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Promethian [Running it?]
mcc
glitchRegistered User, ClubPA regular
glitchRegistered User, ClubPA regular
DON'T LET WUUKIEE READ THIS THREAD
So, has anybody tried this game (Promethian) out? I picked up the book last night and am really liking it, and I'm hopefully going to be GMing a game for some people over the next couple weeks. The thing is though, I'm having trouble making some decisions about how to run it. I was wondering if anyone could give me some advice, or just generally let me know if you've run/played a game of Promethian yet and how the game more or less worked out.
(If you don't know what Promethian is: White Wolf already made games about Werewolves and Vampires; now they've got a game about Frankenstein's monster, basically, and it's awesome. It's also the first of the "New World of Darkness" games that, in my opinion, recaptures the feeling and depth of the old world of darkness games. If you haven't read the Promethian material, though, most of the rest of this post won't make any sense to you.)
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Basically, my main thing is, there's a few things I want to change about the game, but I'm nervous about doing so-- I've only GMed one game before, and I didn't do anything particularly unconventional to the system. Lacking experience with system-twiddling, I'm afraid of doing something wrong. So I was hoping I could just kind of list out the things about Premethian that I'd probably change from standard when I run it, and anyone who's played Promethian (if anybody) could maybe let me know if it sounds like I'm making some kind of gigantic mistake. I do really like it when GMs treat the sourcebook more like guidelines than a straitjacket, and this is one of the reasons I like White Wolf games (because they're almost designed to be treated like silly putty)-- but on the other hand I don't want to accidentally destroy some critical little detail of setting that I hadn't really noticed, but without which the tone is different and the game just isn't fun anymore.
So, here are my thoughts on how I currently plan to run my game different from "standard":
The only other thing I wonder about was how to implement the wasteland effect; I'm not sure what to do about the idea that the wasteland effect should take root and spread the longer you stay in one place. Wouldn't that basically prohibit you from setting your game in one city and keeping it there, unless you want to like completely destroy San Francisco by th eend of the chronicle?
Oh, and also, what the hell does "Saturnine" mean?
Anyway, thanks for any advice anyone might have.
So, has anybody tried this game (Promethian) out? I picked up the book last night and am really liking it, and I'm hopefully going to be GMing a game for some people over the next couple weeks. The thing is though, I'm having trouble making some decisions about how to run it. I was wondering if anyone could give me some advice, or just generally let me know if you've run/played a game of Promethian yet and how the game more or less worked out.
(If you don't know what Promethian is: White Wolf already made games about Werewolves and Vampires; now they've got a game about Frankenstein's monster, basically, and it's awesome. It's also the first of the "New World of Darkness" games that, in my opinion, recaptures the feeling and depth of the old world of darkness games. If you haven't read the Promethian material, though, most of the rest of this post won't make any sense to you.)
----
Basically, my main thing is, there's a few things I want to change about the game, but I'm nervous about doing so-- I've only GMed one game before, and I didn't do anything particularly unconventional to the system. Lacking experience with system-twiddling, I'm afraid of doing something wrong. So I was hoping I could just kind of list out the things about Premethian that I'd probably change from standard when I run it, and anyone who's played Promethian (if anybody) could maybe let me know if it sounds like I'm making some kind of gigantic mistake. I do really like it when GMs treat the sourcebook more like guidelines than a straitjacket, and this is one of the reasons I like White Wolf games (because they're almost designed to be treated like silly putty)-- but on the other hand I don't want to accidentally destroy some critical little detail of setting that I hadn't really noticed, but without which the tone is different and the game just isn't fun anymore.
So, here are my thoughts on how I currently plan to run my game different from "standard":
- I probably won't stick so closely to the Lineages. Or even really use them at all. I mean, the Lineages will exist, but they will not be the only sources of Promethians or even the expected primary sources of PCs. Promethian creation events will still be deathly rare, but it will be "a very small number" of creations instead of "five, ever". I'm probably going to suggest to the players that promethians can be created accidentally, for example by people who have magical or other creative powers which are untrained but still so strong that they wind up accidentally channeling into creating life (for example, a master puppetmaker accidentally infuses pyros into a puppet that was his masterwork, which disappears the next day and he never finds out why). Probably these "hobbyist" promethians are only as powerful even in the first generation as an n-th generation promethian from a proper lineage, and for whatever reason they don't tend to start lineages themselves. Closely related to the puppetmaker example, incidentally:
- Why dead bodies? I mean, why is it that EVERY promethian has to be made of reassembled corpses, and "made of clay" golems don't actually exist? The sourcebook is very emphatic about this-- that promethians are all reanimated things, stolen bodies-- and I don't really see any good reason why. It seems to put a big limit on the whole alchemy principle of mutability, and anyway, I like golem myths. I'm inclined to run the game such that promethians can be created out of darn near anything that you can force pyros into (although maybe human blood or a human heart or something ought to be involved in their creation), and once created, since they're animated by human pyros they immediately take completely human form, organs and all. I'm afraid this will slightly weaken the horror feel of the game, but I think will make potential character creation options more interesting, plus I really like the idea of for example the group successfully killing a horde of tiny creeping pandorans, only to have each of the pandorans, which previously looked like agglomerations of flesh and limbs, revert to being basketballs and iron fenceposts and the various other little objects they were originally fashioned from. Along the lines of animate objects:
- Elementals. This may be the biggest change I'm planning to introduce, and probably the riskiest. When I originally mentioned to someone who's going to be in the group that I was considering buying and running this game, before I'd read the book or really understood the premise, almost the first thing she asked was whether she could play an elemental. Like, a human embodiment of some elemental force. If the game is about humans bringing life to the inanimate, then she wondered if there was room in the game to play an inanimate thing animated by the force of nature, or which chooses to take on a life on its own. I said I really liked the idea, and if it didn't exist in the game I'd find a way to work it in. It doesn't exist in the game, at all, but I still really like the idea and I've been thinking about how to implement it.
What I'm currently planning to do is this: Elementals exist, but are not known to promethians, probably because they're rarer or slightly better hidden or usually don't exist in that form for long. One of these creatures somehow, for some reason, is going to join the group in the game I'm running, but that one will probably be the only one that shows up the entire game. Elementals, in the game I'll be running, occur when the Pyros that exists everywhere in nature begins to bunch up, forms a knot in the natural flow, and coalesces into a human or other shape. Sometimes the elementals know what they are and retain some kind of special natural/supernatural knowledge absorbed from the slices of reality they're made from, but often the elementals don't even realize they're not "real", and live out brief lives as imitative humans before the pyros that forms them breaks apart again and returns to the world. In the old wyrm/wyld/weaver or entropy/dynamism/pattern trinity of the old Werewolf or Mage games, the Promethians represent pyros in the service of pattern, seeking a state of regularity and humanity. The Pandorans represent pyros in the service of entropy, seeking destruction and seeking to feed. An elemental would represent pyros in the service of dynamism, simply existing as part of the world for its own sake. (There may be a connection here to the Pyros/Flux/Elpis relationship that seems to exist in the game's alchemy system, but I'm not sure I've got the correspondence there right.) An Elemental would not be anything like one of the funky angel creatures, who are oddly divine and featureless and seem to somehow actively serve the pyros. An elemental would serve the Wyld, and would be as flawed and knotty as the natural world itself is.
The hard part of this would be making the elemental character balanced with the promethian characters. The elemental, not sharing the promethains' tragic origin, would inherently lack some of the promethian disadvantages; either she'd need to pick up some disadvantages of her own to make up for these, or would have to lack some of the powers the promethians have. I'm currently thinking that Disquiet and the Wasteland effect would apply equally to Elementals as they do to Promethians, but kind of in reverse. The elemental would impress the same feeling on humans of a Thing That Should Not Be-- but instead of this disquiet being sourced from the a distant awareness of an unnatural thing that humanity created against the natural order, the elemental would be too natural, a thing of the natural order that should not have been created human, which would leave a completely different but equally disquieting 'inhuman' feeling on human observers. Meanwhile, the wasteland effect would work literally in reverse; while a Promethian seeks human company but scorches the land, the elemental would be completely attuned to the land but cause a wasteland effect on civilization-- on the infrastructure of cities and humanity and such, instead of killing greenery and poisoning the earth maybe glitching electronics and causing dry rot in buildings. - A small detail I haven't quite thought out yet: Futurism. It seems to me that all the old World of Darkness games had this fascinating blend of the archaic and modern, infusing gothic horror with references to computers and pollution and mad science. The new world of darkness games seem exclusively to be gothic; the vampires are more creatures from a 1930s silent film than the shadows of modern society they were in masquerade, and the glasswalkers and the sons of ether just seem to be gone altogether. Although Promethian is entirely inspired by a famous act of science fiction it shies away from science fiction itself; there's even a part early in the sourcebook where they go out of their way to talk about how promethians are NOT THE SAME THING AS ROBOTS. I like the tech-magic interaction thing, though, plus nearly everyone in my group is likely to be a computer programmer, so I'm going to try to think of ways to mix in modern technology along with everything else. The sourcebook does have the entire thing with cloning, but I don't think this goes far enough. I'm curious about, for example, what happens if you infuse Pyros into a computer program or a website. Could you create a Promethian AI? And there's so much about bioengineering that screams with the potential of frankenstein's monster...
- Finally: Why is alchemy so promethian-centric? I mean, traditional alchemic ideas absolutely flood the sourcebook, but they're all in reference to Promethians and Promethians using them. The sourcebook hints that alchemists understood something of Promethians and alchemic writings hint at that truth of the Promethian condition, but that's clearly bullshit. A lot of people wasted a lot of time on alchemy for a couple thousand years, and they clearly would not have put all that study into it just for some knowledge about an obscure method of creating false humans which-- if the sourcebook is to believed-- has only been pulled off five times in recorded history, and the results have been uniformly disasters. The transformative "lead into gold" metaphor clearly meant something for classical alchemists that had nothing to do with promethians-- there was some kind of transformative effect they were looking for there, whether literally turning lead into gold or some kind of work on their own souls or bodies. The sourcebook gives us no clear idea what this would have been though, or what the hell alchemists were doing with alchemy all throughout history. This interests me, and I want to somehow work in a subplot involving humans (and not mages, either) trying to work alchemy with some degree of success and having some kind of interaction with the Promethians-- say a little surviving offshoot of the Rosicrucian Order, or a group of Islamic extremists who just happen to be Sufi mysticists. I can't decide exactly. But I was wondering, has anyone else successfully worked with humans doing alchemy in a Promethian game, or is there anything in the sourcebook I missed which might have hinted at what the Great Work was that the human, non-promethian alchemists of yore would have been seeking (since they clearly weren't questing to become human)?
The only other thing I wonder about was how to implement the wasteland effect; I'm not sure what to do about the idea that the wasteland effect should take root and spread the longer you stay in one place. Wouldn't that basically prohibit you from setting your game in one city and keeping it there, unless you want to like completely destroy San Francisco by th eend of the chronicle?
Oh, and also, what the hell does "Saturnine" mean?
Anyway, thanks for any advice anyone might have.
mcc on
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The whole reason the dudes in the game are special is because they're just wrong, they're perversions, they've even got a statistic to represent that (although I can't recall it off the top of my head). Putting a animated rocks or fire elementals in kind of hurts the idea that the characters are meant to be perversions of the natural order of things.
Animated rock is just not as terrible as a dead body forced back to life through alchemy.
...hmm...
Considering that gargoyles and the like exist in the WoD, simply being a sentient, animate object made of normally inanimate material is not enough.
Rock Band DLC | GW:OttW - arrcd | WLD - Thortar
Saturnine - adjective 1. of Saturn 2.
I think part of the idea is that you can't set your game in one city. I think you're supposed to be wandering the earth. I'm pretty sure I remember seeing the word wander in the description.
Magical AI sounds cool.
Edit: Now I sort of agree with Salt. I think the tone of the game you're trying to run comes into the decision
I'm pretty sure that's absolutely part of the point, but I'm just confused as to how to make that work well, and I was wondering if anyone else had played the game and could tell me how/whether they did the "wandering" thing. Like, whether it turned out to be hard to create a consistent storyline for things when the setting has to change every few sessions and none of the characters can be permanent. (I'm thinking of setting it in one of those small blocks of little insular towns in Oklahoma or somewhere that all neighbor each other but are each miles apart, so that they could move from vaguely similar town to vaguely similar town staying one step ahead of the wasteland they leave in their wake. Or would that be cheating?) Also, most pen and paper roleplaying games, it's just horribly arbitrary as to why the group of characters even continue traveling together in the first place, and this always bothers me a little-- I'd prefer there to be a coherent reason the PCs form a party. I can imagine the "wait, why are all these people hanging out in the first place?" factor being even harder to explain when no member of the party can stay in one place for more than a couple weeks at a time. Is it particularly difficult to make that all make sense without actually formally creating a Throng? Or is making the party be a Throng what one is supposed to do?
I agree with this sentiment. I have nothing useful to add, however.
Gloomy.
All I knew was that there was a Marvel character named Saturnine. Now that I know what it means, it rather fits...
My friend and I tried to make a Horror RPG system, and one race was monsters like this. I'll have to make sure he sees this book.
The problem I see with that kind of tinkering is that first off, they destroy the coherence of the game-- a bunch of people I know who aren't very good gamers like to run games where you have like a mage, a vampire, a demon, and a half-werewolf half-changeling all in the same group, and the game just winds up directionless and idiotic, among other things because it never makes any sense why all these things came together or how they can interact without destroying the believability of the whole setting. The bigger problem though with that kind of thing, as I see it, is that it's wish fulfillment-- it's doing things because "it would be cool" rather than because it would actually enrich the game and create a good or meaningful experience, it inspires a kind of malaise because if everything is possible then nothing is surprising, and it makes things way too easy for the players because they no longer have to approach the world from the limited perspective of the ruleset any one of those component games would have to normally.
I think I'm safe on the first front-- I'm still following a coherent specific concept for the game, it's just that that concept isn't exactly the same as the specific concept White Wolf had in mind; as long as the changes are applied consistently and pervade the setting, it's probably indistinguishable on that front from the game having been written that way to begin with.
I'm a lot more worried about the wish fulfillment thing-- I'm not sure how much of my impetus for making these changes is because I think golems are "cool", and "hey, it would be cool if" destroys games; I'm afraid opening the player creation options up the way I plan to is giving "too much" freedom to the players and probably opening the door to munchkinry; and the elemental thing in particular is worrisome in terms of making the games "too easy" because even if the elemental character is a tightly restricted one, the restrictions will inevitably be different from the restrictions the promethians have, which means the other group members might potentially have an "out" on certain difficult situations just by getting the elemental to do something for them (one of the best themes of the game, as far as I can tell, is that the Promethians are super powerful in some supernatural ways yet are totally incapable of doing certain mundane things that would be totally basic and simple for a human; I'm not 100% sure I could preserve that in a party that wasn't uniformly Promethians).
So... I don't know where I'm going with this
Keeping people in line might not be a problem. Elementals could be even more worrisome for other interactions. The normal promethians can probably walk through a city. Man of fire is screwed. However, preserving the "useless in mundane ways", I don't think I know enough about the game for that.
Start the game as if you actually intend to keep it in a single city. Give them a strong plotline, and make them like all the characters involved and want to see how it ends. Keep stringing them along as the area around them slowly rots, and have them figure out for themselves at what point resolving the plotline would actually be far more harmful than leaving.
[spoiler:beeaa99d5f]Holland actually did die, but the regeneration chemicals mixed with nearby plants, which absorbed Holland's memories and personality, much like how flatworms seem to be able to absorb maze learning by eating other trained flatworms. Basically, Swamp Thing only thought it was Alec Holland turned into a monster, when it actually WAS a monster, through and through.[/spoiler:beeaa99d5f]
I think there's a good potential for alienation with elementals if you play up the whole "You want to be human, but you're NOT" aspect, which would be common to both Promethians and Elementals. Also, Elementals, as embodiments of natural forces, could be very focused in their thinking and personality, matching the focus of the element they embody, much like how Elementals are portrayed in Exalted. For example, an earth elemental would be very slow and static in its thinking, while an air elemental would always be moving from one idea to another, but both would be obsessed with spreading their element as much as possible.
I also like the idea of promethians not being made from flesh, but I think you should go a bit further. Have them appear to be human, but still be made of wood/clay/whatever. In your puppet example, the creation (should I call him Pinocchio?
Switch: nin.codes/roldford
See, I hadn't thought of it in terms of like skin texture, but that was actually something I was quite liking the idea of-- that moment comes where suddenly the veil of the Promethians' human appearance is stripped away, and bystanders for one fraction of an instant see the party as one horribly misassembled patchwork of disparate, rotting corpse flesh, one stiff looming pastiche of leather panels in a vague parody of a human shape, one tottering man made out of chicken wire at the center of which a visibly-beating human heart drips rivulets of blood down the framework inside, one disembodied human head unceremoniously wedged atop a broomstick standing upright, her eyes and mouth sad, half-closed and downcast...
It would take a little more work, but I think even with the interesting way the book lays out the disfigurements for normal promethians (earth-affinity promethians appear as if caked in mud, etc), that has the potential to be so much more horrifying than just another bunch of reanimated corpses.
Anyway, thanks.
:shock:
Yeah I think you will do ok as a Promethian GM.
Yep. I want to play.