[OSSR]Sins of the Blood

[Ancient History]

OSSR: V:tM

Sins of the Blood


Nope.


Also not that.


There we go.

There are actually a lot of books called “Sins of the Blood” and even more books that are named some minor variation of that. It turns out that a majority of people in North America consider themselves to be some kind of Christian and one of the pieces of available Christian theology is a thing about everyone having sins and sins being absolvable only through blood rituals. This is mostly deprecated in modern practices, which of course makes it that much juicier as a thing to reference in fiction.

This book uses the supernatural for settings, characters, and themes. All material and supernatural elements are fiction and intended for entertainment purposes only.

If this craven disclaimer every satisfied one church lady or youth pastor that this wasn't a devil book, then good job with whoever took the “over” on that bet.

AncientH

Humanity was a mistake.

The mechanic at least. Jury's still out on the surviving hominids. Humanity as Vampire: the Masquerade conceived it was a finite resource that you had to deal with continually, a way to emulate the slow descent into inhumanity brought about by the Beast within, a ruler for which sins you could safely get away with.

It was, basically, a Sanity or Cyberpsychosis mechanic for vampires. The counter ticked down, and when it hit zero, you couldn't play anymore. That was supposed to be a bad thing.

In practice, Humanity was a terrible idea from the get-go. Vampires basically have to kill something to survive; most starting vampires don't have the right combination of powers or resources to get the nightly blood they need through non-violence. On top of that, most of what you want to do as a vampire involves things that make your Humanity drop; nobody wants to be the asshole that is 500 years old and survives off draining squirrels and worries that not paying taxes is equivalent to theft. The fact that Humanity was pretty explicitly based on Christianity as understood by a bunch of Southern Baptists who discovered the local Hot Topic didn't help.

One of the "solutions" was Paths of Enlightenment, which at least offered different combinations of sins so that you could hopefully find some pseudo-philosophy that matched what you were going to do anyway. These became popular enough that their use was generally expanded in Dark Ages and Revised, and that's where we get here...

So, Sins of the Blood (2001) came out after The Cainite Heresy (1999) but before Road of the Beast (2002), the first of the Road books. The Vampire writers were really playing on religion/Path as a new and largely unexplored avenue of your character, especially since religions and Paths could transcend Clan differences and offer a connection or degree of common ground with other vampires outside of the usual sectarian bullshit; coupled with the White Wolf penchant for philosophical asshole-gazing and throw in a couple new powers, this seemed win-win.

But in the middle of this, they decided they needed White Wolf's own shitty version of The Book of Vile Darkness.

Frank

This book is a deep dive on Wassails, Wights, and Suspires. If you don't know what any of those words mean, you're in good company. Indeed, those terms don't mean anything to the vast majority of people who were pretty deep into Vampire: the Masquerade. Indeed, I played LARP Vampire for a long time and had a large social group who talked about Vampire shit pretty frequently and not one person ever uttered any of those words.

Vampire: the Masquerade has a lot of made up bullshit terminology and some of it had surprising amounts of resonance, but a lot of it just didn't. Many of the themes and terms that were introduced in the original Vampire: the Masquerade went over like brussels sprout ice cream, and for the most part those segments were allowed to quietly die. Shit no one cared about just wasn't mentioned in later editions and expansions and we were all allowed to just mercifully memory hole. Like, there was supposed to be this big theme about turning back into a human in the original book but that's dumb as hell and ain't no one got time for that, and we just... stopped.

Well, in 2001, Justin Achilli has had enough of your passively ignoring setting elements that don't hold your interest and aren't remotely compatible with cooperative storytelling. He is going to make you care about these shitty themes that were supposed to be super important but instead got sidelined at literally every gaming table. You have been playing the game wrong, and Justin Achilli just got five hack writers together to spend 124 pages telling you extensively that you've been playing the game wrong.


Justin Achilli, 2001.

Spoiler alert: this didn't work at all. No one was going to play out a chronicle about skirting the edge of Wassail while people degenerated into Wights. Because that would be a shitty and depressing game. And even if they did do that, they wouldn't use that terminology, because that terminology is terrible even by White Wolf standards. When I was growing up, my mother was big into folk music. My grandfather won a Grammy for his work in anthropology (yes, really), I fucking know what wassailing actually is, and it doesn't have a god damned thing to do with a moral event horizon. We're deeply into Humpty Dumpty territory here.


Mark Rein • Hagen, 1991.

AncientH

One of the main problems with moralizing in a game about vampires, is that you are already a vampire. Being an unholy beast forsaken by men and damned in the eyes of God is the point. It's what people wanted. Yes, there were always a couple of people that wanted to mope about living forever as they popped their pimples and dared to move their hand one inch higher up somebody's thigh, but a lot of people had graduated from Interview with the Vampire to The Vampire Lestat and realized that having superpowers could be fucking fun.

But you gotta have rules.

I would say that this is because it's an RPG, but from a design perspective, you have a society of basically sociopaths. Everybody in your social circle - which isn't very fucking big to begin with - are effectively serial killers. When you get those kind of people in a room together, you need a pretty ironclad social contract. Which is why the Camarilla has Princes and Justicars and commandments and...

...why there are lines that even vampires are supposed to not cross.

Now, in a perfectly legal sense, some of this is like "Look, don't break the Masquerade or I'll break your face and then stake what's left of you and let you get some sun." Which is fair, you can see the reasoning behind that one. Don't shit where you eat.

Then there's a couple things that get more...spiritual. Like Diablerie. Don't drink another vampire's soul. Which is actually a good one: it's an action that is unique to vampires and definitely has consequences (nobody wants Final Death), and benefits (everybody wants to lower their generation). So there's a risk/reward scenario. On top of that however, is a lot of weird baggage. It stains your aura, and there are vampire powers that make it more efficient (most of which you can't access), and a lot of the fluff suggests if the soul is stronger than yours it doesn't "digest" and you end up getting possessed by the dead guy you just ate...

...it's supernatural consequences which are weird. Because we don't live in a moral universe. If you go and kick a puppy, you are a bad person, but John Wick does not show up to blow your ass away. You can go through your entire life without looking over your shoulder, knowing that John Wick is coming for you. Maybe you worry about what God will say, but that's after you're dead. Having immediate real-world supernatural consequences for a moral choice is something that usually happens in the Old Testament or ancient Greek myth.

And that kind of tells you what we're dealing with in Vampire, as far as Sins of the Blood goes. This is not a game that gives a fuck about moral ambiguity. It wants you to be punished for doing things it disagrees with, with immediate penalties. Because that's how they think the world should work.

Frank

I'm not sure where to draw the line between a heresy and a religious minority. The classic pithy answer to the difference between a religion and a cult is that a cult kills its own people and a religion kills other people. But a religious minority is just a heresy that has enough people to be respectable. In modern society, I would call the Fundamentalist Latter Day Saints a heresy, and the Jehova's Witnesses a religious minority. There's enough Jehova's Witnesses that our hospital's commitment to multiculturalism makes allowances for their refusal to get blood transfusions. There are few enough Fundamentalist Latter Day Saints that the governments don't even pretend to recognize their polygamous marriages as legit. By the numbers, Jehova's Witnesses are 0.8% of the population, and the Fundamentalist Latter Day Saints are 0.02 percent of the population. Groups like the Old Order Amish (0.06 percent of the population) are at the cusp and I wouldn't begrudge people talking about them either way just as the law sometimes accommodates their desire to live without cars and sometimes the law does not accommodate their desire to live without vaccinating their children.

Where this all comes crashing down is when you want to write a book about vampire heresies in Vampire: the Masquerade. The demographics in V:tM are already shockingly bad, and the claim was that there were just three thousand vampires in all of America (which accounts for like two of the larger LARPs, but that's a different issue). The thing is that 0.8% of 3000 is 24, and 0.02% of 3000 is less than one.



There isn't room for cultists and schisms. If you're a follower of the Path of Death and the Soul in Santa Carla or even New York, you're the only one. Because the vampire population is extremely small. If you're a minority of a minority, it's just fucking you if you exist at all. This book talks about various different religious groups, but remember that the pie they are thin slicing only has 3000 fucking vampires in it. How many members could there possibly be in the eighth most common of the uncommon religious heresies? How about the fucking sixteenth?

AncientH

The idea of a vampire, an immortal being that preys on humans just to exist, having a different outlook on life than regular people isn't a stretch. You get assholes on 4chan and 8chan and reddit who barely fucking qualify as human by most standards, and they still feel the need to interact with other human beings and get the message out; add a couple centuries and the only other critters that can possibly understand your sexual preference are the same assholes you've been dealing with for the last hundred years and you begin to see how maybe a different point of view could be valuable.

Unfortunately, none of that was ever baked into the game from the beginning, which it sort of needed to be. If you're going to have Paths be a core component of your unlife it needs to be core; Paths probably should have been something fundamental like "Oh, yeah, there's some assholes who only drink animal blood, it's a whole undead lifestyle with them" and the Path gives them powers to let them do that, like a fucking Coils of the Dragon. But we don't get that, it would be too big a change.

What we get instead is that one kid in high school that read The Satanic Bible or Ayn Rand and thinks they have all the answers. Except in a very pragmatic and literal way, they do not actually have the answers to the most pressing question of vampire existence: why do I care?

We mentioned this in the Clanbook Assamites OSSR, but nobody gives a shit about the Path of the Blood. It's basically limited to Assamites and you are never going to play an Assamite. A lot of the more interesting Paths are like that; they exist just to exist, to be cool or weird or quirky, but not to be playable. Player characters generally don't take the Via Hyvron, not because they don't want to shoot bees out of their vagina, but because that Path does not actually help you shoot bees out of your vagina, even if that is a thing you want to do. And being part of a Baali Hive, shooting bees out of orifices is basically THE sole perk. So if it can't do that...why the fuck are you bothering?

Anyway, that said, on with the book.

Introduction:
Something Wicked This Way Comes

Probably a reference to the Disney movie rather than the Bradbury novel directly.

Frank

This entire book is incoherent, as only a book cobbled together from five different unrelated drafts according to the mad whims of a developer who literally hates the idea that the reader might be having a good time can be.

That's what makes Sins of the Blood necessary.

Yes, even on the first page, this book is lecturing you that you are playing the game wrong and also pounding its fist on the table demanding to be taken totally seriously. I don't know if any of the authors were laughing at how fucking pretentious this all is, but we are quite certain that Achilli was not. This book wants you to meditate on the motivations and spiritual beliefs of evil people. It wants the bad guys to be deep and artistic and shit. And if you don't like it, then you're shallow, man. And playing the game wrong.

Totally missing from this chapter: any discussion of what it could possibly mean to be outside of society when your society is already itself outside of society and ludicrously small. That's like Klein bottle shit right there.


The outside is also the inside and also go fuck yourself because you're playing the game wrong.

AncientH

There's an argument to be made that Vampire can be played as a game of psychological horror involving your personal struggle against the ravages of eternity, losing parts of yourself as, night after night, you face the choices that test what you will and won't do to survive. Where some vampires cling to a code, any code, just because it's all that separates them from being the monsters that they claim not to be.

There's also an argument where you're a Deathdealer like from the Underworld movies, so you're basically this badass vampire cop that even other vampires are afraid of because if they break the rules you're the one sent to kill them. (Note: Underworld came out in 2003 and so was after this book, but no one cares. Vampire cops was totally a legit idea for a V:tM campaign).

The point is, it's Calvinball, except you don't get to make up the rules. You're kicked out of mortal society and into immortal society where you're on the bottom rung of a ladder where the punchline varies a bit, but ends up with you dead if you don't follow the rules. Even the Sabbat, which started and ended as the Insane Clown Posse of vampires, has rules and traditions.

Achilli wants to paint this game as fleshing out the motivations and desires of vampires as having somehow wronged or been wronged by vampire society...but that doesn't necessarily reflect what the player characters are going to give a crap about. If you've been a vampire for two months and are told that doing X is bad, you don't have any social context for why X is bad except that somebody told you that. So a lot of the things that the Vampires might describe as "Sins" are...meh?

Put another way: you do not care about vampire morality. This book, and indeed this game, should have given you some reason to care about vampire morality. It doesn't.

Frank

The introduction is just three pages and a lot of it is filler art. There's four mini essays (entitled “Something Wicked This Way Comes,” “Making it Count,” “The Questions of Scale and Frequency,” and “Evil! Evil!” and I am dead serious about those titles) followed by a chapter summary and a laughably short lexicon. The lexicon only defines a few words, including names for followers of three of the Paths of Enlightenment but not for any of the thirteen others mentioned in the next chapter. I assume the Lexicon was either cut for space or just had random path names shoved into it for typesetting reasons. It does end precisely where the page ends. So it has that going for it.

Based on the repetition and contradiction, I'm going to guess that this introduction was cobbled together from different drafts. Either by different people or at different times.

AncientH

Personally, I bet each one wrote an intro, except the one guy who forgot to do it, so they just put what they had together and called it a night.

Frank

According to the chapter summary, next up: Sins of Morality. This one is about the minutiae of ethical philosophy in Vampire, which is as bad as you can imagine. But we'll get there next time.

[Orca]

In actual play though whatever extreme minority the players or MC are interested in is likely to have more than one member, right? Those other extreme minorities can be extinct or living in France or whatever, and there just happen to be three of your particular sect in your game's Chicago.

[Thaluikhain]

I would complain about people using the word "Wight", but you already mentioned "Wassail", so whatever.

In actual play though whatever extreme minority the players or MC are interested in is likely to have more than one member, right? Those other extreme minorities can be extinct or living in France or whatever, and there just happen to be three of your particular sect in your game's Chicago.

In addition to that, if there's only one of you, surely that doesn't have to be the fun of you if you are a vampire and you don't care about the organisation telling you not to make more vampires? You could get weird cults springing up whenever one vampire makes it to another populated area without any local supernaturals, formed up of very low ranking vampires, ghouls and one older vampire boss (ancient heretical text that they came across that prompted them to do this optional).

Of course, it'd make sense for the Camarilla to be against such things if they threaten the Masquerade, and your adventure basically writes itself from there. I'm guessing that this is not the sort of thing this book is concerned with.

[Ancient History]

Sins of the Blood

Chapter 1: Sins of Morality


Tell us the lesson that we should learn.

AncientH

There is room for a game that explores the morality of actually needing to drink blood to survive and having super-powers that let you subvert the will of other people or mind-rape them or in any other way do something that is verifiably wrong but also outside the scope of normal human activity. Like, if you're fucking Wolverine or Deadpool, and they can just regenerate any wound...

...yeah, we won't go there.

But that is not what "morality" means in this context. We're not talking about "How do you adapt to living outside the normal human condition? How would your norms and ethics change?" exactly; rather it's sort of an introduction to Paths of Enlightenment how they interact with vampire society. But the way it goes there...

Frank

The chapter is bookended with scratchy pen art that doesn't seem to be meaningfully about anything in this book. So it doesn't really fill its 29 page length with text. But it is factually 29 pages long. There are clear traces of the drafts not having been harmonized particularly well (like the Path of Night being mentioned twice on page 15 and then again on page 16), The typesetting is also quite bewildering as “box text” is inserted into the same column structure as regular text and some of it fills entire half pages, which basically just makes it look like sentences are being abandoned mid thought in order to start new sub sections. This book is fundamentally made without craft.

I am writing all this for a very specific reason, and the reader will bear with me , I trust. The reason for this treatise, essay, rambling – what you will – will become clear in the end. For now, only read and try to understand. It will, I assure you you, not come easily.

This chapter is almost entirely a dry recounting of game mechanics and interactions of game concepts. But the conceit is that most of it is in character. So what you get is a talentless hack telling you in explicit terms that upon falling to the Beast a vampire traded unusable Presence dots for Celerity dots – but in dolorous nominally in-character prose. Like, imagine the most half-assed response to a storyteller in 1996 saying “You can't say you have Auspex 4! Say it in-character!” And now do that over and over again for an entire 29 page chapter about the interaction of numbered character traits. This is one of the few works of White Wolf prose that actually sells me on the idea of immortality being a curse, because reading this makes me want to kill myself.

About the only thing of note from the lugubrious verbiage is that at least one of the authors and probably also the developer (Justin Achilli) have a really big hate boner for atheists. You'd think that a chapter whose nominal topic was about moral Chads going their own way and finding their own grounding philosophies and perspectives about what makes something right or wrong in a thoroughly Nietzschesque fashion would be all about the atheism. But no, trying to center yourself morally without the crutch of human societal norms still requires a fundamentally Christian framework because fuck you, that's why! The fictional author is Jewish, which makes the mandatory Christian viewpoint with respect to sin and repentance extremely uncomfortable. The sock puppet author states outright that Jews and Christians worship the same god and also too that Islam is a false promise and what the actual fuck am I reading?! The cultural chauvinism is so thick that you could use it in load bearing walls.


Honestly I can't even tell when this book is trying to be transgressive because the authors are so fucking clueless about what is and is not offensive to people outside their narrow cultural framework.

The horrible thing is that I'm sure these guys thought they were being enlightened and inclusive by talking about Judaism and Islam at all. But like... no. For fuck's sake, no. Like, they tell you that they hate anti-semitic bigots, but they literally are anti-semitic bigots for thinking it was Okto go to print with this. They are writing anti-semitic things, I'm reading the anti-semitic things they are writing. It's really uncomfortable.

AncientH

Paths, like Disciplines and bloodlines, are one of those things that agglutinate. White Wolf has ruled that certain bloodlines or Disciplines are no longer canon and just memory holed or retconned them, but they have never thrown away any of the Path of Englightenment/Roads nonsense, so there's a lot of stuff covered here and unless you've been diligently reading all the books, none of it is covered in enough depth for a new player to actually know what the fuck is going on. You don't really get an idea of what the Path of Lilith is about, who practices it, or where the fuck you can find out more about it.

This gets doubly weird because you have variations on the same goddamn path which were made separate things for...reasons. So if you want to be a philosophical necromancers, your go-to options are either the Path of Bones or the Path of Death and the Soul. Not that you need to follow either of those things, because there are no material benefits either way, but it's really fucking annoying that we even have to have this conversation about why the Road of Bones split into goddamn sub-paths, or why the followers are called Necronomists.

And then we talk about Wights.

When your Humanity/Path rating hits zero, you succumb to the Beast. You become a non-player character. And then...honestly, it's not fucking clear exactly. You're supposed to lose/not use any of your discipline powers that require higher intellect and...it's really goddamn unclear. You're supposed to just go feral or something, living like a murder hobo, not talking. Except if they have "moments of clarity" or...y'know, it's all nonsense. Wights are as intelligent as Mister Cavern needs them to be.

Frank

Such that this chapter is about anything, it's about what happens when your morality scale goes up and down and also too what happens to make your morality scale go up and down. It is a chapter which is very concerned about the different paths of morality. Thus it seems kind of important to note that not one of the authors of this chapter actually knows what all the paths of enlightenment even are. So like, the Setite Path of the Warrior is never mentioned at all, and there are multiple lists that repeat some paths and not others. There's a bit where they write out three “additional” paths of enlightenment, but none of them are new. Two of them are from Dirty Secrets of the Black Hand and the other is I think from a 1996 adventure. I have no idea why these ones are “additional” or why they are here at all. It doesn't cover every path of enlightenment from obscure books or even every path from Dirty Secrets of the Black Hand specifically. I think the listed paths are simply whatever the authors could remember and the three additional paths are ones where someone decided to passive aggressively overwrite parts of some path for weird personal reasons.

Although the terrifying possibility remains that the three “additional” paths are there because one of the authors realized that Justin Achilli did not remember some of the more obscure paths and they could get paid by the word for mostly copy pasta. If so... congratulations I guess. Unfortunately, that kind of chutzpah was probably only rewarded with pizza money, because White Wolf paid pennies on the word to its freelance authors. Regardless, there's just no way to square reprinting the Path of the Scorched Heart from Dirty Secrets of the Black Hand and calling it an additional path while referencing but not reprinting the Path of Lilith from the same fucking book.

But this means that due to the in-character framing, much ink is wasted on telling you the levels of the path of humanity, but using shit like the second person and passive voice to make it “in character.”

AncientH

In a different world, your Path of Enlightenment could have been the third choice during character generation. Pick a Clan, get a discipline; pick a Sect, get a discipline; pick a Path, get a discipline. But they didn't do that. Paths have no real material benefits or drawbacks aside from the sin hierarchies. They have "preferred" abilities and disciplines, but the vampires who follow these Paths don't get any ability to actually use them, an out-of-clan discipline is still an out-of-clan discipline.

Which is one thing I'll say about the Roads books over this one: they at least came up with the idea that giving the PCs some incentive to increase their rating in a Path is better than letting the player just get up to the level where they can do whatever the fuck they want and stop. If the higher levels of the Paths actually unlocked new appropriate abilities, that would be cool - especially if said abilities were not directly tied to generation, because then it would give higher-generation vampires an alternate path to diablerie.

But we don't get that.

Frank

This chapter spends a considerable amount of time discussing what happens if your morality bottoms out (you turn into a monstrous NPC that can be hunted for sport). And it spends a considerable amount of time talking about Golconda. There's rather more on the first bit, but I'm at a loss to understand why. Vampires in World of Darkness are incredibly weak and fragile. Reduced to the intellect of a rabid weasel, they wouldn't last a week. The degree of sun protection they need in this fucking world is so intense that it takes quite a bit of human ingenuity to survive one day. There's no room in my house that I could get dark enough to survive a single day as a World of Darkness vampire. I'd have to smash all the shelves and crawl into the fridge to survive one dawn. The “Wights” as described would dust themselves almost immediately.

Golconda they describe as first being a deeply Christian search for penance and redemption, followed by a surrealistic dream quest where you get trolled by Jesus. It's supposed to be the thing where you regain touch with your humanity and can see the sun again by achieving enlightenment. But none of the paths of enlightenment actually get you there, which is weird.


And then you confront your doppelganger who berates you for failing as a father.

But the big thing that makes this whole chapter fucking worthless is that Humanity scores actually have mechanical effects. It isn't a lot, but having a Humanity of 10 does stuff. Mostly that stuff is to tell you what you're not allowed to do if you don't want to degenerate. But it also determines how human you look, how long you sleep and so on and so on. Does being a righteous dude according to the Path of Typhon or the Path of Caine give you similar benefits? That would be an important spiritual data point either way and this chapter doesn't seem like it has even considered the question.

Golconda is one of those things that is supposed to be a functionally unobtainable goal. Something to strive for eternally without ever achieving it. But the thing is that being good all the time actually isn't very hard. People like Fred Rogers and Jimmy Carter exist, but there are firefighters and nurses who go do good works every day. Making the correct moral choice is sometimes difficult and identifying right from wrong is sometimes hard. But you know, some people just work in pediatric intensive care and doing good works isn't complicated or confusing. Some people cheat on their wives and husbands, but lots of people just don't. My father once told me “adultery really seems like it would be a lot of work.” Sometimes you don't kick puppies because you have no interest in doing that, and anyway the puppies are all the way on the other side of the road.



In a role playing game, your character has whatever motivations you say they have. You might play a conflicted drug addict, but if you wanted to play a character motivated by helping others and improving the world they left behind, you could just do that. Such people exist. In a world with concrete personal rewards for spiritual goodness and concrete punishments for spiritual rot, why wouldn't people choose to be excellent to each other? I do “good” things and “bad” things because it doesn't fucking matter and nothing changes for me either way. Things have whatever meaning I personally choose to ascribe to them, and sometimes that means relaxing to music while at work after all my patients have plans rather than try to be busy all the time. It's not that I don't think diligence is a virtue, it's that I don't give a shit because the universe doesn't give a shit.

Having the universe give you solid feedback on what is right and wrong fundamentally devalues the choice to do right in the first place. The choice to take care of the sick is only praiseworthy because it is arbitrary. If the universe actually punished you for not doing it, why the fuck would we bother praising the choice? How could we call it a choice at all?

AncientH

And like that, you've all thought more about actual morality than this chapter and indeed, all of Vampire: the Masquerade, ever has. You're welcome.

A large part of the Wight/Golconda balance point is that the whole idea of a quest for salvation that you can lose is an early Vampire: the Masquerade plot point that was largely ignored or lost. Golconda in early vampire games wasn't impossible to achieve, just kind of arbitrary; like becoming human again, it's a weird goal that only works when you're in a specific mindset of "Okay, I'm playing a vampire with the ultimate goal of not playing a vampire." That works for movies like Near Dark, where apparently all you need is a blood transfusion, or The Lost Boys where you just kill the head vampire, but in V:tM the whole idea of "yeah, okay, I don't want to be a vampire anymore" was largely lost in the shuffle of...having fun being a vampire.

And no, this sort of shit doesn't end here. I don't want to talk about Gehenna, but this shit shows up again in Gehenna. And spoiler alert...

Everything in this chapter is a goddamn lie when the game ends. It doesn't matter how high your Humanity is, it doesn't matter how good of a vampire you tried to be or how much you wanted to be human or even if you have True Faith. If you want to be human you have to get down and beg God for forgiveness and maybe he'll let you survive the Last Night. Which is another reason I hate that goddamn book.

Frank

The semi-secularized folk Christianity that is Vampire: the Masquerade's Humanity makes it fairly oppressive in a game where you're trying to play a blood drinking monster. I mean, it's a pretty hard sell that fang raping people is remotely acceptable in most moral frameworks and the unexamined generic Chistianesque American baseline morality has no place for that kind of antics.



The very vagueness of it all made it impossible to escape. While you might not agree with the person next to you about how bad stealing is, you can be damn sure that your storyteller would consider some of the shit you pulled to be as bad as stealing. Or Arson, or whatever other common law crimes were morally unacceptable at your current level of investment.

On the flip side, the very arbitrariness of the paths meant that they were at times a shield from storyteller dickery. Like, I have no idea what “Allowing gross disruption of the world.” is supposed to mean in any context. I suppose the MC could slap me with his dick constantly because shit's going down in Brasil and Congo and basically I'm just allowing it to happen. But equally any particular thing I do is not going to be an “equivalent crime” to that, because it's all made up bullshit and it has no equivalencies in the code of Hammurabi. Hittite law may have a clause for what happens if someone gets raped by an ox belonging to someone else, but it sure as heck doesn't tell you what crime would be equal to “failing to spend some time each night in meditation” or whatever the fuck.

These things aren't crimes, they are completely arbitrary observances. And because of that, the claim that these require more structure and discipline than abiding by the vague laws of White Wolf Humanity is total horse shit.

AncientH

It's not as if some novelists haven't already played with the whole vampire morality issue. Fucking Anne Rice, in Interview with a Vampire, has Louis go through the whole "Wait, we can survive off the blood of animals? So why the fuck do we prey on humans?" spiel.

And that, amazingly, is not something this chapter ever chooses to address in any depth. It's the most basic fact of vampiric unlife, and it's basically taken as fucking given that you're going to prey on humans in some form or fashion. If you had ten basic paths of morality that stemmed from that, they might boil down to:

- It's okay to drink dead blood, nobody is using it

- It's okay to drink animal blood, they're just animals

- It's okay to drink human blood, we're vampires

- It's okay to drink vampire blood, vampires aren't fucking special

- It's okay to drink werewolf/fairy blood, they're not human

- It's okay to drink this alchemical blood substitute I brewed, try not to vomit

- It's okay to steal the breath of newborns, I've got a discipline for that

- It's okay to drink semen and convert it into blood points, I've got a discipline for that

- It's okay to drain the soul-stuff of ghosts, I've got a discipline for that

- It's okay to eat people, I've got that merit

...you can expand the reasoning from there. Being a vampire that rips the heads off squirrels and drains them dry doesn't give you any particular advantages, but you can at least defend it as "Okay, at least I'm not preying on humans." And you can have bloodlines whose disadvantage doesn't allow that, and you can have Path disciplines that make it easier to drink from animals or give you advantages to it or cancel out disadvantages, whatever. The point is, it's something critical on a night-to-night basis. It grounds the philosophical reasoning behind your chosen morality in a very fundamental aspect of your unlife: how are you going to survive? Is it okay to drink human blood? Are there other options? You might need certain disciplines or merits to unlock those options, and others are fucking suicidal, but it's nice to know they're out there, right?

Yeah, none of the Paths of Enlightenment actually have anything to do with how you survive night to night, in a practical sense. It's all college-era half-assed philosophical wanking.

Frank

One of the stranger aspects of this chapter is the idea that your vampire moral code is going to get you subjected to the Camarilla thought police when they find out that you are infected with Sabbat-think. It's like the authors think of the Camarilla as being basically Alpha Complex from Paranoia. Where everyone is a member of a secret society, but everyone pretends to not be a member of a secret society because the punishment for being a member is death.


No... the roleplaying game called Paranoia.

The thing is that this is just obviously an unplayable way to run the campaign setting. Things can't fucking work that way, because it's dumb and also because you can't tell cooperative stories that way.

You'd think that anyone writing this would say “Shit, we have to rethink a lot of our setting assumptions, because this is unplayable trash!” But obviously they did not do that.

AncientH

I should point out at this point that there's a large cultural inertia to a late-stage RPG book like this: you're probably not going to try and fundamentally alter the nature of the game in a throwaway book like this one. But then, why the fuck are you writing it if you're not really going to change anything?

Answer == $$$

And that really does come down to one of the major issues with major RPGs to begin with: lack of planning. What do you do once the first major book comes out? What do you do after that? D&D3.x was ambitious in just having the three core books planned out; V:tM was struggling after the last splatbook hit the shelves, because they were already throwing shit at the wall to see what stuck.

It's too late in the edition to come up with some fundamentally new mechanic at that point; shit like Incarnum is never going to get embraced if it isn't part of your core. Edition fatigue is real, and yet so often the people writing these things are way too conservative, not wanting to re-invent the game because hey...people are already buying it.

But that's also why games evolve so slowly. Books like this right here.

Frank

Notably absent from this chapter: any particular relevance to sins. Like, this chapter isn't actually about doing bad things or why you might do bad things, it's a dry recitation of the mechanics of what happens if your morality meter gets very low (or very high on the path of humanity specifically). But there's actually no discussion at all about why you might want to take actions that offend your moral code and risk forfeiting your mind to the beast. It's just a description of what happen if you did.


This whole chapter is basically this.

AncientH

Also missing: pretty much anything on the Beast in particular. This has always been a really cagey bit, because it's not like there aren't dozens of powers involving the Beast and frenzies and shit, and tying it into Shadows in Wraith and crap like that. There is definitely room to talk about the Beast and maybe doing something interesting there...but they don't. Such is life.

Frank

Next up: Sins of Society


So many “we live in a society” memes.

[Ancient History]

OSSR: Sins of the Blood

Chapter 2: Sins of Society


We live in a society.

AncientH

Congratulations! You've joined the anime club.

Now, as a member of the anime club, you are expected and required to follow the rules of the anime club, in addition to the general rules of the school. Officers are appointed to various positions in the club, and have rights and responsibilities pursuant to fulfilling their duties. One day, you may be an officer yourself!

Tha's not very fucking hard, is it?

Anyway, a newborn vampire is either born into an existing clan, which may or may not have an organization and hierarchy, but at least has a general culture and expectations of behavior; and they have a sect like the Camarilla or Sabbat, which have their own rules and traditions, and which are imposed and enforced by local authorities (the Prince, etc.)

...or not. If you're unlucky or just opt out, you may end up as an Anarch and auturkis. Sufficiently Powerful(TM) vampires also generally tell vampire society to fuck off except when convenient.

If this chapter was actually about how vampire society worked and how older vampires have really weird ideas of how government works compared to the much more numerous but less powerful younger vampires, this could be an entire book on how "vampire society" can be a thing. But it isn't, and that's mostly because even though vampire society is bullshit small, it is also extremely hidebound and vague and always has been, even from the first edition.

Frank

This chapter is 24 pages long and it is nominally about vampires that for various reasons can't hang with vampire society as a whole. And there's a couple of things you'd think that would be about: namely social taboos and demographics. This chapter is about neither of those things, so I think I have to get my rant on because this is so puzzling that I just have to talk about these elephants in the room even if this book does not.

So first off, there are things that are frowned upon that are in fact socially acceptable. When we say “socially unacceptable” we usually actually mean something which carries a social cost. There are things that are genuinely unacceptable to society that will get your ass ostracized or murdered on the spot. And these things are “taboo” to the point that oftentimes we have difficulty even thinking about them – it's just outside our social framework. When you walk up to the counter at Burger King, you don't shit in your pants, reach in, and draw your order out in feces. It's simply inconceivable that you would do that. When the BK manager called that into the police, they wouldn't even know what to call the transgression against the social order that you had committed.

Did you know that...


On the other side, much of what people tell each other and themselves about the rules of the society they live in is bullshit. Hypocrisy is extremely common of course, but also too most people think of things that they don't want you to do a little bit when they tell you what they don't want you to do. But the hypocrisy is really ubiquitous and because of that it's really important. Donald Trump is the living embodiment of at least five of the deadly sins and white evangelical Christians love him because he hates the same people they do and all of their claims to be against envy, lust, and greed are empty lies. There are things Trump could do that would lose him his followers, but I doubt most of those people could even imagine what actions might do it – it obviously isn't cheating on his wife with prostitutes or stealing money from veterans' charities because he did that shit and they didn't mind.

Vampire society would presumably be at least almost as alien to me as white Christian evangelism. They would have their own hypocrisies – the thing they spend a lot of time telling everybody who'd listen is very bad but which in reality they wouldn't change much about how they treated you if you did. And they'd also have the truly unspeakable taboos – the things so unthinkable that they actually don't think about them.


The thing you do with your hands at night... very bad.

That would be a pretty interesting thing for this book to do a deep dive on. Like, is it considered actually unacceptable for a Vampire to have a truly subordinate relationship with a mortal? It seems like having a regular job might be the kind of thing that would make other Vampires go apoplectic about because taking actual orders from a human boss is a gross betrayal of the Vampire's place in the universe. Or maybe not; because this fucking book is written by people who don't know what the difference between a norm and a taboo even is.

But really to play in this world, someone should have gone through and told us what vampire taboos are. And no one ever did. Not in this book, not in any of the other mountains of shovelware, not anywhere. These people don't even have the vocabulary to discuss what the limits of conceivable and acceptable vampire behavior might look like.

AncientH

When you're a teenager who has to do what your parents say, what your teachers at school say, and maybe what the boss at your part-time job says, and who has in turn no say into the political process and extremely limited rights...the idea of suddenly waking up as a super-powered vampire and having basically the exactly same relationship with the vampire that turned you and the Camarilla and/or Sabbat is not always something they look forward to.

Some of them just want to take their balls and go home.

Which is why we get a lot of teenage rebellion movies, and disaffected youth movies, and Ayn Rand-style Objectivists and Libertarians and, by extension, vampires that just fuck off and have no Sect.

Fuck your rules, man.

In V:tM terms, this is supposed to be a Bad Thing. Anarchs are usually shown as caitiffs, ostracized from society, with limited resources and fearing death from both the Camarilla and Sabbat. Which is fine but...

...what exactly do you get from being in the Camarilla or the Sabbat? Both these sects don't actually provide a lot of real benefits to the members. There's a top-level philosophical/political struggle that they're involved in, so there's a gang-mentality where there's safety in numbers, but both sects still have members that have Resources 0 and Resources 7. You don't have any particular rights or power in either system unless you spend a lot of time politicking, and even then if you don't have the physical & mystical power or charisma to back up your authority, the other vampires are just going to ignore you and do their own thing anyway.

But the general idea of fucking off outside of the system that is stacked against you from the beginning is pretty strong. Remember, Shadowrun traded on the basic "Neo-Anarchist" mentality for years in its early editions. When you're already outside the normal system of laws of man and god, why the fuck do you have to live by the rules of a bunch of mummified old farts from the Dark Ages?



And the thing is - being a vampire is in part an escapist power fantasy. Lost Boys was all about how teenagers could escape their normal lives and restrictions. Near Dark was about how that could quickly turn scary and fucked up. Interview with a Vampire was about a couple of non-affiliated vampires just fucking living their unlives and not playing by the rules.

They were punished for that.

Frank

Three hundred and eighty four.

That's the number of metropolitan statistical areas recognized in the United States according to the definitions of the OMB. 220 of them have less than three hundred thousand people in them. 290 of them have less than six hundred thousand. And fully 330 of them have less than a million. And that's important because this chapter confirms the White Wolf dumb idea that there are one hundred thousand mortals for every vampire. The whole of America is supposed to have but three thousand fucking vampires in it.


...further reports indicate it is a very small society.

Think about what that means. Like dude, really think about it. That shit's crazy. Think about how empty the upper echelons of most cities must be. There are 54 metropolitan areas of over a million people, and the top 1% of American kindred is only 30 dudes. No matter how you spread them out, there just aren't enough “elders” to be present at all in every major metropolitan area. By the time you get to the dozens of cities that have almost a million inhabitants like Fresno, Honolulu, and Omaha, there aren't any one percenters available for leadership positions. Because we fucking already ran out of one percenters before we got to large metropolitan areas in the second half of the list like New Orleans and Cleveland. If the elders get together as a primogen council in any of the mega cities like New York or Chicago, there might not be any left over for Boston or San Francisco.

If you pick a random city, the biggest baddest dude in it isn't in the top 1% of fucking anything. They are like one or two sigmas above the median. It's a fucking embarrassment.


Hey Prime Minister!

But consider it from the other end. Let's say we don't go to one of the biggest metropolitan statistical areas in the country. We go to like Gainesville or Waco. Or the lesser known Gainesville in Georgia. These are places where according to the “hundred thousand rule” the vampire population is fucking two. That means that we actually don't live in a society, there's literally just two vampires. Simon and Garfunkel, Abbot and Costello, Cain and Abel. Questions of pack and sect just don't even exist, there's just two vampires. They either choose to socialize with each other or they do not. And there are fucking hundreds of these places. The idea that vampire society could meaningfully stop you from striking out on your own is fucking absurd. Vampire population density is so low that you could go fucking anywhere and if there was enough local power to make settling down inconvenient you could just go one county over and that wouldn't be true anymore. Repeat as necessary across three thousand fucking miles of wide open America.

But beyond that, imagine you're Dracula and you have three vampire bitches with you because you are Dracula and obviously that is a thing that you do. Your little coterie of four vampires is the super majority of the vampire population almost anywhere you go. There are a few dozen cities with a few dozen vampires where you wouldn't be able to Rajneesh yourself to grand pumbah just by moving in, but there are literally hundreds of cities where it would literally be that easy. A single coterie is enough to declare most places to be in or not in whatever sect they want, because in Fargo or Roanoke, a coterie is also the polity.

So this book rambling on about the hard life of an Autarkis is just fucking mind boggling. It isn't fucking hard! Just go to Clarksville or South Bend. The one or two other vampires present can't peer pressure you for shit.

Also, Dracula is supposed to be an Autarkis, and they ramble on about this at length. He has vampire bitches though. And as previously mentioned, him and his three vampire bitches is as much presence as any sect might have in the vast majority of American cities. His coterie is as much vampire society as exists in Mobile or Salem, so how the fuck is he meaningfully more “alone” than the assholes who are nominally in a sect?

AncientH

The alternative is that there are just large segments of the country which are vampire deserts. Like, there are no vampires in Juneau, Alaska, but there are twenty vampires in Seattle. That's a possibility, and one that sort of highlights the idea of a "points of light" style campaign. But then you have to consider why you're in a city with other vampires to begin with.

We've done the math before, but if you're an average new vampire, you're killing a non-zero number of people a year. How many serial killers can your metropolis safely accommodate before somebody starts to notice? The more vampires you have, the more control you need over the city to keep the Masquerade from fraying, and the more overall people you need just so the bodycount gets lost in the general noise. In a city of 600,000 people, killing six is a statistic. In a town of 600, killing 6 is a massacre. Unlike 30 Days of Night, you don't want to just walk into a town and drink it.

(Or you could, but VtM doesn't really have the balls for that.)

So, like a lot of RPGs, you have to take a lot of assumptions in stride - you're in a city with other vampires because of feeding opportunities and because the game wants you to play undead politics. There's absolutely nothing to stop you from just wandering off, which is something we pointed out in the Kindred of the Ebony Kingdom OSSR.

Which is why this chapter is at great pains to make it out like being a solo vampire who just opts out of vampire society seem like a really bad fucking deal. Because once people realize that's an option...why not? Why not fuck off and go declare yourself the prince of some small city with no supernatural presence worth mentioning? Who is going to stop you?

Well, in the early editions the Werewolves would eat you, or the Sabbat, or the mortal hunters. But in these Final Nights, it's vampire society itself which judes your inability to deal with their shit as some sort of heinous crime.

Frank

The prose in this chapter is vile. And by that I mean that it is performatively vile. Either one of the authors or one of the people in editing or development has “spiced up” the language with edge lordy bullshit whose intended purpose is to offend. For example:

Fate unzipped its pants, and they could do nothing but bend over and take it like a vampire.

Uncle Tom to all, master of none.

These provocative turns of phrase appear at the end of largely unrelated paragraphs and don't really advance any particular narrative or rhetorical point. They are punctuation. The reader is being presented with offensive language in order to ensure that the reader is offended. That's as far as the rabbit hole goes. There isn't a larger point being made. Someone looked at the draft and said “This draft isn't offensive enough” so they added rape jokes and racially insensitive asides until they thought it was.

And this is a bit of a hard thing to talk about, but this kind of edge lord humor was simply more socially acceptable back then. I mean, obviously you couldn't make a rape joke in polite company, but it was considered the kind of thing you could reasonably expect to do if you were hanging out with the cool kids. People didn't hold it against you, even though presumably then as now actual rape victims felt horrible every time this shit came up. But the point was that at the time there wasn't a literal political movement rallying around the slogan “fuck your feelings” that was actually openly supporting people who had bragged about sexual assaults they had committed. Offensive statements like this were assumed to be “jokes” and people who were offended by them had to suck it up and keep their pain to themselves.

Now let me say that there are funny rape jokes. This is very much not the same as saying that rape jokes are funny. There are lots of rape jokes that are not funny, regardless of the ethics or tribal signifiers involved in making them. Same for racist jokes. These particular jokes aren't funny, but it is a genuine cultural loss that the deplorable have successfully claimed racist and sexist jokes as a form of neo-Nazi virtue signaling. But this book was written in 2001 and none of that had happened. The performative vileness of this chapter is the period appropriate equivalent of Hot Topic rebelliousness. No more, and no less.


To complete this look in 2001, you told a joke about dead babies or prison rape. I don't make the rules.

AncientH

I touched on this back in the review on Violation: Rape in Gaming, and Frank and I touched on rape in VtM back in the Ghouls: Fatal Addiction OSSR, among other places. The sexual politics of Vampire were/are real and White Wolf was continually working with an audience consisting primarily of horny teens who thought they were being edgy with rape jokes, and at the same time were caught in a constant crisis of masculinity.

Kind of like The Matrix, except there was never anything to say at the end of it.

And because we're still doing the weird Christian morality thing, we've got a rundown of the seven deadly sins (as far as vampires perceive them) that can get you kicked out of the Camarilla and weird photoshopped black-and-white art of naked women.

Frank

There's a seven deadly sins thing where someone tries to write an essay about how the various ways of falling, jumping, or getting pushed out of vampire society can be mapped to the Christian Seven Deadly Sins. This essay is fucking garbage. It doesn't hold together at all. It contradicts itself several times and fundamentally doesn't make any sense. This is a longer and more rambling version of New World of Darkness' “all motivations can be replaced with the Seven Deadly Sins because basically all moral philosophy is Christianity anyway so who cares?” essay. It's worse in this form, because it's less polished and also isn't even nominally about the kind of thing that would make any sense to argue from any perspective for.



It's bad, and considering how bad it is, I'm genuinely kind of baffled that Justin Achilli kept running with this obviously terrible idea instead of just letting it die. It's genuinely surprising to me that Justin Achilli was able to crash the company into the ground over and over again with this same stupid idea that no one liked the first three times he did it.

AncientH

Mostly because nobody fucking read it. I skipped this chapter when I first read this book and didn't miss it.

The actual Anarchs get less space than they deserve, because the Anarch Revolt is made out to be this kind of hippie young vampire insurrection, but it started in the fucking Middle Ages and there are still Anarchs. It's like this century-long guerrilla warfare campaign, and that could have been really cool where you're literally embraced as part of being drafted to fight the ancient vampire conspiracy.

But more to the point, the Anarchs value personal freedom, and being a vampire in Vampire: the Masquerade is largely about not having personal freedom. Blood bonds and dominate exist to create chains and shackles for the mind and soul that go beyond any physical or legal prison. Vampire the game proposes mystical forms of bondage that create conditions worse than wage slavery or sex slavery. So it is a very weird movement and it could have been very interesting as a "third sect"...but the Vampire writers hated it. They wanted them to be the bad guys, because they wanted the PCs to resent being the bootlicks of the system, and they wanted the players to aspire to be the ones doing the blood bonding and dominating.

Which is really fucked up, when you think about it.

Frank

Quite a bit of ink is spent on making sure you are up to speed with the various shakeups in the metaplot that happened while they were thrashing around writing up the final nights.

• The Assamite curse got lifted and then a bunch of them joined the Camarilla because YOLO I guess.
• A new shittier type of vampire called the “thin blooded” happened and no one played them because normal vampires are already so weak as to be unplayable without copious mind caulk.
• The Gangrel left the Camarilla to go be their own sect that's kind of like being an Anarch but shaggier.
• The West Coast got invaded by Chinese vampires who are called, and I am not making this up, Cathayans.
• The Camarilla conquered New York from the Sabbat.

With the exception of the last one that I don't care about much one way or the other, all of these are terrible to the point of inducing rage. Like, fucking Cathay? What the actual fuck is this orientalist nonsense? And there are like 200 fucking Gangrel in America, and most of them don't live in the big cities. Who fucking cares if they leave the Camarilla or not?



The whole fucking stupid rearrangement of what clans were “in” each sect was LARP politics bullshit. According to the demographics the game espoused none of this made any sense. But also too, how fucking shitty is it to tell Gangrel players that they've been booted from the Camarilla and can't functionally play their character any more? What the actual fuck?

It's one thing for enough Lasombra to join the Camarilla such that players get a new character generation option. It's quite another thing to kick characters out of the sects they've been playing in for ten fucking years. Who thought that was remotely acceptable?

AncientH

There's a bunch of noise about "defecting" from your old Sect, and honestly no-one gives much of a fuck. It's not like you've got "Camarilla" or "Sabbat" written on your soul like a goddamn Cybertronian.

Setting considerations aside, if the sects shared more of a philosophy and maybe preferential Discipline access, they'd be a lot more important than they are...but that's something that they actually brought out in Vampire: the Requiem. Here, it's not even a line on the character sheet. You have to pencil that shit in on the margins.

Frank

This book talks about conservatives and moderates in various sects but I can't make hide nor hair of it most of the time. Conservative relative to what? I legit have no idea what the different philosophical and political lines are being contrasted about. And as such there's no context for telling me where conservative Sabbat members or Moderate Camarilla elders or whatever side on particular issues. You might as well be telling me whether Splorbs react favorably to Shumlang.

AncientH

Y'know, the goddamn weird thing is, this entire chapter could have been a rehash and update of that stupidest of cheap books, The Kindred Most Wanted (how is there not an OSSR of that yet? Or a drunk review?), and that would have told you more about the laws, ethics, and mores of the Camarilla than anything else in this goddamn chapter.

Frank

The final section is about Diablerie. Which isn't really a society thing. Like,maybe you could have tied it in with discussions of societal taboos and understandings of itself, but we didn't fucking get that so whatevers.

AncientH

Diablerie is one of the few things that seems like a totally justifiable sin for vampires.

1) It's vampires hunting other vampires; that's not good for business.

2) Vampires who do it get stronger; that's not good for social stability...

3) ...especially as it primarily is targed at older vampires, since age generally equals power.

4) It can be addictive

5) There are rumors of really unpleasant side effects

But even then, there are caveats: sometimes the Camarilla allows diablerie. In several clans/bloodlines, it's a part of their culture (Assamites, Salubri, etc.) There are entire powers based on Diablerie.

So they could have really gone to town here and looked at all the ways Diablerie is or could be made interesting and...they didn't do that.

Frank

Next up: Sins of Discretion

[Thaluikhain]

[*] The Gangrel left the Camarilla to go be their own sect that's kind of like being an Anarch but shaggier.

...

But also too, how fucking shitty is it to tell Gangrel players that they've been booted from the Camarilla and can't functionally play their character any more? What the actual fuck?

How does that work? Surely individual Gangrel would, or would not decide to leave or stay individually? Or is Word of God saying that they all individually chose to do the same thing for some reason?

[Username17]

How does that work? Surely individual Gangrel would, or would not decide to leave or stay individually? Or is Word of God saying that they all individually chose to do the same thing for some reason?

That is an excellent question. The entire justification for the Gangrel leaving the Camarilla would seem to equally render it impossible for them to organize an orderly exit. If the Gangrel are mostly anti-authoritarian, low tech, and mostly living in low density suburbs, how would the actual Gangrel clan members even know that their clan had "left the Camarilla?" And why would they go along with it if they did? What the actual fuck?

Of course, what you're actually seeing is the result of the kind of 'event fatigue' big events. It's not only unexplained, it's specifically unexplained. The official line is that the Gangrel Inner Circle member just walked into council one day and said 'We Outy 5000' and walked out, and then all the other Gangrel handed in their Camarilla resignations. There's no explanation of how that could work.

It's similar to how they just fucking murdered the Ravnos and the Tremere Antitibu. It's like big events for the purpose of having events be big. Nothing more.

Now in a larger sense, Vampire was in need of a reboot. Everyone agreed on that point. All the fans accepted that things needed to be rebooted, and so it's not especially weird that various authors would take parts of the setting and set them on fire and dance around the ashes. And let's be honest: the Gangrel were very bad at their job. It's exceedingly weird that when they actually did a reboot of the system in nWoD that they didn't strip the Gangrel out and replace them with a clan that was better at being feral.

-Username17

[Shrapnel]

Can someone please tell me what the fuck the whole "we live in a society" memes mean?

The first time I heard about this was when Joker came out.

[The Adventurer's Almanac]

It means exactly what it says.
We live in a society.

[Ancient History]

OSSR: Sins of the Blood

Chapter 3: Sins of Discretion



Before we go forward gentle reader, hold within your mind an idea of what a chapter called “Sins of Discretion” might be about. The regret felt for secrets divulged and secrets kept? The illicit liaisons of unspoken ribaldry? Crimes of omission? Pretty much any of that would be significantly more interesting than what lies before...

AncientH

Okay, so chapter 1 was about Paths of Enlightenment, Wights, and Golconda. You could call that "personal sins" or "man against himself." Chapter 2 was about Sects and you could call those "sins against society" or "man against man." So Chapter 3 is...

...well, there's no way around it. Chapter 3 is about cults.

Now this is weird, because Vampire had just had an entire book called Ashen Cults (2001), and honestly this sort of reads like a contemporary-setting highly-abbreviated version of that, without the mechanics. Because "Cult" is basically just a background in some World of Darkness games and in other games (like V:DA) your coterie is supposed to pool their resources to build a cult and...uh...

Yeah, why the fuck is this chapter in here? A good cult is a great plot gimmick (one you more often see in Call of Cthulhu or Dungeons & Dragons, but blood cults can totally be a thing, sure, why the fuck not?) But why is it here? How does it fit into the theme of this book? Nominally it's because "playing God" is kind of a sin, sure, but wouldn't this be better...I dunno. Where would this be better? The companion, maybe? Storteller's handbook?

Frank

Each of the latter chapters is precisely two pages shorter than the one before it. The previous was 24 pages, this is 22, and the following is 20. In any case, the framing device of this chapter is gibberish. It's supposed to be a cult propaganda pamphlet I think, but it's so far up its own ass that I don't know whether the cult in question is supposed to be “right” or not. Heck, I can't even tell what they want their hypothetical vampire reader to do. I think that the basic inclarity of this framing essay was also apparent to the developer because an additional letter prefaces of the framing essay to try to introduce the introduction. It doesn't do a good job and I legit don't know what the book was trying to get me to think or feel about this shit. This is writing failure more fundamental than most you see. It isn't just that this fails to engage the reader, it fails to even engage with the reader on a level they would know how they were supposed to be engaged. Like... this whole framing essay would be no better and no worse for an English speaking audience familiar with Vampire: the Masquerade if it was just stereo instructions written in Latvian.



I have actually no idea how this is supposed to fit into a chapter called “Sins of Discretion” or how it's supposed to communicate anything to the reader at all. But mostly I'm just hung up on the idea that someone sent out a chapter outline for a chapter that was to be called “Sins of Discretion” and someone read that outline and decided it would be a good idea to submit... this. I assume drugs were involved, because these leaps of logic require the double jump upgrade at the very least.

Is this supposed to be a how-to guide to recognize cult activities? A dire warning about the excesses of religious zeal? I don't even know! The various subheadings of the essay don't fit into a common theme or work towards a thesis statement. There are literally the following subheadings:

• Money.
• Psychotherapeutic.
• Aliens.
• Suspension of Individuality.

Reading the contents of these sub headings elucidates nothing. It doesn't make any more sense at the micro level than it does at the macro level. This is like reading a Geocities page about the spiritual dangers of reading Luciferian inspired role playing game books.

AncientH

Actually starting a cult isn't a major problem for vampires. I mean, you have charismatic assholes with zero supernatural abilities who start megachurches, with a smidgen of vampire lore and the ability to ghoul people, getting a basic cult started should be something most vampires could manage without much trouble.

The problem is, starting a cult as a vampire is generally a bad idea. They don't outline this here, but it's not like the Herd background where you're just stringing the punters on with promises of immortality. A cult is basically a kind of conspiracy, where if too many people spread the word then you're going to attract unwanted attention from some quarter, and for vampires that is usually a Bad Thing.

But we don't get a breakdown of the pros and cons of starting your own cult in this chapter. Hell, this stuff is so generic that the word Kindred only appears about once per page. This isn't a chapter about vampire cults, or starting your own cult, or facing some other vampire's cults. It's just...humans. In cults.

Frank

The rants about cults are not good. But probably the reason I find this section so distasteful is that this is much of the same material as the cults overview from Cybercthulhu but longer and much worse. I genuinely miss the writing styles of Peter Christian and now I am sad.

Anyway, the core issue with this rambling discussion about how cults keep people in line is that the is a setting where Vampires have fucking mind control. It doesn't matter that Qanon drives a wedge between its followers and their families and regular news sources in order to drown out because Vampires can just turn random weak willed people into Renfields with fucking mind control. This might as well be an aside on the limits of horsemanship in a magazine about fucking cars.

Cult Statistics in America
During the course of my research, I learned about more than 2,000 different organizations suspected of being cults.

So begins a piece of box text. Who is the speaker in that box text? One of the authors of the book? The editor? The developer? A fictional in-world character? And what definition of “cult” are they even using for that purpose? At the beginning of this review we told a joke definition of “cult” but this book hasn't given me any evidence that they aren't actually using a definition equally as stupid as the ones we throw around in jest. But I genuinely don't know if they are talking about fictional in-setting research by a fictional vampire or research for writing the fucking book by one or more of the contributors. This chapter doesn't have a bibliography or anything, I just can't tell. How far down the rabbit hole have the authors gone? They seem genuinely uninterested in checking to see if I've gone down that hole with them or not.

AncientH

Wanna start a cult? Find the people who are willing to drink poisoned Kool-Aid at your command. Feed them your blood instead. There are people out there who are bugfuck enough to do it.

It is times like this I remember the vampire cult from Preacher.



The thing about the vampire cult in Preacher is that the asshole who started it acted like he thought vampires were supposed to act, and gathered unto himself a bunch of Goth assholes who were totally wet and/or hard to be his blood pets, and Cassidy just had no time for any of that shit whatsoever. The lesson here is: what's the point? The guy behind it was a wanker, driven by his appetites and leading a bunch of assholes on just because he thought it was eeeevil.

Which again makes us question: Why is this chapter even here? Is there really some deep morality in this? Are there echoes and parallels to vampire society or Paths of Enlightenment? Are all vampires just chasing their own assholes? I don't know, but I have a feeling we're looking for some deeper meaning in a very shallow pit.

Frank

There's a bit where it calls time to give you the stoner party conversation version of some real world cults like the Branch Davidians and Falun Gong. Are those supposed to exist in the World of Darkness? I don't know! Maybe!



Also there are some pieces of box text that talk about some made up vampire cults. That's the stuff in the world that's supposed to be being described by this book. What the shit? Is there some kind of mirror world bullshit where the box text is in-character and the main text is to the real world reader? If so, why is there some rantings about vampire perspectives next to (but not worked into) the real world history? And what criteria does it use to be credulous or cynical about the real world cults. For no particular reason the book appears to take the utterly ridiculous claim by The Order of the Solar Temple that they were a direct continuation of the Knights Templar completely serious despite the fact that they were founded in 1984.

This is so badly written that I can't even figure out what they were trying to write and whose voice they were trying to write in. They use the first person in parts that seem structurally like they are supposed to be asides to the reader! Aaargh.

AncientH

Have you wondered why I took the time to show you some of the cults of the past century? It's important for your understanding of the whole picture. The would never could be as simple as the Camarilla and the Sabbat would like you to think.

In the conclusion, the chapter wraps up...pretty much where it should have started.

Nominally, this chapter is an Anarch document which uses a discussion of cults as some kind of object lesson about how vampire society is just another cult and you need to break free and join the Anarchs. And if his had been written by anyone remotely competent, they would have led with that and gone on from there, and instead we get...this.

Let's remember something from waaaay back in Vampire 1e: the Sabbat was not originally this sprawling competing organization to the Camarilla. It started out as "a medieval death cult." And y'know? That kinda works better than what it became. Or at least it sounds cooler. Because this chapter does less to promote the Anarch cause or make the Camarilla and Sabbat look bad than it makes even the guys rebelling against the assholes making your unlife miserable look like even bigger assholes.

Frank

Conclusion
Have you wondered why I took the time to show you some of the cults of the past century?

Because this whole chapter reads like Qanon “research”? It's that isn't it?

Seek out the conspiracy. It exists.

Yep. This whole chapter is basically Qanon LARPing. Which means that either at least one of the authors was a paranoid schizophrenic, or they decided to write an entire chapter in paralogic as an avant garde performance. Either way it is utterly incomprehensible to me that a developer – even a lazy and incompetent window licker like Justin Achilli – would look at this draft and say “That seems remotely publishable, let's go with that.”

That's the part that really blows my mind. Some editor looked at this and passed it to the typesetter instead if covering it with red pen and writing “See me after class” on it. The mind rebels.

AncientH

At the end, we get a couple boxes about starting your own cult. And by "at the end," I mean "After the section marked Conclusion, which is where this chapter should naturally have ended." There's nothing like actual mechanics, although Backgrounds are discussed very briefly.

Frank

There's rants about various anti-cult groups like deprogrammers and some stories about Scientologists and I just don't fucking know. No one knows. No one has every known.

There's also a how-to guide on making your own cult as a vampire which is all pointless because having your own cult is like 2 dots of Dominate or Presence plus a modicum of patience. The vampires in this setting have mind control powers, making cults is the thing they are actually good at and they don't need elaborate deep dives into pretend personas as divine inspired prophets or whatever the fuck. They can just turn people into Renfields! It's a power that they have! For fuck's sake!

AncientH

The thing is, Vampire: the Masquerade could actually have used something like Call of Cthulhu's Big Book of Cults. There's nothing wrong with a guide to the major (and some of the minor) vampire-related cultic movements in the setting, or actually discussing how vampire powers work in building a cult, or what special difficulties, challenges, and benefits a cult might have.

But they did not do this.

Frank

The final twist is that this entire chapter is supposed to be a recruitment tool to get people to join a meta cult that is all about pretending that its members are too smart to join cults. And this twist isn't much of a twist. That's like an actual thing that multiple cults did, including some of the ones that are listed in this chapter. It's a very weak big reveal and it doesn't meaningfully recontextualize the rest of this chapter. This chapter is still ass.


Dun Dun DUN!

Like, ranting about how Psychiatry is a cult is a big thing that Scientologists do. It's not new and clever. It's not a big reveal. It's not a fucking twist ending. This chapter is incoherent in pursuit of a big ending flip that they don't even land. What a fucking waste.

AncientH

I'm still leary on what the fuck the pitch or assignment was supposed to be for this chapter. It doesn't give the Anarch point of view, to contrast against the Camarilla and Sabbat. It doesn't really give you an overview about vampire morality or ethics. It has little to nothing to do with vampire cults. What exactly was the remit here? What information has been presented that wasn't there before?

I can't answer those questions.

Frank

One of the things that leaps out at me about this fucking tire fire is that the author talks about cults as if the term had the same meaning as religious heresy. The idea that you can have Christian groups with completely mainline beliefs and insular social structures or multilevel marketing scams that act like cults and offer no theology at all seems to have totally missed these chucklefucks.

This chapter angers me. I've read it. Now I'm angry.

AncientH

This kind of...filler...is why this book is damn near forgotten. You could skip this chapter entirely and your life would be better for it.

The thing is, it's not even acceptable shovelware. There's no there, there. The amount of material in t his chapter actually relevant specifically to Vampire as a game probably boils down to two and a half pages. And...the question of why always comes up with this. I know White Wolf had serious production schedules and multiple books in production at the same time and the focus from the money people is always about push push push to get product out, but there's nothing in this chapter worth publishing. You could have left this twenty pages out of the book, charged the same amount, and would anyone actually have been pissy that this book was twenty pages shorter?

I think not.

Frank

Notably missing from this chapter is anything at all about “Sins of Discretion.” Having completed the chapter I have absolutely no idea why the chapter is called that. The introduction claimed this chapter was going to be about “those who break the Silence of the Blood for their own ends.” And I can kind of see how you could see that chapter description and pitch that you were going to talk about cults. But I don't understand how or why you don't tie it back in and actually have any part of this chapter being about demonstrating vampire powers in order to set up a cultic following. Like everything about this chapter I am left mouth agape wondering how anyone accepted this draft as meeting design and development guidelines.

AncientH

It's worth mentioning that Vampire society has a couple of genuine cults. The Setites, their bloodline the Serpents of the Light, and the Assamites are all explicitly religious organizations in addition to vampire clans.

Maybe this chapter should have been titled "Sins of Omission."

Frank

Next up: Sins of Power. According to the chapter summary it's about evil magic. But after this last car crash of a chapter, who fucking knows?

[K]

Frank

Next up: Sins of Power. According to the chapter summary it's about evil magic. But after this last car crash of a chapter, who fucking knows?

Would you believe that I had forgotten that this book had material other than a section on evil magic?

[Shrapnel]

It means exactly what it says.
We live in a society.

Gee, that's helpful.

[Ancient History]

Frank

Next up: Sins of Power. According to the chapter summary it's about evil magic. But after this last car crash of a chapter, who fucking knows?

Would you believe that I had forgotten that this book had material other than a section on evil magic?

I'll be honest, when young Bobby first read this book, he skimmed past the first three chapters because they had no mechanics and focused entirely on chapter 4.

[The Adventurer's Almanac]

Because this whole chapter reads like Qanon “research”? It's that isn't it?

I can't believe that even White Wolf could release something so incomprehensible. I must see this for myself.

Shrapnel - you must meditate more on the meaning of living in a society before you can truly understand. We live in a society.

EDIT: Oh my god, this is just slabs and slabs of ponderously worded paragraphs with EXTRA SHIT slotted into the side just because... they had nowhere else to put it? This chapter wouldn't be half as insufferable if it wasn't in the first person.

[Ancient History]

I got so sick of seeing "Sounds familiar?" stuck onto the end of paragraphs like it meant something.

[Grek]

It means exactly what it says.
We live in a society.

Gee, that's helpful.

It's just a catchphrase, like "You know what grinds my gears?" or "Am I the only one that thinks..." or "What's the deal with airline food?"

[The Adventurer's Almanac]

It's not. Think about it.

[Username17]

"We Live In a Society" is a classic line from The Joker and also a classic line from Seinfeld, and it is used differently by the clown prince of crime and George.

When The Joker uses "We Live In A Society" he uses it to open a monologue about the hypocrisy and contradictions of our society. Different authors will then put different things into The Joker's mouth at that point to condemn different facets of modern life that they take umbrage with. The complaints would be left wing, right wing, insightful, or crankish depending entirely on the perspective (or lack thereof) of the writer.

The Joker might use that as a lead to complain about the Mercer family's ability to have police protection despite ruining the lives of millions with their drug dealing business. Or he might go into a ranting defense of ephebophila. It just depends on who is doing the writing that day and what soap box they want to sock puppet into the mouth of a murderous clown.

The Seinfeld bit is actually the tail end of the rant rather than the beginning. George complains about some minor irritation such as someone parking over the lines or talking on their cell phone too loudly and sums up with "We're not animals! We live in a society!" The joke of course is that George is elevating a minor irritation to the level of a fundamental law. The overreaction is the comedy, but also too the behavior highlighted is itself wrong to some degree, and so the fact that the audience has been similarly inconvenienced is also part of the comedy.

In both cases you are expected to agree with the speaker and accept that they are over reacting. Whether you actually do or not depends on the writer.

But I guess the take home is that George Costanza from Seinfeld is basically The Joker. And while not as good a Joker as Ledger or Hammill, I would put his Joker as better than Nicholson or Leto.

-Username17

[Prak]

Player characters generally don't take the Via Hyvron, not because they don't want to shoot bees out of their vagina, but because that Path does not actually help you shoot bees out of your vagina, even if that is a thing you want to do. And being part of a Baali Hive, shooting bees out of orifices is basically THE sole perk. So if it can't do that...why the fuck are you bothering?

I had to stop reading and track down the Baali clanbook to see if the Via Hyvron was a thing. And... Actually, I could see the appeal of playing a Via Hyvron/Road of the Hive character. Because... it's like one fucking writer actually did some half-assed homework on Satanism, and came up with something that actually scans with a form of LaVeyan Satanism. Sorta.

(Aside- I mean, it's basically my personal morality. You side with yourself against all others--tho, you should have the rationality to admit when you're actually wrong--and your friends against non-friends, and you have these "concentric rings of self" where LaVey's "only care about what you want" is an actual functional philosophy. Of course, I've never seen anything in LaVey's or other CoSatan writings about this, it's purely me making the "do what thou wilt" thing functional. Because LaVey stopped maturing at around 18, and while I've got my flaws, I definitely matured past 18 year old libertarian bullshit.)

Like so many things with VtM, and, well, White Wolf in general, there's a seed of something pretty compelling in the Baali clanbook. But of course, even cursory scanning looking for the Road of the Hive reveals that seed is buried under about 20 tons of shit. Not fertilizer, actual shit. Like the seed got dropped in a latrine.

[The Adventurer's Almanac]

Because LaVey stopped maturing at around 18, and while I've got my flaws, I definitely matured past 18 year old libertarian bullshit.

Shame you haven't matured into an Egoist yet. You're so close, Prak!

[Ancient History]

OSSR: Sins of the Blood

Chapter 4: Sins of Power


More Evil? More Power? Where do I sign?!

But wait... there's more!

AncientH

84 pages in, we finally get to something interesting! Sins of Power are probably the closest thing to a playable part of this book, because it introduces actual things that players might want or could plausibly face in an NPC, along with the consequences those powers have.

Keeping in mind that Vampire in its various incarnations has been kicking around the idea of "forbidden" powers for a long time: Infernalism, pacts, and Dark Thaumaturgy were a hallmark of the Sabbat way back when, got expanded in the Dark Ages, which brought in the Baali and...well, you get down to it, some people just want to set the world on fire, and there are voices in the dark willing to do that...for a price.

Frank

While literally the shortest proper chapter of the book (the “appendix” is actually the same length at 20 pages), this is the chapter that had the most influence. If this chapter didn't exist, I doubt anyone would remember this book existed. It would be one of those books like “Hunter: Utopia” that has a wikipedia entry but I have no genuine memories of having ever seen it in any context.While the previous chapters were essentially book reports (and really bad book reports at that), this is the chapter that actually has game mechanics and new content in it. This is the first part of the book which provides value for the reader that is greater or at least different than the reader just putting this book down and reading whatever the fuck the authors were reading.



Role Playing game fans often divide book content into “fluff” and “crunch.” With the usual definition is that if something provides numbers and references actual game rules it's “crunch” and all the rest of the prose is “fluff.” And the sentiment “I don't even fucking read the fluff” is not exactly uncommon. For the most part that's unfair. There are lots of declarations about the parameters of the world and aspects of characters that don't have numbers but are still important. Motivations. Themes. Alliances. Enmities. Language. History. All of these things can be vital to set the scene for cooperative storytelling without providing numeric inputs for the game.

But with this fucking book, it's absolutely fair. There is less than zero value added in reading chapter 3 rather than just finding some actual source on cults and reading that. The prose is bad. The contextualization of facts is bad. The application of declarative statements to the fictional urban fantasy setting is bad. The only thing you would possibly want to bring into your home game are the cool new magic powers. So here it is: Chapter 4: the one with the new magic powers in it.

AncientH

What price, power?

We're actually off to a bad start here, because for most player characters the whole standard "soul bargain" concept is a bit of a wash. Most games just don't last long enough for the vampire to achieve Golconda or become a wight, even if those are real things that would happen to your character when they mostly aren't; you're more likely to get staked in your haven by the Scooby Gang than to achieve Golconda. So the idea of "power now, suffer eternal damnation later" is a classic literary thing that...uh...

Well, put it this way, there is rarely a later.

Which is why actually working these bargains becomes problematic in games like D&D and Shadowrun and Vampire. The game designers realize that just handing players a bunch of power is just going to empower the munchkins at the cost of everyone else at the table. So they load that shit with caveats. This book in particular adds something called "The Devil's Price" - an option where in addition to getting Kewl New Powerz, you also get some associated or thematically appropriate weakness to go along with powers - which you've already paid XP for and/or bargained away with a demon for. Either way, these better be some cool-ass powers if they start off with a drawback that regular disciplines don't have!

Frank

How much real content is in this chapter? Well, aside from a half page of white space at the beginning and end and a half page introduction and some atrociously bad pieces of black and white art, the chapter is just descriptions and rules of magic powers. The prose is more florid than it needs to be, but nowhere near the space wasting shovelware standards of some future books. You get five new dark thaumaturgy paths that each have five powers in them and also each of these dark magic paths comes with its own ironic curse. Further, there are rituals that are not directly connected to any particular paths, which are standalone powers: sixteen of them. And finally there's five weird character generation options in the form of merits and flaws.

Now some of these bits, especially a few of the rituals, are not exactly new. And some of them don't even have mechanics – just pointers to other books that they are written in. Indeed I'm not wholly sure why some of them are in this book at all. But consider the fact that this chapter discusses forty six magical thaumaturgy effects and no one thought that was weird.



But consider how weird that actually is! The previous chapter could have had forty six magical effects that can be realized with vampire mind control powers, but it didn't. No one ever made a book or even a chapter called “Secrets of Animalism.” Of all the vampire disciplines it was Thaumaturgy and Thaumaturgy alone that was allowed and expected to metastasize and grow and get new powers that players could potentially access. All the other disciplines just had their own five dot progression with an option to get crazy if and only if you were an elder allowed to take dot six. But players didn't normally have access to even that, meaning that like a Toreador or Gangrel could look forward to eventually collecting all fifteen of their in-clan magic effects. This obscure sourcebook talks about more than three times that much for vampires who have access to Thaumaturgy, and it's not the only book that does this!

It is not an exaggeration to say that there are more magical effects written for the Thaumaturgy discipline than there are for all other disciplines available to all other flavors of vampire in Vampire: the Masquerade. For whatever reason all the authors seemed extremely reluctant to add any expansion material for any of the vampire powers. Except Thaumaturgy. Writing more crazy shit into Thaumaturgy was considered completely normal and this book just vomits that shit up despite in a theoretical way not even being about Wizards. This book was supposed to be about vampire religious quests or some shit, and by page count it still is – but based on readership and interest what it's actually about is dark magic.

AncientH

So, new Dark Thaumaturgy paths:

The Path of Pain

The Path of Pleasure

Path of the Defiler

Path of the Unspoken

Path of Pestilence

So, before Frank gets to the mechanics, let's get the thematic aspects out of the way: Paths of Pain and Pleasure have a kind of BDSM theme going on, part of a longstanding characterization of sadomasochism in White Wolf books (especially Black Dog). Path of the Defiler and Pestilence both trade off of Biblical imagery of Satan/Lord of the Flies, often filtered through some Georgia Baptist preacher mentality. The Path of the Unspoken is all about literally forbidden knowledge.

Some of the weaknesses associated with these paths are deliberately in the "ironic punishment" category. The Path of the Unspoken gives you vast knowledge, but you develop a kind of vampiric dementia, unable to remember anything. I say some, because others are...just weird. Path of Pleasure doesn't make you hedonistic, for example, it increases your difficulty in resisting Frenzy. Because you're feeding the Beast? Something like that.

It's also worth pointing out that there is very little thematic difference between Dark Thaumaturgy paths and regular Thaumaturgy. It's not like you can't fuck people up with regular Thaumaturgy, often in ways that Dark Thaumaturgy cannot.

Frank

It is strictly true that having access to more options is better than having access to less. Assuming the players can read and understand the rules, any additional magic power on offer can only increase the power of the dark sorcerer. A new path of magic might not be your first or seventh choice, but even if it makes the eighth path more useful, that's still a net positive. That being said, it's not very positive in most cases. The basic Thaumaturgy paths in the basic book are already very powerful and new ones would have to be very powerful before you'd even consider taking them over something like Movement of the Mind or fucking Weather Control.

Or would you rather get people sick by sneezing on them?

So the paths of evil magic in this book have an effect on you just for learning them. This is sold as a cost, and in some cases it is. But in any case it means that the paths aren't necessarily a thing you'd always want eventually, in some cases you wouldn't learn them if they were free just because the constant magical effect of knowing the path would be inconsistent with your character's idiom. From a game balance standpoint, this shit is all over the map. The Path of the Unseen makes you get Vampire Alzheimers and that seems very bad, but the Path of Pestilence makes people you bite and people who bite you get real sick – and that seems kind of good? Like, I understand that you're a vampire and that biting people you don't want to suffer is a thing you might want to do – but you can feed with a fucking syringe and only bite people you feel sternly about. “Sickening bite” is the kind of power I'd be pissed at having to pay points for, but coming literally for free it seems not bad. In any case, there's very obviously no sense of proportionality to the costs or effects. Dark Thaumaturgy was written with total lack of concern for how it might impact the game – which is obvious enough from a casual reading that a lot of people spent more time trying to come up with ways to break the game using this stuff than it genuinely warranted.

Because yeah, Dark Thaumaturgy wasn't balanced, but that's not the same thing as being the true route to ultimate power. It's not even the same thing as being good.

AncientH

Only by reaching the depths and depredations of sadomasochism can a thaumaturge unlock the true potential of this wicked art.

There's a 7-point merit in one of the Mage books that lets you be born as the result of a demonic impregnation ritual with a 4-point Pact for free. And for vampires, you can get a dot in Dark Thaumaturgy per point (depending on which rules you're using). So if you ask Mister Cavern very nicely, maybe you can start out as a D'Habi revenant with some cool Dark Thaumaturgy powers!

...but would you want to?

Dot one on the Path of Pain lets you make a Willpower roll to ignore a number of wound penalties. That's not nothing, but it also isn't exactly flashy; it is in fact rather less useful than a dot of Fortitude that keeps you from getting wounded in the first place.

Dot one of the Path of Pleasure lets you get someone high with a touch. This could potentially make it easy for a vampire to feed, but honestly is more of a Setite gig than anything else.

Dot one of Path of the Defiler lets you chat up a victim and then ask the Storyteller one yes/no question that has to be answered truthfully. That's not going to get you fed, but makes you a pretty formidable interrogator.

Dot one of Path of the Unspoken can ask one question and get an answer, no conversation needed. It's an open allowance for the Storyteller to fuck with the player, so the utility of this power is based entirely on their good graces.

Dot one of the Path of Pestilence lets you subject a victim to a bunch of symptoms at a touch. If you want someone to suddenly cramp up and having a miscarriage or that they have open sores on their dick, this is the power for you. Again, won't help you feed (maybe back in the time when doctors were called leeches and bled you for everything it would work).

Does any of that sound particularly "dark"? I mean, slipping a mystical roofie or cursing someone with a temporary illness isn't good, but regular vampire disciplines can set shit on fire at dot one, so there's no real guideline as far as how "immoral" these dark powers are.

Frank

Lots of magical powers aren't particularly useful because we live in a society. You have access to a cellular phone and a car and a flashlight just as a random person from modern life. If you get ahead of the game you can have rappelling kits and night vision goggles and firearms for quite obtainable amounts of money. Magic powers operate with a different set of rules and that means that some of them are incredibly powerful. But a lot of them can be replicated with modern tools (whether general or specialist) and then we just put a dollar value on your ancient magic. For a significant amount of these spells, the dollar value is pretty disappointing.


I have a gun in my room. We could shoot him right now.

The five evil magic paths:

• Pain
• Pleasure
• The Defiler
• The Unspoken
• Pestilence

Aside from Pestilence they are in alphabetical order, provided that you alphabetize all the ones with definite articles under “T” like they do. I don't know why the Path of Pestilence is out of place. I imagine it is because it is from a different draft.



Anyway, you're probably wondering what the killer app is for these things. In literally zero cases would you be remotely tempted to take the fifth level of any of these. All of them are attacks and all of them are less efficient than just having a gun and shooting people if you want to get rid of them. You might want to magically draw out a physical manifestation of someone's sinful soul in the form of oozing pustules erupting across their entire body. That is pretty cool, but it's not meaningfully better than shooting someone in the face and is a bad use of XP. Also, the entire Path of Pain is garbage. It's various means to hurt people or avoid feeling pain and shit, but at the end of the night you could have just had a board with a nail in instead.

The killer app for the Path of Pleasure is the first dot. There is no reason to learn any more of it, because the first level lets you incapacitate people with ecstasy for as long as you keep your hand on them. This is as addictive as crack or heroin and while there are rules for using it in combat on unwilling targets, the simple fact is that this power very obviously lets you turn people into Renfield sex slaves if that's what you want to do.

The Path of The Defiler is pretty weird. The first dot is a strange information gathering tool where you can discover what people are ashamed of. It's very powerful if you're playing detective vampichu and otherwise it's kind of meh. The next three levels make other people destroy their own lives in various ways. So if you wanted to get someone fired or fix an election or something it would be real good. It does nothing at all if your opponents are coming to fight you with a flaming chainsaw or you don't have any particular desire to destroy someone else's career to advance your own. But this is Vampire, so a power that is only good in investigations and jealous intrigue is still something worth book marking.

The Path of the Unseen gives you vampire Alzheimers, so you would presumably never want to have it yourself. The first four levels of it give you various abilities to access forgotten knowledge. So that's.... incredibly powerful. Basically having this makes you a mad prophet, which makes you super useful because of the prophecy, but also mostly unplayable due to the madness. Everyone wants to be friends with an NPC who has this power, and no one wants their player character to have this power.

The Path of Pestilence is a long slog. The first three dots and the fifth dot are just various ways to hurt people with magical polio that are individually and collectively less threatening than a shot gun. The fourth dot allows you to puppet peoples' bodies around by magically controlling their salmonella. That's insane, unique, and very strong.

AncientH

Just for funzies, they add optional weaknesses for the three pre-existing Vampire Dark Thaumaturgy paths (Fires of the Inferno, Path of Phobos, and Taking of the Spirit). You don't really care about any of them. Vampire the Dark Ages had a couple more Paths, but those aren't covered here, because the left hand wasn't talking to the right hand.

I should point out at this point that Dark Thaumaturgy could have been much cooler than it is. As it is, it is just one more random set of blood magic powers which are tucked away in an out-of-Clan discipline. Dark Thaumaturgy should really be at once very accessible and tempting. Basically, anybody with Thaumaturgy or another Blood Sorcery Discipline should be able to learn Dark Thaumaturgy paths and perform Dark Thaumaturgy rituals. It should be able to do things that normal blood sorcery cannot do. The whole thing is you want vampires to be corrupted, but the power has to be worth the price.

There are three Thaumaturgy rituals presented in this book:

Level 2: Spite of the Harridan - You can terminate the pregnancy of any woman within sight, no matter how far advanced it is as long as birth is not actually happening. This is dark and edgy and really quite appropriate.

Level 3: Ritual of the Bitter Rose - Multiple Kindred can benefit from Diablerie. Again, quite appropriate. This is the kind of ritual Dark Thaumaturgy needs to have to be attractive to punters. The mechanics are long and messy, but that's as it may be.

Level 6: Quench the Lambent Flame - Increase the generation of a particular vampire to 13. Which is cool, although seldom-useful. I can definitely see this as more of a story-gimmick than something you actually get to use, but in a game where Blood Potency isn't a thing, it has its uses.

Frank

In the original Vampire: the Masquerade, one of the seven clans got Thaumaturgy and all the others could just go suck eggs or whatever. The cool kids table had room for precisely one group of cool kids and everyone else just didn't belong. But just as Thaumaturgy is the only discipline to get meaningful upgrades with expansion, so too did various people who expanded the game come up with half-assed justifications for members of various other clans to get access to Thaumaturgy. So there was various thaumaturgy that was available to the Assamites, the Lasombra, the Nagaraja, the Setites, the Tzimisce, and a few others that escape me for the moment including some that could be used by non-vampires. And sometimes White Wolf was content to just call it [Clan Name] Thaumaturgy, and sometimes they gave it an in-character name. Like, the Lasombra shadow magic is also called Abyssal Mysticism sometimes. This particular book remembers that Tzimisce Thaumaturgy is called “Koldunic Sorcery” but it does not remember that Assamite Thaumaturgy is called “Dur-An-Ki” because how can you possibly expect paid authors and developers to remember or look up the names of things they are writing about?


Settite Thaumaturgy is also called “Akhu” but this book doesn't remember it exists.

The primary things that differentiated one flavor of Thaumaturgy from another was access to rituals. Since most of the authors writing about various flavors of Thaumaturgy couldn't be bothered to remember what all flavors there were, this is actually quite contentious. This book doesn't mention Abyssal Mysticism one way or the other, can Lasombra wizards use any of the rituals listed in this book? I have no idea. No one fucking knows, there isn't any design intent to subvert or conform with. The “rules as intended” don't exist because the authors never considered these questions.

AncientH

Koldunic Sorcery is a simple and straightforward blood magic discipline that has been royally fucked by being split between Vampire: the Masquerade and Dark Ages versions, so while it has a relatively small remit - there are only 5 main paths, four of which are fundamental elemental air/earth/water/fire kind of thing, and anything beyond that is rare (Way of Sorrow) or a translation glitch (Green Ways).

Where it gets weird are the rituals which are all over the map, and sometimes require Vicissitude. Sins of the Blood gives you 10 rituals, which makes this a major sourcebook for any Koldunic Sorcerer (unfortunately, given the disconnect pointed out above between the Modern Nights and Dark Ages).

Level 1 - Enlightenment: You can perceive nature spirits. Sortof? Doesn't actually have any mechanical benefits.

Level 1 - Mephistophelean Minx: You can get a cat to go steal Willpower from a sleeping child to give yourself a temporary boost.

Level 2 - Service for Souls: You can summon nature spirits to do things. Again, no mechanics, so what this accomplishes is entirely arbitrary.

Level 2 - Withering Agony: Take the spirit of a sick tree and use it to make a human being sick.

Level 3 - Raze the Lelek: Destroy inanimate objects. Maximum size of effect: a small car.

Level 4 - Beyond the Wall of Death: Stand over the body of a recently deceased koldun and convince their spirit to teach you their magic. Actually a Necromancy hack, fucking cheating Tzimisce.

Level 4 - Incubus Viage: Make somebody ugly.

Level 4 - Merging of the souls: Enhance a ghoul with nature spirits.

Level 5 - Elemental Savior: Summon elemental. Less cool than it sounds.

Level 6 - Embracing the Demon: Bind a demon into a dead neonate vampire. Complicated and should be a Dark Thaumaturgy hack.

Frank

Paths only go up to 5 dots each, which is normally fine because player characters are normally limited to having no more than five dots in any discipline. But elders who have a better generation number can unlock the sixth and seventh dots of discipline powers. But Thaumaturgy paths still don't have a sixth dot to take. [AH: Caveat, you can get Koldunic Sorcery Way of the Spirit up to 6, because one asshole couldn't do math.] Getting Thaumaturgy past 5 only unlocks additional Rituals. Sometimes that's fine, because honestly many Thaumaturgy rituals are just as good as (or even better than) the discipline levels that puny non-wizard vampires have to chase. And sometimes that's pretty ass, because there isn't any particular tendency for level 6 Rituals to be better than level 5 Rituals. It's all pretty random.

In any case, there are three level 6 Rituals discussed in this book. One for the Tremere, one for the Tzimisce, and one for the Assamites. Because they are level 6, player characters will presumably never actually get access to any of them. The Tremere one is a convoluted way to hurt someone who is completely at your mercy without killing them. This is pointless, because instead of stripping lots of their powers with powerful sorcery you could strip all of their powers with a sawzall or a cordless drill.

The Assamite one mentions the ritual where they use a lot of blood and permanently increase their power without committing diablerie. I say mention, because the rules for this ritual aren't in this book. It gives a fucking page citation. The only reason they mention it at all is to go off on a little rant about how now that a lot more Assamites can commit diablerie to acquire the same power boost by murdering elder vampires that achieving the same results by using replenishable resources just doesn't appeal any more. I don't understand that line of thought at all. It's totally incomprehensible to me.

The Koldunic Sorcery one is where things get... weird. You make a vampire, then you blood bind that new vampire, then you kill that vampire, then you summon a demon and have it possess the corpse of the young vampire that looked up to you and.... profit? This takes more than a page to describe and I can't for the life of me understand why you'd want to do this. It exists so that some evil NPC villain can have servants with eclectic ability lists, but holy shit that's a long walk to get there.

AncientH

There are also three Assamite Sorcery rituals. Necromancers get nothing.

Level 3 - Kafir's Bane: By smoking weed, you can automatically ride the wave when frenzying.

Level 4 - The Sire Impotent: Curse a vampire so they cannot Embrace any new vampires with their vitae. Also requires smoking weed.

Level 6 - From Marduk's Throat: Pointer to Blood Magic: Secrets of Thaumaturgy. Lets you reduce your generation without diablerie.

And that's it for the actual sorcery! If you're wondering how those powers thematically fit this book...they don't, really. But it is what it is. In a better world, you could totally have explanations about how blood magic was an important part in keeping vampires in line in earlier nights and even today is both a tool of the elders and a path to doing "heretical" things like summoning demons, but in practice this is just a grab-bag of random shit, most of which is never discussed anywhere else in any other book. Seriously, I think the whole thing with nature spirits in Koldunic Sorcery begins and ends here.

But we have merits and flaws.

Frank

The merits and flaws in this book are bad even by the standards of White Wolf, which are themselves comically loose. There is seriously a 7 point merit that mildly inconveniences someone if they ever murder and eat you. I assume this is just there for the storyteller to irritate the fuck out of player characters. Because the idea of any player spending 7 points for this shit is simply too hilarious for words.

AncientH

I don't actually want to detail these, there's rarely going to be a campaign where any of these are actually useful. But what the hell, we're here.

Blessed (7 point merit) - You can't learn Dark Thaumaturgy, Dark Thaumaturgy can't hurt you.

Indomitable Soul (7 point merit) - If you get diablerized, your murderer doesn't gain any of the benefits. You also never become a wraith.

Devil's Mark (1-7 point flaw) - You have some stereotypical sign of being damned. Hairy palm, third nipple, backward-bending knees, vestigial wings, cloven hooves, whatever.

That's not terrible, but it's also the kind of thing you can hide with illusions, shapeshifting, or custom-made boots so...meh.

Spoiled Beast (3 point flaw) - Penalties on Willpower roll to resist pleasure

Unrepentant Beast (4 point flaw) - Pick up compulsion derangements when you botch an Instinct or Self-Control roll. Lame.

Frank

Next up: Appendix: A Conspiracy of Sinners

This is very much like being stuck in an elevator when someone starts telling you about their Vampire character.

[Prak]

Because LaVey stopped maturing at around 18, and while I've got my flaws, I definitely matured past 18 year old libertarian bullshit.

Shame you haven't matured into an Egoist yet. You're so close, Prak!

My self-esteem isn't good enough for that.

[souran]

So, lets say you were making a game where people played vampires who deal with supernatural politics. You would indeed want a vampire society and you might want to boil the major rules down to 3-5 really simple things.

If I were setting the rules I think I might go with something basic like the following:

Rule 1: "There are no such thing as monsters"
In game Explanation: The vampire lords who rule over the night like the current state of the mortal world. While its true that in the middle ages a vampire could rule openly over the mortal world, the current state is almost better. Most people don't believe vampires, werewolves and other horror monsters exist. This makes it easy to feed and our prey does not hunt us back. Keep it that way or else!

Out of game explanation: So this is the central conceit of any vampire game. It is also something that is core to the Camerilla but that they didn't play up enough. All vampires wish that they could just use their powers without restraint and lord over mortals with no repercussions. However, when they try that the vampire hunters show up in force. In the modern era those hunters would have flame throwers and rocket propelled grenades. These is no regenerating that.

The Camerilla should have always acted as though every vampire was part of its society regardless of what they personally said. The sabbat should have had its hands full with vampire hunters and werewolves while the camerilla laughed at them.


Rule 2: "Children are off limits, no exceptions"
In game explanation: A Nile crocodile can take down a fully grown wildebeest. However, a wildebeest mother can stomp a crocodile to death to save its baby. No matter how good you think you are, if you prey on children you will be noticed. The penalties for feeding on children will be appropriately proportional. The penalty for turning a child is final death.

Out of game explanation: A vampire game is going to push boundaries and probably going to include sexual content. This is a basically your hard limit what the game will and won't include. It also has some nice Anne Rice connections.

Rule 3: "Don't Prey on your Own Kind"
In Game explanation: Feeding on vampires will turn you into a monster. Also, other vampires won't be able to trust you. Just don't do it!
Out of Game explanation: So, this is one of those rules that probably going to get broken at some point. This is more is mostly needed to make sure you have a functioning vampire society where vampires don't basically try and kill each other on site.

That said, if your party eats the bad guy vamp at the end of the adventure and nobody else knows well...sometimes things happen.

[DrPraetor]

So, lets say you were making a game where people played vampires who deal with supernatural politics.

Well, of course Frank did.

Does such a game want an expansion about sins? Darn-tootin' it does. But, what do you want in that expansion?

Category of Sins	Do you want Fluff?	Do you want Crunch?
Personal	Yes! You totally want guidelines about how the different sects view baby-eating, and all that stuff about rules and taboos is gold. You want in-character rants from sample PCs who do-and-don't feel different ways about what monsters they've become, not to mention whether it's beneath your vampire dignity to work at a tech startup.	No. If you want to have angst or guilt you make a plot point out of it; if you want to be beyond good and evil you don't. Rules for this stuff start with Kevin Siembieda or Sandy Petersen playing madlibs with the DSM and then vampire somehow gets worse from there.
Societal	This is essential. Is the vampire conspiracy fixing elections and buying slave children? Do they dominate organized crime or not? The player characters will bust up a triad opium den and we need to agree that there are cannibalistic serpent men in the back room.	Yes, because the players will interact with this aspect of the game collectively and adversarily-against-the-NPCs, it definitely needs rules. There need to be rules for covering up and therefore for exposing plots.
Cults, for some reason	Sure, if it floats your boat, but...	If you do have fluff about starting cults - which is a good topic to address, it's just not essential - then you certainly need rules for it!
Eviler magic	I'm not a fan of edge-lordism. There are lots of ways to keep stuff out of the players hands, including just requiring unrealistic levels of resources and materiel, or having it be leveled off the top for their lists. Having fluff where some magic is just too evil doesn't work, and then you have the one PC summoning the loli-rapist spider demons and the half the table just stops coming.	You do want rules for evil rituals, which After Sundown is missing. For more conventional "powers", for example the spell list in After Sundown, you can have plenty of evil to do without putting little "this power is extra-evil!" warnings anywhere at all.

[Ancient History]

Eviler Magic

This is worth talking about, at least a little.

The Entire Point of Vampire: the Masquerade Is To Play The Bad Guy
This sounds weird, but it's not all Vampions where you're a superpowered creature of darkness or some mopey Gothic chronicle about being an immortal who will always lose everything you love. A large part of the entire vampire aesthetic is reveling in the idea of being the unholy abomination in the eyes of God and Man.

Pretty Much All Vampires in VTM Are Evil
I emphasized this above in the whole "you are what you eat" approach to philosophy, but every single vampire in VTM nominally subsists on blood, probbaly human blood, to survive night to night. And the basic assumption is that this requires preying on and very often killing mortals. Now, there are some rare character options out there where with the right combination of merits and/or disciplines you can survive partially or wholly off of animal blood or the blood of the dead, but for a 99% of the setting, you're basically playing a mass murderer. What justification you put on maintaining your unlife and how far you'll go to feed on certain groups over others is entirely out of the scope of the Paths of Enlightenment as written, but by most human standards...vampires are evil.

Vampire: the Masquerade is Inherently Christian
I mentioned this way back in the GURPS:V:TM OSSR, but it's not just that vampires are evil, but the writers (and to a degree the readers) are all working from a very Western, very Christian mindset. Which is why all the things that are defined as "Evil" are the things that would shock and piss off their parents and/or Pastor. When they talk about heresy, it's heresy against Christian dogma or morality; when they talk about sin, they talk about the Seven Deadly sins. The things that they get edgelordy about are the very things that black metal bands cling to in order to piss of the straights. You don't have Vampire philosophies which focus on self-improvement by tearing down your internal hangups about sex and gender and being more accepting of other people, you have vampire philosophies which focus on why BDSM is a spiritual cancer that also lets you stuff a book full of vaguely fetishistic art to sell to horny teenagers.

Even "Evil" Has Its Standards
V:TM doesn't try to be FATAL. Example: Having a magical ritual that requires something inherently squicky like fat of an unbaptized infant is the type of thing that people scrunched up their noses to in high school when they first read about what witches were supposed to be up to. Vampire rituals don't ask for that. Baby-killing isn't a major or even minor aspect of the game. Vampire: the Masquerade is the kind of game that can talk about the Giovanni making snuff films as an investment, but they don't have an NPC Venturi that can only drink the blood of under-threes.

There are good reasons why keeping the baby-eating in a game to a minimum is a good idea, but in the case of VTM, it is the Step Too Far. VTM plays to fantasies of evil, and sticks to fairly safe ones where most of the rape is implicit and primarily heterosexual, and Werewolves fight Captain Planet villains.

Any Explicitly "Eviler Magic" Has A Try-Hard Element
Which is a long way to say...when you look at "eviler magic" in Vampire, there's a heavy try-hard element. Summoning demons is evil, but summoning demons is also objectively more difficult than it could be. Seriously, summoning a demon wasn't really available as an option until Player's Guide to the Low Clans made Infernal Compact a level 4 ritual in 2003. But you could graft up to seven extra vaginas onto a corpse and have sex with it to reduce penalties in 2000.

The approach to "magic" as a cohesive system of effects in VTM has never been entirely coherent, but the actual edge-lordy stuff is always incidental and assumes that it's bad because it hits some major human taboo - but it never looks into why some of those things are bad or how basic vampire powers can be used for "evil" all by itself. I mean, even a rather unimaginative neonate Tzimisce could do a human centipede in about ten minutes. They didn't feel the need to explicitly point that out. (In part because HC came out in 2009, but the idea holds.)

Anything explicitly held out as "evil magic" in VTM is inherently edgelordy or kind of boring because those are the two safe options. It's a lot more difficult to talk about the moral ramifications of using Dominate to subvert free will; it's a lot easier to imagine actual physical infernal elements that you could theoretically summon up to reinforce the idea that Hell is a place and Christianity is basically correct as long as you don't think about it too hard.