Demon: The Descent opinions?

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Has anyone here read Demon: The Descent? What did you think?

Can it actually do monstrous super-spies reasonably well, or does the power set mean you're actually playing mages that laugh at typical spy challenges?

Also, do you actually have to own the old-new World of Darkness core book to make sense of the product?
 
So is it that people have genuinely not looked at this game or are Onyx Path games verboten? :hehe:
 
I like the concept of otherworldly spy thrillers, but I've never played or bought it. Sorry!
 
So is it that people have genuinely not looked at this game or are Onyx Path games verboten? :hehe:

I’ve looked at it, but I haven’t played it. Yet.

It’s sort of a funny game. I haven’t really grokked where’s the horror, or terror, of the God-Machine or its angels, which leaves me at a loss in just what our techno-gnostic demons do.

But the whole demonic true seeming thing (there’s a name for it which I don’t recall) has some great imagery going on for it. Reminds me of Hellraiser movies and H. R. Geiger and Palladium’s Nightbane.
 
Meh, Demon: The Descent sucks in my book. Then again, so does the rest of Second Edition Chronicles of Darkness.

Which is a damn shame, because First Edition New World of Darkness was generally awesome.
 
It’s sort of a funny game. I haven’t really grokked where’s the horror, or terror, of the God-Machine or its angels, which leaves me at a loss in just what our techno-gnostic demons do.

Well personally I'm less interested in the horror aspects than the Trench-coats & Katanas potential. However, I'd say the horror is that sinking feeling one often gets while watching gritty crime/spy movies multiplied by 4: the feeling that everything nice in the world is a fleeting illusion, that we're just deluded meat-machines locked in place on a conveyor belt of causality and being ground into paste by vast and unsympathetic forces. Ideals are just another scheme to manipulate you, and the violence cannot end. Watch the movie Munich, or Child 44 for example...

... or don't, fuck that maudlin shit and run the Man From U.N.C.L.E. with creepy superpowers and casual Faustian overtones.
 
Anyway, I've gone and bought the thing. I've been reading it for a few days, so I guess that makes me the resident expert if anyone is ever curious. I'm leaning towards running it.
 
Anyway, I've gone and bought the thing. I've been reading it for a few days, so I guess that makes me the resident expert if anyone is ever curious. I'm leaning towards running it.

You made me go back and re-read my copy, which I had only skimmed when I bought it a while back. I must say I like what I'm seeing even if I still have some trouble grokking what the God-Machine and its angels are all about. Too much OMG INSCRUTABLE.

As a side note, I have also been reading the C:tL2 previews from the KS, forwarded by a friend, and it's looking really, really good. I'm digging CoD/nWoD2.
 
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It’s sort of a funny game. I haven’t really grokked where’s the horror, or terror, of the God-Machine or its angels, which leaves me at a loss in just what our techno-gnostic demons do.
.
That is a problem most WoD games have. Cool setting, but what do you in it? Nothing is as cut and dried as D&D, Traveller or Cthulhu where you are a adventurer, merchant/mercenary/explorer or investigator. And the factions don't help as well, because they don't have a clear goal. Most of time it's about some ideology they follow.
 
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That is a problem most WoD games have. Cool setting, but what do you in it? Nothing is as cut and dried as D&D, Traveller or Cthulhu where you are a adventurer, merchant/mercenary/explorer or investigator. And the factions don't help as well, because they don't have a clear goal. Most of time it's about some ideology they follow.

Hmmm, sort of. Some splats have more clear-cut goals beyond faction squabbles:

V:tM and V:tR vamps fight over temporal power (territory, influence, etc.) because that's the surest way to a steady trickle of blood and upholding the Masquerade. V:tR if anything downplays faction struggles.

W:tF werewolves fight over territory and do the whole spirit CBP thing while fending off the Pure. W:tA was pretty much about fighting the Wyrm and its cronies, with rivalry among the tribes as a subplot to complicate the ongoing war.

Mages in both versions are strongly focused on their own philosophically-motivated struggle over reality; I think Awakening's chief merit is to make this conflict subtler and less "science/technology bad" (an idea that has aged very, very poorly) and, once more, to introduce more of a squabble over resources (mana, artifacts, grimoires and even new Awakenings).

Changeling is such a massive tonal shift that I don't even know where to start, but there's plenty of hooks for the Lost to hook themselves into.

Geist and Mummy I know nothing about, and very little about Promethean.

It's Demon that I struggle with right now. The God-Machine was a great piece of fiction in nWoD1 but as a campaign chronicle device it seems to boil down to "whatever the GM Storyteller Chronicler ah fuck it GM thinks is creepy and apropriate" which is useful but... not really inspiring, I guess, like the other games.
 
It's Demon that I struggle with right now. The God-Machine was a great piece of fiction in nWoD1 but as a campaign chronicle device it seems to boil down to "whatever the GM Storyteller Chronicler ah fuck it GM thinks is creepy and apropriate" which is useful but... not really inspiring, I guess, like the other games.

I'd think of the God-Machine as a Terminator/Matrix style super computer with two key goals, neither of which are good for humanity and the demons that live among them:
1) Preserve itself, which means preserving an awful status quo that it is enmeshed in and prefers.
2) Conduct gigantic and frequently inhuman experiments to gather data for some unfathomable purpose. These experiments often look like the lower-key Bond villain schemes, and the demons foil them for various straightforward reasons: the experiments affect the humans they like, the experiments affect society in ways that risk exposing them, the experiments target them specifically, they want to destroy the God-Machine to build a new order on its carcass, etc.
 
2) Conduct gigantic and frequently inhuman experiments to gather data for some unfathomable purpose. These experiments often look like the lower-key Bond villain schemes, and the demons foil them for various straightforward reasons: the experiments affect the humans they like, the experiments affect society in ways that risk exposing them, the experiments target them specifically, they want to destroy the God-Machine to build a new order on its carcass, etc.

Okay, this is neat. Reminds me of the first season of Fringe before the whole alternate universe shebang.

Oh yeah, and here's a piece of Mage: the Awakening headcanon: the God-Machine as an Abyssal entity (an Annunaki?) summoned by proto-Seers (Exarchs? Perhaps even The Gate herself?) to strengthen the Lie... but one that's spread roots all over, threatens their own command over the Fallen World and is slowly dragging it into the Abyss...
 
So is it that people have genuinely not looked at this game or are Onyx Path games verboten? :hehe:

Never even heard of it, honestly. I liked Changeling The Lost and Prometheus, and I've backed the latest Changeling Kickstarter, I think those are all Onyx Path. But they seem to have no presence on the shelves of any of the gamestores in my area, which is odd as I used to be able to find White Wolf in every bookstore chain.
 
Oh yeah, and here's a piece of Mage: the Awakening headcanon: the God-Machine as an Abyssal entity (an Annunaki?) summoned by proto-Seers (Exarchs? Perhaps even The Gate herself?) to strengthen the Lie... but one that's spread roots all over, threatens their own command over the Fallen World and is slowly dragging it into the Abyss...

This is cool, but personally I prefer WoD games to be mutually exclusive: if I'm currently running Vampire, Changeling doesn't exist, etc. Hidden supernatural worlds are already clunky and a serious strain on suspension of disbelief, and the more you crowd them with competing freaks the worse those problems get. I especially hate the old "Is anybody in this fucking city a regular human!?"

Demons and Mages are an especially bad fit because they overlap so much: They both rely on reality bending powers, they are both fighting a gigantic metaphysical lie, they are both hiding from powerful "loyalists", they are both fixated on information, etc.

But they seem to have no presence on the shelves of any of the gamestores in my area, which is odd as I used to be able to find White Wolf in every bookstore chain.

They have no such presence because they decided a while ago that they are now exclusively PDF and print-on-demand.
 
Never even heard of it, honestly. I liked Changeling The Lost and Prometheus, and I've backed the latest Changeling Kickstarter, I think those are all Onyx Path. But they seem to have no presence on the shelves of any of the gamestores in my area, which is odd as I used to be able to find White Wolf in every bookstore chain.
... you kidding? White Wolf / Onyx Path went PoD and PDF only in, like, 2006 or something. They couldn’t afford to keep doing traditional printing. They’re only just NOW looking at getting back in stores with things like Pugmire.
 
Okay, this is neat. Reminds me of the first season of Fringe before the whole alternate universe shebang.

Oh, and a quick note related to this on something I appreciate: The God-Machine is really not into doomsday events. A big natural disaster at most. It likes the status quo and works to maintain it, which doesn't sound so bad until you remember that the status quo is the WoD.

... you kidding?

There's no need to be judgmental in pointing this out to him.
 
Oh, and a quick note related to this on something I appreciate: The God-Machine is really not into doomsday events. A big natural disaster at most. It likes the status quo and works to maintain it, which doesn't sound so bad until you remember that the status quo is the WoD.



There's no need to be judgmental in pointing this out to him.
I am genuinely trying to figure out if that was a joke.
 
... you kidding? White Wolf / Onyx Path went PoD and PDF only in, like, 2006 or something. They couldn’t afford to keep doing traditional printing. They’re only just NOW looking at getting back in stores with things like Pugmire.

Well that would explain it. I only do hard copy for anything bigger than 20 pages
 
It's Demon that I struggle with right now. The God-Machine was a great piece of fiction in nWoD1 but as a campaign chronicle device it seems to boil down to "whatever the GM Storyteller Chronicler ah fuck it GM thinks is creepy and apropriate" which is useful but... not really inspiring, I guess, like the other games.
Well, the GMC is a very thick book about the God Machine, but it doesn't tell you anything about ... the God Machine. It has some fluff and some mechanics in places where you don't need it about Infrastructure, but nothing about what it is and what it wants. So it's mostly about filling in the blanks for the GM and the mechanics are pretty narrow, so you can't do a zillion different things with it. To me it seems to be all about keeping order and it can either be a thing from another reality, dimension or timeline ... or it is something ancient and has always been here ... or the WoD is the Matrix and everyone is living in a sim.
 
... or the WoD is the Matrix and everyone is living in a sim.

I definitely think that's the worst option. To me anyway, the appeal is that the world is real and therefore matters, if the magic is Clarke's law it's impenetrable to humans (and thus remains magic regardless of aesthetic), and the god machine isn't all-powerful, just a demiurge in the gnostic sense.
 
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