Alt-white wolf?

[Prak]

Thinking about it, White Wolf antagonists seem slap dash in general.

I've commented elsewhere that Pentex as written would work better as a cult that happens to control a bunch of businesses, but it could also work as a sort of "Koch Industries run by actual fundamentalists" and the corporate reason for the Captain Planet villainy is that the CEO believes nature should be subjugated under humanity. Then there's a reason for the conversion therapy company being owned by Pentex.

Or if Garou we're all about free love and pansexual orgies and created new Garou through a means other than birth, then there could be this thing about gay werewolves and Pentex owns a conversion therapy company as a means to attach a source of new werewolves.

As it is, it's just tragedy porn in a poorly written game, included for the sake of offense.

[Thaluikhain]

Always seemed a bit awkward to me, if you're doing a thing set in the real world+monsters, and you are dealing with nasty things, you're going to end up taking real nasty things and sticking your monsters in them.

"What were the vampires/monsters secretly running things in Europe doing 70-80 years ago?" is an obvious question, but there's a lot of really bad ways to answer that one.

[Prak]

Thinking about it more, another problem with the conversion therapy company specifically, Homogeneity, Inc, is that it's depicted as working, even if the subject has to go to meetings regularly and drink the special potion. If you can successfully change people's sexuality, then... What is the negative emotion eating sprit actually getting?

[Username17]

"What were the vampires/monsters secretly running things in Europe doing 70-80 years ago?" is an obvious question, but there's a lot of really bad ways to answer that one.

One of the great fictions we have as a society is that everyone pretends they weren't a Nazi. Then everyone pretends they didn't support Apartheid. And so on and so on. When moral evils are defeated, everyone pretends that everyone was on the winning side. But obviously they were not.

Dick Cheney was a big supporter of the Apartheid regime. That bizarrely didn't get brought up when he was running for vice president of the United States, because newspapers liked to pretend that everyone had been united on team good during that period when that was factually untrue.

Where this goes awful is with actual immortal characters. Anyone who was alive in the 18th century was almost certainly pro-slavery because the abolition movement was ludicrously tiny at that time. It was completely normal to support owning people and genocide and kidnapping people to rape them and sell their children to child traffickers and judicial torture and so on and so on. The past is a really grim place, and a recognizably modern moral zeitgeist is comparatively recent. 400 year old characters were almost certainly supporters of regimes that were comically horrifying by modern standards - North Korea is simply a nicer place than any 15th century kingdom and allows for more vigorous freedom of thought.

There is thus tension between wanting to have very old characters and wanting them to be even a little bit relatable. Even progressive viewpoints of the past are riddled with cancers of unconscionable evils that were normal for their time. People who did good things in the early 20th century were still racists and eugenicists. People who did good things in the early 19th century were still human traffickers. People who did good things in the early 18th century still torture-murdered children. And so on and so forth.

When you ask what a character was doing during the sacking of Ireland by the roundheads, the authentic answer is probably "torturing and enslaving Irish children" and it's very difficult to approach that kind of revelation with anything remotely similar to tact. And obviously asking a bunch of Swedish Edgelords to discuss issues with that kind of gravitas with the respect they deserve is a ridiculous ask.

-Username17

[Thaluikhain]

While that's absolutely true, and a serious problem, of course, it wasn't what I was getting at.

If you've got shadowy, evil groups secretly pulling strings for centuries, you will have to answer things like "How much of the Nazi party is their fault?", which is another way of asking "How much of the Nazi party isn't the fault of the people who were responsible IRL?". A lot of people then jump to saying Hitler was a werewolf, the Holocaust was intended as blood magic and thus had a strategic purpose or there really were subhumans lurking in German society they needed to get rid of.

[K]

While that's absolutely true, and a serious problem, of course, it wasn't what I was getting at.

If you've got shadowy, evil groups secretly pulling strings for centuries, you will have to answer things like "How much of the Nazi party is their fault?", which is another way of asking "How much of the Nazi party isn't the fault of the people who were responsible IRL?". A lot of people then jump to saying Hitler was a werewolf, the Holocaust was intended as blood magic and thus had a strategic purpose or there really were subhumans lurking in German society they needed to get rid of.

The Buffy-verse answer was that the vampires were running scared from the Nazis.

I think I'm OK with the answer that vampires are fundamentally cowards and parasites rather than the reason for all of society's evils. You can still have vampires making things worse without whitewashing real evil.

[Prak]

Or that in the 20s-40s, most European vampires came from cultures targeted by the Nazis and so they had every reason to flee, especially given that the methods of the Holocaust largely would have put vampires into long term torpor at least.

I suppose you could say the Venture and Giovanni would be exceptions, here, but they would mostly be involved in Mussolini's fascism, I would think.

[OgreBattle]

Or that in the 20s-40s, most European vampires came from cultures targeted by the Nazis and so they had every reason to flee

[Username17]

The fact that the Nazis happened is hard for vampire narratives. If you say that the Nazis hunted vampires, you are in effect saying that at least some of their mass murder had purpose - you're making the crimes of the Nazis less bad. If you put the vampires in secret command of Nazi atrocities you are reducing the culpability of real Nazis - again making the crimes of the actual historical Nazis less bad. But of course, World War 2 was the largest and most important event of the 20th century and probably the entire history of the world - if that managed to happen without Vampire involvement, your "secret masterminds" narrative takes a huge hit.

Threading the needle where the vampire conspiracy is important, but the Nazis are neither justified nor not responsible is something that takes a fair amount of tact. It's not a question that has an easy answer, since of course you end up saying horrible things if you push too far in any direction.

Expecting a bunch of Swedish Edgelords to navigate terrain this treacherous is laughable. They can't even avoid own-goaling themselves talking about relatively simple modern moral dilemmas. Dotmeister can't even bring himself to admit that opposing modern Nazis is the right thing to do.

-Username17

[Chamomile]

The straightforward answer would appear to be that the Nazis rose to power without being directly shepherded by a supernatural conspiracy, committed the Holocaust for purely ideological reasons, and the vampires either went to ground until it all blew over because the Nazis weren't after them or else integrated themselves into the Nazi regime in order to take advantage of the ongoing massacres and eat some people.

[Leress]

The straightforward answer would appear to be that the Nazis rose to power without being directly shepherded by a supernatural conspiracy, committed the Holocaust for purely ideological reasons, and the vampires either went to ground until it all blew over because the Nazis weren't after them or else integrated themselves into the Nazi regime in order to take advantage of the ongoing massacres and eat some people.

I think the latter was used as the vampire motivation in the game Operation Darkness with the added point of using the holocaust to fuel the Resurrection of Dracula.

[Prak]

Yeah. What I was suggesting was not that Nazis were hunting Vampires, but rather that vampires in Europe happened to be primarily present in the Slavic, Jewish, Roma, and other targetted groups, and the Nazis, completely unknowingly, were killing vampires in their atrocity, because they happened to be using methods that were effective against vampires, so the vampires fucking fled. That seems to be the least problematic means by which to explain what the Vampires were doing in WW2. There's still problematicness to it, especially if you don't explicitly say "we're not saying the victims of the holocaust were mostly vampires, we're saying that a large proportion of the European vampire population got killed during the holocaust."

And even then, you're basically saying the Nazis accidentally did a good thing.

Fucking nazis, always ruining shit.

[hyzmarca]

Thinking about it more, another problem with the conversion therapy company specifically, Homogeneity, Inc, is that it's depicted as working, even if the subject has to go to meetings regularly and drink the special potion. If you can successfully change people's sexuality, then... What is the negative emotion eating sprit actually getting?

I haven't actually read that book, so I can't tell you what canon is supposed to be, but if I were writing it I would make it a conformity factory. They get everything unique, special, and different sucked right out of them, eaten by parasitic monsters that feed off of those differences, and then the hole in their soul is filled in using bits and pieces of a conformity demon and covered with the spiritual equivalent of stucco.

The end result would not be a happy straight person, but a demonic version of a stepford robot. They're an exaggerated, uncanny caricature of a straight person. They unironically and with complete seriousness say phrases like "I'm sorry, completely platonic heterosexual friends, I must depart for I have an appointment to have reproductive heterosexual intercourse with my wife, who is a woman, using the missionary position, the only position approved by God."

Basically, they're creepy to the point that no one wants to be around them except other people who have been through the same process. Which is why suburbs exist.

The fact that the Nazis happened is hard for vampire narratives. If you say that the Nazis hunted vampires, you are in effect saying that at least some of their mass murder had purpose - you're making the crimes of the Nazis less bad. If you put the vampires in secret command of Nazi atrocities you are reducing the culpability of real Nazis - again making the crimes of the actual historical Nazis less bad. But of course, World War 2 was the largest and most important event of the 20th century and probably the entire history of the world - if that managed to happen without Vampire involvement, your "secret masterminds" narrative takes a huge hit.

Threading the needle where the vampire conspiracy is important, but the Nazis are neither justified nor not responsible is something that takes a fair amount of tact. It's not a question that has an easy answer, since of course you end up saying horrible things if you push too far in any direction.

Expecting a bunch of Swedish Edgelords to navigate terrain this treacherous is laughable. They can't even avoid own-goaling themselves talking about relatively simple modern moral dilemmas. Dotmeister can't even bring himself to admit that opposing modern Nazis is the right thing to do.

-Username17

I prefer the one where even the guys who enslave and eat people thought that the Nazis actions were beyond the pale, even if its just in a hypocritical "I treat my cattle better than this" sort of way. .

[Dean]

I'd say the most reasonable option is that Nazism happened and because some vampires are in positions of political power in germany they got on the train for personal gain. Likewise some Vampires existed in Russia and America and the like and likely helped efforts to combat the Nazis because that helps their own power bases. It's not a clean narrative but in a global war where you have a vampire autocrat in every city on earth you probably won't have "Vampires" have any single response to it. Various Princes will do whatever benefits their personal power platforms and communities.

[OgreBattle]

Well Tolkien said in real life orcs are on all sides, so you have the vampires spread across nations and using WWII to dick each other over or just fuck up their own subjects.

Like American vampires were eating folks in Tuskegee, Japanese vampires were eating in Manchuria, Soviet vampires eating Ukrainians, British vampires eating Bengalis, German vampires just did whatever is neat but not too sensitive.

The nagas of southeast Asia then take it as a good time to kick out those French vampires in Indochina.

After the Nazis were defeated the British vampires go to town on those Kenyans and Malays, while German vampires do... something with the Berlin wall maybe?

It can be all worded vaguely so the company isn't responsible for whatever distasteful real world history vampire conspiracy they feel line introducing to their own table.

[Dogbert]

And just because someone needs to be the Well, Actually guy in the thread: As per WoD canon, Hitler was possessed by a spectre (a wraith consumed by their own shadow/beast).

But yeah... the existence of WW-II is a gordian knot for any "secret masters" premise (at least today that the wound is re-opened and chances are we're gonna bleed to death because things are getting worse before they get better)... in my case, I'd handle it the same way I handle The Problem Of Evil in a Superman story: by shrugging, saying "genre conventions," and go on with the story, olympically not going there.

The most unrealistic part of today's superhero comics isn't that Superman can catch a Boeing plane by the nose without wrecking it like an accordion, or that The Flash can afford hero-grade segmented armor on a cop's salary... but the fact that ANY superhero would put up with 45 putting babies in cages.

Mind you, one of my favorite things of City of Heroes was how they decided to turn their setting into Alternate History Fiction from Korea onwards (their world didn't have a half-century long cold war, or a Vietnam, or a 9/11, or three desert storms, and if the game was still around, they'd sure as hell would have no 45).

[Prak]

Thinking about it more, another problem with the conversion therapy company specifically, Homogeneity, Inc, is that it's depicted as working, even if the subject has to go to meetings regularly and drink the special potion. If you can successfully change people's sexuality, then... What is the negative emotion eating sprit actually getting?

I haven't actually read that book, so I can't tell you what canon is supposed to be, but if I were writing it I would make it a conformity factory. They get everything unique, special, and different sucked right out of them, eaten by parasitic monsters that feed off of those differences, and then the hole in their soul is filled in using bits and pieces of a conformity demon and covered with the spiritual equivalent of stucco.

The end result would not be a happy straight person, but a demonic version of a stepford robot. They're an exaggerated, uncanny caricature of a straight person. They unironically and with complete seriousness say phrases like "I'm sorry, completely platonic heterosexual friends, I must depart for I have an appointment to have reproductive heterosexual intercourse with my wife, who is a woman, using the missionary position, the only position approved by God."

Basically, they're creepy to the point that no one wants to be around them except other people who have been through the same process. Which is why suburbs exist.

Yeah, I'd be way more on board with that idea. I suppose it's a semantic difference to the conversion therapy thing, but for whatever reason, I have less of a kneejerk revulsion at the concept of putting that in my game. It, of course, goes back to the whole "that's a Weaver thing," but then Werewolf is one big game of the heroes plotting how to kill an abuse victim rather than stopping the abuser, even though it's not like they're fans of the abuser...

[Dogbert]

but then Werewolf is one big game of "the heroes" plotting how to kill an abuse victim rather than stopping the abuser

Fixed that for you (see added quotes).

(I mean, I don't think we need to go back remembering the little things about rape camps, enslaving of perceived "sub sentients," and the whole War of Rage ethnic cleansing campaign, do we?).

Well Tolkien said in real life orcs are on all sides

Considering Tolkien loved his world with 2 meters tall immortal aryans that "were worth twenty thousand human men each" and was pen pals with a card-carrying nazi sympathizer (Lovecraft)... yeah, it wouldn't surprise me if he had been the one who coined the "both sides" crap.

[Prak]

Yeah, that's how I meant it anyway. Thanks.

EDIT: Recently, whenever I think of the whole Weaver/Wyrm problem in Werewolf...

[maglag]

Modern conventions demands that there must be "heroic" vampires and "villanous" vampires so I don't see what's the problem with just having vampires in both sides.

The most unrealistic part of today's superhero comics isn't that Superman can catch a Boeing plane by the nose without wrecking it like an accordion, or that The Flash can afford hero-grade segmented armor on a cop's salary...

Heh, when you have super-uber-speed, you can easily make a lot of money if you need it. Even just collecting lost pennies off the streets would easily cover any fancy equipment. Remember that the Flash's fast enough to evacuate a full city between the time of a nuclear bomb going off and the explosion actually expanding.

[Mord]

Inserting fictional elements into real-world atrocities is something you should not do in a way that 1) minimizes the suffering of the victims, 2) justifies the actions of the perpetrators, or 3) denies the culpability of the perpetrators. This is true whether we're talking about the Holocaust or gay conversion therapy.

Vampires in single-author fiction are often a metaphor for something else. Maybe in one author's version they're symbolic of the rentier class dominating the workers and stealing their lifeblood, in another they're AIDS, in another they're a device for exploring grief about your daughter's recent untimely death. The thing they are a metaphor for is a specific bad thing that the author is deliberately engaging with at a remove. The metaphor often breaks down when you attempt to transplant a particular author's set of ideas about vampires into real life history.

What are Anne Rice vampires doing during the Holocaust? Probably still moping in Paris, because world war isn't really in their idiom. The idea of Louis dressing in Hugo Boss passes muster, but the notion of him goose stepping about attending meetings at the Reichstag is faintly ridiculous. What are AIDS vampries doing during the Holocaust? Spreading mysterious ailments among American troops stationed overseas, for certain. What are rentier-metaphor vampires doing during the Holocaust? There are most definitely vampires running the Nazis, the British Empire, and the USA, because their metaphor is about the extractive and exploitative nature of capitalism.

If your vampires are a metaphor for the insatiable greed that drives capitalism and you're using them to explore the idea that the atrocities of Nazi Germany are the fruits of the same fundamentally rotten tree that previously brought you such hits as "child labor" and "the trans-Atlantic slave trade," then I don't see that there's anything offensive about saying Heinrich Himmler was a vampire. In no way does doing so justify his actions or deflect blame from him, nor does it distract from the evil of his deeds. The depiction of Himmler as a vampire in such a context is in service to a bigger and fundamentally humane idea, so assuming the hypothetical author doesn't fuck it up by depicting Stalin as a heroic vampire hunter or something, I would say this novel could be OK.

If you're writing an RPG, though, you are probably trying to present a vampire that is flexible enough to be most things to most people. You can't say, "vampires in this world are a stand-in for Bad Thing X," because you're writing a framework for other people to hang stories on and you don't want to limit your audience to telling stories about Bad Thing X. When your fantastical elements are no longer in service to a coherent idea, that is to say, that they are no longer about something, it becomes altogether too easy for them to become fetishized in a way that causes their involvement in a real-world atrocity to become disrespectful.

Related digression: I recently saw Overlord in theaters, which is a movie about Nazi scientists experimenting on French villagers to make super-zombie soldiers. Is it something that should cause offense? Well, for one, it's choosing to use French people as its victims, which is less objectionable than using Jews for the obvious reason that IRL French people are not historically or currently discriminated against anywhere so at the very least the filmmakers are not punching down. It's certainly not making any excuses for the Nazis, because they are clearly shown as evil people attempting to harness a fictional source of evil power by evil means and are in no way controlled by it. The zombie serum appears to make one previously nice guy flip out violently, but importantly, by the time any of the Nazis themselves are exposed to the serum, those particular Nazis have already shown themselves, as people, to be contemptible fucks.

The quest for the immortality bestowed by the zombie serum in any way presented as a justifying cause that excuses the cruelties the Nazis are committing in researching or developing the serum - it is depicted as an especially pernicious tool in the toolbox of a regime whose ends and means are entirely evil, and the Nazi characters who talk about what they will do with the serum if it is perfected make it very clear that they do not have a secret humanitarian aim here.

However, does the zombie serum plotline minimize the suffering of actual people who died in Nazi laboratories, battlefields, and death camps? Unfortunately, yes. The fact that these are French people and not Jews obviously and purposefully distracts from the real-world Holocaust, and the fact that they are being abused and killed in a fantastical undead laboratory necessarily distracts from their suffering as people. There's one especially memorable moment where the protagonist, infiltrating the lab, whips aside a surgical curtain to reveal a woman's severed head and spinal cord suspended over a table; she is conscious, makes eye contact, and repeatedly begs him to kill her in a terrible wheezing voice. This is definitely a moment of suffering as entertainment - the grisly spectacle of the living severed head begging to be killed, in its stomach-churning fascination, certainly overwhelms the humanity of the person who has been reduced to begging for death.

So, should the movie cause offense? The fact that it comes down on the side of "Nazis are bad and you should shoot them or blow them up if you get the chance" isn't really a moral, because Nazi-shaped silhouettes have been in digital crosshairs ever since Wolfenstein. Taking the Nazis out of their context of vigorous ethnic hatred and redirecting their cruelty against fictional French peasants gives everything a storybook quality - the fact that the bad guys are wearing Stahlhelme and have little skulls on their collars is about all they have to do with the real horrors of Nazism. And that is indeed the point of the movie. It's B-movie-ish horror entertainment trotting out a very well-worn set of visual tropes. I think you probably get further away from a real understanding of the evil that the Nazi regime stood for the more you partake of this kind of entertainment, but I don't actually think the film manages to be offensive to humane sensibilities.

Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter is definitely much more objectionable than Overlord. It portrays the Confederate States of America as being an explicit vampire conspiracy run by vampires for the benefit of vampires, which 100% lets human Southerners off the hook, especially since all the Southern vampires are killed at the Battle of Gettysburg. Implicitly, the human puppets of the CSA, from its Congressmen to its generals to its foot soldiers, never really supported slavery - they served their undead masters out of fear or ambition, but certainly not out of principled and enthusiastic support for the institution of black slavery. All of the actual stated justifications for the CSA's existence, which IRL people actually did fight for, were, in ALVH, a set of vampiric ruses. They may have tricked those who were not in on the conspiracy, but no one who fought for the South was really a true believer in slavery... right, modern Alabamans? To the extent that the vampires in ALVH represent something, they represent the actual real-life evil beliefs of antebellum Americans, which are then murdered with silver cannonballs, dying a substitutionary death for all the actual racist shitheels of America.

To bring this fucking thing back around: Why isn't it OK for Adam to be the secret Vampire King of America in ALVH or for Sultan Ramzan to be the vampire puppet President of Chechnya, but I could still be OK with Heinrich Himmler as a vampire? I think the difference is that you still have to present ordinary humans as being part of the problem, and to still possess the actual horrible beliefs and still do the actual horrible things that they are reviled for believing and doing in real history. You have to have the scene where Vampire Heinrich Himmler is hanging out with Human Albert Speer and they're talking about their evil vampire plot and Albert Speer is completely gung-ho because he really likes the plan on its own merits and not just because he's hypnotized or Dominated. (I think it's also OK if Speer is trying to curry favor with Vampire Himmler so he can become a vampire himself, since that extends the metaphor into the reasons that people willingly participate in capitalism, but somebody has to be presented as a true believer in the cause.) If you make sure to include that scene, and integrate that idea into the work as a whole, you are at least one step closer to OK in how you are integrating your urban fantasy into actual terrible history.

[Rubick]

v5 is now basically dead

It's an ongoing story but it's a damn hot mess

[Dogbert]

Ikr?

In the meantime, I decided to just go ahead and adapt M:tA to V5's system and will run a game at some point next year... I mean, no point waiting for the next edition now, right?

[Longes]

V5 got passed to Modifius (formerly the V5 printer).

[Dogbert]

Not that it matters at this point... but at least it's Modiphius and not Onyx Path.