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Message: <blockquote data-quote="VelvetViolet" data-source="post: 8298365" data-attributes="member: 6686357">Yeah. There are ton of 90s urban fantasy games that I thought had interesting ideas and I'm frustrated that they're now essentially dead and unsupported by any communities beyond a few lingering fans (if that). Nephilim, Immortal: Invisible War, WitchCraft, The Everlasting, Nightlife, probably a bunch of others that I'm missing.World of Darkness has plenty of problems that make it unattractive to me. The mechanics are a mess, with a dozen different editions, different imprints, and whatever I can't hope to keep track of. The main reason people even seem interested in it is because of its three decades of oppressive lore, which I am not interested in at all. I don't like ecoterrorist werewolves or luddite wizards or vampire generations that get permanently weaker with distance from the progenitor. That is not reflective of the urban fantasy genre at large either and I hate being forced into a pipeline to that if I ever express interest in urban fantasy gaming.With something like D&D, you have plenty of encouragement and freedom to invent your own settings and discuss them with others. The WoD fandom is basically a brand name cult at this point that frowns upon anything remotely creative. You want to create your own setting and defy the sacred lore? They'll shun you. I hated it when I ventured into the fandom in the 2000s and I still hate it now after a decade of being away from it.I know Everlasting and WitchCraft et al were WoD heartbreakers, but they actually improved upon the aspects of WoD that I didn't like. They provided unified settings where you could play mixed splat groups and everyone ran on the same rules for superpowers. They provided lore, but it wasn't oppressive and stifling like WoD because the writers expected people to play rather than read. Nightlife did so even before WoD was a thing.Feed provides a humanity mechanic that is vastly superior to any edition of WoD, because it doesn't operate on the unfun premise of "you go crazy for doing bad things." It operates a lightside/darkside premise, where you lose human traits and replace them with vampire traits.After seeing other games implement the same ideas better, I can't stand WoD and I can't stand its undeserved market dominance. The only WoD games I can still stomach are Changeling: The Lost and Hunter: The Vigil (first editions, obviously) because they're the single most toolkit games ever released by the company even if they are held back by some WoDisms.I read about the real life Benandanti. The shifter bit is actually due to confusion with the Livonian "hounds of God." This was probably first propagated by GURPS Shapeshifters or something.I had my own ideas for shifters inspired by Dresden Files, WitchCraft, and Everlasting. The basic idea is that shifting comes from a connection to a beast totem, and the exact nature of that connection affects how the strengths and weaknesses manifest. If you're using spells or talismans to temporarily invoke a beast totem to assume animal form, then you're not going to run into problems immediately. If you're possessed by or bonded with the totem (such as due a curse, a pact, heredity, etc), then the problems start accumulating faster. If you're a spiritual warrior who draws your power from the totem (a la Everlasting's manitou splat or Liminal's werewolf splat), then you're at risk of losing your human mind to the totem's power. If you're cursed with possession (a la WitchCraft's accursed feral splat), then you have to struggle with the urges of the beast totem and may risk infecting others with the curse. That sort of thing. You do have options for ecoterrorists and enforcers of balance (owing to the shifter's liminal nature giving them superpowers because liminality), but it's not enforced by the setting. If you want to play Anne Rice-style werewolves who hunt down evil-doers, then I'd allow that.That's just the generic version, tho. In a setting where the theme was that most monsters were in fact monsters, then I'd have the bond go wrong vastly more often. Most lycanthropes would either be beasts bereft of their humanity living in the wilderness, sociopaths that prey on humans, psychotic ecoterrorists that view humanity as interlopers in the domains of their bloodthirsty nature gods, Satanists straight out of evangelical propaganda, etc.</blockquote>

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