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My current impression is currently that you don't know enough about anti-semitism to know why this kind of thing is a gigantic problem. Many anti-semitic conspiracies also involve the catholic church. I respectfully urge you to slam very hard on the brake pedal and ask yourself if you understand enough of the why and how anti-semites use the Rothschilds, the "global elite," global conspiracies, blood sacrifice and the catholic church to form a cogent argument about why this is OK. worm girl fucked around with this message at 17:27 on Apr 9, 2022 |
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Apr 9, 2022 17:25
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worm girl posted:My current impression is currently that you don't know enough about anti-semitism to know why this kind of thing is a gigantic problem. Many anti-semitic conspiracies also involve the catholic church. Your right. I don't know enough evidently. Clearly when I made the post I just thought it was an possible Mage campaign.
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Apr 9, 2022 17:30
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I can't emphasize enough how much the hoops VtM 5E jumps through to, supposedly, get rid of the globe-spanning conspiracy stuff and allow for that coveted and elusive prize, the gritty street-level small-stakes localized vampire game, stands as an explicit affirmation of conspiratorial thinking. It's like... argh, these individuals are Too Powerful and keep getting in the way of my satisfaction. If only there was some way to neatly get rid of them all, then I would finally have the thing that's been denied to me for so long.Tulip posted:I wonder how much of the difference in outlook is based on the time things were written. Illuminati conspiracy theories post like, 2000 or 2005 feel just hokey and old-fashioned. Like vaudeville comedy or something. Just don't impress me much. Millennials and Zoomers much prefer their "no but what REALLY drives society" to be structures, incentives, modalities that lead to secretive but conflicting groups working toward similar end results but with different people on top, rather than "everybody who shares the ideology lines up in the same org" I also feel this way, but I bet there are a lot of people older and wiser (or just wiser) than me who would be like "no poo poo, Ferrinus, that's what I've been trying to tell you for the past three decades".
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Apr 9, 2022 17:33
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Helical Nightmares posted:Your right. I don't know enough evidently. Clearly when I made the post I just thought it was an possible Mage campaign. Really, if there's any lesson to be learned from the last 2 years, it's that Western institutions (government and business alike) are more than happy to entertain the prospect of mass human sacrifice if it will ensure Number Go Up. If anything, I'd argue the plot of BMM is too personal in scope with the sacrifice (though given it was written/out pre-2020, how could they have guessed what reality would bear out). Now, a fun Mage (probably more Awakening than Ascension) plot spiraling out of Black Monday Murders is (depending on campaign scale) either heads of state or even your local Chamber of Commerce making a deal with an Abyssal entity that says hey: I will ensure your businesses stay open, that your employees live in terror and precarity, and that you continue to live a life of insulated comfort. All I ask is that I can kill as many people as I want, whenever I want. Maybe a 9/11 every day amount of people. Don't worry, they mostly won't be people you know, and definitely won't be people you, personally, care about. In short: https://twitter.com/OminousJazz/status/1512406560152166408
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Apr 9, 2022 17:57
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Right, but Chainsaw Man doesn't repeat verbatim Nazi (capital N) tropes about Jewish and Jesuit conspiracy theories involving total control over world finance and blood sacrifice. When you make a story like this and invoke the Rothschilds, you're not talking about people in power, you're talking about a certain kind of people in power. (its jews) some basic rear end poo poo posted:Since medieval times, Jewry has frequently been depicted as a wealthy, powerful, menacing and controlling collectivity, demanding the sacrifice of others to their own greed. In these respects, Jews have been associated with Mammon, the deity associated with of money, and Moloch, the Ammonite god associated with human sacrifice. These stereotypes are often connected with stereotypical Jewish traits, such as malevolence, criminality, greediness, stinginess, and mendacity. There are lots of cool stories with good art that aren't perpetuating myths that were used to justify the holocaust. worm girl fucked around with this message at 18:06 on Apr 9, 2022 |
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Apr 9, 2022 18:01
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The Rothschild are bad, but not because they're jewish, it's because they're rich. However, since they are jewish, there's a lot of antisemitic conspiracies that involves them. Like, A LOT. Helical Nightmares posted:If you were looking for a good Mage plot for a campaign or a handful of adventures I'd recommend the comic series Black Monday Murders where the central story revolves around the revelation that the elites involved in high finance (Rothschilds and others) are literal Mammon worshipers and whenever the Market suffers a crash, human sacrifice of one of the practitioners is required to keep the Market afloat. Did you read The Ninth House? It's a modern fantasy novel set in Yale, where it turns out the Skull and Bones do live haruspex with kidnapped people.
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Apr 9, 2022 18:07
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MonsieurChoc posted:Did you read The Ninth House? It's a modern fantasy novel set in Yale, where it turns out the Skull and Bones do live haruspex with kidnapped people. Never heard of it until now. worm girl posted:some basic rear end poo poo posted: So you linked to Fact Sheet on the Elements of Anti-Semitic Discourse from the Louis D Brandeis Center. I've got a question about 4. The Wandering Jew. A Canticle for Leibowitz features a Wandering Jew in the form of Leibowitz who shows up in three time periods (iirc). Is this also anti-Semitic?
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Apr 9, 2022 18:12
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I don't know what that is, and whataboutism isn't going to make the comic you posted any less cartoonishly anti-semitic.
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Apr 9, 2022 18:15
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worm girl posted:I don't know what that is, and whataboutism isn't going to make the comic you posted any less cartoonishly anti-semitic. I hope you understand this was a legitimate question, not whataboutism Edit: I also hope it is clear that I'm reading the links you are posting.
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Apr 9, 2022 18:17
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Literally anyone who is talking about the Rothschilds specifically is being antisemitic, they’ve been a buzzword on it for literally 150 years.
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Apr 9, 2022 18:27
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Helical Nightmares posted:I hope you understand this was a legitimate question, not whataboutism Alright then. I don't know that work, but a good example of the Wandering Jew is Caine in oWoD, who is a figure out of Jewish myth who is solely responsible for the curse of vampirism and by extension all the evil that vampires do. By itself, that wouldn't be a big deal, but then you combine that with Vampire's focus on a worldwide conspiracy of blood-drinking monsters who control global politics and it starts to get a little collar-tuggy. For me personally, even that setup is salvageable, but it's important for writers to be aware of the territory they're in when they write for the setting. Plenty of oWoD writers have tried and failed, or not tried and succeeded, I guess. A comic about the Rothschilds running a blood cult to mammon is so far beyond the pale though. That's less a trope and more just repeating nazi propaganda.
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Apr 9, 2022 18:29
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worm girl posted:Why'd they restrict clans like that though? It kinda made sense in old-old WoD because the Tzimisce and Lasombra had powers you might not want players running around with, but splitting up the Anarch and Cammie clans is weirdly restrictive. None of that is set in stone and it's just vague overall vibe. There's a ton of side stuff with the official live play games and the recent video games that specifically points out exceptions, and this is done intentionally to further illustrate that though the book lists a litany of clans that are generally in the Camarilla, you can still make whoever and whatever you want and it's fine, because the game is a set of tools to tell a story first and foremost. Examples: Prince of Minneapolis is a Brujah despite them having left the Camarilla. A very young Brujah, no less. Prince of Tucson is/was a Gangrel Victor Temple is a prominent as hell Anarch Baron and is Ventrue Same for Nelli G, but Toreador Boss Callihan has always been an Anarch Baron and Ventrue Etc etc. The listings are just a framework to help people flesh things out, and the book even says that Rule 0 is there it all out the window if you want, it's all just suggestions anyway. worm girl posted:My current impression is currently that you don't know enough about anti-semitism to know why this kind of thing is a gigantic problem. Many anti-semitic conspiracies also involve the catholic church. Seriously, this. Anything that uses terms like "globalism" in a negative light is coding for antisemitism. It's one of the more blatant "we're just gonna say this ALL THE loving TIME on TV and insane right wing 'news' and pretend it's okay and totally not that." It's really hosed up that there's not more vocal outrage on the topic, but as has been the case historically, people don't give a poo poo if it doesn't directly affect them.
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Apr 9, 2022 18:38
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Fuzz posted:None of that is set in stone and it's just vague overall vibe. There's a ton of side stuff with the official live play games and the recent video games that specifically points out exceptions, and this is done intentionally to further illustrate that though the book lists a litany of clans that are generally in the Camarilla, you can still make whoever and whatever you want and it's fine, because the game is a set of tools to tell a story first and foremost. I gotcha. Well you've convinced me to pick it up. If nothing else, I do love me some Vampire sourcebook fiction.
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Apr 9, 2022 18:42
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worm girl posted:I gotcha. Well you've convinced me to pick it up. If nothing else, I do love me some Vampire sourcebook fiction. The second Inquisition book is good from what I read of it (mostly the fiction and general information, skimmed the stat block stuff), same goes for the Sabbat book. The Onyx Path books (Chicago by Night, Cult of the Blood Gods, a couple I'm forgetting) are also good from the bits I read, Blood Gods gets into some really weird poo poo which was cool. Basically V5 has been getting better with every book released after the core/Cam/Anarch/London books. And Renegade is reprinting the OP books soonish and the quality of their books is really really nice.
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Apr 9, 2022 18:57
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Lurks With Wolves posted:Hey. You know why I think Fuzz is always too defensive of V5? Because this thread is firmly CofD territory because V5's launch was that bad, and anyone who keeps leaning into a thread that's against an edition by default to defend it is going to be at best kind of a defensive weirdo. Don't make this worse than it has to be, christ. Thing is, and it's important to note: I'm not at all ANTI-CofD. Hell, I started that Nazi killing WW2 MGS inspired Deviant game on here, which sadly petered out because holy poo poo parenthood kicks your rear end for time and mental energy. I quit oWoD in like 2006ish specifically because the community was a haven for fascists and white supremacists and the islamophobia post 9/11 had reached new levels of cringe (literally every other game recruiting in NYC was "the Assamites attacked America! Let's gently caress those MOOSLIM CANNIBALS UP!"). I mostly just played nWoD and Shadowrun after that. It's only in the last year I've gotten back into WoD5 after playing Night Road and getting curious about the new edition in the wake of Bloodlines 2 getting announced (and then having dev hell, because of course it does, it's Bloodlines!) Both CofD and WoD5 are good. Me coming in to say how great something in CofD is just more worthless echo chamber and adds nothing new to the discussion, so why bother wasting time and energy on it? It's like reinforcing the social media bubbles our society lives in nowadays. This is the World/Chronicles of Darkness thread, though, so someone should mention the good and cool stuff happening with V5 and soon H5 (haven't read it, but the interview with Justin Achilli about it seemed very interesting) because there may be silent lurker types that would be interested, so I choose to focus my thread energy on that. Simple as that. citybeatnik posted:I'm still not sure what I think about Thinblood Alchemy. TBA is definitely an oddball, but it's also not even mandatory. The one TB game I recently played in (was a one shot that only went for 3 weeks following a movie style arrangement) none of us even had it - but all Thinbloods can't even do it, you need to specifically take the merit to unlock it for exp buying in. At first I thought it was needless ability tax and bad design, but when we actually played a game and no one bothered but we all had other weird merits and would randomly pick up powers based on the resonances of blood we were feeding on, all while just trying to survive what was ultimately intended to be a suicide mission by our handler/jailer (we had been rounded up by the Camarilla and made to go rescue/destroy before they get compromised a pair of neonates who had been captured by some mystery group), I saw why it's an optional buy in and not the default. Being a Thinblood doesn't need to revolve around that and oftentimes a certain discipline or specific power distracts so heavily from everything else in terms of clan/Bloodline that people can't see the forest for the trees. In the end 2/5 survived to live another night as Thinbloods, one was killed in the mayhem, one killed himself because he refused to go on with this hosed up unlife and refused to carry out the mission, and the last one diablerized one of the neonates to become a full blooded vampire, hoping to be accepted by the Camarilla only for them to brand her a violator of the traditions and have her destroyed. (My PC was the one that died in the mayhem, sacrificing himself to help the two survivors escape) Was wild and crazy but really drat fun. Doesn't answer your TBA concerns, and honestly I've only seen it used thus far with NPC Thinbloods, but it's nuanced enough that it seems like it could be a fun option to have. Fuzz fucked around with this message at 19:22 on Apr 9, 2022 |
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Apr 9, 2022 19:15
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worm girl posted:Why'd they restrict clans like that though? It kinda made sense in old-old WoD because the Tzimisce and Lasombra had powers you might not want players running around with, but splitting up the Anarch and Cammie clans is weirdly restrictive. If I missed a direct answer to the Lasombra/Tzimisce question I apologize but they did give them rules in Chicago By Night and the free player's guide that got released a couple Decembers ago. Some of both clans weren't down with going across the ocean to fight the ancients so they stayed and blended with vampire society at large.
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Apr 9, 2022 19:31
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H5 lost me when they decided to discard the Imbued. It's just not Reckoning! Call it Hunter's Hunted instead, and drop the unrelated Imbued stuff you're kludging in there to make people think it's Hunter when it's not.worm girl posted:Alright then. I don't know that work, but a good example of the Wandering Jew is Caine in oWoD, who is a figure out of Jewish myth who is solely responsible for the curse of vampirism and by extension all the evil that vampires do. By itself, that wouldn't be a big deal, but then you combine that with Vampire's focus on a worldwide conspiracy of blood-drinking monsters who control global politics and it starts to get a little collar-tuggy. For me personally, even that setup is salvageable, but it's important for writers to be aware of the territory they're in when they write for the setting. Plenty of oWoD writers have tried and failed, or not tried and succeeded, I guess. Caine is also in Christianity and Islam, he's not solely Jewish. And actual jewish characters are almost entirely absent from Masquerade, with a very VERY christian focus to the whole game that got slowly opened. In Mage you ahd the Lions of Zion and the Hermetics stealing Kabbalah. TheKingslayer posted:If I missed a direct answer to the Lasombra/Tzimisce question I apologize but they did give them rules in Chicago By Night and the free player's guide that got released a couple Decembers ago. Some of both clans weren't down with going across the ocean to fight the ancients so they stayed and blended with vampire society at large. Splitting rules in unrelated supplements is something I loving hate. If I want all the clans I gotta buy this dumb Chicago book I don't want.
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Apr 9, 2022 19:35
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Yeah I wasn't really thrilled about them splitting Lasombra like that either. I get it, gotta give people a little extra reason to buy the book but come on.
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Apr 9, 2022 19:37
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WFRP 4E is doing the same thing and I'm not happy about it either. I understand putting related stuff in a book. A new Chicago-only bloodline of young caitiffs? Sure, go wild! But all 13 Clans should have been in the core.
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Apr 9, 2022 19:46
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TheKingslayer posted:Yeah I wasn't really thrilled about them splitting Lasombra like that either. I get it, gotta give people a little extra reason to buy the book but come on. This is unfortunately standard for a lot of the industry and 2nd Edition did the same poo poo. Revised was a weird exception at the time of its release and the WW of that time went out of their way to make the "all the core stuff is in the core book!" thing a selling point for it and then Exalted. Sadly, Capitalism is a gently caress and spreading poo poo across multiple books ensures more sales from people that get into the system vs them just borrowing some book from a friend or skipping it. On the plus side, the upcoming Official Player's Guide will have all 14 clans (Salubri are included) in one book along with alternative Clan Banes for all of them. Only one that's basically been confirmed is Nosferatu not needing to be hideous and instead having a horrible and off-putting aura about them that drives people away. Remains to be seen exactly how this differs mechanically from Obvious Predator, but Sheriff Cui in Parliament of Knives has the alternative bane.
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Apr 9, 2022 19:56
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Oooh, I might get that one then. Is it a replacement for the core?
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Apr 9, 2022 19:59
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Lasombra will never be as effortlessly cool as Mekhet, I'm sorry it's just the truth. Too bad hollow Mekhet were only in a single edition. They were the best of all...
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Apr 9, 2022 20:07
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Yeah the general Thinblood ability to manifest powers based off the blood they drink is Cool and Good. TBA is just a headscratcher due to some of the techniques. Like, the one where you need to do it to folks you feed from at least follows from the general thinblood sbilities. But when you need a drat forge and alymbic station is where it veers headlong into just plain off.TheKingslayer posted:If I missed a direct answer to the Lasombra/Tzimisce question I apologize but they did give them rules in Chicago By Night and the free player's guide that got released a couple Decembers ago. Some of both clans weren't down with going across the ocean to fight the ancients so they stayed and blended with vampire society at large. I prefer to think that the Fiends that stayed behind to integrate with the Anarchs all met that Voivode Of The Hood sample character and went "you know what this dude rocks i'm gonna be like him".
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Apr 9, 2022 20:10
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worm girl posted:Lasombra will never be as effortlessly cool as Mekhet, I'm sorry it's just the truth. They should do another Translation Guide so we can make a bunch of Caitiff characters who just happen to actually be Requiem characters.
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Apr 9, 2022 20:15
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Tulip posted:I wonder how much of the difference in outlook is based on the time things were written. Illuminati conspiracy theories post like, 2000 or 2005 feel just hokey and old-fashioned. Like vaudeville comedy or something. Just don't impress me much. Millennials and Zoomers much prefer their "no but what REALLY drives society" to be structures, incentives, modalities that lead to secretive but conflicting groups working toward similar end results but with different people on top, rather than "everybody who shares the ideology lines up in the same org" Yep, this was the decade kicked off by The X-Files, an unprecedented hit. We also saw stuff like Deus Ex or Metal Gear Solid 2 a few years later. One theory I've seen is people just didn't know what to do with the USSR gone. One moment, there was this massive, external threat just ready to rain down nuclear fire on you and then it was gone. So people invented a more nebulous enemy to cope with their fears. That's what conspiracies are - a way to control your fear and your world. I've never read it but I've heard Umberto Eco once wrote a story about a guy setting out to disprove the Templar conspiracy theory but in the process of research, he actually came to believe the conspiracy himself. The human mind hates nothing more than coincidences and accidents.
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Apr 9, 2022 20:45
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MonsieurChoc posted:Oooh, I might get that one then. Is it a replacement for the core? It's being pitched as a Players guide so maybe not a replacement for the core. I assume the core will remain needed for general rules and the PG will focus more on making character creation more interesting. I'm not sure if Renegade has put it up for pre-order yet, but they did announce it a couple months (weeks?) ago.
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Apr 9, 2022 20:48
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citybeatnik posted:I prefer to think that the Fiends that stayed behind to integrate with the Anarchs all met that Voivode Of The Hood sample character and went "you know what this dude rocks i'm gonna be like him". That was always one of my favorite pre-gen characters from back then but I never got a chance to give the concept a spin. Might take some time and re-read all the revised clan books tonight.
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Apr 9, 2022 20:59
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NikkolasKing posted:Yep, this was the decade kicked off by The X-Files, an unprecedented hit. We also saw stuff like Deus Ex or Metal Gear Solid 2 a few years later. One theory I've seen is people just didn't know what to do with the USSR gone. One moment, there was this massive, external threat just ready to rain down nuclear fire on you and then it was gone. So people invented a more nebulous enemy to cope with their fears. That's what conspiracies are - a way to control your fear and your world. I've never read it but I've heard Umberto Eco once wrote a story about a guy setting out to disprove the Templar conspiracy theory but in the process of research, he actually came to believe the conspiracy himself. The human mind hates nothing more than coincidences and accidents. Well, also, the America Government has been doing horrible stuff for decades in the name of "fighting communism" and at some point people noticed. Of course it's more giving money to mosnters to do horrible stuff and less sci-fi aliens spoopy stuff.
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Apr 9, 2022 21:05
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worm girl posted:Right, but Chainsaw Man doesn't repeat verbatim Nazi (capital N) tropes about Jewish and Jesuit conspiracy theories involving total control over world finance and blood sacrifice. When you make a story like this and invoke the Rothschilds, you're not talking about people in power, you're talking about a certain kind of people in power. (its jews) The next time you reach for a neutral guide to the definition of anti-semitism in media, you can definitely do better than the Louis D. Brandeis center, which is a fanatically Zionist think tank that engages in harassing and blacklisting Palestinian students and other pro-Palestine, anti-apartheid activists and academics for their crimes of supporting BDS and not adopting the IHRA definition of anti-zionism, which is that criticism of the state of israel is anti-semitic
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Apr 9, 2022 21:39
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MonsieurChoc posted:Well, also, the America Government has been doing horrible stuff for decades in the name of "fighting communism" and at some point people noticed. Oh absolutely. I think stuff like X-Files and, yes, oWoD, were born of that anti-US counterculture. Black helicopters, G-Men, this is all probably more concretely linked to things like JFK's assassination (the truth of his murder is almost irrelevant at this point) and the FBI actively spying on and killing folks, to say nothing of America's actions abroad during the Cold War. But it reached its heights in the post-Cold War decade and I've always wondered why. Ttimes have changed since then. I'm not exactly sure why. Maybe it's the internet it has given people an undue sense of their own power or importance and the idea of this monolithic force out there controlling everything hurts that image of themselves. "If there was a conspiracy like this, somebody would know about it by now. This is the Information Age." Not that I believe in any Illuminati but the stories we tell each other says a lot about our fears and concerns and so the decline of this conspiracy fiction says our fears and concerns have changed. NikkolasKing fucked around with this message at 21:52 on Apr 9, 2022 |
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Apr 9, 2022 21:48
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tatankatonk posted:The next time you reach for a neutral guide to the definition of anti-semitism in media, you can definitely do better than the Louis D. Brandeis center, which is a fanatically Zionist think tank that engages in harassing and blacklisting Palestinian students and other pro-Palestine, anti-apartheid activists and academics for their crimes of supporting BDS and not adopting the IHRA definition of anti-zionism, which is that criticism of the state of israel is anti-semitic i mean it's a poo poo source but it's also not wrong in this case? the stuff about "self-worship" in the comic is also very reminiscent of some weird poo poo i've only ever seen in right-wing conspiracy circles, usually alongside tortured misinterpretations of Kabbalah as being about binding God to your will fwiw i'm 100% on board the "the Rothschilds aren't evil because they're Jewish, they're evil because they're rich" train, but giving them top billing in a comic about Mammon and human sacrifice is basically last century's version of being obsessed with George Soros; it's a really specific set of dog whistles and grabbing some low-hanging fruit in terms of classism doesn't really change that
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Apr 9, 2022 21:52
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NikkolasKing posted:Oh absolutely. I think stuff like X-Files and, yes, oWoD, were born of that anti-US counterculture. Black helicopters, G-Men, this is all probably more concretely linked to things like JFK's assassination (the truth of his murder is almost irrelevant at this point) and the FBI actively spying on and killing folks, to say nothing of America's actions abroad during the Cold War. But it reached its heights in the post-Cold War decade and I've always wondered why. Oh I'm sure there's some really good anthropology and history PhDs on this. To my knowledge there isn't a real consensus on this, but several competing explanations. My preferred explanation, which undoubtedly has to do with my social and political biases, is that the internet has made it too obvious that each "conspiracy" is actually an interlocking grid of competing factions who are not actually that concerned with hiding their overall existence from the public, just with hiding their specific movements from their rivals. Like, the most straightforward organization to accuse of of conspiracies is The Roman Catholic Church, and we've seen not only that they're using that to cover up very mundane sexual abuse for very mundane personnel retention, but also that it's fairly easy to find evidence of factional clashes over how to handle it. When you learn that Benedict XVI (when he was Cardinal) and John Paul II quite bitterly disagreed about whether or not to kick out priests over sexual abuse and fought quite a bit over it, then it becomes a lot harder to think that they're doing bizarre Templar bullshit. I guess what I'm saying is that we have seen smoking gun conspiracies now that all seem so much less cartoonish and more messy, and in general there's been a social preference trending toward messier, ambiguous narratives. Or maybe grand universal conspiracies just feel dated. I dunno I think there's a lot of options.
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Apr 9, 2022 22:12
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Fuzz posted:It's only in the last year I've gotten back into WoD5 after playing Night Road and getting curious about the new edition in the wake of Bloodlines 2 getting announced (and then having dev hell, because of course it does, it's Bloodlines!) I wouldn't blame that anti-WoD5 sentiment on SA though. V5 had a rocky start, including on the business side with the publisher switch. I mentioned a few pages back that it took me 6 months to receive a set of dice for a game that (sort of) uses special dice. This overall sentiment here reminds me of the WoD Discord (>3000 people online), where everything is also talked about, everyone has a long memory, and the newer material is sometimes looked at with distaste. That has changed over time, especially as media like LA by Night, Night Road, Shadows of NY, Parliament, etc continues to be good and draw people in. The newer books (Chicago, Blood Gods, that free supplement for the missing clans) have been good too. Now the V5 discord has about 1/3 the population of that WoD discord, and is a good place for rules and lore discussion and game recruiting. The largest V5 game server I'm aware of (Prague) has 70 active players who earned XP last week. Last night on reddit, someone put up an interest post for running a V5 PBP game. The ST had some line/veils up front which was a good sign to me, seemed like a reasonable person, so I went into the discord link to check it out. 45 loving people already there in just a few hours. There's definitely more interest than there are STs able and willing to run a game. I shouldn't talk though, I haven't tried to run it yet either. So what I'm saying is keep discussing it here, there are players here and interested lurkers. But you don't have to defend games so much as just describe them and what you enjoy - if the game is worth it, people will come around. SA went through this with 5e D&D too (omg that was painful). And maybe also look at those v5-friendly spaces if you really want to dive in.
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Apr 9, 2022 22:13
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Tulip posted:Oh I'm sure there's some really good anthropology and history PhDs on this. To my knowledge there isn't a real consensus on this, but several competing explanations. My preferred explanation, which undoubtedly has to do with my social and political biases, is that the internet has made it too obvious that each "conspiracy" is actually an interlocking grid of competing factions who are not actually that concerned with hiding their overall existence from the public, just with hiding their specific movements from their rivals. Like, the most straightforward organization to accuse of of conspiracies is The Roman Catholic Church, and we've seen not only that they're using that to cover up very mundane sexual abuse for very mundane personnel retention, but also that it's fairly easy to find evidence of factional clashes over how to handle it. When you learn that Benedict XVI (when he was Cardinal) and John Paul II quite bitterly disagreed about whether or not to kick out priests over sexual abuse and fought quite a bit over it, then it becomes a lot harder to think that they're doing bizarre Templar bullshit. Counter point: Qanon. The over arching bizarre conspiracy poo poo is still alive and well. It's just gone utterly batshit crazy
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Apr 9, 2022 22:32
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NikkolasKing posted:One theory I've seen is people just didn't know what to do with the USSR gone. One moment, there was this massive, external threat just ready to rain down nuclear fire on you and then it was gone. So people invented a more nebulous enemy to cope with their fears. As a theory that would be incomplete: the lack of an external enemy leading the eye to turn inwards can explain some stuff, but the US conspiracy movement predates the 1990s by decades and grew significantly in the 1980s, before the end of the Cold War. It's also important to keep in mind that it was tied heavily to millenialism in the lead-up to year 2000, which again, also predated the end of the Cold War and came together with a series of religious fears that were heightened during, again, the 1980s. In fact, the 90s as a decade of conspiracy-mania is probably connected very directly to both the rise of the US militia movement (with its fears of the US government) and the rise of the religious right in the 1980s. The militia movement's conspiracy stuff was contemporaneous with Iran-Contra and the October Surprise conspiracy theory, and could itself draw upon the preceding decades of political unrest and government-critical thought spurred on by the Rockefeller Commission, the Vietnam War, the COINTELPRO revaltions, the renewed interest in the Roswell incident, and the controversies over the MLK assassination and JFK assassination hitting in short order.
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Apr 9, 2022 22:51
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Tulip posted:Oh I'm sure there's some really good anthropology and history PhDs on this. To my knowledge there isn't a real consensus on this, but several competing explanations. My preferred explanation, which undoubtedly has to do with my social and political biases, is that the internet has made it too obvious that each "conspiracy" is actually an interlocking grid of competing factions who are not actually that concerned with hiding their overall existence from the public, just with hiding their specific movements from their rivals. Like, the most straightforward organization to accuse of of conspiracies is The Roman Catholic Church, and we've seen not only that they're using that to cover up very mundane sexual abuse for very mundane personnel retention, but also that it's fairly easy to find evidence of factional clashes over how to handle it. When you learn that Benedict XVI (when he was Cardinal) and John Paul II quite bitterly disagreed about whether or not to kick out priests over sexual abuse and fought quite a bit over it, then it becomes a lot harder to think that they're doing bizarre Templar bullshit. LatwPIAT posted:As a theory that would be incomplete: the lack of an external enemy leading the eye to turn inwards can explain some stuff, but the US conspiracy movement predates the 1990s by decades and grew significantly in the 1980s, before the end of the Cold War. It's also important to keep in mind that it was tied heavily to millenialism in the lead-up to year 2000, which again, also predated the end of the Cold War and came together with a series of religious fears that were heightened during, again, the 1980s. In fact, the 90s as a decade of conspiracy-mania is probably connected very directly to both the rise of the US militia movement (with its fears of the US government) and the rise of the religious right in the 1980s. The militia movement's conspiracy stuff was contemporaneous with Iran-Contra and the October Surprise conspiracy theory, and could itself draw upon the preceding decades of political unrest and government-critical thought spurred on by the Rockefeller Commission, the Vietnam War, the COINTELPRO revaltions, the renewed interest in the Roswell incident, and the controversies over the MLK assassination and JFK assassination hitting in short order. This all makes sense. It's definitely a topic I need to read up on more, and this current discussion motivated me to grab a couple scholarly books on the subject. I did forget to count a lot of other factors, like the millennialism stuff. Also just glancing at one of the books i got, i totally spaced on AIDS and crack spawning a fresh wave of mistrust and conspiracy. But while the conspiracy "culture" goes back to at least the 60s, conspiracy fiction seemed to hit its boom period in the 90s/early 2000s. I don't know how I always overlook The Matrix in these discussions, possibly because it's the supreme apotheosis of that type of fiction. It's not even our world anymore, it's story about the future where our world is just an illusion. That does set it apart from X-Files and the rest of them but it is still pushing the exact same ideas and feelings and symbols while being probably the most influential and popular example of that type of fiction. Maybe it was everything built up for the last 3 decades and the coming millennium all combining or something. Hopefully at least one of my sources addresses this satisfactorily. If you're interested, these are the ones I found right now, I have a few to buy later The Truth is Out There (this is a free link) A Culture of Conspiracy
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Apr 9, 2022 23:17
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tatankatonk posted:The next time you reach for a neutral guide to the definition of anti-semitism in media, you can definitely do better than the Louis D. Brandeis center, which is a fanatically Zionist think tank that engages in harassing and blacklisting Palestinian students and other pro-Palestine, anti-apartheid activists and academics for their crimes of supporting BDS and not adopting the IHRA definition of anti-zionism, which is that criticism of the state of israel is anti-semitic Good to know, I won't use that one in the future, though I didn't see anything bad in the section I shared. Boy I sure hate the internet. worm girl fucked around with this message at 23:32 on Apr 9, 2022 |
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Apr 9, 2022 23:21
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Fuzz posted:Me coming in to say how great something in CofD is just more worthless echo chamber and adds nothing new to the discussion, so why bother wasting time and energy on it? It's like reinforcing the social media bubbles our society lives in nowadays. This is the World/Chronicles of Darkness thread, though, so someone should mention the good and cool stuff happening with V5 and soon H5 (haven't read it, but the interview with Justin Achilli about it seemed very interesting) because there may be silent lurker types that would be interested, so I choose to focus my thread energy on that. Simple as that. I'm a big old CofD fan who's never played an oWoD game and I'm curious what they're doing with H5 mechanically. How much does it deviate from V5's mechanical spine? From that of Hunters Hunted? Are there extended character-building options besides Merits and Loresheets? How much does it zoom in and out, how versatile is it with the different "tiers" of play as Vigil saw them? How does it model NPC antagonists, and what kind of antagonists is it focused on?
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Apr 9, 2022 23:31
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To add fuel to a completely different fire, a facebook post from a writer on the upcoming W5 board game says the new lore has the Get of Fenris falling to the Wyrm. Just reading the comments there makes me want to actually try and learn Forsaken 2e to scrub the taste of Apocalypse out of my mind. I apologize if this was already suspected or confirmed somewhere else but it's news to me. Kavak fucked around with this message at 23:56 on Apr 9, 2022 |
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Apr 9, 2022 23:49
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Honestly, they've done some stupid things, but "deciding that the Nazi splat isn't worth trying to scrub the stink off of" doesn't sound like such a terrible idea.
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Apr 10, 2022 00:02
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