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Message: <blockquote data-quote="VelvetViolet" data-source="post: 9835262" data-attributes="member: 6686357">I generally despise lore as irrelevant self-aggrandizing microfiction. That's one of the reasons why I dislike World of Darkness and preferred other games like C.J. Carella's WitchCraft, New World of Darkness/Chronicles of Darkness, and Nephilim.I adore WitchCraft for its broad flexible setting that more or less reflects how urban fantasy fiction was written, without all the weirdo baggage that I disliked about World of Darkness. The factions were driven by actual ideologies rather than shallow clique nonsense like "basement dwelling chud vampire" or "sneaky werewolf." The Unisystem rules and unified worldbuilding made crossover play easy. For example, the "ferals" (totemic shapeshifters) could emulate the Talbot stereotype who transforms involuntarily under the full moon or a Werewolf: The Forsaken-esque Sumerian spiritual warrior that protected the balance between the mundane and magical worlds (this was written a few years before Forsaken released, eerily enough). It would be great if the game wasn't canceled for decades and the fandom dried up.I thought Chronicles was pretty neat, even though I didn't agree with every creative decision. It wasn't WitchCraft, but it had its charms. The bloodlines, the factions, the bestiaries, the historical eras, all of it sounded neat to me. I particularly loved Hunter: The Vigil and Changeling: The Lost for their broad and flexible settings with lots of factions, powers, creatures, etc. What ruined it for me were the haters. I got viciously cyberbullied for liking it in the 2000s and early 2010s by World of Darkness fans, not to mention a bizarre fixation among the CoD fans for masochistic mechanics I despised (the morality meters are fundamentally stupid and I will die on that hill, and also I just don't like grimdark settings anymore after outgrowing my teen angst phase), which ultimately led to me just leaving the hobby because I couldn't deal with the vitriol. To this day, they still trot out fake statistics like "nWoD flopped" when <a href="https://www.enworld.org/wiki/top_rpgs/" target="_blank">the ICv2 indicates it was a huge financial success for five years straight</a> and popular enough that it got second editions in the 2010s under a different publisher. By contrast, I found my myself drawn to Nephilim for opposite reasons. That game has a lot of lore, especially in the original French version. Usually I dislike lore for being irrelevant self-aggrandizing microfiction, and to be fair a lot of the French lore seems to be exactly that, but I fell in love with the US version because it made that lore personally relevant to PCs through its past life mechanics. The PCs could be personally involved in historical intrigues, flashback to events, and engage with the legacy of their past actions. Unfortunately, the BRP mechanics were a horrible fit for this, especially since Chaosium took the messy French 1st edition rulebook as a loose foundation before just making stuff up and changing their minds mid-development and releasing supplements with new mechanics that overruled the core rules. It's this whole thing. (The French version trudged along and got lots of rules refinements, eventually abandoning BRP in the 2000s third edition in favor of a roll under d20 mechanic, with the fourth and fifth editions making up new systems due to the rights being resold multiple times. It took the French version until the 2020 fifth edition to make past lives easy to manage and possible to recall during play. It does this by simply treating past lives as skills, replacing a conventional skill system.) Also, the PCs are body snatching thetans; that allegedly rubbed players badly because it was morally repugnant... I don't understand why they would care when other games let you play puppy-eating vampires, but whatever. Anyway, poor design aside, it has thus far been the only game that made me actually like lore.</blockquote>

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