I went ahead and grabbed to core book. It definitely has the WoD/CoD vibe in the writing and style, though sometimes I want the book to stop with the edgy first person narrative and just give me the meat and potatoes of the rules.
Our group is going to take a look at the game and see if we want to port our current campaign over. It might take a few flavour rewrites and tweaks to make it feel similar, but probably nothing too drastic since we were already playing pretty fast and loose with the World of Darkness setting. I think in the long run the game will run much smoother with the rule changes, and we’ll certainly need to do less hacking and fudging to make our mixed splats play nicely together.
We have 2 hunter characters, so we might have to engineer something ourselves until the Player Guide comes out or have them swap. But the it shouldn’t be too much trouble considering how many game mechanics we were writing ourselves in our current campaign.
Thanks
@The-Magic-Sword for drawing attention to this game!
Hell yeah!
The book does have a lot of that lore/storytelling thing going on in it, but it's a lot more streamlined than the COFD offerings in terms of organization. But I do recommend the table of contents for better navigation.
Venators as they appear in the current manuscript are interesting, they get delayed access to spells but up front access to rituals, their main thing is that they form a bond with a supernatural creature and have to fulfill a 'duty' that could be hunting them, but could also be protecting others from them.
What's interesting is that it can explicitly be a positive or negative bond, and bonds give a lot of dice, which seems like the intended equalizer with what the accursed get-- so you're either getting big bonuses to teamwork if you're obsessed with an allied supernatural you're managing, or bonuses to take actions against a target, between the two the teamwork benefit is actually more reliable, but they might buff the oppositional bond style by the final version.
I think I’ll have to see it in play, but I’m not sure I love the damage system where it seems like you normally inflict 1 damage with possibility of boosting it to 2. It reads like combat will be a slow slugfest with combatants chipping away at health. I get that weapon tags and tricks add some flair, so maybe I need to actually give it a go before judging.
So, Storypath Core Manual explains this well when it discusses how to make powers and about just adding damage, with the way injuries work it makes the system extremely lethal to just add more damage. When a creature only has a handful of injury boxes, two can be a third of the way to dead if they 'only' have six, which is already fairly hoity toity villain territory.
You can get more damage out of complications from status effects/complicate, and momentum makes the game very punchy, since base momentum gain is pretty high and it becomes very easy for players to stow extra successes as momentum, and then for each person to draw that pool
hard for critical and other tricks-- and they're incentivized to spend it down by session's end.
For perspective, the most powerful category of adversary (the nightmare) in Curseborne have 10 total, that includes the 'great cosmic beings summoned by ritual' your minions have 1-2 and the elites among them have like, 4. For perspective, someone who imposes Burning and buys the Critical Trick for 3 total, would delete like a third of the strongest enemy's injury boxes by themselves in one round.
I am also a little confused to why the “stake” appears like one of the best melee weapons with the “deadly” and “piercing” tags. What am I missing?
Probably to justify the trope of a vampire hunter staking a vampire, honestly, but the weapon tables are actually just examples-- any weapon you would want to model is two traits, gaining more if you get better quality from edges and etc, so if you have a cool weapon in mind, you can just give it the cool traits it would make sense for it to have within that.
