Alt-white wolf?

[Kaelik]

But muh communist manifesto!

While different parts of the Communist Manifesto are of varying degrees of accuracy and relevance to the modern world, the Communist Manifesto never talks about implementing a dictator or any such shit, and in fact says:

We have seen above, that the first step in the revolution by the working class is to raise the proletariat to the position of ruling class to win the battle of democracy.

The proletariat will use its political supremacy to wrest, by degree, all capital from the bourgeoisie, to centralise all instruments of production in the hands of the State, i.e., of the proletariat organised as the ruling class[.]

So unless someone seriously wants to make the contention that "That dude Stalin" was the proletariat and won democracy by himself, it's a hard argument to make.

But even that just covers the initial structure, and then there's the whole "state fades away to produce communism, which is different from the communist party" part.

[infected slut princess]

Democracy and communism are pretty much the same thing.

[K]

If Vampire wanted to be edgy right now, they'd talk about how the first thing that people do when they become vampires is Blood Bond a rich person and pay off their students loans because capitalism is a fucking joke.

[DSMatticus]

The critical difference between the various ideologies of mass murder is you can't find very many people who will say in all seriousness that "Well, you know that true Nazism hasn't actually ever been tried."

You're being a fucking idiot.

No one who has ever said "what's communism's excuse for the USSR?" has ever said "what's capitalism's excuse for genociding Native Americans / enslaving black people / Japanese concentration camps?" It's a ridiculous dumbass double standard that refuses to think about the reasons things happen in favor of playing a rigged game of guilt by association in which only evidence you personally like is admissible. So China is communist because it calls itself communist regardless of what communism actually means, and therefore the things China does are evidence communism = bad. But China isn't a democracy even though it calls itself a democracy because duh obviously, and therefore the things it does are not evidence democracy = bad. And all that genocide and slavery the U.S. did isn't evidence that capitalism = bad, because no one thinks like that when it's about something that affects them - come on, simplistic reductionism is the thing I do to other people, you can't do it to me. That's not fair! I'm complicated and special! The whole debate sounds something like the fundamental attribution error. When it hits close to home, suddenly everything is complicated and nuanced and slavery is a complex problem resulting from a variety of factors in which the economic system of the colonies and the U.S. likely only played a small part... but everything bad that happens somewhere else has a three-word explanation; commies did it!

Of course, the real answer actually is surprisingly simple. The absence of democratic accountability kills people. It will kill people under a corporatist regime and it will kill people under a communist regime. Puerto Rico does not get to vote in our elections and the current U.S. government does not give a single shit about them and they are dying because of it. Governments have power, there are people who will want to leverage their power for their own benefit, if the mechanism by which the people remove the corrupt from power crumbles then people will die at the hands of that corruption. That is a topical example that I imagine hits close to home for the english-speaking world, what with it involving the U.S. but there are certainly worse things being done in the name of democracy and capitalism elsewhere in the world.

That is why the People's Republic of China looks the way it does and why countries operating the Nordic model look the way they do. The PRC doesn't have fair elections, and they are a "communist" nation that is heavily corporatized because corporatization was a way to bring in foreign investors and thereby aggregate wealth and power in the hands of the ruling political party (which is the only party allowed on the ballot, of course). The Nordic countries do have fair elections, and so they have de facto partial worker's control of the means of production through government intervention and politically empowered unions and people can vote to sabotage those things (and occasionally do) and their government doesn't make a habit of genociding political dissidents or ethnic minorities.

Which is, by the way, another reason why the "true communism hasn't actually ever been tried!!1!" strawman rings so pathetically hollow me - because you don't fucking hear that from communists/socialists/what the fuck ever. What you actually hear from communists/socialists/what the fuck ever is "Scandinavia, dipshit, ever heard of it?" You hear "true ____ hasn't actually ever been tried!!1!" from libertarians who are trying to explain away why deregulation always seems to make the world shittier and want the answer to be "because we just haven't deregulated enough! Even if the trend looks really, really bad, there's a magical utopia at the zero, I promise!"

It is honestly amazing how many right-wing criticisms of left-wing policy are straight-up 100% projection. "This is the flaw with my position, so in front of a microphone I should always scream loudly about how that's a flaw with my opponent's position." Next time you get stuck listening to diarrhea come out of a Republican politician's mouth, try it. Just do the basic test of identifying their complaint and seeing if it doesn't actually 100% apply to them. Trump bitching about fake news is a freebie, too easy, but it applies to basically everything else. Republicans just ran a bunch of attack ads about Democrats wanting to cut healthcare funding (Democrats don't, Republicans do, what a shocker).

[infected slut princess]

Scandinavia isn't "socialist" or "communist" though. It's "democratic socialism" or "social democracy" like Canada or Germany or even the US. Despite the hype, in many ways Scandinavian countries are more, shall we say, "market oriented" than the US. Also important is the fact that America has a stupidly big expensive empire to run and a massive crony defense industry that devours resources, while Sweden does not. The US could have a more generous welfare system if it did not spend so much on its empire and and the associated crony defense industry, and it wouldn't even have to raise taxes.

[OPG]

If Vampire wanted to be edgy right now, they'd talk about how the first thing that people do when they become vampires is Blood Bond a rich person and pay off their students loans because capitalism is a fucking joke.

It'd actually be pretty interesting if they had examples of shit like this that people would actually do, rather than what their fantasies would do.

[OgreBattle]

Today Chinese post online about how scandanavia is full of cucks getting raped by muslims, and get really steamed at europeans taking in arabs instead of their model minority selves as immigrants

[Omegonthesane]

If Vampire wanted to be edgy right now, they'd talk about how the first thing that people do when they become vampires is Blood Bond a rich person and pay off their students loans because capitalism is a fucking joke.

I suspect if that was taken to its logical conclusion you'd find that literally every rich person was already blood bonded to an elder so that the inequalities of the real world are repeated in the secret vampire conspiracy.

[Whipstitch]

That's pretty much the Ventrue and La Sombra gimmick, albeit the former leans towards capitalist robber barons and the latter is old money eurotrash. Which, you know, rather handily explains why they resent the shit out of each other.

[Ignimortis]

That's what I get for going off to work for days at a time. So much stuff to read through.

Oh, ffs. Russia was not fucked by the "extreme left." It was fucked by the usual selfish totalitarian fuckwads, who just happened to start by picking up a leftist ideology and selling it to the public as a means of control.

And extremist leftism is literally all about personal liberty. Or do you think anarchy is somewhere in the middle?

There isn't a well known road map from true far-left social democracy to Soviet Union With All The Bad Stuff Reborn - the USSR is certainly not famous for having once been democratic under Lenin before it went state capitalist under Stalin, and my suspicion is that this is because that didn't actually happen.

ETA: And most places that try socialism got fucked by the US military during the Cold War, because the US thought that poor people having food was an existential threat to Democracy(tm) instead of an opportunity to co-opt the appealing parts of Soviet rhetoric and thereby defang the appeal of Communism(tm).

Russia is a weird example. It had various governments that espoused leftist and rightist doctrines, but it's never been anything other than an authoritarian empire. You can set the timeline as far back as you like and even the horse nomads who used to ride across the northern steppes had an imperial and authoritarian clan structure.

There were a couple of major attempts to liberalize and democratize Russia in the 20th century, but those all met with failure. In every case some brutal strongman ended up winning the day and the secret police never stopped keeping dossiers on suspected subversives. Russia stopped having an explicit death penalty in 1996, but obviously the government continues to kill people just using extra-legal means. I don't think anyone thinks that government sponsored assassination is particularly better in practice than government sponsored judicial execution - but it is at least on paper more liberal to not have a death penalty.

I don't think you can find much evidence for Russian totalitarianism being a thing that happened "because of" left wing ideology. Russia had and has totalitarian governments of all nominal political affiliations left and right. You can't really put your finger on a point where people became less free by not being subjects of the Czar and becoming subjects of Stalinist dictatorship. It was a bad time all around, but the transition from monarchist dictatorship to nominally communist dictatorship isn't any more or less of a dictatorship.

-Username17

Yeah, the "extreme left" didn't fuck over Russia.

Russia experienced both super fucked up mass murder and also the greatest improvement of standard of living during the USSR, MUCH better improvements than they have experienced since the USSR ended.

The USSR made literally zero changes to actual political self determination and freedom in any direction and vastly improved standards of living at the cost of lots of murders. It's certainly not a success story to brag about, but basically the only argument that increased political deaths came from the "left" is that the left aspects of the government made the country a stronger more advanced country, and therefore better at killing it's own people. Which when you think about it, almost makes it sound like actually the left aspects didn't kill more people, and it was the dictator parts, the same parts that were killing people during the Tsar, and the same parts that have killed people since.

Also, if you are literally my age right now and living in Russia, you have in fact, suffered WAY more from the right than the left, since by any possible metric the "Left" hasn't oppressed you in any meaningful way politically, and the historical economic boons of the USSR are at minimum even, if not improvements over what you could argue you should have expected. Meanwhile, the right has both done 100% of the political oppression in your entire life, and also made the life of the average person economically WORSE when accounting for technological progress, since they have siphoned wealth out of the people and lowered standards of living for the poor for their own benefit.

But yeah, nothing about "increased democratic control over the economy" the thing that is extreme left, is responsible for a single bad thing that happened in Russia, and yet, that is the thing it means to be extreme left.

All valid points, I guess. So basically I mistake correlation with causation and take issue with political strongmen, who try to disguise their shit with ideology, because they, in general, liked to use leftist terms and scraps of ideology for their masks.

The USSR was the first country to fully criminalize rape, in 1922. The first two countries unaffiliated with the Soviets to do so were Sweden (1955) and Norway (1971). The USSR was already collapsing by the time the oh so enlightened moderate West started catching up. If you are old enough to get appreciably screwed by the Soviet Union, almost everywhere else was a nightmarish hellhole when you were born.

In conclusion, kindly go fuck yourself.

Ayup. USSR also improved literacy and living standards incredibly...which wasn't hard to do, since Tsarist Russia was a clusterfuck of two diametrically opposed societies with an enormous lower-class uneducated peasantry, who mostly tried to survive and few of them prospered, an incredibly small middle class that basically sabotaged itself, and an upper class that sucked balls as they almost always do.

I don't deny that USSR made some significant progress in the social sphere. However, all of this was done by the 70s at most. Two or three last decades of USSR were basically it slowly imploding upon itself, and what arrived at 1991 was already a wreck in many regards, except it took a rough plunge afterwards.

Scandinavia isn't "socialist" or "communist" though. It's "democratic socialism" or "social democracy" like Canada or Germany or even the US. Despite the hype, in many ways Scandinavian countries are more, shall we say, "market oriented" than the US. Also important is the fact that America has a stupidly big expensive empire to run and a massive crony defense industry that devours resources, while Sweden does not. The US could have a more generous welfare system if it did not spend so much on its empire and and the associated crony defense industry, and it wouldn't even have to raise taxes.

And the US wants to influence world politics, while Sweden doesn't care much, I think, apart from taking some part in blocs. If the US just said "y'know, fuck our ambitions and exerting influence, let's genuinely try to make our country the best in the world by working on our faults, not pushing everyone else down", they could do that. Funnily, Russia could do that too.

And then China would fuck us all over, I guess? Maybe not, but they could certainly try. So I don't think that anything could be as simple as that, because the world is full of assholes who want to be the top dog.

That's pretty much the Ventrue and La Sombra gimmick, albeit the former leans towards capitalist robber barons and the latter is old money eurotrash. Which, you know, rather handily explains why they resent the shit out of each other.

Ventrue follow political power in all of its' forms. That's why they have constant beef with Brujah — Ventrue are The Man as a clan, in all of those forms, from benevolent to self-serving to actively malevolent.

Meanwhile Lasombra are usually associated with religion in some form, which is why they always snipe at Ventrue - the traditional Catholic Christian church always had issues with worldly power of kings and not having as much themselves. Ventrue stopped being the military aristocracy of knights and warchiefs and shifted towards merchants and businessmen at about the same time as those institutions started to lose power in favour of wealth and owning as much shit as you can. Lasombra have a subset of nautically inclined Elders who engaged in piracy, perhaps as an extension of that conflict.

It's interesting to note that this doesn't happen for most other religions (even Orthodox Christianity), which usually twine themselves about their rulers if not enforce theocracy altogether.

[Username17]

Ventrue follow political power in all of its' forms. That's why they have constant beef with Brujah — Ventrue are The Man as a clan, in all of those forms, from benevolent to self-serving to actively malevolent.

Meanwhile Lasombra are usually associated with religion in some form, which is why they always snipe at Ventrue - the traditional Catholic Christian church always had issues with worldly power of kings and not having as much themselves. Ventrue stopped being the military aristocracy of knights and warchiefs and shifted towards merchants and businessmen at about the same time as those institutions started to lose power in favour of wealth and owning as much shit as you can. Lasombra have a subset of nautically inclined Elders who engaged in piracy, perhaps as an extension of that conflict.

It's interesting to note that this doesn't happen for most other religions (even Orthodox Christianity), which usually twine themselves about their rulers if not enforce theocracy altogether.

This kind of post-hoc mind caulking of Vampire history doesn't actually hold up to scrutiny very well. And the reason it doesn't is because the declarations about Vampire clan origins and interactions with historical figures don't actually make any sense and can't be made compatible even with significant mental gymnastics. Quite simply: the Vampire history rants were written by people who didn't really know very much history and also were written by people who weren't working very closely together.

So you have a lot of declarations that can't be squared easily or at all with actual history, a lot of things in history that would have been pretty important to the historical origins these Vampire groups supposedly have that aren't mentioned at all, and what few declarations of magic history there are often directly contradict each other. It's disappointing.

Ironically, that alone would have been an entirely acceptable premise on which to make a reboot. If they said "We're making a new edition, but this time we've got some people who actually read some fucking history books and the Camarilla is going to have a bit of fictional history to tie it into the actual history of the last thousand years or so." that would be a reason to do things. Being able to reasonably and explicably say what Camarilla policy might have been in the English Civil War or the Eighty Years War or the formation of the United Provinces of the Netherlands or the breakup of the Grand Duchy of Poland-Lithuania would be fairly valuable in a game about overthrowing immortal aristocrats.

The Ventrue in particular were associated with Rome. And political power. And yet, in the 20th century they are the "non-religious" branch of the aristocratic vampires. How? Why don't they own the Papacy? Given their supposed origins and location, how are they not all-in on the opiate of the masses? The ones with a strong religious background are the ones with a power base in Spain. Which, I grant that Spain is more Catholic than America today and that probably seemed like a reasonable thing to say, but honestly: What the actual fuck? Most of the Vampire history was spent with most of Europe being heavily Christianized, and specifically Catholic. The five hundred year anniversary of Martin Luther's door pamphleting was last year. Which means that any of the Euro-Clans that aren't all-in on the Catholic Church as a medium of power have done so relatively recently. This core reality of the fact that the modern world is only 2 centuries old and the Vampire political organizations are a lot older than that doesn't seem to have penetrated fucking anyone writing for White Wolf in the 90s.

NuNuWhite Wolf doesn't seem to think this is a problem, but it really really is. And without doing anything about it, there's not much reason to give a shit about their new edition.

-Username17

[Whipstitch]

Yeah, I was just taking a jab at the narcissism of small differences that characterizes the Lasombra and Ventrue PCs given that they were the closest Vampire ever came to palette swapping clans like a couple of Mortal Kombat ninjas. In practice running a Sabbat game often meant you get pushed around by Vampire Cardinal Richelieu instead of Vampire Daniel Plainview. At least until you find a way to set fire to their chateau, anyway.

[Thaluikhain]

Can you (sorta) get away with it if you say all the histories (and thus the associated problems) are in-universe written by different vampires of dubious accuracy? Of course that works better if that's decided on before they are written.

[Whipstitch]

People mind caulked things that way all the time and WW never really discouraged such behavior what with it meaning they got to do less work and more bullshitting. The biggest issue with the approach was that it still left figuring out what to veto up to the MC and there's no guarantee your average rando basement dweller can do a better job making sense of things than White Wolf did. Indeed, odds were rather against--TTRPGs are just a hobby and you couldn't interrupt the LARP to google 15th century politics on your smart phone back then even if you had wanted to. The problem is much more immediate than with other settings given that vampire PCs can start out fairly old and it only takes a dot or two of resources to start the game with Grandpa Munster in your contacts list. The fact that you don't know what information is real and which is fake is a pretty serious pain in the ass if you're the sort of person who genuinely wants to write a detailed backstory without consulting the MC at every turn.

[Username17]

Can you (sorta) get away with it if you say all the histories (and thus the associated problems) are in-universe written by different vampires of dubious accuracy? Of course that works better if that's decided on before they are written.

That solves exactly two problems:

• By having a "he said, she said" approach to major Vampire events in the past, you could potentially play campaigns set during those events which wouldn't be contradicting or contradicted by canon for the most part because there is a penumbra of facts that the game can fit into.
• By having each declarative statement about the setting have an unknown truth value, you can be really lazy about policing your world bible. Authors can write whatever they want to write and you don't have to enact strong editorial controls or brand management.

That's it. Those are the only problems that are solved. You'll note that absolutely none of those problems being solved are related to the difficulty of actually filling in the history or telling cooperative stories with consistent inputs. Because declaring your worldbuilding statements to be inherently unreliable does not help with those things and indeed makes them significantly worse.

If you have a half dozen versions of what went down at the Council of Thorns, it allows you to have a campaign set there and not have anything directly contradict your campaign. But it also means that if you want to put the Council of Thorns into your character's backstory it doesn't actually convey much information to other players.

Fundamentally, Vampire is a game about playing in the modern nights and facing off against opponents who are relics from an ancient past. But the ancient past was never really defined or engaged with in a satisfying or even coherent way, which meant that the supposedly important plot points about the Jyhad were just basically unusable.

-Username17

[Longes]

V5's art design is soooooo bad. Look at this picture. If you were just shown this picture with no context, would you ever be able to guess that these are vampires? That these are vampires living in 2018? That these are the vampires of clan Nosferatu?

[tussock]

Heh.

Bought the frock not even 20 years ago, in an op shop from someone's dead grandmother, because it looked like that fashion thing from the last magazine she read, in 1932.

It's not a bad modern vampire look. They're supposed to be a bit lost, not really understand anything, maybe let themselves go a bit, just been sleeping rough for ... a while, food's easy to get at. No, they don't have a social security number, used to, but not now, they check too well now. Just lay low, governments like this don't last, not more than a century or two anyway.

[Longes]

This isn't "let themselves go a bit." This is "Hunger Game fashionistas surviving in the post-apocalypse."

[nockermensch]

Is "washing" the clan Nosferatu new weakness, or something?

[Thaluikhain]

Those aren't bad, for Victorian steampunk monsters that aren't vampires. For modern day vampires in 2018...not so much.

[Username17]

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

In any case, they look like the kind of clip art that would appear in the cut scene of a Japanese dating sim or electronic card game. I could totally see those "Nosferatu" pictures sliding in and then have word balloons and minimal blink animation. As RPG art, they aren't very good. I mean, obviously it's better than something I personally could draw, because my artistic abilities aren't particularly great. It takes a lot of effort for me to make something that looks passable and highly detailed modern primitive hobo outfits are well beyond my capabilities.

Now perhaps a better question is why you would want your Nosferatu to dress like people from Zion. And honestly, I got absolutely nothing there. When I think of Nosferatu, the iconic image that comes to my mind is someone who's hairless. And these people all seem to have white people dreads. Even the bald guy has a hipster goatee, so he's not hairless, he's bald.


This is the iconic Nosferatu, and obviously everyone thinks of this when you say the word out loud.

And yet, obviously there's a whole Nordic LARP aesthetic of showing up in artfully mismatched hobo gear and viking dreads.


Like this, only usually less hot than this.

So my assumption is that this set of Nosferatu pictures are based on actual people who showed up to some Swedish Vampire LARP, and it wouldn't surprise me a bit if those 8 pictures were actually like 3 real people in different outfits. And as such, I regard this as just a continued confirmation of NuNuWhite Wolf crawling so far up their own ass that they can't see me and I can't see them. Nothing about this set of art says "Nosferatu" to me. It only says "Nosferatu" to people who are two decades invested in a Swedish Vampire LARP whose name I don't even know.

Now I'm not trying to be all grognardy about all this. The reality is that if Vampire is going to move forward in any way it has to be rebooted. And the branding has to be updated. A lot of the Masquerade clans and bloodlines are references to books and movies that are... no longer current. Vampire fiction has moved on a fucking lot since the early 90s, and you have Vampire Cyberpunk Action like Blade, Underworld, and Ultraviolet; you got a shit ton of supernatural romance like Twilight and True Blood, you got vampire deconstructions like Daybreakers, What We Do in the Shadows, and Buffy, you got Vampire Noir like Let The Right One In, Byzantium, and Only Lovers Left Alive. Vampire fiction exists in a post-Rice state, and has for literally decades. If a hypothetical college student were to pick up a new edition of Vampire: the Masquerade and try to relate any of the vampire types to any vampire fiction that has come out in their fucking lifetime, what are they going to find? Not very fucking much, to be honest.

I would say that it is an absolute requirement of any reboot of Vampire that wishes to be taken seriously to do a serious rethink of what Clans they have and what the intended powers and aesthetics of those clans should be. It's been said a thousand times that it's really hard to even conceive of a Toreador character who couldn't be a Brujah and couldn't be Ventrue with no changes at all. The Toreador Clan just doesn't have any unique conceptual space: there's no part of the Venn diagram of "artsy" that doesn't overlap with "revolutionary" and doesn't overlap with "sophisticated." It's just not a thing. But it's even more important that major works of vampire culture have happened in the last twenty five years that don't seem to have any place in the Masquerade universe. And for a kitchen sink vampire RPG, that's not actually acceptable. They'd need to rework the Ventrue so that they do the stuff the Volturi do in Twilight or the American Vampire League do in True Blood. They'd need to rework whatever hobo vampires they have so that they could work like the hobo vampires in Byzantium or Let The Right One In.

But reworking the Nosferatu so that they look more like Nordic cosplayers is just so... very... provincial. They literally might as well be telling me about their D&D campaign.

-Username17

[Mord]

Vampire #6 from Longes' post is this meme guy:

I never would have expected him to get Embraced, but I'm glad he did.

[hyzmarca]

The women look like Malkavians who having changed their clothes in 300 years. The men look like two homeless guys, Stark from Farscape, and joseph gordon-levitt Cobra Commander after being mugged and set on fire.

I supposed they have bad clothes to represent the fact that they can't just go out shopping. But really, they can just go out shopping, They have Obfuscate as a Clan discipline. And they're the computer Clan. They have Amazon.

[Chamomile]

It's even easier than that. Those people can go out shopping because their disfigurations are so subtle as to be easily passed off as the results of mundane injury, illness, or misfortune at birth. Frank has pointed out the clearly LARP-inspired origins of these Nosferatu, and one side effect of that is that they don't look like anything more hideous than what a reasonably talented amateur makeup artist can accomplish as a hobby. Some of them hint at more grotesque deformity by virtue of wearing masks, but notably none of them have the kind of deformity that would actually require a mask to cover up - because in the LARP, you can't look like this guy:

[hyzmarca]

because in the LARP, you can't look like this guy:

You say that only because you havn't done a Google image search for Bertram Tung Cosplay.

http://mitternachtcosplay.blogspot.com/ ... set-1.html

It is absolutely 100% possible to look like that guy at a LARP. It can be accomplished by talented amateur makeup artists doing it as a hobby.

There aren't many cosplayers for him because he isn't that popular, not because the makeup in insurmountably difficult.

If you look up Nosferatu Cosplay you'll get even better results and more of them.

Like this woman
https://www.deviantart.com/enerl/art/be ... -603852716

You can't even specifically say that it's a issue for Swedish LARPers. Because this person is Swedish.