[OSSR]Kindred of the Ebony Kingdom

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Ancient History
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[OSSR]Kindred of the Ebony Kingdom

Post by Ancient History »

OSSR: Ebony Kingdom
Kindred of the

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Yes, we're really doing this.

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Fucking seriously?

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That's really in there? Well... fuck.
FrankT:

Africa is underrepresented in media, and in Role Playing Games even more so. Heck, even black people are underrepresented in role playing games, and they are a major demographic group in North America and Europe. Rectifying that is something that game companies should do. But it's hard. It's really hard to write things “about black people” in a way that isn't terribly offensive, in a way that it's not hard to write about Norwegians or Italians. That's not because there's something inherently racist about describing black people as black, but because you're always walking on the knife's edge of racism whenever you talk about a demographic group directly – it's just that no one gives a shit if you happen to say something racist about the British or the Dutch. Those people have power and privilege, and no one is worried that you saying racist things about Belgians is going to lead to real Flems and Walonians being deprived of their voting rights or lynched. Racist stereotypes are often repeated because there is an element of truth to them. Racist jokes are funny. But racism that is directed against powerless minorities can be very hurtful. In extreme cases, it can cause the deaths of millions of people.

Kindred of the Ebony Kingdom is a 203 page book dedicated to expanding Vampire: the Masquerade into Africa. That is a noble goal, and something which White Wolf honestly should have done nearly ten years earlier, rather than pooping it out in 2003 right before closing up shop on the World of Darkness and walking away. But it's also obviously a mine field. We are talking about a book which by its very nature is discussing stereotypes about some of the most disadvantaged people on Earth, and it would take a book of great craft and subtlety to walk that line without veering into the realm of the profoundly insulting. And it may not surprise you that this is not such a book.
AncientH:

Kindred of the Ebony Kingdom was at least inspired by Kindred of the East, but without the anime flavoring; the results are pretty much the same, with some notable exceptions. You see, neither of these Juanny-come-lately Kindred books were the first effort to write anything about Asia or Africa, but whereas Kindred of the East retconned all the terrible vaguely-racist gobbledygook about the "mystical Far East" with brand new vaguely-racist crap, Kindred of the Ebony Kingdom tried, in a small way, to incorporate the material that had been written on Africa in oWoD to this point - which is to say, not much, and not well.

The main issue was probably the Laibon in Vampire: the Dark Ages. This was supposed to be a single bloodline which basically covered all sub-Saharan vampires from Africa. This sounds a little complicated because obviously they already had the Assamites and Followers of Set and Children of Osiris, so that essentially covered Middle Eastern/Egyptian/North African/Islamic vampires; different sourcebooks here or there talked about various European vampires with interests in Africa, like the Ghiberti family of the Giovanni clan...

...terrible aside here; despite being a massively huge continent with the greatest diversity of physical types among humanity and many different cultures, in oWoD the entire continent had a single afterlife called the Bush of Ghosts or Dark Kingdom of Ivory (while Egypt got two); the major distinguishing characteristics of the Bush of Ghosts are that the local wraiths had quadripartite souls that were funky to manipulate with Necromancy, and of course when animals died there they left talking wraiths too. Which is just weird. But I digress.

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No, seriously, the Japanese did it first.

The main take-away here is that Africa is a big place. Huge. It's culturally and ethnically diverse, and pretty much the only thing Americans learn about it is that brown people come from there, and it was exploited by Europeans for a couple of centuries in terms of setting up colonies and taking slaves from there and everything. It's also probably the cradle of the human race, since the Out of Africa theory is still pretty current. So you could plausibly have a lot of weird supernatural shit happening in Africa, and you could make a lot out of that just based on native beliefs.

But then, vampires - classical vampires - Dracula, basically - is a European concept. And attempts to marry the classical European vampire myth with Africa has traditionally not been anything less than exploitative...

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...and this would be no different.

(Ironically, when Anne Rice finally included a token black vampire in her novels, she made him cool and with a kind of golden glow. But then the Queen of the Damned burnt him to a crisp. But they got Ayesha to play the Queen in...y'know what, this is not a constructive strain of thought. So, moving on.)
FrankT:

Kindred of the Ebony Kingdom has nine people writing in it. Six of them are credited as having “written” this book, while the other three produced “additional material.” Now, we see some repeat offenders and known chucklefucks like Ari Marmell and Justin Achilli on this list, but I don't think any of these people are black. Now, I am definitely not saying that you have to be black to write about black people. I also don't think you have to be named Sven to write about vikings or have an epicanthal fold to write about kung fu. But let's be real here: white people say offensive shit about black people all the time, and for a project this large and having this many white people contributing, it really would have been nice to pass everything in front of a genuine black person so that he or she could say “Are you out of your damned mind?!” from time to time to try to put a hard cap on how offensive the final product was. I don't think anything like that happened. Now, at least one of the white people on this project has apparently lived in Africa in real life. But considering the other white people I met while I was living in Africa, I can say with confidence that this is not any particular indicator of racial sensitivity (or lack thereof, to be fair).

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It's important to remember that the ugly history of oppression of black people is a long and convoluted story with many horrible episodes in it, so there are things you can say about black people that are true or even seemingly complementary that have enough grim echoes to crimes of the past that it's still deeply insulting and offensive. Black people really do like fried chicken and watermelon. Because fried chicken and watermelon are delicious. But actually talking about black people and watermelon is right up there with talking about how Jews are good with money. It has to do with minstrel shows in the 1870s, and it's still offensive because the treatment of black people in that era was bad enough that we haven't forgotten.

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Believe me when I tell you this is not a google search you want to do. It goes to very dark corners of the internet.
AncientH:

It also needs be said that this is an American product developed primarily for an American audience, and Americans are a bit more race-conscious about the whole thing than some other countries. Which isn't to say Black British people or Black Germans or Beurs or whatnot don't have their own issues, but in America black racism was ensconced in law for several centuries and became a high-profile civil rights issue, which we're still dealing with in places like Alabama. So we might be slightly more sensitive to some parts of this book than our European or Australian or other readers.

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Context is important.

For example, the fact that the cover is purple is...uh...well, perhaps not the best choice.

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Yes, purple is traditionally the color of royalty. But it's also the color of grape soda, which in the American south is traditionally associated with black people, and...look, we might overanalyze a few things here. Be aware.
FrankT:

Unlike most White Wolf books of the period (or any period), Ebony Kingdom doesn't have a long rambling opening fiction piece. This is probably for the best, because those things had already gotten excessively decadent in 2003, and the last thing this book needs is another two dozen pages of some guy's King Solomon's Mines fanfic cluttering up the beginning. Instead we jump right in, with just 3 pages spared on a title page, a credits page, and a table of contents, we jump into chapter 1 on page 4. Well, that's what the ToC says anyway. Actually page 4 is a picture of a lady who is using hyena powers on some dude's floating feet. Or something. Chapter 1 really begins on page 5. Now, there are still some multi-page stories in illegible fonts, but they are later in the book. The first such doesn't happen until page 34, when there's a 4 page story in ALL CAPS that I can't read because it is too loud.

The entire book is 203 pages, and this isn't bullshit like Mummy, where a bunch of those pages are just black or something stupid. That's pretty much 203 pages filled with what is nominally content. We're well into White Wolf's shovelware phase, so the merit of some of that content is certainly up for debate. But it does exist. The book has 7 chapters and an appendix, so we're going to try to do it in four posts. But I'm guessing that we're going to end up doing it in five or six because there's a lot to be angry about.
AncientH:

Just to get this out of the way, yet the trimming and incidental art and fonts and whatnot are "tribal," like everybody in Africa lives in villages and hunts zebras for a living and shit.

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...so, yeah, this book by and large passes up vampires as elegant and cultured predators of the night.

Chapter 1: The Ebony Kingdom

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That explains so much.
FrankT:

So the first page of the first chapter is a little disclaimer about how the author is an unreliable narrator because go fuck yourself. It's supposed to sound deep and edgy about how the author doesn't give out the whole truth because truth is precious and shit, but it kind of comes across as “black people are untrustworthy” and that's a bit unfortunate. After some books like Dirty Secrets of the Black Hand were... poorly received, White Wolf often attempted to give themselves an easy out to retcon away new setting materials in case they went over with the fans like weaponized ebola, and this piece is a bit hamhanded even in that context.

This is the leadup to explaining that your narrator actually spent his formative years as a slave in the Americas and was turned into a creature of the night by an English vampire, and if this all seems like a fairly strange POV character to choose for a book that is nominally about Africa and not America or Europe, then um... yeah. It really does. There's no second shoe to drop here, the narrator explains that he doesn't really understand Africa and this book has put way more effort into setting up an eventual disavowal of all or part of this book than it has into hooking the reader. Our narrator is of course part of one of the African bloodlines, despite being not from Africa, and the explanation we get is: no explanation. I assume it has to do with different authors writing in different voices and then a half-assed story being written in at the beginning to explain how they were all really the same dude. I have no idea why they didn't use the framing technique of having the book be written by multiple people. It's so fucking obvious.

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Instead we kind of end up with the implication that all Blackulas are Blackulas regardless of background.

Box text in this book is handled with this horrible thing that I think is supposed to look like chalk on slate or something. The background of the box text is black with gray grainy shit in it to make it kinda look like rock or something. And then the text is white. It's horrible. Anyway, the reason I bring it up is because sometimes this book presents half a page or even an entire page of box text, because the typesetter doesn't know what box text is for. The entire page of page 6 is “boxed text” and it is fucking illegible. It's where they present you the information for “How to Use This Book,” which is probably the most ironic part of the book they possibly could have hidden inside a visual cypher.
AncientH:

There's a lot that doesn't get said in this section, so here's the gist:

1) Vampires in Africa are of the same kind as European Kindred, they're not like the Kuei-Jin of Kindred of the East or anything like that.

2) The African Vampires have their own clans/bloodlines called Legacies, which are related to/derived from the European clans, but most of which don't remember the connection because they've been developing differently for thousands of years.

Also, and this is worth mentioning, the implicit idea is that all vampires really do come from Caine, and so the European-based clans came first, and wandered into Africa later. This is emphasized by the fact that the average African vampire is supposed to be of higher generation than the average starting V:tM vampire. It really is marginalizing Africa's importance, and emphasizing the pro-Christian-origin-of-all-vampires deal.

3) The "Laibon" that wandered into Europe during the Dark Ages weren't a bloodline, they were just sub-Saharan African vampires, who use the term "laibon" to refer to themselves (but not white people vampires). (The word laibon is itself a Maasai word, so it makes practically no sense in this context.)

4) "The Ebony Kingdom" is what the African vampires cause Africa, which is sort of unfortunate, but is obviously inspired by the afterlife being called the "Dark Kingdom of Ivory." Ebony and ivory. Hilarious.

Like with many White Wolf books, there is no indication given as to why the author is writing this book or their intended audience.
FrankT:

Chapter 1 is forty pages long, and is in a “jumble of random stuff” format. There's an essay about a group, then there's a story, then there's some wiki facts, then there's another essay about a different group, and so on for the whole chapter. There's just one page given for stats on various African countries, and they are on one of those illegible box text backgrounds this book uses – and you literally only get the numbers off the charts they presumably copied out of wikipedia or some old book, not the all important explanation of what the numbers mean. By simple division I was able to figure out that the GDP per capita numbers were 1,000,000 times different than the Gross Domestic Product numbers (for the handful that I checked), but I still have no idea if those numbers are supposed to be in nominal dollars, purchase price parity dollars, local currencies, or IMF
SpDRs. Area and density are in miles rather than kilometers according to the text. The chart is in no way useful, which itself has a disclaimer:
Kindred of the Ebony Kingdom wrote:
What This Book Is and Isn't

Kindred of the Ebony Kingdom doesn't pretend to be a travelogue or history of Africa. Rather, it is an expansion of the Vampire setting into a portion of the world that has remained unexamined thus far. Such being the case, you're going to want to do some research of your own when planning ot playing a Vampire chronicle set in Africa. We have only so many pages to use in this book, and we're not ashamed to say we're not going to devote too many of them to reprinting material you would be able to find elsewhere. Take a trip to the library, hit a search engine on the Web or talk to an expert to round out your African experience, or even as a preface, to see what ideas inspire you or resonate with you the most. This book will be here both before and after, so you'll be able to see how your newfound knowledge fits with the continent's vampiric population.
Run on sentences aside, this is not a bad sentiment to have. Although in this case I can't help feeling that the authors are using it as a shield to hide behind while tacitly admitting that many of them didn't do any real research at all for this book and are basically talking out of their asses.

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Very little effort was used to make the different essays look like they weren't written separately by different authors. So... basically it looks like the first chapter is “all the stuff that didn't fit in the other chapters,” which is not a good sign considering this book also has a fucking appendix for that sort of thing.
AncientH:

Laibon society is predicated on illiteracy and lack of communication. That sounds terrible, and it is. The idea is that in any given location the eldest vampire is usually in charge, because they're the oldest, wisest, and most powerful; if you travel, you meet a bunch of strange people that don't know you and they won't believe you if you tell them how old and powerful you are. So Laibon society tends to have very little social or physical mobility.

This is interesting on a fucked-up kind of level. It's the kind of thing which only makes sense if disparate groups of vampires in the same legacy don't keep in contact and don't really have means or desire to keep in contact. I mean fuck, you could send off runners or something to carry messages. Use ghouls if you have to. Even if you keep most history to oral traditions, you'd think the appropriately old vampires would flex their supernatural muscles and prove who is boss.

There's also a weird rant where Laibon don't believe in pseudo-family structures like the V:tM Clans, but something closer to the cultural ties of Covenants in V:tR. I don't think it was intended to be a dry run, I think it was just meant to be another way in which Laibon were "alien" from other Cainites.

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Eddie Murphy doesn't know what the fuck you're talking about, he just wants to have fun.
FrankT:

Much of the first chapter is about giving new names to standard Vampire concepts. Because what Vampire really needed was more terminology confusion. So Bloodlines are called Legacies, Princes are called Magaji, Traditions are called Tenets, and so on. Domains are, thankfully, still called Domains. Terms are introduced out of order, where for example it tells you that historically a local Guruhi used to nominate all Magaji many pages before the Guruhi essay or even the entry in the lexicon where it unhelpfully tells you that Guruhi are “A legacy of vampires named after an evil Gambian god.”

Of course, World of Darkness already had a flavor of Vampires who are from Africa: the Followers of Set. I mean, they are from Egypt, which we classify as part of the Middle East or the Mediterranean, but it is physically on the African continent. Apparently the authors didn't notice that the back story of the Brujah says they are from Carthage, or perhaps they just happen to not know that Carthage is also in Africa. Regardless, the authors have figured out that Egypt is in Africa and thus feel compelled to talk about the church of Set. Here, the Setites are portrayed as being dedicated to rebuilding the great temple of Set in its original location to fulfill their prophecies and issue in a thousand years of darkness.

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Thanks, Morbo.

To be fair, this was one of the Setite plotlines from the old Setite Clanbook. It's just... it's never been a major plotline and it doesn't actually fit very well. Rebuilding the temple in its original location in order to fulfill prophecies and issue in a thousand years of darkness is actually a Christian plan. Yes, really. Just remember that when it comes to conservative Christians, everything is projection. They want to destroy the world by rebuilding their temple to fulfill prophecies to issue in a thousand years of darkness, so they kind of assume everyone else wants to do basically that as well. It's kind of weird. This book also contains eight new legacies, but they are not explained well here and the next chapter is devoted entirely to giving each legacy a whole lot more text and also some pictures and stuff, so we'll talk about the different legacies when we get there.
AncientH:

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If it makes you feel any better, after this book the various writers on oWoD continued to cram in random groups and bloodlines into Africa with no consideration for Kindred of the Ebony Kingdom whatsoever.

I have the sneaking suspicion that a lot of the thought put into this background on the society of Kindred of the Ebony Kingdom came out of a couple planning meetings that basically equated to Why the fuck haven't we heard of any of these vampires yet? Which is why the Laibon society is designed to be insular and largely immobile, with individual vampires tied to specific domains for fairly poor reasons and staying there in rigid undead hierarchies where high-generation vampires are the low men on the pyramid. Unlike in Europe where vampires moved between cities and different massive groups like the Camarilla and the Sabbat came together, in Africa...uh...things have pretty much been like they are for thousands of years, with domains growing and breaking apart, everything kept very internal, with only the rare Laibon wandering into Europe.

Which is unfortunate because it kind of reinforces the popular conceit that Africa failed to develop. Like all base beliefs there is a bit of truth in it - Africa didn't have an industrial revolution before Europe, and had a very different political and economic development. This doesn't mean Sub-Saharan Africa was undeveloped, but technologically it was behind Europe in weapons and transportation, and so faced some serious issues when White People arrived with cannons and rifles and big-ass ships.

I think I've mentioned it, but just to reiterate: the book borrows terminology left-and-right-handedly from cultures from all over Africa, with the typical White Wolf blindness to culture and context. So, zombies are "Zombu." Yeah.

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I take it back, bring back the vampire one-world culture.
FrankT:

The Ebony Kingdom has their own “Tenets” which work exactly like the Traditions of the Camarilla, but are written up differently. There's a lot of text here, but it's pretty much the same crap about keeping the masquerade and sires being responsible for their offspring and so on and so on. Maybe people who wrote for Vampire for a long time really wanted to be able to rewrite the Tradition list, or maybe they wanted to pretend that Blackula was a standalone game and felt they had to rehash all the argle bargle from the beginning of Masquerade. But I'm guessing the bottom line is that despite their earlier protestations that they have limited space, this is actually a paint-by-numbers shovelware project, and if they can fill nearly seven full pages with just a shallow rehash of the Traditions writeup from the basic book, they were going to do that. It seems like every time these things get repeated they get longer, but this isn't because there's more being said. It basically covered the same fucking ground in less wordcount back in Nightlife.

We also get a thing on the War of Ages, which is the Jyhad in Masquerade-speak. The thing is, this was a central theme in the original Masquerade, but never managed to be a thing that people who were actually playing the game really cared about. The slow motion war between the generations was of course, originally in there because Anne Rice, but they never gave any good reason for it to occur until nWoD (when they introduced the idea of Vampires with high enough blood potency having to feed on weaker Vampires because human blood no longer cut the mustard), but of course nWoD also failed to have a metaplot at all, so that never went anywhere either. But here we see Achilli giving another stab at presenting a writeup to make you care about the Jyhad. Spoiler: you do not care about the Jyhad.

If you were feeling extraordinarily charitable to the authors of this book, you might say that you were looking at the work of people who really loved Vampire and were trying to expand it into a new setting while keeping all the stuff in it that they loved. But... I really don't see it that way. This is shovelware regurgitation. Pieces from Masquerade are repeated not out of homage, evolution, or parody, but out of simple rote repetition. This is a cargo cult World of Darkness product. If Rein • Hagen had photocopied his butt on page 17 of Masquerade, we'd have a picture of Justin Achilli's taint in here.
AncientH:

There are nine Legacies in Africa. Which doesn't count any of the white-people clans, except when it does, and there's no talk of bloodlines or any of that crap. But the long story short is that one way or another all of the vampire clans have some presence on the Dark Continent. They probably could have squeezed the Kuei-Jin in through Indian immigrants in South Africa or something, but chose not to go that route.

Anyway, the major legacies are:

The Akunanse (based on Anansi, the spider trickster, related to the Gangrel).

The Followers of Set. Same as in the rest of the world.

The Guruhi. Act like the Ventrue, based on the Nosferatu.

The Ishtarri. Based on the Middle Eastern goddess Ishtar, so what the fuck are they doing in Africa? Based on the Toreador. Fuck, we're four clans in and they've stopped trying.

The Kinyonyi. Act like the Tremere, actually Ravnos. Not sure how any of these are even still alive since the clan is supposed to have eaten itself during the Week of Nightmares.

The Naglopers, based on some African legendary critter of the same name, basically the Tzimisce. If Prince Mamuwalde did exist, these would be his people.

The Osebo. Brujah, basically.

The Shango. Based off a West African warrior orija. Basically the Assamites. Which is weird, because you'd think that if the Followers of Set are the same clan, the same would go for the Assamites. Whatever.

The Xi Dundu. Reskinned Lasombra.

As you can see, some of these guys they flipped around traditional roles, and we'll talk about minor legacies and weaknesses and crap later, but for a lot of these they didn't even try to do anything interesting. Probably to emphasize that point, we're given the multi-page story of "How Cagn Earned the Wrath of the White Lion," which is basically how Cagn (intended to be Caine) became vulnerable to sunlight.
FrankT:

Kindred of the Ebony Kingdom wrote:Africa is a continent populated by several billion people.
Google wrote:Population of Africa in 2013: 1.111 Billion.
The section on Animism is extremely weird. The authors apparently believe that animism binds the lives of people throughout Africa in a way that nothing else does. This is basically incomprehensible because all traditional African faiths combined are only ten to twenty percent of the population of Africa, and not all traditional African religions are animist. I can't tell if this is incredibly racist or if the authors just lost tracks of zeroes somewhere and vastly overestimated the impact that animism has in Africa. Certainly, the section opens by mis-stating the population of Africa by about half the population of the entire fucking planet, so anything is possible.

And then of course it starts talking about how different people live in Africa, and it looks like it was taken from a colonialist manifesto from the 1820s. Discusses “the bush” and “the savages” who live in it. It's... wow. I mean, it's really bad. It's the kind of thing that you really needed to pass this by a real live black person so they could say:

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Lots of subtle racist shit would still get through I suppose, but really crazy crap like this rant about animism and traditional living would go into the circular file. So basically we got several layers to white people explaining Africa. You got shit like how there's a piece of box text that tells you about South African cudgels, except that it never tells you that you're talking about a Afrikaner word for a specifically South African object – just that it's an “African” word for an object used “in Africa.” Because I guess the country of South Africa is all of Africa, or at least close enough. So there's that sort of “Africa is not a country” type racist generalization. Like, a lot of it. But then there's this whole other level where it talks about Africans as if they were all jungle dwelling primitives with bones through their noses. It's embarrassing is what it is.
AncientH:

Seriously, read this bit and see if you can get through it without wincing:
In recent history, stone buildings have replaced much of the jungles, but the kine still display a ferociousness to rival the animals.
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Most of this crap focuses on West Africa, which is the part that Americans are most familiar with because that's where we got our slaves, and where Vodun and Santeria and Obeah get their African links from. Pygmies are mentioned. A long, weird rant is given over to how the creeping tide of civilization is taking over the villages and roads are ruining the traditional way of life of hunting game and keeping cows and dying from snake bite and malaria. For no explicable reason, a sidebar pops up giving us the stats for a kerrie a walking stick which is supposedly ubiquitous and traditional in Africa and can be used as a weapon. Why? It's a mystery.

Okay, so the LOOMING THREAT to the Laibon way of life isn't even the terror of roads, it's...Western vampires! Well, at least for a sentence or two. Then it goes right back to internal power struggles of old African vampires vs. young African vampires.
FrankT:

The final bit is a rant about how the Guruhi are the old power and are in a generational struggle with the Xi Dundu for control of various domains across Africa. This is probably an attempt to duplicate the relative success of the Ventrue and Brujah conflict in the original Masquerade book. The thing to note however is that this whole “young bloods versus ancient lords” thing is not a terribly good fit because all of these guys are Vampires. If you play a Xi Dundu, you play a recently turned Xi Dundu; and if you play a Guruhi, you play a a recently turned Guruhi. On the other side, if the Prince Magaji (or any other Storyteller penis extension character) is a Guruhi they will be hundreds of years old, and if they are a Xi Dundu... they will also be hundreds of years old. The metaphor of old bloodlines and inheritance and crap doesn't really hold up when the people involved don't actually die and it's just one dude holding on to power and wealth for however many decades or centuries. Every magaji is a usurper, because it's fucking Vampires.

But I guess we'll get into that a bit more next chapter when we start in on the Legacies.
AncientH:

I want to take a minute to talk about this thing:

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I don't know what this is. I know it is intended to be a symbol of the game, much like the ankh was long a symbol for vampire, since the ankh is an ancient and well-recognized symbol for life, and handily is somewhat dagger-shaped in certain incarnations.

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The source of many poorly-thought out tattoos.

The Kindred of the Ebony Kingdom thing is...I don't know. What the fuck IS that? It's meaningless, but kind of cross-shaped, but doesn't really look like anything except maybe the hunga munga from Buffy: the Vampire Slayer.

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It's just indicative of the issues this book has, and we're only through Chapter 1 so far. What the fuck is the point? What is going on? For fuck's sake, who thought this was a good idea?
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Post by TheFlatline »

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Guyr Adamantine
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Post by Guyr Adamantine »

Aw yiss. I was hoping this one was coming.
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Post by Lago PARANOIA »

Ancient History, FrankTrollman, please be sure to post lots of pictures of attractive black actors in skimpy clothes for this review.

You guys kind of fell down on the job for the Crusades, in that while you did post a couple of sexy pictures of half-naked knight women, you posted NO super-sexy pictures of Middle Eastern women. And I didn't see a single goddamn fucking flapper in your Call of Cthulhu review. So don't let Daddy Lago down this time. :sexface:
Josh Kablack wrote:Your freedom to make rulings up on the fly is in direct conflict with my freedom to interact with an internally consistent narrative. Your freedom to run/play a game without needing to understand a complex rule system is in direct conflict with my freedom to play a character whose abilities and flaws function as I intended within that ruleset. Your freedom to add and change rules in the middle of the game is in direct conflict with my ability to understand that rules system before I decided whether or not to join your game.

In short, your entire post is dismissive of not merely my intelligence, but my agency. And I don't mean agency as a player within one of your games, I mean my agency as a person. You do not want me to be informed when I make the fundamental decisions of deciding whether to join your game or buying your rules system.
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Post by Koumei »

Do they know about the honest-to-goodness cities found across the African continent? Like, are they aware Africa has some proper cities full of multi-story buildings, with electricity and people and electrified people and cars and all that other crazy shit?
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Post by phlapjackage »

Lago PARANOIA wrote:Ancient History, FrankTrollman, please be sure to post lots of pictures of attractive black actors in skimpy clothes for this review.
I was ashamed that most of my attention to this review focused on that picture of the Queen...until I read your post. Now I don't feel so alone (although still slightly ashamed). Thanks for that!
Koumei: and if I wanted that, I'd take some mescaline and run into the park after watching a documentary about wasps.
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MGuy: The point is to normalize 'my' point of view. How the fuck do you think civil rights occurred? You think things got this way because people sat down and fucking waited for public opinion to change?
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Post by Omegonthesane »

The First City was in the Middle East, and was where all the Antediluvians came from, so logically was the birthplace of all the clans.

While a sweep of the wiki sayeth that somewhat more than half the original thirteen got their first real stronghold in Europe, it may be worth noting.
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Post by hyzmarca »

This is the leadup to explaining that your narrator actually spent his formative years as a slave in the Americas and was turned into a creature of the night by an English vampire, and if this all seems like a fairly strange POV character to choose for a book that is nominally about Africa and not America or Europe, then um... yeah. It really does. There's no second shoe to drop here, the narrator explains that he doesn't really understand Africa and this book has put way more effort into setting up an eventual disavowal of all or part of this book than it has into hooking the reader. Our narrator is of course part of one of the African bloodlines, despite being not from Africa, and the explanation we get is: no explanation. I assume it has to do with different authors writing in different voices and then a half-assed story being written in at the beginning to explain how they were all really the same dude. I have no idea why they didn't use the framing technique of having the book be written by multiple people. It's so fucking obvious.
Since your bloodline is entirely dependent on who your vampire parent was and has very little to do with your location (except for the probability of meeting a suitable vampire parent) this makes sense. An English guy goes to Africa and gets Embraced by a local vampire, then he travels around and Embraces some other people.

Heck, there's no telling how many White Blackulas there are in the modern age of international travel.

(Unless of course the English Vampire that Embraced the Narrator is black, then its just vaguely racist.)

It is a shame that they so closely cleaved to the Vampire standard, though. They missed out on a chance to use some of the really bizarre vampire-like creatures in African folklore. Kind of like how Kindred of the East really missed out by making all of their vampires Jiangshi.
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Post by Username17 »

The English guy embraces him in Canada, so I'm not really sure where Blackula patient zero fits in.

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Post by name_here »

Technically, nothing says the English guy couldn't have been Embraced during the Crusades or something.
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Post by JigokuBosatsu »

FrankTrollman wrote: Blackula patient zero
Band name/song title alert.
Omegonthesane wrote:a glass armonica which causes a target city to have horrific nightmares that prevent sleep
JigokuBosatsu wrote:so a regular glass armonica?
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Post by Ancient History »

Ebony Kingdom Continued
Chapter 2: Legacies

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It doesn't get any less dumb later on.
AncientH:

Chapter 2 is LEGACIES! Now, you might have noticed that they already addressed the Legacies in brief in Chapter 1, but this is where they officially talk about the legacies with splash pages and shit, as they did in all the Vampire 3rd edition stuff and most splatbooks from Revised onwards.

Weirdly, this chapter starts off with a quotation from Things Fall Apart. Which I guess gets points for actual literary effort, since they didn't quote Tarzan or "Black Canaan" or something, but I still bet it's only because they couldn't find a suitable quote in "Cry, the Beloved Country."

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You have to admit, James Earl Jones would make an awesome vampire.

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Presence, Serpentis, sorcery...could well be a Follower of Set.
FrankT:

There are nine legacies in this chapter, each getting two pages (including some art and a fuck tonne of white space), the whole chapter is 20 pages because there's a mostly-empty title page with little tiny introductory text at the beginning and a full page of art at the end. This chapter is essentially the bare minimum amount of text required to technically fill this 20 page chapter.

These are “legacies” rather than “clans,” and we are told that they differ from the clans in that bloodline loyalty is a bigger thing and African Vampires don't work with their coterie against their legacy's interests. Which means that someone on the author team got a bug up their ass that people were playing Masquerade “wrong” by ignoring the clan-level rivalries in the interest of having an actual playable game where everyone in the coterie worked together. Putting an admonition to not make concessions to the playability of the fucking game in the chapter intro seems tone deaf even for White Wolf. Certainly not a good sign.
AncientH:

It also goes against the bit in chapter 1 where they emphasized that the Laibon don't go in for family relationships, so...y'know what, fuck it.

You've all seen these splatpages before, I'm sure, so you know the format. A lot of fluff, some quotes on how they feel about the other Legacies, and tacked on near the end the actual disciplines and weaknesses. The latter are actually more interesting than the former; the Legacies mostly use the same disciplines as regular flavor Vampire: the Masquerade, but some of the weaknesses are new and terrible.

The main highlight of these entries is that it takes some of the fundamental aspects of the traditional clans and reimagines their position in society; it's a bit like in high school if the football team and ballet switched places and everybody kept going as if nothing changed. So for example, the Akunanse are basically Gangrel, but instead of being lone hunters and undead kinfolk and Near Dark nomads that slowly gain bestial features as they lose to the Beast; they're traveling storytellers...that gain bestial features every 20 XP they gain, which is actually worse in every possible way.

The Akunanse also are called "Weavers," just to confuse the fuck out of any lingering Werewolf: the Apocalypse players.

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It doesn't help that the were-spiders of Werewolf also drink blood.
FrankT:

The nine Legacies of Ebony Kingdoms are:
LegacyDescriptionDisciplines
AkunanseUnplayable mutants with hideous spider faces.Animalism, Fortitude, Obscurica*
SetiteThe Followers of Set.Obfuscate, Presence, Serpentis
GuruhiLeader Vampires who get ugly when angry.Animalism, Potence, Presence
IshtarriHedonists and gluttons for mortal food somehow.Celerity, Fortitude, Presence
KinyonyiAnnoying hobo Vampires.Animalism, Fortitude, Chimerstry
NaglopersEvil and horrifying monsters.Animalism, Auspex, Vicissitude
OseboPack Vampires with poor self control.Auspex, Celerity, Potence
ShangoSorcerers who are more addicted to blood than most.Celerity, Obfuscate, Obscurica*
Xi DunduShadowy Vampires who want to take over.Dominate, Potence, Obtenebration

*: Not the actual name of their discipline, but the last thing you want is for the names of the stupid Ebony Kingdoms disciplines to be cluttering your brain.

Now you may have noticed that more than the Followers of Set are repeats. The Xi Dundu are Lasombra, the Naglopers are Tzimisce, and the Kinyonyi are Ravnos. The others have some amount of changes worked on them, and I suspect that the three direct expies are like that because the authors felt those clans were under used and they might as well just write them up straight. The Shango are Assamite Sorcerers with a rewritten discipline, and the Osebo are pretty much exactly the Brujah with Auspex instead of Presence. So it's not like the ones that aren't literal repeats are all that creative even so.
AncientH:

It gets worse when we get into the minor legacies. Also, the art in these books, while typical of White Wolf products of the period, is fairly terrible. The illustration for a Follower of Set is clearly an Indian snake-charmer in turban and loincloth. NOT ALL BROWN PEOPLE LOOK ALIKE, ASSHOLES!

Unsurprisingly, that illustration was done by Leif Jones, artist for our favorite NSFW piece of oWoD art of all time:
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Note I didn't say our favorite NSFW piece of White Wolf art of all time; Exalted holds THAT particular gem.
They're not all that bad, although Leif seems to forget that vampires have fangs every other picture.

The elephant in the room for all this is, of course, what the fuck the African Legacies think of (in no particular order):
* Non-African Vampire Clans
* Kindred of the East
* Other Supernaturals

It really is determined to be so fucking insular they don't want to spend the time to talk about...fucking...Silent Striders or Werecrocodiles or Mages or anything. Aargh.
FrankT:

Some of the clans have mechanics for their clan weaknesses and some do not. The Xi Dundu don't cast shadows, which doesn't need mechanics, but the Ishtarri are “addicted” to “mortal stuff” and apparently some of them get very fat. I have no idea how this is supposed to work, considering that they are still World of Darkness Vampires and as far as I know that means that they can't eat food and wouldn't get fat from it even if they did. So I guess that like the Nagaraja they have the ability to eat food? I dunno, it doesn't say.

When there actually are mechanics in here, it's not super helpful. They talk about variable target numbers as if that was a thing. I... don't know. This book isn't actually stand alone and is supposed to be played with Masquerade, which at the time of publication had been in its Revised Edition for five fucking years, during which it had gotten rid of variable target numbers altogether. Basically I don't think most of the authors of this book had ever read the then-current edition of the game, and were going off the 2nd edition – a core book which at that time was over a decade old.
AncientH:

Take every frightening rumor you've ever heard about Africa - cannibalism, bloody rituals, you name it - wrap it up inside humanoid form, and most likely you'll be staring into the face of one of the Naglopers.
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I didn't think it was possible, but White Wolf invented another n-word.

These guys are basically the Tzimsce, minus...uh...everything interesting and fun about monsters from the Carpathians. It also specifies that nobody in Africa knows the discipline of Protean, because the Naglopers need to bury themselves in the earth each day and Earth Meld would say them a lot of digging. That is bizarre. I mean, I could see there being no Thaumturgy or Koldunic Sorcery, but fucking Protean?

Several of the legacies are noted for, uh, being unorganized. Which rather defeats the purpose of having a Legacy to belong to, and also seems to directly contradict what they were saying about being a tight-knit society that won't cross their own. When your Legacy's ultimate goal is "Fuck it, whatever, look, stop bugging me, okay?" that does not help.
FrankT:

The art in this chapter is cartoonish. I don't have a huge problem with that sort of thing in general. However, when you're doing the “all black people all the time” book, doing all the art with people having big eyes and big hands and big lips starts to look a little bit racist.

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Actually a kind of bad ass picture, but when everything looks like that, it starts looking like you're drawing racist caricatures.

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Not a great pattern forming...

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Kinda starting to make me uncomfortable.
AncientH:

About seven of the nine Legacies are explicitly from West Africa, because quite fucking honestly it's the only part of Africa that the authors apparently think they know a god damn thing about. You'd think I'm lying, but I'm dead serious. Even the fucking Lasombra Xi Dundu "originated from the Congo, the very heart of darkness."

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...shit like that is everywhere throughout this chapter. It just highlights the general ignorance of the writers. And while we are on the subject I should add that it's really weird how complete far out of their Gothic Punk comfort zone the writers are. I mean, when you're talking about V:tM, there is a fairly strong focus on regular people that become vampires - gaming nerds, college students, truckers, bum fighters, prostitutes, IT people...the idea that these are urban people that live and interact in the modern world is just taken for granted. In Ebony Kingdom...not so much. It's much more like the Dark Ages supplement, where you're playing with some really large conceptual space between your current experience and your destination experience. It's less Gothic Punk than Shaft in Africa. There's no real talk here of...actual professions, cultures, societies.

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When Quentin Tarantino and Robert Rodriquez do a more believeable and sympathetic black vampire than you, you may be in trouble.

Chapter 3: Character Creation

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Well, it's certainly unfinished.
FrankT:

At 27 pages almost entirely filled with text, this is one of the longest character generation walkthroughs you will ever see in a White Wolf product. And that's even with the legacies having been put into the previous chapter and all the magic shit being dumped into the next.
This chapter assumes that you have at least some familiarity with Vampire: The Masquerade.
This is weird on a couple of levels. Firstly, this book is not in fact playable at all without Vampire: The Masquerade. It doesn't tell you what skills do or how to roll dice, this is an expansion book. You fucking need an actual copy of Masquerade to play this game, there is no “some familiarity” at any point. Secondly, despite having said that they still feel the need to prattle on at you about how you should choose a character concept and how the Storyteller should work with you on your character's backstory and integration into the chronicle and shit. You know, basic Storyteller Game shit that Masquerade already does.

If I was being charitable, I would say that we're looking at some authors who feel the need to impart some of their wisdom about how to keep a Vampire campaign from falling apart before it comes together. I am not in a charitable mood, so I kinda think that someone figured out that they could just rewrite the character generation boilerplate advice section and get paid by the word.
AncientH:

This chapter starts out with a quote from Andrew Bird's Case in POint. I've never seen a White Wolf produce give up all its fucks so quickly, it's almost impressive.

Also, very obviously whoever was writing these two chapters missed the fucking memo on how vampires work. I was scratching my head over references in the Legacies chapter to strong vampires being muscle-bound and fast vampires being lean and all that - because it's not how it works. In Vampire, you are as you were when you died. Stuck, frozen in that moment. That's half the fucking point of the game. But this chapter opens up with:
They are symbolic creatures; the bearers of divine warning set in flesh. Nothing lives inside a Laibon that is not stolen from mortals. Don't forget this. Whatever part of the soul is left, it swims in blood. Starve the monster, and the soul dries up. Gorge the monster, and the soul drowns.

In this way, Vampire creatures are allegorical, just like the vampire myths than inspire us. The fictional undead monster evoked by the game is dead on the character sheet. You give it life.
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No. NO NO NO NONO NONONO NONONONO.

<sigh> Okay, let us go over this again. In Vampire, the vampires are walking corpses. The game is not inspired by vampire myths, it is inspired by Gothic novels and Anne Rice's homoerotic horrors and vampire movies. It is explicitly that.

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And I think this explains in part why this book is so shit: the writers completely lost the fucking thread of the game they were making. Wrong system! Fuck the setting! Wrong concept! Symbolic vampires. For fuck's sake.
FrankT:

There's a disclaimer about how “Africa” is in fact really big and you probably can't do justice to the entire thing all at once. That's the kind of thing they should have mentioned earlier and probably even taken to heart themselves. Indeed, following this advice, they could have set the whole book in Lagos, and offhandedly mention that there was some other crazy shit in the rest of Africa as well. But maybe the authors couldn't read this advice, because it's hidden in chapter fucking 3 in one of this book's amazingly illegible text boxes.

Anyway, most of this is standard White Wolf chargen crap, even if it is amazingly padded and long winded. I mean seriously, after “Concept” there's a section on “Finding a Concept” that runs for another half a page and then another section called “Refining the Concept” that drags on for two more pages of dense scrawl. You still assign abilities and skills in dots in roughly the same amount .

You get to pick your Legacy off the list of nine in this book from the previous chapter. Elsewhere in the book it discusses other bloodlines and shit, but I guess you don't get to play with any of those. You also don't pick a sect. So you're automatically part of this Ebony Kingdom nonsense and don't get to be Camarilla or Sabbat. This is kida strange when you remember that the Followers of Set are themselves an actual Sect unto themselves, and you're allowed to play one. But you have to sign up for the Ebony Kingdom rules even if you're an all-Setite coterie because reasons.

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You especially don't get to be part of that one. Although Caine's Chosen is also an OSSR waiting to happen.
AncientH:

Like all White Wolf products, they add a useless fucking skill - in this case, Divine. Which covers Divination. Then it talks about Backgrounds. If I drank, this is worth a drink. Because you would think Backgrounds would be pretty generic across the game, and you would be wrong. For example, many paragraphs are spent telling us that Fame as depicted in Vampire: the Masquerade is "almost useless to the many Laibon who dwell in small communities or large cities with few meaningful media resources."

...yes, that's right, you just read that in Africa, being famous is different from being famous in, say, America.

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What, I can't have groupies?

Also, just to hammer home that vampires in the Ebony Kingdom suck worse than you, they start at 14th generation. Normal vampires in the Masquerade start at 13th generation. EK vampires actually need to invest in a point of Generation just to get to where privileged American vampires start out at.

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New backgrounds include "Artifact" and "Ancestor Spirit" and "Membership." The last covers being a member (or, at five points, leader) of a secret society in Africa. Which actually sounds kind of cool, because having a murder cult at your beck and call has got to be worth more than a couple points in Herd.

Then there are Reliquaries. Which sounds like it should be covered under "Artifacts," but is apparently different. It's an item tied to your mortal family or Legacy containing part of a dead person, which you imbue with blood points and then drink back at a later time to gain benefits. Sort of like a battery charged with awesome. I don't know how that's supposed to work, especially the five-point version where you can store up to 5 blood points in the thing, which is made from the remains of a Laibon (remember, vampires turn to ash when they experience True Death, so wtf?), and it gives you a one-dot boost in one legacy Discipline for one scene - even if you don't have the discipline in question.

Which could be awesome, and it could suck. For a relatively low-powered vampire campaign, it could be super-awesome - one dot in any given blood sorcery discipline means you can have one dot in any path in that discipline, or use any of its one-dot rituals. That could be awesome. Or you could have hit your generation cap in disciplines and it can't do shit for you. So there's that.
FrankT:

This book adds completely unplayable mechanics. I mean seriously, completely unplayable. African Vampires have these extra traits that limit their dicepools in various ways, and they can't add up to more than 10. One of them limits the dicepool on any test involving a discipline. Remember, dicepools are normally stat + skill in this game, and both stats and skills go up to 5 before specializations and bonuses. So when you institute a blanket cap on total dicepools that is around 5, that's a pretty huge kick in the nuts. Basically, African Vampires will never ever be any good at any disciplines that require an activation roll, which in turn means that they gravitate to disciplines that turn on automatically. And it gets better worse. Because those dicepool limiting things are actually like Humanity in that if you “sin” in various ways they go down (thus permanently fucking your dicepools even more). And the lists of sins are insane. You lose your magic powers for blaspheming against the gods or working for foreign companies.

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This is the actual logo of the Gazprom-Nigeria division. You can lose your magic powers by joining up with Nigaz.

And that's when we can objectively figure out what the mechanics do. Oftentimes we can't, because as previously noted this book insists that we are using it with the Vampire: The Masquerade book, but refuses to specify an edition. And a lot of the stuff in here is pretty clearly not compatible with the then-current edition. So it's pretty much unplayable, and I don't think people really played this thing. Which is probably for the best.
AncientH:

It actually gets worse; according to a little unreadable sidebox on page 86, your combine Orun and Aye scores are capped by generation - so not only do you start out at a higher generation than everybody else, and your dice are capped by unfeasible mechanics, but to improve that at all you basically need to commit diablerie. A lot.

Orun and Aye have their roots in the fact that African ghosts in Wraith had two extra attributes. I wish it was more complex than that and the fact that the designers felt the need to come up with unplayable new mechanics for each game.

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Seriously, you're better off arguing that you're a Caitiff and you fought for the French in WWII and you're not actually a Laibon.

Finally, however, we learn that all that symbolic crap they were spouting about the soul "drying out" in the opening bullshit monologue is actually represented in the game mechanics. Y'see, as a 14th generation vamp, you have 10 blood points, but you can only spend 8. If those run out, your body continues to feed on the next 2 blood points (in Vampire, you autospend a blood point when you awaken for the night). If that happens, your body starts to rot...and depending on your Orun/Aye scores, actually dry and flake out.

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I started to write a joke about lotion, and now I feel bad about it.
FrankT:

This book introduces a pile of extra merits and flaws and some new backgrounds and stuff. Most of them are terrible, but some of them manage to be terrible in a way that is simultaneously vaguely racist (see: Ancestor Spirit). Like all piles of new traits that don't follow established rules or protocols, some of them are kind of broken. If you get the “well marked” scars thingy, you get a free soak all the time, which as I understand it is kind of a big deal.

I genuinely have no idea whether these backgrounds, merits & flaws, and so on are supposed to be things you could take in a non-Ebony Kingdom game. Nor do I know which backgrounds and merits and flaws and shit from other World of Darkness products are supposed to be available in this book. You have to use other books to play this “game,” but the book does not tell you which other books.

Special call-out to the description of Fame, which is so tone deaf that it's hard to really talk about it:
Kindred of the Ebony Kingdom wrote:Fame is a funny notion in the Ebony Kingdom. The reaches of Fame described in Vampire: the Masquerade are almost useless to the many Laibon who dwell in small communities or large cities with few meaningful media resources.
That's just... wow. Apparently black people don't get TV or something. Honestly, when I was in Ghana, fucking everyone knew the big songs and the major movie stars. The fact that there aren't five hundred channels means that famous people are more famous, not less. And people see television and shit in restaurants and shit even if not in their homes. There's fucking electricity and radio and movies and crap. Lots of Africa may be underdeveloped, but it's not like people don't have culture. Fuck!

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This is Nigerian super model Oluchi. People do in fact know who she is.
AncientH:

My major issue with merits is that these are the things a vampire character should be able to pick up in-game. Most of them are at least as useful as a discipline, and even the fucking flavor text says that they're things that the vampire has learned after XX period of being undead, so what the fuck?

Most of these are unspectacular. Some are terrible. There's one where you gain extra benefits from Maasai blood-milk.
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Which is cow milk and cow blood, so I'm not sure how that's supposed to work for a lot of vampires. Although technically I guess you could combine Earth-Feeder with Milk-Fed and gain extra blood points from feeding on cows.

Arguably, some of these merits and flaws suck so bad that you shouldn't even be considered a vampire. For example, if you take Wretched Embrace (4-point flaw) and Fixed Generation (3-point flaw), you're basically just a really shitty ghoul. You can't have more than 7 dots worth of Disciplines (total), your Attributes can't go higher than 5, you can't create new vampires or blood bonds, and you can't increase your generation through diablerie. You're stuck as a 15th-generation vampire. But you can use those extra seven points to buy Milk-Fed and Earth-Feeder and Excellent Thirst, and basically survive as a nocturnal farmer that needs a frothy pink milkshake every couple of weeks.

What a horrifying thought.

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I'll take mine rare.
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Post by Nath »

Ancient History wrote:It also needs be said that this is an American product developed primarily for an American audience, and Americans are a bit more race-conscious about the whole thing than some other countries. Which isn't to say Black British people or Black Germans or Beurs or whatnot don't have their own issues, but in America black racism was ensconced in law for several centuries and became a high-profile civil rights issue, which we're still dealing with in places like Alabama. So we might be slightly more sensitive to some parts of this book than our European or Australian or other readers.
Just to clarify something here, "beur" or "rebeu" is French slang for Arabic and, by extension, Northern African people. Black people are colloquially called "black". That is, French use the English word "black" instead of French "noir" (though the term "renoi" is also in use).

Not that it changes anything to the prejudice faced by any of those population (which I think could adequately described as a mix of prejudice faced by black, latinos and muslims in the US).
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Re: [OSSR]Kindred of the Ebony Kingdom

Post by Whipstitch »

This is emphasized by the fact that the average African vampire is supposed to be of higher generation than the average starting V:tM vampire. It really is marginalizing Africa's importance, and emphasizing the pro-Christian-origin-of-all-vampires deal.
This bit has always astounded me. Africa and the Middle East have regions of astounding inequality, have played host to some of the oldest civilizations on the planet and on a meta-level this book came out super late in V:tM's lifecycle. Under such circumstances how do you feature a book on these regions without touting a few tremendously old vampires who wield some intense local influence? It could have been the WW equivalent of a high level campaign setting but nope, gotta keep up with the god botherin'. Christ, if you're going to make your book super racist it should at least be interesting.
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Post by Ancient History »

Nath wrote:Just to clarify something here, "beur" or "rebeu" is French slang for Arabic and, by extension, Northern African people. Black people are colloquially called "black". That is, French use the English word "black" instead of French "noir" (though the term "renoi" is also in use).

Not that it changes anything to the prejudice faced by any of those population (which I think could adequately described as a mix of prejudice faced by black, latinos and muslims in the US).
Good to know. Thanks NMath!
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Post by hyzmarca »

FrankTrollman wrote:The English guy embraces him in Canada, so I'm not really sure where Blackula patient zero fits in.

-Username17
Does it really matter? There are these big wooden things called ships. People use them to cross the ocean. Rich English aristocrat fancies himself the Great White Hunter, makes a trip to the the Dark Continent, and decides that he knows better than his guides when they tell him not to go to the place full of mysterious bloodless corpses. He comes back to England and becomes the reclusive Uncle who never goes out in the day and no one ever talks about. Then his favorite nephew draws the short staw to visit him and bam. Nephew goes to Canada to forge an unlife for himself away from his family. Or whatever.

Other possibilities: Slave Trader enslaves a Vampire, gets tables turned on him, gets Embraced and blood-bound as ironic punishment, eventually escapes the bond.

He could possibly be anyone. The thing is, The United Kingdom had a huge Empire. This included Canada. And, importantly for this subject, colonies in West Africa. There are, funnily enough, English people in those colonies. An Englishman in a West African colony being embraced by a West African vampire is perfectly reasonable. Him then taking a job in Canada is also reasonable.

The lack of vampires with iron teeth, though, is unforgivable.
Unsurprisingly, that illustration was done by Leif Jones, artist for our favorite NSFW piece of oWoD art of all time:
I'm at a loss as to what's actually happening in that picture. I mean, yeah, on the surface it appears to be a rather violent lesbian strapon rape in a public mens room but there are a lot of details that just don't add up.

First of all, they're all women, so why are then in a men's restroom?
Two, why the hell is the vampire wearing that outfit in public? You'd think it would attract a lot of attention anywhere and is likely to get her arrested anywhere outside a BDSM club.
Three, there's more blood on the floor than in the test tube. If you're going to collect blood from your rape victim's torn vagina then why not use one of those cardboard toilet seat inserts that they use to collect urine samples from women?
Four, Why is the vampire crying?
Five, Why don't any of the test tubes have stoppers? For that matter why the fuck aren't they vacuum sealed? For that matter, why use test tubes instead of plastic cups? And why the fuck use an antique glass syringe instead of a modern disposable one? Cleaning and sharpening reusable hypodermic needles is a pain in the ass.
Six, What the hell is the woman in the corner wearing on her face?

The more I look at that picture the more I'm convinced that all three of them are about to be kicked out of a BSDM club for being absurdly unhygienic.
Last edited by hyzmarca on Tue Feb 24, 2015 5:18 pm, edited 2 times in total.
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Post by Night Goat »

Note I didn't say our favorite NSFW piece of White Wolf art of all time; Exalted holds THAT particular gem.
I'll probably regret this, but out of morbid curiosity: what is your favorite NSFW piece of White Wolf art of all time?
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Post by Koumei »

I think that was the inclusive "our", referring to everyone. No, it is not optional, you have to consider it your "favourite".
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Post by Night Goat »

Okay, what is our favorite NSFW piece of White Wolf art?
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Post by Grek »

Exalted's Savant and Sorcery cover. Be fucking hold:
Image
NSFW, obviously.
Last edited by Grek on Fri Nov 07, 2014 8:37 am, edited 1 time in total.
Chamomile wrote:Grek is a national treasure.
Night Goat
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Post by Night Goat »

I'll be in my bunk.
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Post by Lago PARANOIA »

And here I thought our (royal our) favorite piece of Exalted art would've been either fursuit loli, naked woman ripping out her eyeballs, or rape ghosts. I'm glad that Cameltoe Girl beat out those ghastly entries.
Josh Kablack wrote:Your freedom to make rulings up on the fly is in direct conflict with my freedom to interact with an internally consistent narrative. Your freedom to run/play a game without needing to understand a complex rule system is in direct conflict with my freedom to play a character whose abilities and flaws function as I intended within that ruleset. Your freedom to add and change rules in the middle of the game is in direct conflict with my ability to understand that rules system before I decided whether or not to join your game.

In short, your entire post is dismissive of not merely my intelligence, but my agency. And I don't mean agency as a player within one of your games, I mean my agency as a person. You do not want me to be informed when I make the fundamental decisions of deciding whether to join your game or buying your rules system.
Grek
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Post by Grek »

It's the most offensive Exalted art that I can link to without breaking my state's child pornography laws, and therefore my "favourite" when it comes to pointing out how bad Exalted art is. Obviously, the one where the demons rape a 12 year old child is worse but I'm not exactly about to link to it or call it my "favourite" however ironically, am I?
Chamomile wrote:Grek is a national treasure.
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Ancient History
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Post by Ancient History »

And Grek remembers the winner. The Cameltoe o'Doom is more well-known, but actual child porn wins for "Where's the vodka, I need the last few minutes to not have happened."
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Post by Koumei »

And in the case of Cameltoe, it's full colour, and a lot of effort went into drawing it, regardless of what you might say about proportions and such (and I won't, because it still looks better than my art).

It could conceivably be used as wank fodder by a teenager. Statistically speaking, it probably has.
Count Arioch the 28th wrote:There is NOTHING better than lesbians. Lesbians make everything better.
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