AncientHistory wrote:They were, without pushing this explicitly, trying to work up a Grand Unified Theory of Monsterness.
While a general theory of Monsterness is not actually required, but a general theory of what kinds of themes your world is going to support genuinely is.
So you
don't have to come up with a unified background for Werewolves and Vampires. Heck, you don't need to have a unified background for all the Vampires. It's totally alright if some of the Vampires were created by Phoenician blood sorcery and others were created by an Aztec demonic pact.
They don't even need to be able to use the same kinds of magic. It's alright if the Fairies in your world use Cthonic magic and the Vampires use Blood sorcery. Heck, it's possible (although
usually a bad idea) for the different kinds of magic to use radically different rulesets. There's nothing stopping you from designing a system in which the mechanical process for resisting Elf Sleep was largely or wholly unrelated to the process for resisting Vampire Domination.
What needs to be unified is the acceptable range of tones. It wasn't a problem for White Wolf that Werewolves and Vampires had different rules and different powers and different origin stories; but it was a problem for White Wolf that they wrote Clanbook Giovanni
and Clanbook Malkavian. It's really hard to imagine someone being OK with the edgelord misery tourism of Clanbook Giovanni
and the fourth-wall breaking flippant wackiness of Clanbook Malkavian at the same time.
Law and Order Special Victims Unit does not, as far as I know, ever call time for a humorous musical slapstick routine. And last I checked there aren't any episodes of Glee where the audience is asked to confront the autopsy findings of the rape and murder of a child. While there are shows that do attempt a significant breadth of tone like Buffy/Angel and Hercules/Xena, this is actually quite hard to do and often doesn't work. See the Evil Cordelia plotline from Angel Season 4 or really the entire Dahak plotline from Xena to see how
terrible it can be when you try to shift back into full melodrama.
White Wolf obviously suffered from poor use of conceptual space. And their insistence on doing fractal design for expansions meant that they were constantly getting into the weeds with tiny groups that you didn't care about getting way too much fucking text lavished on them while things you were supposed to care about got left off the page entirely. For fuck's sake, the Changing Breeds book has fourteen flavors of non-standard lycanthrope including Wereaurochs. You will never encounter a fucking Werewaurochs, fuck you! It turns into a kind of cow that is extinct. Fuck! And then on top of that, there are sub-types of these fuckers, because obviously. Meanwhile, there are nearly nine hundred thousand people living in Albuquerque and I have legit no idea what kind of supernatural power structure is there or whatever. But I wouldn't say that any
particular thing in World of Darkness (except maybe Wereaurochs) that
couldn't be fit into an Urban Fantasy kitchen sink campaign that was a bit more judicial with their use of conceptual space. You'd just have to figure out a place in the world for your various stuff.
Kitchen Sink Urban Fantasy has room for potentially a lot of different stuff in it. It's OK to have Camazotz
and Onaqui, even though both of those things are Aztec Bat Monsters. You could compare and contrast them. In your world, one of them could be the protagonist faction and the other be the antagonist faction of Bat Monster from Mexico City. Or they could be Bat Monsters that differ by power source. Or the Onaqui could be humanoid bat monsters who ride around on the more bestial Camazotz. Fucking whatever. It's Kitchen Sink Urban Fantasy and as the author you can write in whatever you want.
But you should still block out what parts of the conceptual space you are using for various things. White Wolf fucked the chicken not because it was wrong to include any particular thing, but because many of their flavors went together like innocent children and sex magic.
-Username17