Quote:
Originally Posted by ak_aramis
So, if you want sympathetic Nephandi, a compelling story arche can be made by players discovering the nephandi are not in fact evil... and fit right in with everything canonical despite actually contradicting it.
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I don't think "sympathetic" is really the issue I'm concerned with.
In the original books, the Technocracy were adversaries. But they also have an agenda that calls for specific things. They have a culture, and interests, and a history. And if I want to flesh them out, I can, because those are resources I can work with. In fact, later WW writers did work with those resources, though perhaps not in quite the way I would have.
I'm not seeing that the Nephandi have those things. Where the Technocracy have "we want to strength static reality and build an organization on it that empowers the Masses, and in pursuing that we have to do evil things X and Y," what I'm seeing of the Nephandi is just "we want to do evil things P and Q and R because they're EVIL." I'm not seeing an agenda that motivates doing evil as a means to an end. And I suppose I could try to make up one, but I don't see that the published material gives any resources for doing this, in the way that it gave resources for saying, "Maybe the Technocracy have a point, you know?"
It would be one thing if I had an entirely different theme in mind, and I had decided that the Mage rules gave me exactly the game mechanics I needed to explore that theme and create a suitable world. But what I'm actually wanting is to explore the Mage world (and specifically the Mage world; I'm not interested in the Vampire or Werewolf world, or even the Changeling world). I'm perfectly willing to look at the published material and say, "Well, okay, this would make more sense if I changed X." But I want to start from the published material. And I'm just not seeing anything in the published Nephandi material that I can use as a starting point. It's really a case of "There's no there there" for me.