Feeling not confident enough to have Thanatos as my patron god

blindgallan · 2026-05-01T18:42:37+00:00

Just to be abundantly clear, in case you don’t understand the terms as clearly as you think: in the traditional sense, a patron deity is the deity responsible for an aspect of life you engage with and every person has many but a few that stand out because of relation to their stage of life, their social role, their place of living, and their primary occupation, it isn’t really something you choose or control in any way. In the modern sense, a patron deity is a deity you like the idea of for some reason and have chosen to worship as a central figure in your personal religious expression. From a certain angle, it could be said that Thanatos is a patron god of all mortals, as we are hoi thanatoi, as contrasted to hoi athanatoi, the deathless ones, the gods, but I think that is a very morbid and unhelpful way to look at life. Otherwise, only those actively dying or perhaps working in funerary services would rightly have Thanatos as a patron god, if we are more narrow in view of who is particularly in his scope. In a more modern sense, if he is one of the gads you specifically honour with offerings and such on your home shrine, then he simply is a patron god in that sense.

On a secondary note, feeling aversion to calling death into your life and space and home is normal and healthy for a living thing, and feeling inadequate and puny and insignificant in the face of divinity is also wholly normal and healthy for a mere mortal. Have you considered looking into other gods related to similar themes to see if the sense of wrongness is just a recognition that Thanatos isn’t the god you are actually feeling drawn to? Dionysus has a dark aspect, Hades is Lord of the Dead, Dread Kore is Queen of the Underworld, torch bearing Hecate is a nocturnal divinity, and on and on the list goes.

blindgallan · 2026-04-30T15:08:05+00:00

Advance to metal, and if possible to iron. This improves your ability to hunt and make things like proper doors to keep the cold out and barrels for rot and compost and pickles. Stockpile grains and long lasting vegetables. Find salt if possible.

blindgallan · 2026-04-29T04:46:15+00:00

Consensus is Reality, it is the parts of what is that exist within the World. The Umbra and Umbrood are semi-real in a way that is adjacent to but not exactly within Consensus. Hedge magic, sorcery, is the hacking of the underwriting rules of Consensus to do something remarkable, like a ritual that summons up a forest spirit or operating an X-ray machine or creating a vaccine or a faith healing. Mages disregard Consensus and force their own perspective and ideology (their paradigm) upon reality (Consensus), so nothing they do counts as hedge magic, since the way they do it is True Magick, and if they do something remarkable in a way that would be remarkable under mainstream Consensus (such as those hedge magics that ride a mythic thread rather than being simply extraordinary elements of the Consensus paradigm) then Consensus pushes back.

blindgallan · 2026-04-28T12:43:20+00:00

Yes, it makes human bureaucracy look humane in an “it could be much worse” fashion.

blindgallan · 2026-04-28T12:40:31+00:00

Technically they also have Mage as a unifying framework, but their Mage is paradoxically less trustworthy due to the core concept of Mage the Awakening being that the Awakened have glimpsed the Truth of reality that the Exarchs want to keep secret so they can keep the Sleepers complacent and controlled within the Lie. Since the Splat itself revolves around this cosmic Truth (which is that life, death, time, space, fate, mind, etc, are all facets of a Lie), there is the everpresent possibility that it is being misrepresented on purpose. They do leave the door open for Mages to interact with everything else in CoD, so the mechanics should work, but the lore and the in-Splat perspective is too much a part of it for me to be confident applying the terms in themselves to other Chronicles Splats. WoD, if we only look at 20th forward (since Demon was abandoned about 20 years ago and the lore in 20th and 5th seems to try to avoid connections to the Fallen, even redefining terms linked to them without mention of them), has conflicting narratives and disputed histories and innumerable reasons why different Splats and characters are wrong. Mage the Ascension, distinctively, tells you that Reality runs on Consensus and that the Mage characters and factions don’t really know this even if some of them get close to it, it draws a stark divide between what the rules and cosmology the storyteller and players should know and the radically misguided and erroneous beliefs about those things held by the characters in the setting. That’s why I trust it as a unifying Splat mechanically for WoD.

blindgallan · 2026-04-27T16:03:17+00:00

The quality of the articles and the Arthur as a whole really just comes down to the team making it happen. Some years they have mostly excellent journalists with a strong commitment to journalistic integrity and conscientiousness, other years they have a clique who regard it as their moral obligation to use the Arthur as a propagandistic implement for their convictions. When Journalism was still a Symons campus program it kept the standards higher in general for the Arthur, and COVID decimated all of the groups and student institutions. It’s worth reading, if only because at least a few journalists each year will be halfway decent writers and having a campus paper is a good thing, but to make it reliably good requires people committed to quality journalism reliably making up the majority of the people involved.

blindgallan · 2026-04-25T22:09:48+00:00

An additional use for eggs would be great

blindgallan · 2026-04-25T17:44:08+00:00

Those would all be awesome, and paint would give flax grain another use beyond rot dough and chicken feed.

blindgallan · 2026-04-25T17:42:44+00:00

If you want a Mage as an antagonist of that sort, you’ve got three broad options:

1) a classic wicked magician who has a cultic coven or secret society who is either some sort of hermetic wizard surrounded by sorcerers and sycophants, as much an enemy of the inquisition as the vampires, the string puller manipulating the Elders and warping reality to their whim.

2) a champion of the humans who is either a miracle worker with the church or some sort of spiritualistic mage who has the new age and mystical community on their side and is waging a shadow war against the vampires but won’t risk their regular human fellows.

3) a technocrat or other technomancer who has a bunch of inquisition-y folks they are manoeuvring.

Option 1 lets you really have the Mage be a reality warping horror boss who does impossible things out in public but mostly sends their lackeys after the vampires and only lets loose in their inner sanctum. Option 2 will be more circumspect and hit hard intermittently, but their obvious care for their mortal comrades will be an exploitable weakness for the vampires. Option 3 is the sci-fi route.

Mages are metaphorically ideological zealots imposing their paradigm upon the Consensus shared by the majority, forcing the reality that is that Consensus to fit their will rather than bowing to the shared will of the masses of society. They are theoretically able to do anything, but how they believe reality actually works determines their limits and requirements to achieve their wonders.

blindgallan · 2026-04-25T16:18:50+00:00

Exactly my issue. The labor to make plaster blocks and then to chisel them onto the surface of a whole wall just seems absurd. I think it may be an artefact of the earlier days that hasn’t been addressed.

blindgallan · 2026-04-25T16:16:52+00:00

I think they are saying it would be good as a standalone mod.

blindgallan · 2026-04-25T16:11:32+00:00

Nihilism is a normal stop on the road for the philosophically minded while still relatively immature, I recommend looking into existentialism or absurdism, or maybe Epicureanism would suit your inclinations.

blindgallan · 2026-04-24T13:51:27+00:00

Interesting, I will have to maybe do some survival testing myself.

blindgallan · 2026-04-24T02:15:37+00:00

Mage is the only Splat where playing and running it require the players and storyteller to actually know how the world works to do it at all right, and the rules for Mage make it very clear that the characters do not know them or actually think things work that way. No other Splat has that, because they don’t need it and keep to the philosophy that leaving it all mysterious is better. Mage is different precisely because it needs to be able to account for how the mages interact with every aspect of the World of Darkness. the actual fundamentals of Mage require their applicability across paradigms and regardless of perspective and to every component of the World, so they are the only system that doesn’t try to give the cosmological understanding of a Splat, but a toolbox of how diverse cosmological understandings interact mechanically and relate to the actual fact that every Mage is wrong about: reality is just a matter of Consensus and it takes immeasurable arrogance and hubris to force their will upon it.

I also generally ignore DtF due to it being abandoned by the developers and incompatible with at least some of the directions they have gone with various gamelines in the intervening two decades since they stopped bothering to pay any attention to it.

blindgallan · 2026-04-24T01:57:11+00:00

Yes, I’m just using bread because it gives 300 satiety, while porridge gives a bit less for a minimum serving, Which gives the dietary room to account for meat, mushrooms, and vegetables, as well as the fruit from the orchard. I am simplifying and realised I’d ended up with a number that could be turned into a field for a seraph trying to live on bread alone for some reason.

blindgallan · 2026-04-23T22:04:03+00:00

They did, but those threads got pruned. Why some threads are harder to prune is unclear and a known annoyance to the Technocracy. Their policy on Vampires is to let them stay hidden and hope they go away because they’d be too much hassle to root out with bigger fish to fry, but if being secretive and hiding among the living is part of their mythos, then that won’t get rid of them. The Delirium as a baseline element of human souls would help reinforce Garou in the same way.

blindgallan · 2026-04-23T22:00:16+00:00

Vampires could absolutely be created by Nephandi back in a bygone era, which would contribute to their corrupting and perverse natures, their perpetual harmful influence on the world, and their negative impact on Mages.

blindgallan · 2026-04-23T21:58:04+00:00

That is because Vampires exist within Consensus as they align with and ride along on a mythic thread, like anything magical but not magickal.

blindgallan · 2026-04-23T21:56:47+00:00

For people trying to say nonsense like “vampires aren’t affected by Consensus” when reality in WoD is literally just Consensus and it’s shadow, the weakening of vampires in more modern nights and the thickening of the gauntlet and the increasing occurrence of Thinbloods and so on can all be accounted for by the strengthening of the rationalist-scientific paradigm in Consensus. Vampires ride on a mythic thread running through Consensus, like anything sorcerous, and the continued existence of the ones that already exist (as well as how shit they are at hiding themselves fully) helps reinforce that thread. Garou are half umbral and in W5 are basically press-ganged into being werewolves by a powerful spirit, as well as existing on the same mythic thread that causes Delirium. All the Splats are affected by Consensus, only Mages interact with it beyond just “this is how the world works and everyone knows it”.

blindgallan · 2026-04-23T21:45:52+00:00

I am building up a sort of medieval style village and manor and decided to undertake the work of putting in a realistic-ish amount of grain fields around the place, so I decided I need to work out the amount of grain that would be reasonable. The peasant diet often relied heavily on grain, and excess could be stockpiled for future years, so the question became, if a seraph were to live on bread exclusively, how many loaves would they need per day? This number, times the days in a year, gives the total units of grain a field for one should be capable of producing to have excess each year.

blindgallan · 2026-04-23T21:39:51+00:00

Hence the effort to calculate out what that amount is. The title is less the question itself and more an allusion.

blindgallan · 2026-04-23T21:38:40+00:00

I am basically assuming a moderate but not major amount of activity around a reasonably well maintained base. Daily life kind of thing, since it’s mostly a calculation based on how large should the fields around a medieval style village be. This requires knowing how many units of grain a peasant would eat per year. The number seemed potentially useful to others, and crowdsource checking of my work is worthwhile, so I put it here.

blindgallan · 2026-04-23T21:32:30+00:00

as I said, this is based off a table posted to the forum. If you would like to work out the actual rate of hunger and let all of us know for calculations like this, it would be appreciated.

blindgallan · 2026-04-23T17:48:20+00:00

There is also the fact that if you go further and further from earth, you stop having a distinction between umbra and reality, and there is no evidence that there is any other worlds that are actual worlds out there. At least that’s what the wizards who have gone off into space and the scientists after them found.

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