Vampire 5e

[TheFlatline]

Much like it's namesake, VTM is going to shamble in a state of unlife towards 5th edition.

https://geekandsundry.com/vampire-the-m ... is-summer/

[Username17]

I wouldn't hold my breath for Vampire to come out this summer, because I am not a vampire and would probably die. Paradox bought the White Wolf IP in 2015 and promised a tabletop game in 2016. Winter 2016 came and went and they promised a tabletop game in 2017. Well, 2017 is over and now they are promising a game in summer of 2018. Forgive me if I don't start pre-ordering things.

The thing is, I don't hear any great insight or reflection coming out of P-WW. oVampire and nVampire had a lot of things about them that are simply unacceptably bad by modern standards, and Paradox has shown no special understanding of what those were, much less what could possibly be done about it.

-Username17

[Fucks]

For what it's worth: Pre-Order starts this weekend, with shipping to take place in August.

https://www.modiphius.net/collections/v ... masquerade

[Fucks]

http://frialigan.se/en/news/#/pressrele ... nt-2491275

White Wolf Entertainment announced today that Free League, the award-winning Swedish publishers of speculative fiction, art, and roleplaying games, will provide the visual design for the Vampire: The Masquerade 5th Edition tabletop roleplaying game.

“Vampire has always pushed the limits of what a roleplaying game can be, and V5 is no different. The rich World of Darkness universe lends itself really well to exploring new takes on art and design, and that's a great opportunity for us when we work on the layout. This will be an RPG book that truly stands out," says Free League CEO Tomas Härenstam.

[OgreBattle]

tiddies

[Fucks]

https://icv2.com/articles/news/view/402 ... querade-5e

Modiphius Entertainment and Impressions have shared trade release information on the first Vampire: The Masquerade Fifth Edition products hitting the hobby market.
White Wolf Entertainment announced details on the first releases earlier this week (see “White Wolf Unveils First 'Vampire: The Masquerade' Fifth Edition Releases”); now there are prices and release dates:

August

Vampire: The Masquerade 5th Ed. (Hardback, Full Color), $55.00 MSRP
September

Vampire: The Masquerade 5th Ed. - Deluxe (Alt. Cover with special finish, Hardback, Full Color), $140.00 MSRP
Vampire: The Masquerade 5th Ed. - Storyteller Screen (4 Panel screen with 32-page booklet), $28.00 MSRP
Vampire: The Masquerade Dice Set (20 Custom 10-sided Dice- 15 black Vampire and 5 blood red Hunger dice), $21.00 MSRP
Vampire: The Masquerade Official Notebook (160-page Digest Notebook Supp.), $14.00 MSRP
Fall

Vampire: The Masquerade - Camarilla (Vampire 5th Supp., Hardback, Full Color), $50.00 MSRP
Vampire: The Masquerade - Anarch (Vampire 5th Supp., Hardback, Full Color), $50.00 MSRP
Vampire: The Masquerade 5th Ed. Slipcase Set (3 Books in Slipcase), $140.00 MSRP
Several bundles are available for retailers featuring a free edition of a book with bundle purchase.

[Foxwarrior]

$55 for a hardcover huh. Either they're really going all in on the fleecing or that's print on demand.

[Aryxbez]

It's a pity we have such a big company behind Vampire, seemingly doing nothing with it. As I recall this is because the Tabletop RPG division is the same people before Paradox even bought it? Wish they'd just bring in the actual Paradox designers, and give us our Crusader Vampire Kings 3 RPG.

[Chamomile]

I want to believe that Paradox will make it work, but I'm not buying until the dust has settled.

[Starmaker]

http://frialigan.se/en/news/#/pressrele ... nt-2491275

White Wolf Entertainment announced today that Free League, the award-winning Swedish publishers of speculative fiction, art, and roleplaying games, will provide the visual design for the Vampire: The Masquerade 5th Edition tabletop roleplaying game.

“Vampire has always pushed the limits of what a roleplaying game can be, and V5 is no different. The rich World of Darkness universe lends itself really well to exploring new takes on art and design, and that's a great opportunity for us when we work on the layout. This will be an RPG book that truly stands out," says Free League CEO Tomas Härenstam.

1. This looks terrible. And generic. And terrible. And did I mention terrible?
2. If they really want to push this borderline artbook notion, different clanbooks/sections need different aesthetics. I don't see that being in the budget. Nothing about that washed-out filter assplosion look says Toreador, but it sure as fuck does say "not Brujah".
3. Nothing good will come out of a designer who can't be bothered to lern2kerning.

[Username17]

$55 for a hardcover huh. Either they're really going all in on the fleecing or that's print on demand.

$20 in 1991 is like $37 dollars today because of nearly thirty years of inflation. It's not weird for a new edition of an RPG to cost forty bucks, it would be weird for it to cost less than that. Slapping a pricetag of fifty or even fifty-five is not inconceivable, since RPG books tend to be bloated beyond belief and filled with full color art when compared to the works of the late eighties and early nineties. You're getting "more content" with an RPG from 2018 than you were from an RPG from the nineties, so a relative cost increase of 25-50% isn't hard to justify.

But... and let's face it, you knew there was a "but" coming...

This looks terrible. And generic. And terrible. And did I mention terrible?

Yes. This looks extremely awful. It represents a sad retread of a most unfortunate trend in RPG books that I commented on in the SR5 Review.

The insides are the kind of thing that looks high budget and snazzy on an initial flip through, but on closer inspection is actually just really busy. Interior layout is by a guy who calls himself “Wrath” unironically, and it shows. There are... doohickeys... all over the page. The opening fiction is white text over a gray text crawl on black background background. Yes, really. They put text on a pseudo-text background, and it is fucking painful to read. An ordinary page might have white text, black text, yellow text, three different fonts, magenta backgrounds, picture backgrounds, and gray and white “futuristic” backgrounds. Not as like a choose your own adventure of a page, that's seriously all on the same page. Someone went to the zen typesetter and asked to make him one with everything. This makes it look really professional on a flip through, I mean, there are so many fonts, it must be really well organized, right? Wrong. This visual clutter serves no purpose other than to clutter the visual

They have shown one page with text in five different fonts in three different colors, and some of that text is displayed over textured backgrounds that make it hard to read and some of that text is an extended italics block that is also hard to read. And that's pretty much all they are offering. "We're making a book that uses fiddly typesetting to make it hard to read."

There's certainly nothing about their Toreador poem that makes me interested in their new edition or want to pick up Vampire again. It's a bad poem that is mostly just words from a thesaurus. It fucking ends with the word "Taurarius" which is Latin for "Bullfighter." That word has literally nothing to do with anything and would actually just be better as the word "Bullfighter." It's so out of place and conveys so little information that I'm not entirely convinced that the author knows what it means. Certainly including the word "Arikelites" without explanation sounds like someone did an internet search for terms associated with Clan Toreador without specifying context and just wrote down all the terms in a snaking beat poetry format. That's a reference to the myth of Arikel from Clanbook Toreador, but that's such an obscure piece of lore that only someone with their head way up their own asshole or who had no idea what themes were major or minor in V:tM would write it down. The "Divas" thing is kind of even worse, since the "Divas" are the Toreador replacement clan from nWoD. Meaning that it's a term that is associated with Clan Toreador online, but very specifically not associated with Clan Toreador in the context of the actual V:tM universe. It would be like listing Superman's Justice Lords title next to a description of Superman or putting an AKA on Barry Allen as some Flash from Earth Two. Divas is the alternate universe name for these fuckers, you assholes.

Anyway, the bottom line is that the page spread displayed shows a complete lack of ability or interest in conveying information to reader combined with a total lack of vision for moving the setting forward. For fuck's sake, Arikelites? Are you fucking shitting me?

-Username17

[FatR]

If you're putting tits in your book, at least make them fapworthy. These aren't.

Also, in general, the bleached aesthetics and pictures looking as if someone spilled paint on the page weren't impressive in nWoD and they aren't impressive now.

[Username17]

Also, in general, the bleached aesthetics and pictures looking as if someone spilled paint on the page weren't impressive in nWoD and they aren't impressive now.

That is true. Other than specifically name checking some oWoD shit you don't care about (fucking Arikelites?), that bit could be an excerpt from any fucking piece of Onyx Path shovelware. Hell, if you told me that that was a piece from an unfinished V20 piece commissioned by Onyx Path kickstarter backers and written by child molesters, I would believe that. All they have to show me is photo manipulation, bad type setting, and an artistic direction which is absolutely indistinguishable from the shit no one liked that drove the company into bankruptcy. Twice.

Now I don't actually think that you could recapture the cultural position that oWoD art direction enjoyed in the early 90s. Quite aside from the fact that most random pen-and-ink artists you got wouldn't end up being Tim Fucking Bradstreet, the reality is that production values of Vampire the Masquerade were notable in their time for being higher than the competition.


Other RPGs made in 1991 looked like this. If you were lucky.

Shit has moved on, and a typical RPG doesn't look like it was put together in pasteup with a typewriter and the pen doodles of the author's highschool friends. These days RPGs you hear about look like a professional product. Vampire: the Masquerade can't be taken seriously with the "high quality garage work" level of production values they had in 1991, but neither can they be taken seriously with the "Photoshop Dilettantes fucking around" level of production values that Onyx Path products threw around.

-Username17

[hyzmarca]

I'm all for casual non-fapworthy tits. We need more casual tits. Casual Tits are the tits.

But that slanted text is just unreadable, and those tits are trying to hard.

[Username17]

So... I tried to figure out who the Free League were and I couldn't. Apparently they helped organize a kickstarter for Simon Stålenhag's "Tales From The Loop," which is an art-book about an alternate timeline where 1980s Sweden has a bunch of robots. I have no evidence whatsoever that they are in any way qualified to make an RPG. It's very strange.

-Username17

[Thaluikhain]

Been wondering for a while, why are Toreadors called Toreadors? Cause bullfighter and vampire...ok, there might be some overlap, but it seems a bit random. Or did someone listen to Carmen and pick up that word and thought it sounded cool?

I'm all for casual non-fapworthy tits. We need more casual tits. Casual Tits are the tits.

Yeah, shame that breasts are always assumed to be sexual. Though, not a great pic either way.

[Username17]

Or did someone listen to Carmen and pick up that word and thought it sounded cool?

The evidence is that Mark Rein • Hagen didn't even listen to Carmen but had instead heard some fragment of the song in another context. Most likely a Bugs Bunny Cartoon, and no I am not kidding. Recall that the dotmeister legit thought that "Brujah" was pronounced "Brew - Jaw" because he had never heard the word spoken when he decided to write it into the game. Fucking think about that - his exposure to Spanish was so minimal that he did not know what "Brujah" sounded like when spoken aloud.

In general, the early White Wolf people were shockingly insular even by white people from the Midwest standards. And these guys were white guys from the Midwest. The Dotmeister was from Ohio and Tweet was from Illinois, and they both went to school in Minnesota. White Wolf got going when Rein • Hagen moved to Atlanta for economic reasons. Elements of Spanish and Russian and German are mangled because the people doing the writing had no idea what they were talking about and it was the days before the internet.

Like, why are the Malkavians called Malkavians? If they were Slavic, they would be Malkovsky, and even if they were Anglicized, they'd still be Malkovian. If they were Latin, they wouldn't have a K at all because obviously, and it would be Malcavius. And it would still Anglicize to Malcavian. The word Malkavian was chosen because it sounded pretentiously European to the ears of Midwesterners, but no one ever checked any linguistic meaning.

The Toreador are called that because their symbol is a rose and someone said the word Toreador in a song while cartoon animals had roses thrown at them. That's as deep as it fucking goes.

Note: the fact that people in the late 80s and early 90s made up some words is the only intellectual property that Paradox actually owns that anyone cares about. You can't copyright rules systems or game world concepts. You can't copyright real world words or terms used in art decades before you were born. All you can do is trademark titles and copyright exact text.

So you could make your own edition of Vampire with blackjack and hookers. You could have 7 main clans, and you could have their organization called "The Camarilla" and you could have one of the main clans be called "The Nosferatu" and another called "The Brujah" and another called "The Toreador." That wouldn't be violating Paradox's intellectual property rights in the slightest, because they don't fucking own those concepts because White Wolf never owned those concepts. But White Wolf does own the trademark to the book-name "Ventrue," so they might plausibly own that actual clan name.

Games Workshop went through something like that after they lost a court case and suddenly realized how little of the concepts in Warhammer and Warhammer 40K they actually owned. So they renamed all their factions and units into things that were deliberately misspelled so that they could be defended in court. There's no evidence that Lion Rampant or White Wolf were in any way far sighted in that regard - their misspellings and misunderstandings are all clearly the result of lack of comprehension.

-Username17

[Fucks]

Go nuts

https://www.modiphius.net/collections/v ... masquerade

[Chamomile]

Please spoiler the image, it's stretching the screen and fucking mobile readability sideways.

Also, that's what they're going for as their cover image? That is the best foot they are putting forward? That looks like something I'd commission on Deviant Art for $30-40 and slap on a cover because I'm running a shoestring operation and can't afford more.

[Longes]

Like, why are the Malkavians called Malkavians? If they were Slavic, they would be Malkovsky

Presumably Malkavians are called after their progenitor Malkav, in which case possible Russian variants are:

* Malkavy - literally "Malkavs"
* Malkavichy - children of Malkav
* Malkovs - children of Malkav

Suffix -sky is associated with places, so a clan could be called "Enochsky" - from Enoch. Or it could be Polish and I don't know shit about Polish.

[Chamomile]

Let's get some experts on Romanian and Croatian and everything so we can figure out exactly how many ways there were to get this right that WoD dodged on the way to getting it wrong.

[ArmorClassZero]

@FrankTrollman:

There used to be a site that had the VTM words and IRL etymology for said words. It's down now, but they suggested that Malkavian was from the Latin 'Mal' + 'Cavilla' roughly translating to 'bad-joke'.

But is highly dubious and / or utterly coincidental, given your account of Rein-Hagen's vocabulary.

Even so, I'd like to give nuWW the benefit of the doubt. The Toreador-like vamps in NWoD were called 'Daevas' which likely a reference to some Zoroastrian minor-godlike beings and translates as 'False Ones'. The word 'diva' which is like the feminine version of the Italian version of 'deus', so roughly 'goddess'. It seems like a nod to the the NWoD, but it's also fair in the sense the word 'diva' is used to mean 'celebrity girls with great fashion sense and spicy attitude' in the modern vernacular.

Been wondering for a while, why are Toreadors called Toreadors? Cause bullfighter and vampire...ok, there might be some overlap, but it seems a bit random. Or did someone listen to Carmen and pick up that word and thought it sounded cool?

The real question is: why would you call your wizard-vampires "tremble" and your punk / anarchist / rebel vampires "witches". Unless... Rein-Hagen & Co. really didn't know what the word Bruja meant...

[Username17]

The origins of the Tremere are pretty easy to follow. Originally, Vampire: the Masquerade was going to be Ars Magica: 1999, a game about secret cabals of Wizards. White Wolf was a company made from the ashes of Lion Rampant, the company that produced Ars Magica, and many elements of Ars Magica such as the thirteen houses or the short list of inviable traditions were carried over with the most superficial set of paint to conform to the new Ravenloft-influenced Vampire theme. The conversion to the Shadowrun-influenced dicepool system from d10 roll-over was so superficial that the game system was essentially unplayable, but y'all knew that part.

Anyway, the Tremere don't even have a new set of paint. They are literally one of the houses of wizards in Ars Magica. The houses in Ars Magica are all Hermetic orders, which is why they conduct all their business in really bad Greek Latin. What you say? Hermes is the Greek name and Mercury is the Latin name? Well... fuck you.

So anyway, Tremere along with houses like Verditius, Bonisagus, and Criamon are garbled near-Latin phrases. Some of the others are taken from other languages, so House Flambeau is obviously French, while House Bjornaer is supposed to sound Norse. Tremere happened to be the Dot Meister's favorite house, as "House Shiver" were the spooky mages from Transylvania, and apparently Rein Dot Hagen's personal character was one. So when the time came to write new names for the Vampire Clans, one of them just didn't get a new name at all - the wizard vampires kept the name of the primary author's favorite group of wizards from his previous game.

But yes, there is absolutely no reason for a Hungarian or Romanian wizard house to be named "Tremere." That's Latin for "Shiver," and there's nothing Transylvanian about it. Also no reason to associate them with shivering. It was just a Latinesque word that some college kids in Minnesota thought sound cool.

Edit: Anyway, trying to unravel what they are actually doing - Free League don't really seem to be a "publisher" in the traditional sense. More like Onyx Path - some dudes on the internet who use layout software on manuscripts and pimp things to kickstarter. The actual publisher appears to be Modiphius, which is a married couple from London. No, I'm not kidding. The company is Chris and Rita Birch, and they are the people behind Achtung!Cthulhu, which we've previously discussed here and here.

Long story short: Modiphius' MO has been to produce lovingly made high-production value books where the mechanics are essentially unplayable. Which is to say that they've been doing exactly what White Wolf did in 1991, but in 2012. And they haven't exactly flipped the table over, because that isn't near enough anymore and hasn't been for like 20 years.

I can see why Paradox would be attracted to working with Modiphius, but it's still probably the wrong approach to take. And in any case, most of Modiphius' work looks much much better than what is being shown in these new Vampire teasers.

-Username17

[Thaluikhain]

Ah, thanks. That seems an impressively unwise way of coming up with names. You could hit random keys of your keyboard and come up with something better.

[Username17]

Ah, thanks. That seems an impressively unwise way of coming up with names. You could hit random keys of your keyboard and come up with something better.

Well... yes. Given enough Hamlet typing monkeys or a machine learning algorithm you could get a better set of names given a large enough set of arrglebargle and enough time with a real person going through the suggestions. The actual method was to have people in the 80s write down elements from their own D&D campaigns and canonize them in their own fantasy heartbreakers and then port as many of those elements as they could into other games in other genres.

The origins of all these groups are written post-hoc. The idea that the founder of the Malkavians was named "Malkav" was simply the best explanation anyone could come up with because it defied linguistic classification. Fans and authors spent a lot of mental effort trying to come up with historical "fits" for the various vampire groups, and it all could have been avoided if the original writers had spent a few hours with some history books and spitballed some vague secret history back in 1990.

Now obviously this would have been a lot more work in the days before the internet. You couldn't just pull up a Wikipedia page on Romanian history back in 1986 when 22 year old Rein-Hagen was formalizing the writing in Ars Magica. It would have required some actual library time and reading actual dusty historical texts that might not have even been available in a small liberal arts college in Minnesota. But it's not very much work now. You could do a reasonably intense search on Germanic tribe migration with a few key strokes.

Which gets to a broader point: how much is the Vampire: the Masquerade IP even worth? I don't mean as a financial investment for a nostalgia reboot (although the answer to that appears to be "not very much, actually" if V20 was anything to go by), I mean as an actual starting point for an RPG that you'd actually want going forward. I mean, you wouldn't want to make your next D&D fantasy world actually be DragonLance, because it's fucking embarrassing to have the god of Paladins be named Paladine and Gully Dwarves are ethnically insensitive and also not funny. You'd obviously be influenced by the fact that DragonLance is a thing that happened, but you wouldn't want your next D&D Edition to actually use specifically DragonLance as its default campaign world.

So why make your next Vampire game literally take place in the World of Darkness? What do you actually get from doing that? A majority of the Vampire fanbase thought the setting needed a hard reboot back in 2003, and they weren't wrong. The specific reboot they did was fucking awful and crashed and burned financially, but the underlying logic of doing a reboot in the first place has not changed and fifteen years passing hasn't made the old embarrassing shit any less so.

Vampire: the Masquerade didn't invent roleplaying games, they didn't even invent roleplaying games where you played in the modern world as vampires and werewolves who were part of a secret society of punk horror movie monsters who had political conflicts involving secret subgroups and had ancient codes they had to live by that didn't specifically rule out eating people. The game that invented that was Nightlife, which Vampire: the Masquerade eventually ate and destroyed because it had higher production values and a more accessible tone. But there's nothing specific to the old World of Darkness that you'd actually want as itself. There are certainly similar decisions to be made: you are going to want a flavor of Vampires that are basically Ventrue - even the fucking Twilight books figured that shit out with their Veturi or whatever the fuck she called those guys. But there's no specific reason to have those things literally called "Ventrue." There's some familiarity in using a 30 year old clan name, but there's also baggage you don't want - the classic Ventrue clan disadvantage is actually unplayable as concepted and totally unsalvageable both intertemporally and interregionally. Once you realize that you have to heavily reconcept the Ventrue, why not just use some flavor of Not-Ventrue like Underworld or Twilight?

It's fairly remarkable how little of what you might care about in terms of clan structures and vampire organizations and shit that World of Darkness (or Nightlife, for that matter) actually owns. They don't own the concept of vampire powers being divided into Disciplines or even for those disciplines to be specifically named Dominate or Celerity. They don't own the concept of Vampires being a secret society, or that society having Clans of vampires or even one of the clans being ugly dudes named Nosferatu! Most of Vampire: the Masquerade is simply public domain, and what little there is that's proprietary is mostly stuff you don't care about and probably wouldn't even want to carry forward. You want art wanky vampires, but as mentioned several times in several ways, Toreador is a terrible name.

Now Nostalgia is a hell of a drug. Appeal to Tradition may be a formal fallacy, but that doesn't make it an unpersuasive argument. I admit to having a soft spot for the Followers of Set, because I was playing one the first time I slept with a woman. But I'll also admit that despite me thinking they are cool, that objectively having your Snake Vampires and your Egyptian Vampires be literally the Cult of Set from Conan the fucking Barbarian is more than a little bit stupid. That is actually a lot stupid. You probably shouldn't do that. But even if you wanted to do that, Conan the Barbarian came out a long fucking time ago. You don't actually have to own the old White Wolf IP to rip off even older R.E. Howard IP. You can just rip off Conan yourself without giving any money to Icelanders at all.

As far as I can tell, the only thing Paradox actually owns is the right to have people take them seriously as people who are going to make a new edition of Vampire and ownership of the actual trademarked clan symbols. Basically anyone could make a new edition of Vampire: the Masquerade as long as they called it "Vampire: War of Shadows" or something and didn't use the specific broken mirror graphic for the crazy vampire clan heraldry. It's not quite as empty as the Scion IP (where literally everything about the game except the logo on the cover is public domain), but it's damn close.

-Username17