General WoD Discussion #2: Its time to Celebrate!

[Cirrylius]

I rate spoilers now? Awesomesauce.

I imagine people are getting tired of reading my text walls on their way down to New News.

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Do souls who go to the bottom of the ocean merge with the World Soul? Do they cease to exist? Do they just float, totally devoid of any thought or will right above the ocean floor? It seems like what happens there could affect whether or not you've got something to reinstall to, or whether the reinstall retains the experience.

I admit, I'm assuming there's at least a moment of stillness as I Am falls out of the back of your head (shaped like a giant pearl), for the purposes of making a cool visual if nothing else.

You may be awesome at RPing someone scared out of his wit while having the metagame knowledge their your victory is assured, but I haven't met many people like that.

Heh. Playing this character would make RP'ing that a little easier and subtler. He's never been emotional, and possesses iron self-control. He'd still be freaking fairly bad, but a lifetime of hardassery and terrors experienced would keep him functional and keep the horror in hand. A good metaphor would be a distant onlooker hearing a single dying prisoner screaming his lungs out in terror in the middle of an empty Alcatraz.

Leviathan isn't described as doing much, but that could possibly be attributed to the fact that there isn't much to do in the Ocean of Fragments. The lack of action on Leviathan's part could be lack of interest, yes, but it could just as easily be lack of opportunity.

That's a good suggestion, but the fact that the Domain is listed in the book at all assumes there are STs who are going to be putting characters through their paces down there. IOW, Leviathan may not have many opportunities, but the implication of running a game in the Ocean means that whenever he's used in game, he will still have them, especially since he seems to know what's going on anywhere and can get there instantly. Leaving that out of the book, even if in a "NO REALLY. STs ONLY!!" sidebar, would be ludicrous.

Xolotl could just be crazy, but if it's even slightly sane, that implies that Leviathan isn't just passively guarding its domain; it has agents actively seeking beings to destroy.

That would make a great story arc, and Leviathan's Ferrymen would make a really frightening enemy conspiracy for Geists. But 1) unless the ST expands on that via fiat, there's just the one assh*le doing Leviathan's bidding, and it strikes me that over the course of millennia, Leviathan could catch more drowned rats than that. 2) Even if the guy's not crazy, all that means is that the victims will lose their identities in the water (barring Admirial, divine, or ST intervention). If all Leviathan wants is identities... it's got the character's identity. Even if it actively wants identifiers, there are fewer reasons to want two identical sets of them.

I wouldn't just say "OM NOM NOM" on a less than exceptional success either. It would be more interesting to let you succeed, but inadvertently cause something I could spin into another storyline. Maybe you ascend to godhood, but your momentary merging with the nothingness at the bottom of the Ocean of Fragments connects you to Leviathan in a way you hadn't anticipated, and the Kerberos is able to use you as a sort of anchor to return to the living world ("All oceans are one ocean"). Now you have to search the supernatural world for lore that would possibly lead to the King of the Children of Pride passing on for good, maybe even need to hunt down the AWOL Sky Father to figure out what Leviathan really is and how it can be stopped for good. Meanwhile, a seagoing Gozer the Gozerian is reenacting some of Final Fantasy X's more outlandish cutscenes using the US Eastern Seaboard as its stand-in for Spira.

Heh. I think the worst consequence for the character personally would be his inability to archive the process by which he achieved

godhood

...Archmage. Unless he tries to continually update his Mind re-install on the way Down (which strikes even me as a terrible idea) then he'll have no memory of the time between his last Mind update and his Oneiros. And that little worm of curiosity does gnaw so.

...oh. No. There are worse consequences. Somewhere in the Ocean are floating all of the character's identifiers. He's up and walking around the fallen world, but there's still a fragmented, soulless copy of him in the Ocean. What's really ironic is that this character is based on an older, non-WoD one, and he had a very similar catastrophe in his life.

Also, the mere fact that reality-warping Batman wizards exist in what is otherwise consistently described as a bleak, low-key magic setting makes me gnash my teeth in rage. I generally make it clear that mages as described in Mage don't exist. I hate it so hard that I am homebrewing my own splat for when I need powerful-but-not-omnipotent magicians that vaguely fit the wizard archetype.

*shrugs* Angry letter, or Rule Zero. Sorry.

...but I at least want to inspire uncertainty and nervousness.

You'd be hard-pressed to find a katabasis in actual myth that didn't suck in some way for the protagonist.

...and the Storyteller is under no obligation to let you triumph over all adversity.

Actually describing the journey to nigh-omnipotence as simple and/or safe makes my eyeballs bleed.

How... how is what I am suggesting simple or safe? I'm not suggesting that all that prep should be blue-booked or treated as down-time. This is in-game stuff. A whole goddamn mini-campaign. My character would have to cross a half-dozen rivers at least once, make overtures to initiate contact with Geists, make a staggering expense of all possible kinds of resources, successfully interact with other Kerberoi (including Hades, and he's just a jerk) without violating their Laws, and beat up the False Ferryman if I want to follow all leads. On top of that, there's still the risk of being swept away into oblivion if the character can't build an interface with the Supernal in time, and that's an actual unavoidable mechanical risk. Does all that not somewhat make up for the fact that the actual process of the moment of Threshold is the one moment when the player isn't sweating bullets for his characters life, soul, and identity?