[OSSR]Kindred of the Ebony Kingdom

[hyzmarca]

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.

So, exactly what everyone was going to do anyway?

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.

Hypothetically, you'd either make it hollow and pour the ash into it or mix the ask with some sort of other material, such as clay.

http://en.allexperts.com/q/Pottery-2316 ... h-clay.htm

Using vampire ash in your clay does seem like something that might have mystical significance.

You could also mix it with a binder and use it as paint.

Mixing it with gemi-molten glass is also possible, if you're a glass blower.

[Count Arioch the 28th]

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."

I think I'm with Zack with that one... that artwork upsets me a great deal.... at least Cameltoe o'doom can be written off as fanservice and the bleeding strapon lady be written off as very sick humor...

[Nath]

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.

The World of Darkness, and Vampire more especially, relies on nothing by a very simple recipe: secret history. Most of the setting is about rewriting actual mythological or historical events to involve supernatural beings. And they didn't have much of a vision beyond that.

So, obviously, since it was the only recipe they knew, the little they might have read about mythos and history of Africa certainly did not help into making Ebony Kingdom something good.

But also, the fact that the continent was touched upon so late in the line did not help. So to speak, all the good plots had already been allocated. Since their supernatural individuals are pretty much defined by what events they were involved in, you get as a rule of thumbs that the more important the event, the more important the character behind is. Mythological events make the top of the list, founding a civilization or fighting a major war comes after, and the rank-and-file get credits for an art piece or something like that.

So as what happened around the Mediterranean Sea and in Europe is considered as more important than anything that happened in Sub-Saharan Africa, the characters from that part of the globe simply never get the chance to be considered as important. You get a Queen of Sheba and that's about it.

There's a sentence that can apply to any fictional setting over a long period of time: "If that character was important, we ought to have heard about him/her before." Here in this case, I guess the authors wouldn't even take responsibility, as they simply were following their recipe and point out it is History that made Africa not important in the first place.

And trying to work around is still going to be awkward as long as you stick with the secret history recipe. Because what happened in Africa throughout History mostly sucked (or, at least, what people know about), and making a black character, no matter how long the fangs, be responsible for it is likely not going to make the cut. They could have used local legends to have powerful local vampires so completely onto something else that they actually never gave a shit about major civilizations, wars and art pieces. But that would have required to do some research on local legends as a starting point (besides, that would have also been quite similar to what they already did with Kuei-jin in Asia).

[Prak]

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.

So, exactly what everyone was going to do anyway?

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.

Hypothetically, you'd either make it hollow and pour the ash into it or mix the ask with some sort of other material, such as clay.

http://en.allexperts.com/q/Pottery-2316 ... h-clay.htm

Using vampire ash in your clay does seem like something that might have mystical significance.

You could also mix it with a binder and use it as paint.

Mixing it with gemi-molten glass is also possible, if you're a glass blower.

Also, I just remembered that when Buffy kills the Master in the Season 1 or 2 finale, he doesn't completely turn to ash, his bones are left behind.

[Ancient History]

Ebony Kingdom
Chapter 4: Disciplines and Other Witchery

Yes, it is actually called that.


We got negros and we got magic. So away we go.

AncientH:

The opening to this chapter is actually a made-up quote:

Our parents used to tell the women who had young children to cut out a piece of the hartebeest's foot between the toes, to thread it upon a sinew and make a charm and put it on the little child. For these are the things upon which Kagn sits, and Kagn would smell the thing's scent on the child and would not press it's head.
- Bushman folklore

It's hard to know where to start with this one. I mean, we're on the first page of the chapter and I am flabbergasted by the bullshit here. If I drank, this would make me take a drink.

Okay, so "Kagn" is the mythical progenitor of the Laibon, which most of you will see is cognate with "Caine," and is unique to White Wolf's oWoD. So this is supposed to be an...in-character quote? I don't know. I DON'T KNOW. It's obviously not a citation from a real book, and they can't give enough of a fuck to even come up with a fake book title, so this is supposed to be just a weird little bit of folklore that lines up with vampires but not really because there's no fucking Hartebeest Charm or anything like this anywhere else in this chapter. It's...it's just a weird little thing that exists entirely in its own little world. Floating in a void.

This does not bode well for the rest of the chapter.

FrankT:

The “Bushmen” are of course called the San, and referring to one of them as a “Bushman” is considered offensive. It's about like referring to someone as a Dago or a Wop. Basically, you shouldn't do that, and in 2003 it wasn't new information or anything. This is about the level of ethnic sensitivity of the “The Gods Must Be Crazy” movies.

Anyway, this is a 24 page chapter devoted to the various magic powers. Rather than go through this whole bit and point out all the various crazy bullshit that requires you to roll dice and is therefore completely sabotaged by this bizarre dice cap mechanic for spiritual purity that this book attempts to implement, I think it best to just remind the gentle reader that these mechanics don't work. We're basically looking at weird mechanics not fully Revised Edition and not fully 2nd Edition and yet not having rules of their own. So it mentions Necromancy paths from Revised, but seems to think they use the target number mechanics from 2nd. There are hilarious rules travesties all over this, but it's not unexpected because the authors don't even know what ruleset they are writing for. Every mechanic and game effect exists in a void – a draft idea rather than something harmonized into a game as a whole.

AncientH:

Most of the Disciplines that Laibon use are the same as the ones European vampires do, so the bulk of this chapter covers brief cosmetic and fluff differences between their powers - for example, the Laibon have different names for the first five powers of Animalism, but they're the same powers. That seems pointless. I mean, I can't tell you when I've ever heard any player in Vampire refer to their Discipline powers by name while in character. That's...just not a thing I've ever seen anyone do. Why would they?

Vampire had a lot of Disciplines and combo discipline powers by the end, spread out over many, many rulebooks, so it's not exactly uncommon to see some overlap - there are like four or five different ways for Vampires to create zombies, for example - but it's still a sign of weirdness to run into new rules for which rules already exist in another product. Case in point, the write-up for Celerity they include a new use for running long distances...but I know that in Vampire: the Dark Ages (or was it Dark Ages: Vampire?) there were at least two different combo disciplines or special powers dedicated specifically to using Celerity to run long distances. There's little shit like that throughout this chapter. For example, the section on Chimerstry manages to remind everyone that Gypsies are historically considered thieves and conmen. Yes, let's spice up the terrible racist stew with more racism.

In Clanbook Giovanni (Revised) (and, I think, before that some Wraith sourcebook), the Ghiberti family were Dutch slave-dealers back in the Triangle Trade days that got an "in" to Africa. They tweaked their Necromancy to work better with the four-fold souls of African wraiths, and developed their own path of Necromancy, the Cenotaph Path. In this book, they say that the Laibon invented it first, and call it the Path of Abombo. This is terribad - same discipline/different name is bad on general principles, but what we're dealing with here is just a critical reading failure. For fuck's sake, the book doesn't even bother to tell us if Laibon Necromancy counts as Western Necromancy or Voudoun Necromancy (don't ask, maybe we'll do an OSSR of the VtM Blood Magic sourcebooks some day).

Then, of course, there are the new and different Disciplines. These are probably the primary draw of any new book, the new abilities and options that are available to existing characters...well not in this case.

The big "new" Discipline is Abombwe - which really debuted back in the Dark Ages companion where they introduced the Laibon; it's not terribad, but it's primarily a Discipline about controlling the Beast. For five points of Thaumaturgy you can master The Focused Mind, which renders you immune to Frenzy and basically negates every point of having this Discipline. This shit was all over White Wolf. Also terrible about it is that the Discipline mechanics are given in terms of Orun or Aye scores, basically forcing any existing character that wants to use it to go back to the Dark Ages book.

Auspex gets entirely new mechanics explicitly because the Laibon are Magic Negroes. I wish I was making that up:

Auspex is somewhat more mysterious and less defined in the Ebony Kingdom, making it both more flexible and less predictable than the Auspex of the Kindred.

They did basically the same thing when they re-wrote Vicissitude.

I'm going to be honest, I'm at the point where I can't tell if the writers are deliberately being prats or just being stupid. It's obvious that they want the Laibon to be sort of distinct from the Kindred, but not "entirely different set of fucking mechanics" distinct like the Kuei-Jin. The thing is, that cuts both ways. If you're going to have the Laibon be mechanically identical to the Kindred in every critical respect - then all the shared fucking bits and pieces should be identical too! Don't just change mechanics and shit arbitrarily!

Of course, sometimes it gets confusing. I mentioned Blood Magic: Secrets of Thaumaturgy and Blood Sacrifice: The Thaumaturgy Companion before. In the former, the Assamites were given their own blood magic discipline called Assamite Sorcery (and Setites got Setite Sorcery); in the latter, Assamite Sorcery was renamed Dur-An-Ki (and Setite Sorcery became Akhu). It was all very complicated and weird and obviously clear that you had writers writing at odds with each other, so that it was up to the Storyteller and players to hack out how they think the rules should work. But some things like Assamite Sorcery == Dur-An-Ki is as explicit as explicit could be.

Naturally, the person writing Dur-An-Ki for Kindred of the Ebony Kingdom managed to decide that Dur-An-Ki and Assamite Sorcery were two different disciplines.



It doesn't even make sense that they would write that, because of the two sample Dur-An-Ki paths given, one of them is from fucking Assamite Sorcery!

FrankT:

Vampire has a lot of disciplines in it. You could probably have the vampires do whatever you want them to do by just giving them various combinations of disciplines that already existed. On the other hand, Vampire has a lot of disciplines in it, and you probably could have just written up new disciplines for each flavor of Blackula. Probably no one would have thrown a shit fit either way. What they decided to do instead was to have just a couple of flavors of Obscurica, and extensive rants about how various disciplines work differently. No, I don't understand why this happens. It seems like you could just write a new discipline from scratch, ghost knows I have completely lost count of how many subtly different ways a Vampire can throw magical fire at things. So back in chapter 1, we had standard Masquerade concepts given new names, now we have standard Masquerade names being attached to new concepts.


Because really what we needed was more terminology confusion all around.

Many of the sections that talk about how they fucked with a discipline are really just there to give you “African Flavor” for a discipline. So, the discipline might function exactly the same (as it does in whatever version of the rules you're using I suppose), but the individual levels have different names because go fuck yourself. Some of these things are really fucking weird. The Xi Dundu, who I remind you are from Congo and are based on shadow monsters of the Bavili people (themselves part of the Bakongo people), have named the fifth level Domination power after the actions of Yoruba Orisha. The Bakongo and the Yoruba people are both Niger-Congo speakers, but that's basically like saying that Hindi and French are both Indo-European speakers. The Yoruba live near the Niger and the Bakongo live near the Congo, so it's pretty much exactly that.




I understand that getting information about African legends is hard. Hell, it was hard to get that information when I was literally in Africa (for a variety of reasons). But it really seems to me that if you're going to have a single group use Bantu terminology for one thing and Yoruba terminology for another that there should be at least a little bit of effort spent on explaining why that might happen. We're talking Vampires here, so the story could seriously just be as simple as there being two Vampires, and one who mastered Obtenebration and named it will Bakongo terminology because he was from Luanda and another one who mastered Dominate and named it with Yoruba terminology because he was from Lagos. I mean, this isn't fucking hard, it's just that the authors of this book didn't care enough to even notice there was a problem with the stuff coming out of their mouths.

AncientH:

Frank and I are out of synch with our rantings, but no matter. The "Other Witchery" part of this chapter covers "African Hedge Magic." Now, you would think that this would follow the well-established Sorcery paths in World of Darkness: Sorcerer Revised, which are explicitly the rules for Hedge Magicians. AND YOU WOULD BE WRONG.

Instead, we get a so-brief-it-is-useless description of local African hedge magicians, one new merit and flaw in an impossible-to-read sidebar, and then a handful of undotted rites or rituals or artifacts or something. Seriously, there are no guidelines for these powers. They're called "sorcery," but they're not in any way a Sorcery path or described using any of the nomenclature White Wolf players have ever seen used for "sorcery." They're basically a double handful of random Thaumaturgy rituals with no points given. There's no rules for learning them, either, because it's up to the Storyteller whether or not any given character (including the PCs!) is a Sangoma or Inyanga and knows the appropriate ritual. If the earlier stuff about changing the names of various Discipline powers to give them a more African-y feel was cheap and pointless and half-assed, than this is entirely pants-out no-shits-are-given.


I'm saving the rant about voodoo for the Geography chapter, but seriously, you couldn't at least include a pointer to actual hedge magic rules for players that don't want to be a bad stereotype of a character out of an H. Rider Haggard novel?

FrankT:

Most of the discussions of the disciplines talks about how they are viewed by the Laibon culture rather than any changes in what they actually do. This is mostly about how Blackulas pray to various gods when using their powers because apparently black people are a superstitious cowardly lot.


Seems legit.

But in some cases, there are actual changes to how a discipline functions. When this happens, the discipline will simply not be listed in the discipline list at all, and then it will instead be in alphabetical order in the “new or changed disciplines” list. Sometimes a discipline will not only have its rules changed but also have its name changed. So to find the Quietus revision, you need to read through the discipline list and find that Quietus is not list, and then go through the new and changed disciplines and realize that it isn't there either – and then figure out that it's been changed substantially and also given a new Obscurica name starting with the letter “D.” And then you try to do the same for Melpominee, and eventually figure out that it's actually not in the book at all.



There are no African singers anyway.

AncientH:

Remember last chapter when we talked about the Artifacts background? Well, this chapter also includes a list of artifacts. These are actually given a points value. None of them are terribly good and they all still assume that Native Africans are jungle-dwelling primitives. That's really kinda grating at this point. I mean, why can we not have a Gothic Punk Africa, where vampires on the streets of Lagos create soul-jars out of glass Coca Cola bottles, or special Nigerian zombies that repetitively send of phishing scams and generate X resource points per month in revenue or something?

FrankT:

We get some extra spells for African hedge magicians to use. Strangely, none of them involve penis theft.


Nyoink!

There's a lot of ranting about how various spells were used against the British, which is why they can only fit five of these fuckers per page. It's a shovelware product, and information density is not high. Strangely, all the really crazy shit you might want to do with West African magic (because let's face it: that is why we are talking about here) is not available. So no stealing peoples' penises, no inverting your feet to throw off pursuit, no shooting black arrows into the hearts of your enemies over the horizon, etc. etc. There's some stuff that seems folkloric like cursing people to have ugly frog skin, but the authors didn't go deeply enough into the subject to get any of the really cool stuff.


In Ebony Kingdom, there is no penis theft risk from evil Witches.

All artifact lists are dumb because White Wolf never put together a coherent idea of what a dot level of Artifact was supposed to mean. I have no idea whatsoever whether these items are supposed to be on the same scale as the artifacts in Mummy or Werewolf. None. There's a level one bead that gives you traceless walk that seems pretty cool, and a level 5 sword that lets you assassinate people you've already hit with the sword that seems pretty nearly useless. I just don't even know.

AncientH:

Okay, so on the scale of "Can I use any of this shit?" the dial is pointing toward zero and then breaks off, buries itself in the ground, and burrows towards the center of the earth. If you're keen on playing a Laibon, you need this book and the Vampire main book, which is going to use different mechanics and make reference to Humanity and things which will make you sad and frustrated, and if you're keen on playing a Kindred and learning some Laibon powers, it will also make you sad.

There is an extra special bit of sadness that comes with the fact that you can have Abombwe or Protean, but not both - if you have one power and try to learn the other, your Discipline powers are converts to XP, halved, and used to buy up the other discipline. This is weird and there's no good reason for it; the only other time they've done something this bugfuck stupid was when they made the same kind of deal with Celerity and Temporis for Revised. In any event, Abombwe sucks harder, so stick with Protean.

Chapter 5: Geography


Africa is ridiculously huge, and it probably would have made more sense to give this book a narrower geographic focus.

AncientH:

There are many issues with geography, but I'm going to address one not addressed here - why are the Laibon restricted to Africa? Why are there not Laibon in South America, and the Caribbean? Would it not make sense to sort of merge Laibon and Kindred in the various vampire voodoo sects that fill out the whole fucking world, and maybe have a continuum of Laibon culture, and incidentally make them much more playable and open them up to learning more powers and able to show up more places?

Somebody mentioned earlier that it's a symptom of Late Edition Fatigue, where the Laibon are restricted to Africa specifically because it's the easiest way to explain why they weren't mentioned anywhere in fluff before...but that's bullshit. That's never stopped White Wolf before. Hell, they still stuck random vampire groups in Africa after Kindred of the Ebony Kingdom was released. There's no reason they can't claim that the Legacies have little branches scattered hither and yon throughout the whole African diaspora. You could easily say that the Kindred were too wrapped up in their internal politics and meditating on their own brown eyes to notice. Maybe some of the "Infernalists" that the Sabbat routinely fights were just vampires from other places, which explains their weird behavior and powers.

But I digress. Back to the chapter.

FrankT:

The geography section begins with a slice of life story about our narrator's childhood with a special callout to the convention of giving children a name based on the day of the week they were born. This is an Akan naming convention that is and was really used in the part of the world that our narrator supposedly came from, so that's almost legit. There are a couple of caveats however. The first is that people don't just get day names in that system, they also have a bunch of other names so that you can still distinguish people even when there are eight or more children. The second is that this is an extremely West African convention. Kenyans don't do this and neither do South Africans. Reading this section, you wouldn't know that, and I don't know that the section author did.

Anyway, this rambling story involves someone becoming a priestess and learning sorcery and being captured by Blackulas and turned into a spider headed freak in the wilds of Africa so she could mount a guerrilla war against the European slavers. This is a completely different life story from the one in Chapter 1 and is extremely obviously a different POV character. The timeline doesn't make any sense, the POV character learns about HIV from missionaries during the colonial wars between England and France – despite the fact that the last colonial war between England and France ended in 1899, and HIV was discovered in 1983. It is literally impossible for any of this shit to have happened. I think the authors believe that Africans have been dealing with AIDS for centuries, which I guess makes HIV in this book a


Yeah, I went there.

At 41 pages, this chapter is pretty long, but it's not really about geography. The title is a fucking lie. It's a pile of fiction pieces written in different voices by different people, none of whom are the people who were introduced as the book's author, although since they are in first person this is really hard to figure out. What the fuck is this chapter for? I don't fucking know.

AncientH:

There is a map of Africa, on page 126, and there are other close-up maps of parts of Africa in the chapter. I guess that is the reason this is the geography chapter. It's not a bad map, although it's not to scale, and weirdly enough they seem to be siding with Western Sahara.

There's also an almost full-page sidebar given on malaria, and how it can be passed by vampires and vampires can suffer from it. This isn't how diseases actually work in vampire; I mean yes, there was a vampire that spread the Black Plague, but that's because she had ghouled fleas that were fucking spreading it, not her.

Several pages later, they do it again with schistosomiasis.


I googled this so you wouldn't have to.

Also, the font changes between sections. THis is bad and hurts my eyes.

FrankT:

The fanfiction train only has a couple of stops, and those are to include extremely unrelated maps or some even more unrelated pieces of box text about diseases. Of the entire chapter, the only thing which could even generously be said to be about geography, which I remind you is the name of the fucking chapter is those maps. Those maps look like the maps from old Shadowrun books, all computerified and made slightly
abstract and blocky. But they are just traced directly from the real-world maps. There's no attempt to make the maps convey any game relevant information and they don't. You would literally be in all ways better off opening up an atlas or even just typing “Africa map” into a search engine.

The diseases that get boxed text are schistosomiasis and malaria. HIV gets a multi-page inset story in an illegible font that hurts to read so I'm not gonna do it. That's a weird list. Two of those (malaria and HIV) are on the most deadly diseases in Africa list. Two of those (schistosomiasis and malaria) are virtually unknown in the United States. Tuberculosis would seem to be high priority to talk about given the other three choices, but it's not here. I mean, obviously more people die in Africa from influenza and diarrhea, but those lack the “exotic” tag. There's really nothing exotic about HIV, but I understand that you can't really talk about plagues in Africa without talking about AIDS.



What is still not explained though, is why we are talking about plagues in Africa at all. The nominal topic of this chapter was supposed to be geography, and really no attempt has been made to make this chapter convey any geographical information. There's no discussion of different language groups or tribal identity across the continent. No attempt to speak of the different climate zones across the truly vast land area being discussed. The diseases mostly get wikifacts, with just a small rant about what happens to Vampires who drink the blood of people with parasites in them. Even this discussion basically makes no sense, because last time I checked Vampires in Masquerade were still undying corpses and didn't get sick. Fucking fuck. This is just as dumb as that rant about Ghouls dying from AIDS from Fatal Addiction. Fucking White Wolf authors can't remember their own damn vampire rules. Not even the purely narrative ones like “Vampires don't get sick.”

AncientH:

I haven't really been getting my rant on this chapter, mainly because there is so little of this chapter in terms of content. Africa is a massive, geologically diverse, ethnically diverse place. You can't do it justice in a chapter like this, it's like trying to describe New Jersey as a realm of secret forests and illegal toxic waste dumps like Newark. So while you get the idea that there are villages and deserts and rivers and "the Bush" - like it's the fucking Outback or something - actually that is a good example. This book would be better if it said that all Laibon lived in cities because the fucking werecats would eat them if they went too far outside, that WORKED for Vampire: the Masquerade first edition, and it was a weird points-of-light thing but the thing about vampires is that they are social creatures. They need people to feed off of, if nothing else, so you would expect to find them in points of relatively high concentrations of people. This fucking section SHOULD have been a discussion of the biggest cities in Africa, and who called the shots where. Do you seriously think that vampires could stick around in fucking villages of <50 people and nobody notices the bite marks and blood loss (and, apparently, fucking malaria and HIV) being spread around?

This chapter had ONE JOB, and that was to provide enough information to players and Meister Cavern so that they could feasibly play a game set in Africa, and it FAILED. HARD.

FrankT:

Such that there is even a tenuous connection to “geography” in the “geography” chapter, it is that in the various first person narratives involve people moving around a lot and babbling about various events from the recent past. Like the kind of wikifacts that might have just been mentioned when they did a web search (or “Web search” as described in this book) about the countries in question. There's some numbers thrown out here or there, but no attempt to contextualize any of it. And I'm pretty sure that the lack of context for any of the numbers is because the authors don't know the context for any of these numbers.

I expected this chapter to be about Geography, but I was wrong. There's actually literally more geographical information in the introduction to the next chapter when they tell you that the capital of Kenya is Nairobi.



This is the worst chapter in the book. I mean, it doesn't quite hit the offensive racist high notes of the first chapter (unless there's a bombshell somewhere in the AIDS rant, which there probably is), but it's so completely off topic and useless that words don't really convey it.

AncientH:

There is a thing in the HIV/AIDS section where they talk about how African men blame women for HIV and think sleeping with a virgin will cure it. That's pretty bad, but pretty par for the "I heard it on the internet" course. It's hard to read because they went with a supercursive font, and it gets off into a weird little paranoid gambit about how AIDS is going to kill all the doctors and then there will be no-one to administer the AIDS Drugs.

The most frightening fact of all is that within the next 10 years, it is projected that 40 million AIDS orphans will grow up in Africa. Zimbabwe and Botswana already have zero population growth because one in four has the disease and it tends to be adults in the age ranges of 20-50. The children grow up without parents and with little, if any, social structure at all. Businesses will collapse because there is will be no adults to run them, and this will mean economic ruin for many countries.

Next up on Vampire: the Masquerade - Anarch Free State: Africa and Lord of the Flies: the Dark Continent!

Yes, according to the UNAIDS Report on the Global AIDS Epidemic, 2001 was a bad time to be an AIDS victim in Zimbabwe and Botswana. But the vampires must have learned that they can't actually spread HIV while feeding, because Zimbabwe is not a hell of orphan children...yet.

[name_here]

I do recall that in the Bloodlines video game, it was mentioned that vampires couldn't get sick, but if they drank infected blood the blood was still infected and their bites could spread it to other people, and vampires who just didn't give a shit about that got called Plaguebearers. There were quests to go murder them to death because they'd gotten out of hand enough to attract CDC attention to the outbreak of something dangerous and exotic they'd caused, and the local vampires were afraid the response team would catch on.

[Prak]

I actually saw this book in a physical store once. I wanted it because I'm a whore for character options, but I'm now very glad I didn't buy it.

[hyzmarca]

I actually prefer to think that Great Britain and France continued fighting colonial wars in Africa until the late 80s or early 90s in the WOD. That's just cooler than people being aware of HIV before it existed.

I also perfer to think that millions died when Nazi Vampires and genocidal Catholic supersoldiers invaded London for similar reasons.

[Nath]

But also, the fact that the continent was touched upon so late in the line did not help. So to speak, all the good plots had already been allocated. Since their supernatural individuals are pretty much defined by what events they were involved in, you get as a rule of thumbs that the more important the event, the more important the character behind is. Mythological events make the top of the list, founding a civilization or fighting a major war comes after, and the rank-and-file get credits for an art piece or something like that.

So as what happened around the Mediterranean Sea and in Europe is considered as more important than anything that happened in Sub-Saharan Africa, the characters from that part of the globe simply never get the chance to be considered as important. You get a Queen of Sheba and that's about it.

There's a sentence that can apply to any fictional setting over a long period of time: "If that character was important, we ought to have heard about him/her before." Here in this case, I guess the authors wouldn't even take responsibility, as they simply were following their recipe and point out it is History that made Africa not important in the first place.

Somebody mentioned earlier that it's a symptom of Late Edition Fatigue, where the Laibon are restricted to Africa specifically because it's the easiest way to explain why they weren't mentioned anywhere in fluff before...but that's bullshit. That's never stopped White Wolf before. Hell, they still stuck random vampire groups in Africa after Kindred of the Ebony Kingdom was released. There's no reason they can't claim that the Legacies have little branches scattered hither and yon throughout the whole African diaspora.

I guess this is my post you were referring to. But this is not what I meant. It was not about their presence or lack of, it was about their importance.

I actually doubt the authors were searching much beyond an easy way to fill the book with the chosen topic. What I was saying is that Kindred of the Ebony Kingdom would not portray the Laibon as important, in Africa or elsewhere, because they weren't mentioned anywhere before.

They could have put some of them all around the world, they would still have not play a major role for this reason. The authors didn't even avoided to mention them elsewhere for a reason, because they likely did not even considered it in the first place (because books should be about interesting features, while people mix up "interesting," "significant" and "important").

[Ancient History]

Ebony Kingdom Part Four:
Chapter 5: Storytelling


Cool story bro.

AncientH:

Storytelling sections in White Wolf products tend to be fairly bad to start with; the makers of the game never quite seem to be able to grasp how tabletop roleplaying games work, which may be why the LARP does so well. I don't know.

I do know that Vampire is at a bit of a disadvantage here because they're in, more or less, virgin territory. There are not a lot of black vampire movies - Blacula and its sequel, Vampire in Brooklyn, etc. - and even fewer novels. There's a bit more leadway in comics, because Marvel was forward-thinking with Blade and backward-thinking with Conan the Barbarian, but very few of them were Gothic Punk or set in Africa.


Really, Thulsa Doom makes a very respectable Setite.

FrankT:

At 21 pages, this is one of the shortest chapters in the book. You'd think that for a “Storyteller Game” that is nominally about something that the authors think you don't know anything about, that they'd have a lot to say about “storytelling,” and I guess you'd be wrong. Mostly this stems from the storytelling chapter having no mechanics in it at all – it's totally system agnostic. Now, I know that really the entire book is system agnostic in the sense that the authors literally do not seem to be able to agree with each other as to what edition of Masquerade they are writing an expansion for, but this chapter is system agnostic to the point that it could apply equally well if you were playing nWoD or MET rather than using any edition of the Storyteller System. “Equally well” in this case meaning of course “not very,” but that's just how this book rolls.



You may ask, if this chapter doesn't provide suggestions for handing out XP or setting test difficulties and such that storyteller chapters are normally called upon to do, does that mean that this information is just fucking missing from the book? As far as I can tell, yes. I don't think there's so much as an XP chart anywhere, which means that you get to try to use the chart from Masquerade (certainly the Freebie Points from chargen blithely told you to do that). But Laibon have some traits like Orun that don't exist in Masquerade, how much do those cost? I have theories, but they cannot be verified.

Fundamentally, this book isn't a game. It's all cargo culting all the time. It's supposed to look like a game, but only on the most superficial level. Not only have things not been mathhammered or meaningfully playtested, things haven't even been written to completion.

AncientH:

Now, come up with three or four authentic (or even authentic-sounding) African names. Right now!
No big deal. We can't either.

This is indicative of the problems with the entire chapter, basically. The writers know that the storytellers and players have no idea how things actually work in Africa, and the writers themselves quite clearly don't know shite either.

What the storytelling advice in this chapter amounts to then is "like a regular game of Vampire, but the names are changed. Also, Africa is a emphasized to be poor and mostly rural, and even major cities aren't given the respect they are in other Storyteller games.

Cities do exist, where most if not all of the trappings of "civilization" provide a thin veneer of modernization. Still, it's vital for the Storyteller to remember and to account for the poverty and hunger when running her games. You cannot simply take a story set in New York or London, scratch out the name and stamp "Cape Town" on it, and expect to be playing in an African idiom.

Can I get a fucking page here where they're not talking down to Africa? Jesus wept. Fuck, in the very next paragraph they're reminding us that even the Laibon exist in crippling poverty compared to vampires in Europe and America.

FrankT:

The names sidebar is bad in pretty much every way it is possible to be bad. Their basic suggestion is that you get yourself a list of regional names and then pull them out when you need to name an NPC. This is actually good advice, but considering that they have 19 more fucking pages in this chapter, it's actually insulting that they don't provide one. But then to one-up being simply useless, they kick it up a notch to the point where it's clueless and racist.

Nothing ruins a player's suspension of disbelief faster than running into a witchdoctor named Frank or a cab driver in Kinshasa named Kate.

This is Nigerian singer Frank Ugochukwu Edwards. Who routinely introduces himself without his middle name without severely destroying the “feel” of Nigeria to anyone's knowledge.

Now, leaving aside the potentially pejorative label of referring to a traditional healer as a “witchdoctor” (it's World of Darkness, there are witches, presumably you'd need witchdoctors to treat curses properly), are they fucking serious? Do they actually not know that there are lots of people in Africa who have European names in addition to or instead of “African” names? Do they really think their player base is so reflexively racist that it would destroy their suspension of disbelief to have an African named Jonathan or Nelson? What the fuck?


Jonathan.


Nelson.

It's really not all that much work, and it's worth it to keep your players from rolling their eyes and wandering off to the kitchen every time they run into Bob the bushman.

• 1. If it's not much work (and it is not), why didn't you inclue a fucking name table?
  2. Please stop referring to San people as bushmen.

AncientH:

We're reminded on every fucking page how terrible and backwards Africa is, so even if you're a Setite in Adis Ababa with a laptop "or even a cell phone"... let's hold that thought for a moment.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mobile_te ... _in_Africa

Cellphones are huge in Africa!

I suppose I shouldn't give them too much shit for that because it was 2003 and who knew we would have mobile proctology apps on our Jesusphones, but seriously, what the fuck? Why would this be a thing? Why not have, say, a group of hot young Nigerian Laibon who have whipped together something like the Path of Technomancy for Dur-An-Ki and terrorize Ventrue bank accounts from halfway around the world?

It really is like they went out of their way to emphasize what a crap place Africa is to live, much less game. There's no emphasis given on why you would want to play a Laibon rather than any other sort of vampire, why (or how) you would interact with other vampires, or why they would come here to Africa. If this was a Black Dog project we'd at least get stories about Giovanni necromancers warring with the locals over a vast horde of untapped wraiths dating back to the slave trade and the strange underworld of Great Zimbabwe, or a war with Cathayans trying to promote Hinduism in South Africa or an ancient Elder Mujaji who really does control the weather or something.

But we don't get any of that. We get shit about how hard it is to get a cellphone in West Bumfuck Village, Angola.

FrankT:

OK, let's get this out of the way right now: yes, a lot of old ass cars are on the roads in Africa. This book has a lot to say about that, but it's mostly offensive and wrong.

Over two-thirds of Africa's population lives in rural villages or tribal lands largely unchanged by the last several centuries' worth of technological progress. Much of the reason for this has to do with the simple poverty of the people and even, in some cases, the individual national governments. If no profit is to be had making power, easy communications or modern medicine available to the poor villagers of the so-called “Dark Continent,” why should any First-World entities bother?

Why bother indeed?

OK, the fact that there are a lot of old cars on the road doesn't mean that people are impoverished or that they've missed out on the last couple of centuries of technological development. Keeping an old car on the road takes skilled labor, while getting a new car takes money. In an advanced economy with full employment, people with skills who are willing to work can trade their labor for money and use that money to
buy new cars. In an economy with a shortage of available investment and thus an insufficient demand for labor, skilled people can't work as much as they'd like to for money and thus end up spending time repairing and maintaining items they already have rather than buying new ones. A lot of Africans see Europeans as lazy and wasteful because they throw things away that could be maintained and buy new ones; and a lot of Europeans see Africans as lazy because they don't work for wages to buy new cars and washing machines, but the truth is that both groups are willing and able to work but in Africa there isn't enough money in circulation so there's a persistent underutilization of labor resources. Like Greece or Spain since the crisis, but like all the time.

But in any case, even in the most impoverished and rural villages in the CAR and DRC are still completely modern places. It's the 21st century there just as it is everywhere else, they just happen to be poorly supplied and under monetized. The people there are not going to think you're a wizard because you have a camera. They may think you are an asshole because you thought they might think that.


These people are very poor, but they will match your ass boomstick for boomstick.

AncientH:

The section on playing Laibon starts off by emphasizing family ties within Legacies. This seems weird to me, because I distinctly remember them saying that they don't think of themselves as families. It also calls these organizations of Laibon "tribes" instead of "Legacies," because it's supposed to be multiple Laibon of different Legacies which come together and...uh...what the fuck?

Seriously, this book still has not gotten past the basic vampire hurdle of WHY THE FUCK DO DIFFERENT VAMPIRES WORK TOGETHER? I mean, leaving aside the whole problem of how you're supposed to keep bands of vampires fed in rural areas with limited population, there's still no reason for a Shango not to gut a Akunanse as soon as they see their spidery asses, just on general principles.

They do address the difficulty posed by not having the "sects" - the Camarilla and the Sabbat, primarily - but they don't actually say anything about that. See, what White Wolf sort of intuitively grasped when they were making the game in the 1st edition is that sides are a good thing, it gives large bodies of PCs and NPCs things they are collectively interested in, provides the groundwork for allies and enemies, grudges and fragile truces, open wars and cold conflicts. It's a fine balance, because having too many sides and you can't figure out what the fuck is going on.

Which is about the case with the Laibon. What do they want? Who runs what? What, in fact, is the point of the Xi Dundu doing a power play against the Guruhi? And where the fuck do the players fit in?


Whose shit do I have to fuck up to king it around here?

FrankT:

The section on incorporating disease into your campaign is puzzling on many many levels. First of all, the core conceit is that Vampires can pass on HIV and malaria. This is not true. Malaria is passed by mosquitoes, but that is because the lifecycle of the malaria parasite has a stage that parasitizes mosquitoes. And not even all mosquitoes, it has to be the right kind of mosquito. If malaria plasmodia end up in a tick or a cold glass of blood for a few hours, they just die. You can't get malaria from everything that bites you, you can't even get malaria from having sexual intercourse with someone who has it. To make the leap from one person to another, it really needs to jump into a specific kind of mosquito and then go from that mosquito to a human. Nothing else is going to do it. So World of Darkness Vampires can't fucking spread malaria. Frankly, it's rather hard to imagine a setup of Vampire that would transmit malaria, because vampirism is usually considered as similar to sex, and sex doesn't spread malaria, you assholes!


Unless you've spontaneously turned into a female Anopheles mosquito, you are not going to be spreading malaria no matter who you bite or fuck.

HIV is more complicated. On a purely symbolic level, Vampire bites are conceptually similar to sharing needles or having unprotected sex. So Vampire bites are in the general ball park of things that spread the human immunodeficiency virus. However, the specifics of World of Darkness Vampires make them unsuitable hosts. First of all, Vampires don't have immune systems and don't produce T-cells. They can't get AIDS nor can they incubate HIV. Secondly, they are room temperature and don't alkalize their saliva or vitae, meaning that actual viruses of HIV in a World of Darkness Vampire would survive for minutes rather than hours or
days. So I guess if a Vampire were to bite a second victim with a mouth still full of blood from their first victim, they could spread HIV that way – but if you're doing the normal Masquerade thing of feeding once per night, Vampire bites are safer than kissing people with AIDS (which is itself so safe that there are no known cases of HIV being transmitted that way).

There's even a nearly-illegible box text about how AIDS is a touchy subject and how it's not being included gratuitously. But for all the chin scratching and pretend-seriousness of this section, the authors themselves seem to be perpetuating the same kind of rumor mongering and superstition about AIDS that they decry. The book tells the storyteller that “of course” Vampires can spread “the AIDS virus,” but as I previously mentioned: that's a load of superstitious nonsense.

AncientH:

There's a bit on faith in Africa. This is White Wolf still struggling with the problem of a non-Christian system of belief mechanic (two of them, actually, competing against each other), although they don't actually come out and say that, so really it's just a lot of talk about not default assuming Laibon use Humanity, like they told us back in the Character Creation chapter. They also emphasize that lots of Laibon and native Africans are superstitious, just to make sure they get their wince-quota for the page. There's a little sidebar that reminds us True Faith should be rare.


Trust me, you don't want context for this picture. But I love the idea of an Imam holding a vampire at bay with a copy of the Qu'ran. Although they probably wouldn't use the Qu'ran itself. And the Blood Qu'ran is another thing entirely.

FrankT:

I won't say that the sectless domains of the Laibon are a test balloon for nWoD, because it's obvious that White Wolf never bothered to collect response data from Ebony Kingdom. I will say that the sectlessness of the Ebony Kingdom is a snapshot of Justin Achilli's thought process shortly before he put together the nWoD package. Most of the good ideas and most of the bad ideas with how the nWoD sects are put together are already on display: the book tells you quite explicitly that the more Sabbat flavored legacies and the more Camarilla flavored legacies are not having a kill on sight Sabbat/Camarilla war and can ally or oppose each other on all kinds of axes. That's good. But on the other hand it frankly admits that there's no real conflict for player characters to be motivated by. That's bad. The end result of course is that the player characters aren't obligated to stab each other in the face, but the players also don't give a fuck about anything, so we're one step forward, two steps back.



And the comparisons to nWoD are obvious. You could imagine nWoD as being the result of people focus grouping Ebony Kingdoms and deciding that the solution to the fact that people liked not having to fight each other over stupid faction lineups but they didn't like not having any sects to interact with was to produce five covenants that didn't matter or affect anything. But as previously stated, I'm pretty sure that no real response data from Ebony Kingdom was ever collected, let alone responded to. nWoD's lack of give-a-fuck is pretty much just a more refined version of the “anything goes” politics that Achilli was talking about here. Like in nWoD, it's laudable that there are lots of groups that could potentially line up with different alliances – but in the absence of issues of contention those alliances have no reason to form in the first place.


You'd think that with a setting that has this guy plus a bunch of magical monsters that there wouldn't be any shortage of conflict. But here we are.

AncientH:

The last bit before we get to the crux of the chapter is on the Masquerade...um...there isn't one.

I am intrigued by this concept and would like to subscribe to your newsletter.

One of the main functions of the Camarilla is the blanket agreement that vampires try not to remind the herd that they exist. The greatest trick the devil ever pulled and all that. In Africa, things are a little more...freestyle. So you're probably not going to see a bunch of vampire warlords openly ruling chunks of the continent with their hyena-ghouls.


Or maybe you can.

...but at the same time probably not going to get a hit squad sicc'd on you if you rip somebody's head off at a bar and drank right from the tap. African rules is a bit more freeform, and presumably the authorities don't have enough of their shit together to track the corpses piling up from fang wounds and blood loss.

Which sounds terrible, and maybe could be a good excuse for some actual hunter (or even Hunter) organizations in Africa that the Laibon can play with and against, but that's not a thing. I don't know why it isn't a thing, except that this really does look like a dry run for some nWoD concepts and they really stay clear of any other African supernaturals in the setting - no words on the Changing Breeds, non-bullshit sorcerers, Mages, fairies, Kuei-Jin, Hunters, Mummies, Demon the Fallen wasn't out yet I think but...well, you get the drift. The Laibon have apparently spent most of the last six thousand years sitting on their collective asses bickering about who is king of the local village of fifty people. That is the message this book tries to convey in the Storytelling section. And it sucks.


Wait. So this is all about two white people that want to fuck?

FrankT:

The core of any story is conflict, and the storytelling chapter spends several pages trying to come up with one that you might want to use. A lot of this is flushed down the toilet in various rants about religious conflict. Not in conflict between religions, but in people struggling with their own faith in introspective circle jerks. This is a Justin Achilli standard, but it's pretty much always terrible. And if you're talking about Africa, where the authors are trying to get you to care about the tenets of religions they cannot even name, it's a harder sell all around.


There are lots of ways to schematize narrative conflict, but this one has little black people on it, who in this instance will represent little black people.

In the standard discussion of writing mechanics, narrative conflict is often stated as “Man vs. XXX” even though the protagonist could be a woman or a child or a time traveling robot or whatever. In our case, our protagonists are going to be Blackulas, but the structures should remain the same. So let's talk about how Ebony Kingdom has really shat the bed as far as setting these things up:

• Man vs. Man: The basic conflict, a Blackula is in conflict with another Blackula. The problem here is that most of the Blackulas are not given anything that they apparently want, and many of the Blackulas are expected to wander off on a regular basis. While a not-Ravnos has to make regular checks to avoid saying rude things about powerful people if he doesn't hit the road like a circa 1970s gay drifter, they are also expected to hit that road pretty soon anyway. There's no conflict there, because there's no reason for them to stay anywhere and no reason for them to care about whether they piss the locals off or not. A not-Toreador apparently just wants to eat ham sandwiches, and has no direct interests in Kindred society at all.
  
  Man vs. Nature: The basic survival story is often presented as a conflict of sorts. The thing is, Laibon don't really care about any of that. They don't get dinged on humanity for feeding, and their Aye crap just forbids them from getting involved with plots. They don't feel cold, fatigue, or disease. The only element they are upset by is sunlight, which just kills them instantly so there's no conflict there either.
  
  Man vs. Himself: This is the one that the book tries to sell you, having pissed in the Cheerios of all the other ones. The problem here is that the only thing they're really set up for is these religious introspective cycles, but those are completely unplayable because neither the authors nor the reader have the foggiest idea of how the fuck you're supposed to act against or in accordance with the beliefs of traditional African religions. Also, there are literally thousands of those things, and the authors don't seem to even really understand that. How can you roleplay a crisis of faith in a faith you don't know anything about? What would test the faith of a Blackula? What would reinforce the faith of a Blackula? Why should I care?
  
  Man vs. Society: Like with the Blackula vs. Blackula, this is severely undermined by the fact that being ostracized by Blackula society is not distinguishable from being accepted by it. You're going to wander off at the end of the adventure and go to a new village and it just doesn't make any difference if the local Laibon see you off with blown kisses or shaken fists. There's no status for the player characters to aspire to, and no status for them to lose.

Fundamentally, the basics of narrative conflict, of character motivation to become involved with plots of any kind, is just lacking. So while they spend literally fifteen pages out of a chapter that only has 21 talking about conflict and drama, it all basically boils down to the fact that we don't actually care about any of this shit. There are headings like “Progress and Outside Influence vs. Stasis and Cultural Integrity,” “Elder vs. Neonate,” “Familial Obligation vs. Personal Ambition,” and “Laibon vs. Nature,” but despite the fact that someone obviously read something about constructing narratives, they didn't bother doing that before writing up a setting that undermines all of those by not having the players be invested into supernatural society in any meaningful way in the first place.

AncientH:

Goth subculture started in the 1980s. Most of the White Wolf audience weren't even born then. The first generation of Goths weren't roleplayers, White Wolf was the game of second and third generation that grew up in the 80s and 90s listening to goth music and cool goth fashions which they might well have bought at Hot Topics. For some people, it was just a fashion they liked, a group to belong to. Like Death Metal or Black Metal, which had a lot of crossover. It was all about finding your tribe.

Then there were the "serious" goths. These were the people that, for better or for worse, got into the philosophy of it - and not the high-minded philosophy of Werner von Goethe, but the whole doom-and-gloom, my-body-is-shit, we're-all-going-to-die-and-the-world-sucks kind of people. (There's a third group that were basically criminals and young sociopaths like Varg Vikernes, but every group has their assholes). The thing about the "serious" Goths is that they wanted to be tortured. They thought it was romantic or authentic to be an unchanging, perfect monster stalking the shadows down the centuries, blah blah fucking blah. It's the I, Strahd meets Interview with the Vampire aesthetic where people wanted to be conflicted and mope about their Curse because they thought it was deep. It's a standard of vampire movies and books and even comics. And there are people that want to play that character at the table. This is the section for them.

The thing is though? Those people? In the minority. Even Anne Rice couldn't sustain that much mope. The one thing anyone will take away from The Vampire Lestat is that motherfucker loves being a vampire.


I'm told this is the first gay black vampire novel. I'm not even sure this qualifies as Rule 34, but the world is a richer place.

As Frank mentioned, the chapter goes out of its way to shoot down most of the actual conflicts that might charge a game. Several paragraphs are pissed away talking about how Africans distrust white people and technology as the tools of colonial oppressors. Because we need our racist stereotyping on each page. And Neonate Laibon are trapped in a system where the oldest vampires are automatically in charge, with a pecking order based on age, and they stick with it because...uh...they have nowhere else to go?

What about fucking America? Europe? Carib? Anywhere that isn't where you are now?

There's supposed to be internal struggles with Legacies/tribes/"families" (wait, aren't "Tribes" supposed to be "families?" For fuck's sake, at least keep the bullshit nomenclature right!) But again, age rules and young fangs drool. Or something. And they already emphasized that the normal sectarian differences don't apply. So that's a bit of a free-for-all at best.

The big conflict then is Laibon vs. Outsiders, i.e. Western Kindred. This could be interesting, but they don't want to go into it in detail here, because they don't even name fucking names. Seriously, this is the Storyteller's own private section of the dark gods-be-damned book, and they can't just tell us the fucking Ghiberti family of the Giovanni have set up shop with their foul Necromancy in some coastal cities? Why the fuck not?

And why are you still reading, who you have so many stories to tell?

This is the end of the chapter. I don't think this is right. This is the sort of stupid shit you end a book with. Whoever wrote this HAD to have known that. I mean, White Wolf basically has a formula for laying out books at this point. They can't be that daft, right? Lie to me.


We may yet go all National Geographic on you. Stay tuned.

Chapter 6: Antagonists and Bestiary


If you don't have anything to protect, you have nothing to fight for.

FrankT:

This chapter is 23 pages, actually longer than the Storyteller chapter. There's 12 pages devoted to converting supernaturals from other White Wolf lines that aren't Masquerade generally or Ebony Kingdom specifically into something that looks like it was written in the same game system. This is totally perplexing, since as previously noted there actually isn't a game system that Ebony Kingdom is actually written to, so I don't know what the fuck. There is like a sample of a Sorcerer with their sorcery translated into equivalent paths of Necromancy and Thaumaturgy that are presumably written up in other Vampire books. But it doesn't tell you which other Vampire books, so fuck if I know. According to the whitewolf wiki, some of these are from Vampire Revised and some of these are from the Guide to the Camarilla, and then I stopped checking because I already ran into at least one reference to a path from a book that this book hasn't name checked.

After that we get to 8 pages that is a bestiary of various animals that you might want to turn into a ghoul and use as a guard animal or scout or something.


Why is this book not about this again?

There's 3 pages of introductions and rules, and that's the chapter.

AncientH:

I mentioned in the last chapter, the Storyteller chapter, that they explicitly did not mention any other supernaturals in Africa. In fact, this is the first place in the entire fucking book where other supernaturals in Africa are even hinted at, and you would think this would be the natural kitchensink for throwing in all the accumulated references to Africa that have built up in 4+ game lines over a period of 20 years, right? I mean, that chapter would basically write itself. You would just fit that shit in around the admittedly-scant material on Laibon society - and holy fuck, it's 172 pages in and I couldn't even tell you who the major players are among the Legacies in any major African city or nation - but they don't actually do that.



No, they still describe these supernaturals - who, I remind you, have not appeared before - even in out-of-game voice as if from the Laibon I-know-nothing-about-these-people perspective. WE the readers, because we have delved mightily in the fucking books can recognize when they're making a distinction between sorcerers and Mages and shit, but if some fresh kid picked this up they would have no fucking clue what was going on. ZERO effort is made to work this game into anything else that White Wolf has ever published. ZERO. No fucks were budgeted for this project at all. We are running on a serious fuck deficit just to mention it.

Also, and this is just fucking cruel, but the sample antagonists given are way too powerful for the Laibon. It makes no fucking sense. We're talking 8-16 dots worth of equivalent Disciplines easy for most of these.

So, these things show up here, with no preamble and in an almost unrecognizable form, for no apparent reason than somebody appears to have thought they should be mentioned, but sans all of their fluff and any possible reason for them to be here and interesting.

FrankT:

The conversion supernaturals get 27 sample monster statlines into 12 pages with a page and a half of introduction and rules lead-in. That's almost exactly 2 monsters per page with an acceptable amount of tiny art pieces. That's perfectly reasonable text density. It's just... the Mummies have shit from the Path of Curses, which I think is to be found in “Blood Magic: Secrets of Thaumaturgy,” which is not a book I think it is reasonable to expect people to go looking for rules in if not marked. When the Ghosts actually have a page citation it is literally a Page XX error. This is pure cargo cult all the way down. Superficially, this looks like an acceptable number of antagonists written up into an acceptable information density. But it's fractal gibberish: every part of it is just as much incoherent psychobabble as the entire thing.

AncientH:

Also, no indication is given for where these animals can be found in Africa. Not that it matters. I'd like to see the asshole that ghouls and elephant. That'll be funnier than the hellcow.


I was going to post a picture of the Ethiopian wolf and make a crack about Lupines, but this picture is way more fucking metal.

Also, Scarab Beetles have 7 health levels? WTF?

FrankT:

The beasts are reasonably self contained. There isn't a lot of stuff on an animal statline, so they get a lot on each page. 42 critters in 8 pages plus a bonus rules page. That's almost 5 per page, which is pretty sweet. I think the big problem here is that a number of these are completely fucking insane. I don't mean that there are some animals in this list which very definitely do not live in Africa (like Tigers), I mean there are 42 creatures in the list and it's OK if some of them are a bit out to lunch. No, the big issue is that an Elephant only has a Strength of 5, which is the human maximum before positive qualities. The African Bush Elephant is the largest living land animal, and I am damn fucking positive that however many dots you give it in “Strength” that it should be more than some asshole human who happens to be on steroids or have some large size merit. Fuck!


Maybe they meant very tiny elephants?

AncientH:

I'm going to quote this bit on dolphins now:

Note: Dolphins have been considered to be the most intelligent of he "lower" mammals for some time, even more so than monkeys or apes. Some biologists believe that dolphins might even exceed humans in intelligence. Their ability in Linguistics reflects dolphins' ability to communicate complex ideas to each other through sonar, as well as to understand and respond to human speech. Their Enigmas Ability reflects their exceptional problem-solving skills. If any animal might be able to learn non-Physical Disciplines as a ghoul, dolphins would be that animal. This is merely speculation, however, and not an encouragement to create Vicissitude-wielding sea critters.

[Koumei]

I really wish the game had been all about the cities (or indeed one specific African city), where you learn that all the in-game supernatural terms are old not because Africans are superstitious and hate change, but because vampires are superstitious and hate change. Where these elder vampires from Africa put their foot down and said "WE WILL BE DOING STUFF THAT IN HUNDREDS OF YEARS WILL BE MOCKED. AND WE WILL STILL DO IT THEN". And then modern vampires have to put up with stupid older terms and "steal their soul through glass" or "steal his penis" powers because "old vampires". Except yeah, being modern, they trap souls in Coke bottles and stuff.

That could be really fun to play.

[Prak]

Now, come up with three or four authentic (or even authentic-sounding) African names. Right now!
No big deal. We can't either.

This is indicative of the problems with the entire chapter, basically. The writers know that the storytellers and players have no idea how things actually work in Africa, and the writers themselves quite clearly don't know shite either.

Holy fucking Greg. That is... literally staggering. No, seriously, I happened to be standing as I read that and nearly fell into my chair.

On the other hand:

• Anansi
• Kunta Kinte
• Goodluck Jonathan

Done before I even read further, and this is literally the bare minimum of effort for this task.

Which sounds terrible, and maybe could be a good excuse for some actual hunter (or even Hunter) organizations in Africa that the Laibon can play with and against, but that's not a thing. I don't know why it isn't a thing, except that this really does look like a dry run for some nWoD concepts and they really stay clear of any other African supernaturals in the setting - no words on the Changing Breeds, non-bullshit sorcerers, Mages, fairies, Kuei-Jin, Hunters, Mummies, Demon the Fallen wasn't out yet I think but...well, you get the drift. The Laibon have apparently spent most of the last six thousand years sitting on their collective asses bickering about who is king of the local village of fifty people. That is the message this book tries to convey in the Storytelling section. And it sucks.

Demon was out as of Nov 2002. I may do an OSSR for it, since it probably deserves one.

As to the other Supernaturals, just off the top of my head, I could see Laibon working with Ajaba (werehyenas) and possibly some Ananasi to exert power and fight off the Simba (werelions) and other Bastet, since the Ajaba really fucking hate the Bastet for a private War of Rage down in Africa were the Simba played the part of the Garou. Of course, in order to do anything with that scenario, you have to figure out how Bastet work, and more specifically what their whole little secrets thing does, if anything. If the secrets are true weaknesses, you can have Ajaba ferreting out Simba secrets and telling them to Laibon in a scene where each half of the team up thinks they're calling the shots.

You can probably do a lot with mages and hedgemages in Africa. Hell, you could take this book as an alternate history where the traditions won in Africa, and so there seriously isn't as much technology because mage-kings are walking around blasting any sign of the Technocracy. Meanwhile the Technocracy has ceded Africa to the traditions because, well, the West only gives about half a shit about Africa.

And Neonate Laibon are trapped in a system where the oldest vampires are automatically in charge, with a pecking order based on age, and they stick with it because...uh...they have nowhere else to go?

What about fucking America? Europe? Carib? Anywhere that isn't where you are now?

Come to think of it, this actually particularly egregious because... if you're an immortal, unaging being whose only concern for the weather is sunlight, and are basically expected to just up and leave... you are pretty much supremely suited to just hiding on a ship, or failing that, shoving yourself in a box and having a dominated or ghouled shmuck shove it into the waves hoping you'll hit literally anywhere else like you're some kind of desperate cartoon character.

AncientH:

I'm going to quote this bit on dolphins now:

Note: Dolphins have been considered to be the most intelligent of he "lower" mammals for some time, even more so than monkeys or apes. Some biologists believe that dolphins might even exceed humans in intelligence. Their ability in Linguistics reflects dolphins' ability to communicate complex ideas to each other through sonar, as well as to understand and respond to human speech. Their Enigmas Ability reflects their exceptional problem-solving skills. If any animal might be able to learn non-Physical Disciplines as a ghoul, dolphins would be that animal. This is merely speculation, however, and not an encouragement to create Vicissitude-wielding sea critters.

Mr Author, you have fucking failed, because now I totally need to creat Cthulhu-worshipping, vicissitude weilding dolphins. This isn't even a desire, it is a deep need in my soul. These need to exist.

[Silent Wayfarer]

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

Now imagine if they had spelled it as NigGaz instead.

[Night Goat]

The thing about the dolphins reminds me of Blood Dimmed Tides, the guide to the oceans of the World of Darkness. That would also make a great subject for an OSSR.

[ckafrica]

AncientH:
There is a thing in the HIV/AIDS section where they talk about how African men blame women for HIV and think sleeping with a virgin will cure it. That's pretty bad, but pretty par for the "I heard it on the internet" course.

When I was in South-Eastern Africa during 2002-3 that was something I heard recurringly from more educated Africans as a common issue in the tribal areas.

[Ancient History]

Ebony Kingdoms: Last Part
Appendix: Minor Legacies and Clans


Bring on the crazy.

AncientH:

For a free White Wolf catalog, call 1-800-454-WOLF

They pack a lot of crazy into the last few pages of this book. Crazy because this is the sort of material you expected/hoped/wanted would be in this book throughout, to see how something of the secrets hidden in the Ebony Kingdom, and how it interacts with the greater world of darkness. Of course, we don't quite get that, but we get a tantalizing taste of that.

FrankT:

This appendix takes 9 pages to explain 4 bloodlines. That brings the total for the book up to 13, which is the magic number of official clans. This means that indeed at some point someone wrote up a variant on all 13 official oWoD clans, and then someone decided to use only 9 of them, and then someone decided to put the other four into the book anyway because if this book had anyone in charge of project management they clearly spent most of their time too drunk to stand. For those of you who can't recall the original clans or can't be bothered to look to the first page where we talked about which clans got mentioned already in the book, the four that are left are the Giovanni, Malkavians, Tremere, and Ventrue. Of those, the Malkavians and Ventrue get played mostly straight, while the Giovanni and Tremere get written up as variants of their Dark Ages progenitor clans (the Cappadocians and the Salubri if you care, which you do not).

Really very little effort has been spent in making these be at all interesting. The only thing that really stands out among these four “minor legacies and clans” is that no one has bothered to rewrite the clan's disadvantage at all. That makes them a tiny bit more half-assed than the nine main ones, although ironically it also makes them more playable because the rewritten disadvantages in this book don't even. The Malkavians and Ventrue are completely unchanged, and presented as being actually white people slumming it in Africa for whatever reason.


Really, as good a reason as any.

The Cappadocians and the Salubri get new names and are pictured as black people, but that's as far as the conversion got. It's just enough change to make this shit confusing, but not enough change to make this shit interestin. Of course, as AncientHistory mentioned earlier, the Cappadocians were replaced with the Giovanni and the Giovanni were supposed to have some dudes in Africa, so the fact that we get these Cappadocian throwbacks at all is both weird and dumb.

AncientH:

The big thing about the Giovanni and the Tremere is that they were supposed to have diablerized the antediluvians and then eaten the entirety of their clans, claiming their own clans in their place. But, weirdly, later in the edition someone got a bug up their ass that nobody was supposed to get one over the antediluvians--ever. So all the 3rd generation that were supposed to have been eaten, it turned out to be part of their ineffable plans, and there were a shitload of survivals. For the Cappadocians, there were the Samedi, the Harbingers of Skulls, and now the Mla Watu; for the Salubri, there were the Salubri, the Salubri antitribu, the Wu Zao, and now the Nkulu Zao.

You can sort of see why the Cappadocians had survivals - they had Mortis/Necromancy, which was fun and, unlike Thaumaturgy and other blood sorceries, somewhat disciplined in its subject and approach. They were fun. The Salubri were just weird, their powers didn't make a lot of sense, and they were better off dead.

That said, the Nkulu Zao in the Ebony Kingdom aren't as bad off as some of the others; sure, they have a shitty disadvantage in that they can only feed from willing subjects, if they take the merit that lets them drink animal blood, they can just buy the fucking blood and everything is coming up Salubri.

The Mla Watu/Cappadocians are weird because...well, you already have a lot of Necromancy in Africa. You have the Ghiberti branch of the Giovanni, some of the Shango study it, fuck there's a Lilith cult somewhere in Africa that's supposed to know Necromancy...so the Giovanni don't have any sort of monopoly on Necromancy, and all the players are basically pissing into the same pool.

The Ventrue and Malkavians are...uh...well, they're pieces that don't quite fit. The Malks are all fishmalks, the Ventrue...well, I'll let them say it:

To the Ventrue, much of Africa is like Casablanca.

FrankT:

Having white people in pith helmets acting like offensive stereotypes of great white hunters and shit is the kind of thing that whitesplainers might tell you “balances out” the offensive portrayals of black people. But I want to make this very clear: it does not. It's like when white people start a sentence with “I'm not racist but...” there's really nowhere that can go that is at all good. Just, walk away. There was maybe something interesting to do with white people Vampires and discussing the truly awe inspiring casual racism that was considered socially acceptable in the extremely recent past, but this wasn't it.


Probably not.

Ebony Kingdoms: Wrapup


The only oversight this book got.

AncientH:

The index is terrible. I honestly think it must have been compiled with index-making software. You might as well not have bothered.


You would be forgiven for thinking all of Africa looked like this based on this book.

FrankT:

This book is really offensive. Not World of Darkness: Gypsies offensive, but it's close. And that's horrible. We've called out lots of individual points where our brains just break and we can't handle any more of the subtle racism or where we just hit a fucking wall and the book is just comparing black people to animals or some fucking thing.


We're in a pretty bad place when the card game expansion based on this book is less racially problematic than the book itself.

Really, we shouldn't have to call attention to mentions of “dark continents” and “bushmen” and stuff, because there shouldn't be any of that shit. But I understand that it's a hard line to tread to talk about areas with genuine privation and systemic problems while still treating the people who live there with dignity and respect. You're probably going to say things that sound more racist than you meant them to. And to a certain extent, that's even OK. The only thing worse than being talked about is not being talked about – speaking about people in a clumsy way is actually better than pretending they don't exist.


Or when writing this book, like all the time.

Basically, this book is bad, and everyone involved in producing it should feel bad. But making a book on this topic is something which White Wolf not only should have done, but should have done earlier and harder. White Wolf needed a book on Blackulas, it just needed to be written by people who had anything to say about the topic.

AncientH:

What is worse, this book is inadequate. This is a massive hardcover of over 200 pages, and the information content is ridiculously low. You could get a better book by buying one of those "books" that just collects related wikipedia articles. The wiki page for this book is more useful and informative than the book itself.

There's also nothing in this book for established players; most of the "new powers" are presented in an incompatible rules format, and few of them are new. The most exciting bit of the book are expanded merits/flaws for playing a fucking chupacabra. They even managed to fuck up a path of Necromancy, and all they should have been doing there is copy-and-pasting.

It would be different if this book was capable of standing on its own feet, and you could pretend it was its own little world like Orpheus. But it isn't, and it can't; it's explicitly an add-on to Vampire: the Masquerade, but it's a shitty add-on that should have been an 80-page softcover splat, not a two hundred page hardbound shelfbreaker.

FrankT:

If we were rebooting World of Darkness with the actual IP, of course the Laibon would be in there. Heck, they'd be front and almost center in the reboot. Because World of Darkness needs Blackulas if it is to be a World of Darkness rather than a small cadre of Atlanteans having white people problems in Boston (see: nMage for details). But of course, while the term “Laibon” would be in use (and probably at least some of the legacies like the Xi Dundu), that's about as far as it would go. Really, all this book would offer to the reboot is some Blackula faction names. For actual Blackula magic and culture you'd mostly have to go back to the well. Because to be honest, Ebony Kingdom never made a good faith effort to go to the well in the first place.


Africa has a whole bunch of magic that is cool and unique enough that it should go in here. Why don't we have Blackulas whipping out literal cans of demon-be-gone?

Your Laibon sample setting should be way smaller geographically than this abortion. This book is trying to cover land areas and populations that are like three United States stacked on top of each other, and that just obviously isn't happening. Most of the material that Americans know is West African, because West Africa is where all the black people are from (oddly enough, President Obama is actually East African, but Michelle Obama is West African). Your primary focus should be no larger than “West Africa” and should probably be “Nigeria” or even “Lagos” when discussing the Laibon. Baby steps.

One thing you'd have to answer of course is why a West African group of Vampires runs around calling itself “Laibon” and drinking Maasai blood milk like they were Tanzanian nomads. But the thing is that that sort of question is actually really easy to address. We're talking about very small numbers of immortal vampires who reproduce by grabbing people off the street wherever they happen to be and giving them the bad touch. If the founder of Laibon society was a really tall nomadic warrior Vampire from nearly four thousand kilometers to the east, that would be OK. It would be a perfectly fine origin story.

When it comes down to it, we should have supervillains with magic hyenas on heavy duty chains and secret bases in swamps that catch fire (and may have rodents of unusual size), and tire fires and corrupt officials and so on and so on. Not because black people haven't noticed that it's the 21st century, but because Vampires are super criminals and super crime in Africa is awesome. This is the continent which had a pirate mother ship that launched little boats with guys holding rocket launchers in them like a god damn Contra boss. This is the continent where Belgian authorities used to demand that villages turn over a number human ears if they failed to meet work quotas like they were an evil empire in a high fantasy novel. This is the continent where an armed gang smashed their way into an Ebola quarantine ward and stole soiled linens like they were antagonists in a Crichton book.


Neighborhood watch on hard mode.

Yes, things should be gonzo and hard core, but they should be gonzo and hard core in the ways that Africa is actually gonzo and hard core turned up to 11 because it's the World of Darkness. Not just a bunch of talking down to Africa because you think they don't know what a cell phone is. Fuck!

AncientH:

And, to get back to what NMath was saying earlier, the advantage of a reboot is that you could work the Laibon thing into the setting from day one. They won't need to feel tacked-on or unimportant because they would be there from the start - the Laibon would be a faction as much as the Camarilla or the Sabbat, and could have a sphere of influence from the Indian Courts of the Kuei-Jin to the Caribbean and South America, where the elder Laibon were brought over in the lightless holds of slave ships and set themselves up as demigods of the night. The Assamites could have followed the spread of Islam down into sub-Saharan Africa and been warring with the Laibon for centuries. Hell, I'd love to see an out-of-Africa theory of vampirism to compete with all the Cainite nonsense.

There is, in essence, a lot of potential in Africa, because it is so huge and diverse and to an American or European audience, largely unfamiliar and exotic. But you can't paint the whole fucking continent as "THERE ARE POOR, AIDS-RIDDEN BLACK PEOPLE HERE." That's just fucking insulting to everyone involved.

And, to stretch a point, I'd like to go back to the Gothic Punk thing again. America has a really weird cultural relationship with Africa, because we know that for several centuries we bought and sold black people from West Africa like they were cattle. It's a sort of collective guilt that doesn't exist for, say, the days when people enslaved the Irish for being Irish. And there's a recognition - or maybe I should say a reminder - among many Americans that black people have a "connection" to Africa (fuck, we still call them "African Americans") - but that's like a Boston Irish having a connection to Ireland. It's many generations gone. Yes, you're great-great whatever came from Africa or wherever, but do you personally have a connection to Africa? Some people try, but it's hard when you're in America, where we thing big wooden spoons and forks on the wall is all tribal and shit.

But...and here is the but...in a Gothic Punk world, you can have that person connection, through the Laibon. You could have a bloodlink that ties back into the hoary mystical past of Africa, a supernatural connection that transcends where you happened to be born and raised. You could be Embraced by a Laibon and accepted by them as...one of them. Which is what the whole fucking Goth scene was about, really. Finding your people. And that is a cool character hook, even if it isn't a major plot hook to hang an adventure on.


One more "blackfang" joke, and you'll be going throughout eternity without your testicles.

FrankT:

It's kind of amazing to me to look at how thoroughly Kindred of the Ebony Kingdom misses every possible standards of quality. The rules aren't playable as written, and even after applying extensive mind caulk I don't think that they are playable “as intended.” Actually figuring out what the intentions are is damn near impossible because the book outright contradicts itself on high level concepts all the way down to mathematical minutiae at a frantic pace.

The book doesn't give you enough information to play “in Africa” or even any specific part of Africa, and several of the authors flatly admit that they aren't familiar enough with the subject to do it themselves. Such as the book has anything to offer in really setting stories in the region it is to tell you that you should really do some research – which the actual authors couldn't be fucked to bother with before writing this garbage.

The Vampire society as presented in this book is not only unfinished but I would honestly say it is less than half done. There are no plot hooks that you could really use and no handholds to assist in creating any kind of narrative. There is nothing to be gained in climbing your way up in this Vampire society, and no apparent means of doing so. There is nothing you care about or want or fear. There's no narrative gravitas – no sources of conflict or driving goals.

The book can't be bothered to extend a modicum of respect to its subjects and is only about three steps up from telling coon jokes. It's just really bad.

You'd think that having your name on this book would be the end of any career in RPG writing. But the chucklefucks who wrote this garbage were mysteriously paid real money to write more trash for White Wolf and other companies. I identified some of these names as chucklefucks not from material they'd shat out before, but from garbage they'd churned out a half dozen years later. I seriously don't understand why there aren't worse consequences in this industry for writing things that are terrible.


Thanks Morbo.

AncientH:

I'd like to think that this book was just a product of its time - the oWoD winding down, pumping out books in odd corners of the 'verse, perfecting the shovelware policy which reached its crescendo in nWoD. Certainly you could, if you were in a forgiving mood and drinking something horrible involving eggs, Tabasco sauce, and vodka say that the AIDS stats were pretty bad in 2003 and nobody could have foreseen the cell phone explosion. But...well, I think it's fair to look at this book next to something like Eurosource, from about ten years prior. The printing quality, the art quality, and the pagecount have increased tremendously; but the art is still cartoonish, the layout is still largely unreadable in sections because of the special fonts and weird sidebars, and the pagecount is wasted on vapid, offensive bullshit. It isn't a step forward in writing at all, only in presentation. And that's what is so sad about this book, is that it was clearly churned out with no love at all (except for that bizarre love-letter to dolphins), and that nobody involved with it has learned a god-damned thing about writing RPGs any different from the 1990s or 1980s. I know we harp on about how RPGs don't like to evolve - fuck, there's plenty of dinosaurs still roaming around the shelves - but it's honestly like the people at White Wolf failed to understand what made their games so revolutionary at the time, and were perpetually stuck being whining, moping teenagers that had JUST figured out that if everything you wear is black, it goes together. There is no progress in this book, and that saddens me.

[ruemere]

Given that you have done some research on this subject, is there any African (or African-based) RPG source book/site/community you would consider worthy of reading or using?

My experiences in this regard are limited to playtest version of Nyambe, however I would prefer something more contemporary.

Regards,
Ruemere

[Prak]

This thread made me remember a question that came up while working the Halloween store this year, and it's a good place to ask, both because of the topic of the thread (black vampires) and Frank being a doctor and all (or med student, whatever).

So, vampires are corpses. That's why they're pale and lacking blood.

I am thankfully not acquainted with the effects of death and blood loss on the bodies of african people. Given that vampires are exsanguinated corpses, what would a black vampire actually look like? Lets say one who has not recently fed, since a lot of vampire stuff tends to say they look alive after that.

[Username17]

Given that you have done some research on this subject, is there any African (or African-based) RPG source book/site/community you would consider worthy of reading or using?

I certainly wouldn't recommend Feral Cities for Shadowrun, but it's better (and shorter) than Ebony Kingdom. Not a high bar to reach, I know. Cyberpirates! (also Shadowrun) was much better, but also only a small section of the book goes into Africa at all. Probably the most entertaining book on the subject is Rifts Africa. It's basically useless and totally fucking insane, but it's a fun read in its way. The sheer insanity makes up for a lot.


If the books are going to be offensive and useless, they can at least be gonzo.

Now if you want specifically Egypt, you're spoiled for choice. There are lots of good products on Egypt. Fuck, even Avalanche Press has a decent enough Egypt book if you can get passed the boobs on the cover. Actual black people Africa, not so much.

This thread made me remember a question that came up while working the Halloween store this year, and it's a good place to ask, both because of the topic of the thread (black vampires) and Frank being a doctor and all (or med student, whatever).

So, vampires are corpses. That's why they're pale and lacking blood.

I am thankfully not acquainted with the effects of death and blood loss on the bodies of african people. Given that vampires are exsanguinated corpses, what would a black vampire actually look like? Lets say one who has not recently fed, since a lot of vampire stuff tends to say they look alive after that.

People who have lost a lot of blood look pale, whether they have brown skin or not. Paleness on black people doesn't make their melanin go away but it does make the pink turn white. So their palms and lips and eyelids become much lighter and the rest of their skin becomes slightly off-colored. It looks wrong, but it's nowhere near as pronounced as it is on white people or Asians. More than anything it looks like they are dusty.

-Username17

[hyzmarca]

Note: Dolphins have been considered to be the most intelligent of he "lower" mammals for some time, even more so than monkeys or apes. Some biologists believe that dolphins might even exceed humans in intelligence. Their ability in Linguistics reflects dolphins' ability to communicate complex ideas to each other through sonar, as well as to understand and respond to human speech. Their Enigmas Ability reflects their exceptional problem-solving skills. If any animal might be able to learn non-Physical Disciplines as a ghoul, dolphins would be that animal. This is merely speculation, however, and not an encouragement to create Vicissitude-wielding sea critters.

So, when they say that they don't want to encourage Vicissitude-wielding dolphins, is that reverse psychology? Because I can't read that sentence and not think that I should be making armies of Vicissitude dolphins. Actually, Vicissitude and Dominate, maybe substitute Presence for Dominate.

Oh, whom and I kidding, Vicissitude, Dominate, Obfuscation, and Dementation; armies of mind-controling madness-inducing shapeshifting stealth dolphins.

[Count Arioch the 28th]

[Longes]

So, DA:V20 remade african clans. Let me go through them quickly.

First of all, none of the african vampires actually leave Africa, so I don't know what the fuck.



Ramanga. OBFUSCATE, OBTENEBRATION (Aizina), PRESENCE as disciplines. Obtenebration (Aizina) is literally just Obtenebration, this is the only time the word "Aizina" is mentioned in the book.

A Ramanga's use of Presence and Aizina, when impacting others, is at +1 difficulty normally. However, if she has a physical piece of the victim, this penalty is negated.

Despite the (better) Discipline spread and the equally meaningless weakness, these are literally Lasombra. Replacing the entirety of the two-page spread with "African vampires call clan Lasombra "Ramanga"" would have been just as useful. Apparently Ramanga spend hundreds of years with their sires before being allowed to strike on their own, and the entire clan is very tight-knit, organized and hierarchical because fuck Tremere fuck Tremere fuck Tremere fuck Tremere fuck Tremere fuck Tremere fuck Tremere fuck Tremere fuck Tremere fuck Tremere fuck Tremere fuck Tremere fuck Tremere fuck Tremere.

A Ramanga lives amongst her chosen group and might even be known (and accepted) by the rulers for what she is. These rulers see her as a supernatural lightning rod who will draw bad omens to herself and thus protect the people. While being perceived as a servant does not appear to be a lofty position, the Ramanga knows better; she is the one who whispers in their ears, controlling their every action and thought. Many Ramanga maintain two havens: One where the rulers know to seek her out during the night, and one in a secluded spot where she spends her day in safety. As part of her services, a Ramanga drinks the blood of the elite to draw out any curses cast on them, so there is rarely need for her to hunt. Even moving into a new territory, she has the skill to quickly set up a new group of people to serve, as it were, and feed from.

Since Ramanga don't actually have any special curse powers, the clan's entire lifestyle and stereotype is smoke and mirrors used to dupe poor africans. Also African vampires apparently live openly among kine.



Bonsam. ABOMBWE, OBFUSCATE, POTENCE as disciplines. Abombwe is a weird-ass Protean, and the entire clan are gangrel who look like Nosferatu.

A Bonsam is typically a loner, and highly territorial at that.

Fucking great.

Possessed by a darkness before time, a Bonsam inspires primordial terror in mortals. Mortals who fail at a Courage roll (difficulty 7) when seeing a Bonsam in his true form either flee in terror or gather up weapons to kill the monster, depending on the size of the mortal group and the Nature of its leader. This fear can be overcome however, and a mortal who has succeeded at this check need not roll again upon meeting the same Bonsam (or at Storyteller's discretion, any Bonsam).

I don't know what this means. Do they look like monsters? Do they have some extra special shapeshifting powers? Does the curse affect only Bonsam with Abombwe 3 and higher? I don't know!

Spread out and territorial, the Bonsam is not beholden to a greater organization. However, he speaks a communal language of bat-like shrieks and whistles that allows him to communicate with other Bonsam in a radius of roughly one mile, depending on terrain and wind conditions.

So Bonsam are territorial loners who somehow developed a language they can somehow scream for miles.



Impundulu. Necromancy (primarily Cenotaph and Haunting Path), FORTITUDE, PRESENCE as disciplines.

An Impundulu only gains sustenance from the Bomkazi. As the witches are independently powerful and their relationship with the Impundulu is voluntary, the Impundulu does well to treat any Bomkazi as an equal ally as opposed to a retainer, with all the complications this might entail.

Welcome to the crazy town, population: potato. The kicker is - Bomkazi are a bloodline of mortal sorcerers. Fucking really. Impundulu can only feed on a single family of african wizards.

Each Impundulu lives with one or more Bomkazi witches in their residence of choice. The Bomkazi can use their life magic to heal, requiring only a small herd (sometimes just one) for every Impundulu. As an Impundulu can only feed from the Bomkazi and the witches are both unbondable and powerful in their own magic, this is a purely voluntary relationship. In fact, a fledgling Impundulu making the mistake of treating a Bomkazi like a servant or retainer will find himself going hungry until he makes amends and is forgiven. An Impundulu and Bomkazi typically stay together for life, though sometimes a clash of personalities makes it best for both to move on. In such cases, unless the Impundulu was truly offensive, the Bomkazi will help him find another companion. The relationships between Impundulu and Bomkazi are wide and varied, and they might be like lovers, parents, siblings, or simply friends.

Your entire herd is a single fucking mortal wizard and when he dies - you are screwed. I don't know how Impundulu can possibly exist, and I also don't know what Bomkazi can actually do, because this is the only time Bomkazi are mentioned in the book.

To sum things up: 20th anniversary african clans are still shit. One is a power-swap copy of the Lasombra, the other two are unplayable as written.

[Schleiermacher]

As with many (indeed most) of the Vampire clans, those are neat characters, as in one character or coterie each, but unbelievably shitty archetypes.

[Longes]

As with many (indeed most) of the Vampire clans, those are neat characters, as in one character or coterie each, but unbelievably shitty archetypes.

It's a really bad habbit of White Wolf and its mini-Me - to make a unique bloodline for each unique NPC that pops up in their adventures. Kyasid are the prime example. The original Kyasid is Marconius, a Lasombra who molested the fairies and got cursed, developing a unique discipline and looking like a Gray (the alien, sectoids from XCOM). Marconius was a solitary occult collector, so they've made an entire bloodline of solitary occult collectors who dabble in faerie magic.

Pretty much all ethnical clans would be better if you just took the original clan and said "this is what they are called in Bangladesh/Moldova/Haiti/etc."

[Username17]

Factions and bloodlines being completely unplayable isn't much of a problem for v20 because no one plays v20. It's a book club or reading group or cult. BMX Bandit and Angel Summoner can pal around because dice are never rolled. It's totally fine for characters or archetypes to be completely incapable of working with groups because there aren't enough potential v20 players to actually hit critical mass and actually have a cooperative storytelling game happen.

-Username17