Alt-white wolf?

[Whipstitch]

I still think Cham's point is a reasonable one. If you base your art on the home game of a bunch of randos then the odds are pretty small that you'll happen to settle on someone who's really putting in that kind of work for their bimonthly larp. Hell, in my experience you're lucky if someone shows up with a creepy Nixon mask.

[Longes]

What is the context for those things, and why are the people on the upper row floating?

There is no context. Every clan description just has this page of concept art showing eight vampire dudes suffering through the various stages of a fashion disaster. Ranging from Nosferatu post-apocalypse hobos to Tremere trying to pull off Shadowrun's street mage aesthetics (they fail) to Ventrue just looking like shitty high fashion.

I can't post the Tremere page right now (will do once I get home in about ten hours), but my main issue is that I can imagine someone looking like this:



going out in Shadowrun because Shadowrun is a wild punk future with no fashion restraints and also there are actual street mages to cater to with street mage fashion. But someone who goes out like this today is a total weirdo and I don't know why clan Tremere would try and go for the shitty street mage fashion. Like they aren't even as cool as this guy. Half of them look like hoboes in mystical ponchos.

[Longes]

Look at these dorks:

[Mask_De_H]

Outside of the top right girl looking like a Slayer groupie, all of those characters look like they bum around alternative bookstores in Williamsburg more than they feed on the blood of the innocent.

There's a gentrification joke in there somewhere.

[erik]

Is stupidly impractical clothing a vampire power? Hennet and Mialee would fit right in.

[Mord]

My wife dresses like the top-left Tremere to go to the Ren Faire. XD

I think WW has confused "the weird shit people wear when they're doing a vampire LARP" with "the shit vampires would actually wear if they were real and there were a Masquerade to uphold." Like, if anyone actually cared about the titular Masquerade, all the clan art would be of completely normal and ordinary-seeming people who happen to be kind of pallid.

[Username17]

Those "Tremere" really speak to the LARPification of this entire endeavor. Those pictures don't look like "Vampire Wizards," they look like "people cosplaying as Tremere." That's a big difference to be honest. And that's a very weird thing to put out as your concept art.

Like, if you were going to reboot DC Comics, your concept art would be something that tried to look like Batman and Superman. You wouldn't try to get the look and feel of fans cosplaying as Batman and Superman. First of all, that would be too meta for fucking words. But more importantly it would just be way too weirdly unambitious. Cosplayers have limited budgets, limited skills, limited access to materials, and usually have non-ideal body types.

I mean sure, there's certainly parts of this Power Girl that I think are spot-on. But Power Girl is supposed to have thicker arms than I do, and this woman just factually doesn't have that. Also the shirt isn't quite tailored to her, which causes a ripple at the bottom of the boob window. It's very good as Cos-Play, but I would expect a movie or comic book to shoot a little bit higher than that.

This is of course ridiculous. Asking the question "how do we use the concept art to evoke the LARPers we know?" is too low a target to even be worth bothering with. The first question is what kinds of vampires a Masquerade reboot should be evoking, and the second question is what those vampires would look like if you had an infinite costume budget to realize them. Because you are drawing a fucking picture, and you are not in any way constrained by your costume budget. For fuck's sake.

Now personally I do not think you should have a group of Vampires who are "The Vampires who use magic" because fucking all of your fucking vampires should be using magic. They are fucking vampires, they have magic powers. Dracula had magic powers. Nosferatu had magic powers. The fucking vampires in Twilight all have weird X-Men powers. No one wants to play a Vampire that doesn't have any powers. This shouldn't even need to be said.

But yes, you're going to want some groups of Vampires that are more into the candles and pentagrams end of the magic than the burning fists of fury end of the magic. Because obviously you are going to want that. And when you draw one of these vampires, it should be a drawing of a bad ass fucking vampire necromancer. Not a drawing of someone cosplaying as a vampire sorcerer using shit they happened to find in their mom's attic. Because fucking obviously.

-Username17

[Whipstitch]

Yeah, "eight dumb outfits" is a bad format no matter how much detail the artist is willing to throw in. You're just not communicating anything compared to even a relatively unambitious action shot like this one:


The obvious nod to Nosferatu is only a problem if you're an idiot.

[erik]

I do appreciate that the first and third males for Tremere don't have right arms. I applaud the placement of persons with disabilities without making them stereotypes or otherwise calling attention to it. I suppose the 3rd guy could be going for his checkbook or other anachronism in his back pocket, the first one, definitely though.

[Prak]

Outside of the top right girl looking like a Slayer groupie

Nah, too fashionable for Slayer

[Pariah Dog]

Pretty sure the bottom right male Tremere is Alex Mercer from Prototype.

[Thaluikhain]

Did not realise they were supposed to be Tremere until that was pointed out. Totally drawing a blank on which clan they were supposed to be.

Do vampire clans even have a dress code? Should you be able to tell a Tremere from a Toreador by their outfit? Sure, Ventrue would be dressed nicer than Brujah, but, unless it's about giving helpful suggestions to cosplayers, the fashions, IMHO, isn't quite what being a vampire is about.

[Starmaker]

All of them look like characters from a hidden object game. I can easily see each of them menacing some poor stay-at-home mom('s husband) in a sexually suggestive way.

[Dogbert]

In all fairness, let's get some context.

Some Swedish Edgelords are well, Swedish. While I don't live there, from what I've gathered from my contacts who do, Europe in general and Sweden in particular has a much different roleplay culture from us (for starters, a ridiculously strong LARP scene, so I totally see the point in LARPers becoming a significant target demo for Some Swedish Edgelords).

Obviously, none of that Shadowrun crap would fly at any "our world, but a bit different" setting, but I can see people rocking that wardrobe in Euro-urban-fantasy comics.

Now, sure, when Some Swedish Edgelords expressed their volition of making the game "more Euro-centric," I wasn't aware they meant this in particular, and sure, it's going to clash with everyone this side of the Atlantic, but at least I think I kinda sorta see where they're coming from, and chalk this mess to cultural differences the same way I would if White Wolf had instead been acquired by Bird Studio and V5's art was all pre-teens in school uniforms (case in which you'd be reading me raging considerably more).

[Longes]

In fact here, have the rest of the fashion victims. As a fun exercise try to guess which clan each set belongs to.

Answers:

Brujah, Gangrel, Toreador, Malkavian, Ventrue

[MisterDee]

I guessed them all.

Brujah and Ventrue because they're actually sorta in the ballpark of what they should look like (rebels and trust-fund hipsters, respectively), Gangrel because of the stupid amount of fur, Toreador just because of the stereotypical I-do-crafts look of the girls, and Malkavian because of the obvious mental health clichés.

To note, apart from the Gangrel and Brujah, all of the male characters are effectively interchangeable (backing the "these are just photos of LARPers" theory) and seriously, hipster Ventrues?

[Thaluikhain]

I should have guessed Malkavian, but got the others. Though, guessed Toreador.

[nockermensch]

You never actually get America's obesity problem until Europeans produce a new edition of Vampire and then every sample character is fit.

Body shaming apart, once we know that the answers would be the missing clans, it becomes quite easy to tell each group apart. You just look for the fashion week version of each clan's particular thing, and this is another thing I don't get: Like 90% of these guys wear elaborate and striking outfits, and the game has Masquerade right in the title. These vampires are supposed to kind of blend in human society! Is this how Europeans really dress? Has my whole life been a lie?!

Composing to the problem above, every single character in these sheets is also caught in the act of posing to a photo shoot, down to the fact that most of them are staring right at the camera as if they're fashion models, while a few others look forlornly to the sides, as fashion models also do. For all the PB-glory of bad old Worlld of Darkness illustrations, at least some sample characters back then were shown doing stuff or at least with facial expressions other than *smoulder*.

[Thaluikhain]

These vampires are supposed to kind of blend in human society! Is this how Europeans really dress? Has my whole life been a lie?!

Eh, a few of those are just slightly more outlandish than normal. If I saw one or two in a crowd, they'd not seem so odd.

[Omegonthesane]

nockermensch: media products demanding a physical appearance that bears little resemblance to that of the general population isn't a sign that people are fitter in Europe.

[Thaluikhain]

nockermensch: media products demanding a physical appearance that bears little resemblance to that of the general population isn't a sign that people are fitter in Europe.

But...female detectives in the US are all fresh faced teens in low cut tops, right?

[erik]

You’d think a clan symbol/crest that could covertly be displayed on jewelry would be all you need or want. I really don’t get the cosplay gallery unless it is as Dogbert suggests, that it is a cosplay guide for the European LARP crowd.

Edit: shit. I hate posting to just say “me too” so I’ll edit instead. I agree with everything Cham said in the following post.

I’d be tempted to mix up the vampires and demonstrate that individually most of them are not distinctive but it’s beating a dead horse at this point. Their design goal was stupid (distinctive appearance) and it fails anyway (many ain’t), and all these pics as a pdf DLC of suggestions for LARP costumes woulda been a better idea.

[Longes]

Something I've just noticed is the credits:

DESIGN

developed by Kenneth Hite and Karim Muammar
system design – Karim Muammar, Kenneth Hite, and Karl Bergström
story & creative direction – Martin Ericsson
producer – Jason Carl

written by – Kenneth Hite, Martin Ericsson, Matthew Dawkins, Karim Muammar, and Juhana Pettersson additional writing by - Mark Rein•Hagen, Karl Bergström, Jason Andrew, Freja Gyldenstrøm, Jacqueline Bryk and Neil Gaiman
editing – Freja Gyldenstrøm, Jennifer Smith-Pulsipher, and Karim Muammar

[Chamomile]

I was able to guess all of them, but only because they're grouped by clan, so if one of them was obvious, I could get the whole set. And even then, I only got Toreador by process of elimination. Like, the bottom right guy in Malkavian is obviously supposed to be a Malk, so by extension the other seven people grouped with him are also Malks, but it would've been way harder to guess them if they weren't grouped with that one guy. A few of the Brujah were obvious, but most were not.

Also, I notice that the women tend to have far more complex costumes than the men. I'm guessing this is not an effort at establishing vampire gender roles as a worldbuilding element and more because there is a demographic gap in how much effort is put into a costume in the Swedish LARP scene. Like, I don't have any evidence that such a demographic gap even exists except that it's showing up in these pictures, but I'm pretty confident that's what's going on just because of all the other evidence that this new edition is just some Swedish edgelords codifying their LARP into canon.

[Username17]

Do vampire clans even have a dress code? Should you be able to tell a Tremere from a Toreador by their outfit? Sure, Ventrue would be dressed nicer than Brujah, but, unless it's about giving helpful suggestions to cosplayers, the fashions, IMHO, isn't quite what being a vampire is about.

You've got a bit of difficulty here. The first issue is that from a branding standpoint you want your different Vampire types to have a different "feel," and that necessarily includes a visual aesthetic. On the other hand, your setting's primary conceit is "The Masquerade," which means that all of your vampires have to be able to pass for human. Further, you are using infective vampires, which means that any and all types of vampires should be represented by any and all ethnicities of people. So you're trying to establish a visual aesthetic without having any of the groups be visually distinct from humans or recognizable as any particular race or ethnicity. It's a challenge for concept artists. And a challenge that the concept art Longes has dug up has clearly failed at.

Now the simplest system is just the system that Masquerade already went with: Heraldric Symbols. You pick a small visual motif, and then characters of the appropriate type of vampire or minion can get tattoos, brands, signet rings, t-shirts, or belt buckles that have the symbol on them. I wouldn't accuse the Clan Symbols of V:tM of being particularly well made or interesting, but they (mostly) get the job done and only have a few that just outright fail (Lasombra, Ravnos, and Giovanni being the obvious ones - and those aren't even basic clans). That's all you really need, but it is literally the least you can do. If your concept art isn't up to the level of a small group of characters with clan symbols worked subtly into different parts of their outfits, you can fuck right off.

Now next level visual branding is certainly possible. You could give a vampire type a visually recognizable theme. Vampire: the Masquerade only really managed this effectively with the Setites. They were all Heka-Punk, whether they were wearing power suits with pharaonic make-up or studding their leather jackets with cartouches. But if you wanted you could certainly go that far with other vampire types in similar or different directions. You could have a vampire type that had a totem animal or a vampire type that a heraldic color scheme. You could also have a vampire type that was for whatever reason really invested in a particular era.

So consider these example pieces of art direction:

• The Ventrue recall when purple was the color of royalty and incorporate purple into most outfits.
  
• The Tremere clan underwent a massive reorganization and modernization in the 1940s and now young and old Tremere are strongly encouraged to wear 1940s fashions.
  
• The Gangrel have the bear as a totem animal, and incorporate bear motifs into basically everything.
  

And the point is not that those are amazingly clever ideas, it's that those were ideas I jotted down in 45 seconds. It literally took longer to look up some appropriate pictures on pinterest than it did to come up with those themes. There's just generally no excuse for not having some reasonably strong themes if you decide your vampires should have visual themes at all.

But you could also go the other way. You could put your foot down and say "This is the Masquerade, and every Vampire type looks like a normal person wearing normal clothes until they are unmasked." And then you could go apeshit with vampire types that sprout bat wings from their head turn into clouds of blood droplets and teeth when "unmasked." There's nothing wrong with that life choice either.

The thing is that what they actually went for is just such an unambitious reboot that I don't even care to read through the final product. Making the LARP costumes of a bunch of Swedish edgelords canon is such a small goal that I just genuinely don't give a shit whether it is achieved or not. It's just so highschool. It's like "I Want My Shit" by Insane Clown Posse, except the paucity of the demands isn't even supposed to be humorous. That's their actual goals with this shit. Finally they'll be able to snub the fuck out of those fucking Finnish edgelords and get in fucking writing that they get to go to the prom with Joey. It's very hard for me to wrap my brain around a headspace in which goals that small are something you'd actually pay a million dollars for.

-Username17