S.J. posted:

You have no idea how excited I am about this. I can use my Infinity minis for it...

ZearothK posted:

Lure. Of. Heroic. Fascism. In. Werewolf.

gradenko_2000 posted:

Not that I would use WOD for this, but "Neo-Nazi Werewolves" sound like a perfect mook to be gunned down in a Weird War 2 campaign.

Blaskowicz: The Shootening

Helical Nightmares posted:

Who is the guy you guys are referring to as Swedish Dracula?

RocknRollaAyatollah posted:

I really can't wait to see Werewolf after the comments by Swede Dracula on them being Neo-Nazis. With Vampire, he just talked about how dark the game should be and how he wants to go back to the old days. With Werewolf he's leading with them being Neo-Nazis and the depths they'll sink to are now endless.

Nuns with Guns posted:

He has the audacity to demand that a photo of himself be used as loving Dracula in the vampire game. Nothing else he does to reshape the oWoD games to fit an image he developed in 1992 should shock anyone

BrainParasite posted:

He's, weirdly, not wrong. Werewolf in both iterations emphasized racial identity, nostalgia, and might makes right. They both seem to have a slightly different take on blood and soil if looked at in just the right way. Heck, many of the facists were environmentalists of a racist sort.

gradenko_2000 posted:

Not that I would use WOD for this, but "Neo-Nazi Werewolves" sound like a perfect mook to be gunned down in a Weird War 2 campaign.

Blaskowicz: The Shootening

RocknRollaAyatollah posted:

This is true but the original subtext was that these aspects of their society was leading them to ruin. He seems to be leaning on them being heroic and these obsessions as positive by describing it as "heroic fascism".

There's nothing wrong with subtext, especially if done well and ultimately having a positive message, but leading with, the Werewolves are all heroic fascists going down in a blaze of glory isn't exactly the original message or intent. It's a character flaw and it's heavily implied that for them to succeed, they have to overcome these flaws.

That Old Tree posted:

Martin Ericsson, the Lead Story-thinker of the revenant White Wolf.

EDIT:



This image you see all over the new WoD stuff is him.

Evil Mastermind posted:

It wasn't even that much of a subtext; the game was always pretty up-front about the idea of how the Garou were supposed to be defending the Earth spirit and everything, but were too busy fighting centuries-old feuds and comparing dick sizes to actually do their loving job.

Alien Rope Burn posted:

RocknRollaAyatollah posted:

Why is he wearing tinsel on his wrist?

BrainParasite posted:

He's, weirdly, not wrong. Werewolf in both iterations emphasized racial identity, nostalgia, and might makes right. They both seem to have a slightly different take on blood and soil if looked at in just the right way. Heck, many of the facists were environmentalists of a racist sort.

RocknRollaAyatollah posted:

This is true but the original subtext was that these aspects of their society was leading them to ruin. He seems to be leaning on them being heroic and these obsessions as positive by describing it as "heroic fascism".

There's nothing wrong with subtext, especially if done well and ultimately having a positive message, but leading with, the Werewolves are all heroic fascists going down in a blaze of glory isn't exactly the original message or intent. It's a character flaw and it's heavily implied that for them to succeed, they have to overcome these flaws.

Flavivirus posted:

The timeline's a little wrong there - he was picked as dracula for the 20th edition of vampire years before Paradox bought White Wolf. If I remember right they got prominent larpers to pose in costume for the clan photos, and he was picked for the Tzimisce photo. It's more that he's a big-name larper in Sweden who was able to convince his bosses to buy White Wolf and make vampire his day job.

Splicer posted:

He looks like a poorly disguised cardassian spy.

Halloween Jack posted:

Indeed, Himmer, Darre, Backe, and a number of infamous SS figures were agronomists who believed in that quasi-mystical "blood and soil" racial pseudoscience.

Oh boy, you got me started. Okay, so there's a lot to unpack in Ye Old World of Darkness. Maybe it's folly to ascribe even a general attitude to a setting written by many different people, working under different editors, over the course of over a decade. Here I go anyway.

The perspective presented in the World of Darkness is not all that different from The Matrix: it's the perspective of a middle-class adolescent beginning to question whether their reality is really real. You know that reality cannot be the one presented to you on television, nor do most people experience reality the way you do in an affluent suburb. (Lewis Mumford criticized the entire concept of a suburb as "an asylum for the preservation of illusion...based on a childish view of the world," and for good reason.) You know that when your parents and teachers tell you to be "realistic," it's a particular vision of realism.

So what you tend to see in these games is the mindset of someone breaking with the Establishment but with all the prejudices of someone raised in it. All the institutions of Western liberal democracy are presented as irredeemably corrupt. Middle-class suburbia is at best a colourless limbo. Christianity is nihilistic and the Roman Catholic Church in particular is made into a Satanic mockery of itself.

At the same time the City, as opposed to the Suburb, is presented as a nightmarish "concrete jungle" haunted by "urban predators." The Eastern world is presented always through the mystery-fogged lens of Orientalism. Non-Abrahamic religion--especially anything that can be conflated with the New Age movement--is "swallowed whole" without critique, to use an outdated Marxist-Leninist term. And of course the stories abound with various subtypes of Magical Negro, Noble Savage, Inscrutable Asian, and most famously, Thieving Gypsies.

In the WoD, what isn't bleak and bitter is often characterized by a jejune sort of New Age sentimentality, and it's no coincidence that New Age and fascist sentiment take root in the suburban middle class. You can lead middle-class people into supporting atrocities if you get them worked up enough about the failures of the system and offer them an alternative that contains a promise of pagan jouissance. To paraphrase Eco, neither St. Augustine nor Stonehenge are fascist, but if you create a pseudointellectual syncretism that combines the two, that's the sort of thing around which fascism can coagulate.

So when you read a WoD book by someone like Phil Brucato, the author appears to outright endorse some really problematic content, or to merely document it with a chilling lack of comment--as if the Red Talons and Black Furies are real tribes. And then there are authors like Steven Brown, who don't work with metaphor and simply enjoy the superficial tropes of the setting--so in Vampire as he presents it, you're playing monsters from David Icke's insane fantasies and it's awesome.

This is another reason I compare the whole exercise to The Matrix--oh, our "heroes" commit mass murder? Never mind, those people weren't really real anyway, just fragments of an all-consuming establishment that must be fought. Transgressing the boundaries is a good in itself, more important than a basic sense of ethics.

Kwyndig posted:

Mage especially had a lot of the Matrix on its sleeve even though it was supposed to be about people who could do actual magic. Of course. you did magic by 'seeing through the lie' and 'imposing your will on reality' and in the first edition the Technocracy (your main antagonist) were literally soulless agents of Paradox (the force that prevented you from performing the really big magics). Even in later editions the Technocrats had a lot of black suits and mirror shades going on.

Kai Tave posted:

I mean so we're clear Mage: the Ascension predates The Matrix by six years, the first edition that post-dated the movie was Revised. It's perhaps a bit more apt to say that Mage and The Matrix were both borrowing from a lot of the same sources, namely Gnosticism 101 and an abiding love for trenchcoats.

Moriatti posted:

Monarchies in settings where Divine Right is provable and tangible always seem like an interesting idea to explore that rarely gets said exploration.

Kwyndig posted:

Huh, well I can never keep that sort of stuff straight in my head. I thought they were closer together. Weird how they're so similar then.

Ratpick posted:

there's a conflict between Big Arcana literally sucking the life out of the planet and environmentalist Druids, Rangers and Elves.

Ratpick posted:

This is actually a great idea. I hadn't decided whether I want Divine magic to come from actually provable and tangible gods or go the Eberron way of "Well the gods might exist, belief in them certainly grants spells, but so do other philosophies so I don't know" but this might make me skew towards provable and tangible divinities.

Also, yeah, the market value of diamonds is definitely going to be something to consider in this setting, thanks to both of you for bringing that up.

e: Just came up with the twist needed for the divine right thing: the gods verifiably exist but they are too aloof to concern themselves with mortal matters. However, centuries ago they did run around for awhile and spawn some demigods who went on to found nation states where they rule as monarchs by divine right. Their descendants still rule even though they only have a drop of divine blood in them, but their divine ancestors haven't really bothered to check up on them for a while so things might have gone south.

Ratpick posted:

Incidentally, this means that the America equivalent also has the largest concentration of evil cults dedicated to nihilism and destruction (but enough about Republicans) because they were remorselessly persecuted back in their original countries, so you might have a friendly neighborhood death cult organizing a bake sale.