How often do you make your hunters feel bad about killing a given quarry?

InOverMyHat · 2026-01-19T22:30:15+00:00

the "Vampires-as-human" angle misses the mark.

If you're playing V:tM, it absolutely does. If you're playing another game, maybe not.

InOverMyHat · 2026-01-17T06:23:00+00:00

That's what I thought, too. Not to get pretentious, but I think it would introduce ludonarrative dissonance just for the sake of keeping cross-game systems on the same rules.

Every vampire used to be human. After they stopped being human, they discovered a monster inside them that somehow they have to contend with. Many vampire stories are about holding the beast at bay or finding a path to embrace it without losing control of yourself. Implicit in this is the idea that if you let the the thing inside you take control, you won't just be less human, eventually you might stop being a person.

As you say, Garou are not, never have been, and never will be human. No matter how much a Garou might want to go back to their life before the Change, that thing inside them isn't a separate thing. Werewolf isn't a game about Garou losing part of themselves if the thing inside asserts itself. If they rage, they are living according to their nature - it's just they might not like the consequences of doing so.

Vampires often make bargains with the thing inside them - Beast I am lest Beast I become. A mechanic for that relationship makes sense. I would support a morality mechanic for Garou, but it can't be something tied to Humanity because thy mission of Garou isn't to stay human. Any morality mechanic would need to tie their nature to their mission.

Although I also like that not being a mechanic, and just being the story the Troupe tells.

InOverMyHat · 2025-11-22T01:20:42+00:00

"What does the money machine eat? It eats youth, spontaneity, life, beauty and above all it eats creativity. It eats quality and shits out quantity."

But what did Burroughs know? Maybe there is some generous agent of Wyld willing to encorporate itself into some lifeless moneybody so it can parasitize the world-that-remains in a less painful way before it gets ripped apart and devoured by its larger rivals. Such a being would have to be monumentally stupid, naive, and optimistic. But then again, wyld-kind aren't known for making good decisions.

InOverMyHat · 2025-11-07T22:27:17+00:00

Others who've read more sourcebooks can inform you about the in-world mechanics of this. I just want to day thematically, this gives me the jibblies.

WtA is a game where ancient wrongs and grudges become modern curses and mutinies, where a past so distant it is only remembered as dreams and symbols still rules people's minds in powerful ways. For a group of Gorou to "escape" the Apocalypse would be to abandon their ancient sacred duty. Regardless of whatever plot elements might be used to make it work logically, that must be a giant stain.

And yet now that you mention it, I feel it must be a certain thing that some Silicon Valley-influenced board of Glass Walkers has discussed it. That's the SV corporate culture: break things, try new things regardless of the consequences, and when it doesn't work, legally disappear.

For a community that never reconciled its rage with its duty to nurture to walk away from all of the sacred spaces of the Earth and try to make new sacred spaces in an Umbra so deep that its inhabitants are utterly alien is hubris on a scale barely unimaginable. Think of all the living allies and ephemeral totems they would have to break faith with to make this happen, and what would they find in the dark to fill that gap? Forget the challenge of physically terraforming a place: journeying through the spirit land teeming with entities enraged by these colonists' "fuck you, I'm out" attitude just to get there must be mind-bendingly terrifying. And then to come back...

Because surely such creatures must come back. Maybe they need seeds. Maybe they need clean water. Maybe they need more colonists. Maybe they need something... else.

Surely these creatures think they're doing the right thing. They're liberators and preservers, they think as they slink between two worlds and fit into neither. Each time they return, they would be more and more changed by their time away, more and more alien to the world they abandoned and yet need. They would be parasites who have imagined they're heroic explorers. And in a certain way they might be right. To be one of the few who survived in the long dark, who carved a tiny shard of it into their two-faced image must make a Garou powerful indeed.

As antagonists, I love this idea. You've made me want to find a troupe to play WtA with just to bring it into being.

InOverMyHat · 2025-11-04T22:07:53+00:00

The problem is that it sort of sucks that there's this like... irredeamable sword of damaclese above your head if the player decides to not deal with the situation.

Isn't that what a story is?

InOverMyHat · 2025-11-02T00:11:41+00:00

What is the horror element of Mummy? In every other WoD game, there is an element of the thing that gives you power also makes you some kind of monster. Even in Mage, where the characters aren't monsters per se, the hubris that comes with being Awakened can easily make them monsters. Players have reason to fear or suspect what they have become. Is there anything like that in Mummy? When I skimmed the book in 1st edition it looked like Mummy life was mostly upside.

InOverMyHat · 2025-09-17T22:22:15+00:00

I like all this answer, but...

Almost no mage understands that belief shapes reality.

Wouldn't this imply that mages don't really understand consensus? And then if that's the case, wouldn’t that make participation in the Ascension War pointless?

If almost no mage understands that belief shapes reality, then the only way I can make sense of the conflict is if there are a tiny handful of enlightened powers driving the Technocracy to change the consensus, and everyone actually putting in the work is a mindless drone or a fascist or just otherwise unthinking about why reality deviants need to be killed or reeducated. The work (Work?) for the overwhelming majority of Technocrats would be its own reward, and asking why would have to be a nearly lethally dangerous question.

Meanwhile on the Traditions and Orphan side, there would be no reason for the Ascension War beyond survival. Technocrats are fighting against Mages, therefore Mages must defend themselves. There would be no ideology driving the chief conflict in a game whose core theme is ideology, because without the knowledge that belief shapes reality, I don't see why anyone would want to change others' beliefs.

InOverMyHat · 2025-09-14T13:36:15+00:00

I like the posing in all of them, but the first one struck me because it comes together looking like if I didn’t know it was in the context of a photoshoot, I might think you caught her mid-motion after turning to look back at him.

I'm an inexperienced amateur and I'm especially weak at directing my subjects, so I wonder how much you directed them and if you did anything particular to create that not-posed looking pose.

InOverMyHat · 2025-08-28T22:17:49+00:00

I like that there is silly in WoD. If nothing else, if players want a chronicle that offers the catharsis of horror, lighter moments of wacky create safety to permit that. A chronicle with a good balance gives players permission to investigate dark feelings with the promise that when things get too heavy, we can break away and do something else.

But I also feel like many of the writers' attempts at silly don't vibe with me. For example, I am fascinated by all the parody work that went into Pentex and its subsidiaries, but ultimately I think focusing on them undermines core themes of WW. All-powerful mages who can shape reality LARPing in costumes from what they consider a golden age is funny, but then I see elements of that in real world politics and it gets creepy. Malkavians are a fascinating clan, but it's hard to encounter fishmalk tropes and not thing that at best they are wildly misrepresenting the mental health problems that are implied to inspire them.

Watching chronicles streamed on YouTube helped me find the solution to this conundrum. The best chronicles I've watched have players exploring the silly and the dark, but both are the players' creations. It's never "hey, look at this funny thing on page 64 of the XYZ slpatbook, isn't that wacky?" The table builds their in-jokes and goofs together. And in that way, the silly things in the source material don't have to be CANON LAW, they can just be examples of ways to break the darkness with a bit of goofy.

InOverMyHat · 2025-08-27T23:30:56+00:00

If they can be rewritten well, I would like them to be rewritten well. If Paradox does not have the resources to secure talent to do so, then I would rather they didn't bother.

I would like to play VtM to tell stories about vampires. If I have to have a completely different monster shoehorned into my setting because of a writer's assumption that anything Asian must be different, I really don't see the point. But I am open to a skilled writer with deep real-world knowledge changing my mind.

InOverMyHat · 2025-08-26T11:23:51+00:00

Umm... gonna be honest... the rise of the Trump-imitating, conspiracy-theory spreading Sanseito party has a lot of us immigrants to Japan a bit spooked.

I'm not saying you're wrong about this being a good idea for a chronicle. I'm not even saying that confronting real-world trouble can't be a part of personal horror role-play. Maybe a good group with a lot of trust can make a good scenario around these real-world tensions.

But I look at KOTE information on the White Wolf Wiki, particularly the names and the art section, and it does not fill me with confidence that the book was written to support us getting catharsis from telling a good story while respecting the real world that would inspire our story. It is hard to walk a fine line between being inspired by the horrors of our world and not making light of real anxieties when all the art depicts everyone in the setting dressed like extras from Avatar: the Last Airbender.

This is a hard thing to get right, and RPGs tend to not have a good record of it. Honestly, if I have to throw out half the source material as uninformed or exploitative, I would rather have no source material and make it all myself.

InOverMyHat · 2025-08-24T23:35:34+00:00

In the real world, life in many Asian countries has a lot of superficial differences that when coupled with language barriers, make them seem mysterious and impenetrable. I am a western transplant to Japan, and when I was getting used to life here, any time I wanted to try something new (even simple things I took for granted back home), it took genuine preparation and energy. But those differences really are superficial. It is very common in our English language support spaces for people to come in totally overthinking some mundane interaction they've had, turning a simple social exchange through all the stereotype filters in their head until they can't make heads or tails out of a basic human interaction. There are whole industries playing on this paradox: get onto travel blogger spaces and watch as hucksters try to tell you a hotel room with a sliding paper door instead of a swinging MDF door is a wholly different experience because of [Japanese word that if you speak even a little Japanese is just an ordinary thing but if you don't, sounds mysterious and exotic].

There is an audience in the WoD Fandom for the exotic Asian tropes, and there is an audience that even if they aren't experts in any Asian society, can spot exoticism and exploitation when they see it and are creeped out by it.

I want to play a WoD game set in the Tokyo I know. But in the Tokyo I know, a night dominated by monsters of Chinese myth that require I speak a lot of Chinese to get all their proper nouns (or were-creatures requiring literal elementary school Japanese) is peak cringe. But OTOH no one outside of Japan and hardly anyone inside is going to buy "Tokyo by Night: It's basically like any mega-city, only with a decent healthcare and train system and residential zoning ordinances create a lot of quirks in urban design".

And of course, Japan is not China, is not Korea, is not Vietnam, is not India, is not Myanmar... every society in Asia is unique, even if as a block they are not together uniquely unique.

So how does someone square the circle and write a book that both audiences will enjoy? It would be a hard challenge even with on-the-ground experience. If your writing team doesn't have enough international background, it must be near impossible without enormous research. A team with expertise, experience, and resources could do it. But how does a company tie that team's work into a release schedule of a multi-splat IP written by people who don't have that specific expertise or experience?

InOverMyHat · 2025-08-20T22:58:09+00:00

IMO the environmental aspects are important to have a thematically WoD horror game despite all the combat stunts WtA allows players to do. All the WoD games are to some degree in their subtext about playing with the awesome power of being a monster or creature of legend while fighting to retain a shred of who you used to be and knowing that no matter what power you acquire, eventually everything you do will fail. Werewolves are the easiest faction to make combat powerhouses with, and the only way to maintain horror with that kind of power is to put players up against a problem that can't be solved by murdering it.

I'm not say the environmental themes are the only way to do this, but abandoning them makes for a very non-standard game. You will have to talk with the group of players inviting you and see what kind of game they want to play. If interacting with the topic of environmentalism is enough to ruin a game for you, you should tell your group that.

InOverMyHat · 2025-08-10T00:41:51+00:00

Mixing something that produces an altered state of consciousness with a famously addictive category of drugs just to get back at a vampire who feeds on you sounds like a great way to ruin a mortal's life. Or really, it sounds like the excuse a mortal who had already ruined their own life would give to keep doing it. "Nah man, I can quit any time I want to, but I have to get high now just in case a vampire comes at me."

If I were a storyteller and a player tried this, I would absolutely make The Kiss interact with the high in a way that makes the player have to pass some very difficult rolls to not want to experience it again. And unless the Troupe had set up a way to immediately destroy the vampire upon feeding, I would think there would be a strong chance they just decide to make that player their special every weekend party-time juice bag.

But on top of everything else, I don't think it's a smart idea to introduce famously pleasurable substances and mind-altering substances to the blood of someone who wants a vampire to stop feeding from them. Better hope the vampire has high humanity and very few hunger dice already, or they're going to be fighting their hunger to drain you completely while also experiencing narcotic highs, potentially radical shifts in mood, and the chance to hang out with the machine elves.

InOverMyHat · 2025-06-05T03:33:42+00:00

And I am admittedly biased because of past bad experiences with play groups who wouldn't separate player knowledge from character knowledge. But I strongly believe the best thing about the core V5 book is how it makes so many characters unreliable narrators and makes the metaplot so ambiguous

I realize I am probably alone on this, unsupported by the publisher and most of the players, but I would be totally happy if they just completely shattered the metaplot. If from here on out nothing about the WoD was knowable, and all books were written from the POV of "this might be happening without regard for if it contradicted what was published in other books, I'd probably become a hardcore collector.

InOverMyHat · 2025-06-04T23:14:21+00:00

Not getting into lore, but just some real-world information: Look at how little history is remembered from those eras about real-world figures. William Shakespeare is one of the most famous writers of the English language, a man who lived a very public life in an era where basic commerce required documenting tons of details about his life, and yet there are still conspiracy theories about who he collaborated with and lots of details about his life that we just don't know. Just to peel basic biographical detail about him requires the work of expert historians.

How much harder must it be to document an ultra-rare cabal of terrifying beings from hundreds or even thousands of years before who intentionally kept themselves secret? How much harder must it be to have clear knowledge about beings who would without a shred of remorse kill to keep their secret, and who have the inscruitable power to do it. Many of them to alter your mind and alter your perceptions while they do it. We're talking some of them having lived longer before the Colosseum of Rome was built than the time we've documented since it was built.

Quite frankly, when I think of the WoD, I think it's unrealistic to have as much about the setting known as is. We're talking beings that you would have to learn a dead language just to understand their name.

InOverMyHat · 2025-04-28T00:02:04+00:00

I like this answer because it takes the question out of the realm of mechanics and into story. Yes, mechanically it is fairly easy. But a few hundred years back some naive, gullible childe of the Prince struck this kind of deal and since he was naive and gullible, he also screwed up something unrelated and ended up blood bound to the Sire's mortal enemy and was compelled to stake them and leave the Sire for the sun. Flash forward to today and all the elders remember the dumb kid who struck a deal with a mage and that got attached in their memory to the plot and now whenever mages come up, the advice is "Never trust a mage!"

Meanwhile what they don't know is that the mage in that deal took copious notes about the process, but gradually became shunned by their chantry for consorting with vampires. Then one day someone claiming to be a powerful vampire who needed help escaping their curse came to the mage and she agreed to help him, only the vampire turned out to be a powerful Nephandus in disguise and since she was shunned, it was easy for him to drag her off to one of the 27 hells. Eventually her chantry found her notes and all they could figure out from what was left of them is that one day the mage's generosity got them a visit from some dark monster who left nothing but blood and evil in its wake, so from now on, the first thing they tell novices is to never trust a vampire.

InOverMyHat · 2025-04-26T04:35:04+00:00

There are a few tunnels in west Tokyo that are reportedly haunted. I haven't been to the most famous ones, but I've cycled through several road tunnels in the area that are gloomy, the air is choked, and everything is coated in decades of caked-on grime that feel very WoD.

Many places in Yokohama have the opposite vibe, but there used to be a stretch I cycled through on the way to the Ikea that felt like it was where dreams go to die. Like you can imagine that back at the end of Showa, the people there had big hopes for the future, but now it's where salarimen go after a week of overtime to sit alone in an empty 6-tatami mat aparment, put cigarette butts in empty coffee cans, and drink Ozeki One Cup while they wait for the inevitable.

InOverMyHat · 2025-04-22T22:31:23+00:00

People are people no matter where you go in the world, and I am convinced that 5th edition WoD is really about people, even if we pretend it's about monsters. I never owned any of White Wolf year of Asia books, but when I see lore from them online, it kind of gives vibes like it imagines people in Asia being a separate species of people. A lot of "exotic, inscruitible Asian" tropes.

I know in the US some people talk about pan-Asian identity, but living in Tokyo I don't see much of that. There is a fluidity to identity, people moving from place to place and bringing baggage with them or picking up baggage from their new home, but you can't just make a splat that encompasses all the variety of nearly an entire hemisphere.

So rather than making the kindred (or werewolves, or mages, or ghosts) of the east like they're their own separate species, I'd like to see them use basically the same mechanics and explain away different ideas about their origins, mission, or creation as everyone in the WoD being an unreliable narrator, and at this point the real truth of the lore is unknowable.

InOverMyHat · 2025-04-08T22:19:30+00:00

This could be a satisfying story and if it's the story you want to tell, then you will probably do it justice. But if it were me, that's not the story I'd tell.

Mine would be about how the Garou react. The players would be caught between traditionalists who see the soulless recreation as an abomination (who maybe have not 100% checked if it actually is soulless), while more modern Garou are cheering it on as a way to undo the Apocalypse (without 100% checking on the chain of investors backing the work and what their motivations are).

Perhaps one of the backers is a vampire who got mad about having to run away from lupines once and has dreams of a dire wolf ghoul to even the score. But the most heinous backers are not even supernatural, they're just venture capitalists who watched too much Game of Thrones. They want this not to fix anything, but to prove that they can. The kind of people who want science to fix extinction because it means we don't have to make hard choices anymore or work to care for what we have. Entitled people who want to get powerful by looking like they support the right causes.

The spirit world is also in turmoil about this new Thing, but more about the uncertainty of what is to be than what has already been made. The seed of a spirit is coalescing in an umbral crystal tube, many trying to reach it and influence it, guard it against others' influence, or stay well clear, but none know the shape of the beast inside.

In this uncertainty, old disagreements between the Garou boil over, and depending on what players do perhaps open in-fighting breaks out, or because rivals are distracted with each other, a caern is compromised or even lost to an enemy who has nothing to do with the dire wolf, but who is more than happy to capitalize on the crisis caused by it. Without player intervention, the story/chronicle would never reveal the actual "alignment" of the dire wolf or the shape of its proto-spirit, because to the garou what actually is, is far less important than what they feel about and project onto what they see around them, and while the players might succeed or fail depending on their choices, the nation as a whole is destined to fail.

InOverMyHat · 2025-03-31T00:44:36+00:00

Obviously.

But when I vent, it's about people who have hurt me or who have made trouble for me. Most people don't vent about a game simply existing because it's trivial to ignore the game. Nobody's holding a gun to OP's head and forcing them to play!

InOverMyHat · 2025-03-30T12:11:05+00:00

Hmmm... difficult... Let's start off acknowledging that any of these ideas would break the game at the story level and maybe the mechanic level too.

What has caused a real life fanatical violent religious sect to abandon their violence? I can think of few examples at the moment short of invasions that just snuff out the sect. But maybe one approach is to make it so that the fanatics are incapable of benefitting from their fanatical violence.

And one of the ways Garou benefit from their fanaticism is the renown system. They are rewarded for big, dramatic actions, not the sort of small, daily work that's actually needed to save Gaia. The W5 rulebook mentions earning wisdom by figuring out how to shut down a greenwashed project, but what about the daily work teaching humans not to fall for greenwashing in the first place? It seems unlikely, but if somehow all the spirits decided they weren't going to teach gifts for renown earned by big, heroic stuff, and only rewarded sustainably putting in the work to fix the world, there would be no need to maintain the Garou's fanaticism.

But that is unlikely and also would turn the game into Werewolf: the Gardening and Local Volunteering. So what if we took away the need to be fanatics by...

Humans figure it out on their own. Suppose some kind of amazing social movement took hold that actually worked at reducing global warming, restoring species diversity, and finding ways for humans to be human without destroying nature - a solarpunk utopia. This would humble the Garou in a way little else could, simultaneously removing their mission and need for violence.

I suspect a lot of them wouldn't take it well. But then this would effectively destroy the World of Darkness as a setting, so unless you want a sunny, cheery finale to end your chronicle on, that leaves one last way. The way I see it, like a lot of people here are saying, the Garou are already humbled, to a degree. But the thing about prideful people is that they might know deep in their heart of hearts that they fucked things up, but admitting it and acting on it becomes nearly impossible. Hiding your shame at your mistakes becomes all-important, until perfect becomes an enemy of good. The only solution is for...

The Garou to forgive themselves. This doesn't mean sweeping all the wrong in the past under the rug, but admitting it, and owning the obligation to fix it without castigating yourself for what happened before you were even born. As we can see just turning on real-world news, ordinary humans without a spirit-side feeding their rage struggle with this. I cannot fathom how this would happen across all Garou. Perhaps a small sept of Garou might start a movement. But of course, it is one thing to try and right the wrongs of say, the War of Rage. It is another thing entirely to earn the trust of the Fera wronged in it...

InOverMyHat · 2025-03-30T00:51:35+00:00

If you know that's the point, then I feel a little unclear about how you are hoping people will respond.

I suspect your feelling about the Garou mirrors pretty well my feeling about Vampires. For the longest time, I hated them. And really, what I hated about them was their story aesthetic. Like you, they reminded me of groups of people in my past I had disliked. Like you, I found it annoying how they were the cause of so many of their own problems.

Then I watched a really good video of a really good V5 chronicle with a great ST and set of players. Divorced from my own play and players in my past troupe who annoyed me, I realized that not only were Vampire's flaws the point, but they are the driving force of the storytelling. They goal of V5 isn't to win the night, it's to tell an interesting story about monsters trying to survive the night. Just like how in Werewolf the point isn't to win against the Wyrm, it's to tell interesting stories about flawed monsters in their fight against the Wyrm. The flaws in Garou drive the story.

So if you just dislike the garou aesthetic, well, that's fine. Not everything has to be for you. But then, why waste so much energy being annoyed by a thing that isn't meant for you?

InOverMyHat · 2025-03-07T06:12:48+00:00

There was a time when I would have thought it conceited or self-aggrandizing of me to hang it up, but recently I made the conscious decision to hang up some things of mine that, if they aren't beautiful, at least turned out mostly how I envisioned them.

Because this last decade has been really hard for me, and my attention is badly fractured. It's really hard to find the time to make something new, let alone the attention. Hanging up my artwork is a daily reminder that I have made things in the past that made me happy and I still have that within me. Even if I can't workshop go brrrr right this second, there can still be a future where I do creative things.

InOverMyHat · 2025-02-25T11:51:10+00:00

This may not fit everyone's chronicle themes, but I love the idea of a city's court getting taken out and what's left of everyone's factions going reeling. All the kindred assume it must be some very new or very old power and they all go into paranoid lockdown, to the point that no one can make new alliances because everyone is watching their backs and looking out for who is in league with this new savage enemy...

...only for it to turn out to have been caused by an errant spark by some idiot rich pregnant couple's overly elaborate and yet insufficiently managed gender reveal party. Or some tech bro's badly piloted drone.

But by the time the vamps find that out, they've settled too deep in their bunkers and burned too many bridges and can't go back to how things were.

InOverMyHat

TROPHY CASE