If you need a serpent god, you can always go for Coatlicue
.
International Man of Mystery
![[up]](https://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/smiles/arrow_up.png "[up]"){kind=icon}
True, the Mesoamericans had no shortage of snake-themed gods. These hypothetical Mexican Setites would have easy pickings to take bits from the old religions and corrupt them for their own purposes.
We have to remenber there was also another snake band call the serpent of life who opose the setties, it wil be easy to have the two fighting in mesomaerica, one workship quezacoalt and other the other snake god.
Also here the information about the culebras
https://dusktilldawn.fandom.com/wiki/Culebras
I recomend the from dawn to dusk series, is pretty good.
"My Name is Bolt, Bolt Crank and I dont care if you believe or not"
International Man of Mystery
Sometimes I wish to return to characters I've played in the past, such as the only Malkavian I've played in the tabletop game. He was a former reporter obsessed with solving his own murder and keeping up the illusion of still being alive, even keeping up his habits of drinking and smoking along with eating greasy food. Though obsessed with his own death, he got repeatedly distracted as his mind devolved into seeing patterns and conspiracies everywhere, which skewed his perception of reality severely. Eventually he started to view his unlife through the lens of a noir detective story, with himself as the hardboiled private eye in a trench-coat. That character would be fun to portray again. 
I recently got my backer's copy for Deviant: The Renegades. I haven't had a chance to fully read it yet, but I'm definitely looking forward to seeing the rules of creating Conspiracies.
Don't want to leave but cannot pretend
...Dammit, if it wasn't so late, I could come up with some sort of Cainite Embracing joke about this thread but I'll just fish: which do you people prefer- the Old World or the New World/ Chronicles and why?
Also, a question that I've had for a while: do you think it's possible to make a Celestial Chorister that isn't so stepped in the Christian aesthetic it has? Like, a Muslim or Jewish or even Shinto Chorister?
Edited by fredhot16 on Aug 1st 2021 at 9:42:55 AM
Trans rights are human rights. TV Tropes is not a place for bigotry, cruelty, or dickishness, no matter who or their position.
The whole old vs new it is near borderline broken base but everything seen to point out to new, it have for example better rule for crossovering and it dosent have a metaplot, which is good or bad depending of your take, I like the metaplot but I can get why is everybody coup of tea.
And the second is yes, they are muslism, some pagans and even atheist(really), in the chorister, I think the second edition said their main chantry look pagan before remaking as christian in the middle ages, is just that more of the aesthetic and focus on cristianity hence the whole "magic is religion"
"My Name is Bolt, Bolt Crank and I dont care if you believe or not"
International Man of Mystery
I'm more familiar with oWoD, because that is what I've actually played. I do like a lot of the things introduced in nWoD splat-books, like Nosferatu being able to be repulsive without being physically ugly, but even more the stuff regarding vampires in Roman times. Because they skipped so many clans, factions and pieces of lore in nWoD, I do prefer the world in Masquerade a little bit more. If I get to run Vampire in the future, then I'd make a homebrew where I mix stuff I like from both versions.
I prefer New, especially the "Second Edition" versions. I like the worldbuilding better starting from Second Edition Vampire: The Requiem and I feel like the Beats system is a very interesting way to gain experience and do storytelling.
Second Edition Changeling: The Lost is my current favorite game in the entire series.
Not to bandwagon, but I also prefer new. I do like the “Deep Lore” of oWoD, but it can get both intimidating, daunting and restricting at times. The old problem that if you had the temerity of letting your players change the campaign setting (or you yourself did some tweaking) each successive supplement was less and less aplicable was something I’m happy not to have dealt with.
I’ve never looked into them, but theres supposed to be a lot of robust conversions for V20 into nWoD or CoD rules just for the streamlining of things. Personally if I ever ST again I think I would like some amount of porting over of oWoD elements to help flesh out the campaign, but I just couldn’t ever let go of the sheer amount of customization that the new version provides. I mean, we could run a game were vampires are born from different cosmic origins (death gods, Cain, science experiments or whatever you want) at the same time even!
Not that I wouldn’t like playing in a V5 campaign or a V20 campaign, I’d love to. I just wouldn’t be super stoked about STing for either.
I prefer the OWOD because I'm edgy and shit.
Something about the atmosphere, themes and ideas just resonate with me.
For example, Mage The Ascension vs. Awakening. Elsewhere, the politics of TTRPG's was discussed with a heavy emphasis on a Left Wing interpretation of Mage, especially Awakening.
That's not how I read Ascension. Ascension is less Marx and more Weber:
To a degree, sociology emerged as a response to the shock of the transformation from traditional to complex society, and one of its major purposes was the diagnosis of what was perceived as an ailing body politic. A massive literature grew up about the notion of social disorganization. From positivist ranks came Durkheim's anomie, while what Shils has called 'German sociological romanticism' spawned Marx's entfremdung, as well as the formulations of Tonnies, Sombart, and Vierkandt.2 In all of these the Hegelian legacy is graphically in evidence, as is the primitivism of romantic ideology in which the bucolic and agrarian is felt to be inestimably better than the urbanized and commercial. The work of these authors is dominated by the tone of lament for a quaint if brutal world that is being crushed to atoms beneath the industrial steamroller.
Max Weber's mode of analysing this process is characteristically individual. Instead offocusing on the individual's estrangement (Marx), or the structural strain of society-at-large (Durkheim), or the polarity between folk and urban existence (Tonnies, Vierkandt), he used the concepts intellectualization and rationalization to explain a larger process called the 'Disenchantment of the World' (Entzauberung der Welt). Weber borrowed the term disenchantment (Entzauberung) from Schiller, the arch-romantic whose poetry was used by Beethoven in the 'Ode to Joy' of his Ninth Symphony. Schiller wanted to respiritualize the world, and Beethoven's musical setting gave this goal an heroic march-tempo. Weber seems to have taken these ideas into the very core of his sociology. The process of disenchantment was set in motion in the primordial past, it rolls on unhindered as the automatic guidancesystem of civilization. It banishes superstition, myth, and magic, and replaces them with a 'realistic' approach to the world.
Although its causes are to be traced to the Hebrew Prophets, it is with the lonely individualism of the Protestant faith that the process of disenchantment begins in earnest. Divorced from his priests and the Church, with its elaborate hierarchy that served to explain the most minute details of everyday life within the sacred precepts of revealed doctrine, Western man fell back upon the painful and 'inhumane' individualism which Weber associateso closely with capitalism.3 'The genuine Puritan even rejected all signs of religious ceremony at the grave and buried his nearest and dearest without song or ritual in order that no superstition, no trust in the effiects of magical and sacramental forces on salvation, should creep in.'4 The liberating aspects of disenchantment are, for Weber, secondary to the massive social disorganization it causes for individual and society. When magical forces are eliminated from life, the mind turns back upon itself and tries to reconstruct the world in 'rational' terms. Intellect becomes the sole arbiter of meaning and judgment. And, 'as intellectualism suppresses belief in magic, the world's processes become disenchanted, lose their magical signiScance, and henceforth simply 'are' and 'happen' but no longer signify anything'.5 Weber went to some length to demonstrate the effect and extent of disenchantment in every sphere of life. In his fragments on the sociology of music he tries to show how Western music has developed along peculiarly 'rational' lines, as opposed to that of other cultures.6 Religion, business operations, statecraft and, above all, bureaucracy attest to the assertion that if any feature can be said to characterize the history of Western societyy it is the systematic elimination of the magical and irrational.
The expulsion of myths and magic-disenchantment per se-should not be interpreted too narrowly. It is not simply that religion as an institution has been routinized and bureaucratized to the point at which mysteries no longer play a significant role in its functions. Disenchantment aSects and radically alters the common-sense logic, experiences, and conduct of everyday life. When Wordsworth lamented that 'The world is too much with us' and yearned to
Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea; Or hear old Triton blow his wreathed horn.
he was depicting the full impact of disenchantment as it alters consciousness and constricts imagination and the senses. In Schiller, Wordsworth and other romantics disenchantment is conceived as a woeful state of aesthetic affairs, and not so much a process that inexorably moves civilization towards an unhappy goal. With Weber, the processual element is more pronounced, but seldom stated as a general theory of cultural development/degeneration.
Weber was in general cynical about philosophies of history, and openly hostile to academic prophets who claimed special knowledge about the destiny of mankind.7 Nonetheless, within his oeurre one finds statements that clearly identify disenchantment as an overall trend of civilization as a whole. He views the ecstatic and magical features of religion as being incrementally extirpated through the routinization of charisma. Mythological formulae cannot stand before the cold light of the rationality that comes with the purposive organization of religious faiths. In the West, where this process has been strongly articulated through Protestantism and the Enlightenment, the direction of culture along a disenchanted course cannot be altered. Given this implication of unalterable 'fate', what recourse is left to the individual ? Apart from finding solace in the churches, which Weber regards with a patronizing sympathy, there seem to be few paths open since 'precisely the ultimate and most sublime values have retreated from public life . . . into the brotherliness of direct and personal human relations'.8 Weber himself chose the expedient of dealing with the meaninglessness of a disenchanted world from day to day. Yet he never held that his own 'sublime resignation' could fill the symbolic vacuum left by the flight of the gods.
The Old World of Darkness simply speaks to me on a more intimate level, both emotionally and intellectually. It tackles ideas that interest me and is supported with a bleak cynicism that I find refreshing.
Edited by Nikkolas on Aug 31st 2021 at 10:14:25 AM
I recently got my Backer PDF of the second edition Hunter: The Vigil.
Something I found interesting ever since the previews were out was that they changed the names of some of the Slasher archetypes. Psychos are now Hypnos, Freaks are now Undesirables, Geniuses are now Virtuosos, and Maniacs are now Puppeteers.
I will say that some of those names were awkward to begin with - the Psycho and Maniac in particular aren't all that descriptive compared to, say, the Brute or the Avenger.
Oh wow, they remembered the best faction (the Sabbat) existed and they're getting their own V5 book next month. I am excited.
I still need to get Cults of the Blood Gods, though. Fantasy Religions are my main interest in lore.
Don't want to leave but cannot pretend
Why do you like them, for the Sabbat and Fantasy religions?
Well Fantasy Religions and Deities create all sorts of fascinating moral questions. Like, the Drow in Forgotten Realms worship an evil deity. But it's their goddess. It's their culture. It's their way of life. I couldn't get into Pathfinder but IIRC one of the evil deities there (Asmodeus?) rescued an entire nation from destruction. They were gonna be wiped out so in exchange they swore themselves to him. Can we blame them?
The lines between good and evil blur a lot more when you have these supremely powerful beings who are literal gods or fundamental aspects of reality. For WOD, why shouldn't vampires venerate Caine or Lilith as the originators of Kindred? The Wyrm is a pivotal part of the multiverse. And so-on.
As for the Sabbat, if I'm playing VTM, I'm gonna go all-in on being a vampire. This Humanity shit is stupid. Anne Rice inspired VTM and Interview with the Vampire is all about how you just...watch everything you know change and vanish while you stay the same. A Vampire is profoundly impacted by their human existence but it's like an anchor weighing them down as time marches on. That's why I love Toreadors; creative humans transformed into walking corpses who yearn for their old passion but it forever eludes them. A vampire is both human and the complete opposite human, a trait which only gets worse with age. So why pretend to be what you clearly no longer are and can never be again? Embrace what you have become.
Your friendly neighbourhood Regent
I mean... That's the Sabbat propaganda.
In practice their rank and file are a bunch of (often literal) murder hobos who use 'we're monsters, embrace it!' to justify doing whatever they want, while the higher ups are literally no different from their Camarilla counterparts in their petty politics and even pettier grudges.
Angry gets shit done.
Well if the choice is which boot heel you lick, why not prefer the Sabbat over the Camarilla? The Cammies don't even wanna acknowledge the blatant facts of Kindred history.
Edited by Nikkolas on Sep 19th 2021 at 6:12:44 AM
Your friendly neighbourhood Regent
But the House and Clan has such superior boot polish...
The Sabbat are also a death cult, whose big claim to fame about killing two antis turned out to be wrong, were completely ignored when another anti did wake up, and are being manipulated by their elders into being disposable pawns.
The cam at least is fairly open about what they are, even if they publicly don’t admit to the antideluvians existing.
Yeah, both suck, however on balance you probably should try to be in the Camarilla. Sure, the Cam will dress up and hide the fact that you Neonate are the utter worst and just shy of disenfranchised versus literally everyone else in vampire society in nice platitudes about the traditions, but at least you have your right and general security that you will not to be diablerized or sent as suicide shock troops into an enemy domain. Keep your head down, and you might even eventually be either powerful enough to matter or at least not get messed with.
Sabbat? Statistically you're either going to be a Shovel Head, a surviving Shovel Head about to be sent on a second mission that will truly kill you, a hideously gruesome Tremere experiment (Gargoyles), or a nightmarishly gruesome Tzimisce experiment (Blood Brothers) or artwork who is addicted to pain. But hey! At least you get a pass with most masquerade breaches and you can be a dick to humans. That's a fair trade, right?
Your friendly neighbourhood Regent
Additionally, if you weren't embraced without permission or have some other inciting incident in your background, all the Camarilla expects in exchange for membership is that you not break the Traditions.
You can just be a random schmuck who spends their whole night playing video games and who occasionally shows up in the Rack or the Elysium to meet their fellow slackers for a drink and the Camarilla is fine with that.
But if you're Sabbat, you're a soldier for the cause. You've got a Pack that you're bloodbound to with a political officer/priest who watches you closely for any sign you're not toeing the party line and a formal boss whose job it is to kick your ass until you follow orders.
Plus... the Camarilla may be largely stuck in a feudal society, but the Sabbat was (by White Wolf) literally structured on South American Fascist terrorist cells.
Edited by Robrecht on Sep 19th 2021 at 11:51:09 AM
Angry gets shit done.
A 5th edition of Hunter the Reckoning got announced today, and while I'm hyped that my favourite old world game is getting a new edition I'm not sold on them marketing it as a fifth edition.
Your friendly neighbourhood Regent
I feel old now.
Because I read that and I was like "Wait, what? 5th Edition Hunter is out already, isn't it? I'm pretty sure I've played with a group already!"
And then I realized that that was nWoD Hunter and it was over five years ago.
Angry gets shit done.
I would not put it past Setites to warp Quetzalcoatl into a murderous serpent-monster, like the Apep-with-Set's-name. They might even claim that the natives got what was coming to them, because they had supposedly sissified Quetzalcoatl by taking away his bloody sacrifices. Now it is time to bring out the "real" Feathered Serpent, so that his children may rule.