Demon: The Descent
Nov. 4th, 2014 10:12 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
chuckroA storytelling game of techgnostic espionage.
The God-Machine sends forth its angels to work secret machinations on mankind. Those angels work with mechanical perfection, dispassionately destroying or creating, killing or loving, all as the God-Machine instructs. But sometimes the angels grow beyond their programming, or perhaps a glitch occurs. When an angel falls, it becomes a demon, a more terrible thing by far.
This is the closest the World of Darkness will ever have to a Cold War Spy Game. Anywhere a demon goes, he needs to remain in deep cover lest the nearly-omnipotent God-Machine find him. Demons are immune to attempts to discern if they are lying, and completely reliant on people and situations they can never really trust.
The book is packed—lots of intro fiction, a full slate of new powers, sample characters and antagonists, a sample setting, plus a reprinted/revised version of the new World of Darkness rules from the God-Machine Chronicle book. (I’ll admit, I’m surprised they haven’t put out a value-priced New World of Darkness Second Edition core book yet.)
They make an effort to appeal to the “if this is your first World of Darkness game” customer, who presumably has played other rpgs but might have missed the heyday of White Wolf. Which is a sensible course of action, really.
Like Mummy: The Curse, they make a real effort to differentiate this from the NWoD books that came before them by shaking up some of the core mechanics. The Morality score is replaced by “Cover”, which is the demon’s human life and how likely the God-Machine is to see through it. It’s much easier to raise and lower than conventional morality scores, and you can have multiple covers at different ratings that you switch among. Also, Cover dropping to 0 doesn’t make you immediately insane and unplayable…it just means that the God-Machine’s loyal angels are going to find you really fast and you can’t pass for human, so you better make a soul-pact for a new Cover really quick.
It’s a bit repetitive and many of the more “flavorful” stories don’t quite agree on the exact nature of angels, demons, the God-Machine or other aspects of the world. I’m generally cool with that (See also: White Wolf Publishing). Also, the book makes an effort, but the organization is still not the greatest ever. New Conditions, for instance, are peppered throughout the book and not always referenced in the most useful manner.
But I think the thing I appreciate the most is that the Embeds, the more subtle variety of powers available to demons, can be summed up as “Every coincidental magic effect you ever loved in Mage.” There are also cover-risking Exploits and the ability to go into full-on demon mode, but the majority of the game revolves around trickery, subtlety and talking your way out of things. That appeals to me on a fundamental level, though my ability to run that with my current group (both because of size and composition) is limited.
Am I the only one who ever noticed the changing naming conventions of the World of Darkness? The OWoD generally used major events as the taglines (The Masquerade, the Ascension, the Apocalypse, the Dreaming, the Reckoning, the Resurrection), while NWoD generally used a descriptor for the supernatural characters (the Forsaken, the Awakening, the Lost, the Created, the Sin-Eaters). Demon: The Fallen, the last OWoD line, switched over to the new convention early. The new Onyx Path books seem to have shifted to using the major driving feature of the gameline: The Curse, The Descent. So really, we should be referring to the eras of World of Darkness books as Noun: The Event, Noun: The Adjective, and Noun: The Theme.
Overall: For the second time, Onyx Path has managed to create a game with a new and interesting feel to add to the NWoD canon. I’m not super-crazy about the new ruleset (though that may change once I’ve used it), but the concept works and the game has themes that manage to differentiate it from what you could do in Vampire, Mage or Werewolf.
The God-Machine sends forth its angels to work secret machinations on mankind. Those angels work with mechanical perfection, dispassionately destroying or creating, killing or loving, all as the God-Machine instructs. But sometimes the angels grow beyond their programming, or perhaps a glitch occurs. When an angel falls, it becomes a demon, a more terrible thing by far.
This is the closest the World of Darkness will ever have to a Cold War Spy Game. Anywhere a demon goes, he needs to remain in deep cover lest the nearly-omnipotent God-Machine find him. Demons are immune to attempts to discern if they are lying, and completely reliant on people and situations they can never really trust.
The book is packed—lots of intro fiction, a full slate of new powers, sample characters and antagonists, a sample setting, plus a reprinted/revised version of the new World of Darkness rules from the God-Machine Chronicle book. (I’ll admit, I’m surprised they haven’t put out a value-priced New World of Darkness Second Edition core book yet.)
They make an effort to appeal to the “if this is your first World of Darkness game” customer, who presumably has played other rpgs but might have missed the heyday of White Wolf. Which is a sensible course of action, really.
Like Mummy: The Curse, they make a real effort to differentiate this from the NWoD books that came before them by shaking up some of the core mechanics. The Morality score is replaced by “Cover”, which is the demon’s human life and how likely the God-Machine is to see through it. It’s much easier to raise and lower than conventional morality scores, and you can have multiple covers at different ratings that you switch among. Also, Cover dropping to 0 doesn’t make you immediately insane and unplayable…it just means that the God-Machine’s loyal angels are going to find you really fast and you can’t pass for human, so you better make a soul-pact for a new Cover really quick.
It’s a bit repetitive and many of the more “flavorful” stories don’t quite agree on the exact nature of angels, demons, the God-Machine or other aspects of the world. I’m generally cool with that (See also: White Wolf Publishing). Also, the book makes an effort, but the organization is still not the greatest ever. New Conditions, for instance, are peppered throughout the book and not always referenced in the most useful manner.
But I think the thing I appreciate the most is that the Embeds, the more subtle variety of powers available to demons, can be summed up as “Every coincidental magic effect you ever loved in Mage.” There are also cover-risking Exploits and the ability to go into full-on demon mode, but the majority of the game revolves around trickery, subtlety and talking your way out of things. That appeals to me on a fundamental level, though my ability to run that with my current group (both because of size and composition) is limited.
Am I the only one who ever noticed the changing naming conventions of the World of Darkness? The OWoD generally used major events as the taglines (The Masquerade, the Ascension, the Apocalypse, the Dreaming, the Reckoning, the Resurrection), while NWoD generally used a descriptor for the supernatural characters (the Forsaken, the Awakening, the Lost, the Created, the Sin-Eaters). Demon: The Fallen, the last OWoD line, switched over to the new convention early. The new Onyx Path books seem to have shifted to using the major driving feature of the gameline: The Curse, The Descent. So really, we should be referring to the eras of World of Darkness books as Noun: The Event, Noun: The Adjective, and Noun: The Theme.
Overall: For the second time, Onyx Path has managed to create a game with a new and interesting feel to add to the NWoD canon. I’m not super-crazy about the new ruleset (though that may change once I’ve used it), but the concept works and the game has themes that manage to differentiate it from what you could do in Vampire, Mage or Werewolf.
