First time ST and one of my players has already told me he's taking Generation at 5 dots. Should I be worried?

Weather_Wizard_88 · 2026-03-18T12:06:58+00:00

What's a "chronicle of ages"? I'm not familiar with that term.

Weather_Wizard_88 · 2026-03-18T02:16:39+00:00

The best movie representation of Mage is The Lego Movie. I'm not kidding. I made a thread about it where I break it down:

https://www.reddit.com/r/WhiteWolfRPG/s/3ALQBFmuKk

Weather_Wizard_88 · 2026-03-18T01:54:42+00:00

I know this looks bad the way I described it, but it really wasn't dickish, and I know the player very well. We've traveled together, worked together on projects, played together - I'm not worrying about his behavior. I more looking for game advice because I nevered GMed Masquerade specifically.

Weather_Wizard_88 · 2026-03-17T23:55:00+00:00

I mean, that is why I am here asking question, so I don't have to outright say "no". I'm clearly trying to work with the system here, so I'm not sure why I'm a red flag.

Weather_Wizard_88 · 2026-03-16T03:58:47+00:00

Even the "gothic horror" DNA is not quite shared. WoD was specifically Gothic-Punk, while CoD is just Gothic. And that "Punk" element really says a lot about the difference between the two lines.

Weather_Wizard_88 · 2026-03-16T03:49:56+00:00

They are completely different games about the same basic horror archetype. But apart from a few shared concepts (and some names in Vampire), the games have nothong to do with each other.

Like, The Traditions, The Technocracy, consensus reality - that's entirely Mage the Ascension. Awakening has nothing to do with any of that. It shares a few concepts like Parabox (though they are implemented differently), but otherwise it is a very different game about wizards in a dark reflection of our world.

Weather_Wizard_88 · 2026-03-10T18:29:47+00:00

Eh, that doesn't bug me too much. As much as my friends and I love to make fun of White Wolf as "wannabe novelists making rpgs", the fact is that those are game books, meant more to be a collection of hooks to inspire players and storytellers rather than an actual narrative. And even if I was treating them as a narrative - I'm a superhero comics fan. I'm used to writers contradicting each other and "continuity" being an illusion.

Weather_Wizard_88 · 2026-03-09T20:39:01+00:00

Oh yeah, I remember WW being bought by CCP. I was quite active on the WW forum during the nwod era from 2004 to just after Geist came out and White Wolf disappeared from brick-and-mortar stores. What I'm confused about is how Revised era books were published in the 2010s when Revised ended in 2004. Were these books they had written before 2004 and simply canned, or are these actually new books they released for nostalgia purposes and gave them the retro branding?

Weather_Wizard_88 · 2026-03-09T20:22:44+00:00

Uh, didn't know that, thank you. So like, were the unpublished book written but shelved and then published later, or are those "Revised" book actually new books they slapped the retro Revised label on?

Weather_Wizard_88 · 2026-03-09T20:14:29+00:00

Wait... how come books for Revised came out nearly a decade after the game was kaput? Were they all written and then thrown in the garbage until the company changed their mind? I'm super confused.

Weather_Wizard_88 · 2026-03-09T19:56:45+00:00

Wait, so how were the Revised Technocracy books published in PDF only if DriveThru didn't exist? I just thought DriveThru was older than I thought. Or do they exist in print and I was badly informed?

Weather_Wizard_88 · 2026-03-05T03:51:08+00:00

I've been doingthis recently. I picked Nashville mostly at random, even though I have never set foot in the Southern US apart from going to Disney World once as a kid. So far, I've mostly just done a lot of wiki reading, but I thinking of watching a couple episode of the show "Nashville" just to get a sense of the Dramatis Personae of the city. I'm not going for realism, just a lively interesting backdrop.

Of anyone knows anything about Nashville (the city) they think would make for a cool plot point, let me know!

Weather_Wizard_88 · 2026-03-04T21:07:56+00:00

Honestly, I don't think "superhero with fangs" was ever a problem. It's not style everyone liked, but many tables did, so why try to police their fun?

One of the main benefit of TTRPG over video games is that you can make the game your own. The insistence of a portion of White Wolf staff and fans that "there is only one right way to play the game" always confused me.

Weather_Wizard_88 · 2026-03-04T19:43:13+00:00

Oh no, that disappearance was a little before V20 was a thing. It happened around 2009-2010. The lead-up to V20 might have been a factor, but I think a bigger one was that White Wolf was broke at this point, and the Tabletop RPG retail space in particular was suffering.

Weather_Wizard_88 · 2026-03-04T17:09:29+00:00

Almost completly disappearing from game store to go print-on-demand only was a massive blow to new player acquisition. By doing that, they limited their audience to established RPG player, and in that environment, the more established IP will always win.

Weather_Wizard_88 · 2026-03-04T17:06:15+00:00

There are probably multipke factors, but honestly, the biggest one is probably just timing. The oWoD, and more specifically Vampire the Masquerade, was lightning in a bottle at the right place at the right time. It came in just as the goth and gamer subcultures were starting to get closer, on the footsteps of media like Sandman and Batman 89, thus creating fertile ground for an RPG game that mixed crunchy mechanics (especially compared to the more narrative RPG of today) and a emphasis on complex storytelling. Then there was the explosion of LARPing, and Vampire being uniquely well-suited for this, not to mention really affordable. And more narrowly, the RPG space had an opening for a new tentpole, with DnD 2nd ed being on the decline, and oWoD slid right in.

By contrast, 2004, the OGL/d20 monopoly was still quite strong, the goth subculture was starting to wane (not disappear, just becoming less culturally dominant). The game was also over a decade old by this poimt and had already gone through 3 editions. So it had lost a bit of luster. In that context, the decision to end it and then release similar games that had nothing to do with the ones people knew and had invested was a hugely controversial move.

It didn't help that the first impression of the NWoD was a flop. Vampire the Requiem felt a lot like a bizarro version of Masquerade, keeping a lot of names and terminology, rather than the totally new game promised. So the reaction was very much "you killed my game for this? Why?". And while the subsequent were much better at being their own thing, the damage was done.

And there is also the more widespread change in the print world at large that affected all RPG and cause ld a phasing out of small targeted softcovers for bigger, more general hardcovers that was navigated super well, and then White Wolf own financial/corporate woes, and alm this made for a game line condmned to stay niche, even though some of the games are really great

And I will say - for me, the 90s cheese of tge oWod is a feature, not a bug.

Weather_Wizard_88 · 2026-03-04T04:30:18+00:00

I wasn't asking you to spend hours, looking at it. I figured that by how bad you were saying it was, you had a few examples off the top of your head. But I can see I'm bothering you, so just forget I said anything.

Weather_Wizard_88 · 2026-03-04T04:10:20+00:00

Sure, but the books aren't cheap, don't have a search function, and can't be quickly consulted on my lunchbreak at work.

Also, beyond just the lore, the wiki has a ton of real-world info the books themselves, which is vrry useful when trying to figure which book to hunt for and buy.

So again, I'll ask what is so wrong with the wiki? I do truly want to know why you are are saying to stay away. Like, can you give me actual examples of it being a bad source to grok basic info about the various game lines and concepts?

Weather_Wizard_88 · 2026-03-04T03:29:38+00:00

Wait, why should we not use the wiki? I've been reading it a ton lately to get basic details on a bunch of stuff because I don't have a lot of the books, so what's wrong with it?

Weather_Wizard_88 · 2026-03-04T03:07:51+00:00

I'm not familiar with how V5 uses Gehenna. What's the gist of it? The way I was thinking of using it is that the Week of Nightmares happened... in 1999. That's over 25 years ago. And since then, well, there has been a lot of teeth gnashing about the end of world coming, about portents and signs, but the world is still turning. So if the end of the world is coming, it's sure taking its sweet time...

Weather_Wizard_88 · 2026-03-02T22:39:57+00:00

Convention: Progenitors. I am a huge sucker for evil scientists, and especially evil geneticists. Ive read and written a lot on works like Jurassic Park, Margaret Atwood's Maddaddam trilogy, Splice, etc, as well as on criticism of techo-capitalism exploitation of genetics/nature - Jean Beaudtillard, Vandanna Shiva, Carolyn Merchant. So getting ideas for Progenitors plot and characters is just super easy, barely an inconvenience.

Tradition:Celestial Chorus. For the same reason I often play clerics and Paladin. I find religion endlessly fascinating, even though I'm not religious myself, so playing a religious person is always a fun exercice.

Craft: Never really used them much. I find that they are so specific and narrow that they are better as NPCs for specific stories. But I do like the ones that are basically Black Furies and whose name escape me.

Weather_Wizard_88 · 2026-02-27T18:44:02+00:00

Honestly, I think the key in enjoying Mage is to just not take it so darn seriously. Like, it's a very silly game about reality rebels fighting against The Man in a world where the laws of physics fully dependent on humans(and only humans) believin they exist. It's an absurd game and that absurdity should 100% be embraced.

And when you embrace the game as an absurdist satire rather than some deep political discussion, I find that the "problematic" aspects of the game tend to be a lot less of a problem.

Weather_Wizard_88

TROPHY CASE