The Gaming Den

FrankTrollman wrote:And a challenge that the concept art Longes has dug up has clearly failed at

Oh no no no no. That's not just "concept art" I "dug up". This is literally in the released V5 book. Every clan comes with this page of eight vampires.

This is the final product you are looking at. V5 is a phenomenally ugly and badly designed book full of ugly art (mostly photos).

Chamomile wrote:Also, I notice that the women tend to have far more complex costumes than the men. I'm guessing this is not an effort at establishing vampire gender roles as a worldbuilding element and more because there is a demographic gap in how much effort is put into a costume in the Swedish LARP scene.

That's not so different from real life. No matter how edgy it might try to be, the artist did not venture too far away from modern aesthetic, which allows much more limited variation in shape, length and pattern for men's clothes than it does for women's. It's not even that goth, given the lack of even one man's skirt or corset.

I'm not sure much inspiration was taken from the Swedish LARP scene or something like that: a number of them have fairly typical body positions, that suggest they were drawn on top of fashion show pics (look at Gangrel Male #4 as one of the most obvious).

Nath wrote:I'm not sure much inspiration was taken from the Swedish LARP scene or something like that: a number of them have fairly typical body positions, that suggest they were drawn on top of fashion show pics (look at Gangrel Male #4 as one of the most obvious).

I suspected something like this was afoot on my previous post. And now I'm wondering if they had the budget to secure the rights for the photos they manipulated to generate the fashionpires.

Photo manipulation is just an extension of the older comic art system of light boxing. Which in turn is quite similar to tracing or drawing with live models. The existence of photography and projection has allowed people to draw directly over a template of still images of real people or other art for decades and that's pretty much how most art is done. There are people who think that failure to modify a lightbox template sufficiently that others cannot recognize the source constitutes plagiarism. And of course, the original source can sometimes be genuinely amusing.

Another issue is that just as live nude models are preferred for fine art, nude and nearly nude lightbox sources are best for most purposes. Which means that comics and animation uses a lot of pornography. This can lead to some really... interesting... poses and expressions in some comics if you look for it.



Which is a bit of a long walk to say that yes, those pictures are obviously drawn over templates taken from magazines. And there's no shame in that, although it's generally considered at least tacky to make it obvious enough that people can tell that is what you are doing. White Wolf is no stranger to tracing images from magazines.


Camille Devereux is model Stephanie Seymour.

But the fact that these pictures are traced from magazines is just the technique. It's a sub-professional level of art, but probably better than what I would come up with if you asked me personally to make the art on short notice. The main issue I have is what it is attempting to be - and that's just pictures of LARP outfits of Swedish edgelords. Whatever the level of the artists involved, I can't really throw stones. But I would expect the artistic vision to shoot a bit higher than "the outfits my friends wear to Friday night LARP." Like maybe the archetypes the friends are trying to evoke with their limited costume budgets and skills? Throw me a frickin bone here.

-Username17

FrankTrollman wrote:Throw me a frickin bone here.

One of the gangrel is wearing a necklace of bones! What more could you possibly want?

DSMatticus wrote:

FrankTrollman wrote:Throw me a frickin bone here.

One of the gangrel is wearing a necklace of bones! What more could you possibly want?

More bones, obviously.

If they annoyed a necromancer, that could end badly, I'd expect.

I mean, yeah, annoyed necromancers in general probably isn't a great thing anyway, but if you were...eh, nevermind

Honestly, she looks more Lasombra or Giovanni, to me.

Dogbert wrote: Now, sure, when Some Swedish Edgelords expressed their volition of making the game "more Euro-centric," I wasn't aware they meant this in particular, and sure, it's going to clash with everyone this side of the Atlantic, but at least I think I kinda sorta see where they're coming from, and chalk this mess to cultural differences the same way I would if White Wolf had instead been acquired by Bird Studio and V5's art was all pre-teens in school uniforms (case in which you'd be reading me raging considerably more).

I would absolutely read a V:TM High School AU where all the clans are different clubs, and the Camarilla is an absurdly powerful student council with the authority to have people killed.

I would be surprised if that wasn't already a thing, hyzmarca.

Also, this whole thing underlines how fucking small potatoes the TTPRG industry is. A bunch of Swedes rolled up with a suitcase full of money to give people the privilege of buliding, designing, and paying for their fanfiction reboot. It'd be amazing if it weren't so sad.

Mask_De_H wrote:I would be surprised if that wasn't already a thing, hyzmarca.

Also, this whole thing underlines how fucking small potatoes the TTPRG industry is. A bunch of Swedes rolled up with a suitcase full of money to give people the privilege of buliding, designing, and paying for their fanfiction reboot. It'd be amazing if it weren't so sad.

Well, the bunch of Swedes Also makes Crusader Kings and it's $200 worth of expansion packs and is actually a bigger deal than CCP, and has more money than CCP.

No, that's a different bunch of Swedes. Those Swedes handed the project off to these Swedes, and it's not clear how much the proper Paradox devs have to do with the nunuVampire guys, but signs point to "maybe they have lunch together sometimes" as an upper limit.

When someone throws enough money at White Wolf to make all the different editions play well together enough that I can have a monster party game I'll be happy. Judging by the porn that gets commissioned by the artists I follow people with disposable income have shit taste though.

Paradox Interactive is a corporation that owns multiple publishers and development studios in Europe and North America and altogether employs over two hundred people. Their total revenue is like 80 million dollars, though I have absolutely no fucking idea how much of that goes into profits or wages and how much it takes to actually run the company.

In any case, Paradox has announced its intention to buy up my entire childhood, and now owns the digital rights to Shadowrun as well as all of the intellectual property of Vampire: the Masquerade. I don't know how much these properties are worth anymore, since they sputtered and died a decade ago and I haven't seen a coherent plan to bring them back.

When Paradox bought up the White Wolf IP, they said they were bringing one guy from the Paradox corporate side to lead the new White Wolf Studios from a business standpoint, and that they were bringing on board Martin Ericsson, the Swedish Edgelord who had been in charge of the story direction of the failed Vampire MMO that the Icelanders had tried to make on as the story lead. Everyone else is some kind of freelancer and/or recruited from the Nordic LARP scene as far as I can tell. There are some legit big names they brought in to put in the credits. But most of the names are Swedish randos that are presumably friends of people who are core employees of Paradox.

-Username17

FrankTrollman wrote:But most of the names are Swedish randos that are presumably friends of people who are core employees of Paradox.

Well that seems reasonable. That's how everybody else runs their TTRPG companies, and they've produced nothing but the highest quality content and mechanics by doing so.

FrankTrollman wrote:In any case, Paradox has announced its intention to buy up my entire childhood, and now owns the digital rights to Shadowrun as well as all of the intellectual property of Vampire: the Masquerade.

Crossover when?

nockermensch wrote:

FrankTrollman wrote:In any case, Paradox has announced its intention to buy up my entire childhood, and now owns the digital rights to Shadowrun as well as all of the intellectual property of Vampire: the Masquerade.

Crossover when?

Probably never, for the same reason that Paradox is probably not going to make an Age of Wonders: The Anarch Revolt or a Europa Universalis: 2056 game. Obviously it's easier for a corporation to arrange an IP crossover between two properties that they own, but the different properties are still run by different people with different projects and goals and branding and shit. Remember that the MCU didn't manage to leverage any Disney properties in any capacity until they put a song from Pinocchio into an ad for Age of Ultron.

It is genuinely difficult to get different IPs to play nicely with each other even when the same people are involved. And while Harebrained and NuNu White Wolf are both owned by the same corporation, one is a design studio in Seattle and the other is a group of edgelord aspiring poets in Stockholm.

And let's not forget: one of the lessons from the 90s of both Shadowrun and Masquerade was that even tenuous links between IPs ended up having very real costs for very dubious gains. The fact that the Tremere were explicitly the Tremere from Ars Magica became a major irritation when White Wolf sold off Ars Magica to another company. The fact that all the big dragons and shit were referenced in Earthdawn became a problem when FASA split up and Shadowrun and Earthdawn went to different companies.

-Username17

https://trulyrural.blogspot.com/2018/11 ... -show.html

Vampire the Masquerade 5th edition continues to handle politics with the grace of a morbidly obese greased up chihuahua.

Not content with saying that Malkav's magical insanity is responsible for instability in the middle east, V5 declares the systemic torture, murder and unpersoning of homosexuals in Chechnya a "controversy" and then says that it's fake news created by vampires. To cover up the presence of vampires by making muslims look bad.

EDIT: AAAAAAAAAND it's written by DOT Hagen.

That's hilariously tone deaf and offensive. Not exactly surprising, but hilariously tone deaf and offensive.

It's not that I can't believe that NuNuWhite Wolf lacks the editorial insight and control to keep shit like this from being printed, it's that I can't imagine a corporate culture that could respond to finding out there was that little editorial insight and control without mass firings. The fact that such a thing could be written at all means that you have people with really weird and offensive viewpoints on staff, but that's not weird in and of itself - almost any company of any meaningful size has people working in it that have viewpoints that would nauseate and horrify you. The fact that it would be able to get all the way through editing and typesetting to be in something like a final draft means that the editorial staff has basically no ability to do their fucking job.

Like, before you even get into shit about your editors catching spelling mistakes or structural errors or whatever the fuck, they have to be able to look at deeply offensive and pointless and pull the fucking plug. If they can't convince their writers to rewrite sections that say that murders of Russian homosexuals by quasi-state sponsored death squads was a "clever media manipulation" then you fucking pull the plug and farm it out to other writers who will. If the editors can't do that, they can't do their jobs. Full stop.

-Username17

Longes wrote:https://trulyrural.blogspot.com/2018/11 ... -show.html

Vampire the Masquerade 5th edition continues to handle politics with the grace of a morbidly obese greased up chihuahua.

Not content with saying that Malkav's magical insanity is responsible for instability in the middle east, V5 declares the systemic torture, murder and unpersoning of homosexuals in Chechnya a "controversy" and then says that it's fake news created by vampires. To cover up the presence of vampires by making muslims look bad.

EDIT: AAAAAAAAAND it's written by DOT Hagen.

I loved the comment that someone is starting a petition to have that one chapter removed. Because (they're suggesting) that's the only bad part of V5.

There's zero chance that's the only offensive portion of the book, even if it's just that one chapter and table of contents.

Iduno wrote:

Longes wrote:https://trulyrural.blogspot.com/2018/11 ... -show.html

Vampire the Masquerade 5th edition continues to handle politics with the grace of a morbidly obese greased up chihuahua.

Not content with saying that Malkav's magical insanity is responsible for instability in the middle east, V5 declares the systemic torture, murder and unpersoning of homosexuals in Chechnya a "controversy" and then says that it's fake news created by vampires. To cover up the presence of vampires by making muslims look bad.

EDIT: AAAAAAAAAND it's written by DOT Hagen.

I loved the comment that someone is starting a petition to have that one chapter removed. Because (they're suggesting) that's the only bad part of V5.

There's zero chance that's the only offensive portion of the book, even if it's just that one chapter and table of contents.

That person is a huge V5 stan and was originally arguing that the chapter is fine and meant to point out how bad things are in Chechnya. So. Yeah.

The thing is that the obvious intent is to show how bad things are in Chechnya. Or rather, the intent is to make Russia look bad, and the trivialization of mass murder of homosexuals is just kind of incidental.

Now you might think: it doesn't actually take very much to make the Russian state look bad. Putinists have gone all-in on supporting basically every villainous group in the world from Assad's chemical weapons bombers to Le Pen's anti-immigrant goon squads. I mean, for fuck's sake, Russia is literally the source of the hackers that pushed Donald Fucking Trump into power, and he's basically wrecking everything good in the US and the world order as fast as his tiny hands can swing a hammer. But the problem is that Dot Hagen hates Russia and doesn't actually mind any of that stuff.

Dot Hagen is a pro-Georgian neo-fascist, which means that he is opposed to Russia on territorial grounds, not ideological grounds. He hates the fact that ethnic Russians have defacto control in Abkhazia, but he isn't opposed to ethno-nationalism as a concept. The fact that Putin is funneling money to ethno-nationalist hate groups in France, Britain, and the United States is something that he probably sees as a silver lining to the aggressive foreign policy actions of the Russian Federation that he is otherwise hopping mad about. Because the Dotmeister genuinely likes ethno-nationalist hate groups in France, Britain, and the United States. We know this, because he went off on weird ass rants about how Antifa were "dangerous communists" when they opposed those groups.

The reason why his tirades casting Russia as the villains seem extremely tone deaf as well as deeply offensive is that his political affiliation is irrational and most sane people would define him as one of the villains. Indeed, it's difficult to divide the world into ideologies and not end up assigning Putin and Dot Hagen to the same category. He is opposed to Putin, but he's opposed to Putin within the same ethno-nationalist framework that Putin views the world through. He isn't opposed to Putin because he wants to stop Putin from supporting global fascism, he's opposed to Putin because he is racist against Russians.

But that's all secondary to why this shit show keeps stumbling on. The primary issue isn't that Dot Hagen is a cranky old racist. The primary problem is that the editors don't cut Dot Hagen's submissions when they veer off into weird cranky racism. Obviously any corporation is going to have employees that have insane and offensive views. That is just going to happen, because the number of people who have some offensive views about something is very high. But corporations are supposed to secularize their products - to edit out the inputs of their employees that would offend large blocks of potential customers. And yes, obviously Dot Hagen's aggressive anti-Slavic racism and implacable hostility towards minority rights advocacy is the kind of thing that's going to offend people. Lots of people. No corporation's editorial department is doing its job when it allows Dot Hagen to spout his bullshit on the equivalent of a hot mic.

-Username17

And WW not-apologizes publicly again on Twitter.

White Wolf community - We realize the way we have portrayed various topics in the recent Camarilla and Anarch setting books can be viewed as crude and insensitive. We appreciate this feedback and we are actively examining our choices in these books. Earlier this year...

... we made a pledge to you to meet certain standards and be more direct with the community regarding the World of Darkness and our games. That's a pledge we failed to uphold, and we are deeply sorry.

White Wolf is currently undergoing some significant transitions...

...up to and including a change in leadership. The team needs a short time to understand what this means, so we ask for your patience as we figure out our next steps.

We thank you for your support, and for calling us out when it's needed. Your thoughts and opinions are essential to the improvement of White Wolf.

Womp womp.

So Tobias Sjögren already got the axe, does this mean Martin Ericsson is next? Tune in next time on "Paradox Interactive: We Are Only Now Realizing What A Bad Idea It Is To Associate With Neo-Nazis!"

"We're sorry you were offended by what we said..."

“I’m sorry you feel like you need an apology”