What would YOUR World of Darkness look like?

[YourSwordIsMine]

Ok, the main problem I saw with the original WoD is that it was a setting where normal people are scared of what goes bump in the night. Unfortunately, since you PLAY the thing that goes bump, it either turns into an emo drama, or a superhero game.

I would alter it so that the humans in power know about the supernatural world, and they are PISSED. They roast sabbat gangs with flame throwers, and bulldoze the Prince of the City's house at high noon. Werewolves get hunted down like dogs, and Mages eat sniper rounds if they are discovered. It's a shadow war between the Human run Technocracy (no longer related to the mages in any way) and the supernatural races, and the humans are winning.

Hunters are no longer psudo-supernatural humans. They are just people that specialize in offing the various monsters of the world.

The Camarilla still survives by hiding in plain sight, though the enforce the Masquerade more brutally than before.

The Sabbat is in open war with the humans, but are losing in all but the poorest, most corrupt countries.

The Werewolf populace still tries to fight the Wyrm, but do so more carefully than before, and are more closely tied to the spirit realm.

The Seelie court fo the Changelings has a tinuous pact with the Technocracy, and is allowed to survive because of it. This cas also caused them to be seen as traitors by the rest of the supernatural community. The Unseelie court has maintained autonomy, but since they hide amongst the Seelie court, no one has really noticed too much.

The Wraiths, having the least to do with the human world, has been largely unaffected by the changes.

The Traditions feel largely responsible for the current state of things, since the Technocracy evolved from one of their branches. They mostly try to hide, and act as a police force against Nephandi and Marauders when they are needed. The older ones see the Mage hunts as punishment for the past hubris of the Traditions, but some of the younger ones are starting to gather the other supernatural races to organize a resistance of some sort.

It's a grittier sort of feel. The supernatural races exist in the shadows, same as always, but it's no longer because they fear the other shadows. What they fear now, is the light.

Now THAT is a world of darkness I would play in!

 

[pallandrome]

I've run my alternate WoD once or twice, and it works really well. The PCs tend to either get stuck between a rock and a hard place, with the technocracy on one side and the (nephandi, sabbat, maraurders, unseelie, wyrm, ect.) on the other, or they end up joining one side or the other between the Technocracy or the Revolution (eg. the young mages who've started fighting back).

One of the nice things is that it gives an excuse for the different races to work togeather, allowing for less clunky crossovers, if you want to go that way. It required a little rebalancing (mostly to keep the were's from squishing everyone else), but not as much as one might think.

 

[Scribble]

The opening line would be: "Honey... I think I'm pregnant..."

 

[SSquirrel]

Personally, I'mnot a big fan of the Underworld-like flavor of Vampire or Werewolf. I prefer core/mortal WoD. I've considered some of the other concepts, but there's something really appealing about a mortal stumbling across the darker or mythical side of the world and struggling with the 'reality' of it. Unfortunately, everyone I know that's familiar with WoD prefers to play Vampire or Werewolf.

Just to be clear here....you DO realize that Vampire and Werewolf pre-date Underworld by quite a bit and Underworld borrowed heavily from them, not the other way around right?

My friends typically enjoyed the Vampires and Mages more than Hunter simply b/c they felt that Hunter wasn't all that well written. Later books may have been better, but it didn't impress us enough to play near-normals

I always hated Werewolf b/c if I wanted to make an anti-combat kinda guy in Mage or Vampire I could and I would always suck in combat. However, any werewolf can just wolf-out in Chrinos form and rip things to shreds. Just always felt like everything that wasn't combat was a distant 8th place.

I'm sure the system is improved, but White Wolf's whole approach to game design hasn't really changed enough for my taste. Plus, I cannot forgive them to taking Mage and turning it into a bland game about wizards.

That Mage bit at the end....QF-MF-T!! Atlantis has to be about as cliche as they could have possibly gone. The original Mage backstory actually made some reasonable sense (so long as you were ok w/considering these people existing and being behind many historic events) and if you read it, it was just an interesting read. The new Mage just leaves me cold. Mage didn't need to progress farther than 2nd Ed. I think we stayed w/2nd and Revised didn't exist, pulled in the changes in dice resolution and such from Trinity/Aberrant/Vampire Revised and called it good.

The whole NWoD is just an excuse to write a new backstory and metaplot, but not to really change very much that matters. The book, however, are exceptionally pretty

 

[hong]

Glam WoD. With shotguns. And trenchcoats.

 

[Aus_Snow]

Amaril..I'm with you on this one.

So am I, FWIW.

Haven't thought about this at all, so this is as it occurs to me. . .

I'd make 'my' WoD roughly based on Interlock (or maybe Fuzion), system-wise. So, take a note from Artesia's or CP2020's pages. This would have more impact on character creation and gameplay than one might initially assume. System *can* be like that, even though it isn't always the case.

For the setting, something a bit like 'core nWoD' actually, with lots of real-world myths, legends and fables come to life, and some strange and unsettling shifting of reality this way and that, so that the edges blur and the pieces seem. . . out of kilter. That kind of thing.

'Where life is more dreamlike and dreams more lifelike.'

Or something.

 

[Kristian Serrano]

Just to be clear here....you DO realize that Vampire and Werewolf pre-date Underworld by quite a bit and Underworld borrowed heavily from them, not the other way around right?

Very fully aware. Underworld just reinforced my negative attitude toward Vampire/Werewolf WoD chronicles.

 

[Patryn of Elvenshae]

Well, it's Dark, so you wouldn't know what it looks like.

The World is dark. You are likely to be eaten by a grue?

I think mine would look a lot like the Dresden Files, actually.

 

[JDJblatherings]

My WoD would have darned few nightclubs full of vampires. It'd be more like Salems Lot.