31 thoughts on “CONvincing! [Monday Meeting Notes]”

1. Hi Richt.
   I prefer intricate history and lore for my Horror/Dark Urban fantasy games really. And honestly i think the things that I find fun to play and fun to read about are almost never different. A good example of a amazing way to insert a intricate history and lore from Cofd was Tome of the Pentacle. The Order’s Timeline was amazing!
   And a gods example from Wod were The Tradition Books and Order Books. There’s not one or those I dislike and unread lots of them over the years

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   • Hi nicolas.
     Glad you liked the timeline! Certainly any of the “splat” books were all about adding more depth to all of their subjects, so they’d be right up your alley – and even though they were for CofD first edition where deep history was not a thing, those Clanbooks for VtR were very evocative as well.

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     • love them too!

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2. Wait, has the ‘Tending the Flame’ backer pdf already gone out?

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   • I haven’t received it yet, so I suspect the update meant it will be going out this week

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   • In the project progress section where the book is listed:

     “HtV Tending the Flame – Backer PDF going out to backers.”

     My emphasis on going. You can look at the project after that on the list where the term used is “out to backers” because that one was already sent out. That’s how we try and phrase the PDF releases so there’s a difference. No worries, it’ll get sent out soon, I’m sure!

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3. This may be a silly answer, but somehow having options for both would be nice. Really, technically speaking, a game could have a very specific history of different key events happening and an overall explanation for how the world works, but there could easily be a section that follows after all that that says “You can ignore literally all of this, keep the mechanics, powers, and other core traits and make your own world. Maybe the werewolves don’t gain their powers through a bite, but from a ritual and instead of the civil war we described them having, maybe they united in your game world.” I think it’s actually a bit of a mistake to view all of CofD as totally lacking any built-in story and lore. There were example locations in the 2E books to showcase particular conflicts and issues, such as the Malta setting for Werewolf the Forsaken. Even if the wider world and game leans more towards a sandbox approach, those written settings provide valid lore and history to work with and one could, dare I say, consider them canon. Even in something like Masquerade with its much-discussed setting and lore, I would not be surprised if some people tossed out 90% of that setting’s assumptions and essentially built their own from the ground up while keeping the clans and powers. There does not have to be such a strict divide between established and unestablished setting, I feel. Scion sort of approaches this with the system Mysteries of the World provides where you can dial aspects of the “default” setting to make the World your own even if there is an official central struggle with the Titans seeking to break free from their prisons.

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   • Not silly at all! As you go through the various ways we’ve approached setting detail in your comment, you do wind up at Scion explicitly saying there a dials for all this – and here’s how to do it. I think we always intended that, but there is always a concern that if you tell readers that they can drop what they don’t want that it undervalues the provided setting. (I can see both sides on that one and have anecdotes for both!) In the end, I think word count in the first two books more than any other concerns made us shift the more explicit advice to later Scion supplements.
     I do wonder at your percentage of players dropping the lore when playing, though. It seems like folks are more likely to hold to more background lore if you provide them with more of it. Tweaking the established lore in places – absolutely! Maybe not even deliberately, but just because they missed a book, misread it, or plum forgot some stuff when setting up the game.

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     • Oh I did not mean that 90% of players dropped the intended setting of Masquerade. I meant that SOME players probably end up dropping 90% of it. I doubt they are the majority when it comes to Masquerade players.

       Ultimately I feel like Scion specifically arrives at a good formula. Even if there is lore and Worldbuilding in the first two books there is still a lot of creative freedom.

       I think Scion’s approach works pretty well and something like that for a new horror/dark urban fantasy could be fantastic, obviously with more horror elements. Now, I don’t actually have Scion: Masks of the Mythos, but now that it is out, do you think however that book handled its darker version of a setting is something OPP would potentially consider for some hypothetical new darker RPG? Granted, plans change so that method may not work for a new property. I am curious to see what you say about that though!

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       • Masks and other Storypath books like a couple of the They Came Froms did give us the chance to look at more supernatural rules and play needs, so you have hit part of how we use the spread of different games. But Masks, even with Cthulhu creatures, still looks at them through the lenses and motifs of Scion, things like They Came From Beyond the Grave! or Cyclopes Cave are still bits of horror and spells through the lenses and motifs of They Came From, etc. So, yes, any new game line is something we look at as a thing unto itself, and design accordingly. Right now, we’d even most likely look at Storypath Ultra as our rules for any new lines, so that’s the chassis we’d be building on.

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4. When it comes to settings, I want a solid foundation I can build on… but I also kinda want it modular and optional. I like maybes and gray spaces and fuzzy logic.
   I’d want to be able to say “Yes, I like this. No, that won’t work for my group. Hmm, this has potential, but what if I did X with it instead.” with the background without having to worry too much that future supliments would end up locking some of those options out (or if they did, they’d either replace it with more options down the road, or else was small enough that I wouldn’t have to use it)

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   • Your worries sound like they’re maybe akin to the dreaded metaplot issues where a later book changes the status quo? For example, actual thing that happened, the Vampire: The Masquerade book where clan Gangrel left the Camarilla due to an ongoing developing storyline. I bought the core book – they are in there. I buy the follow-up, whoops, they’re leaving because of the developing storyline. For some folks, that change coming through a later book is like a plot from a novel series and exciting to read and play through, for others, it wrecks years of their own table’s storylines.

     That’s pretty much why later game worlds like Exalted, CofD, Scion, etc, all moved away from “metaplot” like that that changes the setting through release after release, and towards different kinds of arrangements that tried to stay aware of the fact that while those sorts of plot changes can read really cool, they can really screw up folks trying to play the games.

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     • Oh, I was a serious Non-fan of the Metaplot in the original WoD, and that is part of it.
       But as I said, I also like options. Like, I have the Chicago supliment, and my current game (which is Chronicles of Near Dimness because personal horror isn’t something my group actually likes) is set there… but I’m using very little of it actively, for a few different reasons, but the most important being that none of the plot hooks in the book are applicable to our game.
       What I am using is some of the stuff out of Mysterious Places, because a lot of that stuff is not tied to a particular time and place and I can just drop it in where it works, and build it in my own way later on. Really the whole game spun off from the University chapter of that book, and I developed a complete history for the University that is probably nothing like the original writer inteded. It gave me a place to start, and then I spun off into my own thing, because there was enough ambiguity about the place to let me.
       So that’s the kind of worldbuilding I like for an Urban Fantasy game. One that gives me enough to start from, but is loose enough to let me spin it off into our specific needs.

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5. I’m a total lore whore, though don’t mind vagueness and conflicting stories in parts.

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   • Which parts, if I may ask? Where do you draw the line on the unreliable narrator?

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6. For lore, I guess I’m in between. I like to have the major story bits of the lore, but I guess not the tiny details. Just enough to build my own web in between these details, if that makes any sense. Taking Scarred Lands as an example, Frostlands of Fenrilik is a bit too sparse, but Dead Man’s Rust is at times a bit too dense, as in I don’t want to know about every NPC in every town… so, somewhere in between I’d say 😉

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   • You mean that you want to add in the details in the open space between the big lore facts, and that by adding a detail here and a detail there, you eventually have a web of connected details set against the “established canon” lore?

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7. Intricate lore and history all the way. Tools for sandbox play can be added on top of that (something like the Tags system from Sine Nomine books), but give me a massive, beautiful and detailed foundation of the world first, and tie the sandboxy bits to that foundation.

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8. Out of curiousity, did you work on WW #13 or #19? Those are the two I have, so bit curious.

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   • I sure did, in a lot of ways! For #13 I did the cover, art direction, the masthead for the People of the Land column (featuring our D&D group’s evil PCs on the right side of the logo) and the other column mastheads, the illustrations for the Cloud Abode adventure, the monsters and traps contest winners art, and the Demon Killer fiction full-page art. Plus the wolf-dude riding the motorcycle ad and the art in the Pizza Wars ad! Back then, we wore a lot of hats! For #19, I was still art directing the mag, and did the art for the Underworld adventure for Talislanta, the Wizard’s Archetypes article for Ars Magica, and one of my favorite pieces of that time: the full page piece of the dwarves fighting the dino-creature. Those characters were all played by the early WW Mag team at Gen Con that year, so I based the illustration on an encounter we actually had. Very happy with how that turned out. Thanks for the trip down memory lane!

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9. I’d prefer an intricate lore and even an ongoing metaplot. I think this is currently missing in the market.
   This would be a great change compared to CofD.
   For my games a well established background always is something I can use, change or ignore as a GM. But if it’s there it provides anchor points for stories and characters.
   I’m currently planning a Mage game in the golden 20ies in Berlin. I’m using the rules from Awakening, but the background is losely based on Ascension. I hope my plans for a modified Technocracy in pre-Nazi Germany will be interesting for the players.
   I will not use the defined Traditions though – but I use their mindset as a basis for the NPC.
   So using the rich background of Ascension is useful for me – even by purposly ignoring it and making things different.

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   • Sounds like a fun mix, and how great for your players that you can pull different aspects of different games together like that! Particularly from the Mages, which both come at magic from two different directions.

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10. I am very much in the sandbox corner. I like to read the example settings in backs of the books, but very soon I am on my own path, creating my own setting/city. Often I have an idea of what kind of story I want to tell and then I find it hindersome to look for ways to fit it into an existing metaplot. IOt’s either not the right combination of npcs or the feeling of a city, or something else entirely.
    Originally I come from a fantasy rpg that is SO HEAVY on metaplot, that it got it’s own quaterly newspaper, real world events with elector counts and so on. We joked a lot, that there wasn’t a single milk jug on the entire continent, that wasn’t listed and registered in a book. Being part of that in a tiny way was awesome, but also immensly restricting. You could be playing a game and with the next official campaign or adventure all your actions could be contradicted. Gods changed their domains over the course of adventures, entire cities got destroyed. Maps got redrawn. We had to keep track of ingame years, because the world would change massivly and games needed destinct dates, that let us know, how far away we were from the current state of things. (Minor experience of mine: One time I got very angry because we got chased by city guards in a city that *gasp* as I found out later, didn’t have any guards. Imagine the uproar!) From time to time it is fun to draw upon an extensive backstory, but I ended up always filling in the gaps and grey spaces with my games, that weren’t supposed to be filled in…
    Another thing, that has been said time and time again: metaplot needs time to learn. I say this with all my love for CofD but CofD is already very heavy on the learning part with very complicated characters (amount of powers), setting, subsystems, narrative rules, and terms (looking at you, my darling Changeling). Basically, I don’t have time to teach my players an in-depth metaplot setting nor do I have the time to read it to a point of depth, that I would feel safe to include it. (With the aforementioned problems.)
    As I started playing a bigger variety of games and not sticking with just two, I basically don’t have the energy and brain space to go into a nameworthy metaplot. From the earlier responses I can glean, others do and they enjoy it. That’s great, just not my cup of tea.

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    • Nice experiential recap of some of the challenges of the mega-metaplot, detail-heavy, setting type!

      So, let’s say you have a new game. You can play with the basic character generation rules, and the overall game rules, and they provide a hint – a smattering – of the world these characters exist in. Which was basically how Scion first edition worked. But, in addition to giving you enough to roll into playing a game with the players and the PCs knowing just enough to play tonight, you are also provided with lore: involved histories, significant NPCs that exist in the setting but aren’t necessarily there right then in the PCs lives, that sort of stuff – basically deep backstories of the elements of the setting that you and your players can read _whenever_. Maybe even never, depending on their interest. Is that closer to the sort of thing you’d be into?

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11. I like an intricate history with no furthering of the plot past that.

    VTR had a concept originally when the first edition came out that the books would be written from the standpoint of a specific point of time. Time zero. And the plot past that point would be up to the individual STs. I really lived that concept because I didn’t need to worry that something in my game would be invalidated as we had seen in VtM’s meta plot.

    At the same time novels would present a story that did continue from time zero but you didn’t have to follow or read those or implement their story into your game.

    To me this gave me the best of both world I could have a story I could follow and enjoy as it developed but I have game books all written frozen in a single point in time. I just wish they went a bit further into the history before time zero.

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12. I feel that there are already a lot of “Sandbox” rpgs, where you create a character in a given genre, but with all the rest of the world-building being left up to the GM. If there was going to be an OP Supernaturals game, it needs a worldbook to make it stand out. Anyone with time and intent can write their own game setting, but I think a setting with undead, shapeshifters, magic, fairies, and so on, needs a stage to go with it, somewhere that ties it all together. I’d rather have it and choose not to use it, than not have it in the first place.

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13. I like a solid history and lore. The more informations the better. A minimal backstory is somewhat boring. A solid metaplot/continuity can also be fun to read, like reading a good book, as in the case of Transylvanian Chronicles or Beckett Jihad Diary. I think a sandbox approach is fun when applied to story seeds and/or adventures as in the Orpheus series missions.

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14. Is there a link to the games offered for the Con on Start Playing?

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    • Try this: https://startplaying.games/event/onyx-path-con-2023/search

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15. Thank you very much!

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16. Some more thoughts on a potential new horror game from OPP:
    For me it would be great if the supernatural creatures are a bit more unique. So less “you know one vampire your know them all”, but more “this person drinks blood, this person drinks emotions, this person feeds on the flesh of the recently deceased”. So having a toolbox for your powers and disadvantages. Like with the Dread Powers in Hunter.
    This means that there needs to be another way to connect the supernatural world that just by “creed”. Probably there is an inquisition, or a paradox-like effect that is levied when there is more supernaturals in one place. Or there is very powerful entities that summon all supernaturals in their surrounding.
    Actually a mechanic that makes supernaturlas more powerful when working together would be a great thing to make PC and NPC work together – even if they disagree on certain things.
    Probably supernaturals can learn from each other or have a reason to participate in group rituals.
    I always was a fan of crossover, so a game where every PC can be very different is quite appealing to me.
    This approach would lead to different kinds of source books.
    I know that succesful books need to appeal to GMs and players, so books with settings/city descriptions can be combined with info on the specific dread powers and rituals known there.
    You could also create books like for Orpheus, with an ongoing plot and setting descriptions combined with new powers, enemies and descriptions of new “circles” of supernaturals (like the different Sworn or False factions in the Contagion Chronicle). I think a “Z-axis” with “social clubs” can still be used – probably based on the common disadvantages / feeding restrictions of some.
    I really hope that OPP finds a way to make this new game unique and still interesting for the old WoD fans like me.

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