World of Darkness: Immortals
Apr. 4th, 2012 06:28 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
chuckroThe New World of Darkness take on mummies, along with other methods of achieving immortality, most of them rather horrifying. This was my most intriguing pick out of the $4 bin at I-Con, and it didn’t disappoint.
The original World of Darkness was characterized by its metaplot, the ongoing story of a connected, continuous world with recurring characters, events and locations. While reconciling that metaplot often required acknowledging some things were only true “from a certain point of view”, it did give a very good sense of a collective world. The New World of Darkness has taken a much more “take what you want, leave the rest” approach. The systems were designed to balance and coordinate better from the start, but the mythology and metaplots are deliberately either vague or variable.
This book is an awesome example of that. OWoD Mummies were originally a “crossover” group designed to fit into any campaign, so the writers had to take great pains to loop them into the stories of the other books in a way that collectively made sense. This book offers three major types of immortals and a dozen minor ones, then gives suggestions—mutually exclusive suggestions—for how you can loop them into the greater mythology of the other books. If you’re running Vampire, the blood bathers in this book can be tied directly into the Vampire creation myth. I love this, because I love doing world-shaking campaigns, the kind that show off the foundations of world-building. I could do one real campaign like this with the OWoD (and did—I ended the world that one time), but I could do dozens using this material.
The one complaint I might have is this book refers very heavily to The Book of Spirits as a source for additional supernatural powers, especially for the purified (the new version of Amenti mummies, at least until Mummy: The Curse comes out), who are the most detailed in their special powers. Though upon reflection, the rest of the new characters are so concept-heavy that you could drop them into OWoD or a different system with relatively few rules changes.
Which I just might do. Heh heh heh...
The original World of Darkness was characterized by its metaplot, the ongoing story of a connected, continuous world with recurring characters, events and locations. While reconciling that metaplot often required acknowledging some things were only true “from a certain point of view”, it did give a very good sense of a collective world. The New World of Darkness has taken a much more “take what you want, leave the rest” approach. The systems were designed to balance and coordinate better from the start, but the mythology and metaplots are deliberately either vague or variable.
This book is an awesome example of that. OWoD Mummies were originally a “crossover” group designed to fit into any campaign, so the writers had to take great pains to loop them into the stories of the other books in a way that collectively made sense. This book offers three major types of immortals and a dozen minor ones, then gives suggestions—mutually exclusive suggestions—for how you can loop them into the greater mythology of the other books. If you’re running Vampire, the blood bathers in this book can be tied directly into the Vampire creation myth. I love this, because I love doing world-shaking campaigns, the kind that show off the foundations of world-building. I could do one real campaign like this with the OWoD (and did—I ended the world that one time), but I could do dozens using this material.
The one complaint I might have is this book refers very heavily to The Book of Spirits as a source for additional supernatural powers, especially for the purified (the new version of Amenti mummies, at least until Mummy: The Curse comes out), who are the most detailed in their special powers. Though upon reflection, the rest of the new characters are so concept-heavy that you could drop them into OWoD or a different system with relatively few rules changes.
Which I just might do. Heh heh heh...
