Chronicles Of Darkness - Tumblr Posts

Have you played GEIST : The Sin-Eaters ?

By White Wolf

Everyone has a regret when they die. You realize you didn’t leave behind a legacy, maybe there was something you didn’t want to let go, maybe it occurred to you that you wasted your life. At the very moment of death, something deep inside cries out with this regret, begging to be saved and something answers. A Geist is a powerful ghost, forever changed by drinking from a river of death. It finds your last moments and answers for your cry at a second chance. It strikes a Bargain. If you decline, you will die then and there with all your regrets. If you accept, you let the Geist resurrect you with its ghostly powers under the condition the Geist shares your body. You have accepted.

You are alive once again. Your skin is a healthy glow, you still need to eat and breathe. You think you used to, speak like you used to. Biologically, you are alive once more. Spiritually, you are deader than a doorknob. You have been bound to a Geist who is what is literally keeping you alive. You’re no longer a human, you are now a Sin-Eater. You are counted amongst the dead now, you see ghosts wandering the world and haunting their attachments. You see how ghosts form their societies to escape the oppressive stranglehold of the underworld and its chthonic gods.

As a Sin-Eater you have developed strange new powers alongside your Geist. With these powers and the keys formed by the deaths of ghosts to unlock the gates of the underworld and explore and fight back the Underworld all the while helping both the dead and the living. Form a Krewe, a quasi religious group of Sin-Eaters, humans and even other ghosts that have come together with the same goals. You are bound to both the living and the dead, you are the what stands between life and death.

People please stop deadnaming the Chronicle of Darkness she has transitioned from New World of Darkness for like 10 years.

By the way it’s crazy to me that there’s an online culture that seems to promote a strong niche market for stories about trauma, myth and fantasy, and the wonders and perils of personal identity, AND YET Changeling: The Lost isn’t a smash hit.

Like obviously it’s one of the more popular Chronicles of Darkness games but it should take the world by storm. It’s not even my favorite and I think it should be the most popular, just cause the premise is that appealing.

(If you’re wondering, yes, my blog is largely gonna consist of me being like “Aren’t CofD games good?” for awhile, it’s the mood I’m in.)

I’ve been spending a lot of time thinking about the dynamics between one of the Bound and their geist, the weird and terrifying intimacy of a body shared between its owner and a thing so changed by time and the essence of death it is nearly alien.

It’s the kind of relationship that is both incredibly distant and intensely personal. Two strangers occupying the same vessel, and getting glimpses of one another’s thoughts just by the sheer closeness of that.

From the Bound’s perspective, she is the specter always there, watching and judging him, replacing his conscience, since he can’t help but evaluate himself through her eyes rather than his own.

From the geist’s, he’s the still-beating heart that makes her remember the pain, the purpose, the potential— it was lost to her, but now he is what keeps her tied to this world that has changed so much over so many long, silent years.

Those perspectives blur, and while neither loses themselves, they do gain the other. It is horror, to never be alone; it is bliss, to never be abandoned again.

So tell me, what’s your overall thoughts on Mummy: The Curse, and what are these off-canon ideas you mentioned?

God this has been sitting here a while.

Long story short: Mummy is one of my favorite games. I think that the time travel/alternate continuities aspect of it was absolutely genius, there's so much you can do storywise with it. The powers are satisfying and well-designed, I love how cults are baked into the gameplay, it's just generally a really solid and underrated game.

Also, the Mummies on Mars setting? Literally the coolest fucking thing that has ever been done in Chronicles of Darkness and it has so much competition for that title.

However.

I really don't like they gave a concrete history of Irem. I think that both ruins the mystique of it and having a one true history undermines the uncertainty of Mummy. I think part of the horror comes from not knowing what kind of world you'll wake up into, or if it's even close to what you think you should know. I'd have preferred something like the story seeds that you see in a lot of other games, and I really like the idea that even when you get a bunch of high-Memory mummies together, they're always going to have details of Irem that just don't quite line up together. To me that also helps emphasize how genuinely lost Irem is.

...oh, also I just think if someone is deep into Sybaris, they should perceive the mummy that inflicted it either as having aspects of the Judge they serve, or as the animal representative of their Decree. No reason other than it's cool.

Ok, so.

In the World Of Darkness games - both of them - vampires are paralysed if they have a stake through their hearts. And this is considered "one of their weaknesses is having a stake through their heart"

But if you ram a stake through a human's heart, they just fucking die, which I think we would all agree is a worse consequence then being temporarily paralysed.

Ergo, by any reasonable standard, it's actually humans who are vulnerable to stakes through the heart, while vampires are resistant to them.

So what the fuck?

Pictures with my nWOD OCs, both old and new :D

Starting with Promethean the Created

Sharla, my Frankenstein gorl acting as a loyal knight for my Galatea boi Narkizo. Silly not-yet-people through whom I explore my own existential crisis. I like them :D

And now, Changeling the Lost! Under the cut cause the post is long already.

I have a whole custom freehold (it doesn't work properly cause I messed up lore a lot lol), and I mostly draw local King of Summer, Adlar Dreik, a Draconic Fairest.

He is kinda young for the position of King (he got it when he was seventeen through some sort of revolution, which sounds both much more dramatic and much less draining than it was) and he is not very well liked (except for a few other changelings, one of whom you can see in one of the pictures ;)), so he is struggling.

And this is a "what-if" scenario of Adlar if he was a True Fae and not (technically) a changeling.

And now we have another broken redhead confronted by someone about his lies, and a local Chirurgeon. I'm now thinking they could have been smoking buddies or something, but they would more likely have a passive aggressive "I hate that you are here" type of conversation. Oh well.

How it is going vs how it started

I spent some time staring at my Galatea OC for Promethean the Created... And then he, who was made with "spoiled, but nice kid" vibes in mind, suddenly revealed to me that he's kinda batshit insane, which I didn't plan for at all x')

Yeah, Narkizo is disobeying his creator's (mine) ideas. As a Promethean should, I suppose. That's why, using that knowledge, I drew a picture, which may be the best thing I've drawn in a while. Under the cut you can see what Narkizo was like before this reveal. He's still silly and goofy and affectionate towards Sharla, my Frankenstein girl, but now he has some sinister depth to him >:D

My pathetic little mew mew aka my Changeling the Lost OC.

He's an Elemental Fireheart.

Also he's a Loyalist. Which means he is out of Arcadia but still serves True Fae. These sad eyes will be the last thing you'll see before he sells you out to Gentry 😌

So, a bit of disclaimer. This is a Beast the Primordial OC. He is based on a rewrite of original game. I love the idea of making characters out of something that scares me, I've done it since childhood and it has always felt therapeutic. It's a direction I'm going in with this guy, for example. And it really is a shame that a gameline that could have given me a game made for this was partially written by a messed up person. I do not support him, his actions, or his ideas, obviously. That's why, once again, I'll be using a rewrite.

Having said that, here is Eric vibing in his native reality, sort of custom-made dream (or, more precisely, nightmare) called Lair in game's term. I've also put a doodle with Eric's design under the cut.

Eric is based on fear of exposure, but in an indirect way: he is dedicated to the time, when I, thanks to the religious household I grew up in, was terrified that someone was hearing my thoughts, no matter how terrible and sinful or not. That's what Eric is all about.

His Lair, for example, has a trait where anything one thinks in there is automatically said out loud. Which does mean that Eric has heard some really weird, to put it lightly, things, and sometimes he gets psychic damage while trying to scare someone to feed from their fears. But actually this experience is slowly teaching Eric not to be scared of accidental thoughts, even weird or "sinful", and especially not to stigmatize people based on their intrusive thoughts, because words and actions speak louder and mean much more.

I have a lot of OCs loosely (or not) related to "1984" by George Orwell. They are incredibly bad in terms of conveying the horrors™, but they are interesting to think about. That's all I need. Afterall, I feel like Orwell has conveyed the horrors™ pretty well already.

Some more info under the cut.

From left to right, we have:

- Winston, a Limbus company OC. I'm powering through the game right now, it's right up my alley, I'm so glad my friend talked me into it. I still have to catch-up with all the lore and storyline, so I won't talk about Winston much, he's still a work in progress in a way. All I'll say is that he has a pet rat, formerly a lab rat, which he named "Big Brother". This is pretty fucked up reference, yeah, but I have an explanation in-universe. Besides, I like converting the horrors to something silly. This helps me cope, y'know?

- George, OC from an original setting. Okay, if I'm being honest, he was a BSD OC at first, but that was in the past, and he was a very different person then. Now he's a protagonist of a utopian (?) world, where the AI watching over it makes anything to make everyone happy... Which means that people being upset is treated kinda like people being sick and in dire need of a cure. In this world, three boys, George, Ray, and Evgeny, all named after authors of famous distopias (I'm so sneaky with my references /sarcasm) just want to be able to grieve over their personal tragedies in peace.

- Eric and Julia, my OCs for Beast the Primordial's rewrite. I've talked about Eric a bit in one of previous posts, as for Julia, well, she's a Hero to Eric's Beast, however, she doesn't enjoy being wrapped up in the narrative of the Dreaming (which is what happening with Heroes in BtP rewrite), so in-between fighting with Eric (since that is the whole reason she exists) she tries to sustain a semi-friendly relationship with him. They both try to.

I regretted killing my sim and I brought him back wrong and now he won't stop looking up at me

Alchemists (Chronicles of Darkness)

I’m a lot of things, but one of them is a science person. I’m driven to learn about the new and discover the unknown. All reality is one great big puzzle, and I get to see how the pieces fit together in new and exciting ways. So in fiction, I tend to have sympathy with academics, scientists, and explorers. I will die on my bed raving about how science wasn’t the problem in Jurassic Park. The problem was capitalism.

But alchemists? Alchemists in the Chronicles of Darkness scare me. Alchemists are the dark side of scientific progress, which transgresses and doesn’t care about the harm it causes. Alchemists are the western tradition’s deep connection with imperialism and its arrogance in disenfranchising other knowledge traditions. They are the “ends justify the means” people and the “it’s for your own good” people. They want knowledge, they want power (even if they won’t admit it to themselves), and they ultimately don’t care about anything that stops them from getting either.

Alchemists are mortals who tap into the secrets of Pyros, allowing them to learn Promethean’s Distillations, modify their bodies, and gain Dread Powers. Body modification? In a game crawling with body horror? Totally not going to backfire on you, but you do you. The catch is that most Alchemists get the barest trickle of Pyros and can’t stablize much of it at a time - unless they steal it from Prometheans. And those modifications? They need Vitrol to do that, so at best, they are delaying a Promethean’s progress toward becoming human for their own game. Most of the time, they just murder them.

If Promethean: the Created is a game that embraces humanity, its Alchemists represent the rejection of human nature. If you want to play a game where transhumanism leads to the loss of what makes humanity important, Alchemists are a great place to start.

Graveyard Gary’s been at this a long, long time. He considers himself a reanimator, in the “grand” tradition of Herbert West, while rather missing the point about West’s grizzly fate. In fact, Gary’s missed the point so completely that he didn’t even notice when his body died, but by that point, it was so laced with Spark of Life Distillations that it just kept moving. As a result, Gary’s lack of heartbeat and unblinking stare unnerve anyone who visits his cemetery, but other than the faint smell of formaldehyde and ozone, there is no decay. Gary wouldn’t even mind even if it was pointed out to him; this is the best he’s felt in years. Honestly. Mostly. Probably.

N0V4 thinks he’s big shit, with the corner office in his father’s company and a hacker alias, so he can pretend he’s on the worker’s side. He’s not untalented, but he’s a relentless taskmaster who isn’t half as bright as those who work for him. Unfortunately for every Promethean who comes near Toronto, the world of corporate ruthlessness trained him well for being an Alchemist. He’s mastered various Electrification and Luciferus Distillations, he even sees the electromagnetic spectrum’s invisible colours, but now the electricity is stalking him back. An electricity spirit has latched onto N0V4’s resonance, and it has no intention of letting its food source slow down his experiments.

Good intentions, hell, and all that. Annabel started her study of Alchemy after hearing rumours of the Created and hoped to help them. She’s even knowledgeable enough about Disquietism to help Prometheans learn the Transmutation. The problem is that she now inflicts Disquiet on those around her, and the temptation to use Weaponize to her advantage grows stronger daily.

I’ve gotten my tabletop group to agree to be Mafia members using Chronicles of Darkness rules. I’m going to add supernatural time travel elements because I want to.... and even though the characters are in Nevada, I’m going to pop them back and forth between time periods.

I warned them I would have Mafia characters be in it, but not in what context. Now I have to make character sheets. I’m trying to decide Attribute and Skill tiers at the moment. Everything gets divided into primary, secondary, and tertiary (with points being allotted accordingly).

Attributes are:

Mental (intelligence, wits, resolve) Physical (strength, dexterity, stamina) Social (presence, manipulation, composure)

Skills are:

Mental (academics, computer, crafts, investigation, medicine, occult, politics, science) Physical (athletics, brawl, drive, firearms, larceny, stealth, survival, weaponry) Social (animal ken, empathy, expression, intimidation, persuasion, socialize, streetwise, subterfuge)

The characters I am using right now are Sam, Paulie, Tommy, Vito, Joe, and Henry. I think, at the moment, I have them as such: (going primary, secondary, tertiary)

Sam:   -Attributes (Mental, Physical, Social)   -Skills (Mental, Physical, Social)

Paulie:   -Attributes (Physical, Social, Mental)   -Skills (Physical, Mental, Social)

Tommy:   -Attributes (Physical, Mental, Social)   -Skills (Physical, Social, Mental)

Vito:   -Attributes (Social, Physical, Mental)   -Skills (Physical, Social, Mental)

Joe:   -Attributes (Physical, Social, Mental)   -Skills (Social, Physical, Mental)

Henry:   -Attributes (Mental, Social, Physical)   -Skills (Social, Mental, Physical)

If anyone thinks it should be changed, please do. The attribute assignments for primary, secondary, and tertiary themselves are repetitive (even if the individual attributes and skills won’t be). Essentially, they start with one dot in every attribute stat no matter what, but they get additional dots to assign to each stat (wits, manipulation, etc.) for all of the ones in their grouping. For attributes, primary gets 5 more, secondary gets 4 more, tertiary gets 3 more. With skills, none of them start with dots and penalties are used for any stat you roll that you don’t have a dot in (-1 for physical and social, -3 for mental). For skills, primary gets 11, secondary gets 7, and tertiary gets 4. Right now, I’m just trying to decide if these ratings are correct before I start really getting into it.