[OSSR]Sins of the Blood

[Whipstitch]

Category of Sins	Do you want Fluff?	Do you want Crunch?
Personal	Yes! You totally want guidelines about how the different sects view baby-eating, and all that stuff about rules and taboos is gold. You want in-character rants from sample PCs who do-and-don't feel different ways about what monsters they've become, not to mention whether it's beneath your vampire dignity to work at a tech startup.	No. If you want to have angst or guilt you make a plot point out of it; if you want to be beyond good and evil you don't. Rules for this stuff start with Kevin Siembieda or Sandy Petersen playing madlibs with the DSM and then vampire somehow gets worse from there.

Yeah, while White Wolf's cultural chauvinism was somewhat galling the bit that really got Humanity pushed to the wayside at most tables is the fact that it dealt in sticks rather than giving the MC broad discretion hand out carrots for staying engaged or behaving somewhat consistently. Humanity's christian guilt gimmick made the idea of Vampire sound more distinctive but as an actual table mechanic its only possible function was to encourage cookie cutter behavior on pain of being turned into an NPC and that meant characters were often less distinct. Hardcore "roleplay not rollplay" mouth breathers tended to be excited about Humanity the first time around but even they would almost inevitably mothball the whole thing when it got in the way of living up to clan stereotypes. By contrast the archetype system was way better received and all that did was give you a willpower point for writing "Kind of an Asshole" on your sheet and then proceeding to be kind of an asshole.

[Dean]

A thing I’ve always found funny is that Vampire’s aggressive pushing of Christian values would actually be massively less obnoxious if they just overtly declared that they were in a universe where Christianity was basically literally true. It’s your fictional universe, you’re allowed to make whatever rules you want. I would be willing to play a game who’s double whammy opening to their fantasy world is that you’ve been turned into a vampire and btw yahweh and satan literally exist, deal with it.

But that’s dunning krueger right? They don’t understand that the world and all it’s peoples and religions aren’t “basically like Christianity says anyway” so they don’t even know that putting forward Christianity is a choice one can make. The world where Christianity is basically literally true is the world the authors are living in, and as such they’re literally incapable of thinking of that as an option for their fiction.

I’m not Christian but the offensive bits of vampire aren’t where they tell me my characters have to follow rules from Christian myth, it’s the pervasive element throughout where they’re constantly telling me the actual human that I and everyone else all follow the rules of Christian myth.

I could get down with holding crosses to burn ghouls, what’s intolerable is reading some Seattle illiterate pontificating on religions and philosophies when he obviously doesn’t know anything about anyone else’s nor even his own.

[Ancient History]

OSSR: Sins of the Blood

Appendix: A Conspiracy of Sinners


Let me tell you about the vampire campaign I'm in with my other friends...

AncientH

Serious question: has there ever been a White Wolf appendix which was worth the paper? Did you really expect some hidden exploit, some final revelation which would make the preceding 100+ pages actually worth it? What exactly do we hope for in this, waning of a particularly mediocre book?

More of the same.

Frank

20 pages and the concept is “some groups of vampires that other groups of vampires don't like.” And uh... if that seems like really thin gruel, it's because it's really thin gruel. There are ten groups described and really these are mostly rambling character studies of ten dudes. These dudes do not get stats.

I want to make it abundantly clear that you do not care about fucking any of these guys. Also, every one of them starts with the “thousands of years ago...” nonsense rather than telling you why you should care and then justifying that. So, there's a vampire setting up a cult that's taking over Carroll, Iowa (largest town in Carroll County, Iowa). There are some real estate development plans and also there are enough cultists that they control the county government. The entry starts:

The arrival of the Christian calendar's first century was supposedly significant because it marked the birth of Jesus Christ, and the formation of a novel religion based on compassion, faith and salvation.

I'm going to outsource my confused face to Marky Mark, because his is better than mine.

There is a lot to unpack here. Like, obviously there was no Christian calendar in the first century. So the Christian calendar's first century literally never arrived. It was invented in 525 CE and the birth of Jesus Christ was approximated by someone living in Scythia based on incomplete records. Even people who believe Jesus was a real person don't think he was born in 1 AD. But we're getting ahead of ourselves. The total inanity of that statement isn't the point.

The point is that you're supposed to be telling us about your vampire cult in Carroll, Iowa (largest town in Carroll County, Iowa) in 2001, and not giving us your fifth grade book report on the rise of monotheism two millennia earlier. Carroll, Iowa isn't even mentioned on the first page of this fucking thing, it doesn't get mentioned on the first text column of the next fucking page. So like, acceptable opening sentences might be:

• Something strange is afoot in Carroll, Iowa.
• Carroll, Iowa is the home of a growing new religious movement.
• Cyrus has big plans for Carroll, Iowa.

And sure, there might be some artistic reason why you want to have some other opening paragraph about how everything old is new again and small town America has as many people as Jerusalem did five hundred years ago. Or fucking whatever. But this is absolutely not the place for the author to spend an entire fucking page of text telling me about the independent rise of monotheism in Arab and Yoruba tribes. Because that shit is completely irrelevant and this is a fucking twenty page appendix. If the authors wanted to tells us about the contents of the books they read, there should have been a fucking bibliography with a paragraph or two summary. Not entire pages and even chapters given over to grade school book reports. It's like these assholes never took a college level English course and are treating this like a compulsory school assignment for children.

AncientH

Nominally, these are groups who are "outside" of Kindred society. But given how thin on the ground Kindred society is, that doesn't really mean much. Like quite literally, it's not like WW has ever pushed the idea that there are dozens of different vampire sects and communities out there, and the Camarilla and sabbat are just the biggest and most powerful so you're in there by default. You've got the Camarilla, the Sabbat, the Inconnu when they remember they exist, and the various independent Clans, and everything outside of that is Anarch or Autarkis or just doesn't fucking count somehow, like the Kindred of the Ebony Kingdom.

The Vampire writers did not want to have to reassess their basic political framework. They should, absolutely, have done that. But they did not.

The thing is, Clans kind of make sense when you're talking two thousand years ago. You've got individual bloodlines of vampires and they share blood so they use family as the hierarchy for how they organize themselves. It's not even complicated by marriage or adoption, because Vampires expressly can't do that shit (unless you're a Baali making apostates).

Sects start make sense a thousand years ago. Geography doesn't really mean shit to vampires, but in a period of rising interconnection between polities and increased organization of mortals, the idea of formalizing relations between Clans and setting up local governments to handle disputes and enforce a Masquerade becomes sensible and maybe inevitable. And because you're thousands of miles away and transportation is slow and dangerous and the places that vampires can actually settle to the point where that shit is necessary are few, evolution of vampire culture is going to be slow and develop along different lines. You don't send letters from the Camarilla of Europe to the Camarilla of America and expect to hear back in a matter of days or weeks; we're talking months or years.

Now it's the Modern Nights, and you can just fly to Africa. It's a long flight, but there are movies you can watch to pass the time. You can send an email to the vampires there.

Vampire was not good at adjusting its culture and politics to contemporary needs. It's not that the Camarilla being outdated and old-fashioned is bad in and of itself, but the younger vampires should absoltely be aware that there's a lot more to unlife than whatever shit your elders have been feeding you. Vampire books could have been like Shadowrun, where a bunch of youngbloods got together on SchreckNet to share info and gain a broader understanding of how vampire society works and more insight on the vampiric tradition.

Which really means that small "experiments" like these cults should have a much shorter shelf-life, if the Camarilla is enforcing the Masquerade. Because they know the signs and would stomp the shit out of these things post-haste. Maybe assemble and send a group of troubleshooters to do the dirty work...

Frank

The Serapis ex Machina require that the four vampire members other than Cyrus drink animal blood for fear that there aren't enough humans in Carroll, Iowa to sustain 5 whole vampires.

The Cold Man would watch groups for months before bursting in and eating everyone in an orgy of blood and moving on to watch a new group.

Both of these are bullshit.

A Vampire in Vampire: the Masquerade uses blood to rise every night, and thus the preferred means of feeding is to drink some blood every night. If they take the minimum amount to get them through the night, it's not fatal and if they have a large enough herd, they can rotate through. And no matter how much they feast at any given time, vampires in this setting can't store enough blood in their bodies to rise for even one month of nights. Most vampires can't make 3 weeks and the weakest generations can't make a week and a half. The Cold Man's supposed feeding plan before he set up his current plot was completely ridiculous. He would have torporized himself with his very first scouting expedition.

Carroll, Iowa has ten thousand people in it and the cult controls most of town. A vampire who drinks from a single victim twice a year hits less than two hundred people before the year ends and they can start over. Five vampires doing that needs just over nine hundred people – less than one tenth of the population of the bullshit podunk town they've taken over. White Wolf has always been real vague on how often you could safely feed from a single person, and it's possible that The Cold Man doesn't have enough people to feed off even now – but the vampires in Carroll, Iowa obviously do. If they run the whole town they can feed human blood to fifty vampires, maybe more.

The logistics of vampirism in Vampire: the Masquerade are bad. But the people writing actual books in the game line didn't understand what they were. They'd internalized the 1:100,000 ratio, but never understood that that was supposed to be a limit based on being able to disappear into the crowds – not an actual limit of how much human blood was available.


There is both too much and too little of this stuff to make any of these stories work.

AncientH

The Associates are a group of Infernalist lawyers who figured out that they could quite literally bargain with the devil...on behalf of their clients, of course. In large part, this kind of group is a "take that" at players who have always wanted to do the same thing, getting the most out of a demonic bargain for the least cost, gaining KewlNewPowerz and only having to set a church on fire or something. It's not exactly subtle and it's not exactly clever, but it's the kind of thing that could actually be a setting plot point...

...if they had come up with it about 10 years sooner and actually worked it and Dark Thaumaturgy and pacts more into the setting. As it is, it's a one-off group that never appears again. Like most of these.

The funny thing is, the 6th level power of Daimonion, the Baali signature discipline, just lets you get an investment "for free." Which is really what these guys are aiming for. If investments were actually things most players would want it would be interesting if they just re-structured Daimonion as buying appropriate investments at each dot level, using your knowledge of Infernal pacts and laws to keep your soul intact and "cheat" the devil. It would add a high degree of flexibility to the discipline and make it even more attractive for apostates.

But they did not do that.

Frank

When you deal with the Devil, you don't win.


This chapter wants you to know that the vampire lawyers who think they have a means to cheat the devil are wrong and the demons win in the end and everyone gets damned. What Jack Chick bullshit is this? Why can't some clever vampire lawyers “win” or just leave it ambiguous whether their complicated legalese works or not?

No church lady or god bothering book burner is ever going to look at this book and conclude that it isn't a hedonistic devil book to be banned, why bother putting the disclaimer in the fine print that the Satanists are wrong and the fundie Christians are right? None of the fundie Christians are even going to read the fine print. These writers are cowards, preemptively surrendering to cultural crusaders that would never accept that surrender.

The fine print might as well say that Phyllis Schlafly shot bees out of her vagina for all the fucking difference it makes. But this book bends over backwards to avoid offending Christians. It talks about burnings of the library at Alexandria that happen under Roman Jupiterists, and the burning under Muslim Caliph Omar – but the burnings that happened in between by Christian mobs get left out. Now normally I don't consider people failing to discuss the demolishing of the Serapheum at Alexandria by Christian mobs in 391 CE as being particularly noteworthy. I go most days without mentioning that event at all. But it's part of a pattern, and here it stands out as an act of craven submission.

AncientH

The Tapestry is a stupid gimmick where some ancient Koldunic ritual managed to micro-encode ancient magical books into the fingerprints of Tzimisce. No, really, it's that stupid.

Frank

Matters changes in 1978, when the FBI first used an argonlaser beam for fine fingerprint analysis

Some of these are so meandering that I actually lose track of what the thesis statement is even supposed to be. That thing about argon lasers is from a story about respawning manuscripts from the Library of Alexandria. I don't even know what the hell that has to do with anything. It goes on for a long time, and it's possible that there was even more ranting that might have been left on the cutting room floor. But I suspect the connection between these points was always fairly tenuous and as printed the experience of the reader is like unto channel surfing rather than reading a coherent narrative.

AncientH

The Questing Beast is a Golconda cult. You don't care. Nobody cared about the Children of Osiris, nobody cares about discount children of Osiris. Not being a vampire anymore is not a noble goal for a vampire game.

The Darwin Society believes in survival of the fittest. Like, literal social Darwinism as applied to vampires. That is totally a thing that some Victorian Age vampire probably would have done. Except they're playing up a kind of double life, pretending to be a Sabbat pack for six months of the year and a Camarilla coterie for the other six months.

Why. Move to someplace nobody gives a fuck about and stay there and the Camarilla and Sabbat will both leave you alone. Go to Arkansas. There are no vampires in Little Rock, except for one Ventrue that can only drink from inbred cattlefuckers. You'll get on fine.

Redline is a group of vampires that found out they are all subject to a Camarilla blood hunt, and have decided to band together for mutual protection. That sounds unlikely, but whatever. It's a criminal network for those marked for death by the Camarilla and who don't want to join the Sabbat. That's fine. Again, it's the type of group that makes sense if it exists much earlier and is explored in more depth. Here, it's mostly noise.

Thrill Kill Club are exactly what it says on the tin: bored vampires who are a little too sociopathic for their own good. They're the edgelords of edgelords.

...and that's it.

Frank

The biggest take home from this Appendix is that I do not want to take home anything from this Appendix.

AncientH

Which is about par for more White Wolf appendices. You could do an appendectomy on this book and nobody would notice. While there might be one or two half-decent ideas buried in rubbish, they are ideas that would need to be carefully polished and expanded on and worked into the setting to actually be usable. There's about six paragraphs of useful material in twenty pages.

And it's not as if there weren't models to steal from. Shadowrun has been writing up gangs and shit since day one, and even they tend to a standardized format with leaders, number of members, etc.

Frank

So you're writing a group right? You need to have a thesis statement. “Who are these people?” is a question you need to ask and answer right away. Do not tell me about a college group, do not tell me about a failed blood hunt in the early 20th century in New Orleans. And definitely don't tell me about courtroom dramas and argon lasers in the 1970s. Tell me who these people fucking are.

Now there are reasons to open in media res or lead with a tangentially related quote or do some full circle thing where you start in a surprising place, but none of these authors are skilled enoughto make any of that literary shit work. For these chucklefucks, every single first sentence should have been “The [$GROUPNAME] is a [$GROUPTYPE] that [$ACTIONTYPE].” No fucking exceptions.

And not to get too grumpy about it, but tell me in an organized way why the fuck I'm supposed to care. That could be a little bit at the end like “Five adventure seeds with the Questing Beast” or it could be an ironclad promise to go no more than three paragraphs without giving us a reason for the described group to be interacting with the player character vampires in the here and now.

Instead all of these groups are being described in chronological order starting decades or even centuries before any of the player characters were even born. None of that shit matters! If I'm looking to put a group into my Vampire game set in San Francisco or Chicago, don't make me read a page and a half to get to the part where it reveals that the group you're talking about now never leaves a rural county in Iowa that voted 2:1 for Donald Trump. That is a waste of my fucking time as a reader.

Before I get into the weeds of what some vampire asshole was doing during the Ford administration, I should be able to quickly find out whether the group has any chance of being remotely relevant for the chronicle we're playing in.

AncientH

Also, not to put a point on it, all of these groups are pretty fucking random. In an unfocused book, the groups read like they might have originally been written for specific chapters and then somebody decided they worked better stuck at the end. We don't get an impression that any of these groups fill particularly necessary slots - Redline, maybe, could be interesting as a kind of Camarilla-resistance that players might join or hunt depending on how the events of the chronicle go - but most of these are just fucking blah. They don't have much to do with Paths of Enlightenment or particularly diabolic blood magic (the Associates have possibilities, but they go unrealized).

Frank

Imagine for the moment that this book had documented a series of immortal society taboos. And then imagine that the appendix was about ten different groups that flaunted one or more of those taboos and then discussed the ramifications for human and vampire society of those rules being broken. You are now imagining a much better book and also too you are imagining a chapter that is much more relevant to that book.

The truth is, the groups in this Appendix aren't here for any particular reason. They don't tie in to any particular part of the book and are listed in no particular order. This isn't even alphabetical order, and the different groups don't start at the beginnings of pages. If for some reason you wanted to find something in particular in this chapter, good luck with that.

AncientH

I want to reiterate this appendix's worthlessness is symptomatic. This isn't the worst such appendix. All of the fucking splatbooks had these things, usually describing characters that would never be used or show up again, and when they did you usually regretted it. So it is here. This isn't an appendix because there was some last little thought that wouldn't fit anywhere else, but because...I don't fucking know. Because somebody was paid to write 20 more pages.

Frank

And that's the book. Even recalling that this book was forgettable and also bad, I am still astounded by how forgettable and also bad this book really is.

I don't think we'll bother with a formal wrap up, we'll just post answers to questions separately until conversation dies down. That's the ending this book deserves.

AncientH

Agreed. But I will say one final thing.

In 2003, two years after Sins of the Blood was published, White Wolf returned with Chaining the Beast. This was more focused on Paths of Enlightenment rather than blood magic or Sectarian sins. More than anything else, Chaining the Beast and the various Road books beg the question: what was the point? What need did Sins of the Blood fill?

The whole setting was definitely on a downhill run to Gehenna in 2004, and the 20th Anniversary Edition wouldn't see the light of day until 2011. So Sins of the Blood is in this weird space, ten years after the start of the game and 10 years before the reboot. And yet...it has almost no impact. Nobody picked up the threads from this book, no-one references it. It became forgotten and buried, one more pile of crap in the vast array of shit that White Wolf shoveled out as the setting burned itself out.

If anything, Sins of the Blood stands as an abject lesson in setting design about what can happen when your production schedule outstretches your plan. This was a book that tied into nothing, that nobody asked for or wanted, that is remembered only because of about twenty pages of Dark Thaumaturgy paths and blood magic rituals. It's filler, but not even good filler. Think of all the things you would rather have than the 120-odd pages in this book...and then wonder why they didn't do that.

[K]

This book is a good example of a filler book.

It ticks all the boxes: 1.) Some crunchy bits for the completionists to need to buy it, though not thought out as to how it's supposed to fit into the overall rules set 2.) A heavy focus on fiction and background that obviously won't be used in anyone's game because anyone can randomly write this shit, so they do that because your own shit smells better than someone else's 3.) Odds and ends from someone's campaign.

The death spiral of any RPG seems to be series of releases hitting these three things. Actually figuring out how to make fun games material that people want to play is hard, but you can totally make quarterly earnings by asking everyone to send you a zipped file labelled "campaign notes" from the hard drive on their old computer.

I mean, you could have written a chapter on how to write a Golconda campaign. You could have talked about pacing elements, sample encounters, important characters needed to tell that kind of story, ways to keep players interested and in the right mood, pitfalls and turnabouts, and then tossed in some hard mechanics to make it feel real to players.

But yeh, who wants to take responsibility for doing that? Your paycheck of $400 is not smaller if you just write 50,000 words of in-character fiction and some unusable rituals that featured once in a session you once ass-pulled, and you get the added benefit where no one can criticize you because you didn't actually make something.

[Username17]

The most obviously wrong thing about Humanity is that no one can agree what actions get you in trouble because the moral philosophy is so unexamined that the authors don't agree with or understand what they have written. The classic example of course is Theft. There's a level for petty theft and a level for grand theft, but if you actually gave any of the writers a trolley problem of whether it was worse to steal a thousand dollars from a billionaire who wouldn't notice or to steal a meal from a starving child, you know what they'd all answer.

So it isn't just that the descriptions are vague and bad, it's that the people who wrote them don't actually agree with what they wrote. The list of sins is an unexamined list - upon reflection it would be agreed that the framing and ordering isn't correct by the people who fucking made it.

And that's the issue that the Paths and Roads attempt to address. And they do a shit job of it because none of the rest of the paths are sufficiently well thought out to give a coherent explanation of what any of the restrictions mean or why they are in the order they are in.

But the much more fundamental issue is that humanity is all stick and it's a roleplaying prompt. Meaning that the entire system encourages you to not take actions. For a cooperative storytelling game, that's real bad. Humanity isn't something that encourages you to act humanely, it's something that discourages you from acting inhumanely. Which means the only thing it ever does is encourage players to not contribute to the story in a situation they would otherwise want to.

-Username17

[Whipstitch]

Yeah, I think the bluntest way to put it is that it's all of the bad parts of the alignment system and paladin strictures ported over to a game about playing a fucking vampire. The mind reels.

[Username17]

Sins of the Blood was proof if any was needed that Vampire: the Masquerade needed a reboot. That it needed a hard reboot. Not because the setting and rules had been weighed down by decisions I thought were stupid, but because the people actually writing he fucking thing couldn't tell stories that were consistent with their own setting and rules.

Many of the original declarations about the setting were total ass pulls - writers picking a umber or setting up a relationship between groups with no thought whatsoever of how that would (or even could) work in practice. Sins of the Blood came in at the 10 year mark and there was a lot of stuff that was simply incompatible with itself, let alone future stories and expansion people might actually want to do.

I'm not going to say I have the one true set of answers either. It's not my setting, and it's not up to me what kinds of stories people want to tell in it. But it's just indisputably true that the setting needed some fucking design work. Actually decide what kind of feeding schedules you want vampires to have. How many bodies is the vampire population supposed to be making? If Vampires can feed non-fatally, how many humans in the herd are needed to keep that up long term? Questions like that needed to be asked and answered, and then someone needed to go check real population figures and do some actual calculations to figure out acceptable ranges of vampire populations and blood consumption.

And that's just for the boring numerical mechanics of it all. The intangibles also needed to be worked out. Decide what kinds of vampires you want to emulate in your stories and see what kinds of powers and weaknesses you want them to have. If you want vampires who 'go feral' and live in the woods, they have to be able to sleep their days in the shade of a tree - because there factually aren't any hermetically sealed coffins in the forest. If you want vampires to feel like Bela Lugosi, they need to have access to mind control and bat transformation. And so on. The Dotmeister famously pointedly refused to do adequate genre research while making the original V:tM because he wanted his ideas to not be unduly influenced by what had been made before. Personally, I think that's dumb, but obviously ten actual years into the project that kind of virgin soul writing wasn't even possible. By 2001, the authors should definitely be familiar with the fiction they were supposed to be emulating - even if that was metafiction based on their own stories.

By the time Gehenna and nWoD came out, the Vampire community wasn't even mad. I mean, they were mad at what a shit show those actual products were, but not at the fact that they got put on the production schedule. Everyone understood that Vampire needed a hard reboot. That reality was reality, and the fans accepted it.

But the actual contents of Sins of the Blood were heavy foreshadowing that rebooting Vampire: the Masquerade was going to be a dumpster fire. Not because it was something that didn't need to be done, but because the people making it had no craft. They did no design work. They were bad at writing. Their ideas were bad. It's very weird to me that Sins of the Blood didn't result in Justin Achilli and Richard Thomas getting fired. The development and art direction on this book are unacceptable. And it's incomprehensible to me that apparently White Wolf did factually accept them and turn the people responsible loose rebooting the franchise they were so busily driving into the ground.

-Username17

[The Adventurer's Almanac]

Frank, how did you develop your design skills to this point? You always seem to know the most important questions to ask when making a game, even if the pooch has already long been screwed. Years of experience? Rubbing two brain cells together? Obsessive compulsion to make every RPG better? Fury at the thought that shitty hacks get paid to do it when you can do it better for free?

[Username17]

So there's a thing that still really weirds me out about Chapter 3: the upfront admission of plagiarism.

This book doesn't have a bibliography. It doesn't have a list of movies and books it thinks you should read. So when the book tells you about stuff that has come up in the author's research or that the author has read, that would be plagiarized unless there's an attribution. And there is of course no attribution. This book very explicitly uses the first person singular when there are five hack authors and a developer. Who is the 'I' in that? Whoever they are, they just flatly admit that they are using other work without attribution.

It's weird. It's actually kind of hard to commit ethical violations of writing standards while making a role playing game. Because you're converting all the text into an RPG. You can use other peoples' ideas, even other game systems so long as you just write it yourself. Using unattributed copy pasta is virtually the only way you can fuck this up. And then having one of the authors just come out and lead with the fact that that is literally exactly what they were doing is just fucking mind boggling.

-Username17

[Ancient History]

Frank, how did you develop your design skills to this point? You always seem to know the most important questions to ask when making a game, even if the pooch has already long been screwed. Years of experience? Rubbing two brain cells together? Obsessive compulsion to make every RPG better? Fury at the thought that shitty hacks get paid to do it when you can do it better for free?

Worth pointing out that both Frank and I were freelancers for roleplaying games and were paid real money ($) for our work

[Username17]

Yeah, for what it's worth, AncientHistory and I are "real" game designers. We don't do a lot of professional work at the moment, but that's because we have real white collar jobs and there aren't any companies hiring for projects that we respect at the moment. Not because we somehow aren't good enough for the industry.

To go back to the plagiarism thing, there don't seem to be any actual penalties for simply fucking up in this industry. Someone straight up admitted to plagiarism in the body of text of Sins of the Blood and not only did neither the editor nor the developer see fit to cut that shit out before it went to print, but no one got fired. It wasn't even an industry scandal. To give an even more extreme example: there is a White Wolf book from 1994 called "World of Darkness: Gypsies" and it is exactly as appallingly racist as you might imagine, and the author (Teeuwynn Woodruff) is still working in the industry twenty five years later. Seriously, you can literally write a book about the Romani people have a genetic predisposition for larceny magic and despite that being actual Blood Libel it doesn't get you an industry black ball. The guy who wrote "The Complete Book of Elves" (Colin McComb) still gets work in the industry. He even worked on a kickstarter project with getting him to officially apologize for that book, and the stretch goal was met and he still didn't fucking apologize, and he still works in the industry.

The only things you can actually be fired for in game design are failing to get your drafts in on time and being too difficult to work with. So subjecting one of the other freelancers on a project to racist abuse would probably cause you to crash out of the industry. But writing into your drafts terrible racist abuse simply isn't. I'm not sure if Shit Muffin has managed to make himself sufficiently radioactive with his off-the-page shenanigans (such as partner abuse), but it's certainly close. The fact that the game mechanics he wrote for 5th edition Vampire were unplayable edgelord bullshit isn't even part of the discussion of whether he should ever work again.

But back to us. Ancient History is an engineer. I'm a medical doctor. Looking at problems and tracing them down to microscopic failure points is what we literally do for a living every day. Applying even a fraction of that rigor to game design can be very insightful. Of course, we're also being compared to people who thought it was a good idea to publish The Infernals, and then keep giving chances to the people involved instead of sacking everyone; so we don't have to be that insightful to come off as fucking Galileo.

-Username17

[Josh_Kablack]

The flipside of that is that I never did credited work above playtests because in the late 90s and early aughts when I was gaming in circles with a lot of people being paid for work on Exalted and other more obscure RPGs. it was abundantly clear that I was earning a lot more than they were in my job of working the grill at a hoagie shop. I don't just mean that I had steady work, or could work more hours, or that I didn't have to wait months to get paid or that I wasn't running the risk of my employer going bankrupt before I got paid, nor that I didn't have to spend time hunting new gigs as a freelancer-. Those were all true, but the real dealbreaker was that making a buck or two more than minimum wage plus splitting the tip jar worked out to notably more earned *per hour of work done* than writing for White Wolf at a time when WW was paying writers more per word than any other rpg company....


As the saying goes: pay peanuts, get monkeys.

[The Adventurer's Almanac]

I've lurked here long enough to know that both of you are more "legitimate" RPG designers than the vast majority of people here, but I was wondering when the chicken became the egg, or vice versa. If I remember correctly, weren't you guys making shit back in the 90's, before either of you had your current big boy jobs? That would imply to me a certain level of pre-existing acumen. Then again, it's not like I've read anything you guys made back then, so what do I know?

[Ancient History]

Can't speak for Frank, but I was a freelancer for Shadowrun from 2005 to 2010, mostly while I was at university, and did a couple little pieces for Call of Cthulhu and whatnot outside of that. Before that I was an A1-grade fanboy, websites and everything.

[The Adventurer's Almanac]

The line between fanboy and professional writer... sadly isn't that thick.

[Thaluikhain]

Only example of plagiarism being a problem I can think of was way back in the 90's/early 00's WD had a fluff piece about a Skaven assassin and the next month they had an apology saying it was from a freelance author and they didn't notice it was a lot like something another author (Terry Brooks?) had written.

Don't know if Brooks called them out or if they noticed it themselves.

[Username17]

So you want to reboot Vampire, right? I mean obviously you do, because Vampire used to be the biggest RPG on the market and the general consensus has been that it needs a hard reboot for long enough for that general consensus to vote and buy porn. There are an infinite number of different ways you could reboot it. I'm not your dad, and I don't own the setting. But there are a number of limits that you should keep in mind.

• Questions of the Masquerade.

You want the Earth of your Urban Fantasy to be at least superficially recognizable as Earth so that you can use the source material of actual history and hotel reviews and tourist guides and stuff rather than having to do location books for all 384 metropolitan areas in the US before you can use them.

Most obviously that means that however cool you might think it is, you can't do any "overt supernatural takeover" storylines. You can't have a section of New York called the Deadlight District. You can't have Hungary overthrown by Dracula reborn. And so on. More subtly, you can't have your setting depend crucially on people believing things they factually do not believe. So Mage's conceit that no one believes in the supernatural is right out, because actually factually a majority of people believe in the supernatural. An America where people didn't pray or perform luck rituals because everyone was a committed materialist would be totally unrecognizable - and the same would be true if you made any other sweeping statements like eliminating racism or whatever.

Once you've defined your mortal world in such a way that supernatural society is secret enough that you can do use Yelp reviews as source material, you have to define your supernatural society in such a way that it doesn't immediately reveal itself or call into question how it has managed to not reveal itself already. So first and most obviously, you can't have any teams that want to blow up the Masquerade, because obviously they would just do that, and have already done that. No Sabbat, no Traditions, nothing remotely like that. But also too you have to figure out your actuary tables. How many supernaturals are there? How many deaths do they cause? How many "normal" people need to be in on it? How many Renfields are there?

And this requires doing some math and also some research, which is something White Wolf authors actually bragged about not doing, which is why both the nWoD and V5 reboots were hot trash. And while you are doing this you have to plot out how much white space you have to fill in later. It's not that you can't leave Tanuki or Weresharks or something to be written later, but you have to leave space for them to be written in later or you can't have them at all.

Yes, there are 2.7 million deaths per year in America, but most of those are accounted for and most of those are old people that are decidedly unlike the sexy co-eds you probably imagine vampires going after. You have to go deep into the actuarial tables to figure out what kinds of death you can explain away as the work of secret supernatural crime and also too what categories of death you can increase (and by how much) without making the Earth unrecognizable. Remember that people perceive violence to be more common than it is, so there's room for your Urban Fantasy setting to be more dangerous than reality without feeling like it's incompatible.

And you also have to think about non-lethal victimization. How much is going on, and how much of it is being performed by supernaturals. Official stats claim that one in six women has been raped or the victim of an attempted rape, and there's good reason to think that number is low. If you think of vampires as rapists rather than serial killers it's totally plausible to imagine a world much like our own where it is a near statistical certainty that you know someone who has been fed on by a vampire at some point in their lives. But whichever way you go, you gotta look at real demographics and do real math.

• Questions of Emulation.

I don't think there are answers that are precisely categorizable as right or wrong when it comes to the question of what kinds of monsters and characters your game wants to emulate. But it has to actually emulate the ones it sets out to do.

So if you say you're doing Lost Boys vampires, they have to be able to fly. If you're doing Bela Lugosi vampires, they have to be able to cloud minds. And so on. Emulation takes a back seat to game balance, but only just. Obviously the vampires in Hellsing are much more powerful than the vampires in Buffy and if you wanted both in your game you'd presumably level the playing field be making one better or the other worse or some combination.

But there are limits to how powered down you can make things and have them be remotely recognizable. And V:tM clearly went too far with that. The feral vampires who can't sleep in the woods because the shade of a tree isn't enough to keep them from burning in the daytime. The fact that you couldn't even do the community theater version of Dracula means that people who want to play a vampire "like Dracula" will be totally disappointed no matter what kind of character they make. And so on. But precisely how much more powerful the characters are going to be than V:tM characters is a personal preferences thing. There's a pretty big range of acceptable answers

• Questions of Playability.

The intention is that you actually play this game. That means that when two players make characters the rules or setting should tell them they have to fight to the death. Less obviously but still true is that you can't spiral into unplayability through enacting core game mechanics. Like, you can't have shit like a Humanity score that makes you go insane and stop being playable for drinking blood in a game about vampires.

But in addition to simply avoiding all the many pitfalls that make games in general (and Vampire: the Masquerade in particular) unplayable, you also need handholds to actually play the game. That means that you want to structure some fucking adventures and create space for character archetypes. Decide what kinds of characters you're trying to support and make sure players can play those kinds of characters and contribute to group goals straight out of character generation.

-Username17

[Ancient History]

Going to add one here: Questions of Reusability

Basically, how much of the previous setting and/or mechanics do you re-use in the reboot? You need enough of the fan-favorite stuff so that the game is still recognizable, but keeping in mind that the old game was a kitchensink that kept piles of obvious crap on for years, you don't want to hang onto stuff just for the sake of sentimentality. Some grognards bitched that Vampire: the Requiem went too far in how much it scrapped, but the real gist is that it never went far enough. It isn't just that the Brujah or Ravnos were bad as written (which they obviously were), but they were bad from conception. It was piss poor prior planning followed up by a golden shower of failure to do anything useful or interesting with those concepts, and then people shook the last couple of drops out and called that the True Brujah.

So yeah, that's something to seriously consider. Do you want a clan of wizard vampires, and if so do you want them to be called the Tremere? Because the Tremere come with associated historical baggage at this point. There's something to be said for wiping a setting reasonably clean and starting from a fresh slate.

And this is different in regards to PC options versus NPC options. You could still have Pentex. Evil megacorporations are fucking faceless by definition. But the whole thing about Pentex would be that people would go into the game knowing they were evil, there'd be no big shocking reveal. You couldn't pull a Universal Brotherhood and pretend they were the nice guys of the setting for a few years and then pull the mask off and reveal the evil old rich guy underneath.

But how Pentex is evil, what their exact game and motivations and even backstory are, that can change. That's the beauty of a reboot. Instead of all that incremental shit, you can take all the good concepts from the game, distill them down, and rework them into a legit secret history that doesn't read like somebody's crackfic starring their favorite characters.

That kind of extends to every point of the game - a ground-up re-evaluation and re-think. Which is why a good reboot is so difficult.

[The Adventurer's Almanac]

That kind of extends to every point of the game - a ground-up re-evaluation and re-think. Which is why a good reboot is so difficult.

*furiously takes notes to apply to Pokemon*

[hyzmarca]

Yeah, I think the bluntest way to put it is that it's all of the bad parts of the alignment system and paladin strictures ported over to a game about playing a fucking vampire. The mind reels.

Well no, Paladin strictures are much better. Paladin strictures are at least a result of getting your magical powers from an organization that has rules. And the alignment system is at least vague enough that it doesn't matter beyond fluff and arbitrary magical effects.

Humanity is refined and distilled awfulness. Effort had to be taken to make it as bad as it is.

Paladins didn't have an hierarchy of sins. There is no 10 point scale defining how good or evil you are. It's a binary. You write one or the other on your character sheet and call it a day.

The 10 point scale is what makes Humanity bad. You could replace it with an actual copy-paste of D&D Alignment and it would be a thousand times better. Hell, I could do even better in five minutes. Two Axis scale, How you treat humans on one axis, how you treat other vampires on the second. That would let you have Louis, Lestat, and Blade all as playable characters with their own space on the chart.

The Core idea is that you're supposed to be playing Louis, not Lestat, because you're not ever supposed to have any fun is not unworkable, but it's not everyone's cup of tea.

But the 10 point scale and humanity roles make Humanty an Anti-roleplaying tool.

If you have a humanity 10 character and a humanity 1 character and for some reason you need to burn down a locked orphanage full of innocent children, who is going to do it? Roleplaying common sense tells us that the humanity 1 guy does it, but then he makes a roll and maybe degenerates into an NPC. Game mechanically the humanity 10 guy should do it, because he loses nothing. Thinking Selfish thoughts is the Humanity 10 sin, which means that if he even considers the possibility of letting his teammate take the humanity hit to preserve himself he'll take the humanity hit anyway. The saint commits crimes against humanity and makes a single roll to maybe get knocked down to slightly less of a saint.

The core problem is that the act comes first, then the humanity loss. But real people don't commit atrocities unless they're already the sort of people who commit atrocities (which in reality us a very large portion of the population given the right circumstances but I digress)

As far as Alignment works as a roleplaying tool, it works because you just put it on your character sheet and it informs how you're supposed to act (poorly, but I digress). For Humanity to be an effective roleplaying tool, you need to get rid of humanity rolls.

So you want to reboot Vampire, right? I mean obviously you do, because Vampire used to be the biggest RPG on the market and the general consensus has been that it needs a hard reboot for long enough for that general consensus to vote and buy porn.

I have to disagree on the need for a hard reboot, mainly because of the simple fact that Vampire's fluff, as terrible as it is in some places, is something that people are attached to. Not all the fluff, obviously. I think most people would be happy if no one ever talks about the True Black Hand ever again. But any Vampire revival will be mainly playing to the nostalgia of people who played the game in the 90s. Which means that a lot of it should be slashed and burned, but the parts that people actually remember should be kept when reasonable.

[Prak]

So, let's say you reboot Vampire for the modern night, with smartphones and Instagram and tiktok and everything.

As a podcast I'm listening to points out, people are terrible about keeping secrets. Eventually, some neonate is gonna livestream his sweet vampire powers, and the masquerade has to deal with that.

Obviously, one option is the After Sundown "the world is technologically more like the 80s than the modern day" thing. But if you want the world to be modern, what does vampire secrecy look like? I mean, I can def see a vampire or renfield debunker whose entire job is to discredit incriminating social media stuff, but I feel like that's insufficient.

[The Adventurer's Almanac]

The VIDF.

[Ancient History]

Maintaining the Masquerade gets progressively more difficult the closer the world gets to the panopticon. The only way it is still maintained is a combination of arguably massive conspiracy and/or something like the Veil in Werewolf, where the unawakened people don't process vampires - their memories re-write themselves so that instead of seeing a vampire, it was a mortal but depraved rapist, serial killer, chainsaw-wielding maniac, etc.

Alternately, you can severely restrict the number of vampires by restricting the Embrace to vampires with arbitrarily high Blood Potency. This eliminates some of the contemporary ideas of vampires as potentially viral, and kills a lot of the ideas involving random people getting Embraced, but if you're focused on keeping a firm control on the existing vampire population, a la Underworld, you need some combination of supreme controls...

...and even then, players will try to break it.

The whole idea of having a Masquerade to maintain suggests a lot of ideas for Chronicles - the PCs as a coterie could well be an elite group who are tasked with dealing with breaches of the Masquerade - but it's still objectively difficult to think around all the angles. You end up with a Men in Black or SCP-style Deus ex Machina where vampire technomancers use blood magic to break parts of the internet when they need to, a power which is horrible the harder you think through the potential implications - it's one thing to have a couple ghouls keep an eye on the vampire page of wikipedia to get rid of any edits that hit too close to the truth or hit any video on Youtube with a DCMA takedown, it's something else when the local Prince can turn off all the cameras in London or cause the names of the Clans to slowly erase themselves within 24 hours of being typed.

So yeah, anything set after the year 1999 is probably a Broken Masquerade scenario where at least some percentage of the population knows about vampires and vampire society, but most of them probably won't encounter one and might not recognize them if they do. Which has its own benefits, because then you get to do True Blood style shenanigans, if that's your thing.

I mean, people know that there's an extreme BDSM scene, but most people have no interest in that and really don't know or want to know about the more violent and illegal parts of that particular subculture, and only become aware of them when somebody dies or something and ends up on the five o'clock news - so imagine a real-life Eyes Wide Shut but in a world where Fifty Shades of Gray is still a runaway bestseller.

[Josh_Kablack]

"real vampire footage" nets me 14,200,000 hits on Google right now.

Here's an article from the fucking Smithsonian (which reads like an attempt to preserve the masquerade): https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-ne ... 180955877/

[Prak]

Yeah, actually, the "Vampire subculture" seems like a decent way to preserve the masquerade. I think I've said before, but it really seems like in the modern age, a tradition of misdirection seems to be more useful than flat out suppression and erasure of knowledge.