[OSSR]Clanbook: Assamite

[Ancient History]

OSSR: Vampire: The Masquerade

Colons: Clanbook: Assamite: Colons


There are many versions of all the Clanbooks, but this one is mine.
Or at least, it's the 1995 version we are doing today.



Before we get too deep, this is the official clan symbol of the Assamites. It was made by someone who did not speak or read Arabic copying some Arabic text and spicing it up a bit. The calligraphy choices make a couple of the letters gibberish. The original text is the stock phrase “by the grace and mercy of Allah” which is used so frequently that it could plausibly have been copied off of virtually any piece of art or drawn from any book or text. There are missing dots that are not optional. And a few of the loops are backwards, and may have been traced using a mirror. That is the level of care we are dealing with here.

AncientH

This book, and arguably this entire concept, were never going to age well.

Keeping in mind that the original 13 clans of Vampire: the Masquerade were all pretty much explicitly limited to Europe - the smallest of the continents - at the time the game came out, and the Assamites and the Setites are the primary exception because they're Middle East/Near East/North Africa flavored.

And you couldn't play them.

The Assamites weren't Camarilla, and they weren't Sabbat (although there were some Assamit antitribu). For a long time, the Assamites just weren't a real option on the menu, Player's Guide be damned. They were the bogeyman of the setting, literal outsiders, killing vampires for blood, the assassins of the night.

Frank

Ah... the nineties. Vampire: The Masquerade: Clanbook: Assamite is what was known as a “splatbook.” And it was called a splatbook because of how Usenet hierarchies worked. When you had a variable string, the “*” symbol stood for anything. So searching “clanbook: *” would get you Clanbook: Assamite or Clanbook Toreador or fucking whatever. And while that symbol might be known to you as a “star” or an “asterisk” or whatever, to White Wolf fandom on the internet of the mid-nineties it was called a “splat” because it looked like someone had swatted a bug or dropped something from a height. And that, dear reader, is why books like The Complete Warrior for Dungeons & Dragons are called “splat books.” Because when the gaming internet was young, White Wolf was winning and TSR was losing.

The 90s splatbooks aren't very long, Clanbook Assamite is 66 pages and it contains white space, black space, and patterned gray and white space. And they aren't saddled with much (if any) editorial control – not only did the authors of various Clanbooks and shit write pretty much whatever the fuck they wanted, but they frequently got lost in the weeds of just plain arguing with each other. Books didn't just contradict each other by dint of not reading what others had written – but deliberately sought out such contradictions in lieu of having fucking meetings.


The metaplot of V:tM advanced by the same mechanism by which gang tags are spray painted over the tags of rival gangs.

What I'm saying is that Clanbook: Assamite is probably less than thirty thousand words, and the single author probably could have hammered out the primary text in less than two weeks. That single author is Graeme Davis, who is a freelancer best known for work with Games Workshop. The point is these fucking books took virtually no time to make and could easily be farmed out to freelancers from outside the core company, What's mind blowing is that White Wolf didn't make more of these fucking things. It genuinely makes no sense to me that there wasn't a splatbook for like Selkies and Swan May and shit. Heck, there was never even a splatbook for the Daughters of Cacophony. Yes, print runs would have to be small for these books that deviated far from core concepts, but so fucking what? White Wolf in the 90s had a license to print money, and only the fact that they were as disorganized as TSR kept them from using it more.

It's also important to realize that the whole “thirteen clans” thing took a long time to get settled on. While the rumor that there are thirteen total clans appeared in the very first book, the expansion material quickly and explosively made a fuck tonne more than thirteen expansion clans. The mindcaulk that the Children of Osiris and Samedi “didn't count' was a massive retcon that happened in the late nineties. In 1995 there simply were obviously more than thirteen clans and it doesn't actually make sense that there wasn't a clanbook Samedi. Vampire: the Dark Ages is where people started pruning the clan list and declaring various clans to be “just bloodlines” or whatever the fuck – and that didn't happen until 1996. And even when they did that, Clanbook: Baali came out anyway in 1998. And when they made Clanbook: Assamite they hadn't retconned away Dirty Secrets of the Black Hand and there could jolly well have been a splatbook for the Nagaraja.

AncientH

We here at the old Game Studio have also been messing around with this little thing called fiction. In fact, we've been rather happy with how well-received our first efforts have been. However, we do need to point out a little something about our World of Darkness fiction. We have dedicated ourselves to giving good writers the freedom they need to write good stories. This means that, like Storytellers, they are not necessarily beholden to strictly adhere to our systems. They have creative license to change things around

That seriously just ends there. It feels like somebody dropped a paragraph. Or maybe editor Erin Kelly looked at what they just bought and said "Ah, fuck." We'll never know.

There's an introduction, four chapters, and an appendix. We'll try to get through this pretty quick.


Try to pay attention.

Frank

The original seven vampire clans do a pretty atrocious job of covering vampire archetypes. They are all fractions of Dracula and represent like seven contemporary Vampire depictions that the Dot Meister could remember in 1991. And so it was when they made a bunch new clans in the Players Guide (that came out in the same fucking year as the basic book) they were starting from a point of having comically poor coverage of vampire archetypes. But when it came time to write new ones, they just sort of went crazy and the new offerings were all incredibly specific and basically show cases for individual character concepts rather than broadly applicable archetypes. Also they didn't even try to make the clan list add up to 13 for years, meaning that the only reason we didn't get a clan for Count Chocula, Count Von Count, Blackula, Lily Munster, Vampirella, Mr. Vampire, and so on is that no one freelancing at White Wolf bothered to do it. Which either has to do with poor research into the source material or just none of the writers wanting to play those particular characters and thus not putting in the effort to write rules for them.

The Assamite Clan was introduced in that context, and it's a thin justification for playing a character who is basically Blade.


This movie did not come out until 1998, they were referencing the Comics version.

Anyway, Graeme Davis is also one of the writing contributors to the 1991 Player's Guide where the Assamites are introduced, so there's a significant chance that for the first five years of Vampire's runtime that everything about the Assamites was the work of one dude. That there was never any meetings or focus groups or development sessions or fucking anything at all. There's just one guy who thought dark skinned vampires with swords was “totally bad ass” and every so often White Wolf would publish his rantings on the subject. Presumably the fact that Blade started appearing in Ghost Rider (itself a very popular comic at that time) shortly after the Players Guide came out made it easier for Graeme to argue for his subsequent rants to be published and also helped get the Assamites ruled as one of the thirteen “real” clans when the list started getting pruned.

AncientH

The Islamic slant is also really weird when you consider...well... The Gulf War was 1990, Operation: Desert Storm was 1991. And that was largely it for the average American's understanding of the Middle East. The idea of bearded terrorists blowing themselves up. Car bombs in Egypt and Lebanon. Arabian characters in comic books also tended to be...straight pulp stereotypes. Guys on flying carpets with scimitars.



...and that's if they didn't get political.



It's important to discuss that context because the whole "Assassin" gimmick is rooted in about eight hundred years of legend, going right back to when a group of the Ismaeli sect of Shia Islam basically acted as an underground terrorist movement in the 1090s, spying against and assassinating key officials in Syria, Persia, and the Crusader states for a couple hundred years until the Mongols rolled over them. That's pretty bare-bones, but it still is a long way away from the idea of the mythical fanatical sect that's survived centuries.

Frank

Let's get this out of the way: if you were very familiar with the rules of Vampire: the Masquerade and you wanted to make a clan that was very good at combat, the Assamites have exactly the power set you would give them. Like, literally exactly the power set you would give them.

In Vampire: the Masquerade weapons exist and aggravated damage mostly bypasses damage soak so hitting harder or being tougher is largely pointless. The only meaningful ways to improve offense or defense involve sneaking and taking extra actions, and as long as you have some reliable means of doing aggravated damage you can kill pretty much anything. The combat package of “Obfuscate, Celerity, and some form of reliable Aggravated Damage” is very clearly better than any other build you could possibly have involving dealing damage to enemies in combat. And the Assamites have it.

Does that mean that the Assamites were made by someone who knew the rules and understood what it took to be a good fighter in them? I don't know. The fact that the “City Gangrel” author came to exactly the same conclusion and has the same combat suite would certainly argue for that position. But White Wolf's patented performative rejection of D&Disms makes that difficult to prove. That is, all White Wolf public statements have always claimed that they are far too emo to give a shit about whether a character build is “good at fighting” and they are deeply hurt that you would so misunderstand the point of their game as to even think this was a question worth asking. How much of this bullshit were people drinking in house? I have no idea.

It's certainly the case that if Graeme wanted to have Assamites published as-is, that he would have to at least pretend that he was unaware that the clan was as good at cage matches as it was possible to be in the system. And it's actually totally possible! At times White Wolf has employed freelancers that didn't know their game system at all (see: Kenson, Steve), and I think more than half of the Revised Edition books contain at least one chart that references dice mechanics that were supposedly discontinued in the change from 2nd Edition to Revised Edition. White actually never got to the point of having any particular expectation of rules literacy for its writing staff There's a famous rant on a nWoD bloodline about how they are just maybe too good at combat because they have two disciplines that are factually individually and collectively worthless in combat. And of course, people managed to write three whole shelfbreaker books of Scion without even writing a core game mechanic at all.


Clever ruse or dumb luck? Fuck if I know.

AncientH

Keep in mind that even compared to other Disciplines, Quietus is a big bag full of what the fuck. Serpentis is a bullshit power with no clearly defined hierarchy for abilities, but it's still nominally about turning into a giant fucking snake and/or grab-bag of weird abilities based off of Mummy movies. Quietus never had anything even that reasonably coherent going on. It was basically all about crippling your target so you could stick your knife in, and it got less cohesive and coherent from there in every edition.

Also, for anyone that remembers the three castes and all the rants I had about Assamite sorcery and Dur-An-Ki and all that shit - wrong book! The sorcerers won't show up until Clanbook Assamite, Revised! These are the original, unredacted assholes who want to stick it in you and wiggle it in your holes a bit.

We'll get to the sexism stuff soon. But first, a word on race.

Frank

We had to get there eventually. Are the Assamites racist? Yes. Yes of course they are.

This particular book is written by someone who has done actual library research and read books about assassins from the 19th century. The author has a bachelor's degree in archaeology. But yes, the Assamites are racist, because fucking obviously. White Wolf had the tact and finesse of a racially insensitive muppet on amphetamines.


Old timey racisms don't get any less racist with age.

AncientH

Like I said, you knew this wasn't going to age well.

A large part of it...maybe the only part of it that matters...is that the powers that be at White wolf didn't have any really strong desire to expand out of their very specific niche. It could have been different.



There are punks in the Middle East. There are weird legends and dark nights, and a history as bloody as anything in Europe going back thousands of years. You could totally have done Gothic Punk in Baghdad, or Cairo. You could have some 3,000 year old elder on a throne in an underground temple and dealing with kids with spiked hair and piercings and y'know what? That would have been fine. It could have worked.

As it is, the Assamites have become a stand-in for...basically every polity or ethnic group that can be considered "Non-White" or "Islamic." Like seriously; Afghanistan and Turkey? Assamite strongholds. Africa, the entire fucking continent, they're part of the Ebony Kingdom. You stretch it out to the Dark Ages and they're with the Moors in Spain and the Turks and...okay, sometimes the Gangrel are part of the whole Central Asian thing and a lot of India is just a confused mess, but I'm pretty sure the Assamites were mixed up with the Mughals.

I'm sure if somebody thought about the fact that Zheng He was a Muslim, we'd be seeing Assamites next to the Wu Zao in the Middle Kingdom.

None of which makes sense because...well, Clan does not equal race or religion. At least it's not supposed to. There's no ruling that all the fucking Giovanni have to be Catholic because they're based on Italian mafiosos or any of that shit. But White Wolf did a lot of leaning on stereotypes, it filled in a lot more of the setting they didn't have to write that way.



Chapter Zero: Introduction

Frank

The book starts with some black pages (DRM for the 90s, when books were copy protected by making your xerox machine run out of ink), some thank-yous to people who were involved in unspecified car trouble, a picture of some Arabesque dudes looking dramatic, and some pages that are themselves photo-plates of in-world documents. Technically the “Introduction” begins partway through those things, but who cares? None of those things are an introduction in the classic sense, so the placement of the literal heading labeled introduction could have been placed anywhere. And it basically was.

The first actual text of the book is a glossary. Which is again not really what normal people mean by the word introduction, but whatever. The glossary defines forty two terms for this book and does not actually fit on the page. Some of these terms are in English, some are in some transliteration of Arabic. The idea of being able to check Google for the official Romanization of Arabic words was total science fiction in 1995, and this book is specifically referencing library books from the time of John Quincy Adams. I'm going to give it the benefit of the doubt and say that all these Arabic words were probably spelled as written at some point that the author is cribbing from.

What I will not easily give license to is the fact that this book is defining multiple terms that are already defined in Vampire: the Masquerade to mean something else entirely unrelated. So V:tM has the term “Heart's Blood” meaning the stuff you drink when you diablerize a fool and this book has “Heartblood” which is the unrelated concept of the remains of fallen Assamites that they get sentimental about. And V:tM had the concept of “Jyhad” meaning generational struggle, and this book talks about “Jihad” meaning the actual Islamic concept of sacred dedication and struggle. And V:tM has the concept of “Path” meaning a grounding moral philosophy, but in this book “Path of Blood” is just the literal act of diablerie murdering people.

What I will also not forgive or excuse is taking words from V:tM, purposefully misspelling them to make them look like they were transliterated from Arabic in the 19th century, and then just leaving that there to be extra confusing. Caine, the first vampire in V:tM is named “Khayyin” in this book. There is absolutely no reason for this except to piss me off. There actually is an Arabicization of Cain, because of course Adam and his immediate family feature prominently in Islam. And it's “Qabil” not “Khayyin.” Fake Islamic spellings like this are culturally insensitive and also a major pain in the ass for the reader. It's a bad and slightly racist joke at best.


The image search for fake Arabic things led to some upsetting places and we're just leaving this here.

AncientH

Nominally the start of this is a document from the Society of Leopold, which is literally a Catholic anti-supernatural organization with the motto "Deus Vult" like they were modern-day crusaders. If the whole book had just been found documents and compiled reports, that would maybe have been more interesting than the final product, but ah...that's hard to write.

We get several more found documents, all of them to the general consensus that nobody knows shit and one of which is seriously some 19th century novel talking about the fucking Thuggee. Which has basically nothing to do with anything.

Anyway, after the shitshow of documents that contain negative information, we get the Glossary (which Frank ranted about above) and the Bibliography (which Frank will rant about below).

Frank

There are certainly weirdnesses in the Bibliography. I think the biggest weirdness is how the Introduction to this book has a Glossary and a Bibliography and literally does not have an Introduction! I think that's very weird.

There's no “What is this book?” no “Hello gentle reader” no “The book in your hands is about...” and not even a “This is what this book covers!” Fucking nothing. You can read what Graeme Davis was reading, but there's no indication at all as to what he thought he was writing.

Now honestly I doubt that there are many people in the history of the world for whom Clanbook: Assamite was their first splat book. Chances are very good that if you opened this book you pretty much knew what to expect. But it's weird as hell to see a game reference book so oblivious to the very idea that it might be read by someone outside the fold that no attempt is made at all to tell an outside what this book is, what it's about, or even what game system it's supposed to be an expansion for.

AncientH

Several series of travel guides are available' countries of particular interest are Turkey, Syria, Israel, Jordan, Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan and the former USSR--specifically Armenia, Azerbaijan, Georgia, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan and Tadjikistan.

It's not weird that there are Middle Eastern vampires, or Islamic vampires (or vampires that were at one point Islamic.) It is very weird that there is one clan which is associated geographically, ethnically, religiously, and culturally with the whole Middle Eastern/Near Eastern/Islamic tableaux almost exclusively. Having this wide and weird a swath for the Assamites makes all the other clans seem incredibly tiny and bullshit by comparison. Let's not mince bones about it, the first printed copy of the Qur'an was in Venice in 1537. Islam has been a religion in Europe for centuries, people from Africa, the Near East, and Middle East have been coming to Europe for centuries. This whole bizarre geographic boundary shit is arbitrary, and it gets worse from here.

Frank

I want to say that having a Bibliography implies a much deeper reading into the subject matter than not having one. As mentioned previously, this book involves reading some pretty deep cuts. 19th century histories of Islamic holy warriors and shit. And this book is very dismissive of the “Stallone shoots a bunch of wogs” genre. But the very first movie it suggests you watch is the Charlton Heston rendition of El Cid. Like, what the actual fuck?


Feel the historicism!

It's an eclectic pile of the deeply scholarly and the campy racist diatribes. I just don't even know. But I do genuinely believe this was the author's check-outs from the library and video store while writing this book. Islam for Beginners is on here unironically.

AncientH

Not Without My Daughter (1991) is one of those interesting choices, because it's the kind of movie I remember being forced to watch in school, and it's kinda fucked up to be honest. I mean, it's contemporary, and arguably worse than picking Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves, because the latter actually makes a vague attempt at a well-rounded and positive portrayal of at least one Islamic character.


Azeem would make a bad-ass vampire. Or vampire-slayer.


Unlike Jamie Foxx's character, who is only there to teach the white boi how to shoot arrows

Frank

The rest of the book is divided into five more sections, four of which are numbered chapters.

Next up... History


But like... with more Islamic Ninjas.

[Thaluikhain]

The 90s splatbooks aren't very long, Clanbook Assamite is 66 pages and it contains white space, black space, and patterned gray and white space. And they aren't saddled with much (if any) editorial control – not only did the authors of various Clanbooks and shit write pretty much whatever the fuck they wanted, but they frequently got lost in the weeds of just plain arguing with each other. Books didn't just contradict each other by dint of not reading what others had written – but deliberately sought out such contradictions in lieu of having fucking meetings.

Out of interest, how much did they charge for a 66 page book, compared to a normal length one?

Also, while really obvious in hindsight, surely getting the team to pull in the same direction would have been really obviously at the time as well? Though to a lesser extent GW was doing that in the 200Xs.

What I will not easily give license to is the fact that this book is defining multiple terms that are already defined in Vampire: the Masquerade to mean something else entirely unrelated. So V:tM has the term “Heart's Blood” meaning the stuff you drink when you diablerize a fool and this book has “Heartblood” which is the unrelated concept of the remains of fallen Assamites that they get sentimental about. And V:tM had the concept of “Jyhad” meaning generational struggle, and this book talks about “Jihad” meaning the actual Islamic concept of sacred dedication and struggle. And V:tM has the concept of “Path” meaning a grounding moral philosophy, but in this book “Path of Blood” is just the literal act of diablerie murdering people.

Jyhad is awful, but I can't really fault this book for using the proper word properly (assuming it was) despite it.

What I will also not forgive or excuse is taking words from V:tM, purposefully misspelling them to make them look like they were transliterated from Arabic in the 19th century, and then just leaving that there to be extra confusing. Caine, the first vampire in V:tM is named “Khayyin” in this book. There is absolutely no reason for this except to piss me off. There actually is an Arabicization of Cain, because of course Adam and his immediate family feature prominently in Islam. And it's “Qabil” not “Khayyin.” Fake Islamic spellings like this are culturally insensitive and also a major pain in the ass for the reader. It's a bad and slightly racist joke at best.

Shame, cause that sounds like it's got a good idea buried under there, if it was done right.

[Ancient History]

OSSR: OWoD: V:tM: Clanbook: Assamite

Chapter 1: History


Basically this. But with more Orientalism.

AncientH

When I lived in St. Louis, there was a small chain of comic/gaming stores called The Fantasy Shop, and every year there would be a used gaming auction where people would bring in their old books and minis and crap and the owner Dave would auction it off - the person bringing it got store credit, the people running it got money, everybody else got books.

So Dave was hilarious to teenage me, always trying to spice stuff up with commentary, and in a stack of splatbooks he's going through, having a really difficult time with names like "Brujah" and "Tzimisce" he shows Clanbook Assamite to the crowd and declares loudly "We don't use that kind of language here!" The very next book he picks up, he then loudly reads off as "KINFUCK!"

And the whole room broke down for like five minutes. Dave couldn't even breathe he was laughing so hard.

Anyway, that is my most pleasant memory of Clanbook Assamite.

Frank

The History section is fourteen pages long and is mostly a TL;DR diatribe about Vampire metafiction. The primary time periods it concerns itself with are four thousand years ago and five hundred years ago. Much of this is given to Big Reveals about how various Vampire fiction in other books about shit that happened four thousand years ago or five hundred years ago is like wrong and shit. There weren't three 2nd generation vampires who are all dead, there were five (although they are in fact all dead). There was a certain element of the White Wolf fanbase that fucking loved this shit, but I must admit that I skipped this section when it was new.

To a first (and second, and third) approximation your character was not alive (or undead) five hundred years ago and was even less present four thousand years ago, so what was happening during the first recorded syphilis outbreak in Italy or during the Late Bronze Age Collapse means about as much to your game of Vampire as it does to your actual life. Outside of Final Jeopardy or a pub quiz or something, your ability to name the participants of the Ottoman-Mamluk wars is not especially useful. And the secret history of Vampire: the Masquerade from that period is only slightly more relevant.



But of course the secret vampire history is very important for purposes of politics and shit. I mean, not so much the shit that happened thousands of years ago before anyone gave a shit, but the last few hundred years certainly. The main thing holding this shit back (aside from the courtroom drama of people who were millennia dead before Caesar invaded Gaul) is that while this book is definitely willing to throw down the gauntlet at other books in the series and directly contradict points of the story, it's still keeping a lot of really dumb shit.


Seems like there are more important things to argue about.

The V:tM timeline is mostly written by people who did a lot less history reading than Graeme Davis, and this possibly could have been a place to rewrite some of the dumbfuck. But instead it just... wasn't that.

AncientH

Okay, so important things that World of Darkness almost always skips over is the details of how you become introduced to vampire society. Like obviously, somebody murdered you and then fed you some of their own blood, and now you have a powerful thirst for their cock to do whatever they say because you're blood bound or some shit. But you think back to Near Dark when the protagonist asks the oldest vampire how old he is, the guy just says "Let's just say I fought for the South."

And that's kind of emblematic of a lot of vampire stories, from Anne Rice on. There might be a secret history there, but nobody wants to tell you shit, and lots of people might not even know what the fuck is going on. They're too busy being vampires to wonder how great-grand-fang became a vampire, or what that means.

Which is why things like indoctrination and all that stuff are important. It's important that the Giovanni are all family and mafia-like, that the Tremere are organized like freemasons, that the Sabbat runs in gangs and that the Setites are one part pimp/drug dealer and one part ancient Egyptian cult. You need something to grasp onto. And organized groups like that need their history and mythology.

Which is why there is a History section. And as a young sprog, fond of all the Immortal Elf shit in Shadowrun, I ate this stuff up...to a point. Like Frank says, a lot of the "mists of time" shit isn't really relevant to the Modern Nights. And, as it became clear during Gehenna, was never ever relevant in the Final Nights. The point of a history is to set up relationships between your group and the other groups - to provide goals, motivations, character traits and story hooks.

There's not a lot of that here. What there is, is kind of insulting. One of the essential aspects of Vampire's core mythos was that the Biblical story was essentially correct, but that there's an extra chapter or two on vampires missing from the literal pile of ancient Semitic-language documents that were the honest-to-ghost true history of the world. Which just shits on...everybody? Kinda.

Frank

There's actually a very interesting thing going on with the different treaties and the different weights assigned to them by the Camarilla and the Assamites has a lot of historical parallels in the interactions of Crusader States and the Caliphate and between the Barbary Coast and Coastal Europe. There are some pretty interesting historical misunderstandings that are being referenced in a legitimately clever way.

That being said... it doesn't actually matter. The Assamites have a complex set of beliefs and misunderstandings about how the Camarilla functions and the Camarilla has some fundamental misunderstandings about why the Assamites do the things they do, and it doesn't make any difference. At the end of the night the Assamites don't get to vote on Camarilla Primogen councils and the Camarilla doesn't get to pick Assamite Masters. The two sides are never going to stop killing each other and even the limited cold war they are described as having doesn't make any sense. Both sides have no presented reason for not just immediately opening fire in any negotiation.

The Assamites want to kill literally all the Camarilla Vampires. They don't want to take their territory or convert them to the correct interpretation of an ancient book or have them adopt a congruent economic system – their goal is genocide.



With that established, what possible difference does it make what minutiae of black letter treaty law various people think means this, that, or something else? This isn't even like the Crusades, this is a war of extermination, and I don't think Graeme Davis really grasped how severely fucked up that was. How little room there is for telling any stories other than the ones where you counted injun scalps at the end.

AncientH

Notably lacking from all this ancient history is shit that would later become important, like the Assamite's conflicts with the Baali and other supernatural factions in the Middle East/Near East/Central Asia. Mostly because a lot of that shit hadn't been written yet. There was no setting bible for World of Darkness, not fucking ever, so the idea that somebody had at least sketched the broad outlines of what was supposed to have gone down was completely fucking alien to them.

A dropped ball here is also the idea that the Tremere were somehow behind the Knights Templar. That feels like a Rasputin Moment, because the Knights Templar are also a Mage tradition/craft and probably associated with one or more of the Catholic groups...and let me say that it is amazing how poorly defined the Catholic church is in WoD. Just, fucking weird. Like nobody wanted to do any research there at all. I suspect it's because most of them grew up in evangelical churches which have all the organization of your average youth gang.

Also missing? Every interaction with Middle Eastern history that isn't the Crusades. Punic Wars? Sassanids? Roman Empire? Some time-traveling asshole getting crucified? Rise of Muhammad and spread of Islam? Razing of Baghdad? Coming of the Seljuk Turks? Ottoman Empire?

Nope!

So this is less a history lesson than...uh...I don't know, a Very Short Introduction to...something. It's told like it's a lesson from an existing Assamite to a new clan member, but it doesn't actually cover a lot of ground.

Frank

There is quite a bit of disagreement between different books as to whether the treaty between the Assamites and the Camarilla took place in 1493 or 1496. There are long pieces of fan argument that take sides on this extremely irrelevant issue and this book presents a set of epicycles made of mind caulk to explain the differences. I couldn't care less and won't bother explaining the mental gymnastics.

What gets me though is that of course both dates are fucking gibberish. Nothing special happened in Thorns, England in 1493. Nothing special happened in Tyre, Mamluk Sultanate in 1496. In fact, both of those places were nearly uninhabited goat sheds at that time. Tyre became a ghost town shortly after 1300 and wasn't resettled until the Ottomans took over in the 16th century. Thorns has always been a goat shed. These places and times were never picked off of a historical map for the times supposedly being discussed. They were pulled off modern maps based on having cool names.


The foreground shows Tyre as it appeared in 1496.

But in a broader sense, the period of 1493-1496 was not a time when Europe was ascendant and Islam was being beaten back. Very much the opposite. 1493 sees the Ottoman Empire crush the armies of Croatia and the next 33 years were a series of incremental advances of the Crescent with equivalent incremental retreats of the Cross. Islamic dudes would have no reason to feel that they were on the losing end in 1493 or 1496. The setbacks of the Reconquista in Iberia ended in 1492, everything after that was just Muslims kicking the shit out of Christians in the Balkans for a generation.


If the Assamites had surrendered in 1492, that would have had some internal logic to it.

AncientH

Part of the thing about the Assamites is according to their history, they were the others. It's not like they had a long shared history with the Kindred in Europe, even though they were right fucking there, and the "collision of worlds" when these fucking pale assholes from the hinterlands come banging in the Assamite's hood are treated like WoD would later treat the Kindred of the East or the Kindred of the Ebony Kingdom.

It kinda bizarrely foreshadows how White Wolf would try to otherize every single fucking population of supernatural, whether or not they would admit that they use the same fucking rules and a lot of the same terminology and were basically just the same fucking thing. Like, you don't need to make vampires from different parts of the world substantially different on a mechanical level. Yes, you can do that, but it just makes them more difficult to play together! It doesn't buy you anything.

But all of this cultural misunderstanding stuff gets really fucking tiresome after awhile. I'm just glad this wasn't written 20 years later, because you know some shithead would try to work in a rant about the Middle Eastern slave trade, the Nation of Islam, and Al Quaeda and try to draw that shit together like Jack Chick.

Frank

The Tuareg are not a Middle Eastern people. That shouldn't be particularly contentious of a statement. They are a Berber people who live in Africa, and while a majority of the Tuareg are Muslims they are very much people who live in Africa and have lived in Africa for a very long time. They aren't Arabs who moved into Africa, they are just Africans in a completely uncomplicated way.


Tuareg people, who would look very much like other West Africans if you dressed them in different clothes.

On a similar note: Afghanistan is not in the Middle East and also too it is not in India.

There's a whole thing in the next chapter about how contentious it is for the Assamites to consider embracing humans who aren't of Middle Eastern or Indian stock. But this runs aground here in chapter one before it even goes off on that particular racist tirade by the simple fact that a bunch of the places and people being described are not by any possible stretch of the imagination from the Middle East. They just aren't. Never were.

AncientH

A large part of the problem is that the contemporary ethnic identities of what we consider "Middle Eastern" in the West are way too fucking simplistic. The Middle East/Near East/North Africa/Central Asia have been inhabited for a long ass time, and there are complex histories there. It's not all Arabs and Israelis. It never has been. It's always been a fucking mess, and efforts to simplify it are part of the inherent racism of this fucking book, this setting, the whole skerry of fucking World of Darkness games.

But, y'know, if you're 12-16 and reading this for the first time, you might not get that. As I said, your cultural exposure is probably nil pre-internet. You don't know any better. The fact that multi-ethnic, transnational occult conspiracies are the stuff of racist pulp fiction is just not something to cross your radar. Even if Robert E. Howard and Sax Rohmer were writing that shit back in the '30s. Fu Manchu with fangs.

Frank

The core concept of this book is that it wants to sell the reader on the idea that this entire clan and culture exists basically to justify super assassins with like honor and shit who will hand you the sword and walk away if you beat them like they were the fucking Predator. I can understand why, from the standpoint of someone who watched 80s and 90s action movies that this is a thing you'd want. But of course this is also extremely stupid and would probably require more mind caulk than I'm willing to expend on this.


I understand this image is wicked bad ass... but you still have to do your homework and eat your dinner.

This mostly keeps coming back to the fact that the Assamites have no place in Camarilla society or territory. There's no reason for the Assamites to accept payment to work as assassins, and no reason for the Camarilla to allow them to do this. The book just keeps bashing its head on this issue – the core conceit is fundamentally incompatible with the state of forever war also called for.

Like, if they were a weird caste in Camarilla society banned from certain kinds of work who did crime because it was a way to acquire status and wealth, that would make sense. But like, these fuckers are literally ISIS and apparently people keep inviting them to Boston for the purposes of shooting people.

It's a hard sell.

AncientH

The thing about the blood payment for assassination is that the original Assamite clan weakness(TM) due to the curse was that they were allergic to drinking vitae, which means they couldn't diablerize other vampires.

Which makes the whole blood tithe/payment thing super weird. Eventually the writers would try to get around that with certain sorcery rituals, but the fundamental issue wasn't really resolved until they just up and changed the clan weakness.

Frank

Next up... Culture and Traditions.

[The Adventurer's Almanac]

The more WoD books you guys review, the more I feel that nobody at WW really had any idea what they were doing at any point in their history. Not with the mechanics or the fluff. I mean, clearly tapping into the mall goth subculture was intentional, but how intentional was it?

[Username17]

The more WoD books you guys review, the more I feel that nobody at WW really had any idea what they were doing at any point in their history. Not with the mechanics or the fluff. I mean, clearly tapping into the mall goth subculture was intentional, but how intentional was it?

Vampire: the Masquerade was originally going to be Ars Magica: 1999, a game about being a secret cabal of wizards in the near future. Rein * Hagen carpooled with some of the guys making Shadowrun to GenCon and saw TSR's Realm of Terror box set in 1990. The entire game was retooled to be dicepool versus target number due to the car conversation and the entire setting was retooled to be about vampires because Mark got a stiffy looking at the new Ravenloft materials.

V:tM actually went to print the very next year, so the retoolage was furious and half assed. There wasn't a lot of time available or spent to research vampires or goth culture or whatevers.

-Username17

[Ancient History]

There are isolated moments of good stuff. Some of the art is fun, some of the fiction really hits a nerve. Most of the actual game design, from top to bottom, was flaming trash...but the World of Darkness was going up against Advanced Dungeons & Dragons at the time and killing it largely on attitude alone.

There's also something to be said for some of the basic concepts: Vampire is much more fun LARP experience than a tabletop, for example, and that's not an easy transition for an RPG to make. The basic idea of divviying up your supernatural society into competing factions and giving them specialties and weaknesses and shit is itself a really good idea - the implementation was shit, but they really pushed it hard and it is often aesthetically balanced even when it isn't actually mechanically balanced at all. Players liked blood sorcery, nWoD got blood potency right as a solution to the Generation issue which they themselves created.

And yeah, a non-zero number of human beings have been born into this world because their parents hooked up through the Vampire LARP scene. So it's not all bad all the time.

But the game design and a lot of the writing is shit.

[ArmorClassZero]

Is there any explanation why an Arabic word for a corpse-eating shapeshifting demon that inhabited crypts and tombs was adopted by the Camarilla as slang for: "human you mind-slave by feeding them your blood"?

[The Adventurer's Almanac]

Does this book actually go into why it's called fucking Jyhad, or do they just go "oh wow that sure is similar to this word that already exists" and completely ignore the obvious connection? Did the vampires steal the word from Muslims? Or, more likely, did Muslims steal it from vampires?

[Username17]

Is there any explanation why an Arabic word for a corpse-eating shapeshifting demon that inhabited crypts and tombs was adopted by the Camarilla as slang for: "human you mind-slave by feeding them your blood"?

Nope.

Does this book actually go into why it's called fucking Jyhad, or do they just go "oh wow that sure is similar to this word that already exists" and completely ignore the obvious connection? Did the vampires steal the word from Muslims? Or, more likely, did Muslims steal it from vampires?

Also nope.

The book just mentions that Jihad and Jyhad are "not to be confused." The fact that various parts of Camarilla terminology obviously come from Arabic or come from parts of the world that the Assamites currently control gets no explanation. The book doesn't even acknowledge that you might think you deserve an explanation.

The fact that Ventrue call their Renfields "Ghouls" is very strange considering how little social contact they are supposed to have with Arabic speaking Vampires. And the strangeness of this fact isn't commented on by this book at all.

-Username17

[The Adventurer's Almanac]

The book just mentions that Jihad and Jyhad are "not to be confused."

Okay, I won't be confused, then. However, does this mean that Assamites are in a state of Double Jihad? Because that sounds stupid.

[Ancient History]

Mo Colons: Mo Problems

Chapter 2: Culture and Traditions



The word “Traditions” has a specific technical meaning in the context of Vampire: the Masquerade. It's a concept akin to constitutional law. This book is completely ignoring that and using the word “Traditions” to just mean the normal anthropology concept. You're welcome.

AncientH

Last chapter was primarily in-character voice, like this was an older vampire indoctrinating their childe in the history of the Clan. This chapter is out-of-character and is actually about indoctrinating new vampires into the Clan. They don't dovetail as well as you'd expect.

The first female Assamite was Embraced in 1746, but it was another 150 years before Europeans were admitted. Now, any candidate who shows sufficient promise may be considered.

This is important for a lot of reasons, mostly because for 9/10 of its White Wolf history, the vast majority of Assamites that hit the pages were Middle Eastern dudes. You want sects to actually be distinguishable, and there's something to be said for limiting the pool of potential candidates to those who are culturally similar to you and that you think you can trust - that's why the Mafia' made men were supposed to be pure Italian for a long time, and why the Giovanni keep it in the family.

But this is Vampire, and people need to get laid and feel welcomed. Which is why the whole racial/no women angle is something that needs to be phased out, so that the Assamites didn't end up the No Homers club of the WoD.

There's a weird emphasis that the Assamites place on potential candidates having a proven ability to kill. While this sounds like something that makes sense for a clan of assassins, they are also vampires, and killing people is almost a necessary requirement. But it also emphasizes that while there is a clan structure instead of a bunch of assholes running their own separate operations, like Gangrel, they aren't doing a cradle-to-the-grave operation where promising kids/young people are trained up as assassins.

In a different kind of game, this could go weird, where you start out as a badass mortal and are stalked and killed by one or more Assamites, only to wake up and find out you're a vampire now too. I honestly don't know why the Assamites don't recruit more from mortal Hunter organizations (well, yes I do: mortal Hunters are shit and don't go toe-to-toe with vampires or werewolves and survive).

Anyway, once you get selected, congratulations: you go to vampire boot camp.

Seriously, they kidnap you and take you away to Alamut (which is a real place, and is not a vampire boot camp), and you spend seven years getting combat training and serving as the blood bitch for whatever Assamites are hungry. Remember, Assamites don't normally have Dominate, so your compliance is all down to (probably) the blood bond, addictive vitae, and whatever form of indoctrination they don't feel like detailing in these pages.

After that - maybe! - you get the Embrace. Full-fledged Assamite, your old life long behind you, ready to...go do things. Assamite things.

This is where it gets dicey. Most military and paramilitary organizations are pretty tight-knit. Operational security is a big deal, because one asshole blabbing or getting caught can lead to people finding the rest. And the Assamites are at least nominally a giant criminal organization devoted to killing vampires and other people.

But I guess even Assamites have an unlife? It sounds really weird, because the whole Boot Camp operation sounds like it's very organized and tight and at any given time the Clan can call up various members to work together and do hits. This is at odds with most of the other clans, who basically spend their unlives doing whatever the fuck they want, only dragged into Clan politics when they have to; the exceptions are the Giovanni (family company), the Tremere (freemasons), and the Setites (cult).

Don't get me wrong: it's a good thing that you could be an Assamite that lives in New York as a cabbie that only goes out at night, habitually preys on the homeless, and lives in a dingy apartment while awaiting the call; or that you could be a former ballerina with Resources 5 and an apartment in a skyscraper in Dubai. But the mix of pseudo-military/intelligence nomenclature here really gives a sort of cognitive dissonance as to how much the clan is organized and how much of what you do with your "free time" is up to you.

Frank

What the Assamites do is that they exist outside society and the law, and they take contract criminal work with the only payment they accept being blood. This is the kind of thing that sounds pretty awesome if you are twelve and makes linearly less sense the longer you have to think about it. As such, this book sets itself to the task of explaining why the fuck the Assamites actually do any of this shit. It's... hit and miss.

For starters, let's get the big questions out of the way. If the Assamites are corporately cohesive and all drink the clan blood, why aren't they all one generation worse than the Clan Master? If the Assamites want to collect vampire blood, why do they get paid for doing dangerous missions instead of keeping a live vampire in a dungeon and using them as a blood potency factory by continuously feeding and bleeding their captive? If the Assamites want to kill all the Camarilla vampires why do they bother taking jobs from Camarilla vampires instead of just going into Camarilla cities and fucking murder stabbing everyone? The answer to these questions and all similar questions is “Fuck you.”

There is an amount of this book that stands up to player agency with respect to people actively considering how best to accomplish the goals this clan supposedly has, and it's zero fucking percent. The given justifications for why certain actions are taken are explanations at all, but only barely.



Essentially we get answers to our questions at the level of like Silver Age Comics answers to questions like “Why not Batman kill Joker?” I mean, there's an answer, but it doesn't hold up to scrutiny and it all falls apart under even the lightest cross examination. As soon as you ask “But what if we....” you've already lost the plot.

AncientH

There's sort of a John Wick problem here with the whole society of assassins as far as: how many fuckers need to be killed in any given day? The Assamites are talked about as having bases and stuff away from Alamut, and that's kind of weird because they're not a terrorist cell or normal criminal organization. They don't really need a Continental in New York City. A network of safe houses and places they can dump money and weapons and shit for later is cool, but also requires a lot of resources and...

...how do the Assamites make their money? I have no fucking idea. Terrorist groups are funded by crime and rich assholes who inherited oil fields and shit. Criminal groups are funded by crime. The Assamites are a criminal group, but they're not charging the weight of a human body in gold like in Ninja Assassin, so how do they afford any of this shit?

There's a lot of possible answers to that question, like maybe the Assamites have deep ties to a lot of terrorist groups that they train/do spec work for in exchange for money and equipment, or maybe they've got a Giovanni-like faction that big players in the arms trade and they make their money Lord of War style, but it isn't spelled out here, and that's weird because it goes back into "And what do you do with your unlife?"

Frank

Apparently the Assamites allowed women into the order in 1746. Why 1746? That's a specific year, but I do not know why it was selected. It doesn't seem to reference anything. It was a big year for women internationally, in that that was the year that a woman invented Vodka, for which we are all thankful. But I have no idea why that would be associated with gender equality in a pseudo-Islamic vampire assassin cult.


Whether this is allowed in Islam is contentious, because potatoes are neither fruit nor grain.

Similarly, Europeans were recruited into the order in 1896. Again, what is that even in reference to? Are Turks considered Europeans? How about Albanians? Chechnyans? Crimeans? There have been a lot of white people who were Islamic for a very long time. Still are. In fact, a lot of Arabs are basically white people. Persian is an Indoeuropean language. Cleopatra was a Macedonian. The entire Anarch Revolt takes place during the Reconquista when Islamic Emirates battle Christian Kingdoms in fucking Spain. There has never been a division between “Islam” and “Europe.” Those are fucking venn diagrams and always have been.

AncientH

The anime club has five levels, with the Master on top, three assholes below him handling major operations, and everyone else below them mostly by order of seniority. You can move up a bit by being awesome and you can nominally challenge the Master to a duel at any time, but that is not something you're actually going to do and you don't care anyway.

More important, maybe, is the look at the Assamite moral code, which you have presumably absorbed in your seven years of indoctrination but which is kinda separate and kinda not from the clan's Path of Enlightenment, the Path of Blood, which has the usual hierarchy of sins bullshit.

I should also point out that a lot of these terms are taken straight from Arabic, multicultural diversity of the Assamites be damned.

Frank

The seven principles of Khabar is actually pretty interesting. This is clearly the author having done some reading. The Assamites have a model of virtues and it isn't just Christian virtues with Islamified names. And also too it isn't just the normal Pillars of Islam but evil. And yet, the different pieces are made in reference to actual Islamic philosophy. Or at least six of them are. I have no idea what “Muruwa” is supposed to be, but I assume it's some variant spelling from a dusty 19th century tome. Although it's also possible that this is a straight typographical error. Editing is so bad in this book that there are a lot of partially italicized words and it's super fucking distracting. If one of the foreign words was drastically misspelled there is zero chance of the editor catching it.

Anyway, the ones I want to talk about are Asabiyya and Taqqiya. Those are not the approved of spellings in English transliteration of those words, but it's 1995 and I can forgive that. ALA-LC wasn't even published until 1991 and I don't blame some freelance RPG writer for not being fully up to date with the recommendations of the Library of Congress.

Asabiyyah is like a cross between nationalism and the mandate of heaven. Not in this book, just in real life. It's a thing 14th century Islamic scholars talked about when describing why empires and cultures rose and fell. In this book, it's portrayed more like Confucian filial piety – a loyalty and sense of belonging of the individual to the group. That's weird and different! Also it shows clear evidence of having done the homework and actually read some Islamic philosophy. That's pretty cool. Also, the way it's described you could totally see how that sort of nationalism-but-for-the-cult thing would be really helpful for an assassin cult. Good work on this one.

Taqiya is the Islamic answer to the Inquiring Murderer problem. That honesty is accepted as a virtue but you don't have to be Lawful Stupid about it. If you've ever heard of Taqiya it's probably been blown way out of proportion because Islamophobes like to pretend that it's a divine mandate for A-rabs to be liars and thieves. In this book, it's basically the backbone of the Masquerade, and isn't explained super well. There's definite effort in here to have found a fundamentally Islamic philosophical position from which to have a Masquerade. But it is diminished in the decades since by the fact that misrepresenting Taqiya is a thing that hate groups and Christian terrorists have been doing a lot. It happens to be pretty cromulent with some blood libel that gets spread around like hummus on pita.


This is why we can't have nice things.

AncientH

A lot is also made of vengeance (hadd), where Assamites are supposed to kill people that insult them or whatever, but also that if you manage to overcome an Assamite assassin in the middle of a contract they treat you as an honored enemy and maybe don't kill you.

If that sounds weird...yeah, it's some strange bit of honor. But it's also important to remember that these are supposed to be vampires that spend their entire unlives dedicated to killing; more than a few Assamites have to burn out from PTSD or devolve into straight sociopaths. It's hard to keep up fanatical intensity for years or decades, even most terrorists don't manage it.

Actually, I kinda wish they had a thing about burnt-out Assamites now. Just fuckers that are tired of the killing, hang up their blades, spend their days trying to drink blood from cows and shit. Then they could go all Rambo when somebody interrupts their peaceful retirement. But seriously, at some point you'd think some of these pour bastards would commit suicide by facing the sun or eating a gun or just letting themselves be diablerized.

Frank

This book assures us that Assamites are in no way confused by the fact that “The Path of Blood” means:

• The process of performing blood sorcery.
• An ethical grounding framework for vampires to live by.
• The act of murdering another vampire through diablerie to steal their power Highlander style.

Personally I am very confused by this. I am confused by the assertion that Assamites don't find this terminology. The fact that you can make a coherent sentence of “To stay on the Path of Blood you should use the Path of Blood to perform the Path of Blood” is so bullshit that I can't even.

AncientH

Paths of Enlightenment are very White Wolf solution to a very White Wolf problem. The initial write-up for vampires had Vampires struggling to hold onto their Humanity, which was defined by a quantified series of mostly Western European/Christian paradigm as far as what it meant to "Act Right." You don't have to go to church, but helping out at the foodbank becomes mandatory at high levels, that kind of shit.

So when trying to present villains of the setting as something other than completely inhuman monsters, because of the mechanical and philosophical hole they dug themselves, they created a substitute mechanic called "Paths of Enlightenment." Which people liked, because it gave them an excuse to do the shit they wanted to do without dropping their numbers down to the point where they couldn't play their character any more.

And it took them an obscenely long time to come to grips with what they were actually doing and why and how to make it actually work and useful. In fact, I think they're still working on those last couple of parts, and they put out entire books on Roads/Paths to tie in with the Dark Ages shit.

So yeah, Path of Blood (Path of Enlightenment) is a bowl of warm piss. There's no reason to go for higher levels in it than the bare minimum to keep playing your character as you would if there was no Path nonsense to worry about at all. For most Assamites, that's about rating 5: it lets you still retreat from an assassination job that smells like a trap and give the finger to your clan elder.

Frank

For no particular reason, this chapter just has random shit in it. Spare combat rules. Weird poisons. Extra Thaumaturgy rituals, like fucking whatever. I think there was supposed to be a game mechanics chapterbut maybe things weren't long enough or the type setter wanted to merge chapters or something. I don't know.

You would never think to look for expanded rules for called shots in the Culture and Traditions chapter of Clanbook: Assamite, but the fact that you wouldn't ever find these isn't so bad because they are also terrible and should probably just stay lost.

What I will say is pretty strange is the numerous varieties of blood poison that don't actually kill the victim. Like, if you can trick someone into drinking tainted blood out of a glass, you could probably put a grenade in the punch bowl. I might assume these are all intended for elaborate hijinx of getting people to agree to a public duel and then weakening them severely – but honestly I just don't think it was well thought out. The core reality that if you “get to” an opponent you can also murder them to death is apparently totally lost on the author.

AncientH

We get some merits and flaws you don't care about, mostly about having allies that won't help you and enemies in your clan that will try to fucking murder you; we get some news magic items you're never going to use, and some new skills you're probably never going to use.

We're still getting callbacks like the Assamites were connected with the Thuggee, which has never been made explicit (unless I missed something) and doesn't make a lot of fucking sense in any case because while yes, the Thugs killed quite a lot people, they were only really assassins in the eyes of the British Empire who didn't understand what or who the fuck they were dealing with.

Also, another group I'd like to see: female-only Assamites. Frank and I were talking about this, and it's really weird that they let women in, but we don't have some special sorority of female assassins, especially considering how much they shit on women in the clan in general.

We also talked about how we were surprised at how little low-hanging fruit there is here. I mean, if you're going to plunder Arabic culture wholesale, you coud have the Assamites replaced the Herd background with the Harem background and just have a bevy of nubile mortals at your beck and call. There is a non-zero percentage of 13-19 year olds who would love to LARP an Assamite that says "Bitches come!" like he's in fucking Gor.

Frank

A fundamental issue with this whole setup is that it's pretty much completely incompatible with cooperative storytelling games. There's a perfectly good reason that Assamites would make people train for seven years before becoming vampires and why they'd murder all the people who failed the tests along the way. But that's incompatible with the game. You can't sit down and wait seven fucking years for Kevin's character to do his Assamite thesis defense.

And the genocidal war of Assamites against all is extremely non-conducive to any kind of role playing experience. There's no room for advancement because it's all Klingon promotions and your boss is literally immortal. There's no politics you care about because you're not allowed to have meaningful relationships with other vampires.

It's very much like the Clans in Battletech. You could write a cool story about those assholes and I've enjoyed some of the Smoke Jaguar books (I'm afraid to go back and read them again now that I am not a teenager). But there's nothing to role play. Badass honorable ninjas posturing at each other does not a cooperative story generate. There's no politics. There's no personal relationships.

This chapter makes a half hearted attempt to think up excuses for Assamite players to be in actual games of Vampire: the Masquerade. And considering how thin this gruel is, you genuinely have to wonder why they didn't look at what they had written and just scrap it all. But of course, White Wolf kept doing this to itself over and over again until they went bankrupt. Twice. For some reason “Is this remotely playable?” never seemed to be a question that White Wolf authors or developers ever asked.

AncientH

The thing is, if you actually did loosen up the whole Assamite organization a bit so that it's really multiple independent assassination/mercenary/professional criminal groups that specialize in killing people because that's what their powers are good for...it opens up the world a lot. Yeah, you lose out on a lot of Clan solidarity, but if you can actually accept money instead of blood for services, it becomes a matter of "fuck you pay me"--always a good start for an adventure--and you can start working with other vampires as a coterie of younger vampires pooling their skills to sell themselves as solutions to entranced (and rich) elders who have need of somebody to do shit for them.

"Bloodrunners" as a concept requires a bit more work, but you get the idea: Assamites need to be free to work with non-Assamites, and they need goals in their unlife beyond the next meal or the next hit. Something to strive for. Maybe a minority of those assholes live for killing, but plenty of others want to open up their own dojo of vampire martial arts or enjoy money and status or add a couple more dots to the Harem background or something.

Frank

A thing I should probably note is that while the Assamites are the undisputed kings of killing people by stabbing them with a sword, there isn't actually much reason to do that in this system. It's not quite nWoD levels of combat prowess not mattering, but even in the original Vampire: the Masquerade being a social monkey or wizard was generally much better than being a spear chucker.



Setites and Tremere were just better than Assamites. They weren't the Cuisinarts in close combat that Assamites were, but the explicitly magical disciplines just did better and more useful shit.

AncientH

If I was designing World of Future Darkness, Assamites would get dragged into the 14th century and their special knife powers reworked into Gun Fu. You need an Assamite With A Shotgun, blowing more traditionally-minded vampires to shit. Yeah, they can save the stakes and axes and shit for up-close work, but first they should see how Fortitude fares against about fifty rounds from an uzi, or three sniper rifle shots from a mile away.

Frank

Next Up: Chapter Three: Inside and Outside.

[TheGreatEvilKing]

Maybe I'm nuts, but it seems like it would make more sense for all the vampires to...band together?

As a vampire, you probably have more in common with the vampire dude from the middle east than the edible people next door.

You could still have conflicts and whatnot, but IIRC vampire magic means people can travel a lot faster than you can on horseback so if Paris and London got into a vampire war you'd have a whole lot of foreign vampires hanging around the court who could also fight.

Then again, I was never too into the "woe is me" portrayal of vampires when you get a whole bunch of superpowers and can just...drain the blood of animals.

[The Adventurer's Almanac]

A fundamental issue with this whole setup is that it's pretty much completely incompatible with cooperative storytelling games. There's a perfectly good reason that Assamites would make people train for seven years before becoming vampires and why they'd murder all the people who failed the tests along the way. But that's incompatible with the game. You can't sit down and wait seven fucking years for Kevin's character to do his Assamite thesis defense.

I can see your other points, but not this one. Wouldn't an Assamite joining the party already be a vampire and thus gone through the 7 years of ISIS training? Or is playing out becoming a vampire a regular thing people did?

[Ancient History]

Maybe I'm nuts, but it seems like it would make more sense for all the vampires to...band together?

As a vampire, you probably have more in common with the vampire dude from the middle east than the edible people next door.

That's a bit like saying that the cannibal serial killers should really stick together. But a successful serial killer is one that isn't caught, and the key to not getting caught is usually having a low profile. Every other serial killer operating nearby increases the chances of you being noticed and found out. So most serial killers don't want to work together, it requires special circumstances, and you have to have some way to disguise the body count that crops up.

Which gets us back into some of Frank's rants about vampire feeding schedules and general population. You need a large population to sustain a vampire, and most vampires do not have the abilities they need to feed without basically killing their prey. That's a major problem which the game setting never addresses.

The situation is even worse in Ye Olde Times because of technological and social restraints. New York in CE 2010 can maybe absorb a sudden influx of 10 vampires, but could Rome in CE 1000? Probably not.

[Username17]

Maybe I'm nuts, but it seems like it would make more sense for all the vampires to...band together?

Welcome to the joys and stupidity of unplanned expansion!

The original pitch was indeed that the Vampires all hung together to avoid hanging separately. And that's why you were a member of the Camarilla, like it or not. But the original book also only had seven clans and Caitiffs in it. So when they wrote up expansion clans, most of the time those expansion clans also came with various bullshit reasons that they were not in the Camarilla.

And these bullshit reasons were often extremely heavy handed. Like "This clan is in a centuries long war of genocidal elimination with the Camarilla and it is a death sentence for them to show their fangs in a Camarilla city."

Now obviously in retrospect what they should have done is have expansion material where there were clans of Blackulas that hung out in Africa and clans of Hopping Vampires that hung out in East Asia and just had the Camarilla have those clans in those places. But instead of trying to come up with a pitch that would allow expansion material to be used in the game, they just didn't do that.

Wouldn't an Assamite joining the party already be a vampire and thus gone through the 7 years of ISIS training? Or is playing out becoming a vampire a regular thing people did?

Not only was the "embrace story" a standard thing you were supposed to do sometimes, but the core character generation rules assumed you were basically brand new. Playing established Vampires required weird optional rules from laughably unbalanced expansion books.

-Username17

[Thaluikhain]

Cleopatra was a Macedonian.

Oh, you can get some long and pointless arguments about that.

The situation is even worse in Ye Olde Times because of technological and social restraints. New York in CE 2010 can maybe absorb a sudden influx of 10 vampires, but could Rome in CE 1000? Probably not.

If they are rich slave owners, perhaps it could. Perhaps not while maintaining a modern style Masquerade, though.

[The Adventurer's Almanac]

[quote="FrankTrollman]Not only was the "embrace story" a standard thing you were supposed to do sometimes, but the core character generation rules assumed you were basically brand new. Playing established Vampires required weird optional rules from laughably unbalanced expansion books.[/quote]

I see... that sounds about as exciting as starting at level 1 in AD&D. Except worse, because you probably can't even feed yourself.

[Ancient History]

Assamites and Shit

Chapter Three: Inside and Outside

AncientH

This is supposed to give us different philosophical factions within the Assamites, but they get, like, a paragraph each. (Two paragraphs for the antitribu.) I don't give a fuck, the writer doesn't give a fuck, you don't give a fuck.

the thing about having different factions in a Clan is 1) more politics, and 2) to expand your range of acceptable character types. It makes a Clan more attractive if there's a part of it that somebody can related to. Unfortunately, this also means you get clans with like a half-dozen internal roles/factions and clans that...don't. Like, what is the difference between a Warrior Assamite and a Brujah as far as character roles go? Fuck if I know, except the Brujah is probably gonna suck, even if both characters are optimized for beating people up.

More seriously, this internal faction thing would eventually ead to the separate Assamite bloodlines in future material. Again, you don't care.

Frank

The book has severely run out of steam. This chapter is only 6 pages long and is the last proper chapter in the book. There's more text, but I'm not even joking when I say that from page 40 to page 66 there is nothing but some meandering character studies. Even page 39 is mostly white space.

This chapter is nominally about how political disagreements affect the Assamites (minimally, because it's a military command structure) and how Assamites interact with other groups in the World of Darkness (mostly by stabbing them, as it happens).


Words to unlive by.

AncientH

The whole thing where they gave a rundown on how a Clan/faction felt about other clans/factions is...I dunno. It makes sense in context? But it's also incredibly simplistic and assumes that every clan lives in a kind of systemic bubble. Probably because each clan is trying to fuck every other clan. Assamites most of all.

Most of them basically fall under "things to stab," and "things we've already stabbed and it didn't take." They do okay with mummies now. For some reason.

Frank

The different factions sound like Republican descriptions of Middle Eastern politics from the 80s. Like how we were supposed to really care about the “Iranian Moderates” to the point where Steve Jackson's Illuminati board game has an Iranian Moderates card in there as a joke. The Traditionalists and the Progressives are divided over whether the choice to allow women to become Vampires in 1746 was a good idea. I mean, obviously there are historical parallels in that the nominally the entire Yugoslav Civil War was fought over a monument to the 1832 Battle of Sarajevo Fields. And the patriarchy is still totally a thing to the point that it can smack down even rich and powerful women like Taylor Swift.

But let's be fucking real here for a moment: Should the Assamites recruit women? Yes. Do the Assamites recruit women? Yes. When was this argument settled? Seventeen fucking forty six. Of all the countries on Earth that exist today, literally only one of them was also around in 1746. The Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman Empires were really fighting hard over Wallachia and Hum.

AncientH

Assamite antitribu are weird because they aren't bound by the curse that makes vitae poisonous to ingest and are apparently more hardcore on wanting to kill the other vampires, even though they're part of the Sabbat and thus have to socialize with other vampires.

Frank

Obviously if you find yourself writing a nominally playable group's attitude towards other nominally playable groups in the same game and you notice that you have written the word “contempt” more than five times, you have a problem on your hands and need to rework everything. Also obviously, White Wolf did not do that when they saw this draft. This section weaves between in-character and out-of-character text while discussing how the Assamites feel about different groups and it mostly comes down to the question of how much hatred versus how much disgust they feel.

They are weak with vanity and pride, little glory comes from ending these wretches.

There is no honor in any dealing with them, even in their ending.

Those are entries from different clans.

And of course, this book talks about fifteen different clans because of course it does. While this chapter is incredibly short and amazingly repetitive considering.... um.... yeah. I was going to throw a “but” in there but that's really where we are at. It's short and repetitive and I have no idea why anyone thought this was an acceptable entry for a cooperative storytelling game.

What it does do is show what groups Gaeme Davis thought were important to Vampire: the Masquerade in 1995. So we get discussions of the Serpents of the Light but not of the Daughters of Cacophony. We get discussions of Mummies and Fairies but not Technocrats, Wyrm Spawn, or Gypsies. Which is defensible, in the sense that I also like to pretend World of Darkness: Gypsies never happened. But it means that there is straight up zero evidence that the author had any familiarity with any of the books published in 1994, and to be honest very little evidence of any familiarity with books published in 1993. This could be because this book was stuck in development hell for a long ass time, and it could be that Graeme Davis just wasn't actually interested in following the non-Vampire lines. Which is fair, a lot of people didn't bother with the non-vampire lines.

Simply ignoring what was happening in the other game lines was a pretty common tactic for the various White Wolf freelancers. Also in 1995 the book Changeling: the Dreaming came out, with their big villains “The Fomorians” but also too in 1995 Werewolf the Apocalypse got the book Freak Legion, which was also about villains called “Fomorians” but they are totally fucking different because go fuck yourself.

AncientH

Supposedly, some of the Assamites are indulgent of the Malkavanians because of Islamic attitudes of being charitable to the mad. I feel like this should have been done in a more interesting way, but I would also like to point out that the Assamites recruit from multiple different cultures on at least 3 different continents, so this is bullshit. You don't care.

Chapter Four: Character Templates


Or you know, whatever.

Frank

One of the idiosyncrasies of White Wolf as a book producer is that they got it into their heads very early on that “Character Templates” meant “Sample Characters.” That is wrong, but they never actually let that go. In any case, this is a 22 page chapter that is entirely made of sample characters. Information density is so low that it provides a total of ten characters, which is slightly worse than one per two pages.

At first glance, it may seem like Assamite characters are all the same

Yes. It also seems like that on second, third, and fourth glance. Assamite characters are all the same. They are like Street Samurai in Shadowrun except that they have less meaningful levers of character creation and development.

It is often said that each clan in Vampire: the Masquerade was comically one dimensional giving very little in the way of leeway for the player to personalize. Much of that has to do with how insanely restrictive the “three dots divided between three disciplines” limit actually is. And a lot of it has to do with how bizarrely micro-focused each of these clans is on individual character concepts. In general, the expansion clans are worse about this – most were seemingly written in a fit of pique upon finding out that existing clans did not cover a single desired character concept (both the Ravnos and the Tzimisce exist at all because the Gangrel are comically bad at delivering mechanically what was promised in the original flavor text). But even in that context, the Assamite fucking stand out. Other clans are myopic in scope, but the Assamites are whole nother level of being one note.

AncientH

A lot of these sampel characters also suck and don't conform to any of the ideas of what makes an Assamite. Cases in point:

Playboy: Melee 2, Firearms 1

Psycho Killer: Melee 1, Firearms 1

Look, I'm not saying every Assamite needs at least 3 dots in Melee and/or Firearms, but seriously, what the fuck are you doing with your unlife if you're a member of an assassin sect that can't fucking afford more than a couple dots in basic combat skills?

On the plus side, WoD: Combat wasn't out until 1996, so we're spared any stupid efforts to actually use those rules.

Frank

The sample characters here are all very terrible. This is extremely consistent with the way White Wolf sample characters were always presented, and in general there was a bit of denial in depth about it going on with the company spokespeople. When asked about it, they'd pick one of the following arguments and when pressed would just smoothely move over to another without ever admitting fault:

• The characters are realistic depictions of the talents of in-world characters.
• The characters are actually good because there's more to a character than how big their attack dicepool is.
• Players who try to maximize their dicepools are filthy power gamers and have no place in the hobby.
• Of course you're expected to be better than a sample character with a lovingly made character of your own, otherwise no one would personalize their characters.

Spin the wheel. Repeat as necessary.



But the terribleness of these characters is somethin else. It isn't just that the Holy Warrior wastes points by having Brawl and Melee or that he's a character whose entire purpose is to shoot fools in the fucking face and he only has 8 dice on his Firearms dicepool, only has two dots of Celerity, and causes me physical pain by insisting on buy Stamina up to 3, although all of those things do make him laughably suboptimal and bad at his job. The big brain breaking thing is that this asshole doesn't have any obvious way of feeding himself.

The Assamite clan as a whole has only powers that let them beat the shit out of people in close combat. With a few XPs under your belt an Assamite can be as effective in close combat as a Vampire: the Masquerade character is allowed to be. But they don't get any special ability to get blood out of mortals other than by shooting them in the chest and licking the spoils off the sidewalk. The Curse even prevents them from drinking blood from other Vampires, so if your coterie did have a Ventrue or Malkavian who actually had a means of getting blood on the regular, they couldn't even share that with your dumb Assamite ass.

None of the sample characters take any particular time to explain where your nightly blood is supposed to be coming from. And none of the powers or social connections of the Assamites particularly lend themselves to an answer.

AncientH

Part of the general sameness of Vampire characters is that 99% of the gear is abstracted. You describe what your shopping cart of shit looks like and what you're wearing. There's nothing to stop you from describing yourself as a member of the Persian Cossack Cavalry and you've kept your sword, or whatever.

Also going in on what Frank said, there's no word on how these people afford anything. The Playboy has Resources 4, but that famously doesn't cover what his actual unlife is like, or what he does when he isn't assigned to go stab a fool.

Frank

One thing I will say is that this black and white heavy-ink art looks rad as hell. Robert MacNeil did a good job on this book. It's too bad that it's hard to image search him because he happens to have the same name as the Centrist asshole from the MacNeil Lehrer Newshour.


This is a different Robert MacNeil.

AncientH

Keep in mind, Assamite Sorcery doesn't exist yet and buying Out-of-clan disciplines at chargen is expensive and nobody writing these assholes wants to do the math. So while you have "Magi" as a faction, none of the sample characers are magi and nobody has Thaumaturgy.

In fact, none of these assholes has more than two dots in any given discipline. At least one of these fuckers should have just gone all-in and gotten 4 dots in Quietus, but that didn't happen here.

Frank

It should be noted that being good at fighting in Vampire: the Masquerade was pretty difficult. Stealth versus Alertness, Initiative versus Initiative, Firearms versus Dodge, Damage versus Soak. Just to get to the point where you mark some wound boxes on your target involved rolling eight piles of dice minimum. Four nested opposed tests, and there were a lot of failure points. Now once you advanced a little in Assamitism you pretty much walked all over that shit. A little bit of Obfuscate and your opponent's Alertness and Initiative meant dick diddly, a decent weapon reduced soak to a sick joke and a decent Dexterity and Combat Skill plus Celerity meant you were not only rolling ten dice against nothing to hit your target but you were doing it three times before they could even move. There was still a lot of dice involved, but the end result was a formality. And a Fatality.

But while this route of “getting good” was available to all Assamites and thus all Assamites anyone every actually played took that route, most of the characters in this chapter make only token movements in that direction. The Psycho Killer is armed with a knife and rolls 4 fucking dice to hit things with it.



I think the Psycho Killer is the worst of these dumb assholes. Even the characters at the end who “don't use weapons” have stuff they can do. I mean the “Scientist” who rolls 10 dice on Medicine tests is a joke character but could actually contribute to the team in some imaginable scenarios. The “Gamester” who specializes in Security and Investigation and fights only with traps is actually secretly the closest thing to a playable character. Because even better than drawing your gun first is killing your opponent when you are not even there and it is metaphysically impossible for them to shoot back. Although obviously such a character would be better still by not being an Assamite at all and having relevant abilities with her magic.

AncientH

A large part of the general problem with these assholes is that they're actually written up as mortal characters who already have lives and shit. Not vampires. There's nothing actually specific to the Assamites with any of these assholes except Quietus.

Appendix: Assamites of Note.


My love is vengeance, that's never free.

Frank

The final appendix is four pages that gives a short rant about six different incredibly ancient vampires you will never meet. They don't have stats. Their current locations are not defined. They are presumably far more powerful than any of the player characters will ever be, but other than being names to drop in the age old game of “My dad can beat up your dad” it's not at all obvious why you'd care.

The text is wrapped around pictures of fairly random weapons, and there is a shit tonne of white space. I think this amount of text could have been fit in two pages. While name dropping some big shots who got embraced shortly before the birth of Christ is a completely reasonable thing to include in a book like this, it's also obviously low priority. Coming at the very end of the book is kind of an insult considering how much isn't included in the rest of the book.

Also... there's a lot of gray and white space. It makes the whole thing seem even shiftier than it would already to have the last little bit ssssssttttttrrrrreeeeetttched out so much.

AncientH

Giving any NPC asshole a single name like "Jamal" is bullshit piled on bullshit.

Notably missing from any of these bitches is a reason to care about any of these charcters. The things is, major NPCs don't get assassinated often enough in the metaplot for the Assamites to have any legendary assassins at all. Not ones that you care about. Because every NPC with a name big enough that you would care about them if they suddenly showed up with an enchanted shiv in their heart is one that another writer was invested in.

The thing is, the Assamites work as a greaat excuse to get rid of any NPC that nobody cares about. Haven't heard about Asshole Y for a while? Assamites got him. Vampire society needs a certain amount of turnover like that.

Frank

That's the whole book. I think we;ll do a wrapup with final thoughts.

AncientH

There's a lot of shit they haven't actually talked about in this book, so I guess we'll talk about that too.

[RelentlessImp]

So... this is basically typical White Wolf shovelware, then? Lot of page and word count to say diddly shit?

[Ancient History]

Pretty much. There's a little crunch tucked into odd places, but less than you'd think - which was also par for a lot of these splatbooks. These were sim and quick to produce and relied a great deal on style over substance.

[The Adventurer's Almanac]

I haven't had my coffee this morning and I totally thought you said that it was a sin to produce these books.
I think I'm gonna go with that interpretation.

[Mord]

So... this is basically typical White Wolf shovelware, then? Lot of page and word count to say diddly shit?

To expand on AH's "style over substance" observation, I think it's important to differentiate the "early White Wolf shovelware" period from the "late White Wolf shovelware" period, because the circumstances of production were pretty meaningfully different, as are the resulting texts, even though the end result in each case is "a game you can't play."

Late WW shovelware books are hundreds of pages long with high production values e.g. hard covers, glossy paper, lots of different unreadable fonts, and often full-color art; this owes to the digital typesetting revolution and a general reduction in printing costs. This trend took off in the early 2000s and came to its glorious peak in a golden age that lasted from 2004-2007 and saw dozens of useless bullshit shelfbreakers get shat out as the company bled cash from one bankruptcy to the next. Mummy: the Resurrection, Kindred of the Ebony Kingdom, and basically the entire New World of Darkness came from this period. The ultimate metastasis of this cancerous trend was arguably Scion, famous for not having a core mechanic in hundreds of thousands of words of logorrhea. These books are characterized by having dozens of freelancers on writing and/or design credits, no coherent vision, no clear audience, no playtesting, no playable or useful game content, and really no reason to exist beyond maybe making a few bucks. But they are glossy, ever so shiny. Sometimes the art is OK.

Early WW books are less than 100 pages long, usually only a few dozen, usually printed in cheap softcover on rough paper stock. The line art is simple black and white and there's actually some really thematic and awesome art in the early books (Tim Bradstreet is the first name that comes to mind). Even the art that is bad is often memorably weird or transgressive in a way that reflects that there is a real individual person's fucked-up sensibilities behind it - or at the very least an edgelordy person unsupervised by responsible adults. (You all probably can think of a few early WW images here that fit the bill. No I'm not linking any.) Usually these books have only one or two writing credits and, much like in the art direction, responsible adult supervision is totally absent. This is how you get moral abominations like World of Darkness: Gypsies, and also genuinely interesting books like the original core book for Wraith: The Oblivion, which never sold for shit but obviously came from a very genuine and horrible place in the line developer and contributors' hearts. There's no reason to think early WW books are any more playable than late WW books, but there is a tangible sense of personal authorship and give-a-damn that went into a lot of these shitty books (though not all of them). There's still no playtesting or playable/useful game content, of course, but even template products like Clanbook: Assamite or Tradition Book: Celestial Chorus where you have no reasonable expectation of quality often escape the cookie-cutter assembly line feel of the late period shovelware by dint of all having different individual authors working under basically no editorial control. Also lots of "Page XX" broken redirects because book layout wasn't done on computers yet.

When you have a dozen unsupervised writers all contributing to one book, the result is an overlong melange of forgettable, incoherent bullshit. When you have a dozen unsupervised writers each writing one slim book for the same game line, that gives each one space to put their own mutually incompatible stamp on the subject matter. Frankly I think that's a feature, not a bug. There was a lively Internet community dedicated to coming up with the epicycles and teasing out the implications that could theoretically make old school WW books hang together, and there was genuinely a lot of fun to be had there. Just, you know, not fun at an actual gaming table.

If you sentenced me to be transported to Beast Island with only my choice of one of two crates full of bad RPG books, I would pick the crate with Dirty Secrets of the Black Hand in it over the one with Scion in it every single time. Neither crate contains a real playable game and both will be equally useful as toilet roll or kindling (actually, come to think of it, I don't think the glossy paper would wipe or burn as well as the cheap stuff), but the early crazy bullshit has at least a flicker of genuine creative impulse behind it somewhere, and that comes through.

[Ancient History]

OSSR: Clanbook Assamite

Wrap Up

AncientH

What the fuck is the point of a Clanbook?

That sounds like a stupid question, but the whole point of originally divvying up the Clans into Camarilla, Sabbat, and Independent was to present groups of vampires with different relationships to each other. The Camarilla is primarily opposed to the Sabbat, and vice versa; those two groups are basically defined by their basic ethos of "We're better together than we are apart" versus "Fuck your rules, man!"

What the independent clans offered, then, wasn't just a different clan to play - because the essential setup of Vampire made multi-Clan coteries fucking difficult to pull off - it was different ways of playing the game.

That's what a Clanbook should have been. What they actually consist of are thumbnail sketches of a Clan, its history and organization, with some idea for how to play a character of that Clan or get a hand on intra-Clan conflicts and inter-Clan relationships. Maybe some rules.

So, first and foremost for this book, there's a failure of vision. This could have been a book about how to run a group of vampire assassins, how Coteries work under those circumstances, how they receive and could attempt to commit assassinations, the rewards for success and the penalties for failure. A complex interplay of a Clan that doesn't hold itself outside of the frey of inter-Clan conflict, but actively hires themselves out for it. We didn't really get that.

Frank

A certain portion of the White Wolf fanbase was basically uninterested in trying to play Vampire: the Masquerade as an RPG. And so while in any practical sense the existence or nonexistence of Themes was largely irrelevant to the RPG, he did get a trading card and there are some people who collected it.


Even in the card game this fucker would never see play, but it is impressively large.

The Assamites are so fucking out there as far as red flags of unplayability that they readily illustrate how little the White Wolf developers thought about issues in those terms. They would make declarations and no one would even ask whether those declarations were totally incompatible with actually playing the game as a collaborative storytelling game with a coterie of new vampires of different clans as ensemble protagonists.

This book spends more time talking about centuries old badasses that your character will never match than it does about what your characters are, what they are supposed to do, or why they are supposed to care. This book is laughably unusable at the actual game table and I don't think the company noticed or cared.

AncientH

I want to underline that last part. The company did not spend a lot of time acknowledging or working to resolve any problem any given book started. They moved on. The hard work of actually dealing with the shitting-of-the-bed on the Assamites waited for the Revised Clanbook (which has its own issues, but hey, baby steps).

Frank

This book got a Revised Edition in 2000, developed by Justin Achilli (Boo!) and mostly written by Clayton Oliver. Clayton Oliver went on to write hackish nWoD books of shovelware like Tales From the 13th Precinct. Some of Graeme Davis' tirades about history were copied into the later version because it was either do that or have to do primary research. And there is definitely no primary research done for the Revised Edition. The bibliography is gone and replaced with nothing. The Islamic-inspired philosophy is gone, and replaced with “Laws” that fit into Justin Achilli's cultural universalist theories. Which is to say that Justin Achilli is deeply mired in American Evangelical Christianity and is reasonably certain that all other cultures and traditions are basically equivalent to that but dressed in funny clothes. It was infuriating at the beginning of this century and it's never gotten less infuriating.

There's also some LARP conversion rules sprinkled throughout the book, which was done by Deirdre Brooks – the mad lady who did World of Future Darkness. It might not come as a great surprise to you that the Mind's Eye Theater conversions are the best and most usable portions of the Revised Edition Clanbook Assamite. Of course, the rest of the book sets the bar so low that this isn't as impressive achievement as you'd hope.

But the most noticeable piece of fuckery when just flipping through the book is that the art is worse. It's like amazingly worse. The stark pen and ink work of Robert MacNeil in the original Clanbook Assamite is on point. It's evocative, it's intriguing, it looks good. The Revised Edition has a lot more drawings in it, it has an Art Director (Richard Thomas, the guy who became Onyx Path after White Wolf went bankrupt and he wanted to keep fucking this chicken) and five different interior artists. And I think some of this art is recycled or got recycled later but a lot of it is cartoonish and bad, and not a small amount of it is racially insensitive.



Ugh.

AncientH

I want to emphasize, not everything in this book is a garbage fire. Graeme Davis was working within the framework of what was already on the table as far as the Assamites go. There are some bits and pieces here which aren't bad, there's at least a modest attempt to tie the clan in with the historical Assassins, etc. etc. A lot of what the Assamites became in later editions is due to the work here.

But you're basically talking about a Clan where a lot of the pieces aren't in place. If you're running a Camarilla campaign, how does an Assamite fit in? At least in a Sabbat game, you can play an Assamite antitribu. But you're supposed to be this cog in the assassin machine, and while some of the raw tools are available for you as a player to do that mechanically, from a storytelling perspective you're this exotic other that acts like a bad extra from central casting.

Which is part of the problem here: Vampire is all about letting you play the villain. It is hard to get more villainous than to be a vampire assassin. So how they fuck did they suck all the joy out of killing people?

For one, they took away the immediate benefit from it that everyone else gets. Vitae is poisonous to you. Diablerie, which has been the main character incentive for a couple of the early Vampire adventures, is off the table. For two, you're not paid in anything so nebulous as money, because Vampire doesn't handle money, but in vitae. Which is poisonous to you. Yeah, there's some magical shenanigans to get around that, but none of them are available at character generation which in Vampire: the Masquerade terms is equivalent to saying they are never available for your character ever.

Frank

The 1995 Clanbook talks about the Warriors, the Magi, and the Specialists, but doesn't give them any actual rules. I think that got expanded upon into things with rules in Dark Ages. That basically you picked a flavor of Assamite to be and got different disciplines and weaknesses depending. Which of course basically meant that there were multiple clans. Or another way to look at it was that White Wolf on some level realized that Vampire Clans were too restrictive and you couldn't even fill out a typical vampire court drama with the number of supported characters in a typical clan. So you got clan variants. City Gangrel. Warrior Salubri. Antitribu Clans. And so on, And so it is that in the Revised Edition it was already established that Assamites had a “Sorcerer Caste” who get “Assamite Sorcery.” It wasn't called “Dur An Ki” in that book, because doing so would have required some amount of primary research, which obviously wasn't going to happen.

The Revised Edition Clanbook is one hundred pages long, and only a tiny smidgen of that is Mind's Eye Theater conversions. And it is completely stripped of ruminations on Islamic philosophy. And yet, the text density per page is noticeably higher and there's a lot less white space. It discusses less, but there's more than twice as many words. Mostly it gets there with really long ruminations about a fictional city in Ancient Sumeria. For reals.


You can type it more quickly if you don't reference anything you'd have to look up first.

AncientH

One of the things that became immediately obvious as Vampire aged is that the existing clans covered very negligible amounts of actual historical, geographical, and cultural territory. Which means that every single one was either pigeonholed in some incredibly specific niche (Ravnos) or ended up covering some insane amount of stuff as they became a dumping ground for everything fucking else that anybody could think of.

The Assamites ended up in the latter category. They became, more or less, everything for the Middle East, Near East, North Africa, parts of Central Asia and the rest of Africa from ancient Sumeria to the modern nights. It was a clan that embraced Babylonian thaumaturges and Moorish knights, Zoroaster and Muhammed, Islamic terrorists and for large portions of the game dark-skinned Vampires in general. They're in the Dark Ages and the Kindred of the Ebony Kingdom and they are a dumping ground for every single thing you can think of except bits of ancient Egypt (Setites, Children of Osiris) and most of sub-Saharan Africa (Laibon, etc.)

By the numbers, they should be one of the biggest and most influential clans around. Instead, they're an afterthought, a garbage bin for all the random crap that nobody else wants to talk about can get stuffed. They have a little prominence when talking about the Crusades and the Reconquista, but they're still a very old and powerful Clan which isn't allowed to accomplish anything.

Frank

The Assamites were essentially a single adventure. Not even a campaign, just a single adventure. Well, since it's the Storyteller system, they were a Story not a Chronicle, but you know what I mean. The story is:

• There are some occult murders in the city.
• The Coterie investigates.
• More murders happen.
• The Coterie solves the case and has a boss fight.
• The ancient assassin cult that sent the occult assassin promises to never bother you again.
• The End.

That's a perfectly acceptable Vampire Story. It's not frckin Hamlet or anything but it's fine. They did it for one episode of Kindred the Embraced and it was fine. It's better than “The Prince gives you a package to deliver.”

But very importantly, you don't need an Assassin Cult that has armies from New Delhi to Casablanca to tell this story. You don't need a “clan” to do this at all. The story with the occult assassins could be told if there were like six of these assholes in the whole world. And they could be drawn from existing clans. They don't need their own special blood magic, they don't need to have ancient lineages they can trace to before Noah's Flood. They don't need any of this shit. The entire story could be told with a Gangrel or a Toreador who happened to have enough XPs under his belt to make a decent boss fight. All they need is an established group of Vampire Assassins with a stupid code of Klingon Honor, and the amount of world building given over to this is massively out of proportion to how interesting or impactful this story is actually going to be. This is like creating an entire fictional country with thousands of years of history to justify the existence of a one-and-done Batman villain. Like, not even Lady Shiva or Henri Ducard – more minor than that.

AncientH

The Clan organization is probably the most problematic aspect of the whole thing. It is nominally a paramilitary organization run by fanatics with no useful overarching goal and no way to accomplish that goal. They're given all the hallmarks of religious fanatics, but the religion involved isn't Islam and the Path of Blood is indistinguishable from any other vampire Path of Enlightenment...which in itself is part of the problem with Paths in general.

Vampire has a lot of moving parts that help with starting and maintaining a cult. Indoctrination - you can break them down and convert humans to Paths of Enlightenment. Blood bonding - Helps secure loyalty. Ghouling - same, but empowers them to actually be useful, get to use their powers. Then the Embrace - that's 3-4 levels of initiation right there, before you get into any kind of social structure or anything. In (much later) books, Roads/Paths even interact with disciplines so that there are unique powers you can buy if things align right. If you were to scrap everything and decided to start again with Assamites, you could plot out entire Assamite character career charts just based on what cool powers you want to unlock...

...provided you have something to do with those cool powers.

All-Assamite campaigns, while rare, are pretty easy. You start out with seven years of training in an assassin cult; you're basically assigned a coterie and trained to do things together. You could be sent out to kill an enemy (or a member of the coterie that escaped!), or you could be sent out as an independent terrorist cell in a Sabbat/Camarilla city with the idea of just planning how to kill everyone, starting with a few key players and then hiring yourselves out to each side until there's no one left that can oppose you. You might be assigned to protect the tomb of a sleeping elder from an archaeological expedition or to fight human military threats because you need the money.

Mixed-Clan coteries are way harder, as written. They should have allowed the Assamites to "hire" members from other Clans to fill mission-critical roles. Like maybe a lone Assamite can't get close enough, and needs a Tremere technomancer and Toreador face and a Nosferatu sneak to get them to the target. But you don't get the sense in any of this (or any other) book that that kind of inter-Clan operation is ever really on the table.

Which sucks.

Frank

Assamites are very good at combat in the only way that you can be meaningfully good at combat in the Vampire: the Masquerade system. They turn into a blur of death and turn their enemies into chunky salsa. The actual mechanics are that if you don't have Auspex to match the Assamite's Obfuscate you are going to turn into a red mist. And even if you do, you'd better have Celerity of your own or some powerful sorcery because otherwise they are just going to dodge whatever you did and then turn you into a fine red mist with the rest of their actions. And if you have those things, you might still just roll worse and turn into a fine red mist, but if you succeed you just blenderize the Assamite in riposte. There's no epic boss fight music playing at any time.



Now to a first approximation the only basic clan that has access to the powers you'd need to win a sword fight against an Assamite is the Toreador. The books certainly act as if this is not the case, which leads me to believe that the people writing these books did not actually play the combat system. Certainly there's no “playtester” credits on any version of the clanbook. I mean, it's also possible that the statements of lack of system awareness are performative – that Graeme Davis was pretending to not know what was good and what was bad in the system in order to sneak shit past the “true role players” in development. Assamites are factually ridiculously effective at sword murder.


This line of argument is called “win in front of me”: it goes an infinite number of layers down and in the end you get poisoned to death by iocaine powder.

Anyway the core issue is that the way the Assamites fight does not make for a satisfactory boss fight. The “Assamite comes to town.” story is fine, but the mechanics for representing the final boss fight are not. Now to a certain extent this is simply an outgrowth of the fact that White Wolf combat is and always has been horribad in every edition of all of their games. But the specific ways that it was horrible made the glass cannon structure of the Assamites lead to incredibly disappointing final confrontations. I know lots of people who've played through one variation or another of the “Assamite comes to town” story, and the only ones that anyone ever wanted to talk about afterwards were the ones where the Assamite was dealt with using traps or trickery and simply didn't use the combat rules at all.

Note that none of this applies to the LARP rules, which are much more padded sumo and do give space for the final fight to be a little bit epic when resolved as a fight. People have had fun telling stories about the Assamite Comes to Town story in their LARP games. Which is a synecdoche of how bad rules can ruin good stories in role playing games.

AncientH

Vampire wanted to be a game where pulling out a shotgun was a legit threat but not so much of a legit threat that it stopped the game when everybody came loaded for bear when fighting the Elder Vampire. It had a lot of difficulty sorting out how that works, mostly because it is a (very bad) rehash of Shadowrun rules at heart. But Shadowrun had damage codes and staging rules. You're supposed to be able to take somebody's head off in Shadowrun in a way that D&D explicitly doesn't allow. Vampire never quite managed that.

And, frankly, there's shit that real-life "assassins" would do that don't really work on vampires. You can't rub a poison in a Ventrue's condom and hope for the best. That's very medieval thinking. Poisoning the Ventrue's slave is kind of clever, but none of the vampire poisons given here are really lethal, just different levels of debilitating, so you get the whole grenade issue that Frank mentioned above. If you can get close enough to the target to just kill them with brute force, why use a poison that won't get the job done?

Vampire never had a question for that either...because they were also still on the D&D mode as far as combat meant. They thought big swords should do more damage, especially if it was covered in poison and on fire. A chunk of the magical path in the revised Clanbook is just letting you talk to your sword. It's kind of weird.

And the thing is, there could have been a real pathos to it. If all the younger generation were about blowing shit up with really effective plastic explosives and shooting motherfuckers in the head, and the elders just shook their heads and went back to their alchemical poisons and magical knives, bitching about the younger generations the last couple of centuries just not appreciating the old ways.

Frank

The weaknesses of Vampires in Vampire: the Masquerade are over the top. Their weakness to fire and sunlight is too harsh. Their ability to interact with human society too stunted. Their ability to feed themselves and acquire blood too limited. The Assamites are among the worst about this, their mere existence glaringly pointing out the flaws of this system.

The Assamites by their very limitations raise questions of how Vampires in Vampire: the Masquerade can survive at all. The Assamites have no ability to survive from dawn til dusk, no ability to feed from humans, and for fuck's sake they live in the fucking mountains where there isn't an urban population to feed upon even if they had any special ability to do so. Which they do not.


This is Alamut Castle. The Eagle's Nest. It stood strong against all invaders until the Mongols wrecked its shit. There are no random people to drink from for a long way in any direction.

Vampire: the Masquerade was an underdeveloped concept. The Vampires weren't able to do enough. The logistics didn't actually add up. And the Assamites just ignore all of those issues and those issues are so much worse for them because of it. Despite the whole “path of blood” thing, they don't really feel like Vampires, and Graeme Davis spent no mental effort in actually making them be Vampires.

AncientH

As much as I like the idea of a lone Assamite out in the wilderness chasing down a goat so that they can survive to kill another night, and getting nicknamed "Chupacabra" in the States, there is also a certain lack of Gothic Punk atmosphere in this book to consider - something I touched on above, but which I'll say again with feeling: Assamites aren't very punk.

Seriously, they're all part of a paramilitary fanatical religious organization. They needed to be more...ragged, DIY, broken into roving bands of mercenaries. Not just ex-soldiers recruited to a cause, but people that have grown up in a culture of violence and weirdness all their lives, and maybe this was an out. You could imagine any number of young people, physically capable, with fucks left to give about the local terrorist efforts or economic prospects who just wanted out of the whole fucking scene...

...and the Old Man of the Mountain could give it to them. For a price. Always for a price.

Frank

The Biblical History thing that Vampire: the Masquerade went in for was bad. I understand why you'd want to tie in Christian themes for your Vampire story, but modern Christianity has fuck-all to do with biblical history. Actual “lost books of the bible” days are weird and alien and neither Rein • Hagen nor anyone else who worked on early Storyteller books knew jack shit about the region or the period. It's like if a bunch of white kids in Georgia said “Screw you guys, we're setting our game in the Aymara Kingdoms of 12th century Peru!” Except it's worse than that because those dumb assholes were deeply familiar with modern Christianity and thus thought they were qualified to talk about early biblical historical periods of the Middle East. As it happens, they were not.

But the thing where they made the biblical history the true history but then put all the Vampires you gave a shit about in “The West” anyway just made that all the more bizarre. Everything was supposed to be going down in Bronze Age Canaan, except no one was actually in Canaan tonight. The Tremere lived in fucking Vienna. If the lost pages of the Book of Nod exist at all, it's going to be in a cave in fucking Syria, why are you puttering about the streets of Chicago looking for that shit?

Making Syria, Iraq, Persia, and Anatolia the playground of the Assamites just shone scorching lime light on this whole fail parade. If the early Christian shit is supposed to matter to the Vampires of Europe, why aren't they doing anything about it?


There are ways for Europeans to take over the Holy Land, but we obviously that hasn't been going on for a while.

There could have been an Indiana Jones / Three Kings type thing where the Gulf Wars were a cover for Vampires to squabble over ancient Biblical sites like Gomorrah and Eden. That would be weird as hell, but at least it would be something. As is, the entire Middle East shit comes to nothing and uses an amazing amount of page count to say nothing. Especially in shovelware books like Clanbook Assamite Revised.

AncientH

This is, of course, part of the reason I like GURPS: Vampire: The Masquerade. Because the ancient shit that happened ten thousand years ago? Who gives a shit. It's the modern nights. Shit is happening now that needs to be dealt with.

Nobody really wants to deal with the contemporary Middle East. Rick & Morty might joke about 9/11 and Rick's drunken obsession with Israel, but that's it. Nobody talks about how the Kurds have gotten the short end of a shitty stick or how ISIL might resurge or how there are terrorists who have been in Guantanomo Bay for longer than they were maybe terrorists. In a part of the world where the borders shift too often for people in the West to give a fuck, nobody wants to take the time to try and understand that stuff.

Which is sad, right? Because there is a lot of cool stuff there. Not just ancient ruins and shit, but contemporary marvels. But nobody wants to hear their stories, much less roleplay them. The Assamites underline how much Vampire is a game primarily for white people, by white people.

Frank

The barest minimum for a lineage of Vampires for a game is to imagine what an Addams Family of those fuckers might be like, and how they would fit into the Vampire family and what abilities and temperament they'd bring to the organization and the dinner table. That doesn't necessarily mean that everyone gets their own unique magic power, all of the members of the Vampire family in Lost Boys can fly, and all of the members of the Nordic Coven in Underworld can do funky Scandinavian illusion magic. But it means that your vampire blood line needs to support the proud elder, the uppity neonate, the scheming underling, and so on. Shit like the Brujah and the Ventrue were garbage, because while those are clearly archetypes you'd want to support, they are equally obviously supposed to be in the same fucking bloodline.

The rebellious childe is directly descended from the domineering sire. They are the same bloodline. They have to be, otherwise it doesn't work.

Vampire: the Masquerade came to the table with the idea of every archetype being its own clan, but that's obviously wrong. Every clan needs to support a range of archetypes such that a family of them can show up and do stuff and not have that be embarrassingly bad. But also too it needs for the different clans to provide enough hooks and pizzazz that someone saying “I'm from Clan X” actually fucking means something.

In short, you need to be able to form an Adams Family where everyone is from one clan, because that's what you fucking get when you go to a Transylvanian manor and inquire within. But also you need to be able to form an Adams Family where every character is recognizably from different clans. Because that is what the players are going to actually play at the table.

All of the Vampire: the Masquerade clans fail at this. The Malkavians and Tremere come closest of the basic clans and the Setites come closest of the expansion clans. The Assamites are dead fucking last on this point of all the clans. And that includes fake bloodlines like the Gargoyles and Blood Brothers.


They literally all have the same face and are still better differentiated than Assamites.

AncientH

And, it needs to be said, it needn't have been this way. The problem with the Assamites is that they're treated as this big bad Other, but they're too unified, too much the same. They needed to be deeper, with bigger fractures. What religious organization lasts for thousands of years and doesn't have its heretics and sects? We should be seeing Assamite spin-off cults and bloodlines, renegades and rivals with variants of the Path of Blood, different Quietus powers, etc. They needed to be a lot more complicated than they were.

Frank

The fact that Clanbook Assamite was going to be bad was pre determined. Obviously it was going to be bad, because all the decisions made that led up to it happening meant that it couldn't be anything else.

But the 1995 version does involve someone doing the homework. Graeme Davis read 19th century texts about Hashishim. And he watched El Cid with Charlton Heston. And both of those are reflected in the final product. The 2000 version is primarily written by someone who hadn't read shit. And again, it shows.

AncientH

And this is where we lay the book down and shuffle off for a bit. Clanbook Assamite is selling the promise of sizzle, and can't even deliver on that, much less steak. You're left wanting not just substance, but the promise of something. Vampire assassins seemed a lot fucking cooler before this book.

[TheGreatEvilKing]

I am forced to ask.

Did they ever determine whether the Assamites were Sunni or Shia Muslims? If they're supposed to be Muslims that's kind of...a big deal.

Or is the Path of Blood its own weird splinter off neither because some Big Dick Writer NPC hung out with the Prophet Mohammad?

[Username17]

I am forced to ask.

Did they ever determine whether the Assamites were Sunni or Shia Muslims? If they're supposed to be Muslims that's kind of...a big deal.

Or is the Path of Blood its own weird splinter off neither because some Big Dick Writer NPC hung out with the Prophet Mohammad?

They name check some religious warrior orders they are associated with. This includes famous Shia, Sunni, and Hindu warrior orders. So um.... yeah. Either this is a deep cut about Vampire theology being separate from Human theology or it's a dismissive rant about all brown people being basically the same. Probably it's a little of both.

The Assamite philosophy from the 1995 book is most closely related to Isma'ilism, which is unsurprising considering how much of the original reading material was about the Hashashin. The Assamite philosophy from the 2000 book is just warmed over judgemental Christian bullshit, which is again unsurprising because there's no reading material at all.

-Username17