Arivia posted:

Notably for people unfamiliar with this whole mess, the Wraith Holocaust book is the exact opposite of Gypsies in that it went to great lengths to be historically accurate and respectful of the victims and survivors involved to the point where there's a forward by a rabbi explaining how weird it was to essentially be a sensitivity reader for it.

Toph Bei Fong posted:

One story I remember is that during the development of some Changeling: the Dreaming (a game about fairies hiding in the real world, and who need people to be whimsical and childlike to survive) supplement, one of the co-authors brought in all their old toys from when they were a kid for everyone to play with. And no one had as good a time as they remembered pushing toy cars around and pretending to dress up dolls or whatever. The author cited this as evidence that the modern world was corrupt and fallen, and banality had taken away their ability to dream.

Which, uh... If you're in your 30s and still playing with children's toys the same way you did when you were a young child...

Jaxyon posted:

I believe that canonically when a vampire bites you, you orgasm.

So there's that direct sexualization of violence.

Staluigi posted:

this is loving everything i wanted, there's so much more than i even anticipated

vampires using mormon proxy baptism genealogical recordkeeping to cronenburg monster the entire world? anyone thinking it's a good idea to write roma getting a free stealing poo poo pass from jesus christ to explain their weird pseudocultural pastiche of gypsy thief folk? oh my lord i love it

there's so much ridiculous poo poo these goth kids got up to in their products that i quiver with anticipation of hearing how they handle vodou. because of course they aren't going to leave vodoun alone. i can't wait to find where to read about White Wolf's Basement Nerds giving us their fantastic new take on grand mèt

Sodomy Hussein posted:

Setites are the closest thing the setting has to a faction of moustache-twirling villains, as they have no one's best interests in mind, not even their own.

Milo and POTUS posted:

What's F&F?

Toph Bei Fong posted:

Sure, I can agree with that.

But Mage needs to provide an alternative that isn't anarcho-primitivism until the rule of Randian superpeople who create reality according their whims, or anti-scientific libertarian utopianism in which each person is the ruler of their own dream reality pocket, in order to make them not look so appealing.

From LatwPIAT's F&F write up:

edit: For a more concrete example, Mage cannot explain to me why life under John of God would be much better than life as it currently is, if you aren't John of God.

Nckdictator posted:

Can’t say that without linking it.

radmonger posted:

You kind of screwed up your games subtext when you have vampires, demons and occult secret societies, but imperialism and capitalism has nothing to do with them. Instead those things are the direct fault of scientists (free pass to team good guy granted to mad scientists).

If I recall previous internet discussions, they had to add some text somewhere saying ‘vaccines don’t work the way you would logically expect them to given the rest of the setting, they are actually a good thing and definitely not an excuse for the Technocracy to microchip the masses’.

Staluigi posted:

[claps hands] absolutely perfect, sounds like it's spooky creepy black people death magic hex curse poo poo hazily informed by the most fantastical pop culture stereotypes about vodou. i could ask for nothing more appropriate for 90's tabletop franchises

Gulping Again posted:

It's worth noting that we have not yet truly entered the poo poo dimension when it comes to either incarnation of the World of Darkness.

I know this because nobody has posted word one about Beast: The Primordial, the worst WoD splat ever made by anyone.

Staluigi posted:

i don't understand why we wouldn't dish on this as powerfully as possible

creepyass orientalism and asian stereotyping is actually what keeps the pc game Bloodlines from being something i can conscientiously call a timeless gem. oh no, it's got some time on it. the whole chinatown part and its depiction of eastern cultures aged like milk and dogs the game's legacy

fun to hear about why this was what it was, too, just dissecting these writers

RocknRollaAyatollah posted:

I meant mainly in the sense that it’s dumb and mainly that these inscrutable, evil Asians are invading the United States like some 90’s airplane novel and will kill any foreign vampires on sight in Asia. There’s no real nuance or anything to it, which I could be wrong about, but it’s something Onyx Path doesn’t want to touch for a 20th anniversary edition because it’s that bad. You’d have to build it from the ground up and it doesn’t really work in any sense from the original conceit because the cosmology makes no sense whatsoever in terms of what people in Asia who are religious have actually believed in the last 100 years. It’s also weird that the Asian cosmology stuff is essentially trapped in amber to 500 years ago and very specific while the Western one has evolved to it’s own unique thing that has no real basis in real world belief systems outside of broad things like ghosts and spirits.

Even Laibon, African vampires, have their own morality system because they’re African but they’re composed of some of the main clans and some African bloodlines probably coming from a main VtM clan. It’s also not like a path other than humanity which you have to be inducted into, which I could be wrong about because it’s been a while.

WoD games in a lot of ways are full of low key racist mechanics and metaplot stuff like that, which they do away with in Chronicles of Darkness games. While I don’t think all the writers were outright racist but there’s a lot of FBI crime statistics and not really examining anything beyond a 1980’s high school textbook level with a smattering of the casual racism of America in the 80’s-90’s.

Dienes posted:

I thought it was more "We are waiting fur the vampire antichrist to rapture us. Also Jesus was a vampire"? Or was it the taking over of the Catholic church part?

Absurd Alhazred posted:

Pretty sure one of the devs is a goon, I keep forgetting who, though.

fr0id posted:

I want to talk a bit about the roleplaying game Delta Green. The elevator pitch is that the players are a group of disparate cops and feds brought together by a government conspiracy to investigate, stop, and cover up Lovecraftian incursions into the world. From a gameplay standpoint, the setting is meant to give an excuse for the player characters to actually continue investigating things rather than rightfully going “nope” and leaving. It also pushes for every character to have baseline competencies in relevant skills; all the cops and feds have some combat and investigation ability.

Among the federal agencies you can play as, there is a pretty extensive writeup of ICE. You can play as the FBI, CIA, or regular cops, all of which have a primary in-game goal of hiding their actions from the public. In real life, of course, these agencies do tons of horrific things, with some like ICE being more subject to major public backlash. So you’ve got agencies associated with often bigoted or monstrous actions as the source for the protagonists.

Most people know that the H.P. Lovecraft horror that this game uses comes from a writer who was personally very xenophobic and racist, and who incorporated these themes directly into his work. A big them in Lovecraft’s work is the idea of “things man was not meant to know” and how knowledge of them drives men literally insane.

One of the other bit gameplay elements of Delta Green is the idea of a home life. Like many RPGs, Delta Green has a “sanity score” reflecting how resistant a character is to being driven mad by awful experiences. Losing enough sanity points leads to disorders based on real world ones. Delta Green diverges from many other RPGs by having a group of Bonds whom the agents can project sanity loss onto, leading to home scenes later where the character plays out the deteriorating relationships. I don’t know the exact math for how it balances out, but rules to try fixing those relationships lead doing that rather than trying to regain sanity points, and spending time to regain sanity points results in those relationships deteriorating further. Basically, there’s a guaranteed downward spiral the longer a character is played.

So what is the mindset of this game? To me, it seems that this is a game about playing the worst kind of “ends justify the means” feds and cops who live in a world where that is factually true. There absolutely are dark monsters from other countries, ideological viruses that need to be purged, and a constant need to be vigilant and ready to kill. This world they see is an abhorrent one to live in, and over time they become less and less able to cope with it. There are some members of the conspiracy who believe they understood the evil and how to utilize and contain it, and this keeps them sane. But it’s ultimately a lie, and one that they would come to realize by actually playing one of the delta green missions.

Do the creators of this game intend this level of satire of “deep state” mindset, either at its most bloodthirsty or at its most neoliberal “humanitarian?” It’s hard to say. Their personal politics seem to lean a bit more toward the latter, albeit not hyper-interventionist. More of the “there is some greater threat to our society and culture we need to defend against, but we need to do it in a smart way,” kind of mindset. The irony is of course that the game basically trashes this kind of thinking. There is no “smart” way, except for one of the community’s favorite kind of missions: things would have resolved themselves in a much less messy way if delta green had never gotten involved. Hmm.

Archonex posted:

Doesn't DG also go after the eldritch entities and cultists that want to help as well? I dimly remember some intimations that they're on their poo poo list as well. If so, they might end up hurting as much as they help.

Like, I know at least one alien race and one conspiracy was supposed to be looking into off world evacuation. Granted, their methods are horrific to a human, but still.

Like, it seems like they'd not be down with letting humanity flee into the Dreamlands or something that would let them live on in some form that isn't necessarily human anymore. They've gone all Warhammer 40k-esque "death to the xeno eldritch" without actually having a means to stop them.

Edit: And there is definitely some fiction blurbs of the eldritch gods potentially loving up Earth earlier than that. Though they might have changed that.

fr0id posted:

Edit: no offense, but the most boring thing in the world to me are conversations about higher ups and the narratives of the game beyond the basic timeline. I could read a timeline of the CIA and have a completely bereft of context and emotion understanding. The actual play of the game of delta green, not the reading of it, but the PLAYING of it, produces far more interesting reads of ideology and the like. I could give a poo poo if colonel hardcastle is a byakhee or how the x-1 artifact has produced 37 lasers each held by one of the main protagonists or antagonists of the setting. A bunch of d&d players in heated argument over whether to torch an above ground cistern that may have a demon or a kidnapped woman in it is far more interesting to me.

Kestral posted:

Hite is part of a nearly extinct breed of non-conservative old-school pre-Tea Party Republicans, which makes his politics really interesting and sometimes difficult to parse out. He shares precisely zero of the GOP's flagstone modern cultural stances, spent the entirety of 2015-2020 mocking Trump and all his works, being horrified at the direction his own party was going, and co-hosting a podcast where he regularly makes it clear that he's mostly on the right side of history in terms of American social trends. "America hosed up every other country it got its hands on" is such a regular take for him that it's become almost a running joke.

My armchair psychologist take is that a fair amount of this has to do with Hite having an honest-to-goodness eidetic memory and an obsession with research; the trademark conservative cognitive dissonance is probably harder to maintain under those circumstances.

Speaking of Cambodia and the horrors perpetrated by America, that is a subject Hite has returned to a couple times. Qelong is his Fantasy Cambodia / Vietnam setting in which a fertile and beautiful region has just been fought over by nigh-godlike beings for its resources, and is turning into a nightmare hellscape as a result. The metaphor is, uh, not subtle, but the execution is a masterclass in designing a setting to be playable. Anyone looking to combine their roleplaying with an investigation of military intervenionism and colonialism is advised to check it out.

Triskelli posted: