Sure would be a shame if an omnipotent being were to decide they didn’t want any evidence to be found, because of mysterious ways…

Soap Opera was my favorite as well. I would love to see a game that’s like, a soap opera but also it’s a reverse-masquerade sort of thing where the soap opera characters slowly awaken to the reality that they are in a Truman Show situation being watched by elder powers and they can’t directly talk about this or else they will be returned to the nothingness from whence they came.

Oh, I like that too! And that nothingness will always be so magical, because it could be falling down an elevator shaft, or being lost at sea in a freak lightningcane. Frozen at the top of Mt Everest? Those sorts of things always tickle me. And maybe they can come back from the nothingness after being suitably corrected by the all-powers that be?

I’m in.

I’d just like to say that all of these themes sound fun. I mostly lean toward the soap opera because it’s so particularly unique, but the mall is also pretty high up because it has a quirk to it that I find completely charming.

Soap Opera was my favorite as well. I would love to see a game that’s like, a soap opera but also it’s a reverse-masquerade sort of thing where the soap opera characters slowly awaken to the reality that they are in a Truman Show situation being watched by elder powers and they can’t directly talk about this or else they will be returned to the nothingness from whence they came.

It seems a lot of talk is on the Angels/Demons, so I wanted to share my initial thought: can we play humans, as well? I’m not sure what exactly it is, but my favorite characters in grand conflicts and battles are the small, ‘unimportant’ people caught in the middle who are just trying to live their lives and survive to another day. In a game like that, I’d love to just be a human. Heck, even if the humans don’t last long, it’d be fun to just churn out a new one when the last one expires, because character studies are kinda my jam. So I just wanted to float that thought/question out there.

Trudging over to the desk to write an update.

The Angels v Demons thing sounds like the most fun to me. I think a lot of the problematic issues (re: harmful content) can probably be solved with a sufficient staff-size, an up-front warning about what kinds of content will be unacceptable, and no hesitation to issue bans to anyone introducing that content for any reason (if it’s a weird gray area situation, issue a temporary ban, and if it happens again permaban).

I’d also try to, OOCly, frame the Angels/Demons as being more religiously-agnostic. If people WANT to play Biblical Angels and Demons (whatever that means to them), then that should be okay. But the prior post about having the “Upper Management” (on both ends of the spectrum) be more mysterious and BEYOND MORTAL KENNING would be the ideal to me.

Yeah, different groups of players will always have different lines! it’s surprising at times. Because some people definitely can’t fathom a world where stuff is out in the open, but some people can’t believe it could be hidden.

To be clear, I’m not saying that it’s more believable that supernatural things would remain hidden than found out, but that if they are out in the open that society would have absolutely no changes.

Given the choice between handwaving supernatural forces somehow remaining hidden or handwaving that society would not change one iota from having supernatural forces in the open, the former seems a lot easier to swallow than the latter. Especially if one of primary vectors of RP in the world is to consider the philosophical and metaphysical aspects of demons and angels running around.

YMMV.

I personally fall in the latter camp, especially in any modern type setting. Think of all the money the US government alone threw at investigating wild stories like ESP, etc. Factor in all the surveillance and media accessibility? I don’t think you could keep true supernatural abilities/happenings a secret.

But, I could maybe handwave for fun rp.

I’ll just note that a lot of very popular urban fantasies do just fine without a Masquerade, and I would be happy to play on a game that didn’t have one.

This is probably something we’d just have to agree to disagree on.

Grand Illuminati Conspiracies do not exist, that’s true (two people can only keep a secret if one is dead), but emergent conspiracies – that is, when everyone involved has a self-interested reason to keep silent – certainly do. And there’s plenty of examples of instances where attempts at Grand illuminati Conspiracies collapse – but then the people involved manage to coverup, gaslight, and distract the vast majority of people so that the facts never really come to light.

And even if that wasn’t the case? It’s still going to be a lot easier for players to swallow a world that is exactly like ours only there are hidden supernatural aspects than one which is exactly like ours but supernatural aspects are out and about. This is especially true of a setting in which philosophical and metaphysical thought is encouraged as part of RP.

“Think deep thoughts about the nature of good and evil and humanity’s place in the universe, but don’t think about the giant pink elephant in the room with huge symbols stomping around and screaming selected passages from Mein Kampf! Just ignore it!”

If the supernatural exists, then eventually it is going to get recorded and tested. ‘Actively hidden’ doesn’t cut it; believing that hundreds, maybe thousands, maybe tens of thousands of people (supernatural or otherwise) could keep a perfect conspiracy with no evidence of the existence of a real, active supernatural not just for years, or decades, or centuries, but millennia across every single human culture on Earth is as much a drastic violation of everything we know about social science and basic human behavior that it blows my mind even thinking about it. Nobody’s that good at keeping secrets. No, not even if their life depends on it.

The reason people laugh at Caught on Tape and Ancient Astronauts is because those things are frauds at worst, and…excited people being very credulous, often still with a profit motive, at best. If only one person in a million had a psychic power at any given time, that’s still thousands of people. People have legitimately given away top secret military documents to the internet in order to prove they were right about a mobile game. Do you think we’d last one year without someone demonstrating pyromancy or demon summoning on America’s Got Talent?

@STD IF you want to do that worldbuilding.

You don’t have to. Most modern urban fantasy doesn’t,

Sure. I said as much. You can just dictate that the world hasn’t changed. But you will also make the setting that much harder to get into or take seriously.

and a Masquerade-heavy world runs into just as much illogic as a Masquerade-absent world. Magic, or the supernatural in any regard, being an active presence in the world would result in a very different world.

I’m not sure I agree with this. It seems to me that, if supernatural stuff did exist, but was actively hidden, you’d just get the same sort of stuff we have now with Caught on Tape and Ancient Astronauts trash TV that most people laugh at.

It’s simply a lot easier to handwave the lack of massive changes to the world if stuff that would change it isn’t widely known.

That is the only truth. Everything else we do is just deciding what parts of that change we’re interested in playing with, and what parts of it we’re not. The parts we’re not, we handwave, the same way we handwave TBI when people have a punch up in a bar.

I’m not saying you can’t, only that it’s much harder to suspend disbelief.

You don’t have to. Most modern urban fantasy doesn’t, and a Masquerade-heavy world runs into just as much illogic as a Masquerade-absent world. Magic, or the supernatural in any regard, being an active presence in the world would result in a very different world.

That is the only truth. Everything else we do is just deciding what parts of that change we’re interested in playing with, and what parts of it we’re not. The parts we’re not, we handwave, the same way we handwave TBI when people have a punch up in a bar.

Setting sounds cool. I would add that in addition to In Nomine, there’s a game called Nobilis that has some really interesting takes on playing powerful celestial beings with an interest in mortal affairs.

@Pyrephox said in What original theme interests you?:

I want a bit of eldritch horror there, with true forms of multitudinous wings, eyes, and rings of divine fire.

I mean, I’m not saying this should be mandatory on any game like this but also yes I am

@Pyrephox said in What original theme interests you?:

Also, I’m not that big a fan of the Masquerade - I’d be delighted with an angel/demons setting where angels and demons were at least known OF, even if most people will never meet them, and you have, like, demons running nightclubs where people can sell their souls for a hit of the best drugs ever, or halfway houses for LGBT teens where the angelic guardian will break you in half for bothering their charges.

Honestly Masquerade was the most 90’s thing ever and just doesn’t work/isn’t fun in this format imo, but especially in a setting with literal angels and demons doesn’t even make sense to me. Why would they have any interest in pretending to not exist, unless that served some deceptive purpose on an individual level? And it kinda seems like there would just be a natural sort of light veil anyway where people would believe or not until they couldn’t refute the evidence.

Having some kind of Masquerade makes the setting easier for players to understand. Yup, there are supernatural stuffins going on, but otherwise? As far as the vast majority know? It’s all a mechanical universe.

If supernatural things were provably objective fact, it would change society in monumental ways. Why bother with science at all if you can just pray at something and get everything you want? Everyone would just form cults to their respective angel/demon. If an angel/demon doesn’t provide? Then just switch to worshiping a different one. Spirituality would become a commodity. There’d be no need of faith because there are repeatable, provable miracles and YOU BETTER PROVIDE THEM, CELESTIAL, OR I’LL JUST GO THE DEMON WHO WILL.

Is science, as a concept, even valid if one of the fundamental axioms under which it operates – that the same phenomena happen the same way everywhere in the universe – is provably incorrect?

And you’re not going to see too many atheists, either. They’d be the equivalent of flat earthers – kooks who refuse to see reality and the proof of that reality.

Among those who do still believe in something, religious strife would be rampant. Now that the supernatural is provable, everyone is going to think that their version is clearly the correct one, since even the celestials don’t know for certain. But there must be One True Faith, otherwise there wouldn’t even be angels and demons around.

Hey, there’s a provable afterlife now! I can be as reckless as I want with my life because, eh, I’ll just get sent to Heaven/Hell/be reincarnated, whatever. I can be a serial killer and it’s no big deal! All those folk will just be sent to their eternal reward/punishment/recycled. Life will become cheap if everyone knows for a fact that there’s a safety net after you die.

That’s all just off the top of my head. A society in which everyone knows for a fact that supernatural things are around would simply be entirely alien to anything we know.

Now you could just dictate that in your setting none of this happens yet everyone still knows angels and demons are wandering around, but you’re really straining willful disbelief by doing so. It’s going to make the setting much harder for people to get into or take seriously.

@Pyrephox Aww.

I just know when I played Demon the Fallen briefly, what I was really wanting out of it was In Nomine.

And I have a friend who has spent many years writing In Nomine source materials which always intrigued me.

I absolutely BELIEVE you though that the game system, which wasn’t written by SJG but rather just bought, might be just plain terrible at scale.

But I still have fond thoughts about that kind of setting. A light-hearted but earnest-not-satirical game about leading man to good or evil.

It can be terrible even right out of the box. There’s no real attempt to balance any of the angelic/demonic resonances or powers, so one angel can walk out of the box with ‘immune to fire and summons laser beams at will’ and the other has ‘can talk to fish’. Literally. Fish.

That said, it’s a GOOD TIME with the right players and a GM who can say, “I don’t care what the book says, you’re not starting with 6 celestial forces and a resonance roll that can only fail on an hostile intervention”.

I just wouldn’t MU* it again, without a different system. Some friends and I who were involved in the IN community actually started on a revised fan update, but like a lot of those things, it faded away.

I just know when I played Demon the Fallen briefly, what I was really wanting out of it was In Nomine.

And I have a friend who has spent many years writing In Nomine source materials which always intrigued me.

I absolutely BELIEVE you though that the game system, which wasn’t written by SJG but rather just bought, might be just plain terrible at scale.

But I still have fond thoughts about that kind of setting. A light-hearted but earnest-not-satirical game about leading man to good or evil.

@Pyrephox I’ve read many good things about In Nomine, and I’d invest in the line. Buy some books, learn about it, probably build a game around it.

But SJG is so hostile to MUSHes I won’t even bother.

Oh god don’t.

It’s not even a matter of the hostility (you can work around it - I briefly costaffed a game that did), but the system is TERRIBLE. Nothing is balanced, the powers are a pain in the ass for GMs, and it’s a trivially easy system to break. I would play it in a tabletop with a small group who all agree on what the aim of the game is and restrain themselves. I would not do a MU* again.

That said? The THEME and the VIBE are top notch. You can easily tune it up or down for your preferred darkness, and you can get a fantastic amount of good RP. Some of the favorite games I’ve ever been in have been In Nomine.

But take the setting/theme as an inspiration, and set the mechanics on fire.

But SJG is so hostile to MUSHes I won’t even bother.

I want a bit of eldritch horror there, with true forms of multitudinous wings, eyes, and rings of divine fire.

I mean, I’m not saying this should be mandatory on any game like this but also yes I am

@Pyrephox said in What original theme interests you?:

Also, I’m not that big a fan of the Masquerade - I’d be delighted with an angel/demons setting where angels and demons were at least known OF, even if most people will never meet them, and you have, like, demons running nightclubs where people can sell their souls for a hit of the best drugs ever, or halfway houses for LGBT teens where the angelic guardian will break you in half for bothering their charges.

Honestly Masquerade was the most 90’s thing ever and just doesn’t work/isn’t fun in this format imo, but especially in a setting with literal angels and demons doesn’t even make sense to me. Why would they have any interest in pretending to not exist, unless that served some deceptive purpose on an individual level? And it kinda seems like there would just be a natural sort of light veil anyway where people would believe or not until they couldn’t refute the evidence.

@shit-piss-love

Games like that are a perfect excuse to put your Big Thinky Hat on and get into philosophical or ethical debates, muse about existence, etc all from the POV of a being that can have a vastly different experience and outlook than a human but also be very familiar. It can be fun to explore what the implications of that world are!

I’m still trying to figure out what would be the motivation for characters to interact in a game with this setup. If the main concern of PCs are manipulations of the NPC mortal world, what are two PCs going to RP about other than telling each other the details of presumably GM-narrated scenes where they are doing stuff to mortals?

Cuz they’re people. Played by people.

If you’re taking inspiration from In Nomine (which isn’t necessary, but does make a good starting place to look for inspiration) then none of the Archangels or Demon Princes actually agrees on HOW the War should be won. Every Superior has its own philosophy on what its celestials should be doing, and sometimes that’s “help a fellow Archangel develop this community center”, and sometimes it’s “sabotage this fellow Archangel’s community center because it will mess up this plan that we’ve been working on for five decades”. And SOMETIMES it’s “hey, angels, help out these demons figure out how to stop these other angels from burning down a building with a lot of innocent people inside to destroy a demon-run laboratory; ideally, get some intel on how we can stop the demons later, but first, save the people”.

Things like Cobalt’s suggestion to give each angel/demon PC a celestial goal are ripe for creating clear means to cooperate or interfere with each other - if one angel has been told “bring as many people in this neighborhood out of criminal behavior as possible”, one demon has been told “encourage addiction in this (same) neighborhood” and another angel has been told “show divine wrath to those who abuse others in this (same) neighborhood”, then those PCs have PLENTY of reasons to interact, and with different degrees of hostility/cooperation, depending on how each character interprets their goal.