Monte Cook's World of Darkness

[Voadam]

Has anyone used this book in gameplay? I'm curious as to how well it mimics the actual Word of Darkness settings in terms of the archtypes and what you can do with them. It looks like it has a good setting for a horror game.

I've bought it but not gone over it in depth. I was disappointed it was not going to be WoD d20 but I knew that going in and bought it on sale with eyes wide open.

It reconcepts the vamps and werewolves as spirit possession but retains a lot of mechanics flavor (vampire discipline names and flavors, etc.) so it is fairly easy to reuse the mechanics with straight WoD setting stuff. It is not everything you would want for a complete translation but a good base to start.

There is also something about Mages and some sort of super anti-supernatural mortals but I forget the specifics.

It is modern dark supernatural world with Cthulhu apocalypse having hit Minnesota. So not oWoD or nWod but easily adaptable.

 

[Tarrl]

I would love to see a 4E version of WOD Vampire.

 

[Voadam]

Only kinda sorta. Like in Bram Stoker's dracula, or Anne Rice, you add the blood and it changes the person. Buffy has the demon, sure, but it's part of the mythos: vamp someone, they're changed into this new type of creature: the vampire. Even WoD has this, as the struggle inside the character is to retain their humanity rather than give in to "the beast".
Monte has the Vampires as simply normal humans taken over by the ghosts of other normal humans. For some reason these ghosts also like blood.

In lots of ancient mythologies ghosts want blood. In the Odyssey Odyseus goes to the underworld and brings sacrificed sheep's blood for the dead shade of Tiresias to drink so he can manifest and give Odyseus a prophecy. He is swarmed by dead shades who want to drink the blood and become temporarily more manifest/part living. Odyseus has to fight them off to save it for the people he wants to talk to (Tiresias, Achilles, Agamemnon, Ajax, his mom, one of his crew he left behind). Even after giving his mom the blood she can talk but he passes through her when he tries to hug her.

 

[kitsune9]

Has anyone used this book in gameplay? I'm curious as to how well it mimics the actual Word of Darkness settings in terms of the archtypes and what you can do with them. It looks like it has a good setting for a horror game.

From the review on youtube, it's very different.

 

[fireinthedust]

In lots of ancient mythologies ghosts want blood. In the Odyssey Odyseus goes to the underworld and brings sacrificed sheep's blood for the dead shade of Tiresias to drink so he can manifest and give Odyseus a prophecy.

Ooooh, good call. I see your point, but that's hardly associated with all ghost stories, or with vampires themselves. Interesting association, though.
I've gone over it in some more depth, btw, and found some bad math. MC has loopholes in acouple systems he's made now:

medium or larger animals are worth one vitae for every four points of Constitution, though each Vitae taken from
them still deals only two points of Constitution damage

so you have to do 4 Con damage for a Vitae, but when you do you only do 2 Con damage? Um, how do I drain 4 Con but only do 2 Con damage? That makes no sense. Too much coffee, not enough sleep!

Arcana Evolved (otherwise a landmark book for 3e) he forgot to mention how spellcasters learn or store spells or spells known! Like, totally left that out of both editions of the game.
Otherwise a brilliant book that I thought generally worked, and was the first series I picked up with Mike Mearls writing for it; likewise the art is very fun.
I think he expects DMs to make house rules, or change the RAW for his stuff. So many of the books he puts out now are collections of house rules.

 

[fireinthedust]

From the review on youtube, it's very different.

I just checked out a review [ame=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9WQvSpwHHyc]Here[/ame]

 

[Aberzanzorax]

My apologies.

My memory was a bit faulty on some of the fluff issues.

I looked through the book again, and I'd say that the youtube video posted is pretty darn spot on.

 

[Obryn]

Arcana Evolved (otherwise a landmark book for 3e) he forgot to mention how spellcasters learn or store spells or spells known! Like, totally left that out of both editions of the game.

They know all spells. Seriously; they have access to the entire list. When they rest, they pick their prepared spells for the day, and cast any of them using "slots" from their spells per day. It's a combination of cleric (having access to all spells and preparing a subset of them) and sorcerer (being able to cast prepared spells in any order or quantity, over and over again).

Back on topic, though, I checked out MCWoD once or twice at the bookstore, but it hit when I had grown enchanted with SWSE and was basically moving away from mechanics-heavy games. It seemed quite a bit denser than I was interested in at the time. Specifically, it read as even crunchier than 3.5.

Would those who have played it call it a heavily crunch-oriented system?

-O

 

[fireinthedust]

They know all spells. Seriously; they have access to the entire list. When they rest, they pick their prepared spells for the day, and cast any of them using "slots" from their spells per day. It's a combination of cleric (having access to all spells and preparing a subset of them) and sorcerer (being able to cast prepared spells in any order or quantity, over and over again).
-O

do you have a page number? I agonized over this for weeks a couple years back, and I couldn't find anything. I made up an entry and posted it on his site, especially for exotic spells, which was fun. But yeah, if you know where I can find the page, you would be my hero!!!

 

[Aus_Snow]

If a character has access to a category of spells, she has all of the spells in that category on her list of known spells.

Also, see each spellcasting class's abilities section (specifically, 'Spells').