#Deviant: the Renegades

[bekandrew]

New Release for Deviant: the Renegades

Do you get the Origins mixed up (Epimorph and Exomorph sound awful close)? Ever wondered what the word cohort means or why a group of Renegades might be called that? Do you have a hard time visualizing what a Threat Level 3 Chronicle might look like?

I released my first PWYW title on Storyteller's Vault this morning: Dissecting Deviant to help with these problems. It has the real-world scientific and medical context for Deviant terms explained in easy-to-understand chunks, as well as expanded descriptions of the named threat levels based on the names' definitions and levels' stats.

[manyworldsofdarkness]

To all fans of World of Darkness, Chronicles of Darkness and anything else by White Wolf and Onyx Path. This here is a fan server for both veterans and people interested in learning WoD lore, a fun inclusive server open to everyone with an interest in any of the games! Come talk about your characters, post fan art, discuss the games you want to play or your favorite editions and make some like minded friends who also happened to be obsessed with psychotic monsters.

We’re hoping to spread info about World of Darkness all over tumblr so more of you self proclaimed monster fuckers can get on in this.

[gorgonarcher]

15th Game - Deviant: The Renegade

First, I shall get on with some ranting about the history of White Wolf and Onyx Path.

Deviant is a game within the Chronicles of Darkness setting which was originally referred to as World of Darkness and was intended to replace the original World of Darkness after that setting had it's apocalypse.

White Wolf came out with it before they were bought out and were far too aggressive about trying to get people to purchase this new game. Their methods extended to sending cease and desist letters to people running games on public internet forums or sites and renting out venues so that LARP groups lost their normal place to gather.

Meanwhile other workplace issues ended causing several veteran developers left the company and ended up forming Onyx Path Games.

At some point the decision was made to rebrand the new World of Darkness into the Chronicles of Darkness and to develop both lines, basically retconning the apocalypse of the original World of Darkness, or at least delaying it. The development of Chronicles of Darkness was outsourced to Onyx Path.

Also, Paradox Entertainment, better known for grand strategy video games like Crusader Kings, bought out White Wolf entirely.

I'm not sure of the exact sequencing of the Onyx Path exodus/formation, Chronicles of Darkness rebranding, Paradox Entertainment buyout, and Onyx Path outsourcing.

Regardless the end result (we wish) had Onyx Path writing Chronicles of Darkness which produced games like:

Vampire: The Requiem

Werewolf: The Forsaken

Mage: The Awakening

Promethean: The Created

Changeling: The Lost

Hunter: The Vigil

Geist: The Sin-Eaters

Mummy: The Curse

Demon: The Descent

Beast: The Primordial

Deviant: The Renegades

Onyx Path is a largely much better company than the current White Wolf is, even if it isn't free of its own scandals (look into Beast: The Primordial's issues if you want to be depressed). They've made some of my favorite games and we were expecting them to continue developing Onyx Path for the foreseeable future.

But nah.

White Wolf, or rather Paradox Entertainment, have decided that they are no longer interested in maintaining both lines. So, they've stopped outsourcing to Onyx Path and are basically burying the Chronicles line. And with the lead developers on White Wolf taking creative decisions that involve ignoring everything their cultural advisors pointed out and essentially betraying the flawed but generally progressive intentions of the original games, I'm not really interested in their products anymore.

Onyx Path is creating it's own urban fantasy/horror game called Curseborn. So, I have that to look forward to. But until then, I think I shall more the loss of Chronicles with a gorgon archer build using Chronicles game of dark superheroes: Deviant: The Renegades

The Game

Within Deviant, you play "The Broken" people whose souls have shattered leaving them as fragmented versions of their former selves. But in this fragmenting they have acquired some level of power. Each Deviant is different. Some acquired their powers as a result of the unethical experiments of evil scientists and corporations. Others came in contact with alien or paranatural substances that mutated them. Some few volunteered to be enhanced or even did it to themselves. And still others were born with the potential to spontaneously become fractured and inhumanly powerful later on.

The game focuses around the conflict between the Renegades and one or more Conspiracies that want to collect and control the Broken for their own purposes.

This game firmly exists within the Chronicles of Darkness setting alongside vampires, werewolves, mages and the rest. Population wise, all the supernaturals are generally more rare than in World of Darkness, and by and large even the largest conspiracies lack the omnipresent nature they do in the World of Darkness. Deviants are among the smaller population groups alongside Sin-Eaters, Mummies, Prometheans, and Demons. Like all the games, there is mention of the other groups here and there, but largely you're only going to be interacting with other Deviants, Conspiracies, and the occasional Deviant-adjacent horrors that come out of said Conspiracies.

Character Creation Steps

There are nine steps to character creation:

Step One: Determine Chronicle Threat Level

Step Two: Character Concept

Step Three: Select Attributes

Step Four: Select Skills

Step Five: Select Skill Specialties

Step Six: Divergence

Step Seven: Select Merits

Step Eight: Determine Advantages

Step Nine: Shape Cohort and Conspiracy

Step One: Determine Chronicle Threat Level

In this step we determine the power level of the campaign. This decision determines both the power of the characters and the power of the Conspiracy that they are working against.

In this case, we're going to go a bit in the middle and aim for a Dysplasia level campaign. This means that our gorgon archer here will have 7 total dots of powers on top of the one free dot every Broken gets. Standing 3 for a conspiracy implies "Regionally influential, or global but diffuse, or local but ubiquitous."

Step Two: Character Concept

Deviants are heavily focused on revenge, so whatever she places as her surface, there's a very angry core to our gorgon archer here. In thinking about her origin, I'm thinking she was an unwilling subject to an experiment trying to graft spiritual elements onto people. She's basically an early human trial for supersoldier project in the planning. Lucky her, she didn't end up dead.

I'm thinking she was not kidnapped and pulled into experimentation, but rather was invited to be a trial patient for an experimental medical treatment. I'm uncertain what exactly the treatment was for right now.

Step Three: Select Attributes

As with most Storyteller or Storypath games, there are three categories of attributes:

Mental: Intelligence, Wits, Resolve

Physical: Strength, Dexterity, Stamina

Social: Presence, Manipulation, Composure

We need to rank these into primary, secondary, and tertiary priorities. Each attribute gets one free dot and we get a number of other dots to assign based on our priorities.

Primary: 5 dots

Secondary: 4 dots

Tertiary: 3 dots

I'm going to assign the primary here to Mental, the secondary to Physical, and the tertiary to Social. The maximum any attribute can get here is 5.

My thought here is that she's reasonable intelligent and figured out what was going on with her before the conspiracy could figure out she was expressing mutations and vanished out from under their noses. I imagine the emotional consequences of her Divergence (the shattering of her soul) probably impacted her social abilities hard, but living off grid for a bit has improved her physical capability. That said, I'm going with the following:

Mental: Intelligence 2, Wits 3, Resolve 3

Physical: Strength: 2, Dexterity 3, Stamina 2

Social: Presence: 1, Manipulation 2, Composure 3

I suspect the sudden trust issues has made retiring and given her a difficulty with expressing herself, but she was able to keep calm and present a false front enough to avoid letting the people watching her know she was doing a vanishing act. Hence Presence taking the hit.

Similarly, I suspect she's built up her ability to get out of sight and be stealthy, along with the archery. Hence why Dexterity is high.

Step Four: Select Skills

Like with Attributes, Skills are also divided into Mental, Physical, and Social and we are again going to prioritize here giving the following number of dots. As a note, skills do not get free dots the way attributes do. However, Skills have the same maximum of 5 as compared to Attributes.

Primary: 11

Secondary: 7

Tertiary: 4

In this case, I think we're going to do a bit of a different priority with Social in primary, Mental in secondary, and Physical in tertiary. I'm thinking she wasn't in one of the careers that really leans into the Mental skills and her Physical skills are her newest acquisition. For actually spending them I think the following:

Social: Empathy 2, Expression 3, Persuasion 2, Streetwise 1, Subterfuge 3

Mental: Academics 3, Computer 2, Investigation 2

Physical: Athletics 2, Stealth 1, Survival 1

Step Five: Select Skill Specialities

Now we choose 3 specialties. A specialty is a short phrase or description for a particular area of expertise the character has. These cannot be attached to a Skill with 0 dots. But they basically act as a bonus die when the situation comes up. I'm going with the following:

Athletics: Archery

Streetwise: Urban

Subterfuge: Poker Face

These represent either how she was able to avoid her watchers realizing she'd noticed them, or else skills she's picked up since doing her vanishing act.

Step Six: Divergence

This is where the supernatural stuff starts. We are going to determine her powers and other such things here. To start with we need to choose her Origin and her Clade. The choice of Origin breaks down as follows:

Autourgics (The Elect) - Wanted to be Remade and sought it out. They may even have done it to themselves.

Epimorphs (The Volunteers) - Agreed to be Remade due to threats or promises.

Exomorphs (The Unwilling) - Never wanted to be Remade, it was forced on them.

Genotypal (The Born) - Ancestry or parentage meant being Remade was inevitable.

Pathological (The Accidents) - Pure unmitigated circumstance. Bitten by a radiaoactive spider.

With the description we came up with in the Concept step, we already know that she is an Exomorph since she was lied to and never realized she was part of such an experiment. Thus she is one of the Unwilling. This gets her an extra dot of Conviction (we'll get to that later) and one free dot of an "Overt Variation" (explained soon).

The Clade represents broad categorizations of what sort of changes came about when the character was Remade. These are mostly organized by the surface similarities they express:

Cephalists (Psychics) - Have ways to intrude into and influence the human mind.

Chimerics (Hybrids) - Are a mixture of human and something else. They often appear to have animal features.

Coavtives (Infused) - Harness and channel energies, either natural or occult. Firestarters and cosmic wielders.

Invasives (Cyborgs) - Have had some of their flesh replaced by technological or occult materials.

Mutants (Grotesques) - Have aberrant biology that doesn't easily map to existing animals.

In this case, both the Hybrid and the Grotesques stand out as potentials. Looking at the powers associated with each, I'm going to choose Hybrid, because the snake bit is the most obvious and I literally described her as being grafted some sort of spirit. We can still grab some powers from the other Clades but at least half of her powers need to be from Universal or Mutant powers.

The game calls the powers "Variations" as in the ways the character varies away from other people. Each Variation is entangled with a Scar save for the one free-point that we have. These are the cost, consequence, or side-effect of that particular power. In fact, the ratings of the associated scars can determine some of the power level of the Variations.

We can also choose to take on a "Form" if we want to. These are optional adjustments to the existing forms, which the game presents as they would otherwise be difficult to represent.

Amalgams are a combination of two or more distinct, sapient beings.

Self-Made inflicted their divergence on themselves instead of being victimized by a conspiracy.

Symbiotes have variations that are sapient, such as being infested with an intelligent parasite.

Transmissable deviants can spread their forms like disease.

I think I actually like the idea of a contagious gorgon, after all, transformation is a thing I quite enjoy playing with. Likewise, Symbiote and Amalgam both fit the concept of someone who had something grafted on to them. However, I don't like forced transformation and I'm also going to stay closer to the default here and not add a Form.

I am going to take the following:

Anomalous Biology ** (Mutant)

Carapace * (Universal)

Enhanced Speed * (Universal) - This is the free Overt point

Lash * (Universal)

Predator's Cunning *** (Chimeric)

For the details:

Her Anomalous Biology leaves her Ageless and Tireless. She does not fatigue or need to sleep and she does not age.

Her Carapace is a light scaling that is surprisingly resilient taking the Kevlar option and an armor rating of 1/3, the first number is General Armor which cancels 1 point of damage entirely starting with the most severe. The second number is Ballistic armor which downgrades lethal damage taken from firearms to only be bashing. Which means she's not as resistant to damage over all, but she does survive bullet injuries quite well.

The basic level of Enhanced Speed mostly adds Scar Power to Initiative rolls and doubles her speed when she moves under her own power. No choice here.

Lash is going to be her gaze here. I'm going to make it a Ranged cutting attack, meaning it does lethal damage, using Dexterity + Athletics as she tries to angle to get eye contact. I imagine the injury manifests as calcification. It will be Sickening so that it inflicts the "Sick" Tilt (see below). The Lash has to be activated, so she has to take an action in order to be able to use them. Maybe she has to take a moment to get in the proper headssspace.

Now we come to her Chimeric variation. For Predator's Cunning 3, she gets both the options available at Magnitude 1. This means that people looking for her suffer a penalty to notice her as she sees them first and she is able to activate a lash or ready a weapon as a reflexive action. Then she gets a choice of one from Magnitude 3 and I'm going to choose "Alert" which means that she benefits from the ability to ready a weapon even if ambushed and may elude notice even when she's not aware someone is trying to watch or follow her.

Now we have to choose scars. Multiple variations can be assigned to the same Scar but the reverse is not also true. You can't have the same variation attached to two different scars.

Each Scar can cover a number of Variations based on the highest magnitude involved.

There are three Scar traits: Scar Power, Scar Finesse, and Scar Resistance Each scar is associated with one of the three types of Attributes and these traits are determined by those attributes:

Mental: Intelligence = Scar Power, Wits = Scar Finesse, and Resolve = Scar Resistance

Physical: Strength = Scar Power, Dexterity = Scar Finesse, and Stamina = Scar Resistance

Social: Presence = Scar Power, Manipulation = Scar Finesse, and Composure = Scar Resistance

I am going with the following Scars and noting the entangled Variations

Conspicuous Appearance 2 - Lash, Carapace (Physical)

Bane (Mirrors) 2 - Anomalous Biology (Physical)

Lying Eyes 3 - Predator's Cunning (Social)

Carapace does not depend on Scar Power, Finesse, or Resistance so there's no change to its benefit.

Her Lash also does not have any of the traits that would be improved by Scar Power, Finesse, or Resistance, so it goes unchanged with a basic damage rating of 0.

Neither of her Anomalous Biology changes do anything regarding Scar Power, Finesse, or Resistance, and so go unchanged.

As to Enhanced Speed, I'm going to assign it as a Mental trait. This puts its Scar Power at 2, the amount of her Intelligence attribute. This determines the bonus it gives to Initiative.

Predator's Cunning depends on Social, so it's Scar Power is 1 (Presence 1), she gets half of that (rounded up) as a bonus to avoid surprise. IE: a bonus of 1 from the Elusive trait of the rank 1 level. Similarly she can use a reflexive action to get into cover which applies a penalty to ranged attacks of the same 1 (half 1 rounded up again).

It may just be in her best interest to work on her Presence... for multiple reasons.

So, what this means is that her snake hair and scales are obvious but can still be covered up. And she just gives people a bad vibe when they first meet her. First impressions tend to go badly. She also receives pain from looking in a mirror. I'm assuming this isn't just because she's freaked out to look at herself. I'm going to assume she can look at photos of herself fine and it doesn't look that bad, inhuman, but not really ugly. But mirrors create a sort of feedback loop with her gaze so she has to avoid them.

This also means all of her scars are leveraged at this point and she has no room to gain new powers. She'll have to either develop a new scar in play or focus on her natural abilities.

We're still not done with Divergence, as we have to assign her Acclimation, Conviction and Loyalty.

Each Broken has two conflicting urges: the burning desire to seek vengeance on those that wronged them or their loved ones vs the blindingly intense loyalty they feel to people. The trauma they've experienced, the shattering of their soul, has made less extreme human connections very difficult for them.

Each dot of Conviction and Loyalty comes with a Touchstone representing either a loved ally or hated enemy. At the start, the Remade (interchangable with Broken) have 3 dots of Conviction and 1 dot of Loyalty and they gain a free dot based on their origin. Exomorph, the Unwilling, get a bonus Conviction. So our gorgon here has:

Conviction 4

Loyalty 1

The Acclimation is the level to which the deviant has acclimated to their change. At base, a Deviant starts at an Acclimation of 0 but can spend 5 merit points to raise it to 1 or all 10 merit points to raise it to 2.

Acclimation 0

Step Seven: Select Merits

As already said, we could spend all 10 points of merits on raising Acclimation, but instead we're going to do some merits.

One thing I love to do with Chronicles games is to take on the Professional Training merit. Looking at her skills I'm thinking she's a writer of some sort. Perhaps used to earn her money doing gig-writing for websites, especially aiming at academic type websites.

There is no archery Fighting style, but I will adapt the Marksmanship merit to it for the first level.

I'm also taking Good Samaritan and Hypervigilance. I'm also taking one rank of Anonymity, Resources (perhaps she still does writing on blogs for some funds), and Parkour. Resulting in the following:

Professional Training 1 - 2 dots of Contacts in the field (blog writing)

Professional Training 2 - Two asset skills: Expression, Investigation. They get 9 again (9s and 10s explode)

Professional Training 3 - A third asset skill Investigation. And two specialties: Expression (Layspeak) and Investigation (Archival Research)

Good Samaritan 2 - gain a +2 bonus to Intimidation or Persuasion when warning Baselines away from the Conspiracy. Take a Beat when risking discovery to aid Baselines other than Loyalty Touchstones. Beats build up into Experience.

Hypervigilance 1 - 8-again to detect ambushes, traps, or snares (8s, 9s, and 10s explode), unfortunately, exceptional successes will give her the Spooked condition.

Marksmanship (Athletics/Archery version) 1 - Increases maximum bonus for aiming to Composure + Athletics (6) instead of 3.

Resources 1 - some minor disposable income

Parkour 1 - subtract Parkour rank from successes needed to escape, ignore Athletics penalties from environment equal to parkour

Anonymity 1 - Avoids official authoritative influence. Attempts to find her paper trail suffer a -1 penalty.

That's 10 points.

Step Eight: Determine Advantages

In prior Storyteller games "Advantages" usually referred to the splat unique stats like Conviction, Acclimation, Blood Pool, Rage, etc. In this case it's referring to figured stats.

Willpower: Resolve + Composure = 6

Health: Size (default 5 for humans) + Stamina = 7

Speed: (5 + Strength + Dexterity) x 2 (Enhanced Speed) = 20

Initiative: Dexterity + Composure + Enhanced Speed bonus = 8

Defense: The lower of Wits and Dexterity (both 3) + Athletics = 6

There is one unique stat to Deviants here: Stability, relating to how stable their mutations are. Deviants have to manage this because if they become unstable, they'll fall apart as their mutations kill them in whatever way is appropriate to how they were Broken in the first place.

We are also encouraged to pick an Aspiration here, which is a goal that we seek to accomplish such as "Escape a Pursuit". In this case, I want to more address the difficulty her appearance and aura give her in interacting with baselines (normal humans) so I want to give her the aspiration "have a peaceful conversation with a Baseline stranger".

Step Nine: Shape Cohort and Conspiracy

This is the point where you would talk about how you fit in with the other characters in the group. But also, this is where we set up the Conviction and Loyalty touchstones and discuss the nature of the conspiracy that ruined her.

While the GM creates the specifics of the Conspiracy for the players to investigate and uncover, I'm going to say that the Conspiracy in question here is a defense contractor researching the possibility of creating super-soldiers by the means of grafting supernatural traits onto normal humans. They are a local offshoot of another company with Regional Influence and use a local pharmaceutical lab as a front for collecting unwitting research subjects.

Touchstones

Conviction - Fallis Pharmaceutical Labs - the company her conspiracy worked through to change her. They had been a local company with a pretty good reputation. Our gorgon wouldn't have been surprised if they were doing something shady, but not eldritch super soldier experiments.

Conviction - The Grey Hats - she doesn't know their actual name, but calls them this based on the fact that the people watching her were all wearing some form of grey hat. She's still looking for a proper name for them. They don't always wear grey hats, of course, but she's found other ways to identify them

Conviction - Donner - she overheard this name after barely escaping pursuit and hiding barely ten feet away as they talked about her. He was leading her pursuit and referred to her as an object using pronouns like "it". She's seen him a few times since then.

Conviction - Macen - whoever was on the other end of the phone for that conversation, the person calling Donner's shots. She's actually had conversations with this person when they've hacked into television screens and CCTV cameras. The voice-changer prevented identification, but where Donner treats her as an object, Macen is all too happy to cause her, and other people, pain. They definitely see their victims as people and love to torture all the more.

Loyalty - Jin Klein - A colleague and former roommate, Jin eventually graduated into being a full on medical doctor. The only person our gorgon has revealed herself to when she needed help as the transformation initially took hold.

And I'm going to name our gorgon:

Devyn Vargas

Concept

Origin: Exomorph (The Unwiling)

Clade: Chimeric (Hybrid)

Advantages

Willpower: 6

Health: 7

Speed: 20

Initiative: 8

Defense: 6

Size 5

Stability: 5

Acclimation: 0

Conviction: 4

Loyalty: 1

Attributes

Mental: Intelligence: 2, Wits: 3, Resolve: 3

Physical: Strength: 2, Dexterity: 3, Stamina: 2

Social: Presence: 1, Manipulation: 2, Composure: 3

Skills

Social

Empathy 2

Expression 3 (Layspeak)

Persuasion 2

Streetwise 1

Subterfuge 3 (Poker Face)

Mental

Academics 3

Computer 2

Investigation 2 (Archival Research)

Physical

Athletics 2 (Archery)

Stealth 1

Survival 1 (Urban)

Variations and Scars

Conspicuous Appearance 2

Lash 1 (Ranged Cutting, Dex+Ath, Sickening) - Petrifying Gaze

Carapace 1 (Kevlar) - Scaled skin

Bane (Mirrors) 2

Anomalous Biology 2 (Ageless, Tireless)

Lying Eyes 3

Predator's Cunning 3 (Elusive, Vigilant, Alert, Scar Power: 1)

Free Variation: Enhanced Speed 1 (Double speed, Initiative Bonus, Scar Power 2)

Merits

Professional Training (Blog Writer) 3 - Asset Skills (9 again): Expression, Academics, Investigation, Bonus Specialties

Good Samaritan - +2 to Intimidate or Persuade Baselines away from Conspiracy. Gain a beat (XP) when you risk discovery to help a Baseline.

Hypervigilance - 8 again to detect ambushes, traps, and snares, Downside: Gain Spooked condition on exceptional success.

Marksmanship(Athletics) 1 - Maximum aim bonus is Dex+Ath(6).

Resources 1 - some minor disposable income

Parkour 1 - subtract Parkour rank from successes needed to escape, ignore Athletics penalties from environment equal to parkour

Anonymity 1 - Avoids official authoritative influence. Attempts to find her paper trail suffer a -1 penalty.

Touchstones

Conviction - Fallis Pharmaceutical Labs - the company her conspiracy worked through to change her. They had been a local company with a pretty good reputation. Our gorgon wouldn't have been surprised if they were doing something shady, but not eldritch super soldier experiments.

Conviction - The Grey Hats - she doesn't know their actual name, but calls them this based on the fact that the people watching her were all wearing some form of grey hat. She's still looking for a proper name for them. They don't always wear grey hats, of course, but she's found other ways to identify them

Conviction - Donner - she overheard this name after barely escaping pursuit and hiding barely ten feet away as they talked about her. He was leading her pursuit and referred to her as an object using pronouns like "it". She's seen him a few times since then.

Conviction - Macen - whoever was on the other end of the phone for that conversation, the person calling Donner's shots. She's actually had conversations with this person when they've hacked into television screens and CCTV cameras. The voice-changer prevented identification, but where Donner treats her as an object, Macen is all too happy to cause her, and other people, pain. They definitely see their victims as people and love to torture all the more.

Loyalty - Jin Klein - A colleague and former roommate, Jin eventually graduated into being a full on medical doctor. The only person our gorgon has revealed herself to when she needed help as the transformation initially took hold.

[theonyxpath]

On this day in 2021 we released Deviant: the Renegades for the Chronicles of Darkness! This Storytelling Game of Vengeance is available in PDF and POD via our partners at DriveThruRPG https://drivethrurpg.com/product/341534/Deviant-The-Renegades?affiliate_id=13&src=OPPTumblr or at your friendly local game store!

[scrivnomancer]

Right now you can get a digital copy of my novella DEARLY BLEAK (set in the world of DEVIANT: THE RENEGADES) for just $2.24.

[seidmadr-secrets]

If anyone ever wants to play a roleplaying game about this, Deviant: the Renegades by Onyx Path Publishing is explicitly about this. (You can also be an escapee from other things, such as cults, corporations, or creepy families).

It is one of my favorite roleplaying games out there, so I felt I should give it some love.

Shout out to anyone that ever made a character that’s a ‘Secret Government experiment’ that escapes the lab and is now wanted and misunderstood. That’s top tier character design, thank you.

[vurthshistorian]

I spent like a solid 2-3 hours on this, so You people get to see it Too.

This is a Deviant the Renegade character I cooked up when I realized that you could basically make 90's Shin Kamen Rider in Deviant, because my buddy wanted to run a game. We're playing Hunter instead by popular demand, so I'm choosing to explore the character myself until that game finally runs.

So because we're not playing that CofD game I went whole Hog and just went full sail on making him a KROC.

Here he is Fernando Rodriguez-Hernandez.

Kamen Rider: Darkness.

[bekandrew]

Hi again

It's time for a new pinned post. I'm Bek Andrew Evans (he/they). I'm a freelance TTRPG and LARP writer, illustrator, graphic designer, and as of today - podcaster. Here's the first episode of my Deviant: the Renegades story podcast:

If you don't use Spotify, it's available on most platforms. I'm a transmasc queer disabled guy from the Deep South(TM), US. I like making horror art and writing in particular, a lot of it inspired from life experiences.

My traditionally published titles include M20: Sorcerer and Proteus Novas Compendium for Trinity Continuum: Aberrant. Community Content:

They Came to Get You, Barbra! - Cover, illustrator

self-Awakened: A Conversation with an Orphan - cover

Interview with the Aberrant - illustrator

Thoughts and Prayers (A Deviant: the Renegades Novella) - author, illustrator, cover, layout

Dissecting Deviant - author, illustrator, cover, layout

FIXED Deviant: the Renegades Templates (For Publishing Software) - layout Indie TTRPG:

Silly Names and Spandex! - writer, cover, layout

The Unseelie Saga - illustrator

My full portfolio is on my ArtStation and my main print shop is on InPRNT.

I take writing and illustration commissions, and you can support me on Patreon. You can also subscribe to my linktree for updates.

[manyworldsofdarkness]

Wanna go into detail? Join our discord. Please reblog after voting.

[bekandrew]

it's probably not that much of a coincidence that at least most (possibly even all) of the player characters in my current cohort in Deviant: the Renegades (a ttrpg defined by trauma and being pursued and othered, with big found-family vibes) chronicle are queer.

sure part of the queer experience is being othered but an even bigger and more powerful part is belonging to the othereds

[theonyxpath]

On this day in 2021 we released Dearly Bleak, a Deviant: The Renegades novella by @scrivnomancer via our partners at DriveThruFic https://drivethrufiction.com/product/367895/Dearly-Bleak-A-Deviant-The-Renegades-Novella?affiliate_id=13&src=OPPTumblr Explore this tale of terror today!

[huntunderironskies]

It might not be the type of game for everyone but there's something so fascinating about "daily lives of monsters" type games in Chronicles of Darkness for me. Something about the alienation from human society but the inevitable draw to having to deal with it.

Sure, you might have died last night, and there's a death god sitting on your shoulder who won't shut up but you still have to turn in the rent check tomorrow.

You thought that the shitty dollar store you worked at was sucking your life away, and it turns out not only is it literally doing that, you can now see the spirit baron embodying the store who's controlling it and helping make everyone miserable, and you could try and mobilize against him but it'd take an incredible amount of manpower and resources that you barely have, and you're so tired. Not to mention the power vacuum you'd create and the fact being too heavy-handed with one spirit court is going to potentially turn all the other ones against you and that spirit baron is a petty little bastard who'd probably start targeting your mortal loved ones just to get you to back off.

The trods need constant maintaining and somehow you got talked into being a Summer Courtier so it's your problem. So you go off into the Hedge and just hope you come back at a reasonable time because you sure as hell can't afford to miss a shift, or for that matter that you even return in the right timeline. The hobs are fine compared to the absolute dread each time you unlock a Hedgegate. But hey. Goblin Fruits are pretty filling and sometimes the Absinthal gives you free booze, so your grocery bill's gone down.

Drag yourself into a dead-end job and hide in the bathroom when your Scars act up. Memorize where the cameras are on the path there. Pray it doesn't take more than fifteen minutes because that's all you're legally allotted for the day. You can't have your boss coming in and seeing you like this. For one thing, he'd give you an infraction and you're already on your second strike, and for another you're about sixty percent sure that this company is a subsidiary for the Conspiracy that made you. You can't get fired, or caught.

I dunno! We do a lot of chest beating about how the personal horror aspects of being a monster, and to be fair that is fun, but for me there's something a lot more interesting to me about how being a monster can expose the innately monstrous aspects of modern human society. Probably not a coincidence all of the examples above are capitalism induced. Also this is a very messy off-the-cuff post so hopefully it makes sense.

[horrorlocke]

World of darkness sketch dump <3

[bekandrew]

this but a cross-splat game in Chronicles of Darkness with Deviant: the Renegades and Werewolf: the Forsaken

Werewolf best friend who has the super heightened sense of smell thing like a medical alert dog and just occasionally turns to you and goes "hey you gotta sit down im gonna go get you your seizure meds real quick"

[awakenedsalamander]

What's your opinion on Deviant? My SO and I have looked a bit into it, and truth be told, it seems like an unhappy mixture of Changeling and Promethean.

I agree with you within a certain context— I think that Deviant is probably the gameline that feels the least like a Chronicles of Darkness game. This is partly due to the fact it’s the newest kid on the block, but I would say it’s largely because it’s where the developers got the most experimental. The mechanics are stretching the limits of the system, the concept is weird and sometimes muddled, and it’s hard to figure out how to fit it into the rest of the setting. I mean, it’s essentially a standalone superhero game smuggled into the Chronicles of Darkness.

So there’s definitely legitimacy to saying that it has awkward overlaps with other games. That said, I think Deviant does rather pointedly tackle an aspect that Promethean and Changeling don’t, really: Revenge.

See, the act of striking back against the people who wronged you is something that can happen in those games, but it doesn’t have to. Promethean and Changeling are about self-actualization and recovery respectively, and while revenge can be a part of that, it is neither necessary nor sufficient to those themes on its own.

But Deviant goes full force into angry, messy, brutal revenge. And I respect that! It looks at how tragic retribution is, how it twists the people who seek it, but also how it is an inescapable thing, how the catharsis it brings is too important to ignore, how the justice it offers can’t be denied.

I have complicated feelings about revenge as a concept, and I don’t know how much I can talk about Deviant’s themes without going into them. Suffice it to say, though, I think revenge is what makes Deviant shine. If I were to run a game of it, I would make it a dark superhero revenge story, one not really connected to the other Chronicles of Darkness games, because I think that’s where it works the best.