If I was your Vampire...

I’ve been thinking a lot about Zak Smith’s call for a Cities and Robots game that would be for electronica and hip hop people what Vampire: The Masquerade was (is?) for goths. Then Patrick Stewart made like a script for an intro to ananime series sorta inspired by what the world of this rpg might look like, involving lots of robots. Zak replied with a body part-targeting mechanic that would be useful for a game involving lots of robot combat.

I think these are great ideas, but not for a game designed for the people we’re talking about. I agree with "Cities" being important, but "Robots" are only important in some sub genres, and only as background reference in others. I think the average white male thinking out loud on his computer overestimates the importance of robots.

Goths want to be vampires, but hip hop and electronica people only sometimes want to be robots and only under certain circumstances.

I consider myself an “electronica” person, and I sleep with a reformed goth who played a lot of Vampire. I should be able to figure this out.

This post is about some reasons why Vampire was the shit for goths, so we can replicate them.

SEXY duh

Subcultures exist because the people in it are not turned on by the popular culture. There are flavors missing. A goth’s favorite flavours are seduction, the tension between primal urges and self-control, the dynamics (often sexual) between dominant and submissive members of a group, hidden potentials, silent implications, the feeling of being special and more powerful and intelligent than an average slobbering human, and ultimate refinement.  

Vampires are all these things. Vampires are so refined that their sex and their eating are the same thing, and they spend all their time either trying not to eat and fuck (white-knuckled good guy vampires and spock in heat) or eating too much (debaucherous bad guy vampires).

“Goth” is just a word for the state of wanting to be a vampire. It took almost zero thought to figure out goths would be into a roleplaying game about being a vampire. Every day is already roleplaying.

THE BOOK

What the game did was provide a gothy looking, esoteric, hard cover object that contributed to your goth score simply by being on the table. Books are inherently goth, and this book was one that only you and your friends understood, making it the secret bible of a secret group of people. It was a book your parents wouldn’t be able to read.

CHOSE YOUR OWN VAMPIRE

Not only did you get to be a vampire, but you got to be your favorite kind of vampire through the different Clan (bloodline?) books. You could be a Nosferatu, a Lost Boys, an Almost-Werewolf, an Interview with a Vampire, a Only Lovers Left Alive, a Kurt Cobain, a Insane Clown Posse, whatever. Your personal favorite way to be a vampire had an entire book’s worth of support, so even though you were already in a special club among your friends, you might have had an even-specialer club all to yourself with your own special book.

I don’t know how to actually play a game of Vampire, but I hear that combat is only a small (albeit important) part of the game. You usually only have to fight if you’ve seriously fucked up. Most of the game is spent actively trying not to reveal your true powers. It’s all about furthering the fantasy.

Any game that hopes to be the Vampire of another subculture has to support the fantasy that people in that subculture are trying to live up to. It’s difficult when The Physical Book is by itself a valuable thing to goths. A weird book no one can understand but you is just such goth crack. It doesn’t carry the same weight in electronic music scenes.

Next time I will speculate on what  a game would have to do for subgenres of weirdo drug festival music and also hip hop which is very different. 

Daniel Dean on 3 consequences oƒ a time paradox

Arnold K lifted his skinny fist to heaven: 
3 nasty consequences of creating a time paradox.


TIMELESS CONSEQUENCES

1. You're god.

You find yourself in a world where you have all encompassing, abject power. From outside it looks as if you burst into flame and burn forever, out of sight, never consumed. Within the flames, though, your universe pops and sizzles, and you will stay here forever until you use your limited omnipotence to resolve the paradox. This has the effect of taking you out of time indefinitely, meaning you usually are deprived of whatever you wanted to achieve with that paradox. It also means that anything around you burns, because you're like a small sun on earth, and even stone melts beneath you. You can kill cities from the heat. None can come help you or communicate with you, and if they WISH you out of your state, the wish undoes whatever made the paradox, undoing your efforts.

2. Tachyon Hyenas.

You can't kill them, because their younger selves from before you killed them or their ancestors or their descendents will appear and stop you. They arrive in twos and quickly escalate until they have completely devoured you. They eat only that which fucks with time, which is their territory. They are ultra aggressive and love time travelers and people who cause paradoxes. Before you travel time or cause a paradox, you can hear "laughing."

3.  Doc Daneeka

Time and space are constant, two things cannot exist in the same place, effect shouldn't precede cause, you know the drill. Picture timespace as a bag with 1 thing in it, all that bag has room for. When you create a paradox that puts 2 things in the bag, and it has to squeeze something out to make room. That's you. No one will acknowledge you ever again, because no one can hear you. If you have magic, you don't now, because your words are without power and your god can't find you. You may not attack or affect anything around you. You still need food and water and air and sleep but those things the universe will conspire to deny you. The only power you have is to speed up how fast time goes by for you, and in discovering and experimenting with that power you will likely waste to death quickly. There are probably countless such individuals around us at all times.

Daniel Dean on a mechanically simple but interesting object found in the buried space drill ruins

Ian Reilly has a genie's worth of wishes:

any or all would be much appreciated:

-a mechanically simple but interesting object found in the buried space drill ruins

DOWNBALL

This is the simplest thing I can think of: a ball that determines what down is. It has three grooves, like it was cut in half three times along different axes and reassembled.

Turning one segment determines which direction is down, affecting the immediate gravity for 100' in a sphere centered on the ball. Turning the ball to face in a particular way before rotating its parts gives you the ability to point down in any direction. If you fall and hold the ball then the gravity shift moves, centered on the ball, but if you fall without the ball your gravity corrects when you leave its sphere of influence.

Turning another segment affects how light or heavy things in this radius are, not changing the direction of gravity but its pull.

Turning the last segment attracts or repels things toward the ball, with the ball being its own gravity. It also roots your footing immovable (so long as you're on a surface where down is going) like the Blob from the X-Men.

All of this is written in simple to understand visual language, for eyes of a long dead kind of being, in a language no one should be able to read without crazy magic or thorough study. It's all easy enough to determine through experimentation, though.

After an individual uses the ball 1003 times they will have accidentally solved the puzzle ball and it will cease to work. I does however open. At its center is a miniature floating world, who will orbit you and revere you as a god. There are powerful scientists and sorcerers on that world who will do your every whim, and leverage their science and magic against your enemies for as long as this world survives. If it dies in your care, its inhabitants go to heaven, a.k.a. you, and you are haunted by one billion ghosts and lose your fucking mind.

Chaos Requests June 4

The contest is over and Daniel Dean stands covered in the gore oƒ those who did not participate. Thanks Daniel!

Daniel Dean needs devil people now more than ever:

For a game I'm running soon, better Tieflings and Aasimar than the ones in the 5e PHB and DMG, ones that.....

1. have traits and appearance owing to their heritage which are random

2. don't just have free spells and spell effects, at least not ones which duplicate spells/effects from the Spells chapter of the phb

3. Don't have darkvision

Daniel Dean needs some other stuƒƒ too:

- New kinds of snow.

- d8 table of miracles that are red sea scale along with why everyone would forget about them - literally completely forget - within a week

- witchfinder's field guide to cauldron spotting: knowing your enemies

I speak through my own mouth

I want an NPC personality generator that is potentially 1 roll, and maybe uses well known real world people as reference so I can imitate their voice right away if nothing else. Or just like something that suggests a kind oƒ voice to use because I always lean too hard on Mako Iwamatsu and Russell Brand ƒor some reason.

Ian Reilly has a genie's worth of wishes:

any or all would be much appreciated:

-1d12 encounters: Tolkien creature rejects

-the aristocrat's hidden room including some disgustingly decadent secret

Robin Zinc writes very well in his own blood:

"a dungeon outline for the old, sealed-off temple of a forgotten Dwarf god. Monsters, traps, whatever, dungeon stuff. Back story unimportant unless amazing and necessary. My tastes lean towards the weird".



Mathew Adams makes a sacraƒice oƒ himselƒ, to himselƒ:
"This is a randomly generated as you play dungeon thing, using the card game solitiara as the mechanic for the generating. I am busy with other stuff, so if other people wish to give it a crack and release it for free they are quite welcome to"

Click here to download the word document 


Now comes the hard part. Go ƒorth and render onto chaos what belongs to chaos. Multiple conƒlicting incarnations oƒ the same idea pleases Tiamat so don't worry iƒ someone else is doing it too, it'll all be posted up.

Email me at chaosrequestline at geemail dot com! Please present all messages pregnant with Tiamat's seed in the body of the email. Iƒ you really really want to send me an attachment please explain why?

Chaos extended and requested

I'm extending the Chaos Contest ƒor the ƒree issue oƒ The Undercroƒt til the end oƒ this weekend, to encourage greed-based participation. There haven't been very many ƒullƒilments so get yours in soon! Here's a new one to get your ƒluids going.

Daniel Dean Demands:

A FLAILSNAILSish class not based on race, armor and weapons (like even a monk is an armor/weapon class), or spell use, which would also fit in well with syndicated 80s action cartoons.

Chaos Contest and Requests May 19

ƒulƒill any chaos request below ƒor a chance to win a copy oƒ Undercroƒt #5 shipped to the door oƒ your choice. Time is running out! ƒor all oƒ us.

I speak through my own mouth

I want an NPC personality generator that is potentially 1 roll, and maybe uses well known real world people as reference so I can imitate their voice right away if nothing else. Or just like something that suggests a kind oƒ voice to use because I always lean too hard on Mako Iwamatsu and Russell Brand ƒor some reason.

Ian Reilly has a genie's worth of wishes:

any or all would be much appreciated:

-1d12 encounters: Tolkien creature rejects

-a mechanically simple but interesting object found in the buried space drill ruins

-the aristocrat's hidden room including some disgustingly decadent secret

Robin Zinc writes very well in his own blood:

"a dungeon outline for the old, sealed-off temple of a forgotten Dwarf god. Monsters, traps, whatever, dungeon stuff. Back story unimportant unless amazing and necessary. My tastes lean towards the weird".



Mathew Adams makes a sacraƒice oƒ himselƒ, to himselƒ:
"This is a randomly generated as you play dungeon thing, using the card game solitiara as the mechanic for the generating. I am busy with other stuff, so if other people wish to give it a crack and release it for free they are quite welcome to"

Click here to download the word document 




Now comes the hard part. Go ƒorth and render onto chaos what belongs to chaos. Multiple conƒlicting incarnations oƒ the same idea pleases Tiamat so don't worry iƒ someone else is doing it too, it'll all be posted up.

Email me at chaosrequestline at geemail dot com! Please present all messages pregnant with Tiamat's seed in the body of the email. Iƒ you really really want to send me an attachment please explain why?

Win a copy oƒ The Undercroƒt #5!

Over the next week, everyone who submits a chaos fulfilment will be entered into a draw. The winner gets a copy of The Undercroft #5! Fuck yes.

I am adding my own request: I want an NPC personality generator that is potentially 1 roll, and uses well known real world people as reference so I can imitate their voice right away if nothing else. Or just like something that suggests a kind oƒ voice to use because I lean too hard on Mako Iwamatsu and Russell Brand ƒor some reason.

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