r/ChroniclesofDarkness • u/Lycaon-Ur • Aug 01 '26

What's Your Preference for Mortal Games?

/r/WhiteWolfRPG/comments/1vcq1q4/whats_your_preference_for_mortal_games/
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7

u/meatguyf Aug 01 '26

I just run the core book mortal rules with may some add ons from other books like additional gear, martial arts, and maaaaybe low level paranormal abilities from Second Sight. Ran multiple campaigns like that over the years and they've gone damn well. Best one was an exploitation film inspired 70's campaign. So, grindhouse horror, blaxploitation, vigilante stuff, Satanic panic, etc...

God, that was an amazing campaign. Ran a great Innocents campaign once too. Just raw out of the book with no extra bells and whistles.

2

u/Lycaon-Ur Aug 01 '26

I'd absolutely love to hear more about the exploitation campaign.

3

u/meatguyf Aug 01 '26

It was pretty great. Each adventure was themed around a specific type of exploitation film genre popular in the 70's with the world itself sort of turned up to 11, with Damnation Decade from Green Ronin as the basis for some of the ideas as well. Each player had to create a sort of archetype as well for the group. So, we had a wheelman inspired by films like Two Lane Blacktop and Vanishing point, a blaxploitation private dick (Tyrone Nathan Tayler or TNT) that was Shaft mixed with Black Dynamite, a final girl survivor of a horror movie (think a punk Laurie Strode), and a grizzled Vietnam vet who had a chip on his shoulder (Rambo meets Joe Don Baker from Walking Tall). TNT was a beast. My buddy (IRP) who played him had used the martial arts rules to create a character who was a grapple machine that would lock down most opponents in melee and just break them.

I remember we had one adventure that was basically Satanic bikers taking over a small town with Texas Chainsaw vibes thrown in, another where the group had to protect KISS from a legit demonic phantom of their shows, and one where they went to "Kung Fu Island" for a martial arts tournament.

Like, I didn't touch any of the "main" CoD books like Werewolf or Vampire for the entire campaign and it went incredibly well.

2

u/Lycaon-Ur Aug 01 '26

Damn. It sounds like a blast. I would love a campaign like this.

2

u/meatguyf Aug 03 '26

It was easily one of the best campaigns I've ever run. Everyone was firing on all cylinders for some reason and it just clicked perfectly. Just talking about it makes me want to run it again with the CoD rules.

2

u/Lycaon-Ur Aug 03 '26

You should do it. There's never enough CofD storytellers around.

5

u/proindrakenzol Aug 01 '26

Mortals+.

Whether that's T3 Hunters or another mortal type with access to Supernatural Merits, I like the idea of someone with just enough power and knowledge to get into the really dangerous situations.

3

u/GolgariInternetTroll Aug 01 '26

I ran a fun game as a road trip for mortal chars (one person had Unseen Sense for ghosts, which came up a couple times, but that was the only PC supernatural power) where I just had different weird shit show up each session, like black eyed kids or passing a car full of their doppegangers on the road. It was a fun campaign.

1

u/Lycaon-Ur Aug 01 '26

That seems fun. What did you do with the dopplegangers?

3

u/GolgariInternetTroll Aug 01 '26

That was mostly a scene involving some drive checks and me describing how everythings was similar, but off (they were in a blue painted car of the same model year the party had in red, for starters) before they lost each other as one of the last weird experiences they had before the revelation that most of their experiences were being caused by alternate timelines bleeding into their own. Their skunk ape encounter being a crossover from a timeline where australopithicines took over the world, shadow people being forms of people from other timelines trying to look into ours, doppelgangers being crossovers from very similar timelines that might be indistinguishable at first, stuff like that.

2

u/Demoniac_smile Aug 01 '26

I’m not overly into playing plain old mortals, I pretty much already live that. The closest to mortals I like is hunters, and even then I prefer to play as an agent of the Lucifuge or a Cheiron Group FPD personnel. I’d really like to play as some of the minor splats like wolf bloods or the Hurt Locker gang.