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well if anyone was gonna make this thread it was gonna be me!  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iC-OjR62D40 quote:"Psychos? They look like psychos to you? Psychos do not explode when sunlight hits them, I don't care how crazy they are!" In 1991 Mark Rein•Hagen (yes the hyphen is stylized that way, yes it is stupid), the son of a Lutheran minister in suburban Atlanta, unleashed Vampire: the Masquerade on the world - a rip-roaring, blood-soaked and sensual gothic superhero RPG based on not just playing a vampire, but playing a vampire to the hilt. His one great conceit was to take the Vampire monomyth and break it down into its component elements, and let each aspect have center stage as the defining characteristic of the many Vampire clans comprising the secret society of Vampires.  For instance, you want Nosferatu-style disgusting monsters like Count Orlok? Namesake clan. Anne Rice-style romantic tragedies? Toreador. Shapeshifting, feral Draculas? Gangrel. And so on for each of the clans...  The many, many clans (once the game was a hit and they realized they needed to sell more splatbooks to remain solvent as a company) The big thing that made V:tM a giant hit among gamers (and later the world - see the opening credits for the weekly TV drama the game got) was the deep and absolutely compelling lore. The oft-repeated joke over in TradGames is that White Wolf was a company that made bathroom readers with an RPG stapled to them. GreyjoyBastard posted:
To wit, regarding the lore: in the world of Vampire, all vampires are descended from Cain (from the Bible), who was the first vampire. This means that the bible is literally correct and accurate, which means Vampires are (as stated) definitionally young-earth creationists, as noted. However, there's also the Setites, who reject this lore and insist they are descended from the Egytian god Set. This is just one of many contradictions in the lore that is partly intentional to create inter- and intra-group drama and conflict, and partly accidental because we are dealing with a few goth kids from Atlanta playing with worlds and histories they were not equipped at the time to explore (do not read about the Ravnos, they are a big  through and through)I'm not sure whether this thread is best served by meta-dissecting the various clans' stances and overarcing actions in how they would react or move on current events or to talk about the horribly mangled understanding of history and religion, and how that's reflected in the writing. If you haven't read it, TG Goon Halloween Jack's FATAL & Friends writeup of the system and its history is pretty exceptional snarking on the subject of the game from a game-design and cultural viewpoint. Shrecknet fucked around with this message at 15:37 on Jul 28, 2021 |
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Jul 28, 2021 15:14
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Longform writing about clans and lore and stuff goes here later I'll kick off with a "think this through" situation. The Ventrue clan are the "Underlords of the Boardroom," the high-power vampires most mimicked in the Blade movies. Slick suits, capitalists to the bone and arrogant to the point of self-parody. They style themselves the "Clan of Kings" and assume that ruling over not just humanity but the assortment of Kindred society as their literal birthright. If something happens to shift the balance of power in the mortal world, global supply lines seizing or governments being toppled, it would be clan malpractice for the Ventrue not to at least claim responsibility, if only to present that they are far more powerful than they are. Stability and continuance of power is the thing Ventrue (profess to) want more than anything else. So what do the texts say about World War II, a hugely destabilizing event that led to the firebombing of vast swaths of Europe - a place many Vampires lived at the time! - and the development of unthinkable weapons? Well, the Ventrue weren't paying attention that decade. That's it, that's the explanation in the White Wolf books for the Holocaust and the rest of World War II: Vampires exist on such a long, unthinkably boring timeline that the spasms that burn themselves out in less time than Michael Dorn has been playing Worf on Star Trek just don't come up. Which means the Ventrue are both utterly clued in to every shifting grain in the desert vis-a-vis business and government, and also so disconnected that it's possible for clan leadership to literally be asleep at the wheel for a decade. From Halloween Jack's writeup: quote:The Dystopia of Vampire is very much of the zeitgeist of the 1990s. It rages against what would come to be called the “end of history” after an essay (later a book) by Francis Fukuyama. It was the idea that the current political status quo was the ultimate form of government, and the future would just be a process of perfecting and managing it. You can criticize capitalism, consumerism, and the many injustices of the world all you want, but there are no better alternatives. (The second edition of Vampire was published just months after the Soviet Union finally dissolved.) Shrecknet fucked around with this message at 15:40 on Jul 28, 2021 |
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Jul 28, 2021 15:14
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Shooting Blanks posted:I'm not up on my Bible timelines but where does Cain fall when considering Methuselah, Noah, etc? Are they also vampires that happened to die, did they go into hiding, or are they just absent from the lore? Shooting Blanks posted:Basically, how deep did they attempt to go with this, how closely did they stick to other parts of the Biblical myths (with vampires stapled on) or is it a thin veneer because they couldn't come up with anything better? But then, as I said, there are Setites who can trace their lineage to Ancient Egypt, predating Biblical times by millenia, as well as Ravnos and other Indo-China vampires, to say nothing of the Kindred of the East who also have a culture predating Abrahamic faiths. It's all very reverse-engineered from "we wrote the core book as nominally-Christian Americans and then realized other cultures exist" while having the very convenient excuse of "every culture has its own creation myths, vampires are no different" Shrecknet fucked around with this message at 15:55 on Jul 28, 2021 |
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Jul 28, 2021 15:51
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So to loop this around to actual politics and keep it from getting banished back to TG, Vampire culture is really weird sometimes. See, the thing about Vampires, is that they do not live in a democracy. Not even in a "hah hah, you vote but the monsters at the top are always in charge" situation like we do IRL, but actual no-poo poo territorial lordships. You exist at the pleasure of the regional Prince, and while there are a few laws that are inviolate (only one law, really), everything else is at the whim of whoever is strong enough to hold that space, full stop. When it gets really interesting is with the introduction of the Harpy, though. See, if you're an immortal, ancient and superpowered being, stripping someone of their wealth or privilege doesn't really work, especially if they weren't particularly powerful to begin with. So the only thing you have to really enforce vampires being a society instead of a bunch of slavering blood-drinking monsters is the power of reputation. So every city has a Harpy, a gossipmonger and collector of information on the activities and accolades of the city's kindred. And she is the only one with the power to name the Prince Gauche or Ignorant, and that name will travel with the Prince to his conclaves with the other regional Princes, or across years and years. It's a frightening amount of power, but it's something we see IRL now with  and (sigh) cancel culture - that naming and shaming and applying a title ("Tiller the Baby-Killer") is the only way to truly sully someone once they are of a certain age and power, since you can't really jail or fine someone who is immortal and able to skip town when there's no Marshal's service to bring them back.A Harpy's tongue-lashing in an Elysium can be enough to send a Kindred into a blind fury, as the Beast that guides their inner monster goes on the attack, and more than one Harpy has done just that, enraging a Kindred on sacred ground and goading them to commit an actual sin worthy of their expulsion from the Domain. Oh, and Harpys exist outside the power structure of the Prince, so he can't just dismiss her. She's just a permanent gadfly. Shrecknet fucked around with this message at 02:29 on Jul 29, 2021 |
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Jul 29, 2021 02:24
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I'm amenable to it but there's probably a ton of overlap with the TG industry thread in terms of "oh no! The creator of this thing I like is a horrible person!"
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Jul 29, 2021 16:03
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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.
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Jul 30, 2021 02:46
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There's a reason I play Vampire and don't loving touch Mage.
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Jul 30, 2021 18:16
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Magic is a tabletop card game https://twitter.com/TeaFeck/status/1421925450742444035?s=19
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Aug 2, 2021 00:56
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Mr. Wiggles posted:I'm surprised that nobody has brought up Secret Hitler. I'll assume it's part of the fascist misdirection. The less said about Max Temkin, credibly-accused rapist and maker of the game that says "it's ok to laugh at racist/homophobic/transphobic jokes since the cards said it, not you (the person who played the cards)," the better. Secret Hitler is actually a really fun and well-made deduction game, which they then decided to ruin with the absolute worst-thought-out theme ever.
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Aug 5, 2021 21:49
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so because 1992 was a long time ago, there was a clan called the Malkavians. their clan flaw was "madness," which led to the 'fishmalk' trope (guy so off his nut he would carry around a raw fish and slap people with it) in V5 (due out this year) they added this, explaining how Malks should be played (tl;dr: loving respectfully) https://twitter.com/AlisonCybe/status/1441138597063639050?s=19 lol and then WW cut this whole section and it won't appear in the book
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Sep 23, 2021 22:49
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CAPT. Rainbowbeard posted:My favorite clan is Malkavian, and I've always thought that this Fishmalk stuff is stupid and not funny at all. if you start with the want first, the clan usually falls into place.
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Sep 23, 2021 23:47
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Toph Bei Fong posted:TSR released the Open Game License (OGL). This allowed other publishers and creators to release products, within defined limits, using the D&D framework but not bound by the company’s IP restrictions. While it eventually became just another revenue extraction stream for Hasbro, the OGL pointed out a direction that could have freed the entire TTRPG hobby from capital’s clutches. Oh, and it also caused Pathfinder, which split the market at the next edition jump and caused a sizable chunk of their market to continue using the OGL and - it needs be reminded - the entire D&D platform as its own Shi'a/Sunni split of the church of D&D.
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Nov 5, 2021 18:45
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it's also interesting because if you think about it, in our world gods operate on faith. but in D&D, there's no faith required because Pelor or Gruumsh or Garl Glittergold are literally dudes you can just go visit. so like, how do churches even operate? you gotta be a lot more transactional in your operations when your followers can just go worship a different God down the street if the Raven Queen doesn't sufficiently increase harvest yields
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Nov 9, 2021 04:42
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Cobalt-60 posted:Insatiable greed for gold shows up in Norse mythology.
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Nov 11, 2021 22:03
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Xiahou Dun posted:
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Mar 13, 2022 19:13
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Shadowrun made a dragon president then blew him up in his limo.
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Dec 14, 2022 07:01
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jokes on you all, I only buy games I am interested in running and are good no bathroom readers on my shelf
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Dec 21, 2022 13:59
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There's a bunch of philosophical choices being made at every level when writing an RPG, because it all started as a wargaming simulation and those games were all about simulating all the minutiae down to Italian units using more water because they had to boil their pasta (not a joke) Some designers wanted to keep that cruft instead of ditching it where it belongs (in computer games that could calculate all that in the background) and it leads to some interesting choices by players with system mastery who will optimize every encounter to have the fewest variables possible. It's one of the reasons I love FIASCO! and other GM-less games that don't have combat rules at all and are more explicit about being shared-narrative storytelling over adversarial objective-overcoming.
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Dec 21, 2022 14:54
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