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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Cryptos" data-source="post: 4587666" data-attributes="member: 58439">My personal feeling - and White Wolf purists tend to hate this - is that in a "meta" sense a cross-splat WoD game is best hinged on Mage cosmology.  You can easily draw (very obvious, in some cases,) similarities between the Supernal Realms where magic comes from and the splats, with Mage at the center.  Faerie Arcada is described as a place where Time and Probability are not constants, and there are strange and powerful beings that reside there.  Supernal Arcadia is a place where Time and Probability are not constants, and there are strange and powerful beings that reside there.  Both have a distinctive theme that is similar, so that one could be part of the other, or both could be parts of the same place, with ease.  You could make an effort to draw comparisons to the Primal Wild of the Supernal and the Pangaea/Primal World that Werewolves talk about... it could be that when the Supernal was close to the world, the Primal Wild is what werewolves are howling about in their oral history, before the Mages (or whatever cosmological event) drove a wedge between the Supernal and the mundane worlds.  Vampires could easily be the result of some sort of daemon of lust and wrath from Supernal Pandemonium that makes up the Vampire's Beast, and spreads through the ways in which a Vampire is made, reproducing like a disease.(Hint:  Don't ever discuss this on White Wolf's forums in any detail.  You'll be lynched.  If possible, they'll find you and literally lynch you.)In terms of rules, the core system is the generic WoD book.  Mage is very careful to avoid the "I can turn Vampires into lawn chairs" or "open a portal to Japan and let the sunlight through" tactics so that the Vampires and Magi can exist in the same world together.  As examples, you need a Conjunctive Death 2 to add to a spell to make it directly affect or change Vampires; and those pesky portals only let things through that are sent through by force of Will... someone has to deliberately go through or put something through it... so you can't open a portal to somewhere where it's daylight with basic Space magic and fry all the vamps, or open a portal into a volcano and hit everyone with lava that fries the vamps.  No Will to pass through, no passing through.  You can put a portal to Japan in front of a Vamp and he could unwittingly step through, or you could push him through, but you don't get a free "Sunlight bomb" just for knowing Space magic.  There's got to be a conscious decision by someone to move for something to pass through a portal, whether they know what they're doing or not.  Or Conjunctional Arcana knowledge, like Forces for light or electricity, or Matter for the lava.Every supernatural has a resistance statistic and that resistance stat is used against anything supernatural, more or less.  The various games are as compatible as they're probably ever going to be now, and they were very careful to make sure that one group can't make the other group their ***** with ease.Addendum / Caveat:  Mages will kick everyone's butt in the "gathering information" aspect of the game.  Through existing and improvised spells, the easiest thing to do with magic is to know or perceive something.  If you're running a mystery game with mages, the trick is to give them the facts and leave them to their own interpretation, to give them plenty of opportunities to misinterpret the information.  Don't color it with opinions or interpretations, they get enough info on their own as it is.  Someone at RPG.net described mages as "walking CSI labs"... that's not far off.  The Practice of Knowing and the Practice of Unveiling could be the hardest things for you as an ST to adapt to.  Unless someone with magic or another type of power is working to conceal information, they will get it eventually.  Don't let your stories hinge on finding something out.  Let them hinge on what the PCs will do once they find out.</blockquote>

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