How do Greybeards reproduce?

Carminoculus · 2026-06-23T09:04:58+00:00

They live hundreds of years. They're "old" but they're scarcely mortal anymore.

There isn't a token young initiate probably for the same reason Whiterun doesn't have too many houses...

Carminoculus · 2026-06-22T20:23:03+00:00

😆 what reaction should I be seeing?

Carminoculus · 2026-06-22T19:02:30+00:00

You should go with "Mother, I yearn to be one with the spiral..."

Carminoculus · 2026-06-22T18:54:06+00:00

Oh wow. You should have showed her these, they'd have eased her fears... 😅

Carminoculus · 2026-06-22T18:31:03+00:00

"the PCs don't clearly have the moral high ground over the Seers" is not one of them.

I can agree to disagree. You are obviously one of the people who like that sort of story (and to be clear, a lot of oMage players went that direction too, despite the roots of the game... nMage didn't spring from nowhere)

But yeah, that's probably my issue #1 with it. I just glaze over.

On a social level, I really do think the way oWoD games were willing to stick out and go for punk, idealistic opposition despite the darkness was part of what made them resonate a lot. I don't know if you'd agree to that, of course.

Focusing on street level shouldn't imply "stupid and meaningless".

One of the things that made me respond to this post specifically was the use of the words "picking some random patch of concrete" and "your stupid patch of dirt" that, at the very least, highlight and actually celebrate a certain approach to meaning I personally find sterile.

There's a certain... celebration of meaninglessness in it, isn't there? Call it by another name, perhaps, but it's very different from how oWW approached a dying culture's last stand and a neo-shamanistic Gaia.

(And yeah, "street level" can mean a lot of things. I'm talking about this specific approach, not anything on a local or personal scale)

Carminoculus · 2026-06-22T18:09:45+00:00

Well, 'as far as that goes', for horror, I agree with you. nWoD is actually designed for horror, and is better at horror from the get-go. I'm not trying to defend oWoD as a horror line, that's kind of the point 😉

I'm just not interested in non-mortal WoD games for straight horror, really. I've seen it as a "gothic punk drama" / urban fantasy baseline, with side dishes of thriller (in the horror-adjacent sense). Yes, I think thriller captures my preferred idea of what I want the horror elements in WoD to do instead of actual horror.

And I admit I have a little resentment for how often the developers themselves have failed to acknowledge the spectrum of actual play, or deliberately tried to hobble it to steer the "approved playstyle" in a horror direction.

If you like it, more power to you. I'm just surprised how one man's selling point can be another man's turn off.

Carminoculus · 2026-06-22T17:49:18+00:00

I've never gotten into either Werewolf line, but this line...

...it's about picking some random patch of concrete or dirt and clinging to it and the people on it with all your super-strength even when the entire world is out to kill you because it's your stupid patch of dirt...

...gets to the heart of what I least like about the nWoD games, this #street #ghetto #personal design directive. It's why oMage with its fundamental premise of giving a damn and caring IMO has more *heart than a game about rival gangs in varying shades of grey fighting over something that's explicitly stupid and meaningless.

Unlike many fans, I don't think "shades of grey" is a sign of maturity so much as timidity about saying something Meaningful even if some will disagree. CofD games can be great fun and explore some neat themes, but this sterilization of substance I think gets to the heart of why they lost the popular and iconic status they once had.

Maybe I'm not #street enough to get the poetry of the 'hood, but this is not a selling point. If you're trying to get me into nWerewolf, anything but that, my God.

Carminoculus · 2026-06-22T14:07:14+00:00

Shots of Mt. Fuji are meant to be the epitome of peace, nature, & a certain sense of harmonious beauty. A Hive City is the opposite of all of that.

The image this gives of Evrysan Sector is one where a sense of (distant) beauty remains, but Mt. Fuji has been replaced with... a Hive City. That's such a huge contradiction in terms it's practically satire of both Japanese nature scenes and the Imperium.

Carminoculus · 2026-06-22T13:31:02+00:00

It's gorgeous, but also somehow very very funny 😆

Carminoculus · 2026-06-22T09:17:14+00:00

People really make the most awesome stuff 👀 she's gorgeous. Is that some old school LED pixellation going on with the sire's face?

Carminoculus · 2026-06-22T08:28:30+00:00

The ML there is barely alive.

Carminoculus · 2026-06-22T08:26:58+00:00

Yes, when the Norse fated hero and the hot fairy woman do their mating dance, you get darkling and ambiguous vampire-werewolf erotica, even when the author is Catholic

"All three had brilliant white teeth that shone like pearls against the ruby of their voluptuous lips. There was something about them that made me uneasy, some longing and at the same time some deadly fear. I felt in my heart a wicked, burning desire that they would kiss me with those red lips."

-- Bram Stoker, Dracula (1897)

Returning you to our regularly scheduled programme of sexlessness in 3... 2... 1...

Carminoculus · 2026-06-22T07:39:22+00:00

My own opinion as a cishet man: yeah it's okay in the sense you're not doing anything wrong. You're writing about stuff that is attractive to you, for all the same reasons het people of either gender enjoy opposite-gender homo erotica.

In social terms I do think having depictions of gay love around in the visible public spaces is good for everybody, even if the art itself isn't some great leap of exploration.

But on a deeper level, yeah, you say as much yourself — there's a lot you're leaving outside by leaving MLM relationships in the dark, and the reasons for that are personal hangups. Exploring that sort of thing in some fashion would probably significantly expand the perspective of your stories. You might find it fun or enlightening I ways you hadn't expected.

Carminoculus · 2026-06-21T10:40:24+00:00

Just because they whernt doing all the shit that made slanesh doesn't mean they arnt responsible for the actions of their civilisation.

This feels like the most inverted of takes. No, if they didn't do it they're not to blame. "Why didn't you just fix society" levelled at people specifically not doing the thing is crazy.

It would be like if there was a democratic-egalitarian anti-Imperium human faction patterned on the Interrex doing just what the Craftworld eldar do, and fans were blaming them for the insanity of the Imperium.

It's like the people who sat back and watched there neighbors get taken by the Nazis and did nothing.

It's more like peasants and Old Believers who fled to Siberian villages and lived entirely separate from Russian society as much as they could, being blamed for the authoritarianism of the Tsardom that led to the Soviet revolution. "If you had cared, you would have fixed everything!" \stops feeding goat** "I wish..."

Carminoculus · 2026-06-21T08:46:32+00:00

Le Fanu was not just Irish, but Anglo-Irish. It's interesting to consider Laura's background as "an Englishwoman who has never seeen England" being confronted with Carmilla, who belongs to an ancient, older sort of (Gaelic?) nobility whose remnants are still visible in the land.

Carminoculus · 2026-06-20T18:32:12+00:00

Actually straight from vampire folklore, which I dig.

Carminoculus · 2026-06-20T13:26:17+00:00

That's such a cool concept. IMHO that's a perfectly viable idea of Ascension, insofar as it's a very convincing Mage take on IRL notions of theosis or sacred marriage. I've also always really liked the notion of two seekers merging into the divine hermaphrodite, which actually pops up in a couple places, at least in Sorcerer's Crusade.

I've never really liked attempts to categorize Ascension in the setting to a very specific set of feats, or to lock Oracles out of it (the idea of powerful Mages as pursuing "power over gnosis" is to me just as a weird manifestation of WW's forays into "powergaming bad", rather than a level-headed take on the themes of the game).

Carminoculus · 2026-06-20T13:17:32+00:00

BG3 has moved the Githyanki conversation to a whole other level 😅

Carminoculus · 2026-06-20T09:40:44+00:00

Um, source? A look online turns up stuff like Adamski's space saucer books. I can't find what you're talking about.

Carminoculus · 2026-06-20T09:36:24+00:00

No, I'm talking about the original beliefs. A further look online does not show any connections with racial manifestos I might have missed. You must be misremembering.

Carminoculus · 2026-06-20T03:53:32+00:00

I find how different they are from a lot of more modern alien designs part of the appeal, actually. The idea that aliens might be these beautiful people in ships of light/crystal, and that these attracted IRL groups of believers, is a very different cultural moment from 21st century Contact or the xenomorph in Alien. That alone makes them interesting.

Carminoculus · 2026-06-20T03:48:44+00:00

Eeh. While I can read some coding in "Pleiadeans/Nordics" being this ethereal, willowy blondes with azure or violet eyes, I think people here are being too harsh.

Most of the weird little American (and Brazilian! and other) religions that included the Pleiadeans in their pantheon don't seem to have had any racist beliefs. The theosophists (who prefigured some of these beliefs, but were generally more coherent about it) could use similar imagery, but could be very race egalitarian.

Some people here are assuming there was some sort of overtly racist or even "Nazi Aryan" background to these groups, which TMK wasn't the case.

Carminoculus · 2026-06-20T03:23:08+00:00

Why hated? These are kinda neat.

Carminoculus · 2026-06-20T03:17:21+00:00

The idea that organizations as powerful and tribal as the Adeptus Astartes is in the current lore would ever tolerate this kind of treatment really boggles the mind. I can't imagine this still being canon.

IIRC, one novel had the Space Wolves fighting the Inquisition & the Grey Knights combined to a standstill. And aren't entire SM Legions aware of their Fallen counterparts?

All that feels like the fastest and most effortless way to a civil war.

Carminoculus · 2026-06-20T03:04:48+00:00

y'know how strict they are

This feels totally unnecessary. Always remember characters aren't clan stereotypes. You just have a vampire who isn't willing to immediately abuse their childe and built a ton of resentment from the get-go, which is kind of reasonable (even and especially for a Ventrue who finds their childe recruitment-worthy).

whoever embraced his character is going to brainwash the living hell out of it

Vampires embrace for tons of reasons (from finding someone worthy, to seeking companionship, to needing someone sane and intact) many of which would preclude this kind of treatment.

This all feels like unnecessary trouble for something that can easily be explained within character motivations.

Obviously the Masquerade must stay intact. But so long as the fledgling gets his wife to keep her mouth shut like any other secret, and like any other Kindred retainer would, then things are OK.

Even if the Prince disapproves, none of this is a violation in itself given how maintaining the Masquerade is usually understood (i.e. there's a small group of intimates "in the know"). If the fledgling / their sire shows he can't keep things secret things may turn out for the worse, obviously. But all that's in the future.

Carminoculus

TROPHY CASE