[OSSR]Victorian Age Vampire

[Prak]

They're less good than the first, but they do go into the past of the bar, and it's more or less what you described.

[GâtFromKI]

Vagina Dentata is actually a super old folk loric idea, basically founded in the fact that men often know fuck all about vaginas.

Hell, you don't even have to go to obscure guro hentai to get murderous face vaginas.

That's what the undersides of Alien facehuggers look like. And Alien came out in 1979. More than a decade before White Wolf existed.

Ok, I didn't know about dental vagina in folklore. But I don't buy the face hugger as an example of mouth-vagina: face hugger don't use their "mouth" to eat, they use it to lay eggs; therefore it is more a sexual organ than a mouth. It seems legit for it to look like a vagina.

(and the oral rape seems to be an underlying theme of Alien. In Prometheus, we even see an hentai-cockmonster doing oral rape. I know Prometheus is shit, but it's also the same director as Alien).

Edit: Lovecraft had monstrous face vaginas with teeth on Gugs.

Fair enough.

Although a quick google search shows its vertical mouth can be drawn in several ways that don't look like a vagina, or at least looks less like a vagina. I mean, the tzimisce guy even has a clitoris on his mouth.

[Ancient History]

Victorian Age Vampire
Afterwords


Word.

FrankT:

For whatever reason, the last “chapter” is just a one page letter from Justin Achilli about what he was trying to do with this book. As such, we can say definitively that this book is a failure. With many books you can say that it fails by any criteria you can imagine, but maybe the author was intending to write a Kafkaesque farce, you don't know unless the author definitively says otherwise. Well, here the author says otherwise. We know what the goals were here, and they are hilariously failed.

Indeed, sect is almost as important as clan during the Victorian era, which itself is almost as important as the simple state of being Kindred or Cainite. Quite a departure from modern Vampire's sensibilities, to be sure, but it was an era of secret societies and I wanted to make sure that the writers imposed a bit more institutionalism on the sects than they have in modern nights.

All I can say to this is “Huh?!”

I don't know what games Justin was reading and playing, but last time I checked if you showed up in a Camarilla city with a Sabbat character (or vice versa), local vampires would fucking murder you. I simply can't even imagine how choice of sect could possibly be more important than whether other characters are required and allowed to kill you on sight. It's like saying that you wanted something to be more important than choice of Axis or Alliance in a game set in the contested fronts of 1943. That's a heroically tall order he set himself, and of course this book fails spectacularly judged on those criteria.

It's also just a really weird goal to have. The monolithic implacability of the sects rather undermines the purpose of having multiple sects in the first place. If you are rule bound to stab any Tremere Antitribu right in the third eye whenever and wherever you meet them, it rather renders any goals and subtleties of those vampires rather meaningless. It leaves a whole lot of sects and bloodlines as completely unplayable, which turns most of the setting of the entire game into a pile of white noise that doesn't count for shit. Any sane line developer would have decided that what they needed to do was to dial back the eliminationist rhetoric so that people could make characters at home and not find that they were required to knife fight like they were in a barbarian prison in a pulp fantasy once the game started. But Justin Achilli was convinced that he should increase the relevance of sect choice, and then failed to do that.


Remember all these blood feuds were family feuds.

The blood feuds themselves were actually kind of dumb in Vampire. Remember that all of these guys are pretty closely related, and also that a newly created vampire really doesn't wake up with any special connection to any political affiliation that matters to vampires. Indeed, before you get embraced by a Brujah vampire, chances are pretty good that you did not know that vampires existed. And upon becoming one, you actually don't learn anything special about the secret history of the True Brujah and shit. So what exactly some asshole with Temporis would have against you is somewhat lost on me. Yes, you're descended from someone who killed their great great grandfather, but it's your great great grandfather too, so what the fuck? Also, you never knew the great great grandfather in question or the murderess or any of the vampires involved and the entire event is something no one wrote down at the time and is kind of a family legend/secret thing. So really what the fuck?

AncientH:

This book before you is a labor of love.

I refuse to believe this.

The thing is, the authors don't seem to love the Victorian age. It's not just the lack of dedication to the aesthetic and the general ignorance of the history and literature, but so much of the book is just so...meh. You don't get the sense that this is a book that somebody was really determined to get right. There's no sense of excitement apparent in the book, there's no attention to detail, there's a surprising lack of details on how Victorian Kindred society works and is different from either in the Dark Ages or the Modern Nights. The lack of care is just everywhere apparent in this book - it doesn't really want you to have fun.



Don't get me wrong: limitations are actually a critical part of roleplaying games. You need to give the players restraints, in part so that they can get more creative in working within those restraints, but also so that they can feel a sense of success when they work out away around those restraints, and a sense of shift when those restraints change. But Vampire...doesn't really like to change much. It doesn't like to change the way it plays much. But if you're going to sell somebody an entirely different setting, it needs to be more than the Modern Nights with top hats and sword-canes. You need to emphasize how the syntax of the period influences the embracing of vampires in that period, and how they see and approach undeath and Kindred society.

Because for the Victorian Age Vampires, these are the Modern Nights. The world is changing, and their concept and understanding of the world is going to be very different than some six-hundred year old monster that was embraced back before the nation-state was a fucking concept. The younger vampries should have a familiarity with and fresh approach to unlife that sets them against - and sometimes at odds - with their elders; they should just be learning the rules, and learning when and how and why to circumvent them.

Also, I really want a Tremere with Path of Technomancy and a Babbage engine. I deserve it.

FrankT:

I think it's succeeded quite well.

Our art director and artists also deserve special mention, for taking what could easily been a phoned-in performance and bringing the brooding menace of the Empire to eye-popping reality.

What's odd about the self-congratulatory wanking at the end of this book is that this book actually stands out as being kinda shit. The art does look phoned in and shitty. The book doesn't succeed. Like everyone on the project (or at least everyone in leadership positions) was just so far up their own assholes that it didn't even occur to them that their ideas weren't – or even might not be – good.



Where's the fucking humility? Where's the introspection? A fucking turd like this should come with a preface and afterword laying the foundation for not getting fired. It should be like when the assholes who made F4ntastic preemptively went to the internet to complain about how their movie was ruined by others. But instead we get an Afterword which is like 50% smirking about how everything they made came together perfectly. It's like how Mitt Romney didn't have a concession speech written in 2012 – these people are so far into the bubble that they don't even know what it looks like when they fail. Either that, or they are on cocaine and infused with so much chemically derived confidence that they couldn't be made to apologize at gun point.


This is actually Justin Achilli in 2013, the picture is from an interview where he is talking up the runaway success that is... Onyx Path. Cocaine is a hell of a drug.

AncientH:

The thing is, there are some interesting things you could have done with a Victorian Age Vampire setting. Even if you acknowledge how shitty and terrible things like Kindred of the East and Kindred of the Ebony Kingdom were, that doesn't mean you should ignore them. Part of the advantage of writing late-edition setting books is the ability to use all the colors on your palette. It's okay to get a little silly - I kind of want a Kuei-Jin in Limehouse opium parlors, a bit of the Middle Kingdom in the middle of the great Western empire; I want there to be a supernatural equivalent of the Zulu War, where British soldiers might come back home with a greater knowledge of the dark things that haunt the night, and a thirst and hunger no beer or steak can cure.

It's not just that I want camp or silliness - it was a silly era, in many respects. But I want more of an atmosphere than recycled plots from Gothic novels and ill-fitting Robert Louis Stevenson stories. I want to see potential, vampires working for the present and plotting for the future, I want to see an examination of the possibilities of the setting...and I didn't get that.

FrankT:

The statements that Victorian garb is something vampire fans want to wear and that it looks out of place in the modern world is well taken. The modern vampire came from Gothic fiction of the Victorian era, and we think of vampires as wearing Victorian outfits. However, in the actual stories, vampires usually didn't wear Victorian clothing. They were often described as wearing old fashioned clothes. This description creates a head canon of Dracula wearing Victorian outfits for people today, because the Victorian era is our past. But at the time, Victorian outfits were modern, and worn by the humans. The vampires wore clothes that were old then. So Georgian Era outfits or earlier.


Victorian Era vampires should dress like this, and might unironically wear a powdered wig.


Honestly, no one thinks of the whole “stealing kisses inside hats” thing, even though that was a thing two hundred years ago. In 1810 it was like a gloryhole for your face.


Our concept of vampire outfits comes not from Bram Stoker's stories at all, but from Bela Lugosi's portrayal in the movies. Because Bela Lugosi is fucking awesome and also because that was a visual medium.

Any number of affectations made illegal or outstanding in the modern nights might fit seamlessly with the gothic [sic] literary genre as well as the Victorian cultural norm: opium, absinthe, the Ripper hidden behind a veil of fog, a Golden Dawn sorcerer conjuring “immortality.” Yes; everything I bitch about being inappropriate or a blatant threat to kindred existence in the Final Nights is fair game during Victoria's reign.

Uh... what?

Dude, I drink absinthe. It's not an inappropriate anachronism, it's high proof imported booze. It comes in shitty food coloring varieties as well as expensive and psychoactive varieties with genuine wormwood. The good stuff is actually pretty vile, but only in the sense that other desirable human beverages like coffee and Mountain Dew are acquired tastes as well. Meanwhile, hiding in fog to serially murder women has never been socially acceptable. Not during Victoria's reign or at any other time. If you are in any way concerned about riling up the local Scoobies and police, grabbing women off the street and carving them up has never been a good plan.

But aside from the simple insanity of the list of examples, there's the more fundamental problem: in his own words, Justin Achilli “bitches” about people wearing capes and top hats. Let that sink in: Justin Achilli doesn't want people to dress in neo-Victorian Goth clothing in Vampire games. He thinks it's silly, and looks down on people who do it. Like, you know, the entire fanbase of his fucking game.


If you dress like this, Justin Achilli is pissed off at you. Why the fuckity fuck did he end up in charge of the fucking Vampire line?

AncientH:

The thing about Justin Achilli is that he doesn't just care if you're playing Vampire - he's worried you aren't playing it the right way. One True Wayism is sadly very common in White Wolf products to begin with; and I...I don't understand it. It's a very immature attitude, and you can't help but think that Achilli must know that. The thing is that there is no one concept of what a vampire is, or what Gothic Punk means; every game is going to be different, every group is going to have its own dynamic and take on things. You can try to push a unified aesthetic - and I would say that is what White Wolf largely did in its products, at least visually, and throughout the various books and settings there were some common themes of things winding down, increasing entropy, a zero sum game where even "victories" are fleeting and only a short stopgap on a road toward an eventual ending.

It is Millennialism, really. It's Christian fatalism. It's living in the expectation for the End of Days. And even when they aren't pushing "Christianity is right" in your face - it is a large part of the aesthetic in the setting, the idea that there is an end coming, and nothing you can do can stop it. It's a harder sell during the Victorian Age - after all, you know the setting continues on through the Modern Nights, which are the real Final Nights - but fuck, look at Dark Ages. They thought it was the Final Nights then. There are vampires in the setting that have been waiting for the apocalypse for longer than most nations have been a thing.

Which, to bring this back to Achilli and one-true-wayism...this fatalism comes along with a heavy dose of Choo-Choo.



It's not just that everyone is along for the ride, whether they like it or not, but Achilli & co are determined that you're going to get to the apocalypse the right way. Maybe they think they know the best way to have the most fun, or they're worried about people not having the right kind of fun, but to me it really smacks of the poseurs being unaware that they're being poseurs. Remember, Vampire was written by people that were kids when the original punk came out; they get everything, right down to their aesthetic, second-hand. And like most folks that don't get the scene they claim to own, they want to control it and shape it into their image.

FrankT:

As Ancient History mentioned in the Storytelling chapter, Vampire really needed to develop some fucking roles. How are the characters supposed to accomplish their goals? What kinds of goals are they supposed to have? Why should they join together in a coterie in the first place? Why should they have Carlos on the team instead of voting him off the island? In the absence of any presented goals or roles, the game had a tendency to devolve into an extended They Fight Crime joke or fall apart altogether. See, when you're playing a tabletop RPG, you have a social contract to cooperatively tell a cooperative story incorporating all of the characters presented by all of the players. That's the game.


This isn't good enough. And it's weird and insulting that White Wolf thought it was.

What Vampire: the Masquerade presented, was a series of stereotypical vampire. Yes, they didn't get enough powers to actually do the things they are supposed to do. And yes, there was a lot of stupid shit. And yes, Malkavians are probably going to be bad for the game no matter how you present them. And yes, the extra stereotypes they added in later were pretty much universally racist stereotypes that were bad for the game in the sense that they were offensive and shitty. But the original archetypes they handed out were the kinds of building blocks that made you want to tell stories about vampires.




These are all reasonable vampires that might appear in a show or novel. But what are you going to do to get them into the same story? Because the realities of table top roleplaying are that every one of the characters has to be one of the ensemble of protagonists in the story. And to come back as one of the ensemble of protagonists in the next story. And the one after that. If it's difficult to come up with a reason for the characters to work together instead of stabbing each other in the face or just flipping the bird and going their separate ways, it's difficult to tell a single cooperative story, let alone tell a series of connected cooperative stories.

Obviously, they needed a theory of group goals and team roles and so on and so forth. They actually had that for Werewolf, and for all that game is a dog fucking abomination it did manage to get over the hurdle of “Why are we working together and why are we going through with the adventure the MC has prepared?” questions that so thoroughly flummoxed Vampire: the Masquerade. By the time of Victorian Age Vampire and the New World of Darkness that came after it, the problem and the solution space were clearly defined. You set a default set of one to five assumed group goals, and you define a set of four to eight roles that can each be reasonably covered by several different clans. Then and only then you tell players to go nuts making their characters putting dots into skills and powers as they wish, covering roles partially or fully as appropriate because it's a skill system. Like how in Shadowrun you can be a Mage who specializes in social legwork or
demolitions or a Street Samurai who is also a Hacker.

What Victorian Age Vampire did instead was to shake Justin Achilli's angry one-true-wayer fist at the audience and say “Fine! You may have your thrice-damned theater gloves and sword canes and monocles and waist coats! Is this not enough?! Is this not what you came for?!”

AncientH:

There were more of these. They didn't really get any better. There was no point to it.

I know we like to rant about books in these OSSRs, and sometimes things seem a lot less shiny and fun and cool twenty years later than they did when we were teenagers, and that's disappointing...but these were products that were shitty and disappointing when they were new. It's not that people didn't know any better - fuck, Call of Cthulhu did a better Victorian expansion, GURPS did fucking Castle Falkenstein - it's just that this was almost by definition a one-off gasped out by a dying game just for the money. There was no future for it, and everyone working on it had to know that.

FrankT:

A historical setting is by its nature more constrained than a modern or future one. You know that you aren't going to inadvertently start a war between France and Britain, because it's the past. There are many solutions to this. From going small (investigating rural disappearances where the broad course of history cares not much whether you succeed or fail), to going secret (Indiana Jones adventures surrounding artifacts that are historically still lost – or at least not publicly admitted to being possessed by anyone). Or to go full Man in the High Castle and just have history go alt-history right away. Or to have the main characters trying to save the night to preserve the timeline we remember against terrorists trying to make history even darker than it was.

VAV of course, does none of these things.

AncientH:

Fuck this book.

Fuck this book for potential wasted. Fuck this book for what it could have been. Fuck this book for every wrong historical fact, fuck this book for every gothic novel mischaracterized, fuck this book for every shitty photo-rendered illustration and crappy ironwork. Fuck this book for every callout and injoke while ignoring anything relevant to the setting, fuck this book for being lazy, fuck this book for not giving a damn about making a fun and interesting setting. Fuck this book for what it represents, the giant goddamn middle finger of White Wolf, which shat out shovelware and claimed it was gold as they sold it to you. Fuck this book for what it isn't, for mad Victorian Tremere technomages and Brujah labour organizers, Fenian Malkavians collaborating with the fairies for Home Rule and Ventrue that perpetuated the Opium Wars because they can only feed from drug addicts, ghoul pornographers and revenant horses and Toreador with variant powers based around hysteria. Fuck this book for being boring when it should have been fun, for being bland when it could have been awesome, for being stupid when it could have been smart, when being neutered when it should have been ballsy. Fuck this book for what should have been a new age of darkness, a Gothic Punk Victorian era, and ended up being Justin Achilli's wankfodder for Jack the Ripper enthusiasts.

For all these sins, and many more.

Fuck this book.

---

Word.

[JigokuBosatsu]

[TheFlatline]

But the problems of society and nightlife and the fact that there is no Masquerade aren't even discussed. Hell, DA:V20 doesn't even have a setting section. It has a section on Italy, it has a section on Middle East, but the game's primary setting of central Europe is not in the fucking corebook because they decided to publish it in a separate book.

I know they dug Dark Ages because gloomy spooky shit, but I'd kind of like to see a Renaissance era version of Vampire done not shittily. Nightlife actually happened, travel was a little more reliable and you could probably travel by coach and a ghoul or two, and there was enough political and military turmoil in most of the European powers, especially during the Wars of Reformation, that ambitious vampires could really become power players and move among nobility and royalty potentially.

[Prak]

It sounds like one key thing for a Not Shitty pre-industrial Vampire would be getting rid of Rohtshreck. Which WW obviously did not want to do for some reason.

[Lokey]

Hard to say. Major city you can probably go back a long way without having to change things from modern society too much. It's when you get outside the few urban centers you're into suspicion if not instant death to outsiders.

I wonder if there's a more general Vampire: the * topic to go over this stuff in. RAW (as wonky as they are), as long as you're not saddled with disciplines (which of course means power gaming the crap out of character creation) that suck and you can reliably get a few blood points per day, you're good to slowly build whatever power structure you want. The problem is the horrid setting/npcs: they're there to keep you from doing anything interesting.

Guess I'd like Frank to unpack his vampires that can't feed themselves comment, because that's the main problems of the system in a nutshell.

[Mechalich]

It sounds like one key thing for a Not Shitty pre-industrial Vampire would be getting rid of Rohtshreck. Which WW obviously did not want to do for some reason.

All they really needed to do was tone it down some, and there's the built in excuse that you could simply have vampires who grew up around open flames as humans be slightly less vulnerable (make it a 2 point merit and give it to every dark ages vampire for free).

The real problem is the overall lower population levels and the lower level of urbanization. VtM postulates 1 Vampire per 100,000 mortal humans as a stable population, and estimates the global modern nights population of Kindred at 30,000-40,000 (this number is in the Giovanni clanbook, presented out of the mouth of a big dick NPC whose estimate is presumably accurate). That's out of a modern population of roughly 6 billion, with the of course presumption that Kindred cannot draw on the population base of East Asia at all.

The thing is, once you start going back in time, world population goes down really fucking fast. In the beginning of the 20th century you've got just under 2 billion globally, and at the beginning of the 19th century a mere 1 billion. It drops to 500 million by 1500, and then is reasonable stable in the 300-500 million range, based on estimates, all the way back to BCE times.

As a back of the envelop calculation, assume that prior to 1500 CE, it takes 200,000 people to support one Vampire, due to both lower nutrition and reduced urbanization. Also assume that the unreachable East Asian population (and populations in suitably remote areas incapable of sustaining any vampires at all) is roughly 50%. 400 million then becomes a 200 million global herd, and at 200,000 to 1, your global vampire population is 1,000.

1000 vampires, spread across Europe, Africa, portions of Central and South Asia, and the Americas. Divided across 13 clans (the clans are not equal in size by any means, but if they were that'd be ~75 per clan). The density is incredibly low. Say you wanted to run a game in Tudor England (Vampires versus the Spanish Armada, why not) - the whole country has about 4 million people in it, meaning it has 20 vampires. None of them can occupy the same city for long periods (okay maybe London can hold two). There is no Vampire society, there's just a handful of Dracula-style isolated vampire lords holed up on estates with their ghouls and minions. Do they jockey for power? Quite possibly, control over vital feeding grounds (which would be whole villages) matters a lot, but they must do almost all of it by proxy.

Dark Ages Ghouls is a playable game. Dark Ages Vampire really isn't, the demographics simply don't allow it.

[Username17]

Sounds like we need an Anatomy of Failed Design for Vampire generally.

But yeah, I can't see how Dark Ages populations support there being coteries. Like, at all. The player characters are collectively more vampires than you can fit pretty much anywhere.

-Username17

[Prak]

Could Dark Ages Ghoul work by basically treating ghouls as serfs for their vampire lord?

[hyzmarca]

Sounds like we need an Anatomy of Failed Design for Vampire generally.

But yeah, I can't see how Dark Ages populations support there being coteries. Like, at all. The player characters are collectively more vampires than you can fit pretty much anywhere.

-Username17

Ghouls and Settites.

Settite brews Typhon's Brew. Ghoul gets very, very drunk, vampire feeds. Dark Ages can work if every Coterie has a Settite Alchemist. That's pretty much a requirement for any sizable population. But once you have a Settite Alchemist and a Ghoul, you've got infinite blood.

Open flames can be handled by using covered lanterns, and having servants tend to them when the vampires are away.

Travel can also be handled by servants, with the vampire resting in a lightproof box during the day, while the servants move him.

The Dark Ages actually provides a justification for diverse coteries, since survival requires a wide array of Disciplines, that can't be replaced with technology.

[Ancient History]

The Dark Ages can also provide justification for travel: spreading your depredations out over a wide enough area, rather than staying in one place, can be a more viable feeding strategy. The trick is travel times; movement by horse and boat means long periods between feedings (cf. Dracula draining an entire ship on the way to England).

[Prak]

I don't have books on hand, does ghouling increase an animal's speed? ...I suppose a ghouled horse could have a dot or two of Celerity, couldn't it? So Dracula can send his coachman off with a super fast ghouled horse to round up meals.

[angelfromanotherpin]

But once you have a Settite Alchemist and a Ghoul, you've got infinite blood.

There's also the old Efficient Digestion scam. It's a 3-point merit that means a Vampire gets 3 blood for each 2 they suck out of someone. Two vampires with that merit can profitably feed off each other and so generate a surplus to support their friends.

[hyzmarca]

But once you have a Settite Alchemist and a Ghoul, you've got infinite blood.

There's also the old Efficient Digestion scam. It's a 3-point merit that means a Vampire gets 3 blood for each 2 they suck out of someone. Two vampires with that merit can profitably feed off each other and so generate a surplus to support their friends.

That's not as reliable as having a ghoul chug beer, since the efficient digestion merit is, presumably, something a vampire is born with.

[Longes]

As a back of the envelop calculation, assume that prior to 1500 CE, it takes 200,000 people to support one Vampire, due to both lower nutrition and reduced urbanization.

The assumption is wrong. This is one of the things we actually have rules for and the rules are clear - there is no difference between draining blood and blood regeneration of a mortal in 13th and 21st centuries. Also the 1 per 100k assumption is tied into the Masquerade and Camarilla, and keeping the vampires hidden. Until 16th century there is no Masquerade and there is no Camarilla. If you want to make a childer - just do it. If you want to live in a village of 50 humans and drain them half to death once a month - just do it. A vampires need giant number of humans to stay hidden. If keeping vampires a myth is not a goal, then you can survive just fine on a small herd.

Amusingly, the clan Cappadocian alone posits numbers greater than what you got. After the Feast of Folly the [Cappadocius] had an interview with his clan, and kicked everyone who failed into the Underworld, leaving alive a tiny fragment of the clan. A mere thousand vampires, give or take.

[Username17]

The assumption is wrong. This is one of the things we actually have rules for and the rules are clear - there is no difference between draining blood and blood regeneration of a mortal in 13th and 21st centuries.

Like the Mage assumption that humans don't believe in magic and gods, this is horrendous. When World of Darkness makes casual claims that humans in general are absolutely different from the humans in our world, it throws everything positive about about the real world setting into the god damn fire. If normal human civilians are not basically like normal human civilians in our actual world, there's no advantage to calling your setting Earth and you'd be better off playing in the Forgotten Realms.

The rules of Vampire: the Masquerade are a dumpster fire, and when they make pronouncements about the human condition that are utterly at odds with history and biological reality, the only reasonable assumption is that the rules are wrong. Filling in the game world with mind caulk is pretty much what you have to do all the time for everything. That we are expected to ignore the rules entirely when calculating how often humans can give up blood is not really different from the way we have to ignore the rules when driving cars. It's just one more thing we have to mind caulk over because the rules are offensively bad and the writers don't even care.

-Username17

[Lokey]

RAW it's really a soul pool anyway, they don't put a volume on a blood point, although they may have in this horrid book I don't have. Hope you don't read the bits on carried diseases, they're even worse medically.

I also forgot the rule to pass as human is expend 8 - humanity blood points per day too, otherwise you're cold to the touch and have death pallor, bad breath, whatever. So you have to spend more blood than I thought (and I already thought it was by the gallon--figuratively!) per day, every day you don't hit the snooze button.

And you'll also need blood for your ghoul (more than one gets tricky) otherwise they won't igor for you anymore (when they aren't failing their roll to frenzy or something). Maybe...they probably make it even harder to manage a ghoul in the books on ghouls.

[Mechalich]

In fairness to VtM I think the 1 in 100,000 ratio and the 30,000 - 40,000 global numbers are reasonably defensible, for the Modern nights. The fact that the Kindred rode the global population explosion of the 20th century makes perfect sense and allows for lots of low-XP npcs to be running around and keeps the number of truly powerful elders (meaning people embraced before about 1800) very low.

I mean, if you had a reasonable turnover rate, and if the elders spend a fair amount of time in torpor for whatever reason, you might have only a few hundred high-powered NPCs globally, which makes the big-dick NPC problem way more manageable. The also makes the whole 'ancients as puppeteers' theme far more viable, because said ancients are simply too thin on the ground to exercise vast influence. if you gave each of the kindred-occupied continents plus the Kindred-held portions of Asia 100 elders, that's probably a workable density - allowing for some doubling up in mega-cities that would cover the approximately the top 75 metros on each continent, leaving a huge amount of territory where they had proxy influence only.

[Rasumichin]

It sounds like one key thing for a Not Shitty pre-industrial Vampire would be getting rid of Rohtshreck. Which WW obviously did not want to do for some reason.

All they really needed to do was tone it down some, and there's the built in excuse that you could simply have vampires who grew up around open flames as humans be slightly less vulnerable (make it a 2 point merit and give it to every dark ages vampire for free).

Another way would be to keep Rötschreck, but to give vampires some form of darkvision by default.

[Whipstitch]

Universal dark vision would be a nice addition but if you really want to save rotshreck as a role playing prompt and game mechanic the first thing you have to do is ditch the part where anything below being burned forces a frenzy test. The stakes that come into play for merely lighting a cigarette or pipe is too damn high. MCs are loathe to enforce the rule so often and players have no incentive whatsoever to roleplay discomfort with fire and highlight the issue. We'd all have been better off if instead white wolf had emphasized taboos and traditions regarding the handling of fire around guests instead since that's something flavorful that players and MCs might participate in voluntarily.

[deaddmwalking]

Vampires should be able to smoke cigarettes. It's not like they need to worry about cancer. And it makes a great excuse for standing around in the dark by yourself.

[Prak]

Also, as much as we know how horrible cigarettes are for you, they still form part of certain images of "cool" in the cultural consciousness.

[Maxus]

We'd all have been better off if instead white wolf had emphasized taboos and traditions regarding the handling of fire around guests instead since that's something flavorful that players and MCs might participate in voluntarily.

Oh, I like that. That whole dance of courtesy vs. practicality.

[hyzmarca]

Honestly, you're probably not going to want to adventure in London in a Victorian game, because not much is happening. You're going to want to get on a steam ship and head to the Colonies, Africa or India, probably, maybe Australia or Canada.

When Victorian era people wanted to fantasize about awesome adventures, they generally didn't take place at home, but in mysterious and exotic locations. And England happened to have conquered a bunch of mysterious and exotic locations all over the world.

While the raw aesthetics of the era is certainly part of the appeal, there's just a lot more fun to be had in doing King Solomon's Mines with Vampires than in doing David Copperfield with Vampires (no offense to Dickens).

The other David Copperfield with vampires would be more interesting, a troupe of traveling performers pretending to be illusionists and mesmerists, but really using vampire Disciplines. I can actually see a necromancer making a good penny doing seances for wealthy socialites. But that's not a story idea. That's just an excuse for having your coterie.

But really, a lot of iconic Victorian novels weren't set in England. And there's a reason for this. Because the target audience lives in England, it's safe and normal and lacking in adventure.

The Victorian Era should be a time when upstart vampires ride on the coat-tales of a global empire and establish large networks of control. I'm talking about the British Vamps going down to the African colonies bringing Laibon groups under their control and using the British army to slaughter any native vamps that won't bend the knee. Now, the distances involved might mean that, in practically, most Laibon so conquered are just paying lip service to their new rulers, but that's to be expected. And you've still got sky high advancement opportunities, with like 13th gen neonates getting recognized as Princes of Gambia and Rhodesia through daring and ample application of Maxim guns.


Likewise, it would be really fun to have the Martians from War of the Worlds show up and the Vampires have to join in the fight against them. You know, play the full pulp and steampunk. Jules Vern, HG Wells. Airships.