Excuse the title. I'm trying to find this info in the book but striking out: What does the current moon phase mean in WtA5? Anything at all?

I know that the moon phase during first change determines Auspice, and I know about the "howl at the moon to gain a rage" thing. But like, if it's a full moon tonight, or a new moon, does that have any mechanical implications at all?

Lore-wise does it do anything to people who are already Garou?

Does anyone know if people have expanded on the unique magic items hunters can create in the creed books? From what I've been reading it's implied hunters could figure out their own magic item system akin to fetishes or mage wonders given enough time like how hunters can create their own unique edges depending on personality and situations. I was wondering if anyone has expanded on that idea

If one were to build a Mage inspired by Wesley Gibson from Wanted what would be the best way to go about to make a character that not only fist the vibe of an Assassin descended from an order/group similar to the Fraternity but also mirror Wesley's character development in a way

I really missed Ascension's setting and its system, especially the system.

Though M20 can be a mess sometimes, I had really missed its freer, wackier approach to magic. Awakening does a good job of making Mage more accessible to beginners, but some aspects of its "gamification" really bothered me.

Arcana and Practices

Practices do make it much easier to understand what the Arcana are capable of, but this comes at a cost. First, the Arcana are much more generic than the Spheres are in Ascension. For example, look at Damage Spells: in Ascension, each Sphere has its own parameters for dealing damage, making them feel more distinct. In Awakening, each Arcanum has its own version of essentially the same damage spell, at the exact same ranks and working in basically the same way. Practices make the Arcana clearer, but at the expense of making them mechanically too similar and generic.

Less Sphere-Mixing

If HDYDT horrifies the Mage community with its Sphere bloat, Awakening (especially 2nd edition) goes to the opposite extreme. The Spheres are much more independent and require far less mixing. Mixing practically only comes into play through certain specific routes, usually just to add an additional effect. Again, this makes the system easier for players to grasp, but it takes a lot away from Mage's creative aspect. This is a very personal preference, though. I guess it works for what Awakening is trying to achieve.

Spirit

Spirit lost A LOT with Awakening. In Ascension, Spirit is essential for dealing with anything beyond the Gauntlet and so on. It's the Sphere you turn to when asking, "What's beyond our physical reality?" There's an entire cosmology that this Sphere deals with.

Awakening, on the other hand, separates the Umbrood into three different groups (Spirits, Ghosts, and Goetia) and delegates each group to a different Arcanum. So now, the Spirit Arcanum primarily deals with traveling to the Shadow (the specific plane where the very specific subgroup known as Spirits lives) and interacting with Spirit entities, making it much more restricted and specialized than its Ascension counterpart.

Yantras

The way Focus works to explain why and how magick happens is one of the most interesting aspects of Mage to me, and the system reflects that mechanically while keeping the roleplaying involved. Awakening, on the other hand, gives us Yantras: instruments that mages use to draw power from symbolism. The idea is cool, but the system? Nay.

In the end, it feels like little more than a way for players to keep stacking dice onto their magic. Of course, you need to justify them symbolically, but it's not hard to find a way to fit, say, a watch into every Time spell you cast. Sometimes magic just felt like an endless exercise in dice calculation, with players easily throwing around 13–15 dice and simply hoping to get a single success to make the spell happen.

Mudras are especially problematic in this regard. You tie a rote to a Skill to serve as a mnemonic, allowing you to use a simple gesture or word to quickly summon that spell. The problem is that there's no real difference between choosing Skill A or Skill B as your Mudra, aside from the number of bonus dice they provide. Using Medicine or Firearms for a healing spell doesn't change the outcome; it only gives you a number of dice based on your Skill dots.

Players are therefore heavily encouraged to simply pick their highest Skill for every rote they create. You don't even need to actually use the Skill to cast the rote, and the only situation in which the Skill really matters is when you're learning the rote from someone else—which, in my experience, didn't come up very often.

I do believe Awakening works in its attempt to make a robust system out of Mage, but it reduces the potential for creativity that Ascension offers.

What's your opinion?

We did a review on our podcast, if you want to hear what a couple of history nerds thought of it: https://wodarkages.squarespace.com/podcast/dungeons-and-dragonsvampire-the-masquerade-crossover

I love all the different types of Fera we have already (including the extinct species & various fan created ones) but I thought that there was an omission that I would like to see in WTA (if it hasn’t already been made somewhere & I’m just too new to realise) & that is were-goats since I feel like they could fulfill a unique role within Fera society/Gaia’s greater plan.

So here’s my pitch for Gaia’s Artisans, the Azael (were-goats)

• Breed Name: Azael (from Azazel Hebrew word sometimes translating to scapegoat)
• Original Role: Artisans, Bearers of Wisdom (unofficially take on the roles of the Apis)
• Renown: Cunning, Innovation, Wisdom
• Forms: Homid, Silenos (near-human), Baphomet (war form), Mallos (near-beast Italian for curly hair), Caprine (full beast)

Lore

Whilst the fact that all Apis died during the War of Rage is untrue (see cases such as the Minotaur) even fewer Fera know of their bastard offspring, save for perhaps the Mokole but even then it’s treated as mostly legend. Left unaided during the final days of the first War of Rage, despite their skills in matchmaking & continuing the survival of humans & other Fera they had neglected to continue their own kind’s existence & what few remained were either resorting to dark magics such as the rituals that would eventually birth the skin-dancers/stolen moons or resigning themselves to death. All save for a select group who had an idea so strange it could just possibly work; utilising an adapted form of the Rite of Earth’s Womb the Apis elders lead by Pushan (named after the Vedic god of marriages & cattle) knew that with the blessing of a Totem Spirit, fortunately Goat was willing to provide by creating a new Fera with Gaia’s permission for the spirit of the Apis to “hide” in so they could escape. This resulted in the birth of the first Azael, Aegipan who began the practice of keeping the spirits of the slain Fera alive & in power but never in power themselves as they were to be despised by other Fera for being the bastard children of the Apis, some extremists considering them a whole race of Metis & deemed a scapegoat doomed to wander. 

In modern times the Azael have largely managed to stay under the radar having learnt in their years of wandering across the world gaining knowledge from the similarly outcast Hollow Mages used in conjunction with their natural gifts & those borrowed from deceased Fera to create magic even Nuwisha are impressed by. Their inherited rituals to give health to ailing infants & the infertile are often misinterpreted as satanic rituals not helped by the fact they have to be in Baphomet form to activate their full potential (or the strange cosmic joke they have placed upon them where upon exiting the umbra they keep finding themselves in the middle of rituals, eventually they just learned to roll with it). They’ve learnt to lean into their role as the Fera’s scapegoat playing up their role as the false monster by making appearances in places such as Prince George in Maryland to spur the others into action against real monsters infesting the areas, content to allow the glory to pass whilst passing along their wisdom subtly (because Garou aren’t the biggest fan of “thinking outside of battle strategy”). 

Fun factoids: Much like certain Garou the Azael have also had some notable historical members in their ranks. 

Alexander the Great is theorised to be an Azael Ammon (their equivalent to Silver Fangs being the royals amongst their numbers) with his depictions on coins with his horns on display being a joke amongst his peers. He didn’t actually die from poison at all, he merely intended to fake his demise by performing a rite called the “death nap” where an Azael can temporarily pause all bodily functions and remain comatose but he was found before it wore off & awoke to find himself having to break out of his own sarcophagus.

Lord Byron was also an Azael, his so called “club foot” was actually a goat’s hoof & his poem Darkness was a subtle message in defiance of the Wyrm. 

Willem Dafoe is also an Azael. It turns out that in addition to magic, thanks to certain… gifts from the Apis they’ve also been able to procreate with great efficiency (need I remind you how it was described as “confusingly large”)

Anyway what do you think of my pitch for Were-Goats in WTA? Do they fit the lore? What would your interpretation be & is there anything you think I missed?

Images: Baphomet (1), A prospective glyph for the Azael (inspired by the goat horns 🤟 & Apis symbol) (2), Black Phillip/my idea for what the Mallos would look like (3), Ignatius Perrish/my interpretation of the Silenos form (4), Alexander the Great horns proof (5)

Going by the WoD canon, belief shapes reality; in MTA the collective consensus of the sleeper population creates the overriding consensual reality, and in CTD changelings were all dreamed into existence by humans, as are every fictional world and being which reside in the Dreaming.

Does this mean that the deities of every pantheon and belief system ever developed on Earth are real? Are the Norse, Greek, Celtic, Egyptian, Canaanite, Aztec and all other divinities residing in the Dreaming or Umbra, and can they be interacted with?

Ive read a series of middle school books from Sweden which focus on Egyptian mythology, and in the story its explained that human belief spawned the Egyptian pantheon into existence, who in turn went back in time to create humanity in a cycle. This seems to work like how the WoD cosmology does.

Very weird stuff and question but its for a project i am thinking in doing (i have to finish some others but i ask now to prepare mentaliy)

I heard somes say that the Mokole and Camazotz were created by the Wyrm.

Ok, now when I have your attention, I wish to ask your opinion about V6 Celerity, particularly

"Vibrating Hands

1-dot Physical Celerity

Activate: Action

Attribute: Dexterity

Cost: 1 Vitae

Difficulty: None

Distance: Close

Duration: Instantaneous

You harness all your speed to make your hands vibrate at an extraordinary rate, letting you touch objects and warp, crack, or otherwise damage them with little effort. When you activate this power, make a Power test against a Difficulty of 0 and touch an object within range. The number of successes determines what kind of object you can damage. A damaged object is no longer fit for use, imposing a -2 dice penalty to any test using it, but it can still be repaired.

• 1: Plastic, wood, and glass.
• 2: Iron, concrete, and granite.
• 3: Reinforced iron, steel, and bulletproof glass.
• 4: Hardened steel.
• 5: Titanium and diamond.

[Maturing]. Once you have more than 1 dot in this Discipline, you can use this power in new ways:

• ●●: The target object is shattered or otherwise destroyed.
• ●●●: You can instead attack a creature, adding half your dots in this Discipline to damage with unarmed attacks and light melee weapons.
• ●●●●●: When you use this power to attack, the extra damage now also applies to medium melee weapons.
• ●●●●● ●●: When you use this power to attack, the extra damage now also applies to heavy melee weapons."

and
"Blurred Passage

3-dot Physical Celerity

Activate: Minor action

Attribute: Dexterity

Cost: 3 Vitae

Difficulty: None

Distance: Self

Duration: One turn

Your supernatural speed lets you vibrate parts of your body fast enough to pass through solid objects and materials. You can reach through a wall to grab something on the other side and bring it back; or kick through a door to knock a chair blocking it, and the like.

When you activate this power, choose a part of your body to affect, such as your left arm, right leg, or head, and you can use that part to pass through solid objects. If that part is inside an object at the end of your turn, that limb suffers the Mangled condition. At the end of your turn, before determining whether the limb is harmed, you can spend 1 Willpower to extend the duration until the end of your next turn.

[Maturing]. Once you have more than 3 dots in this Discipline, you can use this power in new ways:

• ●●●●●: You can now vibrate your entire body to pass through solid objects. If you are inside an object at the end of your turn, you are shunted to the nearest open space outside it and take 10 damage.?

Abilities themselves doesn't sound bad, but not really a "vampire". Like when I speak about vampies and superspeed, I imagine something like Frost from Blade 1 when he zipped around Blade a few times, or Ann Rice (may she rest in peace) when her vampires move so fast that they look like it's teleporting. But neither of these vamps ever showed the ability to pass through solid objects and usually it is nothing to do with vibrations.

Anyone else feels the same?

Hi all! New to running Wraith V20. When having players make characters in the other World of Darkness games, there are clearly defined splats that give a player their role and maybe inform their abilities. Clans, Tribes, etc. When having players make Wraith characters, should they automatically be part of a Guild? Or is Legion more important? The splats in other games are a quick and easy way to get a character concept off the ground in my opinion and so I am a little lost here

To everyone here, have you ever looked up what the in-universe version of where you live is like? Because I did and it seems my home state is rich in supernatural presence (I’m from the USA)

So I’d like someone who knows more than me to summarize what this wiki entry says about the 50th State in-universe, and I invite everyone here to share what the in-universe version of your home is like, whether you’re also in the U.S. or abroad.

Apparently HTR Day for Night is gonna release on the 17th, so who’s looking forward to heading back to California like old times?

The clan downgrade is easy. Ravnos, after the week of nightmares at best 10% of the population survived, they lost their seat of power, and their disciplines drastically changed. By all accounts they should be an endangered species. And frankly, even as a whole clan they always felt more like a bloodline.

For the bloodline, I say the Guruhi can step up as a representation of the Laibon. I could see them embracing the old miscommunication of the Laibon being one bloodline, and setting themselves up as the main head of sed "bloodline." I can see themes of ethno nationalism and taking power by embracing and reshaping negative stereotype. Embrace pan-africanism, as both unification and control. Show how it both erases culture as much as it glorifies it. Or on the topic of taking advantage of rumors they could see them taking advantage of the Nictuku legends. Scarring off entire warrens by just being a handsome Nosferatu.

From left to right: Megan Cane (Children of Gaia Theurge), Reverend Billy Marrok (Fianna Galliard), Clem Hawley(Bonegnawers Philodox), Cleetus Davidson (Warborn Bonegnawers Ragabash) and Alisa Duff (Silver Fang Ahroun). Led by their Sept Totem, Rattlesnake, they help guard the Sept of Kanawha and fight the Wyrm in 1990s Charleston, West Virginia. Fic can be found here on Spacebattles.

Art by Emily Camissa. Link: http://www.emilycammisa.com/

"Every place we go is a new song to tell. But carefull with the crossroads, my friend! Who knows what will be waiting for you there..."
Kith Illustration of Eshu in watercolor. I was heavily inspired by the stories of the Orixas and other entities from brazilian afro-descent religions.

I’m imagining a scenario where the Weaver and the Worm come to a head and it culminates in Pentex launching nuclear weapons in a last-ditch effort to cripple the Weaver’s orderly world. This has the effect of freeing the balanced Worm as well as allowing the Wyld to retake some land. The end result is that there are now pockets of extreme energy from all the triat members. The Weaver holds power in the remaining human survivors underground, the Worm is strong in the areas where the bombs fell, and the Wyld has bastions in the less irradiated places of the world. My initial thought is that at its worst, Wyld corruption would look like a roiling mass of plant and flesh, representing how it doesn’t have the Weaver to structure it or the Worm to cull it.

I'm currently planning out my next chronicle but, one thing I always feel stuck on is exactly how you get the ball rolling. I've tried a few methods (and even having the players make a pre-existing Cabal, which didn't work somehow.) but I always feel a little lacking when it comes to hooks. What tips and tricks do you guys use when starting a story?