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Mage: The Ascension

2017-05-24T07:46:03Z

2601:843:C201:B420:599A:7A9B:25C:D72B:

{{Game Infobox
|name = Mage: The Ascension
|picture = [[File:MtAs_logo.png|200px]]
|type = [[Role-playing game]]
|system = [[Storyteller System]]
|publisher = [[White Wolf]]
|authors = [[Stuart Wieck]], [[Chris Early]], [[Stephan Wieck]], [[Phil Brucato]]
|year = 1993
|books = Mage: The Ascension
}}

'''Mage: The Ascension''' is an [[roleplaying game|"epic storytelling game of reality on the brink"]] created by [[White Wolf]] and set in the Old [[World of Darkness]]. Unlike most of White Wolf's World of Darkness gamelines, ''Mage'' centered not on stereotypical horror movie monsters (mostly), but on the force of "magic" and the various people who practice it, from mad scientists to angry druids to stereotypical old men in beards and pointy hats, all of whom can do cool stuff by punching reality in the balls. They are loosely united in their attempts to get humankind to "awaken" and become wizards like themselves, but keep running into problems from reality punching back, the Man, crazy and/or evil corrupted mages, and their own petty grudges with one another and incredible ability to turn any progressive, cooperative project into a territorial fistfight.

The innate problems of being a White Wolf game aside (namely, the design team's obvious sympathy with the 90's-counterculture vs. the "square" factions), ''M:tA'' is generally regarded as one of the best ''settings'' in the original World of Darkness's repertoire, at least by Second Edition. Unfortunately... well, keep reading.

== Paradox, Or Why Being a Mage Sucks ==
One of the biggest problems with the game is that, while magic is cool, it only works well when no one can see you do it. Like all awesome things, the moment you try to show off to impress your friends, it backfires on you. Since reality is "consensual" in ''MtA'', and since doing most magic involves at least swimming against the currents of reality a little, doing it in front of people generates something called "Paradox," which can manifest in all sorts of ways.

So the moment an "awakened" Mage tries to throws a fireball in front of "sleeping" Mage, bad things happen. Backlash happens. Backlash allows your [[GM]] to work out their sadistic streak and protect their special [[NPC]] at the same time, turning a fireball of plot derailment into an exploding lighter that sets your character on fire. On a good day. On a bad day, all of your character's futuristic prosthetic organs fail when an NPC so much as glances at them. Then they explode and set your character on fire.

== The Magic System, Or Why Playing ''Mage'' Sucks ==
To make a long story very short, ''Mage'' has not been regarded as a very good system mechanically. The rules are often criticized for being simultaneously OP as shit in crossover games (once he or she gets to about Arete 3, an individual mage of equivalent "level" will, one-on-one, reliably curb stomp any other supernatural in the oWoD gameline if they can get the first shot off, and can, depending on the opponent, give whole ''teams'' of other types of PC a run for their money), frustrating to manage (virtually ''anything'' can be too "cool" to avoid Paradox in public, and the rules aren't great at examining different levels of "acceptance"), and possessed of intensely, artificially complex mechanics (For those of you not up on your game design, complexity and depth are two different things).

Thus, any player who wants to play ''Mage: the Ascension'' has to beat a completely different game first: namely, the game of finding another set of magic rules to use in place of the ones provided in any of the ''three'' editions of ''M:tA''. The [[GURPS]] version of ''M:tA'' was a common pick back in the day, as it has roughly the same fluff. (And if your players are running ''to'' the "Generally Unplayable Role-Play System" to get ''away'' from the rules, that's how you can tell you've got a '''special''' level of rough on your hands.) Nowadays, the most common choice is to back-port the nWoD [[Mage: The Awakening]] rules via the ''Mage Translation Guide''. Both keep the basic idea of not using magic in public and stuff but aren't quite as blunt and over-complicated about it.

There's a reason why Mage is the game that you love to read all the awesome fluff of but never quite get a group together to play.

== The Nine Spheres of Magic ==
Mage divided all magic into different spheres, like D&D schools but more clear, since they encompass the building bricks of existence. People like to argue over what sphere is the best and like to argue even more about if you can do X with X sphere and if the X and Y spheres overlap, but hey, they're fa/tg/uys and like to argue about anything and everything. Mages have rankings in each sphere, from one (sensing some aspects of the sphere without changing anything) to five (doing mostly anything with it). All of them are [[awesome]] in their own ways, and most factions are particularly good with at least one of them.

=== Correspondence ===
Controls space and distance. You can detect stuff at distance, teleport yourself and others (extra bonus points if you manage to teleport a vampire into the Sun), punch people (or simply [[Dwarf Fortress|pull levers]]) at a distance, warp bullets around, ''stack people on themselves'', ''make several copies of yourself'', and even create planes. Becomes both crazy, drug-worthy and awesome at high levels, considering that you are in fact, telling reality to divide by zero AND IT DOES SO. Two words: black holes.

=== Entropy ===
The EDGY sphere (so naturally the sphere that White Wolf likes the most). Entropy controls luck, fate, odds, and well, entropy. You can sense luck, sense "weakness" in items, do predictions, cheat at cards, alter probability, curse people or alternatively make them lucky fuckers, make people/machines destroy themselves with age and wear. At the highest levels, you can even affect thought and ideas with entropy. Yes, you can make ''ideas grow outdated''. Or the opposite. Awesome sphere is awesome. Also, enjoy your Jhor.

=== Forces ===
FIREBALLS FIREBALLS FIREBALLS- Oh, shut up, there's more than blasting to this sphere. Forces is about controlling energy, that is: fire, cold, lightning, kinetic energy, gravity, radiation, and light. Even the nuclear forces at high levels. Forces is hilarious and varied, and while being the prime offensive Sphere it has also lots of varied effects. At first, you can only control a small amount of forces, but then you can transform energies into each other. One of the best uses of that is setting fast people on fire with friction (changing kinetic energy into heat), get infrared/ultraviolet/sonar vision, shut down electrical appliances, change gravity so the Technocrat here is going to faceplant into the ceiling at a few meters per second, pick up a phone line and intercept messages by reading electric impulses (You'll need to know how it is encrypted though), or for the more classic uses summon storms, fly, call lightning, use telekinesis, and the aforementioned fireball.

=== Life ===
Control over living beings. The quintessential [[druid]] sphere. Includes healing, but ALSO ripping people in half, physical transformations (you can [[Furry|transform into your inner super-special animal if you want]]), and physical augmentations. Very varied, you can give yourself winged flight, gills, super-strength, poison bite, regeneration, immortality or whatever. Also, you can turn others into cancerous masses of still-living flesh if you really want... or even yourself. At high levels, you can create life (feel free to cackle maniacally and make as many references to Frankenstein as you can), and permanently transform into stuff. Ever [[Dragon|wanted to be a dragon]] ? Now you can! Only bad thing with this sphere is that at low levels of control if you transform into animals, you can start to change mentally into an animal. How many furries were in the White Wolf team at that point? Well, apart from the inherent potential for [[yiff]], this sphere is really pretty cool and [[Muscle Wizard|you can do manly stuff with it]].

=== Matter ===
Control over all inanimate matter. Very, very varied. You can transform matter into other matter, change the properties of matter (yup, trapping enemies in solidified air), or simply create matter from nothing. [[Rocks fall, everyone dies|Or just change air into rocks and let them fall.]] You can also use telekinesis with this sphere, which means all kinds of lulz when someone has a gun and it is inappropriately pointed and you pull the trigger with Matter. You can make items rust and/or become worthless, or alternatively build shit out of your wildest dreams, for the architects in you. Summon ''fighter planes'' out of thin air? Go on, man, if you have the skill to create a fighter plane, this sphere is crazy. And then you can ''remote control it'' with the same sphere! Also good for turning vampires into lawn chairs, since they're inanimate matter.

=== Prime ===
The meta sphere. Allows you to do stuff with other spells, to perceive and modify Quintessence (essentially Mana). Broken at high levels. Mostly used with other spheres, but apparently, you can remove people out of existence. With mana swords.

=== Mind ===
Mind magic. What you see is what you get: telepathy at low levels, then you can start to influence people (and find an interesting way to mess up with the Storyteller's story), also you can boost your intelligence or will to superhuman levels. Alternatively, you can make vegetables out of people with Mind curses/debuffs, or restore madness. At high levels, you can create minds (total combo with high-level Life for that Dr. Moreau feel). Alternatively, cast it on a broom and get sentient broom familiars), or project yourself astrally (since you aren't going through the Umbra it isn't Spirit). Very, very good for shenanigans. However, it only controls humans and animals, not spirits (Werewolves, fae, etc).

=== Spirit ===
Everything to do with the '''Umbra''', which is essentially the spirit world. It lets the user tear open the Gauntlet, the protective Saran-wrapping around reality created by the Technocracy's consensus, and slip outside of the universe. Masters of this sphere can conjure, bind, and control powerful spirits and other entities, create "bases" for themselves out in the Umbra, and travel around inside of it. If, rather than fight a useless war you already lost to restore a bunch of incompetent fucks who did a shitty job of running the world the last time they took a crack at it, you just want to relax in a palatial extradimensional mansion while your harem of adoring [[monstergirl]] wives feeds you fresh [[meatbread]] mouth-to-mouth, this is the sphere for you... unless you're playing ''Revised'', which essentially nuked the entire Umbra to prevent that sort of thing, consequently making your entire sphere nearly useless. The Technocratic version practiced by the Void Engineers is essentially identical, but they call it '''Dimensional Science''' instead.

=== Time ===
Well, it's temporal magic. Actually, manages to be not completely broken because time travel is HARD. Like if you travel into the past, you lose yourself in history or something equally trippy. At low levels you can perceive time accurately (yay!), then you can do more interesting stuff like sensing the past and trying to sense the right future between all the possible futures (prescience is hard, go read [[Dune]] again), controlling the flow of time on targets (actually slowing down your relative time means you get super speed and probably get extra turns. Broken ? Yup) , and then you can go time-travelling at high levels... and interestingly, past-traveling is harder because the future is yet to be written and you go against the tide of history and memory. Also to avoid munchkins doing ridiculous stuff with time travel.

== Herding Cats: Organizations ==
The Traditions are a loose association of even looser organizations, <s>led</s> represented by the Council of Nine who are doing what they've always done: pursuing independent agendas. Their meetings take place every nine years and only three Masters even bothered to show up in 1988, it's unknown if any were there for 59th and last planned council of 1997.

The alternative is the Technocratic Union, who are currently winning due to being much better-organized than the Traditions and generally having something resembling a unified agenda. See, scientists, doctors, bankers, and bureaucrats tend to be better at the whole rational planning thing than fat Wicca chicks, drug addicts, scattered patches of Indigenous peoples, steampunk losers, Bruce Lee wannabees, and Jesus Christ an actual tradition of wizard serial killers somebody stops them. The Technocracy grew out of the late Medieval and Renaissance-era Order of Reason, who decided that a world ruled by elite cliques of insane reality warpers, vampires, werewolves, and demons was pretty shitty if you weren't part of this 1%, so they decided to Occupy Consensus Reality. They are responsible for adapting Consensus Reality to a rational, logical, and consistent materialistic form, and uplifting humankind out of the Dark Ages with ideas and technology, but they've since decided on a much more conservative course of trying to control the world before guiding it into utopia. This paradigm has pissed off enough people that two member organizations eventually left the Technocracy, and those remaining are starting to split between the ones who want to make a positive difference in the world, and the tubby old farts who just want to keep their power and make everything the same forever. Unfortunately, the Old World of Darkness wasn't always that great about inter-gameline continuity, and whether or not they're heavily corrupted by the Weaver from [[Werewolf: The Apocalypse]] is difficult. At the very least, though they're still aligned ''against'' Pentex and its ''Captain Planet''-villain shtick.

The Technocracy are one of the most highly praised aspects of the setting; while most villain factions in the old World of Darkness tended towards pure evil, monstrous indifference, or violent insanity (the Sabbat, the Wyrm-tainted, the Nephandi, etc.) the Technocracy are relatable. Most fans either see them as misguided, corruptors of a good purpose, or even morally superior (if still a dark gray) compared to the Traditions.

===The Nine Traditions===
====Akashic Brotherhood====
Kung fu Buddhist wizards. [[Awesome|They can flip over cars with flying kicks]] and their super-special martial art, which is called Do, Japanese for "the Way," (both the suffix of every martial arts ever and a reference to Taoism, the basis of their magic). They specialize in Mind since they're basically Jedi anyway and need to do the mind-trick to make it complete.

====Celestial Chorus====
The religious, "miracle worker" class, mostly comprised of various Abrahamic religions and their followers. They focus more on the ecstatic, "spirit-filled" religious practices than on old-fashioned tradition, with the Kabbalists joining the Order of Hermes and the hyper-traditionalist Muslims sticking with their ethnic craft, the al-Taftani. Unfortunately, given the largely-paganist bent of White Wolf's design team, this also meant they didn't get a ton of focus or cool new stuff outside of their one write-up. Their sphere is Prime.

====Cult of Ecstasy====
Sex, drugs, and rock and roll, man. But, like, not for their own sakes, man, but so that they can, like, free themselves from the concerns of the material, temporal world, and, like, achieve a higher state of pure... like... I dunno, pass me some more of that ganja goodness, man. ...Yeah, can you tell that the development team was full of hippies yet? It will be a running theme in this article. There are ways to do the Ecstasists right (the ones who hunt down child pornographers to make pleasure as a whole more clean were welcomed for being an extension of the concept that ''wasn't'' just more of the same), but a lot of people just played them in very boring, "more of the same" ways. Have mastery of the sphere of Time, either as a play on "living from the moment," or because all the various substances inside of them make them lose track of it all the time, and they needed ''some'' way to get it back.

====Dreamspeakers====
The Dreamspeakers represent old-tyme tribal magic from indigenous peoples throughout the world. Which part of the world? ''All of it.'' Wait, so like, all the different Africans, Pacific Islanders, and Native Americans get lumped together because they're all "primitive?" That's racist as ''shit''! ''Yes. Yes, it is. Welcome to early White Wolf, you poor sap. We've got support groups.'' (To play devil's advocate for a moment, an alternate view of this is that the various ethnic mages realized that they were too few and scattered to have any real power unless they worked together. No one is going to pay attention to the two remaining shamans of a tradition most people can't even pronounce. A hundred of them from a variety of sources bound into a coherent group with unfamiliar powers and an ax to grind; on the other hand, is a different story.) Later version made this explicit, with the Dreamspeakers themselves aware and resentful of the fact that the other Eurasian-dominated factions clumped a bunch of minor ethnic crafts together to make a coherent tradition for condescending political purposes. Their mastery is the sphere of Spirit, which mostly focuses on summoning and binding magic. Every sphere has its powerful, broken-ass exploits, and for Dreamspeakers, this means making like a [[D&D]] mage and abusing the fuck out of your ability to conjure things with their own powers to do whatever you like whenever you like it.

====Euthanatos====
Crazy Hindu/Buddhist assassin wizards, who serve the Wheel of rebirth by killing "bad" people so they can reincarnate into better people. They attracted their share of emo roleplayers and [[Vampire: The Masquerade]] immigrants, but there were always some good bits thrown in too. Their sphere, Entropy is all about influencing luck, fate, and decay, which is good because "luck" doesn't necessarily ding the oppressive system of Consensus quite as overtly as some of the others.

====Order of Hermes====
The old-tyme wizards, with the beards, staffs, and so on. Used to be the top dogs and run the world, but they were such dickheads that they more-or-less forced the modern Technocracy into being to keep them in check. Their upper guard is extremely bitter about this, and while they're more united than most Traditions their hidebound ways prevent them from actually getting anywhere. In fact, they are divided into stiffly rigid and systemized "houses" with harshly defined specialties, now more prone to infighting than combating the rise of other Traditions and the Technocracy. Just as well: they didn't do a great job ruling the world the first time around. They use hermetic magic, which involves old Medieval stuff like Decanic Trappings, Sepiroth, and the Seal of Solomon. They master the sphere of Forces. Tend to be pretty fun, but Hermetics also tend to explode into giblets due to Paradox pretty easily if they stick to tradition, and the politics of the Order demands that they do. They also have an embarrassing tendency to fuck up everything in the back story and create terrible splinter groups. The most infamous and important of these are House Tremere, who became Clan [[Tremere]] over in "[[Vampire: The Masquerade]]."

====Sons of Ether====
By general consensus of the player-base, the coolest tradition. They are mad scientist-wizards, each following a vision of '''Science!''' that hasn't been current for at least half a decade. But it still works, because they will it so. Formerly aligned with the Technocracy, but they defected in a huff once their brother Technocrats approved letting the [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michelson%E2%80%93Morley_experiment Michelson-Morley experiment] go forward. (The joke is that it disproved the Luminiferous Ether. Don't worry, they got their revenge by slipping the wacky fun-house world of quantum mechanics into the Consensus on their way out.) Nowadays they've gone from Technocratic organization to being even less united that the other Traditions, constantly fighting over which outdated bit of mad science is right. This is usually accomplished through intellectual sniping in underground scholarly journals, and sometimes through actual sniping via lightning guns and disintegration beams. They have the Matter sphere. The possibilities are endless... so long as, in a bit of Technocratic heritage, it remains internally consistent with your gobbledegook non-science technobabble. In the 20th Anniversary edition, the Sons got officially renamed to the more P.C. "Society of Ether," though lady Etherites had been lobbying for it in the background of several previous editions.

====Verbena====
Think a ''D&D'' [[druid]] and you'll be in the ballpark since their progenitors were the original article. Full of Wiccans and tree huggers, but they also cling to the less-savory side of the druid game in blood-sacrifices and a general discomfort towards the modern world. They aren't ''all'' crazy eco-terrorists, but enough are that one hopes they don't end up on top. And because White Wolf is full of hippies, neo-pagans, and New Age-types, we are supposed to find them sympathetic anyway. They have the sphere of Life, naturally, and can use it to instantly cause a Technocrat's body to instantly reject all of its gene-mods or cyborg bits. Because of ''course'' the neo-pagan eco-crazies need an "I win" button when taking on Team Establishment. [[Werewolf: The Apocalypse|How long have you been in town, mister?]]

====Virtual Adepts====
Very literal computer wizards, and the ''other'' Tradition that emigrated from the Technocracy. In their case, it was a one-two punch of finding out they'd had Alan Turing chemically castrated and murdered, and learning that the Internet was being released to the Masses. The philosophy on why this was a bad thing had its good points ("They aren't equipped to handle it yet! It'll turn them all into lazy basement-dwelling trolls [[World of Warcraft|obsessed with trivialities]]!" which was pretty fucking prescient for the time) and its bad points ("[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September Waaaaah! Newbs on mah Internets! I'm not special anymore!]"). Since they cast spells with programs and the Internet, they're great for nerds who want to play nerds and don't want to stretch. Masters of the Correspondence sphere, which lets them work with space and distance. Their shit works because the Internet is just the upper layers of a great Web of information that connects all things, which is how they can hack your wallpaper and make it change color to send messages. And we don't mean your computer background.

{{WoD-Traditions}}
===The Technocratic Conventions===
Back in the olden days, otherwise known as the ''Mage: the Dark Ages'' spin-off, the Daedalans of the Order of Reason formed out of the Awakened mages who ''weren't'' total asshats. Seeing that their fellow wizards were grinding the common people under heel, and, on behalf of God and the [[greater good]], they began to create a new form of magic that ''anyone'' could use, otherwise known as '''SCIENCE!''' It was a roaring success, and it quickly became so popular that other mages' shit stopped working right via the "consensual reality" mechanics of the setting.

Unfortunately, that was the olden days. Since then, they've become known as the Technocracy, and they've gone from being the ''man'' to being the Man. There were a lot of factors involved, but the biggest one is that they started to shift away from trying to make life better for everyone with clever inventions to trying to control everyone for their own good. Nowadays, the Technocracy is basically a hybrid of a boring government agency and a greedy, money-grubbing business, less actively malicious than sullenly satisfied with the status quo and opposed to change for reasons of sheer inertia. They've even lost two of their old Conventions to the Traditions, the Sons of Ether and the Virtual Adepts, and are finding it harder and harder to get the ordinary people excited enough about their new inventions to actually stop them Paradox-ing.

Their original draft made them out to be, in keeping with the heavy Romanticism of the original ''World of Darkness'', villainous curs out to crush all wonder and joy out of the world to make room for more boring urban developments and soulless industrial complexes, but over time they gathered more and more fans who pointed out that anyone who invented public schools, democracy, and toilet paper couldn't be ''all'' bad. And, after all, with Traditions like the Verbena wanting to knock us back to the Stone Ages or the Order of Hermes trying to take over the world and rule over the [[Harry Potter|muggles]] with an iron fist, they clearly weren't the ''worst'' game in town.

Eventually, White Wolf got out of their granola-and-4/20-scented cave and, blinking in the sun, agreed, making them playable and implicitly retconning their earlier portrayal as Tradition propaganda. It was a smart move that improved the game immensely. Nowadays, they're pretty much an alternative playable set of factions, with their own "reforming a corrupt, stagnant monolith from within" game feel compared to yet another "scrappy rebels fighting against the modern world" plot you can get anywhere else in the World of Darkness. After all, even in their original portrayals, they were the front-line fighters to keep ordinary people safe from supernatural threats, and they still have their share of people who genuinely want to make the world a better place.

A long time ago, they tried to wipe out the Traditions by force in a program of attack called the Pogrom. It was largely successful, but for a number of reasons they dropped it a while ago, and only splinter elements want a return to it. Nowadays, the Technocracy is largely committed to "winning the argument," and only intervening when local mages are getting out of hand. The Traditions and the Technocracy hate each other, but since they ultimately both want humanity to "ascend," no matter how sharply they disagree on what that means, their hearts are both in the right-ish place, and they both regularly declare truces and cooperate to fight Nephandi, Marauders, and regular-old human evils like child pornographers.

====Iteration X====
Talking about the It X'ers inevitably means talking about the biggest divide between them. On the one hand, you have the old guard of master craftsmen and inventors, the cool ones. On the other, you have the crazy transhumanists worshipping the "Xth Iteration" of the Master Computer they've built with their own hands. Naturally, there's a lot of friction there. As a whole, they are the Technocracy's R&D division, focusing on cybernetics and robotics, and they focus on the spheres of Forces and Matter.

====New World Order====
If the Technocracy is the Man, then the NWO (no relation to the professional wrestling stable of the same name) is the Man's Man, man. They are the leaders of the Technocracy, acting as advisers around the world to governments and industries, trying to steer humanity in what they think is the right direction. Their leaders are the Men in White, and their foot soldiers are the Men in Black, the iconic uniforms using the organization's mastery of the Mind sphere to tap into the Masses' brains to make them hard to spot. They ''also'' handle the basic indoctrination every Technocrat goes through, and they're the foremost Technocrats in terms of trying to "recruit" mages. Not ''initially'' as sinister as it sounds (they were the biggest advocates of dropping the Pogrom, and their leader is a former Ecstacist who swapped sides during the Second World War), since convincing mages to turn peacefully is preferable, but they'll break out the dystopian equipment if they have to.

====Progenitors====
The biological sciences division, specializing in everything from medicine to genetic engineering under the umbrella of the Life sphere. Used to have a bunch of horrible eugenics and transhuman types, but after discovering them collaborating with Nazis and Nephandi during the Second World War, they purged that division, and are today some of the chillest, most bro-tier Technocrats... mostly. They really, ''really'', homicidally hate homeopathy, healing crystals, ''reiki'', and all that other New Age pseudo-medicine. Like, they think of it as a honest-to-God ''war crime''. This tends to make them the most predisposed towards violence against the Traditions. Others Conventions regard them as either pathetic throwbacks and relics of a bygone time or a reliable, resourceful enemies who at least aren't as crazy as the Nephandi or Marauders - to a Progenitor, the Traditions are FUCKING KILLING PEOPLE WITH NONSENSE, and force is completely justified to stop them and save ordinary people from their manipulation. For those of you at home wondering how this is supposed to make them ''less'' likable and sympathetic, keep in mind that this was the late-90s early-00s, and roughly 80% of White Wolf's staff were some combination of back-to-nature hippies and neopagan/Wiccan types. Naturally, the rest of us subscribe to the "by definition, alternative medicine has not been proved to work or has been proved not to work" mantra, and the Progenitors have furiously pointed out that even if a mage is there ''making'' it work, it encourages people to entrust their lives and bodies to frauds and hucksters who can't.

====The Syndicate====
Probably the Convention that hews closest to its stereotype, the Syndicate are the Technocracy's business and marketing division. Naturally, this means they're a bunch of cut-throat Gordon Gekko-types who love destructive, Darwinian competition, and so conservative that they think the biggest problem with the Technocracy today is that their fellow Conventions are rocking the boat too much and need to focus less on what could be. (Yes, this is the same organization we called a "corrupt, stagnant monolith" several paragraphs up.) The closest thing to something sympathetic about them is that they honestly believe in being the Masses' partners rather than their rulers and that they just can't or won't see how flawed and cruel their philosophy really is. They focus on the spheres of Entropy and Prime for their hyper-economics, but they have a lot of cross-training in other areas to look into marketing the other Conventions' stuff.

====Void Engineers====
As the Sons of Ether are to the Traditions, the Void Engineers are to the Technocracy. Why, you ask? Three words: Wizard [[Space Marines]]. Fuck yes! Regarded by mages as "the good ones" and their fellow Technocrats as the loose cannons, the Void Engineers are masters of exploration. In the olden days, they searched the bottom of the sea and the furthest reaches of the land, and in modern times they chart the Deep Umbra and run a thriving community of space stations throughout the solar system. They are masters of the spheres of Correspondence and Dimensional Science, a heavily-modified version of the Traditions' Spirit sphere. The Engineers are the most free-spirited of the Technocrats, and the most likely to collaborate with the Conventions (they are especially friendly enemies with the Euthanatos), but they're still loyal technocrats. In fact, while they remain informal ties to the Etherites, ''they'' were the ones who pushed to remove the Luminiferous Ether from the Consensus to keep their brother Convention in line. They also tend to be viewed by the other conventions as the "less corrupt" faction only because they don't have to get their hands dirty running the 'real world' like their brethren. On the other, other hand, they are the single most likely magegroup to get a multi-faction party together to get shit done and pull awesomely pragmatic feats like frying a sub-continent darkening vampire [[Antediluvian]] by using orbital mirrors to reflect and concentrate light from the other side of the world. They had a whole subplot in ''Revised'' where they recruited Traditions to help fight Threat Null, but it's a long story and M20's probably going to make it obsolete when it finally comes out, so long story short, a contingent of Void Engineers wandered off into the Deep Umbra (the extra-extra-dimensional realms of pure possibility) and found something that freaked them right the fuck out and sent them running back home to [[Space Marines|militarize]] - a bunch of high-level Technocrats fucked off to the edge of reality and became the Borg.

===Independant Crafts===
Too small or specialized to join the Conventions and either disliking or outright opposing the Technocrats, the Independent Crafts decided to band together to form a power block of their own.

====Ahl-i-Batin====
The former Seat of Correspondence before the Virtual Adepts jumped ship. They were a group of Arabic mystics who had mastered spacetime; then they saw how things were going and performed a mass NOPE! ritual off to the depths of space. Whether they were legitimate Sufi mystics or Arabian Nights parodies depended on the supplement's author.

====Bata'a====
A group consisting of former slaves in the Americas. They got voodoo, they got hoodoo, they got things I didn't even try! And they got friends on the other side. Are the servants of Les Mysteres, which translates into the Spirit Tradition.

====Children of Knowledge====
Alchemists turned drug users, using all sorts of crazy shit to power up their senses and use their magic. Party even harder than the Cult of Ecstasy.

====Hollow Ones====
The Councilor faction has been trying to join the Traditions since the 1900s, despite not having a Tradition to join with. Stereotypically goth/emo "no future" club kids/ravers. No one takes them seriously, save for the Cult of Extasy (gotta sell that dope to someone, right?)

====Knights Templar====
Yes, the real deal. Once part of the Order of Reason they were betrayed and went into hiding. Are a very secretive group and communicate mostly through the Internet in messages that can only be deciphered by someone with extensive knowledge of scripture and the Templars themselves. Gather in lodges, some of whom are charity-minded nuns while others are monks/soldiers of Christ.

====Kopa Loei====
Polynesian mages using all sorts of stuff related to their culture to protect their lands from The Man.

====Ngoma====
Practitioners of traditional high ritual magic in Classical Africa. Their predecessors got their shit several kinds of wrecked and now seek to recover lost knowledge. Are frequently amongst the richer and more successful people in Africa.

====Sisters of Hippolyta====
Descended from the Amazons, and use a mix of martial art, Wicca and Greek ritual to practice their (frequently Life and Mind-oriented) magic. At best, they are some of the most caring and loving healers in the world. At worst, they are caricatures of [[SJW|Social Justice Warriors]].

====Taftâni====
Arabic Zoroastrian-influenced mages who think the Consensus can go fuck itself, so they enslave djinni, make flying carpets, make brass palaces out of deserts, and other overwhelmingly vulgar magic straight out of the Arabian Nights. They don't give a shit about Paradox either, hell, they consider it is a badge of honor. They also have fought the Technocracy and won, and they make their lands acceptive of Paradox. Basically, they're wizards who not only kick reality in the balls but [[Fist of the North Star|kick her in the balls a thousand times in a second and screaming really loudly]] "FUCK YOU, I'M A WIZARD" that reality got afraid of them and got the fuck out of their lands. [[Awesome|Fuck yeah, Taftani]].

====Wu Lung====
Arrogant Chinese mystics, they got blinded by their hubris and had their asses kicked during the War For Drugs (the Opium Wars) and the Cultural Revolution pretty much broke them. Now they seek to rebuild their power in the great tradition of "China takes over the world". Mages are urged to become powerful bankers and money brokers. The majority of their number are pure-blooded Chinese men, but they have begun to accept women and those of non-pure blood out of necessity.

===Orphans===
Wholly independent mages. The Caitiffs of the Mage setting. Typically never had a mentor. Stumbled into magic by themselves and never had another Craft or Tradition to guide them. Completely self-taught. Jacks of all trades, masters of none. They're a total blank slate for those who don't really like how the other Crafts/Traditions are themed.

===Others===
Two different flavors of batshit crazy. Nobody likes either of them, and some of the Marauders are even wiling to stop being asshats to put down a local Nephandi.

====Marauders====
Insane mages that can somehow avoid Paradox by passing it off to other people. When John the Barbarian gallops through New York on the back of his pet ''T. rex'' Gundar, blasting cars aside with his magic crystal sword and bellowing war-cries as he rides off to fight an imaginary menace, it's not ''his'' problem, it's ''society's'' problem. Very powerful due to their Paradox immunity, and while they're tragic figures, they're also dangerous enough that the mages and Technocrats will team up to keep them under control.

====Nephandi====
Evil mages that worship either insane demons or most of the things [[Lovecraft]] came up with, they seek to cause not Ascension but Descent, encouraging humanity to transform the world into a literal Hell so that their masters can take possession of it. Part of becoming one involves inverting your avatar through a horrific process that persists through everyone else who inherits it, but unless you inherited the job there's ''nothing'' sympathetic about these monsters, and in a world of gray and gray they are the blacker than black. Another threat that forces cooperation between the Traditions and the Technocracy, most famously in World War II. (Unsurprisingly, most of the Nephandi were [[Nazi]]s)

==See Also==
*[[Mage: The Awakening]] (nWoD)
*[[World of Darkness]]

==Links==
* [http://www.worldofdarkness.com/ World of Darkness website]
* [http://wiki.white-wolf.com/worldofdarkness World of Darkness wiki]
* [http://www.unmodchat.com/ Unmoderated WoD Chat]
* [http://mrgone.rocksolidshells.com/ Mister Gone's Character Sheets]
* [https://github.com/locke8/weaponmark/ An Open Source Weapon Comparison Utility for Mage]

{{WoD-Games}}

World of Darkness

2017-05-22T08:31:08Z

2601:843:C201:B420:599A:7A9B:25C:D72B:

{{Game Infobox
|name = World of Darkness
|type = [[RPG]]
|picture = [[Image:WoD logo.png|200px]]
|publisher = [[White Wolf]] / Onyx Path
|system = [[World of Darkness#The System|Storyteller System / Storytelling System]]
|year = 1991 / 2004
}}
The '''''World of Darkness''''' is two different lines of [[RPG]]s published by [[White Wolf]] and later [[White Wolf|Onyx Path]] (and later still by both of them at once, it's complicated) that focus on deep role-playing and, depending on the specific sub-game, the horror genre. The setting can only be described as the modern world, but [[Grimdark|worse in every aspect]]. Every creeping suspicion you have is probably true, and the world is as dirty and corrupt as it often seems to be. In the old ''World of Darkness'', each game was meant to be played separately; as a result the games often had conflicting metaplots and, despite using the same basic "Storyteller System", were incompatible when it came to various supernatural powers. The release of a new ''World of Darkness'' (with an updated ruleset, the "Storytelling System") features a core book that contains the basic rules for all the games, and focuses on normal human beings in horrific situations that may or may not be supernatural in nature. The new games interact in a modular fashion and also have little established fluff, making it more malleable for Storytellers (the in-game term for [[GM]]; abbreviated as ST). The new line has also been trying to avoid the old Gothic feel for which it was known (specifically with ''[[Vampire: The Masquerade]]'') in favor of a slightly more traditional form of horror. As of December 2015 it has been renamed ''Chronicles of Darkness'' to allow its setting to exist separately from that of the setting of the relaunched oWoD (which is itself now called Classic World of Darkness or cWoD).

== The System ==
The basic system in both the new and old World of Darkness revolves around a dicepool of '''d10'''<nowiki>'</nowiki>s. Your [[dice pool]] consists of a number of dice equal to your relevant ability score plus your skill and other relevant modifiers.

In oWoD/cWoD, the [[GM|Storyteller]] sets the difficulty for each roll depending on the circumstances, with the default being a difficulty of 7. A '''success''' is a roll of that difficulty or higher (7 or above, on most rolls). A roll of 1 is called a '''botch'''. If any number of 1's are rolled, they cancel out a single success. No more than one success can be cancelled out in this way, so critical failures (A botch with zero successes) are relatively rare. The net number of successes determines how well you succeed, with one success meaning that you are barely able and a greater number indicating better achievement. When you get zero net successes (if you get no successes or if your 1s cancel out your successes, or if you get at least one success and more ones than successes), you fail the roll. When you get zero successes and at least one 1, you botch-- a critical and spectacular failure. If you have a '''specialty''' in either your attribute or ability that is relevant on the roll, you may reroll all 10s to gain extra successes, and rolls of 1 on these rerolls do not count.

In nWoD/CoD, a success is an 8, 9, or 10, and 10s [[exploding die|explode]]. A critical success is made when you get five or more successes. Instead of altering the target number of the roll, difficulty and circumstances increase or reduce the number of dice in the pool. When your dice pool is reduced to zero or less, you get a chance die. You roll the die normally, but only succeed on a ten (which still explodes) and if you get a one you get a critical failure. All other rolls are called simple failures, although any simple failure can be turned into a critical failure by the player in return for bonus Beats (basically XP).

==== Short Summary of Game Lines ====
* Vampire: You're the bad guy. Your friends are also villains.
* Werewolf: You're fighting a war, and you're losing.
* Mage: You're fighting a war you already lost.
* Wraith: You lost, you died, and now you're trying to avoid a fate worse than death.
* Changeling: You're fighting a war you already lost and nobody is taking you seriously.
* Hunter: You're [[Imperial Guard|fighting a war where everyone's bigger than you and trying to kill you.]]
* Mummy: You're immortal... that's it.
* Demon: You're fighting a cold war with mixed results.
* Orpheus: You're mortal and dying temporarily is part of your job.

== Old World of Darkness/Classic World of Darkness (oWoD/cWoD) ==
[[Image:WOD_old_1e_cover.jpeg|thumb|oWoD 1st edition cover]]
* [[Vampire: The Masquerade]]
:The original World of Darkness game. Covers playing vampire characters in the modern day World of Darkness. It gains its title from "The Masquerade", an in-game set of rules and guidelines dictated by the Camarilla sect in an attempt to keep the mortal populace unaware of vampires and their influence on society. This is also basically the only thing you can get more than one sect of vampires to agree on, and a lot of the game revolves around the resulting political intrigue.
:It is heavily influenced by gothic imagery and by a variety of different vampire mythos, including the romanticised version of the vampire popularised by Anne Rice.
* [[Werewolf: The Apocalypse]]
:Second game to be released set in the World of Darkness. The game covers playing werewolf characters known as Garou. It gains its title from one of the major antagonistic themes in the game where supernatural forces of corruption are attempting to bring about the Apocalypse. The game tended to degenerate into hack-and-slash, mainly as it is a author tract where the authors had conflicting messages.
* [[Mage: The Ascension]]
:Player characters in this game come from a variety of backgrounds, both mortal and immortal and are unified by the fact that they all practice magic of one form or another. Magic is defined by the game as a force that can shape reality with the willpower, belief or special magical techniques of the user. Had a pretty sweet metaplot/setting, but was hamstrung by the extreme clumsiness of its mechanical system.
* [[Wraith: The Oblivion]]
:You're dead, and now you're a ghost. Either move on by severing what anchors you have to this world, or stay and have a good time making scary noises. And oh, try not to fall into hell. Lots of ideas that sound good on paper but ruin friendships in execution, like making each player ''also'' roleplay another player's manifested personal demons.
* [[Changeling: The Dreaming]]
:The characters are fairy souls 'trapped' in human bodies to survive in the cold banal world. The game's theme centered heavily on the concept of Chimera, where things weren't magical or mundane, but both at once. So the real world would see an old butterknife, and it would be - but in the realm of faerie, it would also be a mystical longsword. The concept of Banality is unfortunately somewhat awkwardly implemented and requires some work by the Storyteller to appropriately function. The series was cut short, and a number of expansions that were announced were never released. This game is and was massively popular with otherkin since its premise is their delusion, and if you know anybody post-2012 who still plays it; your friends almost certainly believe themselves to be elves.
* [[Kuei-Jin|Kindred of the East]]
:It is vampires... from the east. Go play vampire the masquerade bloodlines to make that make more sense.
* [[Hunter: The Reckoning]]
:Mortals are imbued with weird powers by mysterious forces in a last-ditch effort to keep the world from circling the drain. Played according to the writing, it's Call of Cthulhu in the World of Darkness- a bunch of scared people who are going to die very horribly unless they're very cautious and paranoid. Played according to the art, it's, well, the licensed H:tR video games.
* [[Mummy: The Resurrection]]
: You play a mummy. Which has been resurrected. And has access to a third-level power (out of five) that levels the town you're in. The game was almost universally met with a directly hostile response, and even reminding a WoD player of it will make him rage. Do it.
* [[Demon: The Fallen]]
:The gates of the Hell that the fallen angels have been trapped in for millienia crack open, and the fallen find human hosts and servitors for their various ends.
* [[Orpheus]]
:It's like Flatliners meets Ghostbusters; focusing on teams that use cryogenics and astral projection to become semi-ghosts, all funded by a corporation called the Orpheus Group. And if you thought The Underworld from WtO couldn't get more grimdark...

=== Fan Games ===
*[http://www.scribd.com/doc/96117271/Gargoyles-the-Vigil Gargoyles: The Vigil]
:A crossover with the cartoon ''Gargoyles'', there's work underway to convert it to GMC nWoD rules [http://forum.theonyxpath.com/forum/main-category/main-forum/the-new-world-of-darkness/383957-converting-gargoyles-the-vigil here.]
* [http://home.pacific.net.au/~turner23/greayz/greys.htm Greys: The Abduction]
: A short fan-expansion from 1997, has three different types of aliens.
* [[Highlander: The Gathering]] ([http://vampirerpg.free.fr/Rules/Highlander/ Link], [http://www.highlander.org/roleplaying/ alt])
:Holy shit this is a fan-made supplement where life doesn't suck! You're immortal and extremely powerful, but still human. It's kill or be killed, though. So once The Gathering comes around you have to kill most of the friends you've made through the ages. Also has a neat custom sword fight system. If you've seen Highlander, you'll love it. If not, see Highlander 2 and The Source. There's also a LARP version called [http://www.greyhawkes.com/larp/highlarp.htm Highlander: The Quickening] made by different authors exists.
* [http://www.maison-otaku.net/~rhea/senshi.html Senshi: The Merchandising]
:A fan-game from the 90's that is a parody of ''Sailor Moon'' and the old WoD. Remember how Mages can bend reality to their whim? Well, now imagine a bunch of 90s anime nerds Ascending... ''"The Technocracy is STILL trying to cover up the 'Tokyo-3' disaster."''
* [http://techinfantry.stasheff.com/ Tech Infantry]
:oWoD meets ''Starship Troopers'', has some parallels in the ''Mirrors: Infinite Macabre'' supplement for the nWoD.
* [[Zombie: The Coil]] ([http://gamingnerdsrus.co/forum/index.php?topic=91.0 Link])
:A Fan-made expansion from 2001. Brai-i-ins and grimderp ensue.

== New World of Darkness/Chronicles of Darkness (nWoD/CoD) ==
[[Image:WODcover.jpg|thumb|nWoD cover]]
* '''The Storytelling System Rulebook''' The core rulebook unifies the rule systems of the other game lines, as well as provides a basic system with which to play as mortal humans, and some barebones ghosts rules that are added onto in nearly every publication where ghosts are relevant. [http://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/114078 The second edition update] is available as a free pdf online and it replaces the old "Victorian" morality system with one that's more modern, and also includes most of the improvements from the ''God Machine Chronicle'' (see below).
** ''God Machine Chronicle'' Essentially the second edition of the core rulebook. Brings in a new morality system, "Integrity", with breaking points instead of the hierarchy of sins. Along with systems of conditions and "beats". If you don't mind the notion of God being a celestial laptop or the increased micro-management of the system, it's worth looking at as it's a big update over the old version. For better or worse depends on how you look at it.
** ''Immortals'' Not an actual gameline as such but a supplement that was released for Immortal characters that follow different ideas of Immortality. Except out of the 3 Immortals in the book, the first jumps off the karma meter so fast its unplayable, primarily because its Immortality is powered by bathing in a '''LOT''' of blood, preferably virgin but any human will do. The second, the Body Thief, is almost playable but again the karma meter gets in the way of anything involving the whole body swapping thing, resulting in the character becoming unplayable again. The third Immortal lives off some sort of mystic Chi/Kai stuff and is basically powered by Feng Shui. It's the only one that could be considered playable, and the authors must have realized this because its much better worked then the others which seem to have been intended as pure NPCs initially and then left as they are now.
** ''Inferno'' Rules for old-fashioned demons (or angels) almost completely different from the fallen angels of the God Machine. As it was one of the earlier supplements, it is horribly incompatible with the GMC rules update, being focused on one half of the old morality system.
** ''Innocents'' An add-on for the core book, you're just a normie who has to deal with the realities of the world revealing themselves to you. If you survive you'll most likely either be institutionalized, a Hunter, or a serial killer. Or more than one. Or a monster, that works too.
** The ''Mirrors'' supplements and ''Translation Guides'' Modifications for the Storytelling System itself as well as hints on adapting it for different genres (the former) while the latter guides allowed mix-and-match rules from the three main game-lines of ''oWoD'' and ''nWoD''. It's notable that the Guides not only go through the crunch but also have chapters with suggestions of how you might fluffwise justify having one nWoD Mage order here or an cWoD tribe of Werewolves there for both New and Classic World of Darkness games. So if you for example really miss Clan Tzimisce in Vampire: The Requiem or think Requiem did the Nosferatu better but you still wanna run Vampire: The Masquerade, have a look in the Vampire Translation Guide and you'll get separate chapters covering both the fluff and the crunch for porting them over from Masquerade into Requiem or vice versa.

=== Principal Games ===
* [[Vampire: The Requiem]]
:13 Clans with fleshed out, restricting histories become 5 clans with vague, open-ended histories and multiple Bloodlines (sub-clans). The Camarilla becomes 5 Covenants with mutually exclusive goals. The Sabbat becomes VII, the Infernalists become the more sporadic, less-organized Belial's Brood. Arguably the biggest difference is that you can't just make someone a Vampire by draining them and feeding them your blood, now you have to permanently spend a dot of Willpower to do it. An alternate setting in ancient Rome also exists, which contains a history of the Carmarilla (and how it collapsed with the rest of the Roman Empire). Additionally, a new set of antagonists in the form of the Strix, which are demonic owl-like creatures bent on purging every last trace of Humanity from vampire society (to the point where even a Humanity 0 vampire is ''too human'' for them) and can possess corpses and vampires to lash out at mortals and undead alike.
* [[Werewolf: The Forsaken]]
:A slightly more "balanced" version of Werewolf. You can't run around in 8-foot tall invincible war-form all the time, and you see humans as a flock of idiotic sheep that you have to protect from malicious spirits due to a vow sworn by your ancient ancestors as punishment for divine patricide. The "adjustments" resulted, possibly intentionally, in the average werewolf no longer being a match for the average vampire, a criticism invariably met with statements regarding the relative level of coordination between werewolf packs and vampire coteries. An example of a well run Werewolf: the Forsaken game is [http://forum.rpg.net/showthread.php?446663-Werewolf-The-Forsaken-quot-Detroit-Rock-City-quot Detroit Rock City]. It is written in novel format for ease of reading, played over Skype.
* [[Mage: The Awakening]]
:Mechanically simplified and involving more magic usage than [[Mage: The Ascension|M:tAsc]], M:tA's biggest criticism is that it doesn't have as compelling a plot — specifically, the revised political landscape is the most frequent target of attack.

=== Limited Release Games ===
* [[Promethean: The Created]]
:Frankenstein: The RPG. You're a scorned mockery of humanity, most likely abandoned by your creator, left to fend for yourself in a world that wants you dead. You're perpetually dazed and confused, always trying to pick up the ways of humans, but that's not happening because you have a disquieting aura that makes every sentient being in the world eventually hate you and the places you stay in will turn into an uninhabitable hellhole if you linger too long, so you can never make real friends and have to live as a nomad. Only five books long, but it pretty much covers all the bases. Surprisingly, it's actually rather optimistic since in theory you can make like Pinocchio and become a true human under the right circumstances.
* [[Changeling: The Lost]]
:No longer are the Changelings faeries, but humans kidnapped by the True Fae and twisted into something not quite mortal. Managed to do the exact opposite of its predecessor and sell enough copies that they extended the series instead of cutting it short. It completed its run with nine books and a long-awaited web enhancement.
* [[Hunter: The Vigil]]
:Hunter, without the ridiculously overpowered gifts. You're just an average Joe with more information than other people, and on occasion ties to people with some special toys that let you use powers that can border on the supernatural themselves. For instance, you might channel the power of your demonic heritage to smite people with hellfire, you might have bullets that are extra-effective against vampires, or you might have access to religious rites that bless your weapons with the power to hurt ghosts. That, and you can break every conceivable human moral code without going insane, provided you can justify it in light of your "Vigil." Though, of course, this slowly makes you inhuman. Well-known for its antagonists - Slashers - who are the World of Darkness take on serial killers. Once again had "lite" versions of all the other supernaturals, which tended to be more singularly powerful than the real thing, but not as versatile (or player-character-friendly). See what happens when Hunter: The Vigil meets Harry Potter [[M-COM|here]].
* [[Geist: The Sin-Eaters]]
:People who die and have ghosts decide to resurrect them, getting stuck with said ghost riding shotgun to said person's body and giving them all manner of powers depending on the way the first party died, all to accomplish the ghost's goals. Instead of humanity, you have "synergy" which is how in sync you are with your spirit. When you die, someone else is forced to die in your place and you lose 1/5 of your maximum possible synergy, stunting your abilities permanently and ultimately making you a slave to your spirit "partner", who often has some rather unusual ideas about what to do with its new body. The Underworld is finally fleshed out, but somehow far more foreboding than expected.
* [[Mummy: The Curse]]
:You're a slave of Irem of the Pillars (Yes, the one in the Rub-Al Khali). But the city is dead and gone, and the Sorcerers who made you into what you are now live in the lands of the dead and tell you what to do. A reversal of normal "You're young and weak, they're old and powerful", Mummies wake up with a power trait of *10*...and lose it quickly, because it drops over time as the magic animating your undying body begins to fade. Most Arisen remain active for about four months, at best. And then they have to come back to life and do it all over again.
* [[Demon: The Descent]]
:Remember the God Machine? From the ''God Machine Chronicle'', and the start of the core book? Yeah, turns out it has robo-angels. Sometimes, one of them decides it doesn't particularly enjoy its function. Or it fails to perform. Or ends up getting saddled with an order it can't actually carry out. Instead of returning they go on the lam, becoming 'demons'. The God Machine sends its angels looking. You don't want to go back, so you become a robot secret agent, pretending as hard as you can to be human while ruining the occult plans of the Divine Calculator; luckily, you retain the ability to hack reality thanks to your former connection to the God Machine. The angels are still Cthulhu-robots in service to the...thing that is in total control of the World of Darkness, and they would really like you to come back so they can erase your personality and replace it with a new, more compliant one. Fortunately Demons are very good at hiding their true identities- so good that even supernatural beings (and other demons, at that matter) can't see through their disguises if they don't want to reveal themselves.
* [[Beast: The Primordial]]
:The most recently publised game, and another one with absolutely no tie to the Old World of Darkness. You play as a Beast, a living embodiment of primal fear running around in a meat-suit, and driven by the need to feed on fear, either passively by hanging out with your "kinfolk" (most every other monster in the WoD) or actively by going out and terrorizing folks. Pretty strongly panned, many consider it the absolute worst gameline in the New World of Darkness because it combines CtD's "otherkin" appeal with some rather hazy moral trappings.
* [[Deviant: The Renegades]]
:The next announced gameline, not much is known other than that its themes are basically "low-power tier" and "body horror". You play as a Deviant, some poor sap caught by a mad scientist or a black ops bio-corp or a twisted cult or somesuch and twisted into something not wholely human.

=== Fan Games ===
*[http://sites.google.com/site/moochava/genius Genius: The Transgression]
:A fan-built WoD set, Genius allows players to gorge themselves on Venture Brothers level superscience while drinking deep from the cup of mundane failure. While Inspiration allows a mad scientist to channel Mania into impossible inventions, their Obligation to humanity gradually gives way to that alien brilliance. If a scientist falls too far off the straight and narrow, they become Unmada, unable or unwilling to accept that they are crazy, that their ideas are true regardless of Mania. Without help or restraint, they become Illuminated. Think Hannibal Lecter in a lab coat and a fascination with altering the DNA of pregnant women. (Also don't even think of trying to get rich off your mad science; your inventions basically break the laws of physics through sheer force of will on your part and tend to malfunction explosively if the mundanes get their grubby hands on them.)
*[[Giant: The Perfidious]]
:Another fan-made WoD gameline, in which you are a Giant.
*[[Mutant: the Aberration]]
:A [[mutant]] is you.
*[[Princess The Hopeful|Princess: The Hopeful]]
:Sailor Moon? ha ha no, try Sailor Nothing, or late-season Madoka Magica. Pretty dresses won't help you fight despair, but sometimes that's all you got.

==Notable Differences==
Even without getting into the specifics of each game's interpretation of one archetype (say, Masquerade vs. Requiem for vampires), the two games are very different beasts.

World of Darkness takes place in a "Gothic Earth". Which basically amounts to an 80s-style (at least in 1e) [[grimdark]] interpretation of the world; monstrous conspiracies are involved in most major events (except World War 2, for some reason), the "Neo-Gothic" art style is popular so there's lots of [[gargoyle]]s and stuff everywhere, all forms of crimes are up, and the world is just generally a very shitty sort of place to live. Humans are generally unimportant; sheep to be fed on by vampires, slaughtered by werewolves, pushed around by mages... generally, if you don't have powers, you're pretty much everybody's bitch. Even Hunters are only viable as a threat because they have some supernatural patron giving them all kinds of nifty powers specifically to fight monsters. Lore is generally very detailed and fleshed out, but not exactly crossover compatible, at least on the meta level; one of the more prominent examples is that, in Masquerade, vampires owe their origins explicitly to a Judaeo-Christian metaphysicality (being spiritual children of [[Caine]]), whilst in Apocalypse, the world is controlled by Paganistic/Animistic spirit-gods, with the most powerful being the Wyld (Creation), Weaver (Order) and Wyrm (Destruction) and werewolves have every reason to believe that the Abrahamic "God" is just some bullshit that humanity came up with and has swallowed.

Chronicles of Darkness, meanwhile take place in "Earth, but with deeper shadows". So the world is basically like it is when you look out your window or look at the news, just a little creepier and more mysterious. Humanity is special, both on a crunch level (mortals are a lot beefier than in WoD) and on a metaphysical level; [[Hunter: The Vigil]] is often held up as literally [[Humanity Fuck Yeah]] the RPG, where you can face down and, if you're doing it right, curbstomp any and every monster out there. Alright, except maybe mages if you don't one-shot them, but that's just because it's a little hard to take on some asshole who can dick around with the laws of reality. Lore is much vaguer and more nebulous, but also drastically more crossover friendly.

== Video Games ==
There were a number of video games made (and cancelled) for the oWoD:
* Hunter: The Reckoning series
:A linear series on ''three different consoles''. If you were interested in the plot, you had to own a GameCube, PS2, and Xbox in that order. But they were also all multiplayer hack-&-slash beat-em-ups so the plot probably wasn't what their target audience was looking for.
* Vampire: The Masquerade – Redemption
:Third-person RPG from Nihilistic Software with a horrible(/hilariously bad) single-player campaign and oddly customizable multiplayer.
* Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines
:First-person RPG from Troika Games that used an early version of Valve's Source engine, it requires the fan-patches; but is otherwise an entertaining single-player game.
* World of Darkness: Preludes
:Two "interactive experience" non-games released by Paradox Interactive in February of 2017. Let's just let the press release speak for itself.
:*Vampire The Masquerade: We Eat Blood
::''In'' Vampire The Masquerade: We Eat Blood ''you’re a young artist who wakes up at night to find you’re no longer human…but exactly what are you and why are you so ravenously hungry for blood?!? Told entirely through an innovate mobile messaging perspective,'' We Eat Blood ''is a sharp, mature, and terrifying story about your first nights as unwilling predator and prey. Will you join ancient vampire conspiracies, or will you turn the tables on oppressive authority and seek your own future? The temptation is real. The game is written and illustrated by Zak Sabbath and Sarah Horrocks.''
:*Mage The Ascension: Refuge
::''In'' Mage The Ascension: Refuge ''you play a volunteer at a European camp for Syrian refugees, and suddenly you discover that magic is real, you can use it, and you’re in the middle of a secret magical war for the fate of the world. The game lets you experience today’s social and political upheavals while learning that you can shape reality itself through sheer force of belief. Your actions and choices will have profound consequences on the world and people around you. Safety or sacrifice? Let them in or build the wall? The choice is yours. The game is written by noted Swedish author Karin Tidbeck.''

==== Cancelled ====
* Vampire the Masquerade [[MMORPG]]
:Used to be in the works of CCP, the studio that made EVE Online, but it was cancelled in 2014.
* Werewolf: the Apocalypse - Heart of Gaia
:Another cancelled oWoD game, [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bYmiwbO5icc 27 minutes of it have been salvaged.]

== See Also ==
* [http://www.worldofdarkness.com/ World of Darkness website]
* [http://wiki.white-wolf.com/worldofdarkness World of Darkness wiki]
* [http://www.unmodchat.com/ Unmoderated WoD Chat]
* [http://mrgone.rocksolidshells.com/ Mister Gone's Character Sheets]
* [[NWoD/Character Sheet | Template for a nWoD Character Sheet on 1d4chan]]

{{WoD-Games}}
{{WW-Games}}

World of Darkness

2017-05-22T08:19:42Z

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{{Game Infobox
|name = World of Darkness
|type = [[RPG]]
|picture = [[Image:WoD logo.png|200px]]
|publisher = [[White Wolf]] / Onyx Path
|system = [[World of Darkness#The System|Storyteller System / Storytelling System]]
|year = 1991 / 2004
}}
The '''''World of Darkness''''' is two different lines of [[RPG]]s published by [[White Wolf]] and later [[White Wolf|Onyx Path]] (and later still by both of them at once, it's complicated) that focus on deep role-playing and, depending on the specific sub-game, the horror genre. The setting can only be described as the modern world, but [[Grimdark|worse in every aspect]]. Every creeping suspicion you have is probably true, and the world is as dirty and corrupt as it often seems to be. In the old ''World of Darkness'', each game was meant to be played separately; as a result the games often had conflicting metaplots and, despite using the same basic "Storyteller System", were incompatible when it came to various supernatural powers. The release of a new ''World of Darkness'' (with an updated ruleset, the "Storytelling System") features a core book that contains the basic rules for all the games, and focuses on normal human beings in horrific situations that may or may not be supernatural in nature. The new games interact in a modular fashion and also have little established fluff, making it more malleable for Storytellers (the in-game term for [[GM]]; abbreviated as ST). The new line has also been trying to avoid the old Gothic feel for which it was known (specifically with ''[[Vampire: The Masquerade]]'') in favor of a slightly more traditional form of horror. As of December 2015 it has been renamed ''Chronicles of Darkness'' to allow its setting to exist separately from that of the setting of the relaunched oWoD (which is itself now called Classic World of Darkness or cWoD).

== The System ==
The basic system in both the new and old World of Darkness revolves around a dicepool of '''d10'''<nowiki>'</nowiki>s. Your [[dice pool]] consists of a number of dice equal to your relevant ability score plus your skill and other relevant modifiers.

In oWoD/cWoD, the [[GM|Storyteller]] sets the difficulty for each roll depending on the circumstances, with the default being a difficulty of 7. A '''success''' is a roll of that difficulty or higher (7 or above, on most rolls). A roll of 1 is called a '''botch'''. If any number of 1's are rolled, they cancel out a single success. No more than one success can be cancelled out in this way, so critical failures (A botch with zero successes) are relatively rare. The net number of successes determines how well you succeed, with one success meaning that you are barely able and a greater number indicating better achievement. When you get zero net successes (if you get no successes or if your 1s cancel out your successes, or if you get at least one success and more ones than successes), you fail the roll. When you get zero successes and at least one 1, you botch-- a critical and spectacular failure. If you have a '''specialty''' in either your attribute or ability that is relevant on the roll, you may reroll all 10s to gain extra successes, and rolls of 1 on these rerolls do not count.

In nWoD/CoD, a success is an 8, 9, or 10, and 10s [[exploding die|explode]]. A critical success is made when you get five or more successes. Instead of altering the target number of the roll, difficulty and circumstances increase or reduce the number of dice in the pool. When your dice pool is reduced to zero or less, you get a chance die. You roll the die normally, but only succeed on a ten (which still explodes) and if you get a one you get a critical failure. All other rolls are called simple failures, although any simple failure can be turned into a critical failure by the player in return for bonus Beats (basically XP).

==== Short Summary of Game Lines ====
* Vampire: You're the bad guy. Your friends are also villains.
* Werewolf: You're fighting a war, and you're losing.
* Mage: You're fighting a war you already lost.
* Wraith: You lost, you died, and now you're trying to avoid a fate worse than death.
* Changeling: You're fighting a war you already lost and nobody is taking you seriously.
* Hunter: You're [[Imperial Guard|fighting a war where everyone's bigger than you and trying to kill you.]]
* Mummy: You're immortal... that's it.
* Demon: You're fighting a cold war with mixed results.
* Orpheus: You're mortal and dying temporarily is part of your job.

== Old World of Darkness/Classic World of Darkness (oWoD/cWoD) ==
[[Image:WOD_old_1e_cover.jpeg|thumb|oWoD 1st edition cover]]
* [[Vampire: The Masquerade]]
:The original World of Darkness game. Covers playing vampire characters in the modern day World of Darkness. It gains its title from "The Masquerade", an in-game set of rules and guidelines dictated by the Camarilla sect in an attempt to keep the mortal populace unaware of vampires and their influence on society. This is also basically the only thing you can get more than one sect of vampires to agree on, and a lot of the game revolves around the resulting political intrigue.
:It is heavily influenced by gothic imagery and by a variety of different vampire mythos, including the romanticised version of the vampire popularised by Anne Rice.
* [[Werewolf: The Apocalypse]]
:Second game to be released set in the World of Darkness. The game covers playing werewolf characters known as Garou. It gains its title from one of the major antagonistic themes in the game where supernatural forces of corruption are attempting to bring about the Apocalypse. The game tended to degenerate into hack-and-slash, mainly as it is a author tract where the authors had conflicting messages.
* [[Mage: The Ascension]]
:Player characters in this game come from a variety of backgrounds, both mortal and immortal and are unified by the fact that they all practice magic of one form or another. Magic is defined by the game as a force that can shape reality with the willpower, belief or special magical techniques of the user. Had a pretty sweet metaplot/setting, but was hamstrung by the extreme clumsiness of its mechanical system.
* [[Wraith: The Oblivion]]
:You're dead, and now you're a ghost. Either move on by severing what anchors you have to this world, or stay and have a good time making scary noises. And oh, try not to fall into hell. Lots of ideas that sound good on paper but ruin friendships in execution, like making each player ''also'' roleplay another player's manifested personal demons.
* [[Changeling: The Dreaming]]
:The characters are fairy souls 'trapped' in human bodies to survive in the cold banal world. The game's theme centered heavily on the concept of Chimera, where things weren't magical or mundane, but both at once. So the real world would see an old butterknife, and it would be - but in the realm of faerie, it would also be a mystical longsword. The concept of Banality is unfortunately somewhat awkwardly implemented and requires some work by the Storyteller to appropriately function. The series was cut short, and a number of expansions that were announced were never released. This game is and was massively popular with otherkin since its premise is their delusion, and if you know anybody post-2012 who still plays it; your friends almost certainly believe themselves to be elves.
* [[Kuei-Jin|Kindred of the East]]
:It is vampires... from the east. Go play vampire the masquerade bloodlines to make that make more sense.
* [[Hunter: The Reckoning]]
:Mortals are imbued with weird powers by mysterious forces in a last-ditch effort to keep the world from circling the drain. Played according to the writing, it's Call of Cthulhu in the World of Darkness- a bunch of scared people who are going to die very horribly unless they're very cautious and paranoid. Played according to the art, it's, well, the licensed H:tR video games.
* [[Mummy: The Resurrection]]
: You play a mummy. Which has been resurrected. And has access to a third-level power (out of five) that levels the town you're in. The game was almost universally met with a directly hostile response, and even reminding a WoD player of it will make him rage. Do it.
* [[Demon: The Fallen]]
:The gates of the Hell that the fallen angels have been trapped in for millienia crack open, and the fallen find human hosts and servitors for their various ends.
* [[Orpheus]]
:It's like Flatliners meets Ghostbusters; focusing on teams that use cryogenics and astral projection to become semi-ghosts, all funded by a corporation called the Orpheus Group. And if you thought The Underworld from WtO couldn't get more grimdark...

=== Fan Games ===
*[http://www.scribd.com/doc/96117271/Gargoyles-the-Vigil Gargoyles: The Vigil]
:A crossover with the cartoon ''Gargoyles'', there's work underway to convert it to GMC nWoD rules [http://forum.theonyxpath.com/forum/main-category/main-forum/the-new-world-of-darkness/383957-converting-gargoyles-the-vigil here.]
* [http://home.pacific.net.au/~turner23/greayz/greys.htm Greys: The Abduction]
: A short fan-expansion from 1997, has three different types of aliens.
* [[Highlander: The Gathering]] ([http://vampirerpg.free.fr/Rules/Highlander/ Link], [http://www.highlander.org/roleplaying/ alt])
:Holy shit this is a fan-made supplement where life doesn't suck! You're immortal and extremely powerful, but still human. It's kill or be killed, though. So once The Gathering comes around you have to kill most of the friends you've made through the ages. Also has a neat custom sword fight system. If you've seen Highlander, you'll love it. If not, see Highlander 2 and The Source. There's also a LARP version called [http://www.greyhawkes.com/larp/highlarp.htm Highlander: The Quickening] made by different authors exists.
* [http://www.maison-otaku.net/~rhea/senshi.html Senshi: The Merchandising]
:A fan-game from the 90's that is a parody of ''Sailor Moon'' and the old WoD. Remember how Mages can bend reality to their whim? Well, now imagine a bunch of 90s anime nerds Ascending... The Technocracy is ''still'' cleaning up after the 'Tokyo 3' incident.
* [http://techinfantry.stasheff.com/ Tech Infantry]
:oWoD meets ''Starship Troopers'', has some parallels in the ''Mirrors: Infinite Macabre'' supplement for the nWoD.
* [[Zombie: The Coil]] ([http://gamingnerdsrus.co/forum/index.php?topic=91.0 Link])
:A Fan-made expansion from 2001. Brai-i-ins and grimderp ensue.

== New World of Darkness/Chronicles of Darkness (nWoD/CoD) ==
[[Image:WODcover.jpg|thumb|nWoD cover]]
* '''The Storytelling System Rulebook''' The core rulebook unifies the rule systems of the other game lines, as well as provides a basic system with which to play as mortal humans, and some barebones ghosts rules that are added onto in nearly every publication where ghosts are relevant. [http://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/114078 The second edition update] is available as a free pdf online and it replaces the old "Victorian" morality system with one that's more modern, and also includes most of the improvements from the ''God Machine Chronicle'' (see below).
** ''God Machine Chronicle'' Essentially the second edition of the core rulebook. Brings in a new morality system, "Integrity", with breaking points instead of the hierarchy of sins. Along with systems of conditions and "beats". If you don't mind the notion of God being a celestial laptop or the increased micro-management of the system, it's worth looking at as it's a big update over the old version. For better or worse depends on how you look at it.
** ''Immortals'' Not an actual gameline as such but a supplement that was released for Immortal characters that follow different ideas of Immortality. Except out of the 3 Immortals in the book, the first jumps off the karma meter so fast its unplayable, primarily because its Immortality is powered by bathing in a '''LOT''' of blood, preferably virgin but any human will do. The second, the Body Thief, is almost playable but again the karma meter gets in the way of anything involving the whole body swapping thing, resulting in the character becoming unplayable again. The third Immortal lives off some sort of mystic Chi/Kai stuff and is basically powered by Feng Shui. It's the only one that could be considered playable, and the authors must have realized this because its much better worked then the others which seem to have been intended as pure NPCs initially and then left as they are now.
** ''Inferno'' Rules for old-fashioned demons (or angels) almost completely different from the fallen angels of the God Machine. As it was one of the earlier supplements, it is horribly incompatible with the GMC rules update, being focused on one half of the old morality system.
** ''Innocents'' An add-on for the core book, you're just a normie who has to deal with the realities of the world revealing themselves to you. If you survive you'll most likely either be institutionalized, a Hunter, or a serial killer. Or more than one. Or a monster, that works too.
** The ''Mirrors'' supplements and ''Translation Guides'' Modifications for the Storytelling System itself as well as hints on adapting it for different genres (the former) while the latter guides allowed mix-and-match rules from the three main game-lines of ''oWoD'' and ''nWoD''. It's notable that the Guides not only go through the crunch but also have chapters with suggestions of how you might fluffwise justify having one nWoD Mage order here or an cWoD tribe of Werewolves there for both New and Classic World of Darkness games. So if you for example really miss Clan Tzimisce in Vampire: The Requiem or think Requiem did the Nosferatu better but you still wanna run Vampire: The Masquerade, have a look in the Vampire Translation Guide and you'll get separate chapters covering both the fluff and the crunch for porting them over from Masquerade into Requiem or vice versa.

=== Principal Games ===
* [[Vampire: The Requiem]]
:13 Clans with fleshed out, restricting histories become 5 clans with vague, open-ended histories and multiple Bloodlines (sub-clans). The Camarilla becomes 5 Covenants with mutually exclusive goals. The Sabbat becomes VII, the Infernalists become the more sporadic, less-organized Belial's Brood. Arguably the biggest difference is that you can't just make someone a Vampire by draining them and feeding them your blood, now you have to permanently spend a dot of Willpower to do it. An alternate setting in ancient Rome also exists, which contains a history of the Carmarilla (and how it collapsed with the rest of the Roman Empire). Additionally, a new set of antagonists in the form of the Strix, which are demonic owl-like creatures bent on purging every last trace of Humanity from vampire society (to the point where even a Humanity 0 vampire is ''too human'' for them) and can possess corpses and vampires to lash out at mortals and undead alike.
* [[Werewolf: The Forsaken]]
:A slightly more "balanced" version of Werewolf. You can't run around in 8-foot tall invincible war-form all the time, and you see humans as a flock of idiotic sheep that you have to protect from malicious spirits due to a vow sworn by your ancient ancestors as punishment for divine patricide. The "adjustments" resulted, possibly intentionally, in the average werewolf no longer being a match for the average vampire, a criticism invariably met with statements regarding the relative level of coordination between werewolf packs and vampire coteries. An example of a well run Werewolf: the Forsaken game is [http://forum.rpg.net/showthread.php?446663-Werewolf-The-Forsaken-quot-Detroit-Rock-City-quot Detroit Rock City]. It is written in novel format for ease of reading, played over Skype.
* [[Mage: The Awakening]]
:Mechanically simplified and involving more magic usage than [[Mage: The Ascension|M:tAsc]], M:tA's biggest criticism is that it doesn't have as compelling a plot — specifically, the revised political landscape is the most frequent target of attack.

=== Limited Release Games ===
* [[Promethean: The Created]]
:Frankenstein: The RPG. You're a scorned mockery of humanity, most likely abandoned by your creator, left to fend for yourself in a world that wants you dead. You're perpetually dazed and confused, always trying to pick up the ways of humans, but that's not happening because you have a disquieting aura that makes every sentient being in the world eventually hate you and the places you stay in will turn into an uninhabitable hellhole if you linger too long, so you can never make real friends and have to live as a nomad. Only five books long, but it pretty much covers all the bases. Surprisingly, it's actually rather optimistic since in theory you can make like Pinocchio and become a true human under the right circumstances.
* [[Changeling: The Lost]]
:No longer are the Changelings faeries, but humans kidnapped by the True Fae and twisted into something not quite mortal. Managed to do the exact opposite of its predecessor and sell enough copies that they extended the series instead of cutting it short. It completed its run with nine books and a long-awaited web enhancement.
* [[Hunter: The Vigil]]
:Hunter, without the ridiculously overpowered gifts. You're just an average Joe with more information than other people, and on occasion ties to people with some special toys that let you use powers that can border on the supernatural themselves. For instance, you might channel the power of your demonic heritage to smite people with hellfire, you might have bullets that are extra-effective against vampires, or you might have access to religious rites that bless your weapons with the power to hurt ghosts. That, and you can break every conceivable human moral code without going insane, provided you can justify it in light of your "Vigil." Though, of course, this slowly makes you inhuman. Well-known for its antagonists - Slashers - who are the World of Darkness take on serial killers. Once again had "lite" versions of all the other supernaturals, which tended to be more singularly powerful than the real thing, but not as versatile (or player-character-friendly). See what happens when Hunter: The Vigil meets Harry Potter [[M-COM|here]].
* [[Geist: The Sin-Eaters]]
:People who die and have ghosts decide to resurrect them, getting stuck with said ghost riding shotgun to said person's body and giving them all manner of powers depending on the way the first party died, all to accomplish the ghost's goals. Instead of humanity, you have "synergy" which is how in sync you are with your spirit. When you die, someone else is forced to die in your place and you lose 1/5 of your maximum possible synergy, stunting your abilities permanently and ultimately making you a slave to your spirit "partner", who often has some rather unusual ideas about what to do with its new body. The Underworld is finally fleshed out, but somehow far more foreboding than expected.
* [[Mummy: The Curse]]
:You're a slave of Irem of the Pillars (Yes, the one in the Rub-Al Khali). But the city is dead and gone, and the Sorcerers who made you into what you are now live in the lands of the dead and tell you what to do. A reversal of normal "You're young and weak, they're old and powerful", Mummies wake up with a power trait of *10*...and lose it quickly, because it drops over time as the magic animating your undying body begins to fade. Most Arisen remain active for about four months, at best. And then they have to come back to life and do it all over again.
* [[Demon: The Descent]]
:Remember the God Machine? From the ''God Machine Chronicle'', and the start of the core book? Yeah, turns out it has robo-angels. Sometimes, one of them decides it doesn't particularly enjoy its function. Or it fails to perform. Or ends up getting saddled with an order it can't actually carry out. Instead of returning they go on the lam, becoming 'demons'. The God Machine sends its angels looking. You don't want to go back, so you become a robot secret agent, pretending as hard as you can to be human while ruining the occult plans of the Divine Calculator; luckily, you retain the ability to hack reality thanks to your former connection to the God Machine. The angels are still Cthulhu-robots in service to the...thing that is in total control of the World of Darkness, and they would really like you to come back so they can erase your personality and replace it with a new, more compliant one. Fortunately Demons are very good at hiding their true identities- so good that even supernatural beings (and other demons, at that matter) can't see through their disguises if they don't want to reveal themselves.
* [[Beast: The Primordial]]
:The most recently publised game, and another one with absolutely no tie to the Old World of Darkness. You play as a Beast, a living embodiment of primal fear running around in a meat-suit, and driven by the need to feed on fear, either passively by hanging out with your "kinfolk" (most every other monster in the WoD) or actively by going out and terrorizing folks. Pretty strongly panned, many consider it the absolute worst gameline in the New World of Darkness because it combines CtD's "otherkin" appeal with some rather hazy moral trappings.
* [[Deviant: The Renegades]]
:The next announced gameline, not much is known other than that its themes are basically "low-power tier" and "body horror". You play as a Deviant, some poor sap caught by a mad scientist or a black ops bio-corp or a twisted cult or somesuch and twisted into something not wholely human.

=== Fan Games ===
*[http://sites.google.com/site/moochava/genius Genius: The Transgression]
:A fan-built WoD set, Genius allows players to gorge themselves on Venture Brothers level superscience while drinking deep from the cup of mundane failure. While Inspiration allows a mad scientist to channel Mania into impossible inventions, their Obligation to humanity gradually gives way to that alien brilliance. If a scientist falls too far off the straight and narrow, they become Unmada, unable or unwilling to accept that they are crazy, that their ideas are true regardless of Mania. Without help or restraint, they become Illuminated. Think Hannibal Lecter in a lab coat and a fascination with altering the DNA of pregnant women. (Also don't even think of trying to get rich off your mad science; your inventions basically break the laws of physics through sheer force of will on your part and tend to malfunction explosively if the mundanes get their grubby hands on them.)
*[[Giant: The Perfidious]]
:Another fan-made WoD gameline, in which you are a Giant.
*[[Mutant: the Aberration]]
:A [[mutant]] is you.
*[[Princess The Hopeful|Princess: The Hopeful]]
:Sailor Moon? ha ha no, try Sailor Nothing, or late-season Madoka Magica. Pretty dresses won't help you fight despair, but sometimes that's all you got.

==Notable Differences==
Even without getting into the specifics of each game's interpretation of one archetype (say, Masquerade vs. Requiem for vampires), the two games are very different beasts.

World of Darkness takes place in a "Gothic Earth". Which basically amounts to an 80s-style (at least in 1e) [[grimdark]] interpretation of the world; monstrous conspiracies are involved in most major events (except World War 2, for some reason), the "Neo-Gothic" art style is popular so there's lots of [[gargoyle]]s and stuff everywhere, all forms of crimes are up, and the world is just generally a very shitty sort of place to live. Humans are generally unimportant; sheep to be fed on by vampires, slaughtered by werewolves, pushed around by mages... generally, if you don't have powers, you're pretty much everybody's bitch. Even Hunters are only viable as a threat because they have some supernatural patron giving them all kinds of nifty powers specifically to fight monsters. Lore is generally very detailed and fleshed out, but not exactly crossover compatible, at least on the meta level; one of the more prominent examples is that, in Masquerade, vampires owe their origins explicitly to a Judaeo-Christian metaphysicality (being spiritual children of [[Caine]]), whilst in Apocalypse, the world is controlled by Paganistic/Animistic spirit-gods, with the most powerful being the Wyld (Creation), Weaver (Order) and Wyrm (Destruction) and werewolves have every reason to believe that the Abrahamic "God" is just some bullshit that humanity came up with and has swallowed.

Chronicles of Darkness, meanwhile take place in "Earth, but with deeper shadows". So the world is basically like it is when you look out your window or look at the news, just a little creepier and more mysterious. Humanity is special, both on a crunch level (mortals are a lot beefier than in WoD) and on a metaphysical level; [[Hunter: The Vigil]] is often held up as literally [[Humanity Fuck Yeah]] the RPG, where you can face down and, if you're doing it right, curbstomp any and every monster out there. Alright, except maybe mages if you don't one-shot them, but that's just because it's a little hard to take on some asshole who can dick around with the laws of reality. Lore is much vaguer and more nebulous, but also drastically more crossover friendly.

== Video Games ==
There were a number of video games made (and cancelled) for the oWoD:
* Hunter: The Reckoning series
:A linear series on ''three different consoles''. If you were interested in the plot, you had to own a GameCube, PS2, and Xbox in that order. But they were also all multiplayer hack-&-slash beat-em-ups so the plot probably wasn't what their target audience was looking for.
* Vampire: The Masquerade – Redemption
:Third-person RPG from Nihilistic Software with a horrible(/hilariously bad) single-player campaign and oddly customizable multiplayer.
* Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines
:First-person RPG from Troika Games that used an early version of Valve's Source engine, it requires the fan-patches; but is otherwise an entertaining single-player game.
* World of Darkness: Preludes
:Two "interactive experience" non-games released by Paradox Interactive in February of 2017. Let's just let the press release speak for itself.
:*Vampire The Masquerade: We Eat Blood
::''In'' Vampire The Masquerade: We Eat Blood ''you’re a young artist who wakes up at night to find you’re no longer human…but exactly what are you and why are you so ravenously hungry for blood?!? Told entirely through an innovate mobile messaging perspective,'' We Eat Blood ''is a sharp, mature, and terrifying story about your first nights as unwilling predator and prey. Will you join ancient vampire conspiracies, or will you turn the tables on oppressive authority and seek your own future? The temptation is real. The game is written and illustrated by Zak Sabbath and Sarah Horrocks.''
:*Mage The Ascension: Refuge
::''In'' Mage The Ascension: Refuge ''you play a volunteer at a European camp for Syrian refugees, and suddenly you discover that magic is real, you can use it, and you’re in the middle of a secret magical war for the fate of the world. The game lets you experience today’s social and political upheavals while learning that you can shape reality itself through sheer force of belief. Your actions and choices will have profound consequences on the world and people around you. Safety or sacrifice? Let them in or build the wall? The choice is yours. The game is written by noted Swedish author Karin Tidbeck.''

==== Cancelled ====
* Vampire the Masquerade [[MMORPG]]
:Used to be in the works of CCP, the studio that made EVE Online, but it was cancelled in 2014.
* Werewolf: the Apocalypse - Heart of Gaia
:Another cancelled oWoD game, [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bYmiwbO5icc 27 minutes of it have been salvaged.]

== See Also ==
* [http://www.worldofdarkness.com/ World of Darkness website]
* [http://wiki.white-wolf.com/worldofdarkness World of Darkness wiki]
* [http://www.unmodchat.com/ Unmoderated WoD Chat]
* [http://mrgone.rocksolidshells.com/ Mister Gone's Character Sheets]
* [[NWoD/Character Sheet | Template for a nWoD Character Sheet on 1d4chan]]

{{WoD-Games}}
{{WW-Games}}

Princess: The Hopeful

2017-05-22T06:03:31Z

2601:843:C201:B420:599A:7A9B:25C:D72B: Grammar Fixes

{{WoD-stub}}

''When they told you that you were a Princess, you felt your childhood dream had come true.'' 
 Sometimes you want to shake your childhood self, to make her see how much hard work it is to be a Princess. 
''They showed you how you channel your hope into magic.'' 
 You never imagined what magic really was like, how your own doubts could drain your powers or turn them against you. 
''They said you were going to help fix the world.'' 
 Some days, you can't even fix your own life. 
''When you told them how you felt, they said it was okay to take a break.'' 
 But it's not okay because you could never forgive yourself if you let everyone down. 

''They told you the world was a beautiful place. They told you that you were special. They lied.'' 
 Alternate tagline, Princess: The Deceived 

The nerds at RPGnet decided to make a [[World of Darkness]] splatbook for the magical-girl genre after a joke spiraled out of control with popularity to the point that it became legitimate. It's worth noting, if you are interested in checking this out, that there are two versions of the game: the Dreams version and the Vocations version. The latter is generally more combat focused and there are some lore differences between the two, but otherwise both are good to go. Princess the Hopeful is set in WoD so it's gonna be more Puella Magi Madoka Magica or Sailor Nothing than Kiki's Delivery Service. Shit's gonna get dark, of course. The backstory is this:

A long time ago, there was a magical Kingdom. This Kingdom was ruled by the Queens. It was almost an Utopia, and was the first line of defense against the Darkness. The fight was ''easy''. So easy, in fact, that the Kingdom grew arrogant, and let the Darkness in. The result? The kingdom was destroyed, and five of the Queens were killed, and their souls imprisoned in the Dreamlands. Three escaped- the Queen of Tears used unholy magic to move the city of Alhambra into the middle of the Darkness and keep it safe there (though it survives only by stealing Light from the real world), the Queen of Storms shed her body to become a never-ending storm, and the Queen of Mirrors... well, nobody knows much about her. The Darkness had, essentially, won...

...Until the Apollo landings and the subsequent burst of hope in humanity that spread from the achievement. The Queens returned, or rather realized they had been stuck in the Dreamlands for lord knows how long and that the real world was just outside, and sent their Light out into the world, hopefully, to reclaim it from the Darkness.

Mechanically it is the bastard child of Exalted 2E and nWoD. Nobles (catchall name for Princesses, Princes and all the Light users) have Practical Magic which is a somewhat less broken version of Exalted's Excellencies. Basically, every Court has their own idea of what's best for humanity and acting within that purview gives you extra dice based on your Invocation score. Nobles mainly use magic in the form of Charms (yeah) which like Exalted can be both hilariously broken or brokenly hilarious. A possible build has a Princess who has no other overt magical powers besides her carrying a bolt pistol, a chainsword and wearing power armor. Made of Love.

==Stats compared to Vampire==
* Blood Potency is Inner Light
* Humanity is Belief
* Blood is Wisps (emotional potence, fuel for the soul-gem, etc)
* Disciplines are Charms, Excellencies are Invocations

==Courts==
Covenants are Queens's Courts; Caitiff are Courtless Princesses. There are eight Courts (eleven with the Road of Dawn supplement), each with three different philosophies and a general theme. The most common Courts are the Radiant Courts, led by the Queens who ended up in the Dreamlands. There are also the Twilight Courts, led by the surviving Queens (well, as 'surviving' as the Queen of Storms can be considered nowadays anyway), which offer benefits the Radiant Queens don't give, but have given up conventional morality (begrudgingly or otherwise) along with one or two other drawbacks to their usage. Also, some anime examples to give you more or less an idea of what we are talking about with these Courts.

===The Radiant Queens===
The Good girls and the ones designed for player characters, though you could play as the other side with DM approval. Also, includes the pre-cursor Courts to what would become the Twilight Courts after the Fall. Though they went on to become Twilight Courts, before that point they're still considered Radiant. Their relevance and presence after the Fall is entirely up to the Storyteller.

====Clubs====
Environmentalism, harmony with nature, with a dash of the best parts of modernity. Kind of like the cliche Elf philosophy, only without the worse bits. Clubs' signature emotions are Harmony and Tranquility. Her Invocation is Legno whose element is Wood.

====Diamonds====
SCIENCE! Okay, so not always, but Diamonds' philosophy of Enlightenment values and improving the world with Reason definitely attracts a lot of the sciencey types. Diamonds' signature emotions are Curiosity and Wonder. ''Eg:'' Ami Mizuno/Sailor Mercury from Sailor Moon. The Diamond Invocation is Acqua and its element is Water.

====Hearts====
Places emphasis on social institutions and duty. Hearts believes in politeness, responsibility, and community. Their signature emotions are Trust and Duty. ''Eg:'' Nanoha Takamachi from Magical Girl Lyrical Nanoha, Madoka Kaname from Puella Magi Madoka Magica. The Heart Invocation is Terra which has the element of Earth.

====Spades====
Basically [[Rogue]]s. They place value on good humor and lateral thinking and try to spread laughter throughout the world. They use outside-the-box thinking and being quick enough to not get caught in doing so. Spades' signature emotion is Laughter. ''Eg:'' Marisa Kirisame from [[Touhou]]. Spades' Invocation is Aria which has Wind as its element.

====Swords====
All about passion, heroism, and adventure. The philosophy of Swords is about following your heart, not hurting others, and inspiring the world by your example. Swords' signature emotion is Love. ''Eg:'' Hibiki Tachibana from Symphogear. The Invocation of the Swords is Fuoco which uses the element of Fire.

====Cups====
The precursors to Tears. They believed in the path of self-discovery that would end in the noble gaining self-enlightenment. Cups' chief philosophies are about keeping an open mind, that you are a person and not a label, and to teach others how to find their own enlightenment. Cups signature emotions are Self-Discovery and Enlightenment and their Invocation, Fulmine, uses Lightning as its element. [[Touhou|Byakuren Hijiri ]] is listed as an inspiration for the Court.

====Wands====
The precursor to the Storms. They're are not all laborers, but they all do believe in the virtue of hard work. Wand’s Philosophies teaches that selflessness and hard work are virtues as well as an ideal of loyalty to comrades. Wand’s signature emotion is Humility. They rely on the Invocation of Metallo whose element is, you guessed it, Metal. Emiya Shirou of Fate/Stay Night fame is an inspiration for the Court.

====Pentacles====
The precursor of the Mirrors. They used to try to look at things without bias so that they can make the clearest decisions for themselves. Pentacle's Philosophies teach to keep a clear mind, that sometimes "the ends justify the means" should happen if there are no better options at all, and that good is subjective, That said if your a pentacle you can see the future so you also can try to avoid those situations if you can. If you gotta shoot a new Hitler in the face, then go ahead {{BLAM}} him if you have to, but first try to avert that future, maybe get him into that art school. Pentacles signature emotion is Wisdom, her Invocation is Vuoto whose element is Void. Inspired by [[/v/|Princess Zelda.]]

===Twilight Queens===
The other side of the splat book, the Twilight queens are fallen Queens who have stopped following the Light, at least the Radiant think so. If you were to ask them they would claim they're the good guys, and it's the Radiant who are not doing their part. Stereotypically the Twilight Queens can be considered lost and/or corrupt, but not outright evil. They still fight the Darkness (indeed, the Storms have more toys than anyone else for it) and try to avoid the shady shit if they can, but ultimately their methods tend to carry some sort of damage with it, which the more idealistic Radiants disapprove of.

====Tears====
All about doing what the Queen of Tears did by transporting Alhambra into the Darkness: Protecting one's loved ones, no matter the cost to anyone else. Unlike all of the other Queens fighting the Darkness, the Tears' primary goal is not the struggle against evil, keeping Alhambra safe is. The problem is, Alhambra is in the Dark World, an environment only slightly less lethal than the Warp. So in order to keep the city safe they 'tax' the Earth of Light (believing the Earth belongs to them in the same way as a province would belong to a medieval monarch and thus owes them fealty, consciously or not) in order to burn it in lanterns to keep the Darkness at bay. As such they're basically disliked by the other Courts, but unfortunately, they have a lot of manpower and old magic items from the Fall of the Kingdoms, and Alhambra is really hard to get into and out of, meaning you can't just attack them straight on, otherwise the Storms have done so by now. Working for the Queen of Tears has a few advantages such as the ability to shelter loved ones in Alhambra which, despite its location, is one of the safest places in existence due to how heavily guarded it is (and note that if you're using the vocation version of the game line, the Darkness has rules to mechanically to find and attack your family and people near to you so this is not a random 'perk'). The Tears Invocation and Charms meanwhile are a mix between screwing with an enemy's mind (most often in morally comprising ways) and defense, with a few Darkness (note the capital letter there: it's evil darkness) powers as well. Tears' signature emotions are Depression and Resolve. ''Eg:'' Akemi Homura from Puella Magi Madoka Magica. Tears Invocation is Lacrima whose element is Darkness.

If you're wondering why they don't just move Alhambra someplace else, it's likely that if the Queen of Tears ever truly realized out that she could have done anything else other than "what she had to" and whose consequences she's endured all this time as a result, she drop to Belief zero and given that her personal charm's element is darkness and it uses the Darkness for a few charms, she will likely become a "Dethroned". Think exactly like a Puella Magi Madoka Magica witch only, with the power of a demigod. Not a good thing at all.

====Storms====
The opposite of Tears. Their philosophy is simple: [[Angry Marines|DESTROY THE DARKNESS AND THE COURT OF TEARS UNTIL NOT EVEN ASHES REMAIN!!]]To them the collateral damage doesn't matter, all that matters is destroying the Darkness and the Court of Tears who betrayed the Queen of Storms and her Court to the Darkness to save themselves. The advantage Storms offers battle magic that's powerful (especially against the Darkness and the Tears), but rather indiscriminately, however, while the Charms are powerful they often have the drawback of doing damage to the caster and innocents as it demolishes the Darkness. Storms also have some other advantages not related to their Invocation and magic. Their Queen (who's kinda a living tornado of hate and rage destroying everything near it) can make [[Hunter: The Vigil|Stormwracked cells]] giving the Stormwracked some fire support and extra body's the Radiant don't get and they can also make "Goalenu", big almost golem-like guys made out of clay and flesh, powered by the storm who can hit like a truck. Needless to say, Storms are not to be lightly messed with when they come out in force. Storms' signature emotions are Rage and Hatred. ''Eg:'' Tsubasa Kazanari from Symphogear (early episodes), Kurumi Tokisaki from Date A Live. The Invocation here is Tempesta whose element is Acid.

====Mirrors====
This philosophy is a mix of vanity and predestination, which appeals to younger Princesses and Princesses looking for a life free of hardship. It follows the example of the [[Mary Sue]]: You are perfect. You are the One True Heir of Mirrors, and whatever you do is right, because it's you doing it. Never compromise, because that means breaking your perfection. Always stick to your ideals, no matter how unrealistic (or damaging) those might be. They may be Princess the Hopeful's version of the Pretty Marines (Seriously they even get a Charm to repel dirt), but unlike most Mary Sues they can back up their narcissism. Their Invocation gives a bonus to anything that targets themselves or mirrors, and Specchio has some powerful self-buffing spells, along with unique spells invoking mirror from turning them into walky-talkies or jumping into and out of them. If you're a combat minmaxer, you could do worse than the Queen of Mirrors. The cost, however, is that Specchio tends to make you go nuts, usually in an attention-whoring way. The advantage Mirrors grants are the ability of prophecy and to stay transformed indefinitely. ''Eg:'' [[Humanity Fuck Yeah|Sumireko Usami]] (before getting beat up by Reimu) from [[Touhou]]. The Mirrors Invocation is Specchio whose element is Light.

If you're wondering why the Queen of Mirrors counts as a 'Twilight' Queen since she's not stealing hope or blowing up civilians to get at the darkness, then you're not the only. In-universe Followers of the Queen of Mirrors (often called "brats") are considered Twilight because of their irrational attitude. To put another way: it's called the "World of Darkness" for a reason, and they refuse to make tough choices and think they can make everything right without compromise. When they inevitably can't, it tends to create a lot of collateral damage, that makes them snap since Specchio makes them mentally brittle. An example given is the following scenario: A village of farmers is about to be attacked. A Radiant Noble would take time and effort into training the peasantry in combat so they can defend themselves and then lead them through whatever hardships they must endure to ensure their survival and continued stay in the village. A Mirror would say "leave it all to me" and try to take on the invading force herself, which of course means that she more than likely fails to fight them all off or else keep them from going around her while she's busy. Thus the village burns because the peasantry can't defend themselves.

==Callings==
There is no equivalent of Caitiff with regards to Callings. The Callings are:

===Champions===
Heroes who stand up for those weaker than themselves. They have an affinity for Combat charms.

===Graces===
The leaders, messengers, and therapists. Graces help people to confront their fears and doubts, making them better able to serve the light.

===Menders===
Healers who tend to people who suffer both spiritually and physically.

===Seekers===
Scientists, detectives, and others driven to discover the truth.

===Troubadours===
The artists and performers.

==Links==
* [http://sites.google.com/site/princessthehopeful/home Princess: the Hopeful sourcebook in ePub and pdf]. Keep in mind there are actually TWO versions of the game, Dream, and Vocation. The two guys working on it could not agree on a few things so made their own version of the game. Vocation is more human focused while Dream focuses more on the magical side of things. There are a few other differences so the two books are not exactly compatible. The website also hosts the PDF for the "Road of Dawn" book which has the precursors of Twilight Queens and their magics before they went nuts.
* [http://princesswod.wikia.com/wiki/Princess:_The_Hopeful_Wiki Princess: the Hopeful wiki]
* [http://mrgone.rocksolidshells.com/nwod-misc.html Mr. Gone's character sheets] scroll down to find the Princess interactive pdfs

{{WoD-Games}}

[[Category:Homebrew Settings]]

Hunter: The Vigil

2017-05-22T03:04:51Z

2601:843:C201:B420:599A:7A9B:25C:D72B: Grammar Fixes

{{Game Infobox
|name = Hunter: The Vigil
|picture = [[File:HTV_Cover.png|250px]]
|type = [[RPG]]
|system = [[Storytelling System]]
|publisher = [[White Wolf]] / CCP
|authors = Justin Achilli, [[Aaron Dembski-Bowden]] ''et al''
|year = 2008
|books = Hunter: The Vigil Rulebook
<div class="mw-collapsible mw-collapsed" style="width:175px">
*''Witch Finders''
*''Block by Bloody Block''
*''World of Darkness: Slasher''
*''Horror Recognition Guide''
*''Night Stalkers''
*''Spirit Slayers''
*''Compacts & Conspiracies''
*''Mortal Remains'' (2e)
</div>
}}
''Two words: Fuck monsters.''

''Fine, I'll give you a longer explanation, but I've got to be quick, the bastard MIBs are probably already tracking this. '''Hunter the Vigil''' is a [[World of Darkness]] game line, back when [[White Wolf]] was still a thing. See, some people didn't want to play as an undead rapist or a lunatic witch. But they didn't want to just sit around and act like they could just ignore the terror in the world as a plain ol' mortal. White Wolf already tried hunters once. Time to try it again.''

''See, these hunters don't ''all'' get powers. Hell, a lot of them don't even know what they're fighting. You want to be a hard working sonuvabitch that's got his buddies and baseball bats to beat down that drug dealer or monster hanging around your kids' school? Do it. Want to be part of an organization of basement dwelling fuckups who use cameras to film demon summoning ceremonies to upload to YouTube? Done. A descendant of Hell itself? Do you want to throw fireballs or get the ability to summon demons?''

''I don't think I need to say it, but since you don't know anything about how the world really is, I'll tell you. Hunter doesn't get along too well with the characters of the other New World of Darkness game lines. You're supposed to be staking vampires that kill people, or cutting up fairies with iron daggers, why the fuck should there be any playing nice?''

''Morality? Here's your damn morality: Monsters don't count. Any "hunter" who says there should be exceptions isn't a real hunter. Ignore those fucks who think they know the right way to handle monsters, and remember that collateral damage is irrelevant as long as you can justify it.''

''Yeah, you don't understand because you haven't been doing it too long. Give it time. Pretty soon you'll realize that you can't trust anyone anymore.''

...Of course, by that point, it might be wise to remember what Nietzche said: "He who fights monsters should see to it that he himself does not become a monster". And sure enough, an alarming amount of Hunters tend to devolve into Slashers: lunatics whose obsession with killing for its own sake grants them limited supernatural abilities which make them the perfect serial killers.

'''Hunter: the Vigil''' is another ''[[New World of Darkness]]'' attempt at adapting part of the Old, in this case, ''[[Hunter: The Reckoning]]''. However, it is in many ways a superior game, with less broken magical powers and ill-thought-out ideas, and more being a squishy human surrounded by terrible threats that will tear away at your sanity, soul, and flesh. If that sounds [[grimdark]] as shit, that's only because it is. It literally has a spin-off game, ''Slashers'', devoted to playing as one of the above-mentioned Slashers so you too can play a murderous psycho who wouldn't be out of place in... well, a slasher movie.

Still, despite all that, ''Hunter'' is, or can be, an oddly hopeful game. Sure, you're probably going to die, but in [[World of Darkness|a world like this one]], it is a good and noble thing for [[Imperial Guard|ordinary people]] to stand up and refuse to be victimized. One candle blows out, but lights two more as it passes. The Hunter dies, but the Vigil goes on forever. World without end, amen.

All in all, perhaps the biggest difference between the two versions of Hunter, and why Vigil has attained a popularity that Reckoning has lacked, is that Vigil takes more of a pro-[[Humanity Fuck Yeah]] stance, whilst Reckoning, in accordance with the rest of the Old World of Darkness, is very much on the anti-HFY! stance. Vigil hunters, even at Cell tier, woke up to the true world around them and chose to fight the things that go bump in the night even though they know next to nothing about them. Reckoning hunters were forced awake by "mysterious powers of good" and can only hope to challenge the monsters because those same patrons gave them all kinds of anti-monster abilities.

Hunter: The Vigil is still in its first edition and had a limited run of books: the core book, an expansion for monster territory, a collection of short stories based in the Hunter setting, three books focusing on the World of Darkness' Big Three (Vampires, Werewolves and Mages) and one book to wrap it all up and reveal the truth on some groups. Four years after the first book it received the book Mortal Remains, which updated the game to fit into the Chronicles of Darkness. This was not a "true" second edition like Vampire, Werewolf, Mage, and Promethean have been receiving, but instead, it was a book that updated some things and expanded on the "lesser" lines of Promethean, Changeling, Geist, Mummy and Demon. Another book, Tooth And Nail, focused on the newly introduced Beast line. Hunter: The Vigil's second edition [http://theonyxpath.com/corebook-outline-kick-off-hunter-the-vigil/ is in the works at this moment.]
== Hunter Organization ==
Hunters are organized into groups at three levels; Cell, Compact, and Conspiracy.

=== Cell ===
At least the [[Imperial Guard]] get some backup, amirite? A Cell has only one to a few people in them, maybe five or six if you're lucky. They have no support base, no guiding ideology, no way of telling if the tentacle monster is really going to rape, kill and eat them (Spoiler: It will, and not in that order). So what do they have to help? They're not being told what to do by people who have no idea what's going on either but act like they do.

=== Compact ===
When a bunch of cells met up and decide they have more in common than being killed by werewolves on a monthly basis, they sometimes form into a compact, a collection of cells that go from citywide to nationwide. The cells have some things in common, but there's no real bosses, so they make things up as they go along still, but now they have some help to call. Provided said help doesn't decide it's not worth it or that they have the right idea on what to do.

'''Ahl al-Jabal:''' A Middle Eastern compact founded in the Middle Ages after a leader of the Hashshashin (the Islamic sect that lent its name to the term "assassin") discovered that vampires had infiltrated much of the Muslim world. They're notable for having very strict rules about collateral damage, for reasons which should be very obvious when you take recent events in the world into account.

'''Ashwood Abbey:''' A bunch of bored, jaded rich assholes who want to hunt the most dangerous game of all in a world where that ''isn't'' "man". Sick fucks to the core, even when other books try to tell you they're in it "for the thrill". To them, hunting's a game, and they want to play without any rules. Also, they have money. Lots and lots of money. Which is why they think they can afford to hunt monsters with swords and arrows.

'''The Barett Commission:''' Politicians who have found out that vampires (and other monsters, but mostly vampires) like to meddle with politics, so they decided to band together in order to keep them out.

'''The Bear Lodge:''' Big Game Hunters who have decided that werewolves are the ultimate trophies to hunt. They can't actually keep any pelts or anything, but the hunt is still dangerous enough they keep at it. Sometimes they even just let the werewolf go if it hasn't hurt a human being since their real interest is honing themselves into the ultimate hunters, something their prey actually respects.

'''Division Six:''' A secret government agency hunting down "reality deviants" before they can cause the total collapse of reality. Really, they're the unwitting dupes of the Seers of the Throne being used to hunt down the Awakened, but they don't know that.

'''The Hunt Club:''' Sick fucks who make the Ashwood Abbey look like saints by comparison, this is only a "hunter" compact in that it's pretty common for burnt-out hunters to end up in it. This is basically a social network for serial killers and Slashers who haven't completely lost their ability to relate to people, based on covering up each other's messes and scoring "points" by their kills. Based on the rules they follow they either hunt people that nobody will miss (homeless, prostitutes), those who have squandered their lives or held others back (aka, those who are only alive because it's illegal to kill them) and those who are quite capable of defending themselves or would draw significant investigation (the physically and/or politically powerful).

'''Habibti Ma:''' Founded by Eme Amun Hassan, an Egyptian woman who lost her husband and sons to a suicide cult. After suing every authority who watched it happen but didn't act she was left with a fortune and an empty feeling. Hassan began to organize a group dedicated to breaking up cults and returning cultists to their families: Habibti Ma. The authors have admitted they fucked up and should've called the group Habibti Ma'at, named after the Egyptian goddess of mercy that Hassan bases her group's ideals on. While they act out of mercy they're not above kidnapping, torture and psychological abuse to deprogram cultists. This means that they'd rather go after cultists of monsters (frequently cults of arisen, vampires and the Kinfolk of werewolves), but if push comes to shove they'll take on the monsters as well.

'''The Illuminated Brotherhood:''' Wigged out druggies whose experiments in psychedelics have clued them into the existence of ghosts and spirits and who continue to poke at the supernatural despite their lack of any training in what to do when they get noticed.

'''The Keepers of the Source:''' A bunch of hippies and eco-nuts who have the sucky ability to sense those carrying Essence by feeling pain, so they think werewolves and mages are "parasites of the Earth Mother". Used to use typical peacenik tactics to try and convince the werewolves and mages to stop channeling Essence; when this kept getting them killed, they upgraded to terrorist acts instead.

'''The Long Night:''' The Westboro Baptist Church on one end, the Triple Rock Baptist Church on the other with tent-healers in the middle. The Long Night believe it's the end of the world and a lot of them do ''not'' feel very fucking fine. The belief that Jesus will arrive if all the monsters are dead is about the only thing most of them can agree on.

'''The Loyalists of Thule:''' Ex-Nazis and people they've essentially blackmailed into being hunters. The Loyalists were originally the Thule-Gesellschaft. Knowing they done goofed, they think they have to atone for what they've done by hunting down monsters. Note that they're running low on people who were actually Nazis and the younger members are asking why they need to be so hung up on WWII.

'''Maiden's Blood Sisterhood:''' A sorority of vampire-hunting college chicks. Like Buffy, only no superpowers.

'''Network 0:''' Making shows like Ghost Adventures and Finding Bigfoot look professional, Network 0 are all obsessed with finding footage and evidence of the monsters and dark parts of the world and either shoving said evidence of them in people's faces or hiding it and waiting to shove it in people's faces.

'''The Night Watch:''' Ghetto toughs, petty hoods, gangbangers and other street trash who've decided they aren't going to stand for being the go-to munchies for vampires anymore.

'''Null Mysteriis:''' When scientists find out the truth, they don't go full-mystical. They break out their gear and start researching. They analyze vampire blood, study things from other dimensions and look for theories to explain why witches can break reality.

'''The Promethean Brotherhood:''' Envious pricks who perform human sacrifices on mages, monsters, even Conspiracy-tier hunters to try and steal their magic for a time.

'''The Reckoning:''' The first of many [[Beast: The Primordial]]-related compacts, but with a twist: they hunt ''heroes'' rather than beasts. It's wacky. Especially when they start kidnapping beasts to lure heroes to them, which makes ''them'' more likely to turn into heroes, or when they go on and on about heroes causing collateral damage while causing collateral damage... ''Beast'' was a weird gameline.

'''The Talbot Group:''' Well-meaning healers hoping to try and "cure" werewolves and spirit possessions. Founded by a couple whose son turned into a werewolf. They're slowly making progress and are considering how the werewolves they have pseudo-pacified handle spirits doing bad shit, [[Derp|which is the entire purpose of werewolves to begin with.]]

'''The Union:''' The compact of the common men and women who don't know or care about what the monsters are as long as they stay out of their neighborhood. Unlike most Hunters, they prefer to react to monster depredations rather than go out looking for trouble themselves.

'''Utopia Now:''' A bunch of Libertarians looking to make the world a better place for everyone. The catch? They want to do this using whatever they pilfered from dead institutional demons, demons who have taken over buildings instead of people (translation: the God-Machine's Infrastructure). Their founder is a Stigmatic, a human who has been exposed to a demon in its true form and was changed for the experience. He is now looking to rid the world of institutional demons and build a utopia where they do not exist.

'''Yuri's Group:''' A mix of the Talbot Group and Habibti Ma'at, Yuri's Group is a support group for critics of [[Beast: The Primordial|this ill-concieved little experiment]], who sometimes take the fight to their former tormentors. Starting to branch out into helping the battered housewives of all the other gamelines too, with the odd attempt to rehabilitate vampires, beasts, and other predatory supernaturals who're still human enough to feel bad about the things they do to humans. Frequently team up with other Cells and Compacts to provide support because sacrificing an entire support group worth of people is bad for attendance rates.

=== Conspiracies ===
It would be god tier, if they weren't so god-awful about so much. Conspiracies aren't just the largest groups in Hunter. They're controlling governments, churches, and have access to endowments. What's an endowment? Do you want to shoot werewolves with plasma weapons? Kill a golem with God's holy power? Wolverine claws? Take your pick, just remember that the conspiracies don't give a shit about you unless you get results, and more than a few have their own dirty little secrets which the Hunters working for them aren't supposed to know about.

'''Aegis Kai Doru:''' Definitely not a front for an Arisen hunting down their old magical toys. Nope, not at all. In all seriousness, they've got a ton of fancy relics, and they really hate mages and werewolves.

'''Ascending Ones:''' What do you need, man? Heroin from Afghanistan? Crack from Columbia? Weed from Mexico? Mysterious alchemical mixtures whose formulas were first perfected in ancient Egypt? Pay up, you'll be helping them wage war on evil. Just as long as you're okay with rampant drug addiction and street crime where they take control.

'''The Cainite Heresy:''' Crazy fuckers who use blood magic and are obsessed with killing all vampires RIGHT THE FUCK NOW. They are descended from an organization of rebellious ghouls in the Roman Empire that turned against their vampiric masters.

'''The Cheiron Group:''' They're better than Umbrella, if only because they haven't accidentally triggered a zombie apocalypse yet. They don't just get powers, they get powers from ''monster body parts''. Vampire limbs, serial killer brain implants, hands "volunteered" from the Lucifuge. Just don't expect a decent retirement package and keep in mind that there's a good chance you might end up becoming the test subject for an implant that they haven't quite worked the kinks out of. Are actually lead by aliens who use the Cheiron Group for some mysterious reason.

'''The Faithful of Shulpae:''' Weird cultists who ritually cannibalize their "gods" (read: any monster that can live a long time) as an act of worship as some kind of messed up version of the Eucharist, in doing so to obtain some of their nifty powers. The fact that the "gods" they worship generally DON'T want to have their flesh devoured doesn't seem to bother them at all.

'''The Hototogisu:''' During the Edo period the Japanese merchant caste, the despised-but-wealthy bottom rung of the Confucian caste system, discovered the various supernatural critters that had infested Japanese society. One of them, while talking with one, realized he could write up a very predatory contract that literally bought some of the monster's supernatural powers off it, and did so in a way that didn't actually result in any kind of loss of resources to him. This is their Endowment: Setto (Japanese for theft). Several hundred years later they rule the roost in the Japanese supernatural community; immortal, rich, and with enough supernatural lackeys at their disposal that they can easily defend their business interests while conning their marks out of shit like immortality.

'''The Knights of Saint Adrian:''' Half biker gang, half paladin order, all bounty hunter, no real subtlety. They work for angels to capture or kill demons. Whether this is a good thing or a bad thing really depends on how big an asshole a particular demon's being. And how much you've read about the God-Machine. To facilitate this they are given tattoos with angelic magic coded in. For example, one makes it so they can punch a demon so hard their stolen human face flies right off while another is basically an infinite ammo cheat code for the Knight's firearm of choice.

'''The Knights of Saint George:''' Ostensibly a branch of the Church of England, in reality, they hunt mages with their own magic-nullifying spells because they fear they'll wake up the Lovecraftian "Faceless Angels" if they aren't killed. Said angels may or may not be Mage-style Abyssal spirits.

'''Les Mysteres:''' They think they're helping the innocent, oppressed spirits fight against their tyrannical werewolf masters. Anyone who has ever played [[Werewolf: The Forsaken]] will realize that they're being manipulated and are too dumb to know that "freeing" the spirits will result in the destruction and/or enslavement of humanity. Somewhere, a Uratha is trying to stave off Death Rage after learning what this group is trying to do.

'''The Lucifuge:''' They've got Hell in their blood and they aren't happy about it. They view the destruction of supernatural beings as a way for them to redeem themselves in the eyes of God. At least they get kickass powers from it. Fun fact: their founder has been alive since the 800s. Fun fact 2: they always have exactly 666 members. Don't ask too many questions about what happened to the guy you replaced.

'''The Malleus Maleficarum:''' Vampires, Witches, and Demons; that's the order of importance for the Catholic Inquisition. Don't question it and you won't be taken down to the church basement. Agree to help and you can call on God and his saints to give you awesome abilities to slay monsters. Please ignore the fact that their leader is a ghoul still addicted to vampire blood who uses "holy" magic.

'''The Merrick Institute:''' A shadowy government-linked research collective used nasty, damaging science to discover [[Beast: The Primordial|the Primordial Dream]], and started gathering "gifted" kids with a mixture of scholarship money and violence to try to weaponize it. The super-smart kids eventually killed all their captors, save a few who could help them, then commandeered their tech and training to try to make something good out of it by doing what every angry critic of ''Beast'' has always wanted to do: hunt those stupid special otherkin in their own stupid special snowflake dimension, and beat their asses on their own turf. Their Endowment is Dreamscape, allowing them to gain supernatural powers while inside of a dream. This makes them very powerful in the dream world, but useless outside of it.

'''Task Force: VALKYRIE:''' MIBs, conspiracy creators, and America's last line of paranormal defense. Great story but the execution isn't quite as neat as it sounds. They're a bureaucratic clusterfuck that can barely keep track of which monsters they're supposed to be killing. But at least they get to carry around a laser cannon and ghost-killing bullets when they need to. Oh, and only some of the top brass know that most of their budget secretly comes from vampires using the organization to deal with their rivals.

'''Vanguard Serial Crimes Unit (VASCU):''' FBI agents with telepathic powers who use their abilities to hunt down supernatural serial killers, mostly Slashers. The subject of much hilarious interdepartmental in-fighting and dick-measuring with VALKYRIE. VALKYRIE's got neater stuff, works outside the law, and has a better idea of what's going on. But VASCU isn't nearly as much of an organizational mess and its agents are often actually good at their jobs.

== Slashers ==
Not really meant as player options because of their powers, goals and because having your players play actual serial killers instead of hunters would be very fucked up, Slashers are either hunters who have gone off the deep end or people who just happened to go batshit insane in the worst possible way. They all have some kind of ''Undertaking'', a modus operandi based on famous real-life and fictional serial killers. Each of these can go even crazier, going from a Ripper (a Slasher who's still human, at least in the physical sense of the word) to a Scourge (a Slasher with powers that border on the supernatural). While Slashers can be very powerful they all have a Frailty, a psychological (and sometimes physical) weakness linked to their particular brand of insanity.

Generally speaking, Rippers are less powerful than Scourges, but Scourges are more deeply crippled by their Frailties in addition to inheriting the Frailty of their Ripper counterparts.

=== Rippers ===
'''Avenger:''' Avengers are out for revenge. Having been deeply hurt by someone else they take (lethal) revenge on those who wronged them, then go on to hunt people like their first target to prevent others from being wronged like they were. But with every victim they kill, they grow increasingly indiscriminate to the point where the subjects of their revenge have only tangential connections to their initial victim. While the drive for revenge is not an uncommon origin for a Hunter, the difference is that Avengers often do not target supernatural beings specifically (not for long, anyway). They are ''very'' capable at handling several targets at the same time, but are driven to chase their targets no matter what, which can make them easily manipulated. Drawn from movies like ''I Know What You Did Last Summer'', ''Death Wish'', and ''Urban Legend''.

'''Brute:''' More of a monster than a man, a Brute lives only for the hunt and the kill, contempt for human weakness estranging the Brute from the rest of the human race. Exceptionally dangerous at close range and nearly impossible to stop when they've found a victim, a Brute out for blood is a killing machine, shrugging off pain, fatigue, and injury in the pursuit of their prey. Their bloodlust makes them less perceptive though, and with care one can avoid a Brute who has not spotted its prey yet. Drawn from movies like ''Ravenous'' and ''The People Under The Stairs''.

'''Charmer:''' A rather friendly and affable sort at first glance, a Charmer will appear nice, help you out, win your trust and then strap you to a rack and work you over with a blowtorch as he mocks your decision to trust him. Often the product of abuse in their childhood, Charmers are obsessed with vulnerability and punishment, frequently abhorring sex as well. They will find a victim, win their trust until they let down their guard, then do whatever horrible thing it is they do. Those who trust them tend to make all kinds of excuses for them and dismiss any implied wrongdoings, all the way until they are the next victim. The particular worldview of a Charmer is also their greatest weakness: if someone resists their charm or sets them off in another way, a Charmer will lash out, often violently, revealing themselves in the process. Based on the likes of ''Death Proof'' and ''Wolf Creek''.

'''Freak:''' Physically deformed and shunned by humanity, Freaks want revenge on the world for rejecting them. They get it by performing the most depraved sorts of acts on their victims. They often grow attachments to people (like their family or other Freaks) or places and know their environments to an almost supernatural degree. Freaks sometimes team up with a supernatural being as an Igor of some kind, but sooner or later they realize they are being used, which inevitably results in the death of either the Freak or the supernatural. Because of their worldviews and hideous appearances, Freaks are very bad at social interaction. Based on works like ''Red Dragon'' and ''The Texas Chainsaw Massacre''.

'''Genius:''' Working with their superior intellect, a Genius can deduce what a victim is going to do, how they'll react to situations, their routines and so on. They can also learn about their target by talking to them, discovering oddities, psychological problems or secrets with nothing but a conversation. They love using traps to kill people, rigging things to kill and maim in inventive ways. Some will give their victims a way out when putting them in a trap, feeling that if a victim doesn't figure it out then the resulting horrible blood-typhoon isn't the Genius's fault. Because Geniuses tend to be creatures of order and routine, when an irregularity happens that isn't part of their plans, they tend to get irate and sloppy, even if it wasn't something they could have prevented. Based on urbane serial killers from ''Silence of the Lambs'' or ''Copycat''.

=== Scourges ===
'''Legend:''' The evolved form of the Avenger, Legends are Scourges who have transcended mortality to become living slasher myths. They're the murderous boogeymen that people tell stories about, stories that are ultimately all-too-real. Each Legend is, as you'd expect, wrapped up in his or her own personal mythos, gaining strength when others "play their parts" right but also being compelled to obey certain bans or afflicted with banes based on their legends- nobody's sure if they're just that fixated on their own legend or if it somehow deprives them of free will. Based mostly on urban myth slashers like ''The Hook-Handed Killer'', the ''Lover's Lane Maniac'', or the ''Licking Lunatic'', they also tap into the more "supernatural" slashers from films like the titular character of ''Candyman'' or Freddy Krueger from ''Nightmare on Elm Street''.

'''Mask:''' The evolved form of the Brute, Masks are killing machines to an even greater extent than their Ripper counterparts. They are supernaturally durable to a level to make even the monstrous player splats sit up and go "Damn, that's a tough bastard!" ''Any'' attack, no matter how weird or supernatural can only inflict a single point of damage to them. However, this durability doesn't count for shit against booby traps, ambient damage, or other things that aren't actually "attacks" (most likely because otherwise, they'd be nigh-invincible), and they're literally incapable of doing anything that doesn't involve trying to hunt people down and kill them- they can't speak or even understand human language anymore, and extended contact with living things seems to actually cause them pain and a desire to respond with violence. In short, they simply want everything around them to die. Based on super-tough film slashers that never seem to stay dead; the most iconic example of a Mask is probably Jason Voorhees from the ''Friday the 13th'' films or Michael Myers from ''Halloween''.

'''Psycho:''' The evolved form of the Charmer, the Psycho has been consumed by their murder-lust, their obsession eating away at them until they can barely feign normality on a day-to-day basis. A Psycho still has enough charm that they can trick victims into lowering their guards at just the right moment, but suffers from intense obsessions; if they fail to manipulate someone, a Psycho is compelled to make that victim their next target. Patrick Bateman from ''American Psycho'' is called out as an inspiration for this kind of Slasher.

'''Mutant:''' The evolved form of the Freak, Mutants are even more hideously deformed to the point where they are no longer recognizable as having ever been human. Their mutations act as either natural armor or natural weapons as a result and are even worse at social interaction than Freaks due to their horrific appearances. However, their mutations also make them painfully vulnerable to a certain kind of stimulation, making it impossible for them to bear and reduces them to a state of atavistic rage- a cave-dwelling monster that burns in agony at the touch of sunlight, a blind abomination that hunts through scent and recoils at strong odors, etc. Mostly owe their origins to "Hillbilly Horror" type Slasher flicks, such as ''The Hills Have Eyes'' or ''Wrong Turn''.

'''Maniac:''' The evolved form of the Genius, Maniacs are even crazier, but also startlingly charismatic; they prefer a more "hands off" approach to killing, and mostly sate their murder-lust through proxies, having the ability to not only gain great understanding of peoples' psychologies by studying them but also driving them off the deep end to become the Maniac's loyal flunkies. Their flaw is that they're obviously insane to anyone who doesn't end up adopting their twisted mindsets, penalizing their Social skills with anyone who isn't as crazy as they are (and doesn't catch their brand of insanity from interacting with them) and making them very recognizable. Jigsaw from ''Saw'' and John Doe from ''Se7en'' are perhaps the best examples of Maniac type Slashers in modern films.

== Books ==
Because of its status as a Limited Run game, Hunter: The Vigil has not received many books. The books that they have made do a fine job at making for a tight setting that does its thing well. The books are:

*'''Hunter: The Vigil Rulebook''' is the core book presenting what the game is about, how it expands on the base World/Chronicles of Darkness book, what the Compacts and Conspiracies are about how to run a game of Hunter.
*The trio of books on the "Big Three" of World of Darkness. These books go into depth on how their particular brand of nasties are fought, how the core Compacts and Conspiracies see them as well as new toys for them, new Compacts and Conspiracies that specialize in a particular brand of enemy and how to fit the monster into your Hunter games:
:*'''Night Stalkers''' is the Vampire book and adds The Barrett Commission, Maiden's Blood Sisterhood, The Night Watch and the Cainite Heresy.
:*'''Spirit Slayers''' is the Werewolf (and spirit) book, adding The Bear Lodge, The Illuminated Brotherhood, The Talbot Group and Les Mysteres.
:*'''Witch Finders''' is the Mage book and details the use of magic in a low-key version of Mage: The Awakening. It also adds Division Six, The Keepers of the Source, The Promethean Brotherhood and The Knights of Saint George.
*'''Block by Bloody Block''' is for urban monster hunting and has rules for Territories, parts of the city that you can drive monsters out of to reclaim them as your own, freeing a city this way. It also has rules for webs of alliances/enmities between various groups so that getting rid of one group might gain you allies somewhere and enemies somewhere else.
*'''World of Darkness: Slasher''' is technically a core book, but it's been made an honorary Hunter book. It details the Slashers, those Hunters who go off the deep end. It also includes the rules for those government agents who hunt Slashers, the Vanguard Serial Crimes Unit (VASCU).
*'''Horror Recognition Guide''' is a collection of fifteen short stories set in Philadelphia, detailing various Hunter Cells who get into contact with various monsters and how this ends. The book works as inspiration for Hunter games, with no stats included.
*'''Compacts & Conspiracies''' is the finale book, greatly expanding on the various core Compacts and Conspiracies. It gives them more rules, more background and lifts the curtain for a few to reveal that they're actually being duped.
*'''Mortal Remains''' was released four years after Compacts and Conspiracies to update Hunter: The Vigil for Chronicles of Darkness. It goes into detail on Prometheans, Changelings, Geists, Mummies, and Demons, adds a whole slew of new Dread Powers for monsters, updates a lot of existing rules and adds four new Compacts and Conspiracies: Habibti Ma'at, The Faithful of Shulpae, Utopia Now and The Knights of Saint Adrian.

{{WoD-Games}}

CthulhuTech

2017-05-19T18:37:34Z

2601:843:C201:B420:599A:7A9B:25C:D72B: Grammar Cleanup.

{{Game Infobox
|name=CthulhuTech
|picture=[[Image:Ctech.png|200px]]
|type=[[RPG]]
|publisher=[[Catalyst Game Labs]]
|system=[[Framewerk]]
|authors=Matthew Grau Fraser McKay Mike Vaillancourt
|year=2007 (Mongoose Edition) 2008 (Catalyst Edition)
|books=''CthulhuTech Core Book''
<div class="mw-collapsible mw-collapsed" style="width:190px">
*''Vade Mecum''
*''Dark Passions''
*''Damnation View''
*''Mortal Remains''
*''Ancient Enemies''
*''Unveiled Threats''
*''Burning Horizon''
</div>
}}
'''CthulhuTech''' is a [[RPG|roleplaying game]] developed by WildFire LLC and published by Catalyst Game Labs (formerly published by Mongoose Publishing). It combines [[H.P. Lovecraft|Lovecraftian]] eldritch horror with [[Anime]] mecha sensibilities set in the [[grimdark]] future of the late 21st Century, complete with a total war on all fronts that would give [[Creed]] a chubby. It's surprising no video games are made about it.

==Backstory==
Early in the 21st-century woman by the name of Teresa Ashcroft discovered arcanotechnology, the science behind magic. The discovery revolutionized the world and sent her mad. Her colleague Simon Yi continued her research, laying the groundwork for the Dimensional Engine, a clean and inexhaustible power source. He was also driven mad. The research was taken over by one Doctor Golvash Czeny, who assembled a team and let people work on minute parts of the D-Engine project. While the staff suffered psychotic attacks, nervous breakdowns, frequent nightmares and other such unpleasantries, they were not driven mad, which was a good thing for everyone involved. Eleven years after Teresa Ashcroft began her research, the first arcanotech-powered D-Engine went public. After three months of trying everything, the global scientific community was forced to admit that the things were legit. With the limitless power of the D-Engine, it became possible to build anti-gravity pod systems, or A-Pods, with which vehicles could fly. D-Engines could also power mecha, allow for better space travel and gave the power required to build underwater research and food-growing bases. It was a pretty swell time to be alive, as long as you didn't live in the Middle East who had their economies go to shit because nobody bought oil anymore and resented the growing power of the UN, so they decided to side with China (who had not joined the UN and its growing power) and another Cold War started. Things tensed up and a global Jihad was an ever-growing threat.

And then the Migou struck.

The Migou were an alien race living on the outskirts of our solar system. Looking like a mix of flies, crustaceans and [[Illithid]], they saw humanity as a threat to their colony on Pluto. They decided to wage war on us, seeking to destroy the human race and acquire the secrets of arcanotech for themselves, since humans developing D-Engine was equal to a monkey developing nuclear technology in a reservation to their eyes, considering the Migou THEMSELVES did not even invent D-Engine yet. To do this they engineered a race in our image called the Nazzadi (who looked like [[Drow]] with seriously cool tribal tattoos), who are mostly unaware of their artificial nature and roots. Believing they were Earth exiles they fought humanity for 6 years, killing untold numbers of people until their leaders (who knew the truth of things from the beginning) called it quits and made their knowledge of the Migou and their status as cloned lifeforms known to both their soldiers and humanity. Three-quarters of the Nazzadi turned on the remainder loyalists and drove the Migou-aligned forces out. They made peace, joined Earth as allies against Migou, were given Haiti and Cuba to form their own nation (and to make them easier to fight if they somehow turned on humanity again) and joined their forces, tactics, and mecha with that of humanity.

After the defection of the Nazzadi, the Migou throw a hissy fit decided to wage their war themselves. Putting all of their race to a fuckhuge ship the size of the Moon, they landed on Earth en masse. And so the second Arcanotech War began. The Migou, seeing the threat of the cults, also worked against them.

Meanwhile, a less obvious war had been going on. Cultists that had been in the shadows of humanity since the discovery of fire saw the advent of arcanotechnology as a sign that it was a time to revive their dead gods. The Chrysalis Corporation, innocent at first, corrupted afterward by Nyarlahothep himself, worked to undermine the New Earth Government and other cults worked to corrupt humanity through vice.

Now with the cults becoming more and more blatant in their actions and the Migou becoming more aggressive in an effort to stop them, the New Earth Government has realized that the war was evolving into something new and so declared the Arcanotech War to have ended and the Aeon War to have begun.

TL;DR Human-Nazzadi (Dark Elf expies) Alliance versus the cold, technocratic Migou versus the Cult of Dagon versus The Rapine Storm (think Scourge from [[Warcraft]]) led by Hastur. Yup, everybody is an enemy. A ''second'' Migou hiveship was on its way, but Human-Nazzadi remnants of the colonies hiding in the Oort Cloud laid down the law on the Migou's Pluto base, forcing the hive ship to return.

==System==
CthulhuTech uses a system called [[Framewerk]], known to some fa/tg/uys as 'lol poker dice'. The system uses d10s and success is based on either the single highest dice rolled ''or'' the sum of the highest sum of multiples of dice rolled ''or'' the sum of the highest straight of dice rolled (e.g. 4 5 6) hence the poker dice moniker. The system is notoriously swingy. A script has been created to show the distribution of rolls. [http://anydice.com/program/6177]

==Tagers==
The Rite of Sacred Union is a magical ritual discovered on the South Pole by the Chrysalis Corporation. Its researchers determined that by using it they could transform a human into a Tager, a being of great power that does not suffer the madness of the lesser Dhohanoids. Training would need to be intense and unforgiving, but the end product would be a powerful soldier for the cause indeed. However, some of the researchers working on the project realized that maybe summoning the Great Old Ones to the world might not be the best idea, so they defected and stole or destroyed all research the Company had. Of the twelve that did this only three survived to found the Eldritch Society. They would dedicate themselves and the sacred warriors that are the Tagers to fighting the Chrysalis Corporation and its allies wherever they can. Basically Furries and Otherkin plus several tons of [[Grimdark]] up the wazoo.

There are 10 known types of Tagers, some more common than the others. As mentioned before, about 0.08% of the population in large cities are Tagers or about 800 per 1 million. 80% of those are either Phantoms or Mirages or about 320 each. 17% are Shadows, Whispers, Echos and Spectres, a rough 34 each. 2% are Nightmares or Vampires (8 each) and the final 1% are either Efreeti or Widow with 4 of both types. Tagers are affected by their symbiont: and have certain parts of their character enhanced: Efreet become proud and righteous, Spectres are aloof and resolute, Echoes are predatory and love to chew on hard things and so on. To undergo metamorphosis a Tager has to play to these character traits, even more, often going out of their way to act in a way where another action would be preferable. In their new form, Tagers are mostly their old one cranked up to 11, but they often gain one or two new inherent abilities.

All Tagers have something called a [[Anime|Limit Weapon]]: with a powerful force of will they can, once every 24 hours, deploy an extremely potent attack capable of ending a fight with ease. Tagers experience a boost to their abilities both in mortal and Tager form, with the latter being far more potent. They also gain new senses, tougher forms that also regenerate, immunity to gas attacks, are linked so that they can tell that there's one of them within a 1 mile radius, have microhooks on their hands and feet allowing them to scale sheer surfaces and can figure out if someone's a Dhohanoid by observing them closely for a minute. Tagers do lose some of their Orgone: most of them lose half of it but the rarest (Efreeti, Nightmares, Vampires and Widows) lost all of it. Mirages and Shadows have abilities that run on Orgone, but this merely drains their ability to use or help with magic and can be kept on indefinitely. Spectres run on Orgone as well, but they can’t keep their abilities going once out of Orgone.

Variants within the same type of Tager exist. Anywhere from five to seven different weapon types have been observed between the various types of Tager, and all are upgraded when a Tager undergoes metamorphosis, becoming more deadly as well.

===Basic Forms===
*The '''Phantom''' is the closest the Eldritch Society has to a foot soldier. They are aggressive and tough, capable of fighting at both range and close combat with lethal efficiency. Their most common weapons are blades sprouting from their palms, blasts of arcane energy coming from its forehead and a howl capable of knocking something out of the sky and knocking a land-based target down. Variants include application of their claws over their blades and other applications of their howls to deal with enemies. Their Limit Weapon is called the Tentacle Sheathe, where a mass of tentacles shoot out of their chest, hitting all targets in close range and dragging one back to be devoured.
*The '''Mirage''' is the other common Tager fielded by the Eldritch Society. More fit for a less direct role in combat, a Mirage draws its name from its ability to create a displacement field around itself making it appear as if it was several feet away from its true location. This, paired with its natural agility makes it more fit for a stealth-oriented approach, closing in on targets and eliminating them that way. If the jig is up and a fight breaks out it can deliver powerful blasts of solid light to attack from a range, or lash at enemies with its barbed tentacles capable of restraining a target. Mirages tend to be precise, cautious and very aware of their surroundings. Variants of the Mirage use their tentacles in different ways, mainly to hinder enemies rather than kill them. Their Limit Weapon is a non-lethal one: it generates 1d5 harmless copies of itself capable of distracting the enemy by making the pack seem more numerous than it actually is or use them as a diversion while the real Tagers flank the enemy.
*A '''Shadow''''s greatest ability is to make itself completely invisible, allowing it to strike where it needs to as the situation requires. The quills it can fire from its body are coated with a paralytic poison, capable of knocking someone out for several minutes. The spines on its appendages might lack this poison, but in close range a Shadow can easily kill a target taken down by its debilitating poison. Shadows are patient and cool of temper, yet will kill without hesitation or feeling when the situation calls for it. Variants of the Shadow can employ their ranged quills as a burst attack at the cost of range, use its poison at close range or make a single ally invisible as well. With Multiport, its limit weapon, it can ninja it up by appearing all around targets within its range and strike several targets in quick succession. As a being meant for stealth it is only lightly armored and not fit for prolonged fights.
*'''Whispers''' are not meant for combat. They are not particularly strong or tough and have no particularly strong weapons. What they lack in a straight up fight however they have in feistiness, a massive array of senses including hearing, x-ray vision, thermal senses and sonar all at long range, the ability to deploy blasts of blinding light and the ability to fly. A Whisper is often determined, observant, patient and has an eye for detail. They also tend to develop voyeuristic tendencies. Some Whispers are tougher than others, gaining access to more powerful weapons than their usual entangling whips. While their Limit Weapon, Razor Wing, can do quite some damage it is used best as an escape route, allowing a Whisper to dart between enemies in a relatively straight line and hit them all as the Tager makes their escape.
*'''Echoes''' are the most predatory of all the Tagers. They are also the only amphibious Tager who can move extremely fast underwater and can breathe there as well, making it the only Tager to be able to function in the water with any skill. That doesn’t mean that they are helpless on land: they have powerful jaws capable of tearing through flesh and bone and a beam attack that works as well underwater as it does on land. An Echo can also release a cloud of blinding ink as if it were a squid, but this only works underwater and has a limited number of uses (10) per day. Variant Echoes can also tear at their targets with their claws, can electrify any target they strike or strikes them, and deploy a sonar pulse capable of detecting nearby foes. Echoes have amazing sense of scent, being able to detect blood in less than one part per million in both air and water. Smelling blood however makes the Echo rather antsy, and it allows it to use its Limit Weapon, Frenzy. This greatly speeds up the Echo and allows it to close in on a target to tear at it with great ferocity, and the speed it travels at creates so much froth in the water the Echo becomes partially obscured. In their human form these Tagers are naturally aggressive with enhanced senses, have a love for water, live on instinct and love to chew on hard and tough food. No Jawbreaker is safe within reach of an Echo.
*The '''Spectre''' is a creature of death. Unnaturally cold they can freeze anything they touch to lethal effect. Spectres also extrude something called the Gravewind: a putrid mist obscuring their forms and being a threat even to other Tagers and Dhohanoids. But their greatest ability is to turn insubstantial, allowing them to phase through pretty much anything that’s not warded against otherworldly things. This also doesn’t make them immune to attacks: chalk it up to mystical stuff. Variant Spectres are capable of extending this phasing to one other living being for a while, but this rapidly drains their Orgone. Other abilities is to mystically age a target up to slow it down, and change the Gravewind so that it immediately obscures an area instead of dealing damage as well. Their Limit Weapon is called Phasing and allows them to enter a living target and materialize inside of them, tearing them apart from the inside. Spectres are precise and very determined, yet aloof, emotionally distant and have trouble connecting with other people.
*The '''Nightmare''' is massive, towering over many of its Tager compatriots with its massive 9’ body, extremely powerful arms and its wide upper body that seems to be lacking a head. The Nightmare’s signature weapon is located on its shoulders, where a pair of pods rest that shoot crimson balls of mystical force at its enemies, capable of punching through any man-sized target. With its massive claws and arrays of tentacles it can restrain a target and make it tear it apart with its massive strength. Variant Nightmares can employ their bulk and stomp on enemies after jumping into the sky, or send out blasts of energy traveling alongside walls and floors to find their target. Its Limit Weapon is the potent Mystic Blast, ripping a hole the size of itself in anything straight ahead of it for several yards and is capable of bringing down even the largest of targets. On top of this a Nightmare regenerates very fast and is quite tough. Nightmares are menacing, cold-tempered and murderous, reveling in shedding the blood of its enemies.
*The '''Vampire''' is akin to a mix of a Whisper and a Nightmare. Its massive form is carried aloft by a pair of leathery wings with a span of well over 30 feet. From the air it can rain down sprays of cruel barbs capable of dealing horrifying damage to living creatures. Up close their mere touch can boil the blood in an enemy’s veins and can decay inanimate objects. Their most lethal weapon however is their Limit Weapon, the Bloodbath. This is essentially a massive bleeding tumor dropped from above, showering every target within 20’ in its gore. That’s when the hemorrhaging begins: all struck begin to bleed violently from every hole in their body. Hiding behind something won’t work: unless you’re mystically shielded you’re done for if you’re within range of the blast. This makes the Bloodbath capable of taking out even a mecha pilot, though doing so against more than one is next to impossible. Variants of the Vampire play up the powers of their namesakes: mastery over the dark, cowing enemies into submission and, coming from their bat-like nature, a sonic blast capable of stunning and hurting a target. Vampires are, to put it mildly, not very nice people. They are arrogant, predatorily, bloodthirsty and very cruel, with a love of torture. Falling into the hands of a Vampire is a cruel fate indeed, with victims who somehow survived being riddled with scars and visibly damaged blood vessels.
*The '''Efreet''' is a thing of fire. Always on fire, the Efreet chars the ground it walks and can ignite things with a touch. Its body burns so hot that anything striking it will be hurt from the temperature alone. The Efreet’s main downside is that it’s pretty much a torch in the dark, but when an Efreet is deployed subtlety is not needed. It is the strongest of all Tagers, capable of hitting with more force than even the Nightmare. It has no special weakness to being submerged, and it is immune to fire and other blasts of high temperature. The Efreet attacks with its powerful fists and the searing heat of its breath. Certain Efreet can also attack with whips of fire, stare enemies into submission or blast everything around them with fire. Its Limit Weapon, the Meteor Strike, calls down a rain of superheated rock attacking anything within a 400 square foot area, capable of dealing massive damage and hits all targets within range. Efreet are proud, righteous and relentless, seeing themselves as the greatest enemies of the servants of the Old Ones.
*The '''Widow''' is a mix of a spider and terror. It can move and climb frighteningly fast, hiding in the shadows and waiting for the perfect moment to strike. It can produce webbing capable of restraining all but the strongest targets and can support great weight with ease. Initially caustic as well, the Widow can weaponize its webs or just restrain someone with it. Additionally, the bite of a Widow can paralyze a foe, allowing it to easily overpower a prey for capture, or play with it before killing it. Certain Widows can weaponize their jumping ability to pounce on their foes or use their webbing as personal armor. Their Limit Weapon, Cocoon, allows them to encase a foe in a, well, cocoon. After that they can decide on what to do with the target: either encase it and have it suffer some minor damage from the caustic threads, or inject them with venom that will liquefy their insides and allow the Tager to drink them. Widows tend to be morbid, patient, cold-blooded, cruel, and have a love for the grotesque.

===Metamorphised Forms===
*Particularly aggressive and bloodthirsty Phantoms in tune with their bodies can metamorphize into the '''Wraith'''. Improving on everything it used to be, the Wraith also gains mastery over its own inertia. Becoming the Juggernaut (bitch), they can knock over people, Dhohanoids, targets in power armor and even massive beasts with ease. They can also root themselves in place, making running into them a very bad idea, especially when you're going 120+ mph. Sure, it'll hurt the Wraith but you'll be too hurt in turn to feel a sense of accomplishment. They also suffer less falling damage. On top of that a Wraith also learns how to turn its Limit Weapon into an area of effect around it instead of a cone in front of it, with the same chance to gobble up a particularly unlucky morsel.
*If a Mirage is the right mix of attuned to its body, aware of it surroundings and unremarkable of form it can become a '''Memory'''. These Tagers have the ability to go full-on Silence, forcing anyone who has not seen them for even a few seconds to completely forget them. They don't show up on recordings either: they just all-out vanish from pictures and storage data. If a Memory is being chased and manages to bolt out of sight even for a moment its chasers will forget what they were chasing, allowing the Memory to strike again as it pleases. Its new Limit Weapon allows the Memory to create illusionary duplicates of its enemies, shuffle their position with the real enemy and have the illusions attack each other and the real enemies, throwing the fight into chaos and setting them up for the pack to finish them off.
*When a Shadow is patient and careful, yet deadly and kills without a second thought it might become a '''Phantasm'''. A Phantasm's poison is more potent, its attacks stronger and it is stealthier than its previous form. On top of that, they gain the ability to create potent illusions. These can only be audiovisual in nature, so they don't give off heat, have no scent and can't be smelled. This can be in the form of an object, but can also be used by the Phantasm to disguise themselves. Phantasmagoria, its new Limit Weapon, allows the Phantasm to create illusions that terrify and confuse entire groups of enemies, making them easy pickings for the Tager and its allies.
*If they are particularly observant and filled with dogged determination a Whisper can become a '''Dream'''. These Tagers have derived their names from the ability to see into peoples’ dreams at-will. On top of this they can read the surface thoughts of a person, as well as determining their emotional state and its cause. On top of this they have senses superior to even that of their previous form, are blindingly fast and possess potent regeneration offsetting their modest armor. The Dream’s new Limit Weapon is called Gossamer Whirlwind. This allows the Whisper to deploy a blast of blinding light around it, strike all enemies within a certain range and then charge off at 24 times its regular flying speed as if it used Razor Wing, making for a deadly escape option.
*To undergo metamorphosis an '''Echo''' has to give into its primal nature. It must live by instinct, fight on after smelling blood, have hunted aquatic foes and even gone the extra mile by devouring and digesting some of the prey it has hunted. When it has done all this, an Echo can become an Impulse. Aside from massively increasing their swimming speed (20 times the normal speed for their stats, which is doubled when using Frenzy) they gain the ability to teleport: they can do so to any location they can see or within 25 yards where they cannot. They can only do so alone, but this does not bother the Impulse: they are great bloodthirsty hunters. On top of increasing the power of their attacks and increased regenerative abilities their new Limit Weapon is Frenzyport, allowing them to teleport around their targets and attack with their powerful bites. This also allows them to focus all their attacks on a single enemy, which has little chance to survive the fury of an Impulse.
*When a Spectre becomes particularly adept at striking without being seen, tenacious even when near-dead, focused on its duty and distant towards others it might become a '''Revenant'''. The Revenant is death personified. They become near-impossible to kill: they suffer less from injury and hits that would put them at the risk of dying will instead put them out of commission for a while, allowing them to regenerate at a frightening speed. Even when dismembered, torn in half or cut into a dozen pieces it can just grow back. Only the most powerful of attacks and largest of weapons can kill a Revenant permanently. On top of all of this the Revenant gains the Deathly Repose Limit Weapon. This allows them to violently explode, dealing massive damage to anything within a five-yard radius. After a minute the Revenant will reform and after ten it’ll be ready for action again. This means that the Tager should only use this when they are not being chased, or have someone to drag their reforming body out in a hurry.
*Not often very nice people, a Nightmare who take the worst aspects of their symbiont to their extreme will become a '''Torment'''. The Torment’s mere touch is agony: those who touch it become wracked with pain. On top of this, the Torment’s cruelty gives it an edge when fighting against injured opponents. Even more dangerous and bloodthirsty than its previous form, everything about the Torment is bigger, stronger and more lethal. Combined with its new Limit Weapon, Death Blossom, it is one of the most dangerous Tagers out there. Death Blossom hits everything within 20 yards with a massive blast of energy, capable of ripping through pretty much anything in a single shot. Fortunately, this targets selectively: only the Torment’s enemies will be ripped apart by the force of this attack.
*The cruelest and most vicious of all the Vampires might become one of the monstrous '''Bloodgods'''. A winged 10’ thing of nightmares, a Bloodgod takes the disposition of a Vampire to its logical conclusion. [[Tzimisce|They gain a mastery over flesh and bone]] that, in its most benevolent form, heal people, perform plastic surgery, grant people natural weapons like claws and fix deformities and handicaps. However, a Bloodgod is more inclined to use this to horrifyingly disfigure people and kill them by reshaping their bodies alone. Anything that is not capable of regenerating on its own will be permanently disfigured by this attack and require magic to return to their true shape. They also gain a new attack in the form of Nerve Strike, which can make an enemy lose the ability to act for a bit. On top of that, the Bloodgod gains a new Limit Weapon in the form of Meltdown. This is a burst released from the Bloodgod, forcefully deforming everything around it. Those who survive (and that’s not likely) will be horribly disfigured and disabled, and easy pickings for the Bloodgod itself.
*With enough moral conviction, relentlessness and affinity for fire an Efreet can become an '''Inferno'''. Its wings allow it to fly around at a surprising speed, but its most dangerous new ability is that it gains pyrokinesis, allowing it to attack as if it were a pyrokinetic of significant skill, without having to use Orgone. It can also become one with fire, becoming very difficult to spot while inside and can travel at a staggering 400mph within the same flame. The Inferno’s new Limit Weapon, Unearthly Radiance, blasts everything within range of the attack, setting them on fire and blinding them from the brightness of the attack.
*When a Widow becomes a particularly good hunter, terrifying, and left behind horrifying aftermaths of its butchery it can become a '''Horror'''. Non-Tagers who see a Horror must resist a supernatural wave of fear, with the Horror being able to stare down targets to increase this effect. In turn they are immune to fear themselves, with not even an Old One being able to scare them (but it will drive them insane). Horrors gain the new Spinneret Dance ability, allowing them to encase all enemies within range in web and cutting them up with their many bladed limbs.

==Books==
Eight books have been released for CthulhuTech. These books provide with a variety of material to play a variety of games with. The books are:

*'''CthulhuTech Core Rulebook''' is just that: the core rulebook. It's comprehensive with enough material to run all kinds of games from Engel and Mecha games to Eldrich Society games, as well as police and investigator games. It is guilty of the whole "talk about stuff that appears in late books so you have to buy those" thing with Para-Psychics.
*'''Vade Mecum''' (Latin for useful book/useful object, used in the context of a frequently referred to handbook) is the CthulhuTech Companion. It is essentially more CthulhuTech. It has rules for Cascades (gun fu and other martial arts), more Mecha and Tagers, the rules for Para-Psychics, new monsters, new spells and all sorts of other stuff. Also, focuses on underwater combat.
*'''Dark Passions''' is a sourcebook on the various smaller cults. This makes them ideal enemies for police and investigator games, and possibly an entry point for Tager games as well. If you play a higher powered game however you won't find a lot of information here though. Note that there are two versions of this book: the original Mongoose printing which is in black and white, and the full-color Catalyst printing which is the standard for the game.
*'''Damnation View''' is the metaplot book for the year 2086. It details how things are going to shit for the NEG and includes a number of storylines. It also details Secret Services, which act like more or less the Men in Black for the NEG.
*'''Mortal Remains''' is the NEG/Migou sourcebook. It details daily life in the NEG, looks into the Nazzadi and describes the Migou and their mindset. Includes new vehicles and mecha for both parties, describes how you can make Migou characters and lists rules for the Nephilim.
*'''Ancient Enemies''' is the sourcebook for Tagers and the Chrysalis Corporation. It has two new Tagers and metamorphized versions of all ten of them, new Dhohanoids, backgrounds on both the Eldritch Society and the Chrysalis Corporation and rules on how to play a Dhohanoid game alongside rules for them.
*'''Unveiled Threats''' is the gear book detailing weapons (now fully illustrated), gear, vehicles, and armor. Also includes rules for drugs (coke is now sold over the counter!), new spells of all kinds, magical artifacts that will mess the user up, some background on technology and some weapons and armor for both the EOD and the Migou.
*'''Burning Horizon''' is the metaplot book for the year 2087. The Independent Solar Colonies, a coalition of the survivors of the various NEG colonies, has made it to Earth after kicking the Migou's asses and deals so much damage that the Second Hive Ship runs back to Pluto. The Migou are sore losers (Being kicked in the shins by your recently cloned slaves and the butt-monkeys of the universe, humans would make anyone bitter) and unleash the Migou Hemorrhagic Virus, which is pretty much Influenza meets Ebola on steroids. A cure is invented, however [[Heresy|it's rewriting of DNA and empowering the individual with immunities is shunned by some Earth citizens]]. The ISC forces have brought along new technology in the form of the Inertial Dampener, an expansion on the D-Engine which pretty much negates any inertia you'd experience in space, allowing a ship to start and stop on a dime and turn at speeds that would normally liquify a human from sheer G-forces alone. The book contains rules for space combat, new mecha, and vehicles for fighting in space and rules for ISC characters who now fight alongside the NEG forces as the Coalition. The plot is promoted from Grimdark to Nobledark.

==See Also==
===Character Sheets===
*[[CthulhuTech Character Sheet]]
*[[CthulhuTech Mech Sheet]]

===Homebrew===
*[[Cthulhu Void Tech]]: An attempt to fix the broken Framewerk System

===Stories===
*[[CthulhuTech: Engel Loev Human]]
*[[CthulhuTech: Engel Loev Human - Naughty Tentacles]]

==External Links==
* [http://www.cthulhutech.com CthulhuTech Website]
* [http://www.voidstate.com/rpg/cthulhutech/roller.php Voidstate's Online Framewerk Dice Roller]
* [http://rapidshare.com/files/118338843/framewerk_dice_rolling_bot.zip.html Framewerk Dice Bot for IRC]
* [http://anydice.com/program/6177 Anydice script to determine CthulhuTech dice distribution]

[[Category:Roleplaying]]

Delta Green

2017-05-19T18:23:12Z

2601:843:C201:B420:599A:7A9B:25C:D72B: Grammar Cleanup.

<blockquote>''Now we're on to the question: "What does Delta Green want from you?" Nothing short of the rest of your life. Delta Green wants you to pick up where I left off: doing what I've been doing for the last ten years. I've falsified official reports. Lied under oath. Planted evidence. Stolen and destroyed evidence. Stolen and destroyed federal property. Run illegal wiretaps. Abused the power and authority of my office. Gone AWOL. Committed arson, burglary, grand larceny, aggravated assault, battery, and killed. On three of those occasions, what I did was nothing short of cold-blooded murder. And all in the name of doing the jobs nobody else can or will.''</blockquote>

==Overview==
Delta Green is a horror RPG based of off the [[Call of Cthulhu]] system. DG shares the Lovecraftian mythos with CoC, but most strongly differs in that it is specifically in modern times (where CoC was typically set in the jazz era).

Player Characters tend to be part of or somehow affiliated with government executive branch agencies (most typically law-enforcement or military) recruited into an officially disbanded clandestine group whose purposes was to investigate and neutralize occult and alien threats. DG is currently organized in a cell structure with 26 cells with three operators active at any one time.

So...basically, a bunch of the 'Federales' grouped up to make a highly illegal terrorist organization to fuck up aliens and occultists.

Did I mention that there's a legit government agency called Majestic 12 who are in bed with what they think are aliens? So yeah, terrorists.

==Basics==
===Crunch===

Like the system that it is based on, Delta Green is based on the Call of Cthulhu ruleset, with some unique mechanics:
*Lethality rating: Basically, no weapon or attack deals more than 2d10 damage. However, weapons such as cruise missiles have a "lethality rating" of between 10 and 90 percent. If that 2d10/d100 roll is less than the lethality rating, the targeted enemy dies instantly. This saves you from rolling a bucketful of dice to determine exactly how hard you hit that Dark Young with a jury-rigged antitank mine.
*Bonds: Each Agent gets a number of Bonds which depends on their background. Bonds are basically friendships or relationships with NPCs (and potentially PCs) that act as both a character-expanding tool for players and a sanity-regulation mechanic.
**When things go terribly wrong on Nights at the Opera, there is a chance that Agents begin to develop bonds with each other (at the expense of already-existing ones).
**When Agents lose SAN or go temporarily insane, they can spend 1d4 from both Willpower and any Bond to try to repress the madness ("I'm doing this for my kids/wife/friend!"). During between-mission vignettes, the results from this coping mechanism should be played out.
*Some skills and mechanics, like Spot Hidden and Education, have been rolled into other ones.

===Fluff===

*PCs are generally more capable at combat; but many many things in the DG universe will hand Agents their ass.
*PCs, to a certain extent, can also call upon the resources/influence of the organization they work for
**Depending on their creativity and ability to come up with "mundane" reasons (you've got to be hella good to divert a B-52 wing and convince them that the town filled with worshipers of the Deep Ones is just a mock city they're supposed to make practice bombing runs on.)
**As a PC typically won't have official sanction, this typically involves a lot of lies, inventing evidence, intimidation, and other various tactics to make sure Deputy Fife doesn't make any calls to check your credentials.
**The last point depends on what era you're working in as well.

==The Setting==
Essentially, the modern world, but where Cthulhu definitely dreams (as opposed to ours where it's only a distinct possibility). Add into that a boatload of secret cults, secret societies, secret governmental agencies, eldritch abominations, a lot of insanity, and you're almost there.

Oh yeah, notice how I didn't say anything about aliens? Yeah, so those "aliens" Majestic-12 are working with, they're just fungoid constructs by one of the many eldritch abominations floating around who are doing nasty things to humans for their own purposes.

If you're [[Game Master|Handling]] a Delta Green game, there are three main eras they can be set in:

===The Classic Era (1928-1969)===

This is the era where Delta Green is an official organization within the U.S. government, founded after information about the Innsmouth raid makes its way to the Department of Naval Intelligence. Sadly not too many scenarios are set in this era (perhaps due to the overlap with Call of Cthulhu.)

===The Cowboy Era (1970-2001)===

After the disastrous OBSIDIAN raid, the powers that be disbanded Delta Green. From 1970 to 1994, the organization worked as a "good ol' boys" model, with old agents occasionally getting together to deal with issues. In 1994, former agent Lt. Gen. Reginald Fairfield was assassinated by MJ-12 NRO Delta operatives, which provided the influence to Professor Joseph Camp (Agent ALPHONSE) to create the cell structure that existed from 1994 to 2002.

This is known as the "Cowboy Era" because it basically consists of old Delta Green veterans and new recruits fighting the Mythos without any sort of official sanction.

===The New Era (2001-present)===

After the September 11 attacks on New York City, the U.S. intelligence community began a major reorganization which saw MJ-12 (which had been struggling to contact the Greys for some time) disgraced and eventually taken over in a coup by Delta Green (detailed in the novel ''Through a Glass, Darkly''.) However, some old-school agents refused to "come in from the cold," so both Program (official) and Group (unofficial) games are possible in this era.

Once the new rulebook comes out, we'll know more.

==Recent Happenings==
After a 6 year drought of new rulebooks, Delta Green was relaunched with a highly-successful Kickstarter in late 2015. A new rulebook came out in spring 2016, together with sourcebooks detailing everything from PISCES to the eventual fate of the Fate (apparently Alzis vanished and DG took back New York City; according to Adam Scott Glancy at Gencon 2016 "We're going to basically put The Fate in a knife-fight in the dark").

The game will feature a new custom ruleset, designed to smooth over some of the things CoC never did particularly well (*cough* combat *cough*) and highlight setting themes (you can keep yourself sane by staying connected to things that matter personally, but of course the nature of DG work eats away at these relationships).

The setting is also significantly revised. Majestic 12 is no longer active, having at last been destroyed by Delta Green (although plenty of its splinter groups and factions are still embedded throughout the US government). Read the novel "Through a Glass, Darkly" to get an idea of how this went down.
Delta Green has been brought back into the government fold, given a budget and official standing, and now uses the War on Terror as a cover for its battles with the mythos (of course, lots of the old guard are utterly distrustful of the government and refuse to come in from the cold). The result is there are currently two "Delta Green" organizations: the Group (the illegal conspiracy) and the Program (the legal government program.) All in all, it sounds pretty awesome. Once the full rulebook comes out, things will be more clear.

==The Big Players==
===Delta Green===
As with any clandestine organization, their history is all kinds of jacked up. DG has existed in some capacity or another since 1928 as a response to the crazy crap found during a raid on a Deep One Cult located at Innsmouth, MA. It is interesting to note that the raid on Innsmouth ended with everything even remotely suspicious being thoroughly dynamited, which remains Delta Green SOP to this day. They changed names a few times and were handed around to various parts of government for a while before they finally coalesced as "Delta Green" which wasn't so much a name for them, but for the classification and access level required to actually know anything about them; however it eventually came to serve as a name, official or not.

During their later years as an official organization, they acted without much of a command structure with people who were in the know just calling each other up anytime they ran across something DG should handle, and then they handled it with little to no oversight. When they screwed up royally in Cambodia during a 1969 raid that resulted in most of the people who participated dying, they finally gave the likes of Majestic 12 and other political enemies an excuse to finally disband them.

This didn't sit well with some portions of DG who quietly got together and said we're going to keep at it. What little oversight and control there was before no longer existed, and as a result, many DG operatives executed their self-appointed duties with extreme prejudice. Eventually, one of the DG leaders started looking into MJ-12, pissed them off to the point where they sent their own operatives, DELTA, to assassinate him. This then lead to the decision to reorganize DG into the cell structure used to this day.

In and around the turn of the millennium, several things happened:
*ADAM is killed in a Karotechia ambush (accidentally) orchestrated by former operative Captain Forrest James, a.k.a. Agent DARREN.
*ALPHONSE goes out in a blaze of glory by summoning a tiny aspect of Azathoth to kill himself and an NRO Delta strike team, leaving just ANDREA (the one who ''nobody'' knows exactly who it is) in charge.
*The remaining members of the group get together and basically conduct a coup against MJ-12, with former MJ-3 director Gavin Ross collaborating and eventually taking over as ADAM.

Not everyone is happy with this turn of affairs, including a whole bunch of Delta Green agents who refuse to "come in from the cold" and become legitimate.

===Majestic 12===
Majestic 12, or MJ-12, was formed in response to the highly publicized Roswell Incident where an alien craft crashed into the deserts of New Mexico. Beyond taking charge of the craft, bodies, and survivor, MJ-12 was responsible for covering the incident up and keeping knowledge of aliens from coming to the attention of the public. It was originally formed with some former members of Delta Green who did not necessarily agree with DG's policy of just destroying everything they came across, wanting to keep some for study and possible use against the USA's enemies. For the most part, DG and MJ-12's responsibilities did not seem to overlap, but from the beginning, there was a basic and divisive difference in philosophies.

Over time, MJ-12 managed to finally ended up making contact with what it thought were alien life forms and agreed to cover up their activities on earth in exchange for technology which they slowly filter into the market (making themselves rich) and a vague promise on the part of the Greys (the "aliens") to be put in touch with other intelligent species throughout the galaxy.

The 12 of MJ-12 comes from the 12 members of the steering/oversight committee that runs all of the projects and subprojects that fall in MJ-12's jurisdiction. Each of the 12 members is head of a specific project that relates to either interaction with the Grays, covering up the Grays' activities on earth, and/or exploiting the technological revelations.

Over time, this relationship with the Greys has soured for some members of MJ-12, but they cooperate out of fear of the superior technology that humanity is essentially defenseless against (a nuclear weapon is unable to scratch the material they use to make the hulls of their craft). Other members are blinded by the technological opportunities and opportunities for personal gain.

As MJ-12 is a proper black governmental agency, they have nigh on unlimited access to various resources, be they the finest minds, money, research facilities, etc. They do maintain their own group of operators whose primary task is to use techniques first developed in the CIA's MK-ULTRA and further refined with the "alien" technology and practice to cover up any activity of the Greys. While strongly preferring non-violent means (which are generally less complicated to implement) they can call into play highly capable combat units.

MJ-12 is aware of DG's continued activities, but mostly does not fully consider them a threat. Some members of MJ-12 see DG as a possible way to strike at their enemies within MJ-12 or even possibly the Greys themselves.

===The Greys===
The Greys are the supposedly alien race who are exploiting the government of the United States of America. They are actually essentially puppets of the Mi-go (an extension of Yuggoth). Long story short, the Mi-go know that all hell is about to break loose because the foretold end times are just around the corner. Among other things, they have a goal to learn everything they can before the get they hell away from the earth (to where remains a question).

To these ends, they had to speed up the research they were doing on humans but wanted to do such in a way that wouldn't get every government in the world looking for them to kill them. So, they made up the Greys who they control via a strange sort of telepathy and set things up in such a way that they now have the most powerful government on the planet cleaning up their messes willingly for a few trinkets.

===Karotechia===
Imagine liches. Make them Nazis. Oh, and there's just three of them, but they've got a lot of underlings. Stick them in South America. You've now got the Karotechia.
One has to stay in a fridge, one is a merc who just enjoys being a merc, and one thinks the ghost of Hitler is telling him to start up the 'Fourth Reich', but this time to base it off of occultism. The last one is crazy as fuck and the other two are scared to death of him, so they play along.

===Deep Ones===
Fish people that can breed with humans to make strange hybrids that look human until a certain age when they change and turn into fish people and go off into the water to live with the greater Deep Ones. Ceremonies of worship are orgies of violence and well, orgies.
Due to shenanigans by Delta Green, namely setting up pillboxes and landmines, then casting Call Deep Ones, creating a scene that makes the D-Day landings look like a drunken scuffle in the pub car park, said spell no longer works.

===The Cult of Transcendence===
Essentially this setting's Illuminati. They started as an occult conspiracy dedicated to secretly ruling the world through magic. This failed repeatedly, so they reorganized as a dedicated cult of Nyarlathotep (who oversees the cult personally). They're run from an extra-dimensional mansion that's kind of located in Switzerland. They also maintain various front organizations throughout the world, secretly influencing mankind to bring about the return of Cthulhu. As people progress up the cult's ladder, they're initiated into more and more of its mysteries, gradually becoming less human, until they turn into generic tentacle monsters. Through its various front organizations, the cult has access to everything from stolen Yithian technology to a massive empire of nightmares carved out of the Earth's Dreamlands. Possibly the most dangerous and evil organization in the DG world.

===PISCES===

Delta Green's British counterpart, the Paranormal Intelligence Section for Counter-intelligence, Espionage, and Sabotage. It was originally founded during the First World War as MI-13, where they dabbled in psychic talents and ESP, but suffered a severe setback in 1925 when they not only lost most of their budget to a cash-strapped British government but many of their "talents" to a bizarre series of mental collapses, courtesy of a partially awakened Cthulhu.

MI-13's big break came during the Second World War, when the current head, Major David Cornwall, placed a sealed premonition by one of their remaining "talents" as to how the defense of France would go in the hands of Prime Minister Winston Churchill. Opened by the latter the day after the evacuation of Dunkirk, the shockingly accurate prediction convinced Churchill that Cornwall and MI-13 were the real deal. Thus PISCES was born and immediately began work to undermine the Karotechia, who were working feverishly to use supernatural forces to aid the Nazi government. The first joint Delta Green/PISCES operation occurred in 1942 when agents (with the aid of French partisans) were able to sabotage the Karotechia's negotiations with the Deep Ones. Though the two agencies were nominally allies, their radically different philosophies led to distrust. By the 1960s, Delta Green and Pisces no longer worked together, which turns out to be very fortunate for the former.

In a 1968 raid on the English town of Goatswood, several PISCES agents were infested by the cerebral parasites known as the Shan. Over the next twenty years, the Shan gradually took over the entire network, placing an infested member in charge of PISCES in 1988. Though they only currently control about ten percent of PISCES personnel, it's the ten percent needed to direct the entire organization. Though they still continue counter-Mythos ops, it is for the security of the Shan's hidden temple and their eventual goal of leaving Earth rather than for the safety of England.

===GRU SV-8===

The Russian counter-paranormal agency, founded after the Red Army found ghoul cults feeding on the corpses of the Russian Civil War. During the Great Patriotic War, they clashed many times with ''Smersh'', the NKVD's paranormal section, as well as destroying Karotechia projects to resurrect the dead. After the war, engaged in a mad scramble to destroy Karotechia information as ''Smersh'' tried to collect it. Later released Delta Green operatives who had been captured by the Spetsnaz to destroy Stalin's life-extension projects, and destroyed ''Smersh'' in a bloody coup. Since then, have tried to steal things from MJ-12.

===Saucer Watch===
A UFO research group that actually has some respectability by both being well funded (by some rich heiress who thinks she was abducted) and actually seriously researching reports of UFO activity, with emphasis on the word 'research'. They sometimes stumble on things MJ-12 would rather they didn't.

===The Fate===
Occultists based in NYC. The Fate are a group of very powerful magic users who contract out to criminal organizations. To those criminal organizations, they are known as The Network (the arm that functions as a sort of public face for The Fate). Mostly they do such to have access to professional thieves and other less than legal vectors for acquiring specialty items for their rituals, information and the like. Led by a dude named Stephen Alzis who is rumored to actually be Nyarlathotep. They have a lot of connection as well to a night club in NYC named Club Apocalypse.

===Other various cults===
At any point, some other Cthulhu lore cult (such as the Cult of the Yellow Sign) may pop up and become a headache 'someone' had better deal with. All of the various eldritch powers will most likely make some sort of showing before the final curtain falls for some purpose, overt or otherwise. I mention the cults and not the powers themselves, because mostly the PC interactions will be with the cults...well, anyone sane would hope this to be the case...

==External Links==

[http://www.delta-green.com/ The (little-used) news site]

[http://fairfieldproject.wikidot.com/ The unofficial Delta Green wiki]

[https://beta.groups.yahoo.com/neo/groups/dglist/info The Delta Green Mailing List]

[[Category:Roleplaying]]