Ebony Kingdom Part Four:
Chapter 5: Storytelling
Cool story bro.
AncientH:
Storytelling sections in White Wolf products tend to be fairly bad to start with; the makers of the game never quite seem to be able to grasp how tabletop roleplaying games
work, which may be why the LARP does so well. I don't know.
I
do know that Vampire is at a bit of a disadvantage here because they're in, more or less, virgin territory. There are
not a lot of black vampire movies - Blacula and its sequel,
Vampire in Brooklyn, etc. - and even fewer novels. There's a bit more leadway in comics, because Marvel was forward-thinking with
Blade and backward-thinking with
Conan the Barbarian, but very few of them were Gothic Punk
or set in Africa.
Really, Thulsa Doom makes a very respectable Setite.
FrankT:
At 21 pages, this is one of the shortest chapters in the book. You'd think that for a “Storyteller Game” that is nominally about something that the authors think you don't know anything about, that they'd have a lot to say about “storytelling,” and I guess you'd be wrong. Mostly this stems from the storytelling chapter having no mechanics in it at all – it's totally system agnostic. Now, I know that really the
entire book is system agnostic in the sense that the authors literally do not seem to be able to agree with each other as to what edition of Masquerade they are writing an expansion for, but this chapter is system agnostic to the point that it could apply equally well if you were playing nWoD or MET rather than using any edition of the Storyteller System. “Equally well” in this case meaning of course “not very,” but that's just how this book rolls.
You may ask, if this chapter doesn't provide suggestions for handing out XP or setting test difficulties and such that storyteller chapters are normally called upon to do, does that mean that this information is just fucking missing from the book? As far as I can tell, yes. I don't think there's so much as an XP chart anywhere, which means that you get to try to use the chart from Masquerade (certainly the Freebie Points from chargen blithely told you to do that). But Laibon have some traits like Orun that don't exist in Masquerade, how much do
those cost? I have theories, but they cannot be verified.
Fundamentally, this book isn't a
game. It's all cargo culting all the time. It's supposed to
look like a game, but only on the most superficial level. Not only have things not been mathhammered or meaningfully playtested, things haven't even been written to completion.
AncientH:
Now, come up with three or four authentic (or even authentic-sounding) African names. Right now!
No big deal. We can't either.
This is indicative of the problems with the entire chapter, basically. The writers know that the storytellers and players have no idea how things actually work in Africa, and the writers themselves quite clearly don't know shite either.
What the storytelling advice in this chapter amounts to then is "like a regular game of Vampire, but the names are changed. Also, Africa is a emphasized to be poor and mostly rural, and even major cities aren't given the respect they are in other Storyteller games.
Cities do exist, where most if not all of the trappings of "civilization" provide a thin veneer of modernization. Still, it's vital for the Storyteller to remember and to account for the poverty and hunger when running her games. You cannot simply take a story set in New York or London, scratch out the name and stamp "Cape Town" on it, and expect to be playing in an African idiom.
Can I get a fucking
page here where they're not talking down to Africa? Jesus wept. Fuck, in the very next paragraph they're reminding us that even the Laibon exist in crippling poverty compared to vampires in Europe and America.
FrankT:
The names sidebar is bad in pretty much every way it is possible to be bad. Their basic suggestion is that you get yourself a list of regional names and then pull them out when you need to name an NPC. This is actually good advice, but considering that they have 19 more fucking pages in this chapter, it's actually insulting that they don't provide one. But then to one-up being simply useless, they kick it up a notch to the point where it's clueless and racist.
Ebony Kingdom wrote:Nothing ruins a player's suspension of disbelief faster than running into a witchdoctor named Frank or a cab driver in Kinshasa named Kate.
This is Nigerian singer Frank Ugochukwu Edwards. Who routinely introduces himself without his middle name without severely destroying the “feel” of Nigeria to anyone's knowledge.
Now, leaving aside the potentially pejorative label of referring to a traditional healer as a “witchdoctor” (it's World of Darkness, there are witches, presumably you'd need witchdoctors to treat curses properly), are they fucking serious? Do they actually not know that there are lots of people in Africa who have European names in addition to or instead of “African” names? Do they really think their player base is so reflexively racist that it would destroy their suspension of disbelief to have an African named Jonathan or Nelson? What the fuck?
Jonathan.
Nelson.
Ebony Kingdom wrote:It's really not all that much work, and it's worth it to keep your players from rolling their eyes and wandering off to the kitchen every time they run into Bob the bushman.
- 1. If it's not much work (and it is not), why didn't you inclue a fucking name table?
2. Please stop referring to San people as bushmen.
AncientH:
We're reminded on
every fucking page how terrible and backwards Africa is, so even if you're a Setite in Adis Ababa with a laptop "or even a cell phone"... let's hold that thought for a moment.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mobile_te ... _in_Africa
Cellphones are huge in Africa!
I suppose I shouldn't give them too much shit for that because it was 2003 and who knew we would have mobile proctology apps on our Jesusphones, but seriously, what the fuck? Why would this be a thing? Why not have, say, a group of hot young Nigerian Laibon who have whipped together something like the
Path of Technomancy for Dur-An-Ki and terrorize Ventrue bank accounts from halfway around the world?
It really is like they went out of their way to emphasize what a crap place Africa is to live, much less game. There's no emphasis given on why you would want to play a Laibon rather than any other sort of vampire, why (or how) you would interact with other vampires, or why they would come here to Africa. If this was a Black Dog project we'd at least get stories about Giovanni necromancers warring with the locals over a vast horde of untapped wraiths dating back to the slave trade and the strange underworld of Great Zimbabwe, or a war with Cathayans trying to promote Hinduism in South Africa or an ancient Elder Mujaji who really
does control the weather or something.
But we don't get any of that. We get shit about how hard it is to get a cellphone in West Bumfuck Village, Angola.
FrankT:
OK, let's get this out of the way right now: yes, a lot of old ass cars are on the roads in Africa. This book has a lot to say about that, but it's mostly offensive and wrong.
Ebony Kingdom wrote:Over two-thirds of Africa's population lives in rural villages or tribal lands largely unchanged by the last several centuries' worth of technological progress. Much of the reason for this has to do with the simple poverty of the people and even, in some cases, the individual national governments. If no profit is to be had making power, easy communications or modern medicine available to the poor villagers of the so-called “Dark Continent,” why should any First-World entities bother?
Why bother indeed?
OK, the fact that there are a lot of old cars on the road doesn't mean that people are impoverished or that they've missed out on the last couple of centuries of technological development. Keeping an old car on the road takes
skilled labor, while getting a new car takes
money. In an advanced economy with full employment, people with skills who are willing to work can trade their labor for money and use that money to
buy new cars. In an economy with a shortage of available investment and thus an insufficient demand for labor, skilled people can't work as much as they'd like to for money and thus end up spending time repairing and maintaining items they already have rather than buying new ones. A lot of Africans see Europeans as lazy and wasteful because they throw things away that could be maintained and buy new ones; and a lot of Europeans see Africans as lazy because they don't work for wages to buy new cars and washing machines, but the truth is that both groups are willing and able to work but in Africa there isn't enough money in circulation so there's a persistent underutilization of labor resources. Like Greece or Spain since the crisis, but like
all the time.
But in any case, even in the most impoverished and rural villages in the CAR and DRC are still completely modern places. It's the 21st century there just as it is everywhere else, they just happen to be poorly supplied and under monetized. The people there are not going to think you're a wizard because you have a camera. They may think you are an asshole because you thought they might think that.
These people are very poor, but they will match your ass boomstick for boomstick.
AncientH:
The section on playing Laibon starts off by emphasizing family ties within Legacies. This seems weird to me, because I distinctly remember them saying that they
don't think of themselves as families. It also calls these organizations of Laibon "tribes" instead of "Legacies," because it's supposed to be multiple Laibon of different Legacies which come together and...uh...what the fuck?
Seriously, this book still has not gotten past the basic vampire hurdle of
WHY THE FUCK DO DIFFERENT VAMPIRES WORK TOGETHER? I mean, leaving aside the whole problem of how you're supposed to keep bands of vampires fed in rural areas with limited population, there's still no reason for a Shango not to gut a Akunanse as soon as they see their spidery asses, just on general principles.
They do address the difficulty posed by not having the "sects" - the Camarilla and the Sabbat, primarily - but they don't actually
say anything about that. See, what White Wolf sort of intuitively grasped when they were making the game in the 1st edition is that sides are a
good thing, it gives large bodies of PCs and NPCs things they are collectively interested in, provides the groundwork for allies and enemies, grudges and fragile truces, open wars and cold conflicts. It's a fine balance, because having too many sides and you can't figure out what the fuck is going on.
Which is about the case with the Laibon. What do they want? Who runs what? What, in fact, is the point of the Xi Dundu doing a power play against the Guruhi? And where the fuck do the players fit in?
Whose shit do I have to fuck up to king it around here?
FrankT:
The section on incorporating disease into your campaign is puzzling on many many levels. First of all, the core conceit is that Vampires can pass on HIV and malaria. This is not true. Malaria is passed by mosquitoes, but that is because the lifecycle of the malaria parasite has a stage that parasitizes mosquitoes. And not even
all mosquitoes, it has to be the right kind of mosquito. If malaria plasmodia end up in a tick or a cold glass of blood for a few hours, they just
die. You can't get malaria from everything that bites you, you can't even get malaria from having sexual intercourse with someone who has it. To make the leap from one person to another, it really needs to jump into a specific kind of mosquito and then go from that mosquito to a human. Nothing else is going to do it. So World of Darkness Vampires can't fucking spread malaria. Frankly, it's rather hard to imagine a setup of Vampire that
would transmit malaria, because vampirism is usually considered as similar to
sex, and
sex doesn't spread malaria, you assholes!
Unless you've spontaneously turned into a female Anopheles mosquito, you are not going to be spreading malaria no matter who you bite or fuck.
HIV is more complicated. On a purely
symbolic level, Vampire bites are conceptually similar to sharing needles or having unprotected sex. So Vampire bites are in the general ball park of things that spread the human immunodeficiency virus. However, the specifics of World of Darkness Vampires make them unsuitable hosts. First of all, Vampires don't have immune systems and don't produce T-cells. They can't get AIDS nor can they incubate HIV. Secondly, they are room temperature and don't alkalize their saliva or vitae, meaning that actual viruses of HIV in a World of Darkness Vampire would survive for
minutes rather than hours or
days. So I guess if a Vampire were to bite a second victim with a mouth still full of blood from their first victim, they could spread HIV that way – but if you're doing the normal Masquerade thing of feeding once per night, Vampire bites are safer than kissing people with AIDS (which is itself so safe that there are no known cases of HIV being transmitted that way).
There's even a nearly-illegible box text about how AIDS is a touchy subject and how it's not being included gratuitously. But for all the chin scratching and pretend-seriousness of this section, the authors themselves seem to be perpetuating the same kind of rumor mongering and superstition about AIDS that they decry. The book tells the storyteller that “of course” Vampires can spread “the AIDS virus,” but as I previously mentioned: that's a load of superstitious nonsense.
AncientH:
There's a bit on faith in Africa. This is White Wolf still struggling with the problem of a non-Christian system of belief mechanic (two of them, actually, competing against each other), although they don't actually come out and
say that, so really it's just a lot of talk about not default assuming Laibon use Humanity, like they told us back in the Character Creation chapter. They also emphasize that lots of Laibon and native Africans are superstitious, just to make sure they get their wince-quota for the page. There's a little sidebar that reminds us True Faith should be rare.
Trust me, you don't want context for this picture. But I love the idea of an Imam holding a vampire at bay with a copy of the Qu'ran. Although they probably wouldn't use the Qu'ran itself. And the Blood Qu'ran is another thing entirely.
FrankT:
I won't say that the sectless domains of the Laibon are a test balloon for nWoD, because it's obvious that White Wolf never bothered to collect response data from Ebony Kingdom. I
will say that the sectlessness of the Ebony Kingdom is a snapshot of Justin Achilli's thought process shortly before he put together the nWoD package. Most of the good ideas and most of the bad ideas with how the nWoD sects are put together are already on display: the book tells you quite explicitly that the more Sabbat flavored legacies and the more Camarilla flavored legacies are not having a kill on sight Sabbat/Camarilla war and can ally or oppose each other on all kinds of axes. That's
good. But on the other hand it frankly admits that there's no real conflict for player characters to be motivated by. That's bad. The end result of course is that the player characters aren't obligated to stab each other in the face, but the players also don't give a fuck about anything, so we're one step forward, two steps back.
And the comparisons to nWoD are obvious. You could imagine nWoD as being the result of people focus grouping Ebony Kingdoms and deciding that the solution to the fact that people liked not having to fight each other over stupid faction lineups but they didn't like not having any sects to interact with was to produce five covenants that didn't matter or affect anything. But as previously stated, I'm pretty sure that no real response data from Ebony Kingdom was ever collected, let alone
responded to. nWoD's lack of give-a-fuck is pretty much just a more refined version of the “anything goes” politics that Achilli was talking about here. Like in nWoD, it's laudable that there are lots of groups that could potentially line up with different alliances – but in the absence of
issues of contention those alliances have no reason to form in the first place.
You'd think that with a setting that has this guy plus a bunch of magical monsters that there wouldn't be any shortage of conflict. But here we are.
AncientH:
The last bit before we get to the crux of the chapter is on the Masquerade...um...there isn't one.
I am intrigued by this concept and would like to subscribe to your newsletter.
One of the main functions of the Camarilla is the blanket agreement that vampires try not to remind the herd that they exist. The greatest trick the devil ever pulled and all that. In Africa, things are a little more...freestyle. So you're probably not going to see a bunch of vampire warlords openly ruling chunks of the continent with their hyena-ghouls.
Or maybe you can.
...but at the same time
probably not going to get a hit squad sicc'd on you if you rip somebody's head off at a bar and drank right from the tap. African rules is a bit more freeform, and presumably the authorities don't have enough of their shit together to track the corpses piling up from fang wounds and blood loss.
Which sounds
terrible, and maybe could be a good excuse for some actual hunter (or even Hunter) organizations in Africa that the Laibon can play with and against, but that's not a thing. I don't know why it isn't a thing, except that this really does look like a dry run for some nWoD concepts and they really stay clear of
any other African supernaturals in the setting - no words on the Changing Breeds, non-bullshit sorcerers, Mages, fairies, Kuei-Jin, Hunters, Mummies, Demon the Fallen wasn't out yet I think but...well, you get the drift. The Laibon have apparently spent most of the last six thousand years sitting on their collective asses bickering about who is king of the local village of fifty people. That is the message this book tries to convey in the Storytelling section. And it sucks.
Wait. So this is all about two white people that want to fuck?
FrankT:
The core of any story is
conflict, and the storytelling chapter spends several pages trying to come up with one that you might want to use. A lot of this is flushed down the toilet in various rants about
religious conflict. Not in conflict between religions, but in people struggling with their own faith in introspective circle jerks. This is a Justin Achilli standard, but it's pretty much always terrible. And if you're talking about
Africa, where the authors are trying to get you to care about the tenets of religions
they cannot even name, it's a harder sell all around.
There are lots of ways to schematize narrative conflict, but this one has little black people on it, who in this instance will represent little black people.
In the standard discussion of writing mechanics, narrative conflict is often stated as “Man vs. XXX” even though the protagonist could be a woman or a child or a time traveling robot or whatever. In our case, our protagonists are going to be Blackulas, but the structures
should remain the same. So let's talk about how Ebony Kingdom has really shat the bed as far as setting these things up:
- Man vs. Man: The basic conflict, a Blackula is in conflict with another Blackula. The problem here is that most of the Blackulas are not given anything that they apparently want, and many of the Blackulas are expected to wander off on a regular basis. While a not-Ravnos has to make regular checks to avoid saying rude things about powerful people if he doesn't hit the road like a circa 1970s gay drifter, they are also expected to hit that road pretty soon anyway. There's no conflict there, because there's no reason for them to stay anywhere and no reason for them to care about whether they piss the locals off or not. A not-Toreador apparently just wants to eat ham sandwiches, and has no direct interests in Kindred society at all.
Man vs. Nature: The basic survival story is often presented as a conflict of sorts. The thing is, Laibon don't really care about any of that. They don't get dinged on humanity for feeding, and their Aye crap just forbids them from getting involved with plots. They don't feel cold, fatigue, or disease. The only element they are upset by is sunlight, which just kills them instantly so there's no conflict there either.
Man vs. Himself: This is the one that the book tries to sell you, having pissed in the Cheerios of all the other ones. The problem here is that the only thing they're really set up for is these religious introspective cycles, but those are completely unplayable because neither the authors nor the reader have the foggiest idea of how the fuck you're supposed to act against or in accordance with the beliefs of traditional African religions. Also, there are literally thousands of those things, and the authors don't seem to even really understand that. How can you roleplay a crisis of faith in a faith you don't know anything about? What would test the faith of a Blackula? What would reinforce the faith of a Blackula? Why should I care?
Man vs. Society: Like with the Blackula vs. Blackula, this is severely undermined by the fact that being ostracized by Blackula society is not distinguishable from being accepted by it. You're going to wander off at the end of the adventure and go to a new village and it just doesn't make any difference if the local Laibon see you off with blown kisses or shaken fists. There's no status for the player characters to aspire to, and no status for them to lose.
Fundamentally, the basics of narrative conflict, of character
motivation to become involved with plots of any kind, is just
lacking. So while they spend literally
fifteen pages out of a chapter that only has 21 talking about conflict and drama, it all basically boils down to the fact that we don't actually care about any of this shit. There are headings like “Progress and Outside Influence vs. Stasis and Cultural Integrity,” “Elder vs. Neonate,” “Familial Obligation vs. Personal Ambition,” and “Laibon vs. Nature,” but despite the fact that someone obviously
read something about constructing narratives, they didn't bother doing that before writing up a
setting that undermines all of those by not having the players be invested into supernatural society in any meaningful way in the first place.
AncientH:
Goth subculture started in the 1980s. Most of the White Wolf audience weren't even born then. The first generation of Goths weren't roleplayers, White Wolf was the game of second and third generation that grew up in the 80s and 90s listening to goth music and cool goth fashions which they might well have bought at Hot Topics. For some people, it was just a fashion they liked, a group to belong to. Like Death Metal or Black Metal, which had a lot of crossover. It was all about finding your tribe.
Then there were the "serious" goths. These were the people that, for better or for worse, got into the philosophy of it - and not the high-minded philosophy of Werner von Goethe, but the whole doom-and-gloom, my-body-is-shit, we're-all-going-to-die-and-the-world-sucks kind of people. (There's a third group that were basically criminals and young sociopaths like
Varg Vikernes, but every group has their assholes). The thing about the "serious" Goths is that they
wanted to be tortured. They thought it was romantic or authentic to be an unchanging, perfect monster stalking the shadows down the centuries, blah blah fucking blah. It's the
I, Strahd meets
Interview with the Vampire aesthetic where people wanted to be conflicted and mope about their Curse because they thought it was deep. It's a standard of vampire movies and books and even comics. And there are people that want to play that character at the table. This is the section for them.
The thing is though? Those people? In the minority. Even Anne Rice couldn't sustain that much mope. The one thing anyone will take away from
The Vampire Lestat is that motherfucker
loves being a vampire.
I'm told this is the first gay black vampire novel. I'm not even sure this qualifies as Rule 34, but the world is a richer place.
As Frank mentioned, the chapter goes out of its way to shoot down most of the actual conflicts that might charge a game. Several paragraphs are pissed away talking about how Africans distrust white people and technology as the tools of colonial oppressors. Because we need our racist stereotyping on each page. And Neonate Laibon are trapped in a system where the oldest vampires are automatically in charge, with a pecking order based on age, and they stick with it because...uh...they have nowhere else to go?
What about fucking America? Europe? Carib? Anywhere that isn't where you are now?
There's supposed to be internal struggles with Legacies/tribes/"families" (wait, aren't "Tribes" supposed to be "families?" For fuck's sake, at least keep the bullshit nomenclature right!) But again, age rules and young fangs drool. Or something. And they already emphasized that the normal sectarian differences don't apply. So that's a bit of a free-for-all
at best.
The big conflict then is Laibon vs.
Outsiders, i.e. Western Kindred. This could be interesting, but they don't want to go into it in detail
here, because they don't even name fucking names. Seriously, this is the Storyteller's own private section of the dark gods-be-damned book, and they can't just tell us the fucking Ghiberti family of the Giovanni have set up shop with their foul Necromancy in some coastal cities? Why the fuck not?
And why are you still reading, who you have so many stories to tell?
This is the end of the chapter. I don't think this is right. This is the sort of stupid shit you
end a book with. Whoever wrote this HAD to have known that. I mean, White Wolf basically has a formula for laying out books at this point. They can't be that daft, right? Lie to me.
We may yet go all National Geographic on you. Stay tuned.
Chapter 6: Antagonists and Bestiary
If you don't have anything to protect, you have nothing to fight for.
FrankT:
This chapter is 23 pages, actually longer than the Storyteller chapter. There's 12 pages devoted to converting supernaturals from other White Wolf lines that aren't Masquerade generally or Ebony Kingdom specifically into something that looks like it was written in the same game system. This is totally perplexing, since as previously noted there actually
isn't a game system that Ebony Kingdom is actually written to, so I don't know what the fuck. There is like a sample of a Sorcerer with their sorcery translated into equivalent paths of Necromancy and Thaumaturgy that are
presumably written up in other Vampire books. But it doesn't tell you
which other Vampire books, so fuck if I know. According to the whitewolf wiki, some of these are from Vampire Revised and some of these are from the Guide to the Camarilla, and then I stopped checking because I already ran into at least one reference to a path from a book that this book hasn't name checked.
After that we get to 8 pages that is a bestiary of various animals that you might want to turn into a ghoul and use as a guard animal or scout or something.
Why is this book not about this again?
There's 3 pages of introductions and rules, and that's the chapter.
AncientH:
I mentioned in the last chapter, the Storyteller chapter, that they explicitly did not mention any other supernaturals in Africa. In fact, this is the first place in the entire fucking book where other supernaturals in Africa are even
hinted at, and you would think this would be the natural kitchensink for throwing in all the accumulated references to Africa that have built up in 4+ game lines over a period of 20 years, right? I mean, that chapter would basically write itself. You would just fit that shit in around the admittedly-scant material on Laibon society - and holy fuck, it's 172 pages in and I couldn't even tell you who the major players are among the Legacies in any major African city or nation - but they don't actually do that.
No, they still describe these supernaturals - who, I remind you, have not appeared before - even in out-of-game voice as if from the Laibon I-know-nothing-about-these-people perspective.
WE the readers, because we have delved mightily in the fucking books can recognize when they're making a distinction between sorcerers and Mages and shit, but if some fresh kid picked this up they would have
no fucking clue what was going on. ZERO effort is made to work this game into anything else that White Wolf has ever published. ZERO. No fucks were budgeted for this project
at all. We are running on a serious fuck deficit just to mention it.
Also, and this is just fucking cruel, but the sample antagonists given are
way too powerful for the Laibon. It makes no fucking sense. We're talking 8-16 dots worth of equivalent Disciplines
easy for most of these.
So, these things show up here, with no preamble and in an almost unrecognizable form, for no apparent reason than somebody appears to have thought they should be mentioned, but sans all of their fluff and any possible reason for them to be here and interesting.
FrankT:
The conversion supernaturals get 27 sample monster statlines into 12 pages with a page and a half of introduction and rules lead-in. That's almost exactly 2 monsters per page with an acceptable amount of tiny art pieces. That's perfectly reasonable text density. It's just... the Mummies have shit from the Path of Curses, which I
think is to be found in “Blood Magic: Secrets of Thaumaturgy,” which is not a book I think it is reasonable to expect people to go looking for rules in if not marked. When the Ghosts actually have a page citation it is literally a Page XX error. This is pure cargo cult all the way down. Superficially, this looks like an acceptable number of antagonists written up into an acceptable information density. But it's fractal gibberish: every part of it is just as much incoherent psychobabble as the entire thing.
AncientH:
Also, no indication is given for where these animals can be found in Africa. Not that it matters. I'd like to see the asshole that ghouls and elephant. That'll be funnier than the hellcow.
I was going to post a picture of the Ethiopian wolf and make a crack about Lupines, but this picture is way more fucking metal.
Also, Scarab Beetles have 7 health levels? WTF?
FrankT:
The beasts are reasonably self contained. There isn't a lot of stuff on an animal statline, so they get a
lot on each page. 42 critters in 8 pages plus a bonus rules page. That's almost 5 per page, which is pretty sweet. I think the big problem here is that a number of these are completely fucking insane. I don't mean that there are some animals in this list which very definitely do not live in Africa (like Tigers), I mean there are 42 creatures in the list and it's OK if some of them are a bit out to lunch. No, the big issue is that an Elephant only has a Strength of 5, which is the human maximum before positive qualities. The African Bush Elephant is the largest living land animal, and I am damn fucking positive that however many dots you give it in “Strength” that it should be
more than some asshole human who happens to be on steroids or have some large size merit. Fuck!
Maybe they meant very tiny elephants?
AncientH:
I'm going to quote this bit on dolphins now:
Note: Dolphins have been considered to be the most intelligent of he "lower" mammals for some time, even more so than monkeys or apes. Some biologists believe that dolphins might even exceed humans in intelligence. Their ability in Linguistics reflects dolphins' ability to communicate complex ideas to each other through sonar, as well as to understand and respond to human speech. Their Enigmas Ability reflects their exceptional problem-solving skills. If any animal might be able to learn non-Physical Disciplines as a ghoul, dolphins would be that animal. This is merely speculation, however, and not an encouragement to create Vicissitude-wielding sea critters.