History TabletopGame / ChroniclesOfDarkness

** Bogstandard for spirits, as given particular attention in ''TabletopGame/WerewolfTheForsaken''. Even the most intelligent spirits is fundamentally alien, with a viewpoint that can be summarized as "promotes my area of influence = good" and "denies my area of influence = bad". This is why spirits can never truly be reasoned with, and certainly not trusted; a fire spirit ''has'' to burn things, and simply cannot care about anyone it maims or kills, while a spirit of love may well force someone who is experiencing DomesticAbuse to ''stay'' with their abuser, simply because "they still love each other", and thusly the pain the abuser inflicts is unimportant compared to the diminishing of love that would be caused by separating them.
*** As beings that are fundamentally part spirit, werewolves themselves are like this; Harmony focuses on promoting and understanding their nature as lupine spirit-beings, and so it is drastically different to Morality. Killing humans is only bad if it is done for no reason, and even then it bothers werewolves far less than murder does for humans, whilst betraying one's comrades-in-arms is a sin of the kind that humans reserve for mass-murder.
*** The second edition of Forsaken takes the concept further, to the point of playing 'blue and orange morality' more or less straight. The Harmony track no longer tracks any sort of moral compass of the werewolf, but measures how balanced they are. Ideally, the 1-10 track should be around 5. The lower you are, the more spirit-like you are. The higher you are, the more human-like you are. The further you stray from balance, the harder time you have keeping control of yourself, and you suffer difficulties to cross the barrier between the physical and spiritual worlds in one direction or another. In fact, if you drift too far in one direction, it's actually in your best to act in extreme ways to even yourself back out (like killing humans if you lean too far towards 'flesh,' and refusing to perform certain rituals if you lean too far towards 'spirit').

** Beasts are one of the strongest examples so far: according to their monomyth, all supernatural entities other than Demons are kin, if sometimes adopted siblings or distant cousins, and their lore attempts to bridge concepts like the Mages' Supernal Realms and the Changlings' Hedge with the Beast's own Primordial Dream. They are frequently shown acting as intermediaries, mercenaries, and {{Wild Card}}s in supernatural society, reflected mechanically by abilities allowing them to pass between realms and factions with ease, and to act as an integrating component in a mixed party.
* CardboardPrison: Subverted. With all the superpowers the characters, both player and non, have, keeping them confined should be ridiculously impossible. So the FBI built their own Superjail and called it the Lansing Facility. It's actually very effective at keeping its prisoners in- the real issue is that, thanks to many supernaturals being either [[TheAgeless immortal]] or LongLived, they are starting to run out of cells, and the president doesn't take VASCU's job ''quite'' serious enough to finance the construction of a new one...

* CosmicHorrorStory: Averted, actually-part of the horror in the New World of Darkness is you can understand the people and phenomena that are ultimately responsible for the suffering in it (apart from ''TabletopGame/ChangelingTheLost'', and even that's a bit of a subversion). ''Second Sight'' actually encourages you to avoid this trope when making an EldritchAbomination cult and focus on the {{Cult}} itself.

* DarkerAndEdgier: The new World of Darkness plays this role to the old one. ''Changeling'' games stand in particularly stark contrast, but the difference in attitude is noticeable in every game with the arguable exception of ''Vampire'', where the new version, at least, offers much lesser chance of being eaten by some ancient vampiric demigod. If in the old WOD the world sucked, but in most game lines you had a chance to do something about it, in the new WOD the world sucks, period.
** Then again, there's ''Hunter: The Vigil'', which is pretty much built around the idea people can do something about the world's suckiness, and have done so for time out of mind. Or ''Promethean: The Created'', where it's possible to go from being a monster to being human. You may make a difference on a smaller level in the nWOD, but you ''can'' still make a difference.
** Also, there's no five deadly, inevitable apocalypses looming over the world like there was in the Old World of Darkness. Which makes the New World of Darkness relatively more positive in many ways, since the good guys can actually make lasting improvements and differences to the world that won't be wiped away by ancient vampire gods or the Wyrm bursting out of the ground and killing everyone. The more pessimistic activities of day-to-day life were probably increased to compensate.
** With ''Geist'' out, it seems that ghosts and fairies swapped places in the new World of Darkness. Fairies used to be joyful humans comprised of dreams fighting against banality and are now mentally scarred half-human survivalists fleeing from inhuman captors. Ghost [=PCs=] used to be angst-ridden horrors tortured by both the unholy hellish afterlife and their horrible living pasts are now happy half-human hybrid shamans who are more like magical versions of the Franchise/{{Ghostbusters}}.
** The New is LighterAndSofter in a critical way, though; it's assumed in most games that there is no unchangable reason why things are oppressive, things are just hard all around. This also means there's nothing that says things ''can't'' change, or things ''can't'' have a happy or BittersweetEnding. Just don't expect it to be easy.
** On a personal level, it's subjective. A lot of faction characters can be awful at times, but said character writeups usually include an explanation for their behavior which is often quite sympathetic. Generally, protagonist factions are portrayed as having good ideas, but frequently terrible application and endemic corruption, while antagonistic ones often have their admirable and understandable traits.

** Satiety measures how well-fed a [[TabletopGame/BeastThePrimordial Beast]]'s supernatural half is. A ravenous Beast suffers the physical symptoms of starvation and cannot use their MindRape powers. Starvation also [[UnstableEquilibrium cripples a Beast's ability to feed]]; only the greatest effort on the Beast's part will restore even a single point of Satiety.

** Satiety measures how well-fed a [[TabletopGame/BeastThePrimordial Beast]]'s supernatural half is. A ravenous Beast suffers the physical symptoms of starvation, cannot MindRape people in the waking world. Starvation also [[UnstableEquilibrium cripples a Beast's ability to feed]]; only the greatest effort on the Beast's part will restore even a single point of Satiety.

** The ''Dark Eras'' series of books are explicitly devoted to historical crossovers ranging the Stone Age to th Twentieth Century. Every setting is about the interaction of two or three of the various game lines.

** Several of [[TabletopGame/HunterTheVigil Taskforce:]] [[MenInBlack VALKYRIE's]] Endowments are specialized rounds made to [[AvertedTrope avert]] this, ranging from silver bullets, to bullets made of wood that splinter to act like stakes, to bullets that can hurt ghosts, and bullets that have a little bit of everything in them, allowing them to be more effective against all threats but not as effective as the specialized rounds.

* LifeDrinker: The supplement ''Immortals'' details a number of types of people who have managed to overcome the limitations of age - generally through this trope.

** The Hedge: The twisting, treacherous border plane between the second Arcadia and the World proper, earning its name because it most commonly takes the form of a great field of thorny, soul-tearing brambles. It does take other forms too, mimicking the mortal world it is entered through, but it's always labyrinthine and dangerous to body, mind and soul.

--> [[EverythingsBetterWithSparkles This one’s pretty easy. You glimmer and shimmer, like you’re covered in glitter. It’s pretty awesome. It gives you +3 to all Socialize rolls, because who doesn’t want to talk to some dude or chick whose flesh twinkles with cosmic glitter?]] [[Literature/{{Twilight}} If your character is a vampire, you gain doubleextra-awesomeness in that you also get to walk around in the sunlight.]] [[YourVampiresSuck When you do, though, you’re fey and frail, suffering a -3 to all Physical dice pools. Further, all Physical-based dice rolls lose the 10-Again quality. Everyone also thinks you’re a little gay.]]

* WeaponOfChoice: Quite a few of the fighting styles provided in supplementary material for the New World of Darkness focus around these, including [[KnifeFight knife fighting]], sword-and-shield, and [[{{BFS}} heavy sword]].

** It's generally agreed that a [[TabletopGame/MageTheAwakening Mage]] [[Franchise/{{Batman}} with prep time]] can smoke everyone. Justified in that it's hard to compete with someone who can change reality with their mind, and also by the fact that a Mage without prep time is as squishy as any other human.

The modular design of ''[=CoD=]'' also created more room for homebrew gamelines, [[SturgeonsLaw though not all of them worth the trouble]], there are plenty that are worth looking into and TV Tropes has a [[FanWorks.TheWorldOfDarkness list of fan-made gamelines here]].