have in mind! 🙂
An alternate Book of Nod? Oh yes, yes please!
We going to see references to the clans bloodlines? It could be a stretchgoal to add a chapter covering them. Just like we have with major clans in corerule books. In special a writeup about yhe kyasids in the medieval era since theu just came out of they silence since the XIII’s or so. Its a great flavour to the book making it more complete and it will be cool for a KS reward.
Kiasyd will be in V20 Dark Ages. I don’t know about a chapter later. But there’s a pretty robust section on bloodlines in the book. Including a couple of new ones, a couple of re-imaginings, and a few old ones rebirthed.
Thanks. Its cool to see the passion you’re doing this. Its have everything to be the coolest v20 book!
As long as you’re doing alternate versions of the Book of Nod, can you be convinced to give official imprimatur to Jason Corley’s “Book of Not”?
I haven’t read it. Link me?
I’ll start by saying that it’s very nice writing. Easy to immerse myself in – it flows very naturally
What would I like to see next? To begin with, a brief general overview of the book. We know roughly what’ll be in it – the clans, Roads, all the character creation mechanics – but have you managed to include any other background material? And is there background material that had to be cut but which might see the light of day if the KS funds a Companion?
A few things caught my eye…
“It’s as bad as you feared and better than you ever imagine”
“But it isn’t all doom and gloom, little bird…. There’s a world of new curiosities and pleasures ahead of you”
Excellent! A balance struck between acknowledging that vampirism has horrifying and depressing aspects, and admitting that yes, there IS a reason why the entire undead population of Europe doesn’t just stop whining and commit suicide, already.
“I’ve watched during the Embrace, watches as pox marks vanish and turn to baby smooth skin…”
An interesting new twist. In the past, the Embrace has always simply locked the body in stasis rather than fixing its flaws – such as re-growing hair. Is there any further mention of this, or is it just background color in the prelude?
“No, your heart won’t beat unless you make it or you’re thick in the heady rush of slaking your lust”
Back in the day, they didn’t have any, except for blood, and they don’t need a heartbeat to sate that. The Road of Sin would work a lot better if they did, and the Road of Sin sourcebook and the Dark Ages Tzimisce clan novel were already moving in that direction. Is that something else you’ve tweaked?
“But you’ve still got your human mind, odd aye? All your memories, your feelings, your attachments”
“For now, you’ve got a human soul as you did before you died”
Also excellent. Granted, this is the first-person perspective of a Prodigal, but seeing vampires with souls and feelings, who experience the highs and lows of their condition in glorious technicolor, is a big advance from having them as soulless, emotionally dead creatures who only know shades of gray (and not even fifty of them, at that)
“In these modern nights where travel, communication, and technology leaps forward at such a pace…”
Ho-hum. That jarred. Granted, I can think of a few advances in this period. Ship-building and cartography, largely courtesy of the Crusades. Castle-building, also partly Crusade-related. The flowering of the Gothic style in Church and Cathedral building. But the word “technology” seems anachronistic. That aside, I’m not sure what this is referring to. You’ve got major Cainite upheavals with the War of Princes just a few decades old, but is there a lot of rapid technological advance in the mortal world?
“The Audacity of Youth” section – a foreshadowing of the Anarch Revolt? It’s not wholly new – we’ve seen similar material in the Ashen Thief – but it prompted happy thoughts of a possible Anarch Chronicle as a future product.
“There’s no universal truth as to what Clans are High or Low. There are trends by region, but ultimately, a city’s Court determines which clans are clans of standing and importance, and which are less”
Very interesting. Shakes up the dynamic a little. Will there (I know, I know, word count…), be any mention of those trends and regions in the core book, even briefly?
“Even in traditional cities like London, the Prince is rarely the actual eldest Cainite. Current, the city is under sway of eldest’s childer, she rules as he devotes himself to esoteric studies… The true eldest lost his mind some fifty years back or more”.
At first, I thought you’d sent Mithras crazy and put his childe in his place. Then I read further and realized that the city she’s talking about probably isn’t London (“The Prince of London’s got himself some petty criminals and thugs dressed up as Knights that do his bloody deeds. That was never the Sheriff’s job here”), but the way this is phrased is a little confusing.
Overview: Did you see the outline? There’s definitely some other background material, mostly in the Storytelling section near the end. But it’s in a much more kit-like approach, instead of fiction. The thing about this book is, because of the way we’re compiling material, it’s going to be REALLY chunky, so we’ve got to be conservative with wordcounts.
That said, there’s definitely some material that’s going to be pushed later. I don’t want to spoil too much of that, because I’m not sure HOW we’re going to release it. But it’ll happen.
Thanks on the tone. It was a huge thing Filamena and I wanted to express, instead of making it all stark bleakness.
The Embrace polishing and perfecting will get a slight other mention in the rules. It’s a slight tonal shift I think helps to hit home the fact that this is a damned good time to be Cainite.
The heartbeat thing is an unreliable narrator note, and a little stylistic thing, since she’s Prodigal. I don’t want to explicitly state it, but it’s one of those things I think is slightly different for everyone. You’ll see a hint of flavor about this in the Roads.
You’re right on the word “technology”. I’ll fuss with it in the last version.
Anarch Chronicle is basically my pet project. If I could get to do it, I’d do it in a heartbeat.
We will mention the High/Low trends, briefly. I don’t want to get into too many specifics in the core. But, if we get later material, it’s a really great place for our designers to play around conceptually. This is one of the changes we’ve made that I’m particularly fond of; the concept of fluid High/Low just makes a ton of sense to us, and lets us express individual cities as worlds unto themselves.
I’ve already earmarked more money than I’ve ever put into an Onyx Path KS for the DA20 one (and I backed the Mage Ultra Deluxe). Is there anything else I can do to make the Anarch Chronicle more likely to happen?
I read the outline when you put it up last September, but not more recently. I just looked through it again. I’m especially interested in the Dark Medieval World chapter, but my inner River Song keeps saying “Spoilers, Sweetie” when I think about reading a preview…
That particular chapter is weird. The way I contracted it, it’s less a formal, structured chapter, more a series of bits, pieces, and essays by various authors. So it’s actually really fun, you see a unique smattering of experiences and ideas to make your chronicle punch. We had to keep the chapter short because of our wordcount limitations, so I favored interesting over regimented structure.
I might give one of the pieces next.
I like this, too… The line ‘in these modern nights’ slays me! The ‘look-and-feel’ of this is really spot on.
…This reminds me of something perhaps a TAD off topic, but still worth mention. In past editions of Dark Ages books, we’d often get in-character exposition text like this in funky, ‘olde timey’ script fonts that wind up being hard to read very quickly. I’m specifically thinking of that ‘high gothic’ calligraphy script that was popular in Libellus Sanguinis books and others of that time. My take is that a LITTLE of that goes a long way, but it becomes proper work to wade through pages of it.
Getting into character for the Dark Medieval is hard enough without asking players to decipher an overly stylised font. Just something to think about as you work on the book.
Ha. I absolutely know what you’re talking about. For the last year, I’ve had to pore over these books like there’s no tomorrow. It was… a chore to say the least.
I’ve been thinking about that book of Noddist Lore. One idea that struck me is that it should be a compilation tome comparing and contrasting a lot of different sources. You could make it something that was rescued from the Library of the Forgotten, maybe an Obertus pet project.
A question I’d like to see it address is: *was* there ever an original text? If there was, it was written thousands of years before the Code of Hammurabi or the earliest books of the Bible, in a language that only the clan founders and their very oldest childer understand. And if there was an original text, what was it written on? Unless it were carved into tablets of stone, the chances are that anything dating from, say, 8,000 B.C. would have crumbled to dust well before the high middle ages.
We know that both Cappadocius and Lasombra (and Tzimisce, to an extent), were taking a semi-active hand in their clans’ affairs in this period, so the text(s) could come from first-hand account(s), but how reliable (and truthful) would they be?
Apart from first-hand accounts, any texts running around in the middle ages would be translations of translations of translations of… [repeat as needed]. Translations of the Bible turned the Sea of Reeds into the Red Sea with only one or two intermediate languages involved. Even if the Noddist translators were honest (yeah, right), how many distortions could they have introduced unwittingly?
It would be interesting to base the book around the idea that a Tzimisce proto-anarch in the Vykos mold (maybe even V Who Must Not Be Named himself), had embarked on a study intended to prove that the Book of Nod was a fraud, created by ancient elders to justify their domination, and subsequently adopted (and adapted) by many different elders in many different cultures. You’re already dropping heavy hints in this first chapter that the “translations” have specific cultural origins and biases – why not run with that?
I’ll bite – Duras the Dacian? A medieval Becket? Will we be seeing more of him, or her?
Duras the Dacian will be a thing. You will hear more of him, perhaps see more. I like the idea of Vampire letting us explore people from cultures of which we know little to nothing.
And if I had to say, I’d say the Book of Nod was never really an “original text”, but instead, a Cainite forced to bear the burden. The way a few of the exiles in Fahrenheit 451 memorized books, one Cainite would be tasked with carrying the true word. What happened to them?
Only one? If so, count on the original being intended to serve the agenda of one particular Antediluvian (assuming that it genuinely did originate in the second city). Agendas aside, only having one seems too risky if the text was intended to survive.
What happened to them is only the last of a string of questions. Who were they? Why were they chosen for the role, and by whom? Why were they given the task at all – was it simple propaganda intended to reinforce elder control, or something more complicated? Did they remain faithful to their task or develop independent, perhaps competing agendas as the centuries wore on? (Perhaps accounting for the different versions, although the need to “translate” the ideas in the text to different cultural contexts, and simple failures of memory, could also play a part) Who’s heard of them? When was the last reliable sighting of one, and where? Are any still active? If so, what are they up to?
Gosh this topic would make for a great stretch goal.
Do we know the year this is set?
1242.
Ah, that explains the “no Pope” comment. Italy’s a war zone and the Holy Roman Emperor won’t let the Cardinals convene just to elect a new rival to his authority.
As someone who LOVES and USES the Book of Nod and Ericyes Fragments in game? A book of Noddist lore in a similar vein would be a GREAT stretch goal! Especially if you can get it to be POD in the same size as the other two.
There will still be the Lords and Monarchs (upper princes to Principes) like last book? Monarchies of the environment will be described? Baronies of Avalon, Voivoidado …