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Old 09-25-2021, 04:44 AM   #1
Shaira
 
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Default Is the Book of Unlife "canon" for Cidri?

Hey everyone,

So, yeah - is it? I guess like other TFT fans, my own campaign setting derives its "real world" logic from the TFT core rules. So, no divine magic, no gods bestowing miracles on worshippers, and little of the "mythical" approach to undead. IE, vampires aren't undead but have the vampirism disease, skeletons and zombies are magical constructs and not undead per se. It's a very clear design choice of TFT / ITL, which is a refreshing contrast to many other fantasy RPGS, giving a "non-mythical", almost science-fictiony underpinning to Cidri and its in-world reality.

The Book of Unlife, while a fab supplement, changes quite a lot of that. Suddenly there are undead vampires (nosferatu) as well as the "standard" TFT vampires, there are spirit guides, there are proto-divine powers in the blessings bestowed by Ancestrals, you can meet souls of the dead, and there's very clearly an afterlife, and a whole lot of themes that had been pinned down by TFT / ITL are profoundly changed.

Now, obviously I get that you can take or leave whatever material you like or don't like in your own game. That's fab. But as many of us enjoy winkling out the "reality" of Cidri from what's in the TFT rulesbooks and building our games round that, I'm wondering if The Book of Unlife effectively "overwrites" old Cidri with a new metaphysics. What do you think?

Cheers,

Sarah
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Old 09-25-2021, 09:47 AM   #2
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Default Re: Is the Book of Unlife "canon" for Cidri?

My approach to these types of questions is almost always to allow both. Some vampires are supernatural in origin, others have a "disease" of purely biological origin.

It's important to give the players enough clues/information to distinguish between the two, and so maintain the feeling that everything makes a certain kind of "sense", and isn't just totally random.
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Old 09-25-2021, 10:44 AM   #3
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Default Re: Is the Book of Unlife "canon" for Cidri?

Note that BoU works entirely within the TFT agnostic framework. The spirits are countered with magecraft, not priestcraft. (Even the Talismans on page 4 are crafted with mundane talents.)

So a party of wizards with a naturalist is recommended as the easiest way to deal with these monsters of the week (as always).
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Old 09-25-2021, 12:16 PM   #4
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Default Re: Is the Book of Unlife "canon" for Cidri?

I think that unless a PC is allowed to start as a learned scholar of the occult, that it works best if the PCs & players need to learn the truth about supernatural things (and even about rare creatures and spells) that they didn't grow up with, during play.

Because, if you're a typical starting PC, you probably have no idea what's out there and how things work. If you're interested in roleplaying what it's like to be that PC, you probably shouldn't have much OOC information about things you've never experienced and have heard little or nothing about.

Which means that each campaign will have different answers to what exists and how it works, exactly.

(In my many years of playing TFT, I think we actually encountered vampires, werewolves, ghosts, revenants, wights and wraiths... less than half a dozen times.)
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Old 09-25-2021, 12:34 PM   #5
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Default Re: Is the Book of Unlife "canon" for Cidri?

The Book of Unlife is great, but it does come with a whole set of implications about souls and the afterlife. I prefer to keep things less defined, so that things like ghosts are rare and not understood. So, I take The Book of Unlife as inspirational material, particularly for using TFT mechanics for a horror game set on Earth.

(It's interesting this comes up just as I'm working on a new blog post of necromantic magic.)
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Old 09-25-2021, 10:50 PM   #6
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Default Re: Is the Book of Unlife "canon" for Cidri?

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Originally Posted by Shostak View Post
The Book of Unlife is great, but it does come with a whole set of implications about souls and the afterlife. I prefer to keep things less defined, so that things like ghosts are rare and not understood. So, I take The Book of Unlife as inspirational material, particularly for using TFT mechanics for a horror game set on Earth.

(It's interesting this comes up just as I'm working on a new blog post of necromantic magic.)
Huh.... I come to the Book of Unlife from the other end of this spectrum. The whole set of implications about souls and the afterlife are possibilities for me to expand on. Still rare and misunderstood, but metaphysical in its approach.

Metaphysics (meta means 'beyond') is the study of those things and phenomena that are beyond the physical realm. ... Physics is the science of the natural world, more specifically dealing with the matter, energy, space-time and fundamental forces that govern the physical world. - thehindu.com

So Wizards are metaphysical too.
A "Hero" may use his weapons, his wits, or both - but he deals primarily with the physical world, rather than the phychic/spiritual one of the wizard. ITL p 12.

The Metaphysical might or might not include gods, though. So priestcraft might not be necessary.


I agree with Tomc that you can have both supernatural and biological beasties. After all, the purely "biological" vampirism disease could trigger a metaphysical phenomenon which makes the disease greater than its physical world results.

I consider Book of Unlife "canon."
But like Star Wars' Force, whether you consider it mystical or clinically caused by Midichlorians, it might not come up at all in your portion of Cidri.
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Old 10-05-2021, 08:59 AM   #7
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Default Re: Is the Book of Unlife "canon" for Cidri?

As the author of said book I like to think it's canonical, since it's an official TFT product. That being said, there is always latitude for each individual GM to use or exclude what they like. There's a whole gamut of House Rules here about how each GM tailors the game to their liking, and stuff in Unlife is no different in that regard.

The Book of Unlife does expound further on certain death-and-afterlife things than the core TFT rules, as you might expect from the title. However, in core TFT things like Ghosts, Wights, and Zombies already exist. So I would say that there is already a presumption of certain theological arguments falling one way. Yet still you have the scope in interpret that in a number of ways - are ghosts actually souls, or just resonant echoes interpreted by living minds? I tried to keep as much of that latitude in Unlife as I could. Again, it's ultimately up to the GM as to what ends up in their games.
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Old 10-05-2021, 02:16 PM   #8
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Default Re: Is the Book of Unlife "canon" for Cidri?

I think of BoU as TFT 'canon'. But note there are one or two inconsistencies with the core book. E.g., wraiths in core TFT are unharmed by non magical physical attacks, whereas this isn't the case in BoU. I defer to the Legacy Edition core book in such cases.
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Old 10-05-2021, 08:46 PM   #9
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Default Re: Is the Book of Unlife "canon" for Cidri?

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Originally Posted by larsdangly View Post
I think of BoU as TFT 'canon'. But note there are one or two inconsistencies with the core book. E.g., wraiths in core TFT are unharmed by non magical physical attacks, whereas this isn't the case in BoU. I defer to the Legacy Edition core book in such cases.
And so there are several breeds of wraiths that typically behave similar to each other but Bou Wraiths have slightly different traits than Legsee Wraiths.

When Bob the Vampire Slayer learned from his research into wraiths that not all Wraiths were the same, he started enquiring which wraith type Vlad controlled.
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Old 10-05-2021, 09:47 PM   #10
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Default Re: Is the Book of Unlife "canon" for Cidri?

If you like. But i'm pretty sure the wraith thing was just an oversight rather than an attempt to make a parallel track of monsters, as was done for vampires.
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