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Because I've been sick for a while, a new little timewaster: I'm doing a read through of the Masquerade of the Red Death trilogy for VtM for the first time in years. Prepare for only the fifth worst VtM novels ever written, starting tomorrow.
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Jun 16, 2023 08:11
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The Masquerade of the Red Death - Book 1: Blood War - Part 1 Who's ready to read what many WoD fans consider the worst novels ever published? Join our journey into... The Masquerade of the Red Death!  No lie – I love this cover. The chap is the titular Red Death and he’s got a great vibe going. Its very early 90s horror-aesthetic, very Skeleton Warriors, with a hint of real horror. That said, the guy is also too big since he never appears as a ten foot giant, but hey – artistic license. But, before we get ahead of ourselves – what the hell is The Masquerade of the Red Death? At its core, it’s an extremely loose retelling (which is to say, it steals some motifs and visuals) of Poe’s Masque of the Red Death, set in the World of Darkness, but that doesn’t do it justice. A straightforward retelling of the MotRD is so obvious and easy to do with Vampire that it writes itself, but this trilogy is absolutely not that. It’s a sprawling hamfisted adventure involving multiple signs of the apocalypse, mages, the vampire mafia (if you remember way back when joylessdivision did his A World of Darkness read-through, the Brujah Don Caravelli is a major character), a completely unknown bloodline, the collapse of political stability in Washington DC, and the sudden death of crucial characters for the setting. Its also, for that same reason, broadly assumed to be non-canon. Most of its ideas are never directly used again, though thematic elements recur later and there are a couple of sneaky references. I’ve never actually seen proof it had a non-canon flag slapped on it by White Wolf back in the day, but as very little of it is ever mentioned again except in Weinberg’s second trilogy, the Horizon War (which itself contained the only canonical depiction of an extremely big deal event in Mage’s metaplot), it’s pretty safe to assume it was quietly popped over to the side as one of the many failed tonal experiments of White Wolf’s early novel runs, along with the Jyhad novels and the paired novels on San Francisco. They are, for want of a better term, very, very, very Weinberg. So, who’s Robert Weinberg? He was a real-deal author (unlike some of White Wolf’s writing stable), though not a terribly good one. Comic fans might know him from a run on Marvel’s Cable, horror fans for the prolific number of anthologies he edited or the awful horror stuff he did in the 90s, pulp aficionados for Pulp magazine and his sponsorship of pulp reprint volumes, weird fiction fans for when he helped run Arkham House. He’s one of Those Authors who aren’t necessarily that good as writers but who love their subject with a kind of infectious enthusiasm for it and whose contributions on the back end of the business are vastly more important than their actual literary output. Their stories might not be any better developed than a ten year old on a playground inventing a backstory for a game of cops and robbers, but where the joy of writing these ridiculous setups come through, there’s something endearing about it, even wholesome. Weird little fellas who write weird little lovely stories that, if you go into it with that spirit in mind, are liable to leave you with a goofy grin. Weinberg wrote a few things for White Wolf. The first was a short story for the rather off-the-wall Dark Destiny collection published 1994, where he wrote pulp bullshit in and really went for it. Dark Destiny was like that – it had stories that were conventional game fluff, but then a story about post-apocalyptic vampires the next chapter, a reprint of an unrelated vampire story about how Peking Man was actually a vampire, and by its third volume, multiple stories about what Dracula was up to in the American Civil War. The folks at White Wolf (which is important here – a lot of White Wolf’s early novels were published via Harper-Collins by better established authors than Weinberg, while Masquerade was an in-house affair) must’ve liked it because they hired Weinberg for not just the two novel trilogies, but to work on a very loose tie-in novel for the tv series Kindred: the Embraced. This is a bit surprising for reasons that will become obvious as we move through the novel, but which can be boiled down to ‘hand a 51-year old pulp author a substantial contract for a property he doesn’t fully understand and see what happens’. So, now that we know what’s going on and who Weinberg is, lets get pulpy. Lets get weird. Spoiler warnings are in full effect since I’ll be discussing stuff both for this series and later works without too much regard to how it might impact on twists. Prologue We open with a quote from Poe, to make it really clear this isn’t a coincidence of naming: “Blood was its Avatar and its seal - the redness and horror of blood” From there, we get a prologue to introduce us to the World of Darkness. Rome, 1992 – a meeting between a pair of twins and ‘Father Naples’ of the Society of Leopold. Naples is, notably, not a name people usually have. Napoli’s much more common, and for an Italian the one you’d expect. We never do learn where Father Naples comes from, only that he’s in his late fities but still ‘…an expert at both kendo and karate [who] could kill an attacker a dozen different ways...’ Oh Bob. They’re meeting to discuss the Kindred. Naples has been lured there by a promise of huge money, but really, the Society wants to know who knows they exist and what they do. So they get together at noon to make sure the other guy isn’t a vampire and eat at an outdoor restaurant. His dinner companion is a handsome young blonde named Reuben, who knows the bible back to front (Weinberg insists on capitalizing and italicizing. Its always The Bible, never the bible. See also The Old Testament) and makes vampire jokes:  As references go, it’s a little blunt, but gently caress it. That’s pulp for you. More wretchedly, he orders linguine with meat sauce and a coke. There are no pizza rules but there are pasta rules and linguine is not an appropriate pasta for a meat sauce (also – which one?) I mention this because a certain cultural bias is already emerging – from names to food, Weinberg was very American and didn’t spend a lot of time digging into other places for the trilogy, even where its detrimental to character. Reuben is set up as older and wiser than his years (though as we’ll see later – not so much: he and his sister Rachel are the children of Seth – as in, Biblical Seth – and probably the first ever Revenants, with a direct trace of Caine’s blood in their veins.) and very well educated, so ordering something a little more specific here would’ve been a great chance to show the man knows what he’s about. As it is, he’s just a bit of a blank slate. This is where we get our potted history. As ways to infodump go, its not a bad one, except for two things. First – the infodump covers way more than it needs to over its twelve pages, and is just a wall of exposition. Second, the Society of Leopold end up spending pretty much the entire trilogy doing gently caress all, so Father Naples here is wasted (paper-thin) characterization work in a trilogy over a thousand pages long. The history is accurate enough – Caine cursed by God, Caine begets childer who beget childer, those childer revolt, etc, etc. A neat tidbit is the Society of Leopold considers Revelation (though Weinberg calls it ‘The Revelations’) to foretell the return of the Antediluvians, which is our first sign that this trilogy is concerned with the apocalypse. We get ghouls explained, the Sabbat and Camarilla conflict, and the Clans get a brief rundown while Father Naples drinks multiple bottles of wine in a row. Then, more apocalypse stuff. Gehenna, and the idea all methuselahs and antediluvians are cannibals. That’ll come up again in the course of the trilogy. Where most VtM novels until the end danced around the idea of the pending apocalypse as an oppressive vibe with the odd omen, Weinberg’s work actively puts on one of those sandwich boards and shouts ‘the end is nigh, goddamnit’. Here, the apocalypse isn’t just looming, its already in motion, which frankly is part of the bugfuck crazy charm. Finally, we get an introduction to the Jyhad, which forms the backbone of the plot. It is, to borrow from Weinberg:  Reuben drops some cryptic questions about the Inconnu and ‘recent events in Russia and Peru’, which we’ll come back to later. That, finally, is where Father Naples doesn’t know anything, and the conversation ends. Reuben slips away with no one even seeing him, and no one can describe him after the fact. The audio tape from the surveillance team is white noise. And finally… Father Naples was dead all along! Gasp! He died of a heart attack shortly after sitting down. Reuben, suffice to say, is on some next level supernatural poo poo. So we come back to my quibble about Father Naples being a waste. As a character, he’s pretty thin, but no thinner than the main characters – and its precisely the kind of book that the Society of Leopold playing a more significant role in would fit neatly. Instead, we get a cheap trick ending to highlight how powerful and spoopy Reuben is: he’s practically invisible, he can keep the dead alive; he can order coke with linguine and not feel shame. Reuben, to be clear, is a bit player – he’s fundamentally not that important to the story and exists mostly for exposition, and his role (and Father Naples, for that matter) in both this scene and most of the rest could be easily substituted with my single favourite NPC in VTM, who we’ll meet later in this book. Chapter One We jump ahead for no particular reason to 10 March 1994, in St. Louis. This time we actually meet one of the protagonists – the fantastically named Dire McCann, private dick. McCann was the subject of the first thing Weinberg wrote for White Wolf, his short in Dark Destiny (along with most of the other St. Louis characters, including McCann’s role as proxy for a methuselah named Lamech, the most powerful sorcerer ever, who invented a Golconda potion 6000 years ago. See what I mean about the schoolyard story style? Everything is straight up to 11.), so this is stuff the folks there knew was coming when they hired him. There’s a tendency in the way people speak about this trilogy to try and act like it was so unexpectedly bad that it had to be thrown in the non-canon bin, but unless my chronology is completely mistaken, there’s no way the editors at White Wolf didn’t know what Weinberg was about during the writing of these books, so the odds that they were somehow trapped into publishing it and didn't have time and opportunity to correct its excesses are slim. To set the scene, its night-time in a sleazy part of town, and McCann is being followed. But how does Weinberg construct a vibe of sleaze and seam? I’m glad you asked, because now I get to show you this:  You can smell the goddamn scotch even thirty years later. That said, this is another recurring element of Weinberg’s approach to the World of Darkness. A lot of its authors skewed towards a more ‘our world but with vampires’ approach, but Weinberg went all in on the flavour text in the rulebook about how it’s a darker, dirtier, and more extreme reality. The streets are packed with vice and brutal violence, the halls of power are corrupt, you can buy drugs literally anywhere, country roads are crawling with bandits and rape gangs waiting for unwary motorists, 50 people a month are murdered in St. Louis, and even the high class sex workers are streetwalkers on bad corners. The individual instances are all very hamfisted but there’s enough of them to really build a sense of exaggerated grime that colours all six of his WoD novels and that a lot of the other writers working for White Wolf, for good or ill (largely good) ignored. To use a painting analogy, Weinberg and some of the other early writers are out here messily using a very bright and basic palette – what follows after they’re done and the next batch of hands take over to refine these loose and crude studies is darker, murkier, technically more proficient but less strikingly ugly. Moving on, we learn McCann works for Alexander Vargoss, wealthy industrialist – and prince of St. Louis. The Mafia runs the underworld in the city, which – sure, okay. Its not actually as unreasonable as it looks at first glance as St. Louis did have its own Mafia family for a long time, but it shared a lot of its turf with smaller gangs and by 1994 was dealing with the Bloods, Crips, and Gangster Disciples who were absorbing the locals into complicated transnational affiliations. So, who is McCann? At this stage all we know is that he’s a big fella (6’4”, 250lbs, to be precise – and this being pulpy, it ain’t fat) noir detective who’s spent six months travelling on business, has close ties to the Prince, doesn’t trust the postal service, and hates mysteries. He’s a man’s man, a hardboiled dick, and he carries a MAC-10. Why? Well, let’s let Weinberg explain:  We need to know this because he immediately gets jumped in an alley by someone who disarms him with a garotte, rendering it pointless. Fortunately, McCann is an expert martial artist! Because, y’know, of course he is. Get used to that, by the way: Every protagonist in Weinberg’s WoD stuff is an unstoppable badass who can only be, at best, moderately inconvenienced. It makes me wonder much of the cringe element people have towards it is reflective of seeing what are, essentially, PCs run wild and recognizing their own excesses. McCann takes out the bad guy and starts the interrogation, only it’s a trap! The real assassin is behind him with a gun! He dives out of the fire and gets ready to get up, only its too late and the real assassin is gone! Only he isn’t, because Vargoss and his bodyguards have suddenly arrived and caught him! Yeah. This is also something to get used to. There’s a lot of escalation and immediate tension builders that are immediately, sometimes within the same sentence, defused. Now to get one of the other glaring issues with Weinberg out of the way, let’s meet the Prince’s bodyguards: Flavia and Fawn, a twin pair of English Assamites embraced around 1815 or so. At the time this was being written in 93/94, there was still a lot of guff about Assamites never embracing women or westerners until very recently, so this is actually a spot where Weinberg not giving a poo poo is good. This little bright spot quickly fades, though. I’ll let Weinberg do himself here:  Expect nearly every significant female character to be hot, wear skintight poo poo, and be completely unable to pass for normal. We also don’t get it here but the two are basically ivory white – and you may be thinking ‘So? They’re vampires’. They’re also Assamites, and prior to V5, all Assamites darken with age, so we unfortunately skip right from ‘Weinberg has no time for this ‘Assamite = Muslim Man nonsense’' back to ‘Weinberg, being a Weird Lil Guy, is terminally horny and has a loose grasp on the material.’ The Prince and his Angels were out walking to visit McCann and spotted the kerfuffle brewing. Yes, McCann is so badass that the immensely powerful Prince visits him on the minor errand of requesting his presence at a meeting. Now’s a good time to mention that Vargoss is a 2000-year old Methuselah, so he can pretty safely walk the streets with or without a bodyguard, but its an odd dynamic, and Vargoss doing so is particularly funny given that he apparently spends ‘too many… nights squelching… ill-conceived plots’ from his ‘loyal subjects [who] believe that they should rule this city’. I suppose its nice he’s an active and engaged figure with an ear to the ground, but maybe if he delegated rather than walking around the red light district doing errands any ol’ ghoul or phone call can take care of while killing people right out in the open, flanked by his extremely obvious matching set of white-leather supermodel sisters, he’d have fewer of his subjects wondering if he’s cooked or not. We close the chapter out with an invitation to Vargoss’s nightclub HQ. He has a special guest he wants McCann to meet – a guest from overseas, with news about The Soviet Union. We’ll cover that next time, but basically: Baba Yaga is real, cool, and back, baby. The excerpts I’ve shared are pretty standard for Weinberg’s prose – none of it is exactly brilliant, but there’s worse out there. His characters are paper-thin cutouts with the emotional depth of a puddle, and his action sequences are muddled – but for all that, it still has some of that breathless energy of a ten year old describing the plot of a movie they saw half of to you in a parking lot outside a dentist’s office. Loomer fucked around with this message at 03:33 on Jun 17, 2023 |
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Jun 17, 2023 03:21
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joylessdivision posted:That is....wow. I thought people were exaggerating how bad Red Death was. Bless you Loomer. Also Baba Yaga is cool and good Honestly, its far from the worst thing they ever published for Vampire. For fiction (thus setting aside the Gypsies book), that's torn between As One Dead, with its hybrid vampire who needs to breathe, and House of Secrets, which contains the single most racist thing White Wolf ever published involving the depiction of a very real, very important figure in the early post-Civil War civil rights movement.
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Jun 17, 2023 07:11
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Dawgstar posted:What novel or series talked about a blood plague? Because that blindsided me as apparently it was a novel only thing and they were talking about it in I think the Clan Novels like I should know about it. That was 'Gherbod Fleming''s Trilogy of the Blood Curse, which were pretty solidly mediocre, a bit confused in parts, and suffered from a forced tie-in with the execrable Grail Trilogy for Dark Ages. Gherbod/John H. Steele also wrote and masterminded half the Clan Novel series (Gangrel, Ventrue, Assamite, Brujah, and Nosferatu - so some of the big hitters in the metaplot side), a bunch of short stories, most of the Predator & Prey series, two tribe novels, and the rather bizarre Tower of Babel where he (not terribly successfully) attempted a postmodern novel about novels in the context of Mage, featuring a character, who writes a character who enters the world from the book, but also John H. Steele himself as a character. Unless he's also a now-dead marine biologist who would've been in his late 60s and 70s writing most of these, he never published elsewhere under either name, so who they actually are remains a mystery. Depending on where I'm at after the MotRD trilogy I might keep at the novels, if there's interest.
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Jun 17, 2023 11:51
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The Masquerade of the Red Death - Book 1: Blood War - Part 2, Chapters 2-5 Chapter Two We return to McCann. He has the standard PI office – tiny reception, small office, bad part of town. He’s from a dime novel, basically, but he’s also switched on and tuned in on the global scale. He monitors the Giovanni’s major financial dealings on a week by week basis and skims from the profits which, while a big risk, makes more sense when we learn McCann is the puppet-avatar of the Methuselah who arranged the diablerie of Cappadocius to fund his long life. He also has a clipping service pick up weird news around the world, though this is where we spin into the unfortunate again.  Yikes, in so many loving ways. Though, fair dues: The reaction of most white Australians is unfortunately gonna be ‘when are they going? Get rid of them!’ so the last line is pretty on the money. Nuckalavee is, by the by, a Scottish word – not exactly an untranslated Warlpiri or Djaru word, and one you can literally just look up in an encyclopedia – but in the Vampire context, its also one of the Nictuku. Apparently its in Australia and stirring poo poo up – which McCann understands. For a private dick in St. Louis he knows some deep cuts of Vampire lore. Another clipping from Peru talks about a weird rear end statue found by an expedition by the private Explorer’s Club. There’s not a lot of delay in the foreshadowing here – we’re maybe fifteen pages in from the first reference of the trouble in Peru. McCann used the money he stole from the Giovanni to fund the expedition to locate another Nictuku – Gorgo – who has now escaped and roams the earth. This is another of those plot points that gives Weinberg’s trilogy a breathless quality – mysterious terrors that may or may not even exist in later work are just plain facts of existence, roaming the world and ushering in the apocalypse. Finally, McCann gets a bunch of top secret intelligence agency documents from a friend in Switzerland. We’ll come back to that, but if you’ve read Joylessdivision’s reviews, you’ve already met them. More weird poo poo follows – an answering machine message that calls him ‘Lameth’ and warns him of the Red Death, then erases itself (gee, who have we met who can erase tapes? It’s a fuckin mystery. Where’d the call come from? McCann has it traced – he knows a guy, very pulp dialogue – to… the payphone in the lobby of the building he rents space in, which has been out of service for months. Nothing to follow up there, so its on to chapter 3. As you might be noticing, these are very short chapters. Chapter Three Still with McCann. We now know he drives a ‘late-model Chrysler’. This being 1994, I can only picture a ridiculously boxy Lebaron, and I can’t help but laugh at our hardboiled private dick cramming himself into one of these shitboxes to go meet an ancient vampire:  The destination is Club Diabolique – an abandoned warehouse turned into a disco in 1984 by some dudes with terrible timing since disco is already dead. And its explicitly disco to boot, because ‘when that craze had died, so had the club’. Oof. Now its been turned into, because this is early VtM and the entire aesthetic is basically just [url= https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pe5q_TdKbsk]this video[/url] on loop. It is, naturally, the hottest place in town as well as the Elysium and primary court of Prince Vargoss. A tongue-in-cheek approach to this would be to have Vargoss actually love modern music, if only because he’s constantly drinking from people high on coke and molly, but rest assured: he does not. Now, who actually goes to a place like this? Let’s ask Bob:   Punk, infamously, had no attitude. That aside, this is also par for the course for early VtM. Club Elysiums are always crawling with rich yuppie pricks slumming it and aggressively edgy goths. It was before my time so I honestly don’t know how often that happened outside of the top-end of the most well known clubs. We also get a long and basically acceptable description of goth fashion (read: ‘black’, ‘frills’, ‘loose fits’, and ‘lots of velvet, lace, and leather’), and find out McCann likes the kids and hopes they never actually encounter the darkness they romanticize. The club’s guarded by a 400 pound ex-wrestler dressed as an undertaker named Brutus. Brutus is one of Vargoss’s ghouls, which again begs the question of why the Prince is personally roaming around the streets delivering messages. The music is live heavy rock at the threshold of pain, because punk, rock, and goth are all interchangeable. Now, we get to meet another vampire and enjoy Bob’s sterling dialogue and the high standard of editing:  Eddie here is 'Fast Eddie' Sanchez, the fastest knife in town.The Elysium itself is soundproofed to keep out the rock music because Vargoss hates it. What kind of music does an ancient methuselah prefer? Well, in one of the most wonderfully bizarre bits:  I legitimately love the idea that in St. Louis’s limited vampire population of, say, 25 (15 in attendance that night plus these 3), an undead jazz band is a significant power bloc. It’s a noir stereotype smashed into a vampire one, but instead of blindfolded jazzmen these are some of the greats kept alive forever, and not even just as ghouls. loving Louis Armstrong might just be chilling on stage doing his thing in between munching on yuppies. This, for me, is one of those big dumb grin moments. Vargoss isn’t Toreador, incidentally, but you might expect him to be if he’s decorating his court with the musical greats, who he presumably has to either bloodbond or pay handsomely for their services because Vampire Louis Armstrong can go anywhere he likes and get a warm reception. Joining the band tonight is a mysterious redhead with ‘the bluest eyes’ and a perfect voice. Her name is Rachel and she’s another sex-bomb, naturally. McCann finds her face strangely familiar at first glance, which we’ll come back to later. We spend a couple of paragraphs there, then its on to the meeting with the visiting vampire, a rude Tremere going by Tyrus Benedict. There’s some back and forth where Vargoss big-dicks Benedict over his disrespect to McCann, and then we finally find out (part of) McCann’s deal:  Nice to know it’s a lie as soon as its established. Part of this, in fairness, is that Bob expects us to have read his story in Dark Destiny before this, so we already know that McCann is the pawn of Lameth. In early VtM stuff, the active role of the methuselahs pulling everyone’s strings is a way bigger deal than in later stuff, so the idea that almost all of them can possess humans is a reasonable extension, though not quite how Weinberg does it. Benedict fills us in on Russia. Basically, when Yeltsin came to power all the supernaturals in Russia went dark and the borders became borderline impenetrable. Vampire fact-finding parties disappear into Russia and never return, for both Camarilla and Sabbat. The Army of the Night now controls Russia – all this gets covered in Rage Across Russia from December 1993, so Bob got briefed on that or had a copy – under the control of the terrible Baba Yaga. For Weinberg, Baba Yaga is one of the Nictuku, and her return a signal of the apocalypse. Now, to prove its true, the Tremere have managed to obtain a photograph of Baba Yaga herself. Unfortunately for Benedict, this is where we encounter The Red Death, who teleports on in:  So – the Red Death here is not a metaphysical representation of greed, deceit, and disease, but a very physical entity and a powerful magician. The description is neat, if rather literal, but doesn’t really stack up to Poe’s namesake. He radiates heat and fire but doesn’t burn. Eddie Sanchez, the lethally fast vampire we met earlier, tries to take him on and bursts into flames, because the lava around the Red Death is real. This is actually one of the better descriptions in the book:  RIP Eddie, we hardly knew ye. It’s a little clunky, but it has a Vibe that works. Pulp horror stuff but in a good way. Also, yikes: the Red Death works for the Sabbat. At that revelation, everyone runs for it while the Red Death walks around slowly turning people to ash because its magic is barring the doors. We get an extremely lame fight scene between it and Vargoss that further establishes how powerful the Red Death is (it can shrug off Dominate from a 5th generation, etc), while McCann tries to shoot it (why use the magic he’s demonstrated five minutes earlier, eh?) to no effect. The Assamite twins try and their swords go right through the Red Death, and McCann finally uses some magic to try and get an edge:  So, this is a new bloodline and discipline that’ve never appeared before or since. We’ll come back to that as we move on. McCann doesn’t recognize the Red Death, but it recognizes Lameth behind his eyes, and the fight continues. Fawn gets murked by the Red Death and Tyrus Benedict gets murked by someone other than the Red Death – and as soon as Benedict dies, the Red Death disappears… and so does the singer, Rachel, who’s left behind a single green sequin from her dress. Mysteries afoot! Its an eventful chapter. It highlights just how unsubtle Weinberg is, but also some of that gonzo charm. The new big bad is the biggest bad ever; Armageddon is here because Baba Yaga ate Gorbachev; guys with knives who seem vaguely racist to me rush to their gallant doom in a pulpy way. A supposed wizard casts Gun on an eldritch horror and wonders why it isn’t working. Also, I’m going to start a counter. McCann likes his Mac-10 because its very effective, so let’s track that. Times his Mac-10 might be useful so far: 2. Times it was actually any use whatsoever: loving zero. Chapter Four This time, we’re jumping to Washington DC’s Union Station. 11 March 1994. Our new viewpoint is Makish:  We also get another of those over-the-top touches. Union Station is a safe beat because it’s well lit and ‘no more than one or two killings took place there in a week’. If that’s a safe beat, what’s the rest of DC like? Well, since you asked…   This is, it must be noted, before the events of the book kick into overdrive. But back to Makish. Makish hates the gangs because they kill wrong, and ‘murder needed to be done with style, with panache.’ He is in fact ‘the supreme assassin in the world of the undead’, because Bob doesn’t do mid-level figures. He’s there at Union Station to meet his client, another vampire, who appears at precisely the stroke of 2AM, which’ll become important later. Immediately, we learn that Makish sent the assassins for McCann, because there’s no way that storyline could’ve been used more effectively. Likewise, we immediately learn that the client is… The Red Death. Because of course it is! And of course there’s no reason not to reveal that immediately! We also learn Makish is a rogue Assamite, who split off because his sire was killed by the Society of Leopold and the elders wouldn’t let him take revenge lest he endanger the Masquerade. He went rogue and killed 114 people (the inquisitors responsible, their friends and colleagues, and their families), and then six Assamites sent to bring him in. Weinberg really likes Assamites because they have the Cool Factor going for them, but there’s something slightly unfortunate about this whole mad Arab shtick to say the least. Makish has the bones of something neat in him, it's just wrapped up in a very poorly built and uncomfortably raced carcass. So – back to that bit about Father Naples and his misuse. We’ve met the Society of Leopold. We had a named member. Now we get this bit about Makish having beef with his clan over them. Does that get developed? Does the Society play any kind of role of substance going forward? Not in the loving slightest. A few mentions here and there, but that’s all. Back to the story. The Red Death spends all of five minutes before explaining, in nice clear terms, that its playing both the Sabbat and the Camarilla against each other. This is… 8 pages after it appears. Wouldn’t want there to be any tension, would we? To stoke tensions, the Red Death and Makish go after a Sabbat pack dealing drugs. DC is a Camarilla city but the Sabbat infest various nooks and crannies, which is a nice change from the novels that assume its possible for twenty vampires to completely control a city of millions. It’s a fairly standard action sequence, but it does introduce a slight issue. Weinberg’s grasp of the setting is… Better than a lot of the stringers White Wolf had at the time, but not brilliant. Finer nuances (not helped by the setting itself still being actively iterated with each new publication) aren’t his thing. So the Sabbat and their ghouls are:  …which is fine, except Weinberg also mixes them up with anarchs, and marks out 'dresses like punk = anarch = sabbat' and 'dresses like goth = camarilla'. But, the fight scene goes on – Makish has celerity, he’s lethal with his bare hands and might have Protean, etc. We also learn he likes to kill with 'Thermit' (which Weinberg describes as an 'explosive'. This kind of error makes me wonder if the '.375' earlier wasn't a typo - and either way, the editor should be catching them), but he doesn't break it out here. They leave one of the Sabbat alive and declare themselves agents of the Camarilla, so that he’ll escape and spread the word and cause a massive retaliatory attack, which will escalate into the titular Blood War – an open state of conflict between the sects. This is where we again lose all subtlety. Playing the two sects against each other? Great, classic. But it takes more than a single shiteating low-end Sabbat being mirked to cue up a full-scale attack on a secure domain. The idea is good, but the execution is lacking, and everything just sort of ‘happens’ regardless of whether it should or not. Why is it happening? Well, ask the Red Death:  I do like that last line, though. A little crude, but effective at what its going for. We're still in awkward early edition Assamite territory, though. By this point I think we have enough to really have a grasp of Weinberg’s style. Things happen, characters pop up like cardboard standees, then some more things happen, and none of it will ever really feel all that connected except where its been very explicitly connected through mostly very bad dialogue. We can’t be trusted to understand the plot so it needs to be explained to us promptly and in plain language. Chapter Five We’re back to McCann and St. Louis. He’s home and resting after Vargoss finally calmed down and went to his haven… in the basement of Club Diabolique. I know I personally like to hunker down in the same place my enemy has shown they can teleport in and out of without difficulty. We flash back to the aftermath of the attack and get to see how McCann comforts Flavia over the murder of her sister – by saying it was an honourable death, which gives you some idea of the awe-inspiringly deep and profound level of characterization going on for Weinberg's Assamites. Flavia is vulnerable, grieving, and bitter at the disregard showed to her loss by her employer – so what do we need to emphasize? Well, Bob’s answer to that is…  We also get to find out the sister’s origins as Assamites! Which, uh…  jesus christ bob Setting aside, just for a second, everything else – its such bad dialogue! No one speaks like that! And returning to those issues, where the gently caress do we start? The idea of Turks roaming Europe and stealing the blonde women (a real Orientalist classic right there)? The bit where they’re under fifteen? The implied incest? The bit where they had the kind of reputation that the kind of people who can afford to go on the tour are destroyed by at the time (a nicher quibble, I know, but I also dabble in writing Regency and Victorian romances so my eye twitches at this sort of thing)? It’s a gross mess on so many levels. None of this adds to the story in any meaningful way, and its so loving tastelessly and poorly done it even lacks shock value or any kind of twisted seductive tension (though frankly, given Weinberg’s abilities… Thank god for that.) It doesn’t really get engaged with in the rest of the books, either – we don’t really get a moment of reflection from Flavia about the conditions of her childhood and how they shaped her, for instance, into being an appealing candidate for the Embrace not just because she was so sexy the Assamite had to have her, but as someone groomed to already accept depersonalization and objectification, which'd allow us to extend a line of critique between the implied child abuse and their transformation into killers who utilize sexuality as an offensive and defensive tool and who are literally owned by a much older and more powerful patriarch figure who doesn't really consider them as people. Not that Weinberg would be the right man for that job, but at least there it wouldn't be solely a matter of titillation - and the bones of it are literally right there! Then just as quick that passes and its back to the dictates of the plot. Flavia swears revenge – you’d think she might have focused a little more on that here – and they discuss… The Path of Evil Revelations, which Flavia suspects the Red Death follows. Every major character in the trilogy has copies of the storyteller’s handbook, I guess. Flavia, at least, recognizes that its weird how McCann knows so much about vampires and tests him after all of two paragraphs of dialogue – and immediately works out his deal:  This is obviously something we should know at page 62 of a 1000+ page trilogy, because we couldn’t gain anything by stringing out hints and allowing the reader to come to a terrible realization on their own, now could we? Flavia then immediately kisses him and offers herself in exchange for Lameth’s patronage, complete with Taut Nipples. Flavia actually gets a little better in her writing as the books go on, but gently caress me her introduction is about as uncomfortably horny as it comes. Its very noir pulp, but not well executed. The grief-stricken reflexive nymphomaniac is not something someone at Bob’s level should attempt to write. Back to the present moment. McCann, being Weinberg’s PC character, clearly has Resources 5 and Contacts 5, because within an hour – at 3AM – he’s able to organize two teams of researchers to… research the Path of Evil Revelations and the Nictuku. I suppose the night time aspect doesn’t matter there since you’re not exactly going to get a couple of history grad students at UCal to tackle Sabbat infernalist rituals without a couple of ghouls or vampires running the show, but these are highly specialized skillsets so its still an impressive feat. We also discover someone’s stolen all his reports on the Nictuku he got earlier that day – and McCann find another green sequin. And that’s the end of Chapter Five! Half of it is spent being uncomfortably horny for Flavia, and while her writing gets a little better as we go, no one should expect nuanced or even vaguely considered representations of women as people in these books. The men barely warrant that either, but there’s that very specific kind of creepy old dude fetishization going on here that’s often very uncomfortable – particularly the fixation on adolescent sexuality which is not the kind of horror we’re here for - and which is difficult to overlook even with my unreasonable fondness for Weinberg’s dumb stories. Next chapter, though, we meet my single favourite character in the entire VtM run – for reasons WoD thread regulars who know about my weird Project will immediately appreciate when we get there.  Not Bob, but gently caress me if Giamatti's L. Marvin Metz doesn't give me Weinberg vibes.
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Jun 17, 2023 16:08
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In the twins case, it took ten years, so on that level at least we're dealing with adult women during Weinberg's attempts to be racy.
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Jun 18, 2023 03:19
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The Masquerade of the Red Death - Book 1: Blood War - Part 3, Chapters 6-13 Chapter Six We’re back – and this time, we’re in Paris. Still March 12, 1994, though. Get used to jumping all over the place – both Weinberg trilogies are full of it. What does ol’ Bob think of the French? Well:  Fair cop, I suppose, and nothing unique to Weinberg – but that last line is important. The French, you see, enjoy loving with tourists by telling tales of how the Phantom of the Opera eats unwary tourists who stray away from the guide at the Opera House. As an Australian, I salute the noble cause of loving with tourists, but I also can’t help but think of this clip: https://youtu.be/v3W-fRxxBq0?t=20 Then we move in to the real stories of the Phantom, not the bullshit leg-pullers. Unexplained disappearances, stretching back in a long line to time immemorial, with a single unifying name: Phantomas, who haunts Notre Dame and is implicated in hundreds of disappearances. The Surete have a special case file on him, including:  Phantomas, naturally, is real, and cool, and my friend. He’s even a weird lil guy in his own right and a frustrated author who, when a series of pulps about him came out, wrote to the authors with plot ideas that were rejected! I love everything about this. He’s a Nosferatu in the classic style:  Unlike most of the characters, we actually have art for Phantomas, from the cover for book 2:  It’s a fairly standard piece but I like it. The more I paint myself, the more I appreciate good light work and composition, and while this one technically breaks some rules by going straight midline in the frame, the lighting and shadow draw the eye away neatly and pay some serious homage to both classic pulp covers and to Murnau’s lighting work. Of the three covers, it’s the best. Back to the story. Phantomas is ‘a quiet, gentle soul’ who mostly only kills people who try to blame him for their murders, which – fair enough, really. Tonight, he’s going to a soiree held by Villon. He’s never invited but he loves going to the Prince’s parties in disguise. And at this point we again get Weinberg being Weinberg, because Phantomas is in fact secretly the oldest vampire in Paris. He’s been there since 53BC, when he arrived as a Roman legionary and close friend of Caesar named Varro Dominus (not a name!) and was embraced by a local 5th-generation Nosferatu, who wanted to use him as a pawn. How did that go? Well:  Before we move on, about the name. ‘Dominus’ is not a name, and Varro is a cognomen, though by 53BC its probably there as a hereditary one, and we could stretch out to say maybe the dude is part of the Terentii Varrones, but we don’t actually have a first or even proper last name here. In short – this is like calling the first Earl of Shaftesbury ‘Ashley Sir’. Moving on, we get a brief description of Paris’s kindred dynamics, which is basically ripped from A World of Darkness, and learn that Phantomas has gone undetected by virtually everyone, including other Kindred, for two thousand years. He does so by staying in his tunnels and wearing the Mask of a Thousand Faces, like… [/i]every other Nosferatu.[/i] This is actually part of the strategy. Vampires who encounter him tend to assume he’s just one of the usual Nosferatu, not a secret ancient Elder. Now, what does this ancient Elder want in unlife? To rule from the shadows and control Villon in secret? To take revenge against ancient foes? We’ll jump ahead to Chapter 13 for a second here:   He’s not even writing it for power’s sake. He’s just a weird lil guy hiding out under Notre Dame drawing genealogical charts because he’s a colossal nerd who likes to compile facts and figures. As the meme goes: he just like me, he just like me fr. This is the best thing Weinberg has ever done, for my money: an ancient elder who isn’t a total badass, who isn’t part of some terrible sinister power play with totally unlimited resources, but who’s just been happily doing his own thing for literally millennia and has more or less accidentally stumbled into a peaceful and contented existence in doing so. Returning to Chapter Six, he’s off to the party at the Louvre and easily tricks the two Assamite guards (Weinberg read that bit about Assamites hiring out and took it as a basic fact that anyone worth their salt gets an Assamite) at the door, and roams the gallery for a while because he likes art and statuary. He thinks Villon is a tasteless fuckwit who wouldn’t know true art if it hit him and needs to grow the gently caress up and accept that he’s dead, rather than trying to be the hot young thing for eternity – and while this characterization of Villon is far from unique, it’s a nice touch. But something, naturally, is wrong. There’s no music, and there’s always music (specifically: ‘a loud rock band playing the latest hits’ because Bob is hip with the kids). You can probably guess where this is going, but to spell it out, a handsome young blonde man with blue eyes is just hanging out outside the actual court and warns him to ‘Beware the Red Death, Phantomas’ before vanishing into thin air. If you guessed its Ruben, correct: He roams around warning people and doing gently caress all. Here, he’s at least more direct and says that anyone who goes in there is gonna die. Phantomas, naturally, goes inside, and…  The Red Death appears and does his creepy act. He knows about the record project and disapproves, so Phantomas reveals his survival strategy of choice: run the gently caress away.  We end the chapter with Phantomas resting in his haven and worrying about the bit where the Red Death knows he exists, which should be impossible. So, here we have it: the Phantom of the Opera is real, but also there’s another Phantom who’s much older and tougher, but who stays the hell out of it and just wants to look at art, read bad novels, and draw family trees. He’s dumb, but since I do the same thing, I can’t help but love him. But this is also where I think we could’ve substituted Reuben and Father Naples for someone else – Phantomas. Move the action to Paris and have him be making sure the Inquisition aren’t too close, and maybe to get access to their files. There’s very little Reuben does in this novel that can’t be replaced easily with other characters. Chapter Seven Back to McCann in St. Louis again. We get another touch of Weinberg’s approach to the World of Darkness:   World is a gently caress, basically. If there’s an overhyped crime scare in our world, in Weinberg’s take on the World of Darkness its true, but double it. Its an unsubtle way to play it but it does build the grime factor up quickly. This whole chapter is a recap of what’s happened so far for McCann as he tries to process it. McCann goes home. He lives in ‘a small brick home in a new development’, bought for cash in 1993 when he first arrived in St. Louis. This means that in the space of less than a year, half of which he’s spent travelling, he’s become the Prince’s closest advisor. Now, in fairness, he’s basically a mage whether in his own right or by borrowed power, but still: six months or so is an awfully short time for a human who shouldn’t even know much about vampires. No wonder Flavia is suspicious! We also bump into the slightly difficult question of how much of McCann is McCann and how much is Lameth. While he drinks scotch and listens to Billie Holiday, he considers the Red Death and Gehenna – which he doesn’t believe in, despite being possessed by a Methuselah who’s seen, first hand, that the Antediluvians are real and who collects signs of the coming apocalypse. Also:  The Dark Messiah! Praise! More importantly, this is where Weinberg first introduces Dark Anis, a contemporary of Lameth, who becomes important later in the book. It’s a brief mention – is she behind it all? – and for once Weinberg doesn’t stop and spell it out in big letters. Through his psychic powers, McCann tracks the wallet he took from one of the assassins sent after him back to DC, and makes plans to visit. He checks out an ancient Egyptian statue of his own face, and then its sleep time, and that’s Chapter Seven. As might be apparent, we’re in slightly ambiguous territory here about McCann, and I don’t think its entirely deliberate. The text is pulling in two different directions – one, that he’s a mortal (mage or otherwise) who timeshares with Lameth; two, that he is Lameth capable of acting as a mortal. I’m inclined towards the first, and the idea that through Lameth’s patronage McCann is simply millennia old in his own right, but the text could support the latter reading. Chapter Eight We hop over to Venice now, 12 March 1994. We get a long description of ‘a black shape… vaguely human in shape…’ sneaking across the city’s rooftops at lightning speed. Its destination: the Mausoleum, the stronghold of the Giovanni. We get a few snippets of the history, including that the Mausoleum stands on the former site of the old prisons, which is a nice touch – and that the plan to tear them down and build a giant skyscraper was met with protests. The Giovanni bribed the commissioners to get it through, then disappeared the most vocal critics. This does, of course, mean that the Mausoleum is smack-dab next to the Doge’s Palace, so I suspect Bob thought the Bridge of Sighs was rather longer than it actually is. Remember that the gap between the Palace and the New Prison is maybe 40 feet when you read the description of the Mausoleum:  We get a bunch of detail on the shape infiltrating the complex. It has all the vaguely nonsensical security measures you’d expect, ghouls (armed, for some reason, with AK-47s), hellhounds, thermal sensors, etc, etc. They prove utterly useless against The Shape, which is so fast and so perceptive it can wait for the four ghouls at the gate to blink simultaneously and flash past them and under the vault door. Inside, the place is bustling with activity, but no one dares to speak or play music. We get some more of the standard infiltration business as the shape transforms into a moving shadow here, a cloud of fog there, disables the building’s electronics and power via magic, and then slips along up the elevator shaft to reach the penthouse on the 40th Floor, where it takes on its true form:  This is the newest of our PoV characters, Madeleine Giovanni – who reappears in a comic, the Horizon War trilogy, and even the Clan Novels in reference. Her sire also appears in other White Wolf material despite originating in this trilogy, so these two are a big part of the ambiguity around the trilogy’s canonicity. Its also nice that we don’t get too much of a focus on her body, but rest assured: Weinberg will resume being a horny lil guy sooner rather than later. First, though, we get to meet her sire, Don Pietro, and find out why she was sneaking in – she’s pentesting their security. Don Pietro is your stereotypical avuncular father figure in an evil organization. He loves his granddaughter and childe, but reacts to the prospect of killing the sloppiest of the ghoul guards by turning it into a public demonstration with an hour of psychological torture slapped on for good measure. And now we get to the heart of the Madeleine plotline: revenge.  Unlike the other revenge hooks, this one is actually followed up on as a significant plot thread through the trilogy. We get some details on the extent of the Giovanni’s power, but also the rather odd idea that:  Bob reverts to type. No one is middling – everyone is the best at what they do. Despite this, she’s tried to kill Caravelli three times and failed three times. To keep away from her, he stays in Sicily, surrounded by Mafia goons. Now, this is… It bothers me. Its lazy. Now in fairness, it was the 90s and excellent histories of the Sicilian Mafia weren’t that accessible in English yet. But the first point, naturally, is that there is no one singular Mafia – even within the overarching Cosa Nostra, its divided into factions, families, districts, and so on. A much more interesting tack, with the caveat of the hazardous involvement of recent real-world violence into a fictional narrative, would’ve been to merge the Second Mafia War or the Second ‘Ndrangheta War with the Giovanni-Caravelli struggle. But, The Don of Dons of Dons is Caravelli, and that’s all there is to that, I guess. For now, he can wait – Don Pietro is sending Madeleine to America. Why?  Gee, I wonder what those two words could be. That’s the end of Chapter 8. Chapter Nine Now we hop to Sicily, because we need a chapter for Caravelli for… some reason? He’s the Capo de Capo of the Mafia, and he’s called a meeting with four major Mafia bosses, who’ve come to negotiate with him on business. Again, I find this supremely irritating but it is, in part, a symptom of the times – and in part, I imagine, Weinberg following the canon available to him. He also rules quite openly as a vampire:  The bosses are… Here we go. Tony ‘The Tuna’ Blanchard, the head of the ‘east coast branch’. Christ. George Kross, representative of the ‘midwest branch’. Harvey Taylor, ‘west coast Syndicate chief’, and Sol Cohen, ‘boss of the South’. You may be noticing these are all Americans. One of the few things Weinberg got right about the Mafia was recognizing that the Sicilians don’t directly run the Americans. The meeting’s discussion is mostly about the threat posed by Madeleine Giovanni, who’s harder to kill than the POTUS, and a loredump. The dialogue is about what you’d expect, and also includes explanations of clans, generation, and diablerie to… a bunch of mafiosi. Caravelli outright states his and Madeleine’s generations because he’s afraid she’ll diablerize him. He even talks about the diablerie of [Brujah] and the origins of the Giovanni and Tremere. Again – to a bunch of mafiosi. During the chat, George Kross walks off to hit the head. What happens next? Well, it’s a special meal, so you’ve probably already guessed:  Kross wanted to sell the secrets of Caravelli, so Kross’s man Dominated him to leave the room and had him killed. I suppose it’s a classy move of Caravelli not to serve them him as dinner, though it kinda reads like Caravelli didn't know one of them was going to betray him when he invited them in for dinner, just when he started speaking to them - so is there a frustrated chef whose actual nice meal has been upstaged for a display of brutal violence? Either way, he has his second in command ghoul them. Their actual proposal is never discussed or indicated in any detail in this chapter – and then the chapter’s over. Chapter Ten We’re back to McCann, only it’s a dream sequence flashback to when Lameth made his Golconda potion. He and Anis are the only Kindred to have imbibed it, and here they are:  Another buxom blonde bombshell, because Bob’s horny. The two were lovers and over the two centuries it took Lameth to make the potion, it was Anis who kept him moving. It all takes place before the diablerie of [Brujah], Anis’s sire. In fact, Anis’s entire plot is to use the liberation from the blood bond that Golconda provides to precipitate the Diablerie by seducing Troile – and tells Lameth to do the same with Asshur, his sire. We skip forward in the dream. McCann/Lameth is discussing the new Treaty between the Camarilla and Giovanni, and we have it explicitly confirmed Asshur is Cappadocius. He discusses the matter with an Assamite of uncertain identity, and hints that Lameth orchestrated the embrace of Augustus Giovanni. McCann wakes as dusk sets (he may or may not be a vampire), and thinks someone made him dream these specific dreams. No poo poo, McCann. Worse still, there’s a mysterious box that wasn’t by his bed when he went to sleep. It has his stolen papers and the photos of Baba Yaga, and a single green sequin, and we end on that concerning note. Weinberg’s really hammering those sequins home, huh? Rachel is about as subtle as a car crash, though at least he isn’t trying to pretend it isn’t blatant. Chapter Eleven Back to Makish in DC. Its now the night of the 12th, and his orders are to kill more vampires to stoke up the conflict. More kills = more pay, and he’s eager to earn his money and exercise his art in the doing. The target is a gentleman’s club called the Deadlands in Anacostia – ‘one of the worst neighbourhoods in Washington’ – run by a Toreador (8th Generation. Weinberg thinks we should know this.) named John Thompson. We get another of those Weinberg moments of grime, because the Deadlands is no ordinary bordello:  Makish is in two minds on this. He considers it a necessary evil to control the government, but also finds the means – specifically ‘pandering to the basest instincts’ – distasteful, because he’s a morally upright gentleman in his own eyes. He likes killing scumbags and racists more than random people, so – good on him, I suppose. Most of the chapter is a fairly rote action sequence. He ignores the guard ghouls – six of them out front with AK-47s (everyone gets an AK this post, I guess) – and just sweeps in from above with celerity, uses his powers over machinery (Weinberg seems to think obfuscate and quietus covers pressure plates and alarm systems but not cameras) to bypass the alarms, and rips open the roof to get in. We also lose the possibility Makish isn’t an awful entity when he murders one of the prostitutes and drapes her dead body over her dead john’s corpse, though at least Weinberg doesn’t wallow in it. He kills some more people, including some congressmen, on the way to Thompson, and talks up some ‘stilted dialogue’ that blames the attack on the Sabbat at the Red Death’s instruction. Thompson records everything, and this way the word will reach Vitel of Sabbat retaliation. We finally get to see how he uses thermite after he stakes Thompson:  I won’t lie – turning Thompson into an incendiary boobytrap is a nice touch. The prose lets it all down, and the idea that he’s both well known for his explosive antics but doesn’t let anyone see the evidence is, uh – not impossible, but a bit weird. We end the chapter with him leaving to go after his next target of the night and, off-screen, a ghoul pulling the pin on the Thompson grenade, and it immediately becomes obvious Bob doesn’t really understand thermite as he says ‘the explosion was so loud that Makish heard it two blocks from the Deadlands’. Not a great chapter, but a lot better than Chapter Ten. This is one of the times Weinberg is actually clicking with the material. Makish’s attack plan is neat, he does a lot of misdirects inside the building, and he lays a trap any Hitman player would be proud of. The concept is fine, the execution isn’t great, but surprisingly Weinberg doesn’t wallow in a lot of violence towards sex workers or labour over long with horny detail on their descriptions, which is a relief after how he writes about Flavia. Chapter Twelve We’re back in St. Louis – now past midnight and into the 13th - where Vargoss is holding Court with McCann and Flavia. We get to meet two more local vampires, both advisors of Vargoss and both with stated generations: Darrow (Brujah 9) and Uglyface (Nosferatu 8). Darrow’s an old British army vet from the 1800s and the voice of reason, which is a nice subversion of the usual Brujah hothead, particularly since he dresses as a biker. Flavia’s swatched her white leather bodysuit for black in mourning, which is really funny to me because I can just imagine some poor ghoul frantically racing from fetish shop to fetish shop to try and find the right sizes for the sudden change. The topic is, naturally, the Red Death, who seems to be able to be in multiple places at once and struck simultaneously in Paris, Marseilles, and three more appearances in the US including the attack in DC. He killed some 35 kindred in a single night, which I suppose is easy if you’re literally immune to all forms of attack and covered in fire. Darrow’s smart enough to wonder if its more than one attacker using the very distinctive visage as a shared mask. We go back and forth for a while on whether or not the Red Death is actually Sabbat aligned. McCann doubts it, Vargoss is convinced of it, and there’s a lot of not terribly good but not terribly bad (for Bob) dialogue, including some chunks of exposition. Earlier, I mentioned that the timing of the Red Death’s appearance in DC was important – and here’s why: The evidence is that the first appearance of the Red Death was in St. Louis, at local midnight. No one can explain why St. Louis, a no-big-deal city, is the first target. The answer, of course, is McCann, but he steers attention to the murdered Tremere. That, in turn, prompts a loredump about Etrius, the Pyramid, and the condition of Tremere’s body. That becomes important later in the trilogy. Again, this is that breathless quality – and some fairly deep cuts. Bob either read a ton of the material or spent a lot of time talking to, and actually listening to, the experts. Things that most other VtM novels never even touch on, even ones where it might be relevant, are thrown in as casually as Makish’s thermite bombs or a green sequin. Things take a turn when it turns out Benedict Tyrus, the murdered Tremere, was:  This prompts discussion of Baba Yaga, who Uglyface claims to be the greatest sorceress in the world and a Nictuku – and the equal of Lameth, The Dark Messiah (praise!) When Lameth isn’t on screen, everyone should be asking ‘where’s Lameth?’. Benedict spent time in DC before he arrived in St. Louis, which prompts more exposition and loredumps – the politics of DC by Night, etc – before its decided that McCann will go to investigate, with perhaps the least Mage line of all time:  Flavia’s going along with him for his protection – and we get another sensuous lick of the upper lip from her. That’s three times now, I believe, but mercifully, end of chapter. It’s a lot of exposition and stilted dialogue without much that stands out except for ‘I have my mage powers to protect me’. Chapter Thirteen We’re back to Paris, where Phantomas is hiding out in the Catacombs – which, naturally, he built. He also likes his creature comforts: https://i.imgur.com/ubksmfL.png He has electricity down there, and collects art. Yet again, Weinberg needs to make his characters The Best and hypercompetent, so Phantomas has an extensive blackmail operation that he uses solely to fund his hobbies and buy artworks, not try and be a power player. Drawing on every major intelligence agency and wiretaps on major telecoms, he can monitor things as well as the NSA – and he uses this, again, to draw bloodline charts. Bob’s made another apex character, immensely powerful, but all he does with it is nerd poo poo, and its weirdly charming. This chapter, he’s freaking the hell out about the Red Death and scouring his database for any trace he can find of the Red Death or vampires old and potent enough to have the kind of power he saw displayed – and this is actually where we get the Project introduced properly for the first time, but I already shared that. His search turns up 27 possible vampires, of which only two remain on a second pass: Lameth, the Dark Messiah (praise!) and Anis, Queen of the Night. We get a little recap of who they are – most powerful sorcerer who invented a Golconda potion and the cause of the revolt of the Second City respectively – in case we forgot in the last fifteen minutes. Both disappeared 5000 years ago and their sires are Unknown to Phantomas’s record, though there's no mystery here for us because, again, fifteen minutes ago Weinberg literally loving told us who their sires were and made it clear they tried to have them killed. Its so sloppy - a touch of mystery here would not have gone astray! Then we get his highly relatable response to the discovery, via his wire taps intercepting Camarilla reports, that there may be more than one Red Death:  Sure, they’re wiping out swathes of Kindred and may come for him personally, but dear god, the charts are incomplete.  Then some cryptic poo poo happens again, because stuff just happens in a Weinberg plot and you just gotta roll with it. He thinks about the blonde fella at the Louvre and his keyboard starts typing by itself and spells out two words: ‘The Sheddim’. End of chapter – and part 1 of the book. So, it really doesn’t get better than here. Some of the characters improve slightly with a tiny bit of depth, and we get a fair bit more of the ‘throw the cool poo poo in the blender’ hype, but we also get a lot of the same grossness, the same bad prose, and the same stilted dialogue. Part of what frustrates me about Weinberg’s trilogies is that the underlying ideas are not necessarily bad – pulpy and dumb is not bad – but the execution ruins any chance they have of actually working well. The Father Naples example is perfectly illustrative: it and the Makish element seem like a plotline in waiting, but it goes nowhere. It isn’t even a misdirect. It is literally pointless, and there are other characters who could’ve achieved the Father Naples exposition much better without the need to fluff up an essentially unnecessary bit character. But, that’s Weinberg for you. His other non-WoD works aren’t really any better, so everyone involved got what they expected, I suppose. Next time: Part 2, and four new major POV characters.
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Jun 18, 2023 14:52
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joylessdivision posted:Erik has a friend in the catacombs Phantomas is my emblem for how the trilogy is both awful and kind of awesome, even setting aside my own project of recording every Vampire lineage. I think of Weinberg's two trilogies almost like the Jose Chung X-files episodes of the World of Darkness, just without the self-awareness or writing quality those had - a parody whether intentional or otherwise of the dumbest bits of the setting and the pulp genre that's done with such obvious enthusiasm and affection for both that you can't mistake it for being earnestly mean spirited, however poorly executed it is. I think thats a big part of why people gave it the big side-eye and tried to memoryhole it as both non-canon and not worth reading: it's bad in this specific way where (a lot like Tower of Babel, actually) you can't really ignore its approach, and it just shreds a lot of the pretentiousness to focus on 'wouldn't it be cool if...?' That part isn't fully evident yet but trust me, as we go it will be, particularly by the second trilogy. Rambam! The Nictuku! Kabbalistic Demons! Tortured Romance! The Three Musketeer-Stooges! A giant ghoul panther presented without a trace of irony! Stay tuned because they're all in here. Napoleon Nelson posted:"Blonde hair the color of the new moon." He literally picked the only phase of the moon that is entirely black, that has nothing that could even approach blonde. lmao I didn't even notice that because my eyes glaze over whenever Bob starts describing another hot blonde. Incredible.
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Jun 19, 2023 03:21
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this book kinda rules lol
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Rambam turns up and generally owns bones, as memory serves. As for the Kabbalah element, it was a big point of reference for Weinberg in his other works. Not a terribly well executed one though, and I don't know that he ever actually went and studied Kabbalah properly either in its appropriated forms or in the traditional form (for instance, the following line: 'we must delve into the darkest secrets of the mystical tome known as The Kabbalah'? It doesn't suggest a particular personal familiarity!) In this context, the Sheddim are the remnants left over when God created the earlier worlds, spiteful and hostile to their successors. Its giving Cosmic Horror Qliphothic vibes.
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Jun 19, 2023 04:01
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The Masquerade of the Red Death - Book 1: Blood War - Part 4, Chapter 14 Part One Part Two Part Three A little bit of a shorter post this time, as I spent yesterday running Mage and have stuff to do today. We’re now into Part 2 of the Book, which brings us another Poe quotation:  Strictly speaking all the chapters reset per part but I’m keeping consecutive numbering for my own convenience. We’re now moving to New York City on March 14. Our new POV character? Why: the most dangerous woman in the world. She owns one of the largest skyscrapers in the city and lives in the penthouse. It is, as you might expect, fancy – though the description is rather lacking and a little plain. We are not spared this with her description, and she naturally sleeps naked:  Tapered legs and not straight-up-and-down cylinders? Wowee! I suppose we should just be thankful she’s not yet another blonde, but it’s ‘interesting’ that we get an immediate and relatively detailed description of her while McCann is still basically just ‘big guy, dark eyes’. And interesting, I mean ‘textbook men writing women’ behaviour. Her name is Alicia Varney, and we mostly get a lot of indulgent nonsense that tries to sell power and prestige but mostly comes across as pretentious. She has voracious appetites for food and sex and rarely goes to bed alone, there’s a brief masturbation sequence with the shower head but by god its no match for a man, and then an incredibly ‘mid-level faux-luxury hotel’ breakfast of three slices of French toast, a selection of ‘imported fruit jellies’, coffee, and the WSJ. Its all very try-hard and stereotyped hedonist, without the necessary appreciation of actual luxury and the pleasures of privilege to sell it. The prose is particularly poor here too, and one aspect that really irritates me is that when you're doing luxury, its incredibly easy to slip a couple of specific products or brands in to indicate someone's taste, social status, and outlook on the world, so the textureless 'its fancy, y'all' descriptions are just utterly toothless and give nothing except the most shallow idea of privilege. We also meet her manservant:  Jackson is a real badass throughout the rest of the trilogy, as you’d expect, and yet again a case of Weinberg being unable to resist making everyone the best at what they do. He and Flavia will bond later but not over their shared experience of being objectified and treated as trophies by their vastly-more-powerful owners. Similarly, Varney’s company – Varney Enterprises – is a big deal:  And America, as usual, remains a gently caress:  Varney, who’s lived as a peasant and now as a veritable queen, is considering whether or not to be made into a vampire, and if it just clicked, yes, her name is a reference to Varney the Vampire. She deals with them regularly but likes life too much to sacrifice it. Jackson is more pragmatic because it’d suck, but in his words, ‘Survival ain’t pretty… death is awfully final.’ Also, he might be a war criminal since it’s implied he may have already committed predatory cannibalism in Vietnam, but that’s neither here nor there. Is this dialogue about whether they could bear to live without the sun foreshadowing? no. There’s more flirtation and power dynamic (read: Varney belittles Jackson and asserts herself in the most shallow way possible), and then we meet Sumohn, Varney’s beloved black panther, which Jackson is pretty convinced is a goddamn ridiculously dangerous pet to own. Point to him: it is not an appropriate pet to keep in a basement kennel in an apartment building. With breakfast done, they’re off to work for the day. Now, just quickly: What in the gently caress is this outfit?  Bullfighting jackets with velvet skirts? They clash, Alicia! They clash, drat it! Moving on, we find out that Varney’s people can’t get into Russia even though Varney’s company has been doing business with the Commies since 1919, and then… Well, for some reason Varney thinks that Andropov is still running Russia?   There’s been a sudden coup eliminating the old guard, including Varney’s contacts at the Kremlin and the ministries, which is to say: Baba Yaga done ate ‘em. No foreigners allowed. This is one of the big divergences, really, because we all know how Russia’s post-1991 economics panned out – but here, Bob’s following the canon, so it’s not really his fault. Jackson’s sources are good enough that he knows about Baba Yaga meeting with ‘the Premier’, and Varney, of course, recognizes the description of the Iron Hag because good golly who could this mysterious sexy lady in her tower be? Sumohn arrives, and she’s just a giant goddamn black panther which Varney, naturally, can communicate with telepathically. If you haven’t already guessed, Varney is Anis’s puppet like McCann is for Lameth. So at this point, Varney goes for a walk to clear her head, taking her cat with her. She’s going to the park in Prospect Heights, which from googling is a very nice place. But in the World of Darkness (part of this is from the next chapter):   This is just how New York is, I guess. Again, Weinberg’s method here is to basically take any crime scare hype campaign (like the real one around Prospect Park and NYC's crime problems generally back in the 80s), accept it as factual, and then dial it up to 11, and it works as what it is, even as over the top as the results get. Terrorists setting up training camps in Brooklyn’s park is just ‘part of the New York scene’, and heads on pikes are just, like, the local culture, bro, you wouldn’t get it if you’re from further north than 51st street. But Varney tells Jackson not to worry despite this whole bit where the park is a real version of a right-winger’s fever dream of a majority Black neighbourhood. She has a giant panther to protect her, which – you know what? Yeah, gently caress it. If I have a giant, probably supernatural panther, I’m not going to be that worried about muggers and crackheads either. She leaves Jackson to get cracking on the Russia situation and make plans for the night’s visit to a vampire bar, The Devil’s Playground, and we leave the chapter there. Next time: Probably the grossest poo poo in the entire trilogy, and also, Reuben ex machina!
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Jun 20, 2023 07:41
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The Masquerade of the Red Death - Book 1: Blood War - Part 5, Chapters 15 to 17 Part One Part Two Part Three Part Four Chapter 15 We’re back! This time, we stay with Varney on her walk with her kitty to Prospect Heights and Prospect Park, which is, of course, A gently caress. As joylessdivision pointed out, this is when the Sabbat still controls NYC so its extreme level of over-the-top darkness could be put down to that, though I still wonder about the two terrorists group that’ve set up shop. We never find out who they are, which is… Probably for the best, given Weinberg’s general level of sensitivity to anything remotely touchy. To recap, though: Varney is the most dangerous woman in the world – according to the book, not me – and her cat is a giant, superintelligent black panther named Sumohn. Does Sumohn prowl along easily beside her? Yes, but she’s still on a leash, which is an amazing visual. You put a domestic cat on a leash and they look like they want to commit suicide and I can’t imagine a giant panther is any different. But, anyway – Sumohn and Varney sense hostility and danger in the park. Which, again, is now host to multiple terrorist organizations the headquarters of over half a dozen gangs in a postmark all of two square kilometers in area, so no poo poo. The place has to be tenser than Swedish Dracula being asked to explain the Chechnya incident to the Paradox board. Varney’s come here specifically to lure out assassins, who she can sense telepathically. We had the same thing in Chapter 1 with McCann. Is it deliberate narrative symmetry, or is Weinberg just bad at his job? My money’s on the latter. Sumohn gets taken off the leash and disappears into the trees to stalk, and Varney just goes on walking with genuine pleasure despite the bit where she’s there to lure out and kill assassins. Her usual exercise regime, we learn, is an hour in the gym three times a week, which I mention because we have the usual nonsense here of the lavish eater who only needs to exercise quite moderately but never gains a pound of weight. Then comes the action. Sumohn takes out an assassin off-screen but five more come at Varney, and things get gross. There’s no polite way to say it, so let’s just get it over with: They decide to rape her, and she weaponizes her sexuality against them in some detail to distract them until Sumohn arrives to carry the day. Then, and only then, does she use her tricks to ‘paralyze the part of the[ir] brains controlling motor skills’ and tear some throats out with her bare hands. Why, precisely, we needed the ‘come gently caress me’ act if she can switch off their brains at a distance with a glance is simple: Bob was, sometimes, a gross lil guy. Once again, the initial attackers turn out to be distractions and a new one is behind her with a Kobra submachine gun. As he opens up – deus ex machina again! A handsome blonde in a white suit appears from nowhere, stabbing our sixth assassin in the back with a bowie knife after ‘paralyzing his fingers’. It is, of course, loving Reuben. He vanishes into thin air but not before telling Varney the assassin’s name, Leo Taggert, and that he was a ghoul who could hide his thoughts from Varney’s telepathy. This upsets her considerably because who’d know she’s a telepath? Who’s been talking? Why did they spend such good money on her? We’ll find out later because that wraps Chapter 15. It was short, but not good. Chapter Sixteen We’re still with Varney in NYC. Now, night – just before 1AM on the 15th to be precise. Varney’s at the vampire club, The Devil’s Playground, wearing ‘an outfit made entirely of layers of white lace with nothing underneath’. These days that’s a little less shocking, I suppose, but naturally she’s still the most attractive woman in the building, because Bob does that, and naturally, she usually comes there to hunt for men, because of course she does. Tonight, mercifully, she’s going right to a meeting with Justine Bern instead – Archbishop of NYC, a 5th generational Lasombra and serial diablerist, and Varney’s domitor. For a relieving change, we meet a woman with a description who isn’t the hottest lady ever:  On the way in, she spots Reuben and a mysterious redhead in a green sequined dress, and in a charmingly dumb touch Reuben waves to her and she waves back awkwardly because she’s not sure how else to handle the situation. We’re given a little infodump on the Sabbat – mostly fine – including the disappearance of Melinda Galbraith, the Regent, several months earlier in Mexico. I believe that should be coming up soon in joylessdivision’s pursuit of Sam Haight, so I’ll leave that one for him to cover! Some other vampires in Bern’s court are there too. Hugh Portiglio, Tremere dickhead extraordinaire, snarls and hisses because all the Tremere in these books are dickheads with like, two exceptions, and Molly Wade, Malkavian lunatic who might be playing it up to gently caress with people. They’re Bern’s advisors, because this is a meeting of the rulers of NYC, which Varney is included in because she’s wealthy enough to bankroll the entire Sabbat. Then… Well, remember what I said about Weinberg’s understanding of anarchs and Sabbat?  There’s a bit of back and forth about the rivalry between Portiglio and Wade, how Bern killed and probably ate her predecessor, and so on. Its about what you’d expect. Then, finally, the Society of Leopold returns. Are they major players? Is it a dramatic raid? An agent in disguise working to build intelligence for a relief mission to the archdiocese? In a word: no.  This is one of very few times we get the Society invoked again, and it’s a brief reference as pawns, nothing more. Its weird how Weinberg’s usual approach is to throw everything cool at the page but he more-or-less ignores the Inquisition entirely. There’s a discussion of Russia – Molly knows Baba Yaga is back courtesy of the madness network – and then it moves to the more important issue: the Red Death’s attack in DC. Everyone involved is, in a nice surprise, too clever to accept the extremely blatant ‘I am the Red Death and I’m here from the Camarilla’ line. But then…  I like Molly. She may be a Sabbat Malkavian, which means she’s almost certainly done some horrific poo poo, but she’s also got some common sense. Portiglio is busy speaking Game Terms and she’s just going ‘nope, gently caress this noise, y’all can burn to death but I’m out’. The Red Death arrives and the battle starts between it and Bern:  Yes, another power name drop. Naturally, it doesn’t work – the shadows just fizzle and sublimate at a touch from the Red Death. Varney probes him (again, these chapters almost directly mirror in structure the ones in Part 1 – if I had more faith in Bob I’d call it clever). We get the same discovery – more than one of them, they’re called the Children of Dreadful Night, etc. Justine and co attempt to flee but the doors are locked thanks to the Red Death’s powers. Is this the end?! No, because unlike Vargoss, Bern understands that bit where she’s a very powerful vampire and just smashes the reinforced fire door into bits, aided by thaumaturgy to disintegrate it into rust. Everyone flees except the dazed Varney, which permits some pretty unnecessary exposition:  I’d like to remind you that Varney is ‘the most dangerous woman in the world’. So naturally, in this situation of great danger, she acts dynamically! Oh, no. She weeps helplessly and waits to die until Reuben turns up in the door to save her. He’s completely immune to the Red Death’s flames, simply walks on in, snatches her up, and takes her to safety using ‘a trick [his] father taught [him]’. The club’s on fire now and we get the standard chaotic club escape background while Reuben outright explains that the Red Death can only hold the Body of Fire for a while. I really loving hate Reuben and Rachel. Here, we learn that they’re brother and sister, and that Varney is Anis’s puppet. Is this reveal dramatic in the least?  No. No it is not. That’s the end of Chapter 16. Chapter Seventeen We jump to another viewpoint now. We’re in the Bulgarian mountains, March 16, 1994. Now we get to meet the Three Stooges in vampire form – Le Clair, Jean Paul, and Baptiste. They’re probably a reference to something but I’m too ill-cultured to spot it. They’re serial diablerists who go from place to place to kill and eat more powerful vampires, which is to say: they’re PCs. Their present target is Dziemianovitch, which seems to be a mangling of the actual name, Dziemianowicz. He’s an especially terrifying and cruel 6th Generation Tzimisce who’s dropped out of all awareness for the last six month, which they know because the local villagers clean his house and talk about it freely. Not much on the horrific flesh tortures, dominate, and blood bonds, our Mr. Dziemianowicz, I guess. Baptiste is especially keen because he’s stuck at 8th gen and the others are at 7th, so he expects to do the deed. Where did these three come from?  So, a bunch of sadistic pricks who had such a good time in the war they got the nickname ‘The Unholy Three’ (Trinity is right there, Bob!), torturing prisoners and doing war crimes. Their embrace came from ‘an officer in their regiment’ old enough to have supported the Student Uprisings of the ‘18th century’. There’s some logistical issues there. Their sire was a devout Marxist and 9th Generation Brujah, who thought he could use their violence for the revolution. Unfortunately for him, they promptly ate him, and launched their diablerie plan to become the rulers of Europe. In the intervening eight decades, they’ve eaten eight more vampires. Now its time for the ninth. There’s a long lot of them sneaking into the place – though sneaking may not be the right term, since Baptiste loses patience easily and smashes the windows to climb in. There are various boobytraps – a hall of arrows, a pit of acid, a pit of spikes, razor sharp hidden wires, etc. LeClair has the ability to control and disable mechanical devices at a distance because Weinberg gives that out like candy. Its not very compelling but does include the immortal line:  Its also nice to know that they’ve kept up with mortal comedy:  Is someone waiting? Yes – Le Clair can sense them, and there’s no hostility in them. They finally break into the crypt, and… Dziemianowicz is long dead! Gasp! Waiting for them is – shock! The Red Death! The Red Death ate him first (which, naturally, tells us something important: just months earlier it was worthwhile for them to diablerize at least one 6th Generation vampire). So what’s he waiting for?  Oh no! Not Phantomas!
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Jun 21, 2023 14:52
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I suspect a lot of Planescape's hype is from people playing Torment and assuming from the experience the setting is as strong as the game.
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Jun 21, 2023 14:59
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Fivemarks posted:I thought this thread was about reviews, and not just copy/pasting the content of books. Well, if its an issue for people I can spend more time rambling on odd tangents about the structure of the Cosa Nostra, which vampires do and do not exist, and drawing bloodline charts, but that'll bloat the read-through to be as long as the trilogy itself. Bouquet posted:A 17 year old ferret is like twice as old they get to on average, so it’s already pretty special. What’s a little miraculous computer program when you’re already 160 years old? My impression from HVSD is that the author doesn't understand anything very well, honestly.
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Jun 22, 2023 03:29
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i'm sorry what
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Jun 22, 2023 03:49
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I didn't realize I could be this angry at badly executed scifi and yet I am fuming. My own sci-fi stuff deals with the question of gender and robots pretty commonly and this is just like - the worst possible take?
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Jun 22, 2023 05:35
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Kurieg posted:When they were making the genome for the owl furries they copied in a bunch of files from the root directory of their computer at random, for some reason. I repeat myself: I'm sorry, what? (but good ways this time, maybe?)
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Jun 22, 2023 15:43
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Kurieg posted:Sorry I misremembered things because like. 30 different incredibly dumb things happen to earth. 
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Jun 22, 2023 16:30
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The Masquerade of the Red Death - Book 1: Blood War - Part 5, Chapters 18 to 22 Part One Part Two Part Three Part Four Part Five Chapter Eighteen We’re back to New York with Varney, in the immediate aftermath of the attack on The Devil’s Playground. Jackson is waiting for her a block away in the car, which seems a little slack. There’s police and fire sirens going off, clubgoers running through the streets, and the only backup Varney’s got doesn’t have a plan B beyond ‘wait for rendezvous’? Well, I guess it can be excused because apparently she had the place packed with spies, microphones, secret communications networks and hidden cameras because of course she does, she’s the secret owner of the club and through ‘subtle but intense mental manipulation’ made Bern set up ‘Sabbat headquarters’ (there’s a concept for you) in it. The entire place is surrounded by Varney’s agents who’re capable of tracking the three spooked and very senior Sabbat vampires to their havens safely, and she was never in any real danger, except for the part where, you know. She was absolutely about to be murdered and not one of the spies, operatives, or bodyguards showed themselves. That aside, this is a fairly standard intelligence-gathering chapter. Varney sets Jackson a new task – find out everything they can about the Red Death and the mystery twins. We also get to glimpse the source of Varney’s power:  Now, the books go back and forth on the concept of Masqueraders. Here’s my best understanding of the reality: Masqueraders are actually real (if not really in anything else – a hint of them in Chicago by Night is about the extent of it), and Flavia’s description is basically accurate, but each one is sui generis. Varney is easy: she’s a ghoul, straight up and down, and Anis is in torpor in the crypt under the Varney building. She probably has some other stuff going on from a few centuries experience – a couple of Paths, say – but at the core, she’s just a potent Methuselah’s ghoul with a telepathic link that lets her draw power and use some more advanced disciplines. McCann’s exact deal is never really clarified. He may, or may not, be a mage – and he may, or may not, be many thousands of years old in his own body. He may, or may not, be Lameth in an alchemical body, or just a human he timeshares mental real estate with. He may, or may not, be a vampire, or just human but immortal. My money is that McCann doesn’t really exist – he’s an alchemical shell. We never get an actual answer to this question, which would be fine if it weren’t hyped up as a grand unknowable mystery. As it is, it just lends more of an air of Special to already overwrought characters. There’s a little more wank over Reuben and Rachel. No one else at the bar saw them! The cameras missed them completely! Alicia comes to the not-unreasonable conclusion Reuben must be a mage, and we get a brief description of them and a piece of characterization I don’t love:  The man literally knows vampires exist, including literal vampire wizards. He’s aware his employer is, at the very least, strongly telepathic and capable of impossible feats. He’s an ex-Green Beret (and CIA Guy, though honestly: that does make him being a complete moron who can’t exhibit an iota of flexibility in thought more plausible), and all the Rambo stereotypes aside, one of the crucial skills of 1970s-era special forces was flexibility in thinking. For Jackson to automatically disbelieve magic is possible when, again, he is literally involved in secretly manipulating the impossibly powerful elders of a sect and has literal video footage of their literally magical powers, all on behalf of a woman who he knows is a telepath who can shut down people’s brains at a distance is nonsensical. I could go on a big rant about materialism and magic, but I’ll save it unless people want to hear it. Suffice to say: This is slack and lazy on Weinberg’s part, and undercuts both the bit where Jackson is written to be both a plain-viewed soldier and a badass. Back to the story at hand. Having fed and changed (black jumpsuit, hoody, and gloves), Varney wants to go to the Bowery. Jackson is getting very tired of his employer wanting to go to the most dangerous areas in New York (the Bowery differs from Prospect Park only because it doesn’t have a wall, per the text – in our world it was mid-gentrification in the 90s but its safe to say the Sabbat aren’t really big on urban redevelopment and probably ate the first yuppies who moved in. Unexpected allies of the working poor, etc, etc.) Varney reassures him by giving him orders to shoot to kill and to shoot first, ask questions later, which is probably a nice fuzzy return to his CIA days in Vietnam. It takes exactly one paragraph for Weinberg to feed us another action sequence. Five punks try and intimidate them, and Jackson gets to do his Dirty Harry impression. To his credit, he doesn’t kill anyone, and for a change there are no fatalities from Varney either. They just ask for directions, while holding these teenage kids at gunpoint (one of them with his mouth around the gun, no less – Jackson’s preferred response to their attempts at intimidation being to ram the barrel of a ‘.357 Magnum Police Special’ – which I assume is a S&W Model 13 – through a man’s teeth). They want to see ‘Madame Zorza’, a weird old witch on the third floor, and on receiving directions let the kids go. Jackson warns they’ll be back and packing serious firepower and the overall tone definitely suggests Jackson did some war crimes in Vietnam. Naturally, he’s proven right, and off-camera will massacre them and their friends while Varney meets with Zorza. Finally, we meet Madame Zorza, a stereotypical ‘gypsy’ fortune teller. Yes, if you thought we were getting away from unfortunate language at this point, have no fear: its back. For that matter, while Jackson is never explicitly described as Black the name choice he gets in Book 1 – ‘Sanford Jackson’ – feels like a Black man’s name to me, and is shared with a former Negro league player. There’s something uncomfortably fetishistic about him in that light, particularly the bit where Varney calls him to her bed whenever she can’t find a man on the prowl. This would actually provide a potentially interesting point of comparison and bonding with Flavia, in better hands – we have two people who’re viewed as objects, to be exploited both practically and sexually, who belong to specific categories of sexualized others and who are both owned by far more powerful people who view them principally as trophies rather than actually needing their services. Again, this is a big part of my frustration with Weinberg: some of these ideas could actually be very potent moments with more considered and careful use! Zorza is a vampire, of course – Gangrel, which is not such a surprise given that the early VtM material made a big thing of a connection between the Gangrel and the Rroma and Sinti communities. She’s lived in New York for two centuries and was active in Europe from no later than the Plague years, and makes everyone who visits her hide their face – and the years have twisted her own to resemble that of the Sphinx. So, is she a neat character? Well, she could be – but her dialogue is, well, bad. Very stereotypical fortune teller. Here’s the only thing of substance she says (free of charge, naturally, because the fates demand it):  Gosh, what could that be referring to? She also calls Varney ‘Anis’, but as she’s been calling her the ‘Queen of the Night’, Anis’s title, since she walked in – its not such a shock. Varney’s reply might be Bob being a hack, or being aware how goofy this all is, or both. I like it, though, in that dumb poo poo way:  If anyone’s seen Lodge 49, in this moment I picture the deadpan delivery of Sonya Cassidy as Liz Dudley. As dialogue goes though? Its bad – its choppy, and it feels like Weinberg never learned how to deploy punctuation in dialogue properly and instead uses full stops to indicate a brief pause where he really should use commas, emdashes, or even the dreaded ellipsis. The last two, for instance, should really just be ‘Soon I’ll be getting letters addressed to Anis – maybe even junk mail.’ Chapter 19 We’re still in new York, but now with yet another POV. Weinberg’s kitchen sink approach is in full swing at this stage. The new guy is Walter Holmes – ‘an astonishingly ordinary’ man of 180 pound at a hair under 6 foot, with utterly unremarkable features and unnaturally pale skin because he’s, of course, a vampire. Specifically, ‘a late-generation vampire of no particular note’ who hangs at the ‘Perdition Club, a hideaway frequented by anarchs’. Again, Weinberg is never terribly clear on the distinctions between Caitiff, Anarch, and Sabbat, as we’ll see soon. Is Walter really so unremarkable? Of course not. He’s a two thousand year old former Roman centurion and the Inconnu Monitor of New York, a fact we learn on page two of his introduction – shortly after we learn he’s really, really into card games and gambling. He’d probably be a big Magic guy these days. We’re given a pocket history of the Inconnu next, and its mostly fine – mysterious, old, shadowy. Again, this is in part a product of the early VtM approach, where the Inconnu was far more front and center than in Revised, with multiple Inconnu characters roaming around. Walter, like the others, is a spy and mook, a mysterious hint of a mysterious truth. He also knows Molly Wade rather well, because she’s come to join him for a game of seven card stud. Molly throws out a blunt reference to Francis Marion Crawford, though without the first name – and states she met him in Italy about 80 years – so, 1914. As she’s a Malkavian known to exaggerate her madness, we can probably excuse her being confused about dates, as Crawford died in 1909. But cards aren’t just cards, of course: they’re a secret code and the two use it to discuss the Red Death’s attack. He’s unknown to the Inconnu, and Molly can’t work out his bloodline. Holmes warns her that Varney is more powerful than she seems, which… Okay. This whole scene is establishing Molly as Walter’s spy. She’s been roaming around beside a powerful telepath for months. He’s only now warning her that Varney isn’t actually Bern’s ghoul. We could say, ‘oh, he’s worried if she knows the truth Varney will read it’… But then immediately after, he responds to the idea she might secretly be Anis, the Queen of the Night, by fearfully stating he thinks she is. So if that’s a worry, Molly is deader than ever now. Its also where we end the chapter. Does adding the Inconnu really achieve anything here? Not especially – they aren’t a major force in the rest of the trilogy. But Weinberg likes to throw a lot of things from the setting books in to the blender, especially anything that strikes him as cool, and Walter is part of that. And, in fairness, the ‘spy uses poker as a secret code’ approach is a nice touch, if not actually that original. Chapter 20 We resume with Varney, on the afternoon of the 15th. She’s sulking in her penthouse to Wagner as the rain pours down. Very moody. Immediately, the action is back to a vampire focus because Bern wants to meet her at midnight in… Perdition! The club we just heard about last chapter. Weinberg doesn’t like to leave anything to cool too long in case we forget it. Jackson arrives with the mail but its all dead ends – no replies to the important queries yet, which is a nice delay for once. Then… Well, as memory serves this is in the ST Handbook to the Sabbat somewhere, so it isn’t entirely Weinberg. But we get a little dialogue on how the Sabbat consider humans, with an unfortunate focus:  This unfortunate focus continues as Varney gets notices from her clipping service about in Australia. It’s… Well. A continuation of the clippings McCann got, involving a riot by hundreds of Blackfellas (presumably Warlpiri – Weinberg doesn’t specify), who refuse to go back to the Tanami under any circumstances. To Weinberg’s credit, while the language is dated (and paints Australia as basically still a 19th-century colonial entity, which… is not entirely incorrect, unfortunately), he has no hesitation having Varney outright call our history genocidal and to treat the violent response to the riot as part of the same. Credit where it’s due. The second clipping cattle ranchers slaughtered 30 miles outside of Darwin. The language is off – we use station, not ranch, for one thing – and they’re mostly further out than an hour’s drive, but you can pretty well see the point of the Blackfellas who don’t want to go back (nevermind that that’s nowhere near the Tanami) because the victims:  I wouldn’t be rushing to go back either if some giant skinless horror is out there literally collecting skulls. All this bad news prompts Varney to think of Lameth, who has a solution to every mystery. How much of this is Varney’s experiences, limited as they are, and how much is her tapping Anis is unclear. Next, we get more Australian stuff. Go us! Only, it’s also bad:  Literally none of this is correct. To the extent the Triads (which I’m going to be generous to Weinberg here and assume he’s using to mean more generally Chinese-origin organized crime) are and were active in Australia, its primarily in Sydney, not the Northern Territory, and they absolutely do not control our criminal underworld. Somewhat ironically, if we had to name a single group that has enough sway to count as a controlling interest, outside of specific areas of drug importation and human trafficking, it would be… The Italian ‘ndrangheta! Pretty well all our major organized crime families that aren’t just bikies are either Serbians or ‘ndrangheta cosche. So, yes, I suppose the Mafia does stay out of it because they don’t wanna get mirked by the ‘Ndrangheta, but since Weinberg doesn’t distinguish between the Cosa Nostra, the Mafia, the ‘Ndrangheta and the Camorra, I don’t quite think that’s the angle he’s taking here. I guess people were really hyped up about the Triads in the 80s and 90s? Still, lets move on to… Oh, and there’s another completely wrong thing already!  Almost every single word of this is wrong. For a start: we’ve already been over the bit where Nuckalavee is a Scottish word. It is not, and has never been, a word in any Indigenous Australian language, at least not to my knowledge. But, beyond that. Weinberg is right that there are hundreds of ‘dialects’, only they’re not dialects, they are completely distinct languages. In fact, they’re so different that Australia has thirteen distinct language families – more than Europe! And the idea of a single shared mythology is insultingly wrong beyond a handful of common archetypes and epistemic frames. Even the idea of the end of the world is, shall we say, contested in a lot of these same epistemologies. Fair due, though. That’s the last line of the chapter, and it kind of rocks. Pulpy, but it has the right air of ‘we’re hosed’. Its also, despite some really unfortunate language and the issues in the para above, got a bonus point for correctly identifying our history as one long and continuing genocide and not shying away from saying it. Chapter Twenty-One Time to jump again. Now, we’re in Vienna during the day of the 16th of March, 1994. Our new POV? Why, none other than loving Etrius. He’s dreaming of the ancient past, when Goratrix has, with Tremere’s approval, summoned the elders of the then-mortal House Tremere to his fortress, Malagris. I don’t recall Malagris ever appearing anywhere else and Goratrix was the master of Ceoris at the time. Goratrix has discovered the secret to mortal life, and he and Tremere have called the rest of the Seven to undergo the ritual transformation. In attendance as Tremere’s advisor is none-other-than the Count St. Germain. St. Germain is a big deal in occult history, but he doesn’t appear on the scene until the 16/1700s, so he’s about eight centuries early here. We’re given a mostly accurate – to the degree accuracy is at all possible here – account of the Tremere apprentices being embraced and the subsequent distillation. Etrius does not want to be a vampire, and there’s some back and forth. Tremere orders it done, though, and that’s all there is to it. In theory, Tremere has been advised, they will not become vampires – there’s no embrace, ergo, no vampirism. He’s been told this by the Count St. Germain. We’re given the preparation of the potion and the ritual, condensed in a dream to a matter of moments. It involves the living sacrifice of the two apprentices, in a nicely grisly touch. The Count St. Germain is in charge of filling and handing out the cups, though no one recalls asking him to do it. You can see where its going, I’m sure. They drink and are embraced with extreme agony while St. Germain smiles – presumably, the pain is the moment their avatars are shredded from them. Then, up Etrius wakes and he ponders the dream. There are holes in his memory that shouldn’t be there, like who the hell the Count’s sire was. For centuries, they all assumed he was Tremere and embraced after the ritual, but what if he wasn’t? Who the hell is that guy? Weinberg isn’t one to let anything sit without really hammering on it to make it clear, so he goes further:  This entire paragraph is unnecessary. We can infer from the dream that’s what happened – it’s pretty blatant. We don’t need the protracted ‘but how, and who?’ to then be followed by ‘oh my god what if he’s the secret master’. We end the chapter with another revelation – the one actually worth wondering. Why can Etrius suddenly remember this? Why are his concerns no longer being suppressed? Who’s sending him this warning? Its not a subtle chapter. The essential narrative we’re being handed is now very clear: methuselahs operate via pawns to diablerize their own sires and free themselves of blood bondage, cue all sorts of nonsense. And in turn it should now be pretty obvious that the Count, who is also the Red Death, is a childe of Saulot. Yes, it all comes back to that slick bastard, as always. This book is part of a really funny trend to me though. Etrius is a character who shows up plenty in the novels, and he’s almost always this kind of confused fuckwit who needs basic things slowly and carefully explained to him even while he thinks he’s a master plotter. Makes you wonder if the Count selected the Tremere for his purposes not because they’re good pawns but because half of their leaders are actually thick as two bricks. Chapter Twenty-Two We return now to St. Louis and Club Diabolique – but not McCann. Who’s our POV now?  Mysterious! But not. She immediately identifies herself and names her clan in case it wasn’t clear, and speaking in the open to Brutus the door man, invokes the Traditions to announce herself to Vargoss. In front of the line to get in. On the literal street. In front of explicitly several dozen mortal humans. Very subtle stuff. She’s allowed in, runs into Darrow who lets her into the inner sanctum, and meets Vargoss. In a nice little touch, Vargoss, as an ancient Ventrue, puts a lot of stock in formal introductions and offers the appropriate replies to Madeleine’s formal introduction, mentioning he knew her sire back in Europe and offering hospitality. The language is lacking, but this cuts to something that a lot of VtM stuff misses – a ruler needs to be seen to rule, and the formalities of court protocol emerge to produce that conspicuous framework. The Traditions are a big deal, and while the weighting of one to another will vary from city to city, Princes discard them and their attached protocols wholly at their peril. It can be overwrought – What We Do in the Shadows makes great hay out of that – but these things exist and shouldn’t be shrugged off. We then move to the cover story. Madeleine is there, she says, to check up on Giovanni investments in the coal industry of southern Illinois – which is indeed a real thing. Everyone involved is aware it’s a polite lie, but a suitable one that appeases Vargoss she won’t be staying long. They drink a toast (drawn from the dead workmen who were killed after repairing the club) to Undeath, to Eternal Night, and the Destruction of the Red Death. This is where Madeleine learns of the Red Death, and mercifully, we’re not required to read a summary of what’s gone before this time. The focus instead is on McCann, who Vargoss has sent to investigate. This is where we get another ‘oh, it has to happen’ moment. Vargoss freely discloses where McCann has been sent to investigate in response to Madeleine’s prompting. He’s a two thousand year old methuselah who’s risen to praxis – but he doesn’t recognize a spot where he should dissemble? It’s a good thing we know that Madeleine’s goal isn’t to kill McCann. How do we know this? Because we end the chapter thus:  Next time: The end of Part 2; Vampire Punk-Rock Bands; and Blood War.
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Jun 23, 2023 09:59
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Yeah, he turns up as a different Comte St. Germaine in Clanbook Tremere (1E) and House of Secrets, and is attested to as a Hedge Mage in the revised Order of Hermes book.
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Jun 23, 2023 10:24
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The amount of upset chuds about it was amazing, too.
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Jun 25, 2023 07:17
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MonsieurChoc posted:They accepted trans women. Yup. Cue enormous amounts of chud tears because vikings are MANLY MEN and trans people don't exist until 2017!!! It was incredible to watch.
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Jun 25, 2023 15:49
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Revenants are legitimately one of my favourite parts of VtM. They're all kinds of tricky to handle but by god there's some serious horror in there.
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Jun 27, 2023 14:27
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The Masquerade of the Red Death - Book 1: Blood War - Part Seven, Chapters 23 to 26 Part One Part Two Part Three Part Four Part Five Part Six We’re back with the most notorious trilogy of oWoD novels ever printed. A bit of a shorter one today since I’ve been busy running Mage and trying to find work as a proofer to fill some gaps. Chapter 23 We pick up an hour later in St. Louis as Madeleine departs. But we have a new POV – Darrow, the Brujah advisor to Vargoss. One of the irritating bits about Weinberg’s work is he has a fairly rigid third person limited approach even where it doesn’t really serve the flow of the narrative best, but that’s neither here nor there. Back to the story. Darrow finds Madeleine captivating because she’s clearly as deadly as the stories say – and looking forward to the challenge of killing her. Wait, why does he want to kill her? Well, because Darrow serves two masters. This is our first chapter with his PoV, the third he’s appeared in in any significance, and we’re immediately told he has divided loyalties. Weinberg doesn’t really do subtle reveals even where he tries (which he isn’t here.) We get some fluff for Madeleine as they all sit around talking about what a powerfully commanding personality she has and try to work out her real intentions. It takes all of a page for them to work out she’s after the Red Death, because she did outright ask them about it, but this is naturally just evidence of the Cunning and Scheming nature of the Giovanni clan as a whole. There’s nothing subtler than just literally walking up, loudly announcing who you are, and demanding to be told precisely what you want to know, I guess? Either way, we close out quick. Darrow and Uglyface are tasked with working out where she’s going next and warning Flavia if its DC, which naturally, it is. Did this need to be a chapter? I’d hazard ‘no’ – but because Weinberg sticks to a very firm third person limited perspective where he directly tells us in clear and simple terms what’s going on (mostly, anyway), he doesn’t try and get away with sneaking hints in the other chapters. That produces part of the breathless 12-year old vibe of the two trilogies, but not the good part of it. Chapter 24 We’re back off to NYC and Varney now. It’s the night of the 16th and she’s at Perdition, the Anarch club, which depresses her because these drat new vampire kids are all idiots. And, you know, fair enough. Weinberg also gives us this gem:  I could quibble for days on the degree to which this is accurate, but for early period VtM its not too far off the mark. This is the high point in understanding the Sabbat-Anarch dynamic for Weinberg, unfortunately, as we’ll see next Part. What do anarchs listen to? Punk rock, obviously. There are a lot of vampire musicians in Weinberg’s work, and the Perdition is a five-man overloud bunch called The Fingers of Death, punch not included. This isn’t important, but again – I really love the idea that for Weinberg its just utterly normal that there are musician-coteries everywhere. Its dumb, but so much of the rest of the oWoD tries to play the numbers a little straighter and not spend ~10% of the allowable tally of vampires in St. Louis on a trio of jazz legends. There’s a little discussion of how powerful Varney is – naturally, she can wrap high-generation Kindred around her little finger without real effort because they all have feeble minds. Naturally, she’s the one using Bern to gain total control over the Sabbat, because that’s something you can just ‘do’. Oh Bob – though at least he acknowledges it probably won’t work and implies rather strongly that Varney (or more likely, Anis) has been trying this for a long time without much luck. But, why’s she at Perdition slumming it with anarchs if she’s a power player at the highest levels? She’s there, though she doesn’t actually know it, for a mysterious meeting. Who could it be? Reuben? Rachel? Close – its Walter Holmes. Bob being Bob, Walter is the world’s greatest card player with unparalleled dexterity. There’s a rather wanky dialogue between them about how evil Bern is, and so on, and then Varney reads his thoughts. He’s just a late-generation vampire of no note, but naturally, she can tell he’s more than that. We’ll get it later but he’s strongly implied to be no other than the Longinus as well as the 2000-year-old Inconnu Monitor of New York. Then there’s some maddeningly dumb poo poo. Walter offers to read Varney’s fortune using a standard deck of cards. The reaction…  Varney is older than the modern use of tarot cards for divination. Setting aside the theories of Peter Mark Adams (a fine copy of which I once possessed but have since sadly lost), tarot has no particular mystical links of great antiquity. They’re literally just playing cards, and the older fortune reading traditions with cards have no special association with them, which both Varney and Anis should know. Now, I’m cross, but…  Just when I thought I was out, Bob reels me back in. This is the dumbest poo poo and I am here for it. Why are Tarot Cards such a big thing that slack-jawed new agers assume have always been first and only tools of mystic power? Because the loving Gangrel made everyone think they are! This bit is also a little unfortunate because I’m pretty sure where Bob uses the clans, he means ‘Roma people’ given the Gangrel fortune-teller we had a few chapters ago, but at least its not a direct claim of some awful fraud and just presented as a savvy piece of marketing. The reading is fine. Not exceptionally well or poorly considered, and very short. The bit takeaway is that both the Red Death and Anis are using pawns in their game and are going to come into conflict, which I’m pretty sure you don’t need to be able to read the future to predict. Then the reading is interrupted because Bern and her advisors arrive. This is the ‘real’ meeting Varney’s here for, but it’s a bit of a nice touch that it plays second fiddle to the Holmes meeting. Not terribly subtle or well-executed, mind, but nice. The chapter ends with a pissed off Bern – and before we get the actual meeting underway. Chapter Twenty-Five We cross back to Europe and the Three Stooges, still in Bulgaria. What are our three diablerist PCs doing? Crimes, duh. They’ve slaughtered an entire tavern because They’re Evil. So evil we get a weird platonic necrophilia dialogue where Jean Paul is playing with a dead girl’s hair! Because… I don’t know. Shock value? A sense of the grotesque? It neither adds nor detracts, honestly. Weinberg’s characters are too thin for it to have any weight. But it can always be worse than being a murderous necrophiliac:  The real purpose of this interlude is to discuss the Red Death. Do they serve willingly, or do they try and betray him and eat him when they get a chance? Points to Bob: that’s exactly what a diablerie-focused game is like. The decision: Eat Phantomas for him, and then using that strength, eat the Red Death. They are nothing if not ambitious. Finally, we close out with them torching the place and a brief introduction of the concept of the justicar, which becomes important later:  This is, bluntly, wrong. The Justicars are far from ‘independent of the hierarchy’. In a very real sense, they are the Camarilla hierarchy given physical form. Nor are they the kind of terminator-esque enforcer depicted here, even if hunting and killing is a good part of the job. Chapter Twenty-Six We’re back to New York early morning of the 18th, with Varney again. This, I think, is a typo: its meant to follow directly from Bern’s meeting, which is just after midnight on the 17th. This is also another largely unnecessary chapter that could’ve been handled later, but Bob really wants his ‘three parts of 13 each’ motif to mirror the clans which…  We’re skipping the meeting completely and are just told what it boils down to, which is also fine. Varney is, you guessed it, being sent to DC. This time, though, it’s not to investigate the Red Death. Its time for… BLOOD WAR. What this actually entails is that Varney and Jackson are being sent as an advance team to lay ground work, because there’s no one, I don’t know, less conspicuous and busy running one of the world’s largest companies to do that? They also have precisely one day to arrange it before Bern and her advisors themselves turn up directly in DC. I again emphasis that Bob doesn’t really do subtle or nuanced. We get our third reference to the Society of Leopold, too. Use them as a pawn in the blood war against D.C.? Nah – that’d be too interesting. Varney instead just has Jackson put in a tip with them to strike against Portiglio, and also tasks him with finding out about Walter Holmes. Jackson’s got eyes and ears everywhere, I guess. And now one of the greatest pieces of writing in any language:  What this actually entails is laughable. In the span of a single night, Bern has managed to send secret messages to every pack on the East Coast. Weinberg’s approach to the sects here involves giant phone trees – but he also really doesn’t grasp how the Sabbat and the Anarchs are structured. While, as we’ve seen in JD’s review, the Sabbat does have a fairly strong internal hierarchy and systems, at the ground level its still very much a fragmented matter where a pack might be nowhere near where it should be at a given time, chasing its own groupthink clusterfuck on behalf of a bishop from another city. To get every single one in a night is a major pull where you’re more-or-less definitely relying on the Tremere antitribu. The goal: seize DC and destroy the Camarilla there before they can use the Red Death to exterminate the Sabbat. Is it a flimsy pretext? Yes. Is it really loving funny given that this same month we’re given the truth about Marcus Vitel, Prince of DC? You better believe it. That said, this is where we begin the parallels with some of what comes later. To a certain extent, aspects of this trilogy feel like a dry run of parts of the Clan Novel Saga – ancient unknowable horrors returning and the Siege of DC, for instance – but I suppose that’s probably just because these are obvious and inevitable parts of the setting. But again, Weinberg’s sense of logistics crumples immediately.  Not only can they all be contacted within a night, but they can all drop what they’re doing and head straight to DC in a single day’s travel, presumably guarded by ghouls. I sure hope there’s no, say, ongoing state of hostilities in any of these territories. You know, like the constant skirmishes in New England, or the ongoing violence over Florida. Gosh, it’d be awkward to completely lose the Eastern Seaboard for a single attack on a single city – wait, I’m getting a memo about the Clan Novel Sagas again… Anyway. In fairness to Bob, he does give us a description of how the Sabbat usually handles this, which might as well be ripped right from the Sabbat guide JD just reviewed. Fifth columnists sneak in first, then turn on their new friends to pave the way for the brute force sledgehammer of hundreds of shovelheads. The only hope of success here, having forfeited the infiltration, is massive overwhelming surprise and force, taking advantage of the internal divisions in DC’s Camarilla. Its not a great part of the book but at least there’s some awareness it’s a terrible plan and, as we’ll see later, that’s actually the Red Death’s game anyway – so in that sense, well, it’s a great plan. How does Jackson react to the idea he’s about to be sent into the flashpoint of a full-scale sect war, possibly involving the full force of every government asset both sides have and thousands of vampires?  I really want to like this line but its so loving clunky! And then we’re immediately back into some gonzo poo poo:  Secret Service anti-vampire flamethrowers! Mysterious nasa technology! Did we suddenly slide into Mage? Either way, Jackson’s also smart enough to spot that the Red Death seems to be sparking these conflicts, which would be nice if it weren’t Bob repeating the same point over and over to make sure we, the readers, understand. We’re left with a single question: Why is the Red Death doing it. For power, clearly: But to do what with? That’s the end of Part 2 of Book 1. Weinberg’s tried for some ‘interesting’ techniques – the mirror image of Part 1’s structure so that we can sense that McCann and Varney are two sides of the same coin, for instance – but he doesn’t really pull it off. It feels too forced, and the part where he doesn’t trust us to make the connections and shouts them from the rooftop ruins any slow realization we could have. Likewise, the 1 Book with 3 Parts with 13 Chapters each is a nice mirror of the clans, but to get there we get break points we don’t need and missed opportunities for richer storytelling instead. Next time, the Blood War kicks off in full, McCann and Varney meet, and we discover just how subtle Madeleine Giovanni’s ride is. I’m sure that the Dagger of the Giovanni, a master of stealth and a feared assassin who strikes from the shadows, travels discreetly. Her ride is a loving big-rig truck with ‘MG’ in big letters on the side.
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Jun 30, 2023 07:44
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joylessdivision posted:Mokole rule. Just needed to express that. got drat Werecrocodiles Mokole do indeed rule - but on my end of things, with the novels and the grand census, present a curious and infuriating problem. Early-to-mid VtM and WtA novels can be divided into three categories. First, the absolutely awful Harper-Collins ones - which often have so little relationship to the setting as a whole they make themselves non-canon (most notably the utterly execrable 'Blood on the Sun'*). Second, regular White Wolf imprint novels like the MotRD trilogy. But third - the Rage/Jyhad novels. These are basically 'here is what a game of rage/jyhad looks like with a narrative applied', and are mostly pretty bad and have the same loose connection to the setting issue (and are also the site of that one novel I mention that has the most racist thing in all White Wolf history.) But, one of them (and one of the better ones) is our only real source of information on the Snow Plague, which the Mokole clanbook later references, so we can't neatly split them off as their own thing. (*: How do you gently caress up a book about a vampire with the tagline 'She was America's secret weapon in WW2'? You hire Brian Herbert and let him assure you through a haze of cocaine that of course he's read the brief and setting precis, its fine, and then never follow up to make sure he has.)
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Jul 1, 2023 01:01
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Pakxos posted:Is there a quick way of describing what this was? I love the random-rear end tidbits in the clanbooks. Although the best at it were the historical ones. Dawgstar posted:That's what the POV character goes to Australia to search for because he suddenly got Mnesis, right? I didn't know it was a whole novel previously, it just felt like a random white dude got access to Mokole ancestral memory for reasons. (And there's a few white Mokole but it's rare enough to feel weird.) Yeah, that's the dude. He got access to it as part of a whole big thing to... as memory serves, locate the original blossoms being used to make the spiritually tainted drug in a memory of... Pangaea?? Its been a couple of years.
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Jul 1, 2023 01:34
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The Masquerade of the Red Death - Book 1: Blood War - Part Eight, Chapters 27 to 30 Part One Part Two Part Three Part Four Part Five Part Six Part Seven We’re back, with Part 3 of Book 1 of the Masquerade of the Red Death trilogy. As with each prior Part, we begin with a Poe quote:  Chapter 27 We’re with McCann again. He and Flavia have arrived in DC and settled into a hotel room by the night of the 20th – two to three nights after the last chapter. To recap, they’re there to track down information on the Red Death – McCann because Lameth is interested, Flavia for revenge, and both, ostensibly, on behalf of the Prince of St. Louis. The Blood War has begun, but what does that look like?   As an aside, we get another update on how Flavia’s dressed. Its perfectly ordinary and acceptable, which is a nice change. She’s been trying to blend in while looking for their contact, Thompson – Makish’s first vampire kill in the book, so no luck there. She also can’t find Peter Dorfman, the Tremere regent, or Prince Vitel. They’ve both gone into hiding for the duration, which is a nice touch. Most of the novels that follow would place them front and centre in this kind of situation, but I like that they’ve got the sense to slip away in the opening volleys – something that recurs to a degree in the Clan Novel Saga. Weinberg also slips in, with uncommon subtlety for him, a hint at the Red Death’s tactics without shouting them. The sheer number of furious vampires in DC render McCann’s telepathy useless – and Varney’s too. Instigating the blood war as a cover isn’t just to produce a state of crisis, its to give him an edge over Lameth and Anis if he needs it. But then we’re right back into the usual with a horny scene about how much Flavia likes decapitating people with swords:  This is prompted by a rumour of an assassin in the city using thermite, which Weinberg again thinks is a high explosive. Flavia recognizes the tell-tale signature of Makish and the stage is set for a Flavia-Makish confrontation… At which point a bunch of Sabbat burst into their hotel room with the rousing war cry of ‘Kill the buggers! Sabbat forever!’ Dumb as gently caress but I love it. Sabbat forever! Weinberg’s still showing a modicum of self-awareness about it, too, via McCann’s internal monologue:  But, charmingly dumb poo poo aside – this scene irritates the hell out of me. Not only does Bob constantly call the Sabbat shovelheads anarchs (and say they’re all bloodbound), but he doesn’t write action well. Its five or six pages of tedium; spraying bullets with the Mac-10 (at least it comes in handy this time – 1:2 on the count), some mage powers (explosive bullets); Flavia decapitating people. The only interesting part is their escape, where Flavia scuttles down the building like a crab with McCann clinging on like a koala. They split up with a plan to meet again at the Lincoln Memorial the next night, and offscreen, Flavia goes on a killing spree. To close out the chapter, there’s one last fight scene – McCann against two Sabbat who… have the power to jam his gun. I really don’t know where Weinberg got the idea this is a fairly common vampire power, but it comes up constantly whenever he needs a reason not to have a trap fire, a gun work, a sensor function. It’d be one thing if it was just Madeleine Giovanni or the Three, but random mooks are capable of it now. Gun out of the way (1:3, now), is it a thrilling fight scene? No. McCann is the most special boy, so his body is made of stone when they try to stab him to death while talking about how drinking blood is better than sex, and in a single swoop he breaks both their necks, then decapitates them with razor wire. There’s a weird aspect to this chapter. McCann kills three vampires in it, and for some reason they’re all women. The others he fights aren’t noted as fatalities, only the women. The two in question here are dressed in ‘silky white butterfly lace’, talk about being turned on, lick their lips, etc. We end the chapter with him slicing off their heads and I don’t think I’m reaching to say there’s an uncomfortable sexual overtone, and not in a good way. Chapter 28 We stay in DC, but swap to Varney. She’s just felt McCann’s presence courtesy of him using his magic, which is… interesting, to say the least. To cast his explosive bullet spell, he spoke a word capable of ‘sen[ding] disturbing ripples through the umbra’, which she can feel. Only Lameth and Anis know the word, so she’s now aware he’s in the city, at least via proxy. A little awkward given she and Jackson are driving to meet Justine Bern at the time. This is again where I’d like to remind you that Varney is the wealthiest woman in the world and the CEO of one of its largest corporations, and that Bern has no idea how powerful she actually is. I may just be being overconservative but I personally would not place what I think is a pawn of that value in the middle of an active war zone, especially since Bern has lost complete control over her forces and they’re running berserk. Bob dips out of the present to repeat what we already know about Lameth and Anis, in case we’ve forgotten the interludes in Part 2. They’re lovers who obtained Golconda via a potion, which didn’t give them peace of mind and just made them more powerful and no less ambitious. Everyone talks about their mysterious existences (where’s Poochy), legends talk of them controlling the Jyhad, etc. Anis is the most beautiful woman ever to live, Lameth the greatest sorcerer, though we do now get to learn he’s from… Drumroll… Atlantis. Just when I think I’m out, Bob pulls me back in! He’s an infernalist (maybe) who (maybe) got himself embraced to cheat ‘the Lords of Hell’ six thousand years ago, which places Atlantis as having been out there in ~4000BCE. They masterminded the murder of Brujah and the desire for Lameth’s potion destroyed the Second City. Basically – if it’d appear in a thirteen year old’s epic secret backstory for their first vampire character, its in here. Then, another action scene. The road is barricaded and Varney orders Jackson to ram it. He warns it could be a trap, she says do it anyway, and shock: it’s a trap. At which point Varney just casually fires off Temporis, confirming that Weinberg got some thorough collaboration or really did his research. But this is one I find interesting. Dirty Secrets of the Black Hand is the debut of Temporis and the True Brujah and came out all of five months before Blood War was published. Publishing isn’t that quick a business, so either Weinberg got told about the True Brujah early or they made fairly late stage revision while he would’ve been busy writing Books 2 and 3. Either one seems to me to be more evidence that Bob wasn’t totally off on some rogue dumb poo poo and that instead, White Wolf knew precisely what they were getting with the trilogy. That brief aside over, Varney freezes the world around them and crumbles the barricades into chalk, presumably with the same thaumaturgic power Bern used in the club. This is a pretty heavy duty power – 4 dots, I believe – and actually kind of a neat use. But then we get another odd tidbit: Using Temporis has alerted every other Methuselah in the city. How? Why? We never learn that. With the barricade destroyed they make it to Bern’s easily, and Bob introduces Bern’s bodyguard:  Naturally, they’re all instinctively terrified of the power radiating off Varney, though usually they treat her without respect. We’ll meet them again later. For now, it’s a meeting with Bern, Wade, and Portiglio. Wade can pick up the power too and recognizes Varney is Anis’s avatar, though for once Bob doesn’t spell it out immediately which is nice. The invasion has stalled. All the important Camarilla have escaped DC to safety and the fighting is now between mortal authority and Sabbat shocktroops, threatening mass masquerade breaches and a war of attrition. Again, we’re foreshadowing the Clan Novels here – a lot of these brushed-over aspects are picked up again in the CNS, right down to the Camarilla strategy. Bern is motivated to resolve the situation not out of any real worry about that, but because her failure guarantees the other Archbishops will turn on her and try to eat her – and, well, fair enough. And then we dip into the Jyhad again. Bern thinks this because Varney has manipulated her to think this. Great, cool. We also get a refresh on the concept in case we’ve forgotten from the prologue – not so cool. Bob ends the chapter with another of his not-so-subtle hints:  This is one of the nicer elements, on the whole. Our Very Special Characters are still just pawns in the Jyhad, controlled by the Antediluvians. It isn’t Bob’s invention, but I appreciate it all the same. Chapter 29 Still in DC, we now swap to Makish. Makish is out doing what he loves most: violence to racists. We stan, etc, etc. He murders an ‘anarch’ (Bob’s confusion is in full swing these chapters. Are the anarchs gullible shocktroops? Yes. Are all the Sabbat shovelheads also called anarchs? Yes. Helpful.) for calling him a ‘little Jap bastard’, gluing a thermite bomb between his eyes. Bob gives him some dialogue that, for a change, actually has a nice feel:  Now, its clunky, but a little tweak – ‘You have one minute before this goes off. Please, feel free to contemplate the mysteries of the great beyond while you wait.’ – and it’d work just fine. He follows up with his actual final remark being ‘Goodbye. Thank you for your contribution to my art.’ Again – actually a pretty nice one-liner, if it were a one-liner. Bob spends three paragraphs on it instead, which summarizes so much of my frustration with these books. Cool stuff is just completely let down by the execution.  This is a character that, fashy though it is, has actually developed motives, ideals, wants, and needs. That’s unheard of in Bob’s stuff. He’s killed sixteen vampires over the prior three nights. Why? Because he can, more or less. He doesn’t even think the Red Death’s being served by it – he’s doing it for art’s sake. Makish isn’t paper-thin (though he could still use some more fleshing out and some buffing out of the unfortunate Mad Arab aspects), but he’s so tragically misused that I want to scoop him out and put him in a better story, or at least a better version of the trilogy. Even the symmetry between the Red Death’s techniques and the thermite are a nice touch. On that note, its at this point that the Red Death reappears and they walk and talk. Makish doesn’t trust or like his employer in the slightest, and we immediately walk back the idea that he doesn’t know or care if the way he’s killing helps TRD’s plans. He’s alternated Camarilla-Sabbat kills as instructed, varied up his methods, etc, all on orders. We were so close to an independent character for a second that Bob got spooked. TRD fills Makish in that McCann and Flavia have arrived, and naturally, Makish has heard of Flavia. Bob not so subtly slips in the weakness of TRD’s Body of Fire – he can only hold it for fifteen minutes. This chapter is a real mixed bag. It has Makish being an actually interesting character, followed by TRD ruining it and infodumping. Varney’s in the city too, TRD informs Makish, and Makish needs to go kill her. This, as we’ll later see, is… an interesting decision. Then TRD has to go but not before Bob gets a chance to jerk off to his extra-special twins again:  The chapter closes on two notes. A cryptic pronouncement that in two nights the trap will be complete, so Makish needs to prepare himself for McCann and Varney. Then, a fairly standard but relatively effective paragraph about how Makish hasn’t survived centuries without distrusting everyone around him, and how he intends to survive his employment with or without TRD’s approval. Great, splendid: but also, thanks to Bob’s attempt at mirror structuring, redundant with the Unholy Three’s own approach. Its also another good example of the weirdly stilted style:  A lot of these full stops should be commas or emdashes or even ellipses, and the full stops sabotage what little good there is in the prose. The last three sentences are workmanlike but serviceable except for the loving full stops. Recast them this way and they scan vastly better: “Distrust was how he had survived hundreds of years as an assassin, and how he intended to survive for many hundreds more... with or without the approval of the Red Death." Chapter 30 This time, we break the DC streak. We’re popping to Lexington, Kentucky, with new POV characters: three teenage car thieves, named Pablo, Junior, and Sam. The car in question: a big-rig truck painted silver, black, and red, and blazoned with ‘MG Enterprises’ on the side. Real subtle, ain’t it? This is also another of Bob’s ‘world is a gently caress’ interludes:   The urchins break in anyway to try their luck. Its another unexceptional sneak-and-peek style scene, but to Bob’s credit he gets down to brass tacks in two pages. The door to the truck is unlocked and opens before they can touch them – while the kids discover they’ve become paralyzed and await their fates. Inside, Madeleine Giovanni, though she’s introduced as ‘a beautiful woman’ in ‘a tight-fitting black shift’. Bob was doing well with Flavia’s outfit but he’s back in horny form, I guess. The truck is a fairly neat mobile command center, outfitted with communications equipment, a large closet of Madeleine’s clothes, and, uh, a coffin – Madeleine sleeps in it for some reason. It all feels like something out of a Vampire Action Hero cartoon, which kinda owns. She uses presence to get their stories out, which are standard ‘old man writes troubled teen’ stuff, with the exception of a slightly unfortunately worded story about Pablo and Junior murdering two racist cops. Its all layered with a heavy dose of ‘world is a gently caress’, naturally. Then things take a turn. They know she’s a vampire, and she confirms it and introduces herself fully. She needs some hired help because she’s spent the last few nights, off-screen, fighting a ‘band of rogue vampires’. Again, this feels like a Saturday morning cartoon in the best way. Unfortunately she already handled them off screen but she still needs help – people who can guard her during the day. People outside the Family because she suspects a rat. So naturally, who better than cop-killing teenagers? They agree once they hash out a price: a million dollars each. In cash, payment on delivery. The chapter closes out with a rare piece of acceptable dialogue:  Again – in better hands, some of Bob’s ideas could be neat stories! Even the cop-killing aspect could work. Its another piece of world is a gently caress, but one that would be effective if it weren’t for Bob’s dialogue:  Alter a few things. Fix the dialogue. Make Pablo’s condition not just cash, but revenge for his family. Make it so the rogue vampires are still a threat. You have a compelling story in its own right right there, complete with the themes of a chosen and found family that Bob really and earnestly (but badly) tries to connect with through Madeleine’s arc. But because Madeleine’s arc is in service to the Red Death storyline, we get the flat and tepid version. Next time: The Mafia, more confusion on whether the Sabbat and the Anarchs are the same, Kabbalah discourse that’ll make Mors mad as hell, a hole in Phantomas’s encyclopedia, and Etrius being a dumbfuck.
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Jul 2, 2023 13:56
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Vitel's secret comes out in DC by Night, which came out the same month as Blood War. He never actually appears in the MotRD trilogy in person, so its not clear they filled Bob in on all the details. That said - I don't think he appeared prior to either DCbN or MotRD, so it might be another of those examples where Bob either got a pretty good level of collaboration or handed copies of upcoming products.
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Jul 2, 2023 15:22
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The bit where it gets murky is that Bob's aware they're distinct, but then uses the specific term anarch interchangeably and has 'anarchs' shout 'Sabbat forever'. I think its probably a combo of a hazy understanding of how and why they split and, potentially, some influence from his son's read of the setting and his game. In the postscript for the third book he gives his special thanks to various folks - plenty of White Wolf staffers for answering so many questions, but also his son Matt, who's enthusiasm and knowledge of the setting was a big help. I don't know how old his kid was at the time but since Bob turned 25 in '71 I'd be surprised if he was older than twenty-one or so, and possibly quite a bit younger. Some of the breathless teenage nonsense might literally be his son's game sneaking into the books, which is sort of sweet.
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Jul 3, 2023 01:42
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The Masquerade of the Red Death - Book 1: Blood War - Part Nine, Chapters 31 to 34 Part One Part Two Part Three Part Four Part Five Part Six Part Seven Part Eight Chapter 31 Continuing the trend of jumping around largely unnecessarily, we’re back to Sicily on the night of March 21 (I’ll just note that I’m not sure Bob took into account timezones with his scheduling), with the POV of… Not Don Caravelli, now, but his assistant, Don Nicko Lazarri. Sigh. These names, man. They’re about to have a blood feast, eating ‘soldiers sent by the Italian government to annoy the[ mafia]’ (world is a gently caress, etc), because a fax came in from the States revealing Madeleine Giovanni is in the states, and thus, vulnerable to an attack by the Mafia. Who tipped them off? Why, Darrow – the guy we were told was a spy in his very first PoV character! At least he isn’t working for the Red Death. Caravelli sends Lazarri to America to place a secret ‘blood bounty’ on Madeleine, because it isn’t VTM if you don’t slap the word blood in front of various words. Whoever takes the kill will be given a chance at diablerie and… made capo of America. He also has instructions to ‘solve it’ if the ‘Camarilla Justicar of North America’ objects to Caravelli calling a blood hunt over a personal vendetta. To this I have only one word: ‘what.’ None of this is how literally any of this works! I’ll hold off on a big rant about mafia structures unless people want it, but basically – there simply isn’t that level of organization and control. The chapter as a whole is more of the same Bob. We’re given names and generations – Luigi, the big goon we met in the first Sicily chapter, is 10th generation Brujah; Nicko is 8th, etc. The dialogue is a bad pastiche of mafia movies that lacks any real substance or flavour, and just spells things out. Anarchs and Sabbat get mixed up even more, and Lazarri also has to kill McCann because why not? The only standout part is this:  There’s two things about this that irritate me. First – this gives the Mafia and its sibling organizations way too much credit. Their codes are rarely difficult to break. But second? This is basically a really lovely way to produce a one-time pad that, even then, wouldn’t hold up terribly well to any kind of serious scrutiny because you’re doing it over and over using the exact same method, which will produce a range of predictable outcomes with distinct seasonal variations. Its not even just using a random selection of days in cities across a random period to generate the key, its doing it live daily! You might notice I’m a little terse on the mafia chapters. Its because I hate them. They’re simultaneously bland, tedious, and offensively ignorant, which is almost impressive. Chapter 32 Another jump, this time back to Phantomas in Paris. What’s Phantomas up to? About what you’d expect: skulking in Notre Dame. He hasn’t been out of the house since the Red Death surfaced, and now he’s braving the outside world for essential information. Again – relatable. This is also one of the times where Bob engages with a discipline in a fairly neat way:  This is, as they go, a nice limitation to slap on Phantomas – and for Bob to limit his dolls in any way is pretty rare, too. To top it off, this isn’t straight from the rulebook, so either Bob or one of his sources spent some time thinking on it in the context of the story. In Weinberg’s take, Notre Dame is a repository of some of the most important secrets of the world, hidden away in the sacristy. Phantomas simply walks in, summons the guards elsewhere with his will (which is to say: presence or dominate), and examines an ancient manuscript. I mentioned we’d be getting more of Bob’s dabbles with the Kabbalah, and here we go:  This all gets built up further through the three books, and as they go, isn’t a particularly terrible interpretation of some strains of Kabbalistic thought, especially the forms adopted by culturally Christian left-hand-path groups that put considerable emphasis on דַּעַת and the Qlippoth. In digging into this ancient manuscript, Phantomas discovers the source of the Red Death’s power, which is for now left unsaid. Its an infernal pact with Bob’s cosmic horror version of the Shedim. They’re beings left behind in the broken worlds – a theme that recurs throughout White Wolf’s more mystical texts, particularly Revelations of the Dark Mother – who hate our world for supplanting theirs and wish to restore their own. There’s only one mystery left – who the gently caress is the Red Death? Phantomas has the sudden realization that he saw TRD’s face despite his attempts to distract from it, and better still, that he knows it from somewhere. That somewhere is the Louvre, where he returns – with considerable apprehension – to let his subconscious memories guide him, because he despises having incomplete records (that, and the only way to avoid being killed now is to get an edge, and TRD’s identity offers one.) And sure enough, there it is. TRD is Seker, a methuselah worshipped as the god of the same name in the First Kingdom of Egypt some 5000 years previously. Phantomas has no record at all of Seker, and the only two figures powerful enough in his records were – naturally – Lameth and Anis. His reaction is again very relatable to me – he’s just going to have to hit the books and puzzle out Seker’s lineage, and that’s all there is to it and the chapter’s done… Except. Bob wants get in one more bit about the most unnecessary aspect of the entire trilogy:   Now, you’d think the twins were going to be important with all this build up, right? They keep reappearing and doing stuff, they have weird powers, one is literally the Pharaoh Khufu – surely they must be important? They must play some crucial role in the storyline? Well, they don’t. They exist to be special, infodump, and be deus ex machina tools. Chapter 33 Our exodus from the main characters continues with a return to Vienna and Etrius. He’s in a bad mood – he has six letters confirming that none of the other Councillors, the ruling body of the Tremere, remember St. Germain’s presence at the Tremere embrace. As a brief side note, this shouldn’t be a surprise on at least one front – half the original Seven are dead, and this info (or at least, that a couple had died/disappeared) was already available at the time Bob would’ve been writing this trilogy. Bob takes the chance to restate that for a thousand years, some impossibly powerful force has been manipulating the House of Tremere. Who could it be? How can it be? This could be good material in the right hands, but… Well, its Bob:  Another example of good – if pulpy and gonzo – material with execution that can’t quite meet the very low bar. This continues for a while. All Etrius’s painstakingly handwritten records contain no mention of St. Germain. At this point, you’d expect a moment of ‘wait, what if someone is planting a false memory’, right? Naturally, that doesn’t happen. Etrius simply accepts that St. Germain exists and is the secret master, and must be stopped. Tremere’s no help, and Etrius, as the gatekeeper to the founder’s tomb, must act alone. Again: Etrius is an idiot because at this point anyone in this kind of position not under intense domination should be pausing and going ‘why am I so sure these memories are real?’ Instead, he goes down to Tremere’s crypt, and we get some not-so-subtle foreshadowing of later events:   Then its on to meet Tremere himself, at the heart of a warren of tunnels of mysterious origin none dare fully explore. There’s even – and as memory serves this is not just Bob – a mysterious black stair leading into the deep no one has ever ventured down. Creepy poo poo, and actually pretty neat. I’ve always wondered personally if they weren’t trying to build up a plotline involving either the Black Labyrinth or even Stygia with it, but that’s just my own brainworms and I will spare people the details of what I’d do with the idea. We don’t actually meet Tremere, though. He’s in torpor. Etrius just hovers over his enormous sarcophagus and looks inside. Bob borrows from existing material here for one of the more effective pieces of his writing:  Still not great, but at least its something. Now, is Tremere a giant white worm? No. Its just Tremere, dozing away the centuries. The entire interlude is more or less pointless: all it accomplishes is to show us Tremere is down there, which – though it becomes important later – probably didn’t need to be done in the last fifty pages of book 1, as we hurtle towards the conclusion. Again, Bob’s efforts at his clever-clever structure impose limitations on his writing he can’t really meet, and it throws off the pacing terribly. We now come to the real meat of the chapter – Peter Spizzo, one of the few Tremere Etrius trusts. He has him bloodbound, for a start (I’m sure its fine), and also knows what motivates him: the lust for a position on the Council. So, naturally, he sets Spizzo the task of finding and destroying St. Germain. The reward: a seat on the Council. The way he’s going to get it is really loving funny to me though – not murder, which would be crass. They’ll just make Abetorius, the loser on the council no one likes, resign! I love this. It feels like high school poo poo in a deeply amusing way. But, Bob’s gonna bob:  Golly gee I wonder what that could mean. That’s the end of the chapter. Chapter 34 We’re back on the main story now that we’ve been robbed of any sense of momentum. McCann is hanging at the Lincoln Memorial at Midnight on the 21st, and as always, world is gently caress:  A most unfair assessment of anarchism if you ask me, but the image of Mr. Lincoln with GD graffiti on his tophat really amuses me. And speaking of ol’ Abe…  You heard it here: Vampires assassinated Abraham Lincoln. This isn’t the only time White Wolf put this in print, either! Dark Destiny III specified that it was in fact [/i]Dracula himself[/i] who ordered it, specifically in retaliation for loving up his plans to emigrate to the slave south and live out his unlife in ease and comfort. Bob segues into a lament for American democracy – doomed by the exploitation of the military-industrial complex and literal bloodsuckers – but then moves back to the actual story pretty quickly. Flavia is late, and McCann is worried that Makish or Anis got her. Naturally, he’s certain only she could be responsible for having used Temporis the night before and discounts the possibility anyone else could’ve. But then – Flavia appears at the start of the next paragraph. Again, Bob goes with ‘tension; immediate resolution’ quite a lot. He knows a good story has tense moments of anxiety and puts them in, but can never resist immediately writing them back out again. She’s back in her white leather, because why bother with disguises when the city is burning? Well, the reason she’s late is she had to kill a bunch of people who thought it was a license to get grabby:  This is another of those lines that almost works but doesn’t quite land. It doesn’t quite have a comic punch, which – if used properly and with more delay – could have functioned neatly as the counterpoint to the anxiety of ‘she’s late’. There’s nothing to worry about, though. The death toll from the blood war is at five hundred with thousands wounded, all mortal, with hundreds more dead vampires. Bob here labours under a common misunderstanding of non-staff VtM writers and thinks that all vampire bodies rot away immediately on death – they don’t, they just rapidly decay to the same point they’d have been if they weren’t a vampire, so those hundreds of shovelheads that’ve died means hundreds of relatively fresh corpses or even half-mummified skeletons suddenly littering the streets. But, that’s a relatively minor nitpick, I suppose, and the important part is five more bodies won’t make much difference. At this point, Bob pulls the telepathy card to move the plot along. McCann, a potent magus (of whatever form), has no idea how to find the Red Death. Does he do some magic? Does he use his PI skills? Nah. TRD just whispers telepathically to him:  The ensuing dialogue is the usual. All Methuselahs are telepaths capable of speaking at great distance so don’t bother looking around nearby, Seker assumes Lameth is like him and Lameth is insulted, etc, etc. TRD/Seker wants to talk parley for an alliance, but its obviously a trap. The one interesting bit is the answer he gives to why they should meet:  For all the over-the-top nonsense of it, I genuinely like how Weinberg used the Nictuku in these books. Having a literal existential threat actively returning is a strong motive to take big risks, and while it didn’t need to be quite so physical and the execution is botched, it gives one of the few genuine motives you could get to slam all these action figures together like he does. McCann and Seker agree to meet alone at the Washington Naval Yards at midnight the next day. Everyone involved is aware it’s a trap. This chapter’s end is pretty standard stuff, and on the whole its largely unobjectionable without much to distinguish it except for the bit about Lincoln. Next time: Varney gets an invitation, more of the wonder twins, The Washington Naval Yard Incident, and those two words Madeleine Giovanni was told are finally revealed.
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Jul 4, 2023 13:06
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I present the abridged review of the Masquerade of the Red Death trilogy: stuff happens, vampires killed Lincoln, bob is horny and bad at sentence structure, why do we know all their generations, and Phantomas is real and cool and my friend. Now you know all you need to know.
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Jul 6, 2023 16:22
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The Masquerade of the Red Death - Book 1: Blood War - Part Ten, Chapters 35 to 40 Part One Part Two Part Three Part Four Part Five Part Six Part Seven Part Eight Part Nine Finally, Book 1 draws to a close with what will no doubt be a thrilling, well-written, utterly explosive finale. Chapter 35 Its Varney’s turn in DC – and its pretty much a mirror of Chapter 34, unsurprisingly. Her telepathy is still useless and she doesn’t have Sumohn, the panther – just Sanford Jackson. The city remains in chaos and teeters on the verge of Sabbat victory, which tickles her to no end because controlling the new Regent would be a nice trick to pull off. First, though, they need to deal with The Red Death, aka Seker. There’s a brief moment of genre awareness I like. Vampire warfare is a big, messy, indiscriminate matter in Weinberg’s book (and White Wolf's generally, honestly) – and so Jackson, being an ex-snake eater, poses the obvious question: why not just use surgical killteams when your total number of targets is rarely going to be bigger than ten or twenty people? This prompts a little dialogue about how someone’s done exactly that and framed each sect for doing so – which Varney, who remember is the pawn and partner of one of the supposed great players of the Jyhad, has to have explained to her by Jackson:   As far as reveals go, it’d be much more effective if it hadn’t been painstakingly explained to us throughout the book that that’s precisely what’s happened. A more interesting novel might have built up the reveal until now, and had the Red Death enter at the close of this first book – right on schedule to maximally exploit the existing chaos, with a genuine creeping dread as the trap begins to close on McCann and Varney. Alas, that’s not what we got. At this point, Seker repeats his telepathic ‘hey, listen’ routine. The dialogue is basically the same as in McCann’s section – greater enemy, it was a mistake to strike at you, etc, etc, come to the Naval Yards at midnight. Unlike McCann, Varney has the sense to share the details with Jackson, and tasks him with putting together a support crew - including some heavy machinery they can borrow from NASA. Chapter 36 With the momentum building, its naturally time to turn away from it and back to the Wonder Twins. We’re still in DC on the night of the 21st, and they’re eating pizza and having a coke. DC, you may recall, is currently best described as an active war zone with the national guard and army firing in the streets. This doesn’t seem to bother any of the other patrons or staff – and, in fairness, living in a conflict zone you do get on with your life… after the initial shock wears off. This, however, is day five – not week five. This entire chapter is unnecessary. All it does is infodump things we already know, confirming McCann and Varney are Masqueraders (as ambiguous as the term is – here, its confirmed Lameth talks to McCann through dreams, which doesn’t really clear it up), that they’ll both be going to the Naval Yard, that the Red Death is in league with the Sheddim, and so on. Naturally, its masturbatory as to how special and amazing Lameth and Anis are, and naturally, the two mysteriously disappear and no one can remember anything about them. I cannot state how much of an error this chapter is. It breaks the flow of the narrative for no real gain – it explains things that are hardly a mystery because they’ve been painstakingly spelled out to us repeatedly. The closest to interesting it gets is that it flirts around about who the Twins father is and outlines that they’re prohibited from direct intervention in the Jyhad. This is in the final 30 pages of the book. This is right after we’ve built the tension for the confrontation, and while a pause-and-reset moment can be an effective storytelling tool, this isn’t. A step to Phantomas or Madeleine might have provided one (a bouncing low in the rhythm, but one where things still take place to advance the overall narrative, is the best way to handle those ‘catch a breath’ interludes), but this one drags the narrative right down again into tedium. Chapter 37 Nearly Midnight, March 22: the Lincoln Memorial. This time, our POV isn’t McCann – it’s a limited omniscient narrator switch. Flavia is there waiting when a shadow suddenly arrives, flashing near-silently into the eaves – and snaps to a combat stance. Is this our Makish vs Flavia battle? No – its Flavia meeting Madeleine. The two immediately get along as icy professional assassins with a shared code of honour and established reputations, which is actually a nice touch. With an author like Bob it was always going to be a gamble if they’d immediately fall to stereotyped catfighting. Madeleine reveals she knew where to go to meet Flavia thanks to something unusual:  Now, this is where I confess the shameful truth: my unnecessarily extensive knowledge of the oWoD is incredibly lop-sided in favour of lore and statistics versus disciplines and gifts. That said, I don’t recognize this, so it seems Bob’s given Madeleine a unique discipline. They proceed to discuss Makish and immediately arrive at the same page: he’s working for someone, and it isn’t the Sabbat or Camarilla, and then Bob has one of his better moments:  Now, it’s a little blatant and didn’t need to be spelled out – but I’ll give him credit here. The relationships that develop between Madeleine, Flavia, and Jackson are halfway decent. Still very broad, shallow stuff that doesn’t come close to passing the Bechdel test – but unlike most relationships in this trilogy, they exist as more than an opportunity to whack off at how special everyone involved is. They raise certain questions around exploitation, meaning, grief, vengeance as a purpose, and what it is to be turned into a (not-quite)-living weapon. In better hands, you could honestly do some really quite poignant stuff with them as characters, and this is where I get sad about Bob’s two trilogies. Not only were there some cool ideas, but there’s stuff here where you can see him reaching for something better, something with purpose – but never actually grasping it. The discussion turns to The Red Death and McCann. Both very mysterious, neither knows dick, McCann is great, etc. Then Madeleine uses her special discipline and the Red Death’s secret is exposed:  Immediately, they realize it’s a trap McCann isn’t prepared for, and race to get there in time. This is another good example of where Bob has a neat idea but fucks up the execution. This reveal, if it came mid-ambush, would be a massive uptick for the tension of the showdown. Imagine them talking, Flavia stalling to get a proper gauge on Madeleine – then Madeleine feels the arrival of one of these terrible enemies. Cue ‘The Red Death’ etc etc – and then the moment of realization that there’s two, three, four all arriving in succession once the trap is actually sprung. Chapter 38 We rewind to 11:45 – Varney’s about to arrive on site at the Naval Yards. She’s loaded for bear with armour and communications gear, with Jackson there to give an opportunity for a last minute explanation of motives. Everyone involved wants to kill one another and think it needs the personal touch – because we probably forgot that in the last thirty pages. That said, there’s a legitimately creepy moment here:  Remember – Varney is a ghoul who is, to varying degrees, possessed by Anis. But she’s also her own person… and the degree to which Anis has overridden her over the centuries is so high she’s content to view her own destruction as more-or-less unimportant because she’s internalized how expendable she is. That Bob doesn’t seem to grasp how horrifying it is makes it more effective. Its just matter of fact. Varney decamps for the Yard to trip the ambush. First, Bob lets us in on the secret from NASA:   Yes – escape pods! Exactly when and what NASA designed them for is unclear, and I don’t really know of any they ever actually did build that’d fit the bill (that is to say: Bob made these up whole cloth), but given the nuclear aspect I suppose they’re some classified Project ORION gubbins or something from the Void Engineers arsenal. McCann arrives 7 minutes to Midnight, and the two finally meet in the Naval Yards. For a change, we’re actually given a description of McCann:  okay, we’re actually given a proper one this time, but I couldn’t resist:  They talk shop – nothing too interesting, except an indication that the events of McCann’s first appearance in Dark Destiny were Anis’s doing. The conversation, of course, turns to the Wonder Twins – but before it can get anywhere, the Red Death finally shows. Do we cut the chapter there? No – they plan how to take him first. McCann will stop him turning to mist and teleporting away, and Varney will finish the job. Chapter 39 Finally, we come to the confrontation we’ve been waiting for. First, they have to talk like reasonable people. Seker tries to sell Lameth and Anis on cooperation because the Nictuku are back and doing things like eating every single vampire in Buenos Aires, but neither are all that interested because who gives a poo poo about the Nictuku – it’s a concern, but not all that pressing. I kind of love the glib ‘who cares, man’ replies here – we know Lameth and Anis both do because they keep close tabs and fund expeditions to keep an eye on them but there’s just something funny about the idea of them shrugging and going ‘not a nosferatu, not my problem’. Seker, in turn, reveals – or at least, pretends to reveal – his plan:   Yet again, there’s something about this I love. Everything else treats Gehenna as an absolute terror, an inescapable doom. Anis, meanwhile, is just going ‘We each had one of the Antediluvians murdered, I’m really not that worried’. Its dumb and lacks in the horror stakes, but there’s something charmingly stupid about it. At last, the confrontation takes the inevitable turn. If neither will cooperate, Seker will just have to kill them both – and he reveals his master scheme was to start a war just to get these two right there and kill them. They’re puppets, but it’ll take months or years for Lameth and Anis to re-establish new pawns, and by then, it’ll be too late… And now, disappointment. This bit could’ve been an effective twist:  Is it shocking? No. Bob explained it to us last chapter. There’s no twist, no surprise, not even a real escalation. Its such a waste of a cool moment. The actual confrontation is pretty lame. They march slowly at the two from four sides, casting Flaming Hands now and then, and McCann conjures a force field to protect him and Varney. The highlight is when Varney reveals her other bit of NASA tech:   I love that her secret weapon is just a bunch of nerds with joysticks steering mars rovers on a suicide run – and as things go, its actually relatively clever. The Red Deaths can’t be harmed in Body of Fire, but you can neutralize the heat and the flames and render them relatively harmless. So, is that the end? Well, there’s two more books, so… no. Seker cackles maniacally and disappears into mist, revealing that he too has a secret back-up plan:  Fin. But wait, I said 40 chapters… Chapter 40: the Afterword McCann’s head bobs up from the Anacostia river. The Naval Yards are burning down in the true red death of raw, unfettered fire. He’s been saved by the mysterious dark shape – who could it be?  Again, not Bob’s worst work – but my god, it’d be better if he’d ended it on ‘protect you’! Final Thoughts So, there we have it: Book 1 of the most notorious White Wolf novels (not counting Eternal Hearts) ever printed. Dumb, badly written – but not, as the internet would lead you to believe, so incredibly bad they lack any redeeming characteristics. Not even, in the scheme of the early novels, that badly conceptualized or written. I think now you might all have had a chance to see why I have a little immature softspot for them – those little moments of pulpy goodness in between the dreck, and the glimpse of what could have been instead of what is. As an aside, the climactic destruction of the Naval Yards is another of those moments that gets referenced in other works - specifically, Heckel et al, DC by Night , 1995, 37. This reference could also be to the 1984 bombing but the description better fits the scale of Blood War's bombing. Since there’s no game mechanics involved to get detailed with, no art to break it up, and this isn’t a fiction-oriented thread, I’ll leave it to you all what comes next: I’ll leave the poll up for a few days for the lurkers.
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Jul 7, 2023 14:17
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To be fair, like all GMs, my soul is fundamentally rotten and that's why I enjoy spending hours of prep on plotlines the PCs never notice or engage with.
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Jul 8, 2023 00:53
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This is a niche criticism, but as far as problematic fetishes go its a terribly common and tedious one in occult circles. I don't say that to excuse it, to be clear: its just so intensely on-point for Brucato's problematic fetish to be the most generic one you'll find a hundred guys just like him with, right down to dressing it all up in psuedo-feminist psuedo-matriarchal language (p.s. Jack Parsons called: he says he gets a pass because it was the goddamn 40s when he was at it and he'll kick their asses for not advancing it into actual praxis)
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Jul 8, 2023 01:49
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LatwPIAT posted:Being into feet is hardly exceptional, which I suspect is why so many of these people think they can get away with it. Quentin Tarantino and its consequences have been a disaster for the human race. Not feet - teenage girls who are at once naive and older-than-their-years, who embody a version of the divine feminine that - like Parsons' Babalon - is innately and compulsively sexual but which nonetheless require an older, almost exclusively (except periodically for those with a lust for lesbians) male guide to help guide and govern them. Its way creepier than just being a foot guy - its the usual ephebophilic bullshit with an additional layer of mystical justification slapped on top that lets them pretend its actually a radically feminist position to want to gently caress a fifteen year old runaway.
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Jul 8, 2023 03:43
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Kurieg posted:It becomes 'common and tedious' when he writes at length and probably one handed about 15 year old girls being raped by their fathers or their parents male friends in like... five different books. and uhh.. To be clear, I'm not saying the tedious bit is that he wants to bang fifteen year olds. The bit that's common and tedious is just how prevalent it is in occult circles with a certain type of guy - the actual stuff itself is worse. I ran into three or four dudes like him when I was still actively building a craft community where I am and dealing with them and keeping them out sapped so much energy and joy out of the entire affair, which is what I mean by tedious: this type of guy both sucks and is everywhere, and uses spirituality as a cover for hosed up poo poo. Like how there's a lot of a Certain Type of Guy who pose as anarchists and use it as a cover to creep.
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Jul 8, 2023 06:35
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LatwPIAT posted:Ah, right. Yup. Its a common type of guy that slinks into any vaguely underground place unless you actively keep them the gently caress out. The flipped variant - guy who actually is at least within spitting distance of the right person because they recognize they shouldn't be loving the new people while also establishing themselves as an authority figure - is unfortunately much rarer. Dawgstar posted:Also my favorite bit is he got beat up by William Butler Yeats who cast that most powerful spell of all, Kick, at Crowley and sent him tumbling down stairs. Then he cast the spell Summon Police. A true wizard's duel! This is also the correct response to finding a guy like Brucato sniffing around your circles.
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Jul 8, 2023 13:18
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Explodingdice posted:I'll add another voice to that, I've certainly been enjoying the world of darkness stuff, both Joyless's work and Loomer with the novels. Oh stop, you'll give me an even bigger head.
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Jul 10, 2023 02:08
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Kathleen Ryan goes on to write some of the best White Wolf material and just generally be prolific, particularly in Mage and Wraith content. Neat to see her crop up as an intern there.
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Jul 14, 2023 01:18
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Nessus posted:The emphasis on the Amazon as a place that humanity has never touched is kinda funny given what has been learned subsequently; the place was a lot more densely inhabited than people assumed. However, this would mostly give Glass Walkers and Bone Gnawers a way to play to their strengths if they find the subtle remnants of ancient temples and so on. There's similar issues for most of WtA's approach to anywhere not-europe. The stuff on Australia pisses me off because (in addition to the many issues laid out in the review in the archives) time has marched on so drat hard on it... but WW/OPP continue to bang the same drum and have apparently never heard of Dark Emu.
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Jul 15, 2023 15:57
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Dawgstar posted:have you heard of uluru Don't make me tap the dang sign
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Jul 15, 2023 16:16
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