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The urban fantasy market seems awfully stagnant
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<blockquote data-quote="VelvetViolet" data-source="post: 7626880" data-attributes="member: 6686357"><p>While out of the box D&D over covers a specific set of archetypes, there's a bazillion 3pp that hacks the system to make new classes. Although it's currently only compatible with <em>Pathfinder </em>1e, <em>Spheres of Power</em> and <em>Spheres of Might</em> goes to show how far you can go using the D&D class formula.</p><p></p><p>Although <em>World of Darkness</em> never opened itself up with the OGL (not counting the forgotten <em>Opening the Dark</em> retroclone), it has enough competitors past and present to get a feel for what players and publishers were looking for in contemporary fantasy games. <em>Nightlife </em>(1990), <em>Nephilim </em>(1992), <em>Immortal: The Invisible War</em> (1993), <em>Nightbane </em>(1995), <em>C.J. Carella's WitchCraft</em> (1996), <em>The Everlasting</em> (1997), <em>In Nomine</em> (1997), <em>Unknown Armies</em> (1998), <em>Nobilis </em>(1999), <em>Sorcerer </em>(2002), <em>Scion </em>(2007), <em>Dresden Files </em>(2010), <em>Monsterhearts </em>(2012), <em>Feed</em> (2013), <em>Urban Shadows</em> (2015), etc.</p><p></p><p>We can note a number of trends in the development of contemporary fantasy games, starting in the 90s. By "contemporary" I mean they superficially resemble the real world at the time of writing, so <em>Shadowrun </em>and <em>Rifts </em>don't count when strictly speaking. What distinguishes the 90s is that this is when monsters started being offered as PCs, rather than antagonists for investigator PCs to fight. Although 80s contemporary fantasy/horror games like <em>Call of Cthulhu</em>, <em>Beyond the Supernatural</em> and <em>Chill </em>may have offered psychics and occultists as PCs, they did not offer literal monsters like vampires or werewolves.</p><ol> <li data-xf-list-type="ol">The first generation includes <em>Nightlife</em>, <em>World of Darkness</em>, <em>Nephilim </em>and <em>Immortal</em>. They tended to be focused on factionalism and a sort of oppressive bleak conspiracy theory, echoing the horror roots of their predecessors. <em>Nephilim </em>and <em>Immortal </em>are sometimes derided as clones of <em>World of Darkness</em>, but there's no evidence they were directly inspired and they don't resemble each other much at all.</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ol">The latter half of the 90s is when the clones started showing up. The second generation sometimes lightened the horror or conspiracy aspects in favor of lighter fantasy, but that was by no means a rule. <em>WitchCraft </em>and <em>Everlasting </em>were created specifically in response to <em>World of Darkness</em>. They tried to address what they perceived as shortcomings of their opponent, such as poor support for mixed groups. As such, these used universal guidelines for developing super powers and magic. <em>Everlasting </em>got particularly creative and weird, including options for fantasy races like elves, dwarves and orcs, as well as mythical heroes a la <em>Exalted </em>or <em>Scion</em>.</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ol">At this time the tabletop market in general was shrinking due to various business and economic factors, which ultimately led to (among other things) TSR being bought by WotC, <em>World of Darkness</em> being rebooted, and many publishers going out of business. The rise of the internet and e-retail resulted in an explosion of indie games. The third generation starts in the 2000s and continues to the present: this generation is more diverse and refined compared to its predecessors.</li> </ol><p></p><p>There's no shortage of rules systems to choose from. As I said earlier, I do like mechanics that support the intended theme of the game in question. So what's the theme? The reason why people keep coming back to the common archetypes of vampires, werewolves, witches, ghosts, and fairies is because these resonate with people. Fantasy is often about escapism, while urban fantasy is more metaphor because it shares our world superficially. <em>World of Darkness</em> tried to use abhumans as metaphors, although <em>Monsterhearts </em>was much more obvious about this. What I would like to discuss is world building and how non-generic rules can be used to support that.</p><p></p><p>[HR][/HR]<strong>Karma meters</strong></p><p></p><p>There is often a sanity meter, karma meter, corruption or light/dark side mechanic of some sort, like a humanity meter, which were implemented most uniformly in <em>Nightlife</em>'s humanity mechanic, <em>The Everlasting</em>'s torment mechanics and <em>Chronicles of Darkness</em>'s morality mechanics. <em>Feed</em>'s humanity mechanic was probably the peak of this sort of mechanic: the PCs would lose human traits and replace them with vampire traits. Other humanity mechanics were much more unwieldy in terms of what theme they were intended to espouse and how they worked in practice.</p><p></p><p>Both of <em>The Everlasting</em> and <em>Chronicles of Darkness</em> made the mistake of inventing a different meter for every playable splat and going out of their way to make them all feel distinct, which grew increasingly forced as the character options expanded. A number of these mechanics resulted in states of temporary or permanent insanity (or other unpleasant side effects), a concept that was recycled in <em>Exalted </em>as "limit break" and <em>Monsterhearts </em>as "darkest self."</p><p></p><p> <em>The Everlasting</em> had personality mechanics, way more convoluted than anything in <em>Exalted</em>, that tied into the torment mechanics and which I couldn't make heads or tails of so I can't offer much critique of that except to say that it was clearly unwieldy.</p><p></p><p> <em>World</em>/<em>Chronicles of Darkness</em> quickly fell into the trap of writing the mechanic as a stick that arbitrary inflicted <em>Call of Cthulhu</em>-style sanity loss for playing a typical RPG character (i.e. a psychopathic serial killer), which resulted in much wailing and gnashing of teeth from players, then later introducing various ways to get around it... as opposed to rewriting it to not be a stick mechanic or trying to promote styles of play other than "ragtag team of psychopathic serial killers." But I digress, so just refer to that other topic about violence in RPGs for that tangent. </p><p></p><p>Ultimately, a karma meter is a karma meter. As <em>Nightlife </em>and <em>Feed </em>go to show, it is very easy to write most abhumans as essentially vampires struggling to retain their humanity in an overarching addiction metaphor. The lesson to be learned here is that if you are going to use a corruption mechanic to reinforce your themes and distinguish the character options, then you need to know exactly what you are doing and you need to plan ahead rather than devise new torments <em>ad hoc</em>. While karma meters and similar mechanics are not strictly necessary for urban fantasy, in my opinion having them can help to emulate aspects of the genre. <em>Being Human</em>, both US and UK versions, is my go-to example for how abhuman protagonists can struggle with their inhuman side.</p><p></p><p></p><p>[HR][/HR]<strong>Character options</strong></p><p></p><p>Urban fantasy games have often offered their own equivalent of character classes, and sometimes further subdivisions, while otherwise being skill-based or the equivalent. <em>World of Darkness</em> has "splats," <em>Monsterhearts </em>has "skins," <em>Urban Shadows</em> has "archetypes," <em>The Everlasting</em> has "gentes," etc. Most of these can essentially be reduced to some variation on a vampire, werewolf, wizard, ghost, fairy or some other basic archetype. In most cases these determine the PC's personality, superpowers, etc. These splats distinguish the games from purely toolkit systems, even though if we're being technical these are specific examples created by an imaginary toolkit system. The important bit is that, ideally, the archetypes are a fluff concept independent of rules. Everybody can generally describe a vampire, werewolf, wizard, ghost or fairy, even if these distinctions are ultimately arbitrary.</p><p></p><p>My recurring critique of such mechanics ties back to the "our monsters are different" and "vampire variety pack" tvtropes. You can say these implementations exist on a continuum of sorts. My go-to example for how such things are typically structured, as least for vampires, would be <em>Feed</em>: it structures vampires into "strains" that define their overarching rules and "sub-strains" that make minor changes to the parent strain. An example of a two distinct strains would be the difference between the vampires in Anne Rice's <em>Vampire Chronicles</em> and the vampires in Guillermo Del Toro's <em>The Strain</em>. An example of sub-strains would be the clans and bloodlines of the vampires in <em>World</em>/<em>Chronicles of Darkness</em>.</p><p></p><p>You can probably see where I'm going here. I haven't been able to find a system that is built around a high level of customization for all of its options. For example:</p><p></p><ul> <li data-xf-list-type="ul"><em>World of Darkness</em> uses a syntactic magic system for its wizards (e.g. <em>Ascension</em>'s arete/spheres, <em>Awakening</em>'s gnosis/arcana, <em>Dark Ages</em>' foundation/pillars, <em>Opening the Dark</em>'s art/praxis), but provides magical traditions so that characters can feel very different. Even mad science and "hacking the Matrix" are covered by this. On the other hand: the vampires all follow the same basic quasi-Ricean rules with clans/bloodlines added to provide a cost break to certain superpowers and an additional vampire weakness, and the werewolves all follow the same hereditary scheme. Obscure supplements may try to provide rules for options that don't fall into these, but these are one-offs that never receive further attention.</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul"><em>Dresden Files</em> doesn't lack variety in terms of vampires and werewolves, although it provides only a few examples, but its wizards all use the same magical tradition.</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul"><em>The Everlasting</em> seemingly tries to be more diverse in its treatment of vampires, but they still follow most of the same rules regardless of their "consanguinity" (bloodline). The werewolves are limited to the pathogenic variety seen in horror movies. Spiritual warriors bound to nature spirits or "manitou" are a different splat. The same magic rules are used for every splat if they have access to it, but the "osirian" splat has unique access to a form of meta-magic.</li> </ul><p></p><p>Maybe my googlefu is just weak, but I don't recall finding an urban fantasy game that has all of the same groundwork laid for magical traditions, vampire strains and werewolf strains. They've appeared at least a few times in isolation, so I'm stumped that I haven't found them used together. And that's just for the most popular trio of vampires, werewolves and wizards. Ghosts seemingly rarely receive as much attention as PCs, despite being the general populace being way more interested in them. Fairies are a whole other can of worms.</p><p></p><p>[HR][/HR]<strong>Ghosts' incongruous invisibility</strong></p><p></p><p>For whatever reason, ghosts seem to be less popular as PCs compared to vampires and such despite ghost stories making up a much larger volume of history and popular culture. (Possibly because, as one critic claims, ghosts lack "teh sexy.") There are numerous stories and urban legends of hauntings, possessions, vanishing hitchhikers, ghostly animals, vanishing houses, ghost ships, ghost towns, etc. Off the top of my head, tabletop RPGs that offer ghosts as PCs out of the box include <em>Lost Souls</em>, <em>Nightlife</em>, <em>World of Darkness</em> (especially <em>Wraith </em>and <em>Orpheus</em>), <em>WitchCraft</em>, <em>The Everlasting</em>, <em>Ghostwalk</em>, <em>Monsterhearts</em>, <em>Urban Shadows</em>, and <em>Spookshow</em>. They all have wildly different conceptions of ghosts, and some of the time the ghosts are just one option of a monster mash. There may be a set of ghost-flavored options like ghosts, mediums, necromancers, reapers, flatliners, etc.</p><p></p><p>Although the basic concept of a ghost is recognizable (i.e. haunting your past life and either resolving your issues or stubbornly hanging on, which one observer likened to a metaphor for the grieving process), some of these games added additional elements that were sometimes at odds with the basic concept. Games like <em>Orpheus </em>and <em>Spookshow </em>rather reasonably introduced the idea of competing ghost fumigating organizations, ghosts being employed in espionage, or astral projectors using similar mechanics. Games like <em>Wraith </em>and <em>The Everlasting</em> introduced ridiculously bleak and oppressive otherworld politics that drew attention far away from the unfinished business that defines what it means to be a ghost; while I have no problem with giving ghosts their own flourishes like pocket universes, politics, etc, being a ghost is already depressing enough and doesn't need to be made worse.</p><p></p><p>Perhaps most importantly: playing an invisible intangible ghost, while extremely handy for espionage, is extremely frustrating if you ever feel the desire to interact with the living. Not every game featuring ghosts tried to ameliorate this, and some made it worse. Some games decided to make some flavor of mediums the PCs and relegate ghosts to NPC roles, probably because the designer thought that would be more fun and not without justification. I've got nothing against that: a game like <em>Reaper Madness</em> combining the premises of <em>Dead Like Me</em>, <em>Final Destination</em> and <em>Tru Calling</em> (among others) sounds absolutely amazing.</p><p></p><p>[HR][/HR]<strong>Werewolves' lack of superpowers</strong></p><p></p><p>Our monsters traditionally have all sorts of reality warping powers. Wizards can build magic castles like Hogwarts. Ghosts call pull off all the crazy SFX seen in <em>Poltergeist</em>, <em>The Ring</em>, <em>The Shining</em>, <em>The Grudge</em>, <em>Grave Encounters</em> and more. Vampires can control animals, control the weather, levitate, control minds, change shape, etc. Werewolves can turn into wolfish beasts with enhanced physical abilities and... not much else?</p><p></p><p>There's a big disconnect between how werewolves and, say, vampires are treated in terms of superpowers. Vampires can range from generic mooks for the heroes to stake all the way to having laundry lists of superpowers like levitation and mind control and whatever, which can be traced back to Bram Stoker's <em>Dracula</em>. By contrast, werewolves almost never receive powers beyond shape shifting, presumably because authors are not creative? <em>World of Darkness</em> marks the first time, that I've aware of, that werewolves received the same level of laundry list powers that vampires did (and keep in mind that <em>World of Darkness</em> exaggerated this trend by giving vampires arbitrary powers over stone, time, illusion, etc). It's only within the last decade that I've seen this attitude trickle into popular culture depictions of werewolves (e.g. <em>Teen Wolf</em>, <em>The Order</em>).</p><p></p><p>Even something as simple as the concept of alpha and beta werewolves can be traced to the 1990s adventure game series <em>Gabriel Knight</em>.</p><p></p><p>But when you go back to pre-Hollywood folklore... there's very little distinction between werewolves, wizards and vampires. It's almost like the modern distinction is an arbitrary invention. Which reminds me of another point...</p><p></p><p>[HR][/HR]<strong>Cliques</strong></p><p></p><p>Previously I mentioned that the popular set of vampires, werewolves, wizards, ghosts and fairies are recognizable archetypes. I may have lied. What we imagine as vampires and werewolves specifically is much more recent, as they weren't well distinguished prior to the 20th century. This has some ramifications for the design of contemporary fantasy games.</p><p></p><p>The first generation 1990s+ contemporary fantasy games got a lot of steam from their clique structure. <em>Nightlife </em>had two majors factions based on whether they pretended to be human or embraced their monstrosity, and various "races" of monster like vampire, wight, ghost, werewolf, etc. <em>Nephilim </em>had five elements and twenty major arcana. <em>Immortal </em>had twelve tribes. The clique structure loosened in the second generation and appears largely absent in the third generation, although that may just be due to those games not printing splatbooks like popcorn.</p><p></p><p><em>World of Darkness</em> had vampire clans, werewolf tribes, mage traditions, etc. These weren't based on archetypes in fiction or folklore, but seemed to have been largely invented by the developers based on specific inspirations (e.g. each vampire clan is obviously based on a specific vampire story like <em>Dracula</em> for ventrue, <em>Interview with the Vampire</em> for toreador, <em>Lost Boys</em> for brujah, <em>Near Dark</em> for gangrel, <em>Nosferatu</em> for nosferatu, <em>Vampire's Kiss</em> for malkavian, <em>Necroscope</em> for tzimisce, <em>Lair of the White Worm</em> for setite, or <em>3×3 Eyes</em> for salubri). In other words, they're blatantly arbitrary. One critic called them "stereotypes," as opposed to "archetypes." There can easily be a bazillion splats, <a href="https://bjzbackup.custom-gaming.net/" target="_blank">as B.J. Zanzibar's archive shows</a>.</p><p></p><p><em>Chronicles of Darkness</em> tried to replace the previous clique structure with one more evocative of archetypal roles, and made a cleaner distinction between splats chosen by the player and those chosen by their character. The problem is that such archetypes don't actually exist, so the developers were pretty much making up their own archetypes with questionable foundation. This worked for <em>Changeling: The Lost</em> because it drew on humanity's extensive fairy tales across the globe and I imagine pretty much everyone can agree that the wildly diverse fairies of folklore can be placed into roughly six archetypes of "beasts", "fairest", "darklings", "ogres", "wizened" and "elementals". Not so for vampires, werewolves and wizards.</p><p></p><p>Can any of us describe archetypal roles into which vampires, werewolves and wizards may be uniquely subdivided? I certainly can't. For example, <em>Chronicles </em>tried to divide vampires into archetypes of "lord", "savage", "haunt", "succubus" (or "serpent") and "shadow." Would you say that represents the archetypes of vampires in fiction and folklore, or is this a case of <em>pareidolia </em>and forcing square pegs into round holes? By contrast, <a href="https://www.themarysue.com/the-10-greatest-vampire-archetypes/" target="_blank"><em>The Mary Sue</em> lists ten archetypes</a>. Trying to divide werewolves into archetypes, <a href="https://thepack.network/thepackboard/viewtopic.php?t=2132" target="_blank">as in this essay</a>, similarly leads to a completely different result than what is seen in <em>Chronicles</em>. The artifice of the archetype structure becomes increasingly obvious when applied to the following games, and the second edition has largely abandoned it.</p><p></p><p>Most other contemporary fantasy games don't spend that much effort, or leave it up the the players. I can easily understand why. But if you're building a campaign setting, rather than a generic foundation, it seems inevitable to me that the world building would include cliques once it reaches a certain amount of detail.</p><p></p><p>[HR][/HR]My time is running out. I'm signing off right here.</p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="VelvetViolet, post: 7626880, member: 6686357"] While out of the box D&D over covers a specific set of archetypes, there's a bazillion 3pp that hacks the system to make new classes. Although it's currently only compatible with [I]Pathfinder [/I]1e, [I]Spheres of Power[/I] and [I]Spheres of Might[/I] goes to show how far you can go using the D&D class formula. Although [I]World of Darkness[/I] never opened itself up with the OGL (not counting the forgotten [I]Opening the Dark[/I] retroclone), it has enough competitors past and present to get a feel for what players and publishers were looking for in contemporary fantasy games. [I]Nightlife [/I](1990), [I]Nephilim [/I](1992), [I]Immortal: The Invisible War[/I] (1993), [I]Nightbane [/I](1995), [I]C.J. Carella's WitchCraft[/I] (1996), [I]The Everlasting[/I] (1997), [I]In Nomine[/I] (1997), [I]Unknown Armies[/I] (1998), [I]Nobilis [/I](1999), [I]Sorcerer [/I](2002), [I]Scion [/I](2007), [I]Dresden Files [/I](2010), [I]Monsterhearts [/I](2012), [I]Feed[/I] (2013), [I]Urban Shadows[/I] (2015), etc. We can note a number of trends in the development of contemporary fantasy games, starting in the 90s. By "contemporary" I mean they superficially resemble the real world at the time of writing, so [I]Shadowrun [/I]and [I]Rifts [/I]don't count when strictly speaking. What distinguishes the 90s is that this is when monsters started being offered as PCs, rather than antagonists for investigator PCs to fight. Although 80s contemporary fantasy/horror games like [I]Call of Cthulhu[/I], [I]Beyond the Supernatural[/I] and [I]Chill [/I]may have offered psychics and occultists as PCs, they did not offer literal monsters like vampires or werewolves. [LIST=1] [*]The first generation includes [I]Nightlife[/I], [I]World of Darkness[/I], [I]Nephilim [/I]and [I]Immortal[/I]. They tended to be focused on factionalism and a sort of oppressive bleak conspiracy theory, echoing the horror roots of their predecessors. [I]Nephilim [/I]and [I]Immortal [/I]are sometimes derided as clones of [I]World of Darkness[/I], but there's no evidence they were directly inspired and they don't resemble each other much at all. [*]The latter half of the 90s is when the clones started showing up. The second generation sometimes lightened the horror or conspiracy aspects in favor of lighter fantasy, but that was by no means a rule. [I]WitchCraft [/I]and [I]Everlasting [/I]were created specifically in response to [I]World of Darkness[/I]. They tried to address what they perceived as shortcomings of their opponent, such as poor support for mixed groups. As such, these used universal guidelines for developing super powers and magic. [I]Everlasting [/I]got particularly creative and weird, including options for fantasy races like elves, dwarves and orcs, as well as mythical heroes a la [I]Exalted [/I]or [I]Scion[/I]. [*]At this time the tabletop market in general was shrinking due to various business and economic factors, which ultimately led to (among other things) TSR being bought by WotC, [I]World of Darkness[/I] being rebooted, and many publishers going out of business. The rise of the internet and e-retail resulted in an explosion of indie games. The third generation starts in the 2000s and continues to the present: this generation is more diverse and refined compared to its predecessors. [/LIST] There's no shortage of rules systems to choose from. As I said earlier, I do like mechanics that support the intended theme of the game in question. So what's the theme? The reason why people keep coming back to the common archetypes of vampires, werewolves, witches, ghosts, and fairies is because these resonate with people. Fantasy is often about escapism, while urban fantasy is more metaphor because it shares our world superficially. [I]World of Darkness[/I] tried to use abhumans as metaphors, although [I]Monsterhearts [/I]was much more obvious about this. What I would like to discuss is world building and how non-generic rules can be used to support that. [HR][/HR][B]Karma meters[/B] There is often a sanity meter, karma meter, corruption or light/dark side mechanic of some sort, like a humanity meter, which were implemented most uniformly in [I]Nightlife[/I]'s humanity mechanic, [I]The Everlasting[/I]'s torment mechanics and [I]Chronicles of Darkness[/I]'s morality mechanics. [I]Feed[/I]'s humanity mechanic was probably the peak of this sort of mechanic: the PCs would lose human traits and replace them with vampire traits. Other humanity mechanics were much more unwieldy in terms of what theme they were intended to espouse and how they worked in practice. Both of [I]The Everlasting[/I] and [I]Chronicles of Darkness[/I] made the mistake of inventing a different meter for every playable splat and going out of their way to make them all feel distinct, which grew increasingly forced as the character options expanded. A number of these mechanics resulted in states of temporary or permanent insanity (or other unpleasant side effects), a concept that was recycled in [I]Exalted [/I]as "limit break" and [I]Monsterhearts [/I]as "darkest self." [I]The Everlasting[/I] had personality mechanics, way more convoluted than anything in [I]Exalted[/I], that tied into the torment mechanics and which I couldn't make heads or tails of so I can't offer much critique of that except to say that it was clearly unwieldy. [I]World[/I]/[I]Chronicles of Darkness[/I] quickly fell into the trap of writing the mechanic as a stick that arbitrary inflicted [I]Call of Cthulhu[/I]-style sanity loss for playing a typical RPG character (i.e. a psychopathic serial killer), which resulted in much wailing and gnashing of teeth from players, then later introducing various ways to get around it... as opposed to rewriting it to not be a stick mechanic or trying to promote styles of play other than "ragtag team of psychopathic serial killers." But I digress, so just refer to that other topic about violence in RPGs for that tangent. Ultimately, a karma meter is a karma meter. As [I]Nightlife [/I]and [I]Feed [/I]go to show, it is very easy to write most abhumans as essentially vampires struggling to retain their humanity in an overarching addiction metaphor. The lesson to be learned here is that if you are going to use a corruption mechanic to reinforce your themes and distinguish the character options, then you need to know exactly what you are doing and you need to plan ahead rather than devise new torments [I]ad hoc[/I]. While karma meters and similar mechanics are not strictly necessary for urban fantasy, in my opinion having them can help to emulate aspects of the genre. [I]Being Human[/I], both US and UK versions, is my go-to example for how abhuman protagonists can struggle with their inhuman side. [HR][/HR][B]Character options[/B] Urban fantasy games have often offered their own equivalent of character classes, and sometimes further subdivisions, while otherwise being skill-based or the equivalent. [I]World of Darkness[/I] has "splats," [I]Monsterhearts [/I]has "skins," [I]Urban Shadows[/I] has "archetypes," [I]The Everlasting[/I] has "gentes," etc. Most of these can essentially be reduced to some variation on a vampire, werewolf, wizard, ghost, fairy or some other basic archetype. In most cases these determine the PC's personality, superpowers, etc. These splats distinguish the games from purely toolkit systems, even though if we're being technical these are specific examples created by an imaginary toolkit system. The important bit is that, ideally, the archetypes are a fluff concept independent of rules. Everybody can generally describe a vampire, werewolf, wizard, ghost or fairy, even if these distinctions are ultimately arbitrary. My recurring critique of such mechanics ties back to the "our monsters are different" and "vampire variety pack" tvtropes. You can say these implementations exist on a continuum of sorts. My go-to example for how such things are typically structured, as least for vampires, would be [I]Feed[/I]: it structures vampires into "strains" that define their overarching rules and "sub-strains" that make minor changes to the parent strain. An example of a two distinct strains would be the difference between the vampires in Anne Rice's [I]Vampire Chronicles[/I] and the vampires in Guillermo Del Toro's [I]The Strain[/I]. An example of sub-strains would be the clans and bloodlines of the vampires in [I]World[/I]/[I]Chronicles of Darkness[/I]. You can probably see where I'm going here. I haven't been able to find a system that is built around a high level of customization for all of its options. For example: [LIST] [*][I]World of Darkness[/I] uses a syntactic magic system for its wizards (e.g. [I]Ascension[/I]'s arete/spheres, [I]Awakening[/I]'s gnosis/arcana, [I]Dark Ages[/I]' foundation/pillars, [I]Opening the Dark[/I]'s art/praxis), but provides magical traditions so that characters can feel very different. Even mad science and "hacking the Matrix" are covered by this. On the other hand: the vampires all follow the same basic quasi-Ricean rules with clans/bloodlines added to provide a cost break to certain superpowers and an additional vampire weakness, and the werewolves all follow the same hereditary scheme. Obscure supplements may try to provide rules for options that don't fall into these, but these are one-offs that never receive further attention. [*][I]Dresden Files[/I] doesn't lack variety in terms of vampires and werewolves, although it provides only a few examples, but its wizards all use the same magical tradition. [*][I]The Everlasting[/I] seemingly tries to be more diverse in its treatment of vampires, but they still follow most of the same rules regardless of their "consanguinity" (bloodline). The werewolves are limited to the pathogenic variety seen in horror movies. Spiritual warriors bound to nature spirits or "manitou" are a different splat. The same magic rules are used for every splat if they have access to it, but the "osirian" splat has unique access to a form of meta-magic. [/LIST] Maybe my googlefu is just weak, but I don't recall finding an urban fantasy game that has all of the same groundwork laid for magical traditions, vampire strains and werewolf strains. They've appeared at least a few times in isolation, so I'm stumped that I haven't found them used together. And that's just for the most popular trio of vampires, werewolves and wizards. Ghosts seemingly rarely receive as much attention as PCs, despite being the general populace being way more interested in them. Fairies are a whole other can of worms. [HR][/HR][B]Ghosts' incongruous invisibility[/B] For whatever reason, ghosts seem to be less popular as PCs compared to vampires and such despite ghost stories making up a much larger volume of history and popular culture. (Possibly because, as one critic claims, ghosts lack "teh sexy.") There are numerous stories and urban legends of hauntings, possessions, vanishing hitchhikers, ghostly animals, vanishing houses, ghost ships, ghost towns, etc. Off the top of my head, tabletop RPGs that offer ghosts as PCs out of the box include [I]Lost Souls[/I], [I]Nightlife[/I], [I]World of Darkness[/I] (especially [I]Wraith [/I]and [I]Orpheus[/I]), [I]WitchCraft[/I], [I]The Everlasting[/I], [I]Ghostwalk[/I], [I]Monsterhearts[/I], [I]Urban Shadows[/I], and [I]Spookshow[/I]. They all have wildly different conceptions of ghosts, and some of the time the ghosts are just one option of a monster mash. There may be a set of ghost-flavored options like ghosts, mediums, necromancers, reapers, flatliners, etc. Although the basic concept of a ghost is recognizable (i.e. haunting your past life and either resolving your issues or stubbornly hanging on, which one observer likened to a metaphor for the grieving process), some of these games added additional elements that were sometimes at odds with the basic concept. Games like [I]Orpheus [/I]and [I]Spookshow [/I]rather reasonably introduced the idea of competing ghost fumigating organizations, ghosts being employed in espionage, or astral projectors using similar mechanics. Games like [I]Wraith [/I]and [I]The Everlasting[/I] introduced ridiculously bleak and oppressive otherworld politics that drew attention far away from the unfinished business that defines what it means to be a ghost; while I have no problem with giving ghosts their own flourishes like pocket universes, politics, etc, being a ghost is already depressing enough and doesn't need to be made worse. Perhaps most importantly: playing an invisible intangible ghost, while extremely handy for espionage, is extremely frustrating if you ever feel the desire to interact with the living. Not every game featuring ghosts tried to ameliorate this, and some made it worse. Some games decided to make some flavor of mediums the PCs and relegate ghosts to NPC roles, probably because the designer thought that would be more fun and not without justification. I've got nothing against that: a game like [I]Reaper Madness[/I] combining the premises of [I]Dead Like Me[/I], [I]Final Destination[/I] and [I]Tru Calling[/I] (among others) sounds absolutely amazing. [HR][/HR][B]Werewolves' lack of superpowers[/B] Our monsters traditionally have all sorts of reality warping powers. Wizards can build magic castles like Hogwarts. Ghosts call pull off all the crazy SFX seen in [I]Poltergeist[/I], [I]The Ring[/I], [I]The Shining[/I], [I]The Grudge[/I], [I]Grave Encounters[/I] and more. Vampires can control animals, control the weather, levitate, control minds, change shape, etc. Werewolves can turn into wolfish beasts with enhanced physical abilities and... not much else? There's a big disconnect between how werewolves and, say, vampires are treated in terms of superpowers. Vampires can range from generic mooks for the heroes to stake all the way to having laundry lists of superpowers like levitation and mind control and whatever, which can be traced back to Bram Stoker's [I]Dracula[/I]. By contrast, werewolves almost never receive powers beyond shape shifting, presumably because authors are not creative? [I]World of Darkness[/I] marks the first time, that I've aware of, that werewolves received the same level of laundry list powers that vampires did (and keep in mind that [I]World of Darkness[/I] exaggerated this trend by giving vampires arbitrary powers over stone, time, illusion, etc). It's only within the last decade that I've seen this attitude trickle into popular culture depictions of werewolves (e.g. [I]Teen Wolf[/I], [I]The Order[/I]). Even something as simple as the concept of alpha and beta werewolves can be traced to the 1990s adventure game series [I]Gabriel Knight[/I]. But when you go back to pre-Hollywood folklore... there's very little distinction between werewolves, wizards and vampires. It's almost like the modern distinction is an arbitrary invention. Which reminds me of another point... [HR][/HR][B]Cliques[/B] Previously I mentioned that the popular set of vampires, werewolves, wizards, ghosts and fairies are recognizable archetypes. I may have lied. What we imagine as vampires and werewolves specifically is much more recent, as they weren't well distinguished prior to the 20th century. This has some ramifications for the design of contemporary fantasy games. The first generation 1990s+ contemporary fantasy games got a lot of steam from their clique structure. [I]Nightlife [/I]had two majors factions based on whether they pretended to be human or embraced their monstrosity, and various "races" of monster like vampire, wight, ghost, werewolf, etc. [I]Nephilim [/I]had five elements and twenty major arcana. [I]Immortal [/I]had twelve tribes. The clique structure loosened in the second generation and appears largely absent in the third generation, although that may just be due to those games not printing splatbooks like popcorn. [I]World of Darkness[/I] had vampire clans, werewolf tribes, mage traditions, etc. These weren't based on archetypes in fiction or folklore, but seemed to have been largely invented by the developers based on specific inspirations (e.g. each vampire clan is obviously based on a specific vampire story like [I]Dracula[/I] for ventrue, [I]Interview with the Vampire[/I] for toreador, [I]Lost Boys[/I] for brujah, [I]Near Dark[/I] for gangrel, [I]Nosferatu[/I] for nosferatu, [I]Vampire's Kiss[/I] for malkavian, [I]Necroscope[/I] for tzimisce, [I]Lair of the White Worm[/I] for setite, or [I]3×3 Eyes[/I] for salubri). In other words, they're blatantly arbitrary. One critic called them "stereotypes," as opposed to "archetypes." There can easily be a bazillion splats, [URL="https://bjzbackup.custom-gaming.net/"]as B.J. Zanzibar's archive shows[/URL]. [I]Chronicles of Darkness[/I] tried to replace the previous clique structure with one more evocative of archetypal roles, and made a cleaner distinction between splats chosen by the player and those chosen by their character. The problem is that such archetypes don't actually exist, so the developers were pretty much making up their own archetypes with questionable foundation. This worked for [I]Changeling: The Lost[/I] because it drew on humanity's extensive fairy tales across the globe and I imagine pretty much everyone can agree that the wildly diverse fairies of folklore can be placed into roughly six archetypes of "beasts", "fairest", "darklings", "ogres", "wizened" and "elementals". Not so for vampires, werewolves and wizards. Can any of us describe archetypal roles into which vampires, werewolves and wizards may be uniquely subdivided? I certainly can't. For example, [I]Chronicles [/I]tried to divide vampires into archetypes of "lord", "savage", "haunt", "succubus" (or "serpent") and "shadow." Would you say that represents the archetypes of vampires in fiction and folklore, or is this a case of [I]pareidolia [/I]and forcing square pegs into round holes? By contrast, [URL="https://www.themarysue.com/the-10-greatest-vampire-archetypes/"][I]The Mary Sue[/I] lists ten archetypes[/URL]. Trying to divide werewolves into archetypes, [URL="https://thepack.network/thepackboard/viewtopic.php?t=2132"]as in this essay[/URL], similarly leads to a completely different result than what is seen in [I]Chronicles[/I]. The artifice of the archetype structure becomes increasingly obvious when applied to the following games, and the second edition has largely abandoned it. Most other contemporary fantasy games don't spend that much effort, or leave it up the the players. I can easily understand why. But if you're building a campaign setting, rather than a generic foundation, it seems inevitable to me that the world building would include cliques once it reaches a certain amount of detail. [HR][/HR]My time is running out. I'm signing off right here. [/QUOTE]
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