World Of Darkness - Blog Posts
What, me? Stealing Xues wisdom? Naaaah.
"Do you ever worry Deb, that the world is going to end?" ________________________________________ Small warmupsketch while watching my brother play Bloodlines for the umpteenth time.
Idk why just wanted to rant about my character that I rp as in my VTM campaign
Soooo our chronicle set in San Francisco 70's started about three years ago and only now finishes (because it's impossible to keep a stable schedule in WOD) and so I finally decided to revisit my character card that I made all the way back in 2022. Turns out, I didn't pay any attention when I was choosing the model from Pinterest back then (I didn't even want to have a real person's face, I wanted to just have male Toreador model from VTMB), because the model was... a photoshopped picture of Ashton Kutcher. Apparently I just didn't recognize him back then, because I didn't even watch any movies with him in my childhood, so this entire time I was playing as a sad anxiety-ridden bisexual Toreador with something that's severely reminding depression... with Ashton Kutcher's face. Now, he wasn't intended to be like this at first:
I love WOD, because it allows you to still have incredible fun, whilst subtly reminding you with its entire atmosphere that you are, in all actuality, fucked, and your existence – is already a tragedy. My character was an aspiring journalist who had a promising future, but stumbled across a Kindred-own gallery that he wanted to expose. He got Embraced by accident, because his sire suddenly felt attracted to him and decided to give him Embrace just so he wouldn't kill him. The relationship between them was as toxic as they come: with light and love slowly fading away from my guy's eyes (his name is Nate btw lol I just found it neatly fitting) while watching as his sire slowly but surely loses all interest in him, simultaneously abusing him both physically and emotionally, and betrays him at the end. At the end, from this golden retriever-type goofball you have a pile of bitterness, filled with angst worthy of Tumblrs golden age, that doesn't have anything it takes to be The Toreador™ (and doesn't want to) and is despised at best by his clanmates (half of which turned out to be Sabbat btw, so nobody cares about their opinion 💅).
I accidentally built him a bit weird for the clan I chose: instead of focusing on social/conversational stats, he is built like an offensive/tank, with him being our primary muscle that takes the most damage, until our Tremere is ready to crit all the enemies. Idk why I just didn't pick Brujah, since that's how I even play him: he's the most rebellious and hot-headed of our coterie, doesn't respect authorities, is liked by Anarchs and doesn't mind dropping the Camarilla if they piss him and his friends enough (only if the alternative pays off more, that is). The only thing he remotely has from the Toreadors is his clumsy and cringey attempts to flirt with absolutely every asshole trying to kill us and the fact that he has comically fragile ego with the worst mouth possible. Oh, and he doesn't like art, like, at all, because it reminds him of sire. Since I don't really know how to play as someone else than myself, I just didn't give him enough taste to appreciate anything neither classic nor alternative (he wears Adidas suits and is afraid to let go of his knife) – he's just a dude that's so terrified for his life that he sleeps with one eye open, but is dumb enough to wear his heart on his sleeve. But hey, nothing to worry about, since everyone already knows where he lives, his tiny ass studio apartment is a known thoroughfare for everyone in the Camarilla, the Anarchs, the Sabbat, and even for his current Giovanni bf.
I honestly didn't even like him at first, but when I made him a backstory he started growing on me... 🤕 Oh well.
Maybe this is crazy and unhinged thing to do but I sometimes assign people I know to the vampire clans (of course without telling them) and explain some of their actions to myself based on it, like "oh this guy is so pretentious and always mentions how his family was Polish nobility before the soviets, typical Ventrue behaviour" or "I know what you are, an art student with penchant for weird sculpture and anatomical oddities", or our local gothic witch bars, book stores and cafés in the city center which I presume is Tremere chantry undercover, is there any hope for me.
This is my Red, White and Royal Blue
Just realized that the Night Road ending where the courier flies off with Lettow is literally the lyrics of Chemtrails Over The Country Club 😭😭😭
The Blue Man at the Register
IT IS HOW IT IS.
IT IS HOW IT SHOULD BE.
We never get to see the rest of his body, so I took a little creative liberty to be a little weird and silly with it.
Bonus Kevin!
Here's hoping our sad lad stays on the winning team, and has many more brilliant arguments with the biggest of Dee-Dee's.
Kevin Wettsworth; The Parable
Kevin, great and mighty, voiced by the amazing @earndiltheequalizer!
The folk over at Ogre Poppenang have the remarkable ability to make a character hilarious one moment, and heartbreaking the next. I think Kevin here is one of my favourites. I hope he survives the series.
Lemme tell ya, making a guy with a nose like a mosquito look forward wasn't easy, but I think I got it in the end.
WoD’s Demon: the Descent took this idea and made a really interesting game with it. It has more in common with the Matrix than Supernatural and the many takes on faustian bargins and trying to blend in with humanity as a kind of celestial-robot running off the tracks are brilliant!
the reason i love the comparison between angels and machines (robots, transmission towers, trains, computers, etc.) is that it gets to the heart of what angels essentially are: divine machines. they’re mechanisms through with the divine is able to act, created with a purpose and “happy” to fill it simply because they were made to do so. they have more in common with a machine programmed to run on algorithms and make calculations based on input commands than they do with humanity, even if they bear a human visage - an attempt by the divine to help bridge the gap. angels do not need to be eldritch monstrosities to be terrifying, because they are already alien to us simply by being angels. for an angel to choose to deviate from their purpose and achieve free will is to fall because in order to have free will they can no longer be an angel, because an angel is defined by its purpose. much like the stories we tell of robots that gain sentence, only to discover that they can never truly be human, but neither can they go back to being a machine, angels who fall become something else entirely, purposeless and adrift and alone. it is a tragic sacrifice.