So in other words, a podesta.
“Hunter: The Reckoning — A Time of Monsters” is out now! Topple the vampires from the streets below!
Only if you choose to ensure nothing fundamentally changes…
Why hasn’t Jangles managed to order the assassination of both dead red, three eyes or only one of them?
Because his own grip on the DTES is based on the buy-in from all of the other powerbrokers. If he openly knocks one of them off, the rest know they’re not safe, which means war in the streets anyway.
The thing about gang warfare is that it’s literally just politics. The clothes are different and the laws aren’t the same, but it’s still governance, wheeling-dealing, and satisfying the interest groups that actually keep you in power.
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Who owns Jangles? Is he beholden to a specific cartel or specific international gang or mafia? Why isn’t he already a ghoul under one of the various vampires, or in some way acting less as a leader and more as a middle manager for a larger organized crime group?
An MC taking the reins is going to ultimately be beholden to … who? In one of my runs FdL found something online that, as I recall wasn’t exactly the homepage of the SI but I got the impression that she did find evidence that would be Priority One to follow up on after the end of the immediate crisis. My thinking was “I don’t care about the gang shit, how do we get in touch with the Second Inquisition?”
Not even in a “hey we want to join up” kind of way but more as a “We just dusted five vampires and we intend to go after the rest of the Vancouver Court. Please advise and assist however possible; in case we fail, here is all the information we currently have about them.”
Does Jangles have associations that would negatively affect this small group of Hunters’ efforts to seek support and larger community and relationships with bigger organizations? Or would it help? Is his little criminal fiefdom a burden or an asset? The way I perceive it, it’s not an asset, it’s just a liability putting the character at risk of police investigation / arrest whatever in exchange for sacrificing some of their Humanity, and distracting from the real goal of going full Buffy.
The thing is that if your gang leader were to try and contact the second inquisition, he would require the trust of Wilson, but even if he has the trust of Wilson, he only contacts them for the sake of stopping the vampires that directly threaten them, I find it almost impossible for him to be willing to contact them if him and the others are not in any immediate danger from vampires.
Not only that but if he were to somehow contact them, he would end up forcibly conscripted along his friends (including the MC) in order to fill manpower of which the second inquisition requires.
Who is Wilson?
edit: I am realizing you mean Wil, the companion. I was over here looking up stuff about whether there’s someone named Wilson who is a major character in the World of Darkness generally.
I don’t really follow why he would matter? I never talked to him in any of my playthroughs, but FdL found stuff on the internet where there were references to the SI. Is he secretly former SI or something?
Sorry, playing burden of command made me forget the full name of Wil in the reckoning lol
Because during his time in the police, he cooperated with “FIRSTLIGHT” which is basically the second inquisition and Wil is the only guy who’s able to contact them, but you need to have enough trust with him or have enough charm if you want to convince him of contacting them.
Well, the asset is not getting killed when the place goes tits-up. You kinda need a place to live if you haven’t secured outside allies.
Ah, ok. This made me curious so I took a look at the code for that conversation in Act 4, and yeah he definitely has a hell of a lot to say about FIRSTLIGHT. I either didn’t get any of these conversations during my playthroughs or I just gave so little of a shit about what that dude thinks that I just ignored him. From what he is saying, a player who did somehow manage to get in contact with the SI would most likely be murdered to keep them silent. That … that feels so much like bullshit. Like that doesn’t have the ring to it of worldbuilding. That has the ring to it of something this dumbass personally believes. Very similar to Lydia’s villainess-act talking about concepts like ‘worthy’ or ‘unworthy’, or Roderick talking about how the Camarilla rules against using the internet and so on being a form of control rather than a desperate grasp at retaining the tiniest measure of OPSEC. Like yeah I can kinda see your point that taking away the ability to freely communicate and form communities is straight out of Manipulative Cults 101, but you’re also just whiny because you’re a rich brat who doesn’t like being at the bottom of the pecking order after a lifetime of privilege. Like, yeah, sure Wil, fine, we won’t try to contact whoever your source is. So we’ll try calling someone else. Who else? I dunno, anyone and everyone we can find online that will believe us if we tell them we’re vampire hunters.
That is actually Wil’s full first - well, middle - name.
To be fair to Wil, he’s also had a complete collapse of personal identity and has been betrayed by his brothers in arms… guys got so many trust issues.
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How is “government agency will snatch you up off the street for being inconvenient” the worldbuilding detail that has you calling bullshit?
If you went believably trumpeting about vampires in the internet at large the Camarilla would either mindwipe you or kill you.
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In that very same post I cited two other examples of characters in this specific game saying things in a matter-of-fact way, “The world works like this, you see” in ways that are demonstrably false and incredibly dumb. Most of these people are in one way or another high on their own weird, dumb, fucked up way of looking at the world.
So don’t start a Tiktok account but let FdL keep poking around online, find people. Use the Chinatown connections, ask them. If we are revolutionaries, we need to find other groups, other cells.
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Betrayed? From what I recall, it wasn’t a betrayal but rather a wrongful assumption on his part, he thought that his brothers in arms agreed with what he thought about the bad things he and them were doing in the police, but they didn’t, they in fact supported those decisions.
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This is a running theme in basically everything I write: nobody has a clear objective view of reality. We’re all just shaved apes peering at what’s in front of us through coke-bottle glasses smeared with the residue of our upbringings and histories.
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He believed he was truly one of them, that his hard work to become a professional badass and killer was in service to the greater good, that his comrades view him as a brother. Instead they only cared he wore their uniform; once their mission set changed, his buddy literally says “if you weren’t in the ERT you’d be scum of the Earth”, when questioned about the morality of their new tasks.
I’d feel betrayed too, if everything I thought about my best friends and how they viewed me, everything I thought about the cause I sacrificed my life for, turned out to be a lie. To them, Wil was always only a Metis.
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Good point.