I saw it first on YouTube
Beast : The Primordial
"What I have found about this game,
it is the best yet at grappling with personal shadow.
Confronting the Darkness by glorifying in becoming it, to understand it.
A necessary outlet, a Jungian safety valve for unspoken desire,
hidden from yourself and from others, to the point of delusion.
This game takes away the veil and rewards you with integration.
Better than Vampire, Werewolf, etc;
This time it is personal, without compromise of masks.
This game releases The Inner You at your worst.
It is love at first sight,
Obviously."
Released March 30th 2016. That's ten years ago. The time it took Odysseus to stop fucking around and go back to his wife, life and responsibilities. The Beast was released by Onyx Path Studios, as part of the Chronicles of Darkness. I am now sincerely contemplating the possibility of Mandela Syndrome being a real thing, and not merely the dominion of the 'half of all humans are less than average intelligence' syndrome. Back in my day there was thing called White Wolf studio who published World of Darkness. That's the page I am on and that's the hill I died on, long ago, at Carthage. I said 'back in my day', I was updating things a little. Back in my day we didn't have laws, the printing press or chocolate. Those were better times.
Anyway. The Primordial. It's simplified and enhanced. The lever here is abuse. The enjoyment one gets from looking into someone's eyes and seeing the fear there. Feeding on it. Not feeding yourself, necessarily. Feeding an extra-dimensional nasty, your own personal incarnation of the Mother Of All Darkness. Home turf, then.
Of course I immediately got the .pdf from DriveThruRPG and have been using an AI to run a story for a character in my homebrew campaign world, living in the same city as all my other WoD characters, a gothpunk-noir pastiche of a real city in SouthEast Wales called Zooport. She fits right in nicely there, filling a gap from the other campaigns I have got the AI to run recently with other characters (a vampire, a mage, etc).
All of this is somewhat of a memoir as I patch together just exactly what it was happened around the turn of the millennium. Being as ancient as I am, making notes from retrospect helps somewhat. They're also interesting short stories, if you're into that sort of thing. Whether I edit and publish it or not, depends on laziness as much as what the laws are on such things. It's World Of Darkness. It's 18+ mature content. Playing the games the way they were designed to be played. Horror.
Anyway, it is the first game from this universe since Vampire, Werewolf, Mage and Wraith, which has really held my attention for long. My favourite is still always going to be Wraith, although it's also the most difficult to deal with. Simply because it is so close to the bone.
There is A Great Temptation with Beast: the Primordial which is to do a sweet little tweak to it. Although the game structure is beautiful in allowing custom modification of characters to evolve into their own madness as they power up, the compatibility of this with Kult: the Original by Metropolis games is amazing. In that game, characters can find portals through to Reality, often by experiencing events which drive them crazy beyond Human comprehension to cope with what Reality actually is. It is similar to the Sanity rating in Call of Cthulhu.
With Beast, the growth of a protagonists personal Otherworld, the empowerment of an incarnation of their monstrous perversion which manifests as an actual environment which its possible to travel into, the creation of their Lair in the Dream, is something useful for any game where journeying through Otherworlds is a feature. The structure of this in Beast is quite simple enough to be flexible. Although it's a game about a monster, the same system could in theory be adapted to anyone at all. Non-monstrous Dreamers would be able to do a similar thing, sourcing their energy from the same source that the Dark Mother sources it from, but flavouring it differently, more positively perhaps.
Now, the Hunger calls. I must feed.