[OSSR]Sins of the Blood

[Dean]

Contemporary repubs float so many active and insane conspiracy theories that I actually think it's easier to sell vampires not getting discovered by cell phone videos in the modern day.

Any actual human playing a Vampire reboot in 2020 would be in a world where media consumed by millions openly talk about how the Clintons had a pizza based child sex slave ring, chemicals are turning frogs gay, The Queen is a lizard, everyone's a lizard, etc. An alternate universe where millions of people were constantly consuming reports and making youtube vids about how every major democrat and billionaire was a vampire would be, I would argue, unnoticeable from the age we live in. That's something that would not surprise you to just actually find out in life was already happening.

[Username17]

I will say that maintaining a Masquerade turns out to be much easier than I thought it would be back in the early 2000s / late 90s. You don't have to convince everyone that vampires don't exist, you have to convince enough people that vampires aren't real that:

• The Earth is recognizable in your urban fantasy such that you can use the available source material for people, places, and events of Earth.
  and
• Nothing gets done about vampires either from government action or mass protests about government inaction to the vampire menace.

It turns out that more than 30% of people believe in ghosts and more than 20% of people believe in witches. Exact percentages vary depending on the exact phrasing of the question, but probably about a hundred million people in America believe that the dead walk under at least some circumstances and life just goes on as if that mostly is not the case.

You have thousands of people in Qanon convinced that Hillary Clinton eats babies. And again, society just kind of shrugs and moves on. On the flip side, Donald Trump has admitted to many crimes on national television and the media still treats the question of whether he should be impeached and removed from office as an open question. There are about five thousand people who publically admit to believing that they are themselves real vampires and no one seems to mind.

Contrary to what I thought growing up, getting the truth out doesn't cause everything to change. Similarly, having thousands or even millions of people believing a thing doesn't cause it to be acted upon. It's totally OK for people to go on national television and say "Vampires are real" because that actually happens on a regular basis and nothing changes.

Maintaining the masquerade isn't about keeping evidence or belief in vampires to zero, it's about keeping it in the penumbra of controversy where nothing is done about it. And that penumbra turns out to be surprisingly large as long as you have media complicity.

There are still things that vampires can't do. They can't massacre towns or murder public figures on live TV. But they can just have their own vampire cult where they tell their Renfields that they are immortal vampires. People actually do that right now and the apple cart doesn't get upset by that.

-Username17

[Thaluikhain]

Most obviously that means that however cool you might think it is, you can't do any "overt supernatural takeover" storylines.

Do you mean that you can't ever have the monsters attack Tokyo, or that you can't start out with monsters having attacked Tokyo? Cause, yeah, big change when they attack Tokyo, but you could put that towards the end of the campaign to spice things up and deal with consequences.

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.

Unless vampire are naturally better at secrecy for some reason.

It turns out that more than 30% of people believe in ghosts and more than 20% of people believe in witches. Exact percentages vary depending on the exact phrasing of the question, but probably about a hundred million people in America believe that the dead walk under at least some circumstances and life just goes on as if that mostly is not the case.

Well, in some sense, but I'd bet the majority of them would freak out if the dead walked past their living room. Lots of people believe things they don't particularly believe. Although that might be enough to hide vampires, yeah.

Anyway, I'd argue that whether or not vampires preying on people matters depends a lot on what people they are preying on. Society is quite happy to ignore mundane and horrific problems affecting various parts of society, as long as it's the right (or wrong) parts. If vampires are targeting a minority group you don't like, then you don't want to know about this problem and you don't want anyone else to either.

Though, that takes things from angsty emo rubbish horror to concrete social injustice horror at best, and would lead to people claiming various real massacres and injustices were secretly due to vampires at worst.

[Username17]

Do you mean that you can't ever have the monsters attack Tokyo, or that you can't start out with monsters having attacked Tokyo? Cause, yeah, big change when they attack Tokyo, but you could put that towards the end of the campaign to spice things up and deal with consequences.

So Nightlife had two districts of New York that were openly controlled by supernatural creatures. The Dead Light District and The Worm Holes. Whether that's a col story or not, it creates divergence from Earth history the very instant that happens.

Divergence from Earth history is fine for a campaign, but it's death for the setting, because from your point of divergence forward you can no longer use contemporary events. The moment the UN recognizes Arcadia or the European Union issues a condemnation of Lycanthropic terrorism, anything you read about current standings and events on Wikipedia will have diverged. If it's two weeks from the divergence, that's fine, but much more than that and you're doing Shadowrun style alternate history. Which is fine if that's something you want to do, but then you are writing Science Fiction rather than Urban Fantasy as such.

The Masquerade isn't a necessity for the vampires, it's a necessity for the genre. With no masquerade you're playing alt-history science fiction and with the masquerade you're playing Urban Fantasy. The difference is how reliably you can look up real world details about Carroll, Iowa and apply them to the game world if for some reason it becomes important on short notice.

The very moment the government has an official vampire policy - no matter what that policy is - you're out of the Urban Fantasy genre. You've become True Blood or Daybreakers instead of Vampire Diaries or Blade. But that still gives you a fair amount of leeway. I mean, The Lancet had an article in September of this year where they editorialized about vampires (as a metaphor for doctor/patient relationships). It's just you can't have government vampire policies or mass demonstrations demanding them. You can even have FOX News segments about vampires, you just have to keep vampire crimes from being the kind of celebrity crimes that Hannity rants about. It's fine for there to be peitions asking for the banning of vampires as long as they get hardly any signatures nd are probably jokes.

The point is not that your players can't impact the world in the stories they tell, but that he world being influenced should otherwise be recognizable and not need any 'location books' to tell you what French people eat and how the German government works and shit.

-Username17

[deaddmwalking]

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.

Your age 40+ demographic is never going to be seriously involved in LARPing again. You might as well make a setting that's accessible to a younger audience so old fogeys aren't telling them 'this is how it REALLY is'. The young people get a digestible amount of lore and the game caters to a new generation. Older players, especially tabletop, have to take it or leave it. You can enjoy the game as a meta-analysis of how immortal vampires would still march inevitably toward cultural irrelevance.

The very moment the government has an official vampire policy - no matter what that policy is - you're out of the Urban Fantasy genre. You've become True Blood or Daybreakers instead of Vampire Diaries or Blade. But that still gives you a fair amount of leeway. I mean, The Lancet had an article in September of this year where they editorialized about vampires (as a metaphor for doctor/patient relationships). It's just you can't have government vampire policies or mass demonstrations demanding them. You can even have FOX News segments about vampires, you just have to keep vampire crimes from being the kind of celebrity crimes that Hannity rants about. It's fine for there to be peitions asking for the banning of vampires as long as they get hardly any signatures nd are probably jokes.

You can have millions signing petitions as long as they think they're jokes like storming Area 51. Who is certain we don't have an official vampire policy right now? You actually can do a lot of stuff in the setting as long as it isn't universally known or it doesn't really change actions. Even among people who BELIEVE VAMPIRES ARE REAL, there are going to be a range of attitudes ranging from 'I wanna join them' to 'This is a serious problem and I'm going to stop protesting in front of Abortion clinics and start protesting in front of Blood Banks'.

[Username17]

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.

Having a hard reboot isn't the same as getting rid of all the stuff people liked. A hard reboot of Superman doesn't mean you don't have Lex Luthor, it means Lex Luthor is played by a different actor and written by a different author. After a hard reboot you might go from Gene Hackman Luthor to Social Network Luthor, but you'll probably have some Luthor.

It's like what Ancient History said about Questions of Reusability. There are elements of the old material that you can use as-is, there are elements you can use again after you scrub them off and rework some bits, there are elements you can reuse very small amounts of while basically mostly making something new, and there are elements that you should just fucking trash can and move the fuck on. And deciding what elements fit into what categories is not easy. A lot of the pre-reboot material has baggage, but a lot of it has fans.

One of the absolutely weirdest decisions of NWoD is that they decided that the Tremere and the Malkavians were going to be binned completely despite being the two most popular clans. Like, I understand arguments that they were bad, but Justin Achilli didn't seem to be making any of them. Genuinely I think he binned them because they were popular. NWoD spends a great deal of its time with Justin Achilli stamping his foot and shouting "Stop liking what I don't like!"

-Username17

[Ancient History]

A lot of it gets down to "Why" levels. Which is a rule of thumb for how many levels of "why" you can get to in explaining any given element of the setting. Most players don't get past about Y-3, which is fine.

For example:

Y1: "Why is the Camarilla?"

The clans of vampires got together to establish mutual rules of interaction and formalize their social hierarchy and rules of order.

Y2: "Why?"

Because otherwise they would eat each other.

Y3: "Why?"

Because vampires are innate predators and every other vampire is competition.


That's a long and formal way to go about it, and that's from an in game perspective, whereas a game design perspective would go something like:

Y1: "Why is the Camarilla?"

We need a default group for the player characters to belong to.

Y2: "Why?"

Because we need a vampire society for the vampires to interact with.

Y3: "Why?"

Because it is a multiplayer cooperative storytelling game.

The basic concept is: you need to interrogate your basic conceptions so that you can understand what you're core themes and approaches are. A lot of writers and game designers don't try to formalize this, they do it instinctually. Which can result in Shadowrun and it could result in FATAL.

And it's not always a case of "Am I overthinking this?" The point is to think about it just enough that the game setting is consistent. You can have lots of weird shit, malevolent green trapezoids or whatever, but you need something to work them into the setting.

[Username17]

Things do need to have in-world justifications and also too they need to have game design justifications. When they did the NWoD reboot, there was really neither. Ideally, there are some things that you're going to want from a game design standpoint which means that the in-world justifications are post-hoc; while other things you are going to want from a theme and narrative standpoint and the game justifications are going to be post hoc.

So for example: you want the player characters to be in a group that works very closely with each other because it's a cooperative storytelling game with ensemble protagonists played by different players. You need an in-world justification for Coteries because the structure of the game demands something like that. For an opposite example: you want the player characters to drink human blood because thematically the story is about frickin vampires, so you need a game mechanical justification for why the player characters will drink human blood.

Now coming up with in-world justifications for things is generally pretty easy. The Sabbat have a pretty simple-to-explain reason for why player character vampires are loyal to their packs. You don't necessarily have to go that ham fisted, but it does work. Of course, NWoD went with 'Predator's Taint,' which makes introducing a character to a potential coterie virtually impossible both mechanically and narratively. So that was a pretty weird decision. It's like no one gave any consideration to even the most basic conceits of the setting or the game.

Mechanical justifications are often more difficult because they are interacted with by players who don't necessarily have the same goals as the authors. Pig blood costs like $5 a liter and is total legal and safe to acquire in whatever quantities you want it in. Human blood costs $400 per liter and is highly regulated and tracked and quite difficult, dangerous, and illegal to procure. If there isn't some mechanical reason for players to have their characters drink human blood instead of animal blood, they probably won't do it. And if there isn't a mechanical ability to get that blood, the player characters are just going to fucking die. In NWoD they provided the blood potency mechanic whereby higher tier vampires needed human blood, but that's not a reason for starter vampires to not get buy on the five dollar swineshake diet instead. And of course, of the five clans on offer only the Ventrue had any particularly reliable means of getting human blood night after night (and even that required a specific set of discipline investment).

There are also more failure points to parts of the design that discuss player character limitations than player character advantages. Because there will be players actively looking for loopholes, you may in fact have to go more "Whys" deep for discussions of things players would like to get their character out of than for discussions of things players would like to get their character into. And because of this, rephrasing things as advantages rather than disadvantages can get players on board with mindcaulking things for you. So like, if instead of trying to fuck around with various cravings mechanics for persisting on pig blood you just gave people +1 Strength and healed at double speed if they've drunk some human blood in the last 24 hours, a lot of the questions of "How can I get out of this" would simply go away. Again, this is not a route that the NWoD design team attempted to exploit at all.

-Username17

[Libertad]

Do you mean that you can't ever have the monsters attack Tokyo, or that you can't start out with monsters having attacked Tokyo? Cause, yeah, big change when they attack Tokyo, but you could put that towards the end of the campaign to spice things up and deal with consequences.

So Nightlife had two districts of New York that were openly controlled by supernatural creatures. The Dead Light District and The Worm Holes. Whether that's a col story or not, it creates divergence from Earth history the very instant that happens.

Divergence from Earth history is fine for a campaign, but it's death for the setting, because from your point of divergence forward you can no longer use contemporary events. The moment the UN recognizes Arcadia or the European Union issues a condemnation of Lycanthropic terrorism, anything you read about current standings and events on Wikipedia will have diverged. If it's two weeks from the divergence, that's fine, but much more than that and you're doing Shadowrun style alternate history. Which is fine if that's something you want to do, but then you are writing Science Fiction rather than Urban Fantasy as such.

The Masquerade isn't a necessity for the vampires, it's a necessity for the genre. With no masquerade you're playing alt-history science fiction and with the masquerade you're playing Urban Fantasy. The difference is how reliably you can look up real world details about Carroll, Iowa and apply them to the game world if for some reason it becomes important on short notice.

The very moment the government has an official vampire policy - no matter what that policy is - you're out of the Urban Fantasy genre. You've become True Blood or Daybreakers instead of Vampire Diaries or Blade. But that still gives you a fair amount of leeway. I mean, The Lancet had an article in September of this year where they editorialized about vampires (as a metaphor for doctor/patient relationships). It's just you can't have government vampire policies or mass demonstrations demanding them. You can even have FOX News segments about vampires, you just have to keep vampire crimes from being the kind of celebrity crimes that Hannity rants about. It's fine for there to be peitions asking for the banning of vampires as long as they get hardly any signatures nd are probably jokes.

The point is not that your players can't impact the world in the stories they tell, but that he world being influenced should otherwise be recognizable and not need any 'location books' to tell you what French people eat and how the German government works and shit.

-Username17

I apologize if this has already been brought up in the thread, but when speaking with an oWoD loremaster they mentioned something to the effect of Washington DC being mass evacuated due to vampire gangs blowing up Congress or something. As a result, public order has more or less fallen apart.

Unless this was one of those "what if?" alternate campaign timelines, it kind of makes the "Final Death for biting people at a nightclub" either a.) not make sense given that at this point there's no Masquerade worth preserving or b.) the Camarilla going into overdrive and being overtly hostile for even the most minor infractions on account of trying to cover up a quite-possibly unrepairable fuck-up.

There have been times where I feel that many vampire (and other WoD) writers wanted something more akin to Urban Fantasy novels where certain stuff about the world is kind of known but an "open secret" taboo: kind of like how the US military is an imperialist war machine primarily interested in resource extraction for the benefit of corporate shareholders, that Medicare for All is a popular concept, or that systemic racism is a thing, but people in power use soft leverage to ensure that such reports get consigned to the back-end of Opinion columns instead of prime-time TV.

I could see a similar thing working for the World of Darkness where the average Janes and Joes on the street know that there's this creepy cult of blood sorcerers but nobody messes with them given that they can ruin your life and make you their ghoul slaves. Furthermore, politicians don't want the Camarilla Primogens withdrawing their super PAC donations for legislating against them.

One More Edit: I just remembered there was this Vampire LARP group with a social media page and a minor argument broke out when one of the Ventrue PCs penned an obituary for the death of David Koch, the "most exemplary of our number in modern nights." One of the Elysium higher-up PCs retorted that this was a false rumor, that the Koch Brothers were actually short-sighted, and their methods were against the Ventrue way or something or other.

I mean, if your Camarilla blue-bloods aren't corporate aristocrats, then what are they man?

[Prak]

I had to take a look at the White Wolf wiki, having not a ton of exposure to them specifically, but... yeah, I don't see anything in particular that's out of character for the Ventrue to be associated with the Kochs. Whether with David Koch as an actual Ventrue, or just liking the work of the Kochs or whatever. I mean, sure, you can easily say the Kochs are shortsighted, but the Ventrue would love the havoc they wreck on humanity and how it keeps humans from unifying.

That said, I'd kind of love to see a game where a Ventrue is also organizing Leftists, because the conflict still destabilizes human society and keeps them controlled, all the more so because they're being handed an organization that ostensibly fights against control.
(note- the above in no way makes any statements about my views on Leftist orgs, I just think it'd be an interesting set piece for a game)

[Username17]

I apologize if this has already been brought up in the thread, but when speaking with an oWoD loremaster they mentioned something to the effect of Washington DC being mass evacuated due to vampire gangs blowing up Congress or something. As a result, public order has more or less fallen apart.

To the best of my knowledge that is not a thing that happened in the normal Vampire continuity. It may have happened in either one of the "Final Nights" scenarios because they were all pointlessly incompatible and blew up the setting in various ways. It also may have happened in 5th edition, because no one reads 5th edition or cares what it has to say on any subject.

In short, it's entirely possible that some author ranted about public order disintegrating after vampires went to war with the US government in a book predicated on the World of Darkness ending in 2004. Because all that shit was lazy, hackish, and in no way even attempting to envision a persistently playable game world.

-Username17

[Prak]

Sounds like it might be some particular table's version of the Crucible of God Gehenna option. My table did a similar "vampires start an open war" story around that time, tho we were playing werewolves, so it was more of a "Welp, time to go burn some leeches" thing

[Thaluikhain]

Out of interest, where does the "1 in 100,000" number come from? Is that according to the official Camarilla census, or do you need 100,000 humans to hide one vampire in (assuming a certain society and technology level, because that'd vary a lot) or something?

Wouldn't it be better to drop that entirely, just give sample cities of x million that has about y vampires in it, and the ratios don't have to match? You need to be able to have the minimum number of humans to hide one vampire in (and that'd vary) because players will need to know that, but there's no reason to assume that's the ratio there is, and for everywhere.

[Username17]

Out of interest, where does the "1 in 100,000" number come from? Is that according to the official Camarilla census, or do you need 100,000 humans to hide one vampire in (assuming a certain society and technology level, because that'd vary a lot) or something?

Wouldn't it be better to drop that entirely, just give sample cities of x million that has about y vampires in it, and the ratios don't have to match? You need to be able to have the minimum number of humans to hide one vampire in (and that'd vary) because players will need to know that, but there's no reason to assume that's the ratio there is, and for everywhere.

The 1:100,000 ratio comes from omniscient setting description text from the first book. And it's been gospel ever since, but various different authors seemed to think it meant different stuff. At least one of the authors of Sins of the Blood thought that it meant that was the number of people it actually took to keep vampires going from like a blood ecology standpoint because they said so explicitly in the descriptions of vampire demographics changes in New York and in the description of the dumb synthetic cult in Carroll, Iowa.

Of course, the entire county that Carroll, Iowa is in barely has twenty thousand people in it, let alone five times that, and also too it's not remotely clear how that could be a problem with blood availability if you have entire clans that normally live in genuinely low population areas. Like, if there's anywhere at all that can support any Gangrel, you cannot also sell me on the idea that a city of two hundred thousand people like Gainesville (either Florida or Georgia, they are roughly the same size) doesn't have enough blood to go around for three vampires.

-Username17

[hyzmarca]

I mean, if your Camarilla blue-bloods aren't corporate aristocrats, then what are they man?

Feudal aristocrats who fondly misremember Primae Noctis as being as actual thing and think that liberal capitalism is a passing fad.

[Prak]

Since taking a look at the Baali book last week or so to see what the whole vagina bees thing was about, I've been thinking about what Satanic vampire principles might be like, and, specifically, the thought experiment of "ok, you're a Satanist, what does your first night as a Vampire look like?"

And that has me thinking- Would a "First Nights" chapter, with a paragraph or two of narrative for different characters of various philosophies be useful? So, like, "Ok, you're a christian and you just woke up with fangs, a neck wound, and craving for blood. Here's what that first 12 hours might look like" and then "That, but a Satanist," "That, but lapsed jew," etc.

If nothing else, it seems more interesting and useful than.... the entirety of Sins of the Blood.

[Ancient History]

Honestly sounds like philosophical wanking. Your first major hurdle coming to terms with being undead shouldn't be "What Would Jesus Think?" as much as "What are the realities of my undead existence?" and coming to terms with that. Because one of the things that should be a quick pick-up for a lot of neonates is that your vampire form has strengths (which you don't know how to use) and weaknesses (which you don't know how to avoid)

Surviving the first night requires doing shit like drinking some blood and finding someplace to sleep so you don't get exposed to sunlight, and while hunger might drive you to attack someone for the former, if you don't know about the latter you're 100% superfucked. And that's before getting into any clan-specific weaknesses or learning how to heal or anything like that.

So yeah, "you're a vampire" is a lot to swallow and how you square that with your human belief system is going to maybe take some time and effort to process, but pragmatically if you don't get the basics of unlife taken care of, that's not going to happen.

And there's going to be a non-zero number of new vampires who decide the whole drinking blood for eternity thing is shit and just suicide. Which is fine and maybe even a moral position, the good of the many outweighing that of the few...or the one.

[Username17]

The idea of discussing what it means to be a genuinely recently turned vampire seems pretty solid. White Wolf's few attempts at that were almost entirely confined to soft core pornography about characters actually being transformed. But of course questions like "how do you use your powers?" and "how do you survive the first couple of days?" are much more important than reading somebody's vore wank material.

Discussing the vagaries of how religious thought handles the existence of vampires is almost completely unimportant. Actual people generally don't use whatever religious views of their denomination to reason through problems. A Muslim man may discuss things with a Mullah if he's having a lot of doubts, but most of the choices he makes in his life will be made following his gut - as informed by his personal upbringing and the culture that actually surrounds him. If he listens to Bach, he will enjoy it because it's good and the fact that it was originally intended as Christian church music won't occur to him at all, and if someone brought it up he'd look at them like they were stupid. Whether or not any individual Mullahs think it's a gateway to apostasy or not doesn't matter, because it's not a thing a normal human would even have doubts about and it's not going to even come up in a conversation with a Mullah. And you can repeat all of that with a Catholic man, a priest, and the man's total lack of interest in the fact that Arabic numbers are originally Islamic.

You can see this quite clearly with Vampire: the Masquerade itself. The Dotmeister was a non-believer, but he grew up in a Lutheran household. The moral proclamations of the game aren't consistent with official Lutheran teachings about anything, but they also don't match the moral proclamations of any atheist philosophy you care to mention. Vampire: the Masquerade comes from the standpoint of secularized but mostly Christian moral values that are contradictory and unexamined. And most people have morality that is like that: fundamentally hypocritical and contradictory, with vague and broad ideas hammered in here and there from the dominant cultural gestalt and various snippets of religious philosophy that are partially remembered and partially adhered to in practice. A newly turned vampire's religious perspective is more informed by their region and class background than their nominal religious views. Because that's pretty much true of everyone in real life and there's no reason for it to be different for vampires.

Which is not to say that Vampire: the Masquerade didn't need a lot more thought put into the early days and nights of a vampire, or that such a deep dive wouldn't be valuable. Many movies like Lost Boys and Dracula feature the newly turned vampire as an important character, so what they do and don't do is really important if you want to tell those kinds of stories. Just for starters, the "sunlight death" thing is actually basically incompatible with vampires getting a start in unlife at all. There's very few places you could be where upon realizing that exposure to sunlight caused you to burn you could successfully get somewhere where the sun didn't reach you at all for the entire day before you burned to death. Places with zero sunlight are actually quite uncommon, and were even more uncommon in the days before refrigerators.

-Username17

[gator]

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.

HAHAHAHAHAhahahahaha...*sob*

[TheGreatEvilKing]

I'm really shocked that they didn't just come right out and say "our game is based on Christian mythology and using Christian themes." They pretty clearly had a "stereotypical vampire arc" where you get turned into a vampire, you are horrified by becoming a blood-drinking parasite, you are damned because exposure to sunlight destroys you, and you're desperately seeking redemption because you stuck your dick in a sexy lady and she stuck her fangs into you. The whole reason vampires are turned by crosses and sunlight and shit is because they're damned in the eyes of the Christian god and that seems to be what Vampire wanted to do.

This falls apart because it's a cooperative story-telling game and you can't really do a group redemption arc very well - before we get into the fact that redemption probably means the end of being able to contribute to challenges that need vampire powers and you have to roll a new character.

It would really make more sense as a one-off videogame than desperately trying to shoehorn it in as the default mode of play.

Granted, this board has done a really good job of convincing me to never play White Wolf games, so...

[Username17]

Vampire was never a 'Christian Game' in the sense of trying to sell a Christian message or tell a Christian story or get in on the Christian identity fraud grift. Vampire was always a Christian game in the sense that the perspective was inherently Christian and modern pop-culture Christian tropes and references were used liberally. So it's Christian in the sense that Devil May Cry is Christian, not Christian in the sense that Settlers of Canaan or Setlers of Zarahemla are Christian games.

When some of the authors of Gehenna got confused and actually tried to make a Christian parable out of the whole thing, no one liked it.

-Username17