FroshKiller Jones's New Writeups

Giovanni (thing)

2001-05-28T05:27:46Z

A clan of vampires in White Wolf's Vampire: The Masquerade roleplaying game. Known as the Necromancers, the Giovanni are both cunning giants of industry (and organized crime) and powerful practitioners of the magic of death. Giovanni Kindred are descended from the same greater mortal family, and all potential recipients of the Embrace must go through a period of ghouldom known as the Proxy Kiss.

The Giovanni are largely untrusted by other Kindred, particularly those of the Camarilla, due to their legacy. Hundreds of years ago, the clan's founder, Augustus Giovanni, diablerized his sire, the Antediluvian founder of Clan Cappadocian. The newborn Clan Giovanni then purged the earth of its parent clan. The Camarilla has a strange agreement with the Giovanni which prohibits the clan from participating in the great Jyhad. This is fine with the Giovanni...after all, it gives them more time to work toward their ultimate goal of…

Storyteller System (thing)

2001-05-28T03:10:43Z

A roleplaying game rules system developed by the White Wolf Game Studio for use in its games, such as Vampire: The Masquerade and Aberrant.

The most salient feature of the Storyteller system is its simplicity. The outcome of events that are governed by skill and chance, such as trying to hit an opponent, is decided by rolling a number of ten-sided dice (also known as d10s). Typically, the number of dice rolled is determined by pairing a character's rating in an Attribute--the physical, mental, and social characteristics common to all people--with his rating in an appropriate Ability, a reflection of the talents, skills, or knowledges possessed by the character. If a certain amount of dice come up higher than a previously given difficulty, the action is considered successful.

Vampire: The Dark Ages (thing)

2001-05-28T03:01:58Z

As much a separate game as a period supplement, Vampire: The Dark Ages is a Dark Medieval roleplaying game produced by the White Wolf Game Studio based on Vampire: The Masquerade.

Vampire: The Dark Ages is set at the close of the 12th century in medieval Europe. It is advertised as a "storytelling game of Gothic horror." The game rules are based on a version of White Wolf's simple Storyteller system. The core book has a MSRP of $29.95 USD and is nearly 300 pages long, containing chapters dedicated to European history, descriptions of vampire mythology, vampiric powers (called Disciplines), and much more.

Cappadocian (thing)

2001-05-28T02:51:47Z

A clan of vampires in White Wolf's Vampire: The Dark Ages roleplaying game. Known as the Clan of Death, the Graverobbers concerned themselves with the secrets of death and the afterlife. Their nature as passive, secretive scholars made them ideal advisers to Cainites in power, but their macabre reputation typically made other vampires wary. They were said to have fed on corpses, to have kept contact with ghosts beyond the wall of death, and to have buried their initiates alive. These ghoulish stories were aggravated by their tendency to wear hideous masks made to look like skulls or death throes and their preference of havens, which usually ran to cemeteries and crypts.

By the Final Nights, the Cappadocians have been more or less destroyed by the Giovanni, and their name has been lost to legend.

Weakness: Cappadocians have a corpselike pallor that…

M.U.G.E.N. (thing)

2001-05-10T19:26:40Z

M.U.G.E.N. is a 2D fighting game engine produced by Elecbyte Games. Almost every aspect of the engine is programmable or customizable, from the graphics used for the health bar to the game's combo system.

The engine works by reading information about the various characters created by the user. M.U.G.E.N. itself does not provide a development environment, though Elecbyte offers a functional suite of development tools that allow you to generate the proprietary SFF, SND, etc. files from your own source graphics and sounds.

More information on M.U.G.E.N., including technical documentation and tutorials, is available at http://mugen.elecbyte.com.

keystyle (thing)

2001-04-30T04:25:42Z

"Keystyle" is an abbreviation of "keyed freestyle," a term used by internet emcees to distinguish between a verse that has been prepared over a long period of time and a verse that they have typed out in one sitting, usually in response to a battle challenge.

There are several typing conventions prevalent in keystyling:

The use of quotation marks to indicate related concepts, e.g. "I'll 'rip' you like 'paper.'"
The use of hyphens to indicate multi-syllable rhymes and sped-up rhythm, e.g. "insidious, can't get-with-this."
CAPITAL LETTERS and *asterisks* used for emphasis.