Baeraad
Delicate Snowflake
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- Oct 4, 2017
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Since I'm getting ready to run a game of Hunter: the Reckoning, I've been thinking about how to go about portraying the classic World of Darkness to the players. While just about all the oWoD books are shock full of verbose mood descriptions, I feel like they're often not very helpful - they frequently seem to take the view that of course you know what a Gothic-Punk aesthetic is supposed to be like, the only reason why you'd fail to follow it is because you're insufficiently committed to Roleplaying As Art and need to be lectured on the subject for another dozen pages.
What I could actually use is what Powered By The Apocalypse games sometimes call an Agenda - a quick set of guidelines to keep in mind when creating characters, locations and situations. I'll list what I've come up with here. More suggestions are appreciated.
Life is struggle. Everyone in the setting is either fighting to maintain something, fighting to destroy something, or just fighting to survive. Rebels rage and scream and claw at the establishment; the establishment stomps down hard on the rebels; and somewhere in between, ordinary people are trying to hold on to the last scraps of dignity and hope. Everyone strives towards something, and everyone despairs, to a larger or smaller extent, of ultimately achieving it.
Look through a veil of cynicism. Everyone's a liar and a hypocrite. Nothing is as good as it should be. That doesn't mean that people can't be sympathetic and that things can't be worth believing in, only that it all has an undercurrent of sullen resignation, of reality failing to live up to idealistic expectations. Whatever you create, remember to make it flawed and imperfect.
Everything is complicated. The world is full of details and clutter. Motivations are complex, political situations are fraught, and everything turns out to be tangled and intricate when you get close enough to get a good look at it. On the bright side, this also means that everything is at least potentionally interesting and holds the potential to be understood and exploited. When in doubt, add more details and unexpected complications.
The world is inhospitable to human life. Everything is either depressingly filthy and decrepit or intimidatingly sterile and pristine. Nothing is ever soft and comfortable. Everything has sharp edges and a note of menace. Cities are nightmares of steel and stone, while the wilderness is so austere in its untamed beauty that it makes you feel ashamed of intruding. No location should ever invite the players to sit down and rest.
You only win by cheating. The world runs on unwritten rules and cladestine arrangements. Who you know is more important than what you know. Important decisions are made by shadowy power brokers in smoke-filled back rooms, while regular people form informal networks of mutual assistance to make up for the fact that the system doesn't work right and and doesn't care about them. While powerful organisations with faceless leaderships are omnipresent, their real impact always comes in the form of their ground-level operatives, who invariably have their own goals and personalities.
Everything has a past. Buildings are old and decaying. People have scars, tattoos, piercings, plastic surgery. There's litter everywhere. Even when something is brand new, there is probably a story behind its construction. Wherever you go, someone has been there before - yours is the final chapter in a very long story.
What I could actually use is what Powered By The Apocalypse games sometimes call an Agenda - a quick set of guidelines to keep in mind when creating characters, locations and situations. I'll list what I've come up with here. More suggestions are appreciated.
Life is struggle. Everyone in the setting is either fighting to maintain something, fighting to destroy something, or just fighting to survive. Rebels rage and scream and claw at the establishment; the establishment stomps down hard on the rebels; and somewhere in between, ordinary people are trying to hold on to the last scraps of dignity and hope. Everyone strives towards something, and everyone despairs, to a larger or smaller extent, of ultimately achieving it.
Look through a veil of cynicism. Everyone's a liar and a hypocrite. Nothing is as good as it should be. That doesn't mean that people can't be sympathetic and that things can't be worth believing in, only that it all has an undercurrent of sullen resignation, of reality failing to live up to idealistic expectations. Whatever you create, remember to make it flawed and imperfect.
Everything is complicated. The world is full of details and clutter. Motivations are complex, political situations are fraught, and everything turns out to be tangled and intricate when you get close enough to get a good look at it. On the bright side, this also means that everything is at least potentionally interesting and holds the potential to be understood and exploited. When in doubt, add more details and unexpected complications.
The world is inhospitable to human life. Everything is either depressingly filthy and decrepit or intimidatingly sterile and pristine. Nothing is ever soft and comfortable. Everything has sharp edges and a note of menace. Cities are nightmares of steel and stone, while the wilderness is so austere in its untamed beauty that it makes you feel ashamed of intruding. No location should ever invite the players to sit down and rest.
You only win by cheating. The world runs on unwritten rules and cladestine arrangements. Who you know is more important than what you know. Important decisions are made by shadowy power brokers in smoke-filled back rooms, while regular people form informal networks of mutual assistance to make up for the fact that the system doesn't work right and and doesn't care about them. While powerful organisations with faceless leaderships are omnipresent, their real impact always comes in the form of their ground-level operatives, who invariably have their own goals and personalities.
Everything has a past. Buildings are old and decaying. People have scars, tattoos, piercings, plastic surgery. There's litter everywhere. Even when something is brand new, there is probably a story behind its construction. Wherever you go, someone has been there before - yours is the final chapter in a very long story.
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