OSSR: Sins of the Blood
Appendix: A Conspiracy of Sinners
Let me tell you about the vampire campaign I'm in with my other friends...
AncientH
Serious question: has there ever been a White Wolf appendix which was worth the paper? Did you really expect some hidden exploit, some final revelation which would make the preceding 100+ pages actually worth it? What exactly do we hope for in this, waning of a particularly mediocre book?
More of the same.
Frank
20 pages and the concept is “some groups of vampires that other groups of vampires don't like.” And uh... if that seems like
really thin gruel, it's because it's really thin gruel. There are ten groups described and really these are mostly rambling character studies of ten dudes. These dudes do not get stats.
I want to make it abundantly clear that you do not care about fucking any of these guys. Also, every one of them starts with the “thousands of years ago...” nonsense rather than telling you why you should care and then justifying that. So, there's a vampire setting up a cult that's taking over Carroll, Iowa (largest town in Carroll County, Iowa). There are some real estate development plans and also there are enough cultists that they control the county government. The entry starts:
Sins of the Blood wrote:The arrival of the Christian calendar's first century was supposedly significant because it marked the birth of Jesus Christ, and the formation of a novel religion based on compassion, faith and salvation.
I'm going to outsource my confused face to Marky Mark, because his is better than mine.
There is a lot to unpack here. Like, obviously there was no Christian calendar in the first century. So the Christian calendar's first century literally never arrived. It was invented in 525 CE and the birth of Jesus Christ was approximated by someone living in Scythia based on incomplete records. Even people who believe Jesus was a real person don't think he was born in 1 AD. But we're getting ahead of ourselves. The total inanity of that statement isn't the point.
The point is that you're supposed to be telling us about your vampire cult in Carroll, Iowa (largest town in Carroll County, Iowa) in 2001, and not giving us your fifth grade book report on the rise of monotheism two millennia earlier. Carroll, Iowa isn't even mentioned on the first page of this fucking thing, it doesn't get mentioned on the first text column of the
next fucking page. So like, acceptable opening sentences might be:
- Something strange is afoot in Carroll, Iowa.
- Carroll, Iowa is the home of a growing new religious movement.
- Cyrus has big plans for Carroll, Iowa.
And sure, there might be some artistic reason why you want to have some other opening paragraph about how everything old is new again and small town America has as many people as Jerusalem did five hundred years ago. Or fucking whatever. But this is
absolutely not the place for the author to spend an entire fucking page of text telling me about the independent rise of monotheism in Arab and Yoruba tribes. Because that shit is completely irrelevant and this is a fucking twenty page appendix. If the authors wanted to tells us about the contents of the books they read, there should have been a fucking bibliography with a paragraph or two summary. Not entire pages and even chapters given over to grade school book reports. It's like these assholes never took a college level English course and are treating this like a compulsory school assignment for children.
AncientH
Nominally, these are groups who are "outside" of Kindred society. But given how thin on the ground Kindred society is, that doesn't really mean much. Like quite literally, it's not like WW has ever pushed the idea that there are dozens of different vampire sects and communities out there, and the Camarilla and sabbat are just the biggest and most powerful so you're in there by default. You've got the Camarilla, the Sabbat, the Inconnu when they remember they exist, and the various independent Clans, and everything outside of that is Anarch or Autarkis or just doesn't fucking count somehow, like the Kindred of the Ebony Kingdom.
The Vampire writers did not want to have to reassess their basic political framework. They
should, absolutely, have done that. But they did not.
The thing is, Clans kind of make sense when you're talking two thousand years ago. You've got individual bloodlines of vampires and they share blood so they use family as the hierarchy for how they organize themselves. It's not even complicated by marriage or adoption, because Vampires expressly can't do that shit (unless you're a Baali making apostates).
Sects start make sense a thousand years ago. Geography doesn't really mean shit to vampires, but in a period of rising interconnection between polities and increased organization of mortals, the idea of formalizing relations between Clans and setting up local governments to handle disputes and enforce a Masquerade becomes sensible and maybe inevitable. And because you're thousands of miles away and transportation is slow and dangerous and the places that vampires can actually settle to the point where that shit is necessary are few, evolution of vampire culture is going to be slow and develop along different lines. You don't send letters from the Camarilla of Europe to the Camarilla of America and expect to hear back in a matter of days or weeks; we're talking months or years.
Now it's the Modern Nights, and you can just
fly to Africa. It's a long flight, but there are movies you can watch to pass the time. You can send an email to the vampires there.
Vampire was
not good at adjusting its culture and politics to contemporary needs. It's not that the Camarilla being outdated and old-fashioned is bad in and of itself, but the younger vampires should
absoltely be aware that there's a lot more to unlife than whatever shit your elders have been feeding you. Vampire books could have been like Shadowrun, where a bunch of youngbloods got together on SchreckNet to share info and gain a broader understanding of how vampire society works and more insight on the vampiric tradition.
Which really means that small "experiments" like these cults should have a
much shorter shelf-life, if the Camarilla is enforcing the Masquerade. Because they know the signs and would stomp the shit out of these things post-haste. Maybe assemble and send a group of troubleshooters to do the dirty work...
Frank
The Serapis ex Machina require that the four vampire members other than Cyrus drink animal blood for fear that there aren't enough humans in Carroll, Iowa to sustain 5 whole vampires.
The Cold Man would watch groups for
months before bursting in and eating everyone in an orgy of blood and moving on to watch a new group.
Both of these are bullshit.
A Vampire in Vampire: the Masquerade uses blood to rise every night, and thus the preferred means of feeding is to drink some blood every night. If they take the minimum amount to get them through the night, it's not fatal and if they have a large enough herd, they can rotate through. And no matter how much they feast at any given time, vampires in this setting can't store enough blood in their bodies to rise for even
one month of nights. Most vampires can't make 3 weeks and the weakest generations can't make a week and a half. The Cold Man's supposed feeding plan before he set up his current plot was completely ridiculous. He would have torporized himself with his very first scouting expedition.
Carroll, Iowa has ten thousand people in it and the cult controls most of town. A vampire who drinks from a single victim twice a year hits less than two hundred people before the year ends and they can start over. Five vampires doing that needs just over nine hundred people – less than one
tenth of the population of the bullshit podunk town they've taken over. White Wolf has always been real vague on how often you could safely feed from a single person, and it's possible that The Cold Man doesn't have enough people to feed off even now – but the vampires in Carroll, Iowa obviously do. If they run the whole town they can feed human blood to
fifty vampires, maybe more.
The logistics of vampirism in Vampire: the Masquerade are bad. But the people writing actual books in the game line didn't understand what they were. They'd internalized the 1:100,000 ratio, but never understood that that was supposed to be a limit based on being able to disappear into the crowds – not an actual limit of how much human blood was available.
There is both too much and too little of this stuff to make any of these stories work.
AncientH
The Associates are a group of Infernalist lawyers who figured out that they could quite literally bargain with the devil...on behalf of their clients, of course. In large part, this kind of group is a "take that" at players who have always wanted to do the same thing, getting the most out of a demonic bargain for the least cost, gaining KewlNewPowerz and only having to set a church on fire or something. It's not exactly subtle and it's not exactly clever, but it's the kind of thing that could actually be a setting plot point...
...if they had come up with it about 10 years sooner and actually worked it and Dark Thaumaturgy and pacts more into the setting. As it is, it's a one-off group that never appears again. Like most of these.
The funny thing is, the 6th level power of Daimonion, the Baali signature discipline, just lets you get an investment "for free." Which is really what these guys are aiming for. If investments were actually things most players would want it would be interesting if they just re-structured Daimonion as buying appropriate investments at each dot level, using your knowledge of Infernal pacts and laws to keep your soul intact and "cheat" the devil. It would add a high degree of flexibility to the discipline and make it even more attractive for apostates.
But they did not do that.
Frank
When you deal with the Devil, you don't win.
This chapter wants you to know that the vampire lawyers who think they have a means to cheat the devil are wrong and the demons win in the end and everyone gets damned. What Jack Chick bullshit is this? Why can't some clever vampire lawyers “win” or just leave it ambiguous whether their complicated legalese works or not?
No church lady or god bothering book burner is ever going to look at this book and conclude that it
isn't a hedonistic devil book to be banned, why bother putting the disclaimer in the fine print that the Satanists are wrong and the fundie Christians are right? None of the fundie Christians are even going to
read the fine print. These writers are cowards, preemptively surrendering to cultural crusaders that would never accept that surrender.
The fine print might as well say that Phyllis Schlafly shot bees out of her vagina for all the fucking difference it makes. But this book bends over backwards to avoid offending Christians. It talks about burnings of the library at Alexandria that happen under Roman Jupiterists, and the burning under Muslim Caliph Omar – but the burnings that happened in between by
Christian mobs get left out. Now normally I don't consider people failing to discuss the demolishing of the Serapheum at Alexandria by Christian mobs in 391 CE as being particularly noteworthy. I go
most days without mentioning that event
at all. But it's part of a pattern, and here it stands out as an act of craven submission.
AncientH
The Tapestry is a stupid gimmick where some ancient Koldunic ritual managed to micro-encode ancient magical books into the fingerprints of Tzimisce. No, really, it's that stupid.
Frank
Sins of the Blood wrote:Matters changes in 1978, when the FBI first used an argonlaser beam for fine fingerprint analysis
Some of these are so meandering that I actually lose track of what the thesis statement is even supposed to be. That thing about argon lasers is from a story about respawning manuscripts from the Library of Alexandria. I don't even know what the hell that has to do with anything. It goes on for a long time, and it's possible that there was even more ranting that might have been left on the cutting room floor. But I suspect the connection between these points was always fairly tenuous and as printed the experience of the reader is like unto channel surfing rather than reading a coherent narrative.
AncientH
The Questing Beast is a Golconda cult. You don't care. Nobody cared about the Children of Osiris, nobody cares about
discount children of Osiris. Not being a vampire anymore is not a noble goal for a vampire game.
The Darwin Society believes in survival of the fittest. Like, literal social Darwinism as applied to vampires. That is totally a thing that some Victorian Age vampire probably would have done. Except they're playing up a kind of double life, pretending to be a Sabbat pack for six months of the year and a Camarilla coterie for the other six months.
Why. Move to someplace nobody gives a fuck about and stay there and the Camarilla and Sabbat will both leave you alone. Go to Arkansas. There are no vampires in Little Rock, except for one Ventrue that can only drink from inbred cattlefuckers. You'll get on fine.
Redline is a group of vampires that found out they are all subject to a Camarilla blood hunt, and have decided to band together for mutual protection. That sounds unlikely, but whatever. It's a criminal network for those marked for death by the Camarilla and who don't want to join the Sabbat. That's fine. Again, it's the type of group that makes sense if it exists much earlier and is explored in more depth. Here, it's mostly noise.
Thrill Kill Club are exactly what it says on the tin: bored vampires who are a little too sociopathic for their own good. They're the edgelords of edgelords.
...and that's it.
Frank
The biggest take home from this Appendix is that I do not want to take home anything from this Appendix.
AncientH
Which is about par for more White Wolf appendices. You could do an appendectomy on this book and nobody would notice. While there might be one or two half-decent ideas buried in rubbish, they are ideas that would need to be carefully polished and expanded on and worked into the setting to actually be usable. There's about six paragraphs of useful material in twenty pages.
And it's not as if there weren't models to steal from. Shadowrun has been writing up gangs and shit since day one, and even they tend to a standardized format with leaders, number of members, etc.
Frank
So you're writing a group right? You need to have a thesis statement. “Who are these people?” is a question you need to ask and answer right away. Do not tell me about a college group, do not tell me about a failed blood hunt in the early 20th century in New Orleans. And
definitely don't tell me about courtroom dramas and argon lasers in the 1970s. Tell me who these people fucking are.
Now there are reasons to open in media res or lead with a tangentially related quote or do some full circle thing where you start in a surprising place, but none of these authors are skilled enoughto make any of that literary shit work. For these chucklefucks, every single first sentence should have been “The [$GROUPNAME] is a [$GROUPTYPE] that [$ACTIONTYPE].” No fucking exceptions.
And not to get too grumpy about it, but tell me in an organized way why the fuck I'm supposed to care. That could be a little bit at the end like “Five adventure seeds with the Questing Beast” or it could be an ironclad promise to go no more than three paragraphs without giving us a reason for the described group to be interacting with the player character vampires in the here and now.
Instead all of these groups are being described in chronological order starting decades or even centuries before any of the player characters were even born. None of that shit matters! If I'm looking to put a group into my Vampire game set in San Francisco or Chicago, don't make me read a page and a half to get to the part where it reveals that the group you're talking about now never leaves a rural county in Iowa that voted 2:1 for Donald Trump. That is a waste of my fucking time as a reader.
Before I get into the weeds of what some vampire asshole was doing during the Ford administration, I should be able to quickly find out whether the group has any chance of being remotely relevant for the chronicle we're playing in.
AncientH
Also, not to put a point on it, all of these groups are pretty fucking random. In an unfocused book, the groups read like they might have originally been written for specific chapters and then somebody decided they worked better stuck at the end. We don't get an impression that any of these groups fill particularly necessary slots - Redline, maybe, could be interesting as a kind of Camarilla-resistance that players might join or hunt depending on how the events of the chronicle go - but most of these are just fucking blah. They don't have much to do with Paths of Enlightenment or particularly diabolic blood magic (the Associates have possibilities, but they go unrealized).
Frank
Imagine for the moment that this book had documented a series of immortal society taboos. And then imagine that the appendix was about ten different groups that flaunted one or more of those taboos and then discussed the ramifications for human and vampire society of those rules being broken. You are now imagining a much better book and also too you are imagining a chapter that is much more relevant to that book.
The truth is, the groups in this Appendix aren't here for any particular reason. They don't tie in to any particular part of the book and are listed in no particular order. This isn't even alphabetical order, and the different groups don't start at the beginnings of pages. If for some reason you wanted to find something in particular in this chapter, good luck with that.
AncientH
I want to reiterate
this appendix's worthlessness is symptomatic. This isn't the worst such appendix. All of the fucking splatbooks had these things, usually describing characters that would never be used or show up again, and when they did you usually regretted it. So it is here. This isn't an appendix because there was some last little thought that wouldn't fit anywhere else, but because...I don't fucking know. Because somebody was paid to write 20 more pages.
Frank
And that's the book. Even recalling that this book was forgettable and also bad, I am still astounded by how forgettable and also bad this book really is.
I don't think we'll bother with a formal wrap up, we'll just post answers to questions separately until conversation dies down. That's the ending this book deserves.
AncientH
Agreed. But I will say one final thing.
In 2003, two years after
Sins of the Blood was published, White Wolf returned with
Chaining the Beast. This was more focused on Paths of Enlightenment rather than blood magic or Sectarian sins. More than anything else,
Chaining the Beast and the various
Road books beg the question: what was the point? What need did
Sins of the Blood fill?
The whole setting was definitely on a downhill run to
Gehenna in 2004, and the 20th Anniversary Edition wouldn't see the light of day until 2011. So
Sins of the Blood is in this weird space, ten years after the start of the game and 10 years before the reboot. And yet...it has almost no impact. Nobody picked up the threads from this book, no-one references it. It became forgotten and buried, one more pile of crap in the vast array of shit that White Wolf shoveled out as the setting burned itself out.
If anything,
Sins of the Blood stands as an abject lesson in setting design about what can happen when your production schedule outstretches your plan. This was a book that tied into nothing, that nobody asked for or wanted, that is remembered only because of about twenty pages of Dark Thaumaturgy paths and blood magic rituals. It's filler, but not even good filler. Think of all the things you would rather have than the 120-odd pages in this book...and then wonder why they didn't do that.