Tacticular Cancer: We'll have your balls

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Let's Play VtM: Wild Nights - Chapter 10

Discussion in 'Codex Playground' started by grotsnik, Mar 15, 2011.

  1. Black Bart Charley Barely Literate

    Black Bart Charley
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    Click here and disable ads!
    Ive seen the man in question posting around.

    Stop avoiding the thread. Announce death or eta.
  2. ironyuri Arcane

    ironyuri
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    That's it bro.

    I'm planning to be in London in late October. If there are no updates before then, there will be blood.

    I will hunt you down, bro. I will cut you.
  3. Storyfag Arbiter

    Storyfag
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    Esteemed colleagues and laclongquan, being all too aware what a "writer's block" can do to a man (and some say it may even change his nature!), I propose you this: until such time as the esteemed grotsnik is able to resume our chronicle, I would be willing to run a substitute one. I have no delusions of reaching grotsnik's writing quality, but, Caine willing, the project will serve to entertain us all.

    Thoughts?
  4. Breaking Axe Barely Literate

    Breaking Axe
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    I'll follow if you do. WoD I assume?
  5. Gondolin Liturgist

    Gondolin
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    Go ahead.
  6. Esquilax Liturgist

    Esquilax
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    Cool, man. Go for it. What's it going to be about? Potato-WoD? Wild Nights: Warsaw.

    We need a WH40K-WoD crossover with Warboss Bonnapartah and the Sabbat ravaging London. This will be like Ultimate Wild Nights, set in an alternate universe where Donnie Jamieson is still alive (in this set of events, the Camarilla won a Pyrrhic victory against Angelos beneath the sewers, saving Donnie's life) so him and Warboss Bonnapartah can form a bro squad of the orkiest vamps in all of London. I would suggest root, but he's probably busy writing the finale of his epic 40k saga.

    I don't blame grotsnik for not updating - maybe things are busy at work or he's got writer's block. Still sucks tho - I'm still trying to come to grips with the fact that The Barbarian hasn't been able to continue his extremely promising "The Redsea Saga" for the past several months. While I'd love to see another update or a few words from the man himself, he's given me a lot of entertainment, so if this good shit sadly comes to an end, I'll at least I'll have a lot of good memories and a few laughs at laclongquan's expense. THE VASE has truly taken on a life of its own.
  7. SCO Arcane

    SCO
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    It's going to be about the tzimisce of course. Sigh.
  8. Kz3r0 Arcane

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    :thumbsup:
  9. Storyfag Arbiter

    Storyfag
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    That's what I had in mind, yes.

    No. Just no. As cool as Bonnapartah was, as cool as Donnie was, just no.

    That gave me a wicked idea.

    No, it's going to be about the Clan of your choice, as determined by a poll. Though, this being the Slavic heartlands, you can bet the Tzimisce will appear more often than not. As will the Nossies and the Brujah.

    Anyway, thanks for the interest. Please expect a new topic, including a list of possible protagonists, by the end of this week.
  10. Gondolin Liturgist

    Gondolin
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    I am pleased.
  11. Luigi Barely Literate

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    That experiment is gonna be abandoned after Storyfag realizes how much work it is and how little appreciation he gets.
    I also doubt that he can even remotely write solid prose.

    So, dont get your hopes up just yet.
    :rpgcodex:
  12. Esquilax Liturgist

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    Heh, I meant it as a joke. The whole Bonnapartah business that I started was sort of a take-off of the whole vase and vaulderie talk we were having. I even posted an intro for it during character creation.

    If the vase isn't somehow involved in your story, then I'm pretty confident in saying that nobody here will bother reading it.

    Sounds really fucking cool, bro. As a fellow Slav of the Balkan lands, I greatly approve of this. A WoD interactive fiction with a Slavic flair sounds great. I love grotsnik's depiction of London (in fact, it's one of the best parts of this entire chronicle), but this sounds different in a really cool way. Eastern Europe isn't really explored that in-depth in Vampire: The Masquerade, so I think this is a great opportunity. I'm psyched.

    I understand why the Tzimisce are so common in Eastern Europe, but I had no idea the Nossies and Brojah had a strong presence there too.
  13. Excidium WOOOOORLD EATEEEEER

    Excidium
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    Cool stuff. I'll certainly follow your thread, Storyfag.

    It's p. weird that grotsnik just disappeared, does anybody know what happened to him?
  14. Esquilax Liturgist

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    At worst, it'll be something to tide us junkies over until grot finally gets his ass back here, wherever he is. At best, it'll be pretty good and offer an interesting saga in its own right. I don't think it'll match grot's mad skillz, but I think Storyfag is the kind of dude that will take criticism well if there are faults within the writing (he is a learning animal) and he's probably put a decent amount of thought into what he wants to do here. The idea at least is pretty cool.

    Besides, I think the standard for shitty writing on the 'Dex was set with Dicksmoker, and I that still isn't close to the worst writing I've ever seen.
  15. Rod Rodderson Educated

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    The vase ain't really my thing, but do note that grot broke it in that mini-post. Now, I'm not going to make any claims, but it's something to think about.

    And, yeah, another story would be pretty cool. I'd almost think of doing something like that myself, but the very thought of writing makes me seize up. Too many ideas, not the time nor patience to put them into words. I'd make a terrible writer.
  16. Breaking Axe Barely Literate

    Breaking Axe
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    VtM: Wild Nights: Vase: Origins

    The story that started it all.
  17. Storyfag Arbiter

    Storyfag
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    To my understanding it's the Brujah's fault. When they sponsored the Bolsheviks and set up their Supreme Brujah Soviet many members of most Clans fled (that's how Turcov got to London, for example), save for the obviously territorial Tzimisce. The Nosferatu stayed for similar reasons - they were loathe to abandon their fortified warrens and set everything up again from scratch somewhere else.
  18. Storyfag Arbiter

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  19. grotsnik Cipher Patron

    grotsnik
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    Fuckit - I feel like this thread deserves a post-mortem, even if it's so overdue as to be pointless. I really did enjoy writing it a hell of a lot; and I'm sorry I let it fizzle out like I did instead of killing it outright (but you keep thinking you'll come back to it, you know?). When it died, I was stressing the fuck out at work, everyone was getting laid off, and (really prissy though it sounds when you're talking about afanfiction) I just kept feeling like I couldn't face coming back to it, but I'm not sure I'd have dried up with it if I didn't feel like I'd led the story unnecessarily into a corner.

    Basically, the problems I considered 'big' problems were:

    -Making the choices 'real' choices. I think I got a bit better at this as it went along, but some of the bad false choices from the first part, which were these momentary reactions rather than considered actions, still really piss me off. Part of the problem was the immediate, one-night-at-a-time style I picked for the narration, which meant I couldn't really skip forward in time to get to a meaningful choice, like root or the Barbarian could in their LPs. It was a mistake.

    -Hob. I didn't think him out well enough - I did have a vague idea of what I wanted him to be, but he was pretty much a plot function, a MacGuffin for the characters to fight over, and once he came out into the open I realised he completely overbalanced the narrative, making it about a big powerful bad-guy rather than vying factions, which was the exact opposite of what I'd intended. By the time he'd turned up, instead of giving him a presence and character, all I could think of was ways to kill him off so we could get back to something less 'epic' - hence the foreshadowing that the Centurion would deus ex machina him out of the story try to hunt him down. He also made too many supposedly cunning and ancient characters act like fucking idiots.

    -Nature of the protagonist. Again, when root or the Barbarian did more wide-scope IFs, of if you're DMing with a group of friends, you can kill off a fuckton of characters without worrying about ruining the momentum, whereas I think with pretty much all of these 'you are collectively a single hero' LPs (at least all of the ones I've read on the Codex) killing the hero means bringing the game to a screeching halt and starting it up all over again, so you worry endlessly about killing them in an arbitrary way that feels like a shitty anticlimax, so you end up just not killing them when they deserve it. I mean, Anthony should have been whacked long ago, he really should. I'm not sure how you deal with that.

    -Joan sucked, as a character concept - players playing as someone dumber and more naive than themselves is just frustrating, her motives were too pre-set, and her situation was too static (hey, let's hang around the Chantry some more!). I'd have been happy just continuing with Anthony, but I couldn't see how you'd avoid him either 1) being absurdly over-involved in everything that happens in the city over a six-month period for someone of his rank or 2) essentially stalling for time and having him accomplish relatively little, which is a shitty thing to do.

    ...anyway. Yeah. I just want to say thanks a lot to everyone who participated, you were all really fucking good fun to play with, and sorry again for fucking this good old thread up. :salute: to you all.

    Lol blogpost.
    Crooked Bee, oscar, Hellraiser and 2 others Brofist this.
  20. Kz3r0 Arcane

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  21. grotsnik Cipher Patron

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    Eh, the company went bust around New Year, but I honestly didn't mind - the stress was all from that long-ass pre-collapse period through the whole second half of the year when people are being laid off all around you and you're expected to pick up their workload to 'do your bit', and the pay-cheques start getting delayed and coming through in dribs and drabs, but your boss keeps making promises to stop you from walking out...yadda yadda yadda.

    Anyways, :love:
  22. Hellraiser Arcane

    Hellraiser
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    Yeah that shit sucks so I doubt anyone can blame you, nothing worse than knowing you are on a sinking ship and being uncertain of the future.

    :bro:
  23. Esquilax Liturgist

    Esquilax
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    Hey, thanks for reviving this. I would have preferred for the story to go on, but better to end things like this rather than having it descend into a nonsensical Lost-esque plotline if you feel that you couldn't have continued it in a satisfactory manner. This was pretty much my favourite thread on the 'Dex for a long time, so I'd love to see you continue doing more writing like this, whether within this setting or otherwise.

    Anyways, hope that your work situation is better now than it was before. Thanks for the LP :bro:
  24. oscar Tacticular Staff

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    This was easily one of the most brilliant and enjoyable things I've read in my life. I would love you too continue but :bro: for providing and writing what you've done so far.
  25. Kashmir Slippers Educated

    Kashmir Slippers
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    I really, really enjoyed this, and I appreciate you explaining everything.

    :bro:

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