[OSSR]Victorian Age Vampire

[Ancient History]

Victorian Age Vampire
PRINTED IN CANADA


Even the cover is half assed.

Music: Vampire Waltz by Hannah Fury

FrankT:

A period cartoon from a newspaper. See the profound subtlety and nuanced viewpoints being shown. The air of sophistication looming over the entire period like lugubrious verbiage in a White Wolf book.

That was sarcasm. The Victorian Era in reality is either the beginning of modernity or the last age that isn't modern, depending on how you look at it. And pretty much everything in it is crude proto-culture that is embarrassing and retro even by the most hipsterish standards. The Victorian era is not a time of high minded elegance, it's a time when people were just starting to realize that they shouldn't put opiates into baby milk.

But very importantly, the Victorian Age is the period where most Gothic Fiction come from. And even more importantly, it's the period where Bram Stoker's fucking Dracula comes from. Mary Shelley wrote Frankenstein in the Georgian Era, but Dracula is still the fucking trope namer when it comes to Dracula like characters, and that happened in the Victorian Era. So it's no surprise that when it came to people requesting that White Wolf make an extra campaign setting period, that the Victorian Age was the most requested. People want to play Dracula-like characters in the time period that the actual Dracula book was set. Go figure.

It's important to remember that while goths often describe their aesthetic as “Victorian,” it is actually “Neo-Victorian.” Goth ladies wear corsets, but they don't wear corsets made out of whale bone. Goth men wear top hats unironically, but Goth womenfolk don't bonnet themselves (well, Gothic Lolita people do, but it's a different bonnet). Vampire players certainly asked for the Victorian Era, like all the fucking time, but what they really wanted was Girl Genius or Van Helsing – a bunch of Victorian tropes and themes plastered over modern Gothic sensibilities. Like Pride Prejudice & Zombies more than Pride & Prejudice.


Actual Victorian Era clothing was pretty stifling.


There's certainly Victorian inspiration here, and I'm not complaining, but it would be pretty scandalous if worn during the actual time period.


Vampire players are actually looking for Agatha Heterodyne, but with more black.


Basically Anna Valerious from Van Helsing. The Victorian Age as a Disney theme park ride rather than an actual thing.

AncientH:

Victorian Age Vampire was the laziest fucking setting port for any White Wolf game ever. And I am including Werewolf: the Wild West, Mage: The Sorcerer's Crusade, Wraith: the Great War, all of the Dark Ages books, and the fucking one-shot article in White Wolf Quarterly that let your vampires play in a cyberpunk campaign.



We will go into the full depths of laziness, but the thing to take away from this is that Victorian Age Vampire added nothing to the game. You could quite literally do a better job just by ignoring the books entirely and trying to run Vampire: the Masquerade in a homebrew Victorian setting based off of J. Sheridan le Fanu's Camilla and Varney the Vampire.


The other great Victorian vampire story.

And the thing is, they could have made this very interesting. The publication of Dracula should have been pretty much the focus of the whole thing, a meta-commentary of how younger vampires were starting to try and learn how to act like vampires based on the writings of a syphilitic Irish scribbler. Instead they turned up the "Pretentious Wanker" knob to maximum wank and then the knob broke off.


Also, half the art is this crappy pretending-to-be-vintage photoshopped cosplay crap, and I don't like it.

FrankT:

The actual book they produced for Victorian Age Vampire is 213 pages long and bookended by 10 pages of indices, tables of contents, empty pages, and pictures. Even a casual flip through the book reveals an enormous amount of white space and doodles. It came out in 2002, which was a period when White Wolf was winding down the World of Darkness. Remember that it was just the next year that they started the Time of Judgement nonsense and the year after that when they declared the entire product line over and done with. Victorian Age Vampire was a thing that fans had been clamoring for for more than a decade, and when it was finally released it was booted out the door with an almost audible “Fine, here it is. Give us money and shut the fuck up.” It's not a ponderous shovelware tome like what White Wolf would shit out later on, this is more like the bare bones of a project that fulfills the absolute minimum requirements to exist as a product that they could claim was what the fans had asked for.

Yes, it's longer textually than a piece of 90s minimalism. This work has five authors (one of whom is also the project developer) and is produced on computer. This is a 21st century shovelware project at its core, with text added in until the bases were covered. It's very workmanlike in its execution.


This is an actual page from this book. It has like 600 words on it, which is very small for a coffee table book. You might think this would be an outlier because it's the intro page for the Brujah, but it's not. The next page has a big and unrelated doodle in the middle of the page.


Specifically this thing. But like, huge.

I can't be fucked to do a full wordcount, but it looks like this book has about 120,000 words. That's not a bad length for an RPG book. Indeed, a five man team producing an approximately 150,000 word book is pretty much exactly what I recommend in terms of being able to produce time-efficient books that convey information to the reader. Unfortunately, this book isn't structured like this because it's finely designed, but because Justin Achilli realized that this was the most efficient means to check off all the boxes so that this oft-requested book could technically be called complete.

Every part of this book is padded. All the text is padded shovelware text, but every page is padded to make the book look bigger than it is. Making this book must have been like pulling teeth, with every author and artist handing in the absolute bare minimum that their production contract called for. It's kind of amazing.

AncientH:

I can't blame them. The thing about this book is that by design, it adds absolutely fucking nothing to the world. There are no new setting elements - clans, bloodlines, metaplot, etc. - there are almost no new mechanics; I think they accidentally stuck a new necromancy ritual in one of the other books in the series. Really, this could have been a 90-page softback that said "go use the rules for Vampire: the Masquerade 3rd edition" and you would have gotten the exact same product, only for about half the fucking price.

You could technically run this fucking thing with Kindred of the Ebony Kingdom rules if you really wanted to, although no one would and hopefully no one did.


You would, from the art in this book, be forgiven for thinking that there were almost no black people in Victorian times.



This is the game setting that should have been written by fans in Neo-Victorian cosplay slamming back absinthe like it was coca cola. It should have been a Gothic Punk Victorian Age, where Elders confined Malkavians in the basement of Bedlam, and the Nosferatu were in charge of the expansion and building of London's sewers; where the popular press version of vampires and the whole Jack the Ripper thing stirred Victorian vampire society into a tizzy. There should have been a war of ages as young vampires took their cue from Dracula and Varney, and illiterate undead from the countryside came to the gaslit big city for the first time. It should have been the meeting place between Dark Ages: Vampire and Vampire: the Masquerade, where the old ways were giving way to the new, and already the Elders were worried that these were the Final Nights...and still bitching about the Colonies breaking away. It should have been a place where the Sun Never Rose on the Vampiric Empire, Lords of the Night whose influence could be felt across the globe.


Basically.

FrankT:

The book is divided into seven sections. Six chapters and a prelude. No appendices or introduction or post script appear. Lots of White Wolf projects end up with ectopic chapters or essays that get crammed into the edges, but it's clear that no one working on this book wrote anything that wasn't in the plan from the beginning. All the sections are numbered, and all the paint is the appropriate color for those numbers. Every section begins with a full fucking page picture that is a treated photo that's supposed to look like a Victorian period photograph of something supernatural going on.


This is actually one from a companion book that was supposed to “expand” the line. But basically all the photos look like shit and this one is probably the only one I could find online because it looks better than the ones in the book we're reviewing.

Actual Victorians made a lot of photographs that are creepy as fuck, and those are all out of copyright by half a century or more. This book could have done way better by simply reproducing period photos verbatim and selecting for weird atmospheric stuff.

Thereafter there is another page of wasted space where the page is covered in doodles and a chapter header and you get a paragraph in an illegible font. Through the body of the “text,” most pages have doodles on them. And I don't mean that they have illustrations, I mean they have doodles. Little pen drawings of people's torsos, scribbles of pyramids and vines, distorted faces with goofy expressions. The aesthetic is best described as “angsty teenager's school notebook.” But it uses up space and makes the book appear thicker, Richard “The Onyx Path” Thomas does deliver the page count which was demanded with the minimalist text and no memorable art pieces he had been provided. When I consider that given timing this book was literally an offering supposed to compete with WotC's 3rd edition Player's Handbook, I just fucking laugh.

AncientH:

They did the whole line in this kind of faded darkening-at-the-edges creamy grey for the covers, because color was pretty much all they had for product identity. Like a lot of effectively stand-alone setting it pretty much gave the finger to any and all of White Wolf's other game lines...well, it just ignored them, which is about the same thing.

Why would you buy this? I mean, aside from being a rabid completionist (hah) or maybe really wanting something to back up your Neo-Victorian cosplay. There was nothing here for the munchkins to grab at, there weren't any new or interesting character options, you weren't going to play a Dark Ages game that lasted until the Victorian era, or a Victorian game that lasted into the Modern Nights. Leapfrogging down the centuries is a bullshit trick that was tiresome in the Giovanni Chronicles.


Victorians were surprisingly okay with you fucking your sister, on occasion. Moll Flanders, and all that.

So this was pretty much a blatant cash grab for enthusiasts. And it is telling, I think, that White Wolf could shit out this product. It's not a product you could quite do with Dungeons & Dragons, because D&D is set in a variety of fantasy worlds where all the history is made up, pulled-out-of-the-ass anyway and the timeline is meaningless. You could technically do it in Shadowrun - they actually did, with that 2050 nonsense - but SR was a game that was mostly about looking forward, not backwards, at least not until the pink mohawk crowd took control. You can really only do this "past settings" thing effectively in a game that is nominally set in the real world, and it pretty much only works effectively if your characters are some flavor of immortal so that they can also interact with the present setting in some fashion.

FrankT:

A major device in 19th century literature, especially the Gothic literature that serves ultimately as inspiration for the Vampire community, is the “Chapter as Correspondence.” That is, a chapter in the book will be a letter from one character to another. The lack of air mail and poor infrastructure meant that mail pickups were infrequent and message turnaround times were often measured in weeks rather than hours or even days. So people had a long time to work on their letters and were expected to spend a good deal of time reading the ones received. As such, it was reasonable in-world for a character to send another character a letter that was as long as a short chapter in a book. And whether you're Stoker, Shelley, or Austen, that device is something you're going to use a lot. It lets the author communicate to the reader the progress of the story through an unreliable narrator and immediately informs the reader of what information characters in the story have to work with. And when you're dealing with supernatural or horror elements, it allows them to be introduced gradually, through the eyes of characters as innocent or more than the reader themselves, building the sense of crushing dread that such stories rely upon.

So naturally you'd expect the one and only “story” chapter in Victorian Age Vampire to be at least framed in that fashion. I mean, that's certainly what I expected. The first three words of chapter one of Dracula are “John Harker's Journal” and the first chapter is excerpts from that in-world character's writing. This book is Victorian Age Vampire, and the entire reason it exists is because the White Wolf guys have been being bugged at conventions for ten years about “How come we can't do Dracula in your game called Vampire?” So I certainly expected a literary allusion to Dracula in this book's structure. Because what the fuck else would you do?

What we get instead is an 8 page story conveyed in near-immediate first person simple past tense. A vampire goes to London (having had lodging prearranged by a proxy because Dracula), and turns a dude into a vampire and kills some women. I think it's supposed to be edgy and progressive because the vampire is a dude and chooses the dude for marry and the lady dudes for kill in this game of marry/fuck/kill. Parts of it are space filling quotes and some of the characters are supposed to be doing cockney shit. Now I can tell you straight up that I have no idea how cockney accents are supposed to work and I don't know how they are supposed to be spelled. I have no clue whether writing:

“Y'r 'and's cold, guv.”

is correct or not. I don't even know how I'd find out. But I do know that that's pretentious and shitty either way. And I kinda think it's not correct one way or the other, because the same character has other lines that have a lot less contractions in them.

Anyway, it's only 8 pages and it's covered in doodles, so it's not a novella like that fucking monster at the front of Scion. Even so, I found myself skimming. The main character doesn't do anything to make them likeable. They just poke around their new rented flat and then immediately wander off to kill a prostitute. I mean sure, we all have days like that, but that doesn't mean that I want to read about yours.

AncientH:

The best intro fiction to a vampire story was the Clanbook Giovanni, which was a bout a mortal snuff film director working for the Giovanni and being creeped the fuck out. It was perfect for its book, and it set the tone for what the Giovanni are by showing them through the eyes of a degenerate fuck that was still creeped the fuck out by them. I talked about this a little in GURPS: Vampire: The Masquerade, but Vampire lives and breathes on the taboos it brings to the table. The players need to see and feel the taboos being set up and broken - and the Victorians, you have to remember, where very prudish in public, and very kinky in private.



It was a high society with a dark underbellied; British class-consciousness was at an all-time height, fortunes were won and lost while the vast majority lived lives of quiet desperation and rude pleasures, all while keeping an air of propriety. It was the period of time that gave us the definition of pornography, and still had open toilets in the street; it was the dawn of industrialization, and the period of the Great Famine, where England left millions of Irish to starve to death. It saw the rise of Theosophy, the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, and the light bulb and automobile. It was the setting of the Crimean War and the Anglo-Zulu War. It was an age of darkness being pushed into the light, and it was ugly and beautiful and awful and...this opening fiction is just rubbish. It's boring. It captures none of that. Just a thin skin of Victorian styling over a generic bit of bloodiness. It's not a good omen for things to come.

FrankT:

Next Up: Chapter 1: The Empire After Nightfall.

[Longes]

Squeee.

[hyzmarca]

The Victorian Era, I think, works better for an Order of Reason eccentric mage game.

You can have people racing around the world in 80s days and the British Empire fighting wars against Martian tripods. While terrorists hold the world hostage using an armed airship and and submarine pirates harass shipping from their unassailable deep sea base.

[Ancient History]

Vampire: Victorian Age
The Empire After Nightfall


Because we was touched by Cain!

AncientH:

We start off with a quote from A Tale of Two Cities. Which was written and published by Charles Dickens in 1859, but was actually about the French Revolution. The thing is, despite Dickens' literary reputation, he was very purely the patron saint of Victorian Age Vampire: the living archetype of a potboiler. He sometimes wrote very good stuff, but most of what he wrote were long serials because he was being paid by the word as each chapter came out, and it was to his advantage to stretch shit out as long as possible. This is, then, the very fucking essence of White Wolf's approach to this book.

FrankT:

The first proper chapter is allocated 34 pages. I don't say it's 34 pages long, because of the various filler pages, but according to the table of contents, pages 14-47 inclusive are allocated to “Chapter One: The Empire After Nightfall.” The first sentence of the illegible scrawl is “The sun never set on Queen Victoria's empire, but vampires rule the world by gaslight.” That's a tortured sentence and really highlights the fundamental failure of naming the chapter itself something that more poetically interacted with the saying that the sun never sets on the British Empire (which is an extremely important geopolitical point during the Victorian period). But it also highlights a more fundamental problem that vampires in Vampire have with regard to historical settings of any kind:




Vampires in Vampire: the Masquerade recoil and go all catatonic like movie vampires when presented with fire or sunlight. Which is a problem if you have characters that want to do anything under any circumstances in historical settings. Electric street lights were invented in 1880, and unless you want to have your vampire parties around the courthouse of Wabash, Indiana whatever artificial light you are going to get in the Victorian Age or before is going to be based on fire. That's what gaslight is. So... no. The vampires do not rule the world by gaslight, they see gaslights and fall over sideways and have a seizure.


A World of Darkness vampire being exposed to gaslighting, as LARPed by Pichu.

This is a pretty serious issue, and one which was a major issue even in modern nights vampire. It was fucking crippling in Dark Ages Vampire, where the preferred source of illumination was a sputtering pitch fire. But this book had a responsibility to walk back shit ideas from the main game that would make this setting literally unplayable. It didn't do that. It comes out swinging with a first sentence mention about how the basic setting includes things which are impossible (White Wolf vampires chillaxing next to continuous fires), and that should be cause for introspection and a major rewrite. We don't get that. It just goes on as if it hadn't just noisily shat its pants while saying “Ladies and gentlemen...”


White Wolf authors hadn't gotten through the ramifications of “fire bad.”

AncientH:

Chapter one is less about anything specific to the setting or creating the mood than it is the pitch. It reads basically like this is the document somebody came up with when they were trying to sell this game to White Wolf management. Everything is very broad-strokes and high level and idealized; it's trying to get across the ideas of the setting in a telling-not-showing way. So instead of trying to show the proliferation of secret societies by, y'know, having a lot of fucking secret societies, they just tell you that there are a lot of secret societies. Well, thanks, assholes. And even in this, they manage to fuck up pretty badly. This is the opening paragraph of the Secret Societies section:

In Gothic fiction, vampires are solitary creatures by their very nature. Authors such as Polidori and LeFanu celebrated the monsters they envisioned as lone stalking predators. A vampire might choose to hunt in solitude or to prey upon a select group of mortals. Yet, for creatures who scheme to survive for eternity, the thought of centuries of isolation is a curse far worse than hunger for blood.

Dude. Read Dracula. He had three bitches in his castle. The first thing he did when he got to England was to recruit a wingman and two more. Dracula was not a loner. And this fucking section goes two paragraphs before mentioning secret societies. For fuck's sake.


Dracula's Brides

FrankT:

This book is about the period between 1880 and 1897, which it calls the “Gothic Victorian Age.” I have no idea why it does that. The book bookends itself with the creation of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn in 1880 and the publication of Dracula in 1897. That is the correct date for the publication of Dracula, but that's not the correct date for the Golden Dawn. As far as I can tell, this timeline is based on somebody misreading a history of occultism. The Golden Dawn got its start in “the 1880s,” which apparently one or more of the authors misread as the actual year “1880.” They actually start in 1886.

So aside from the fact that we're bookending the era the book concerns itself with using events that didn't happen in the right years for the dates they chose, there's still the fact that there's no reason to call this the “Gothic Victorian Age.” That's not a real thing. And if it was a real thing, it would probably refer to a period in the late 1840s. Remember that a bunch of the heavy hitters of Gothic literature actually happen before the Victorian era altogether, but the big “Gothic Revival” of the Victorian Age happens quite early – Faust is in 1846 and Varney the Vampire is in 1847.


The Modern Prometheus was written in 1818, so the Gothic Age is pretty recognizable well before Victoria was born. You could make a case that you're in the “Gothic Victorian Age” in 1837, as soon as Victoria ascends to the throne.

So the whole premise of the book is based on bad scholarship, poor familiarity with the source material, and a pervasive contempt for historicism in what is nominally a historical setting. Can it get worse from here? Well, depending on how you value things, quite possibly not. But the book certainly tries. But really, I have to ask: how could this be a place of ignorance for fucking White Wolf authors? It's Victorian Gothic Horror, the entire company is built on that and Anne Rice. How can you even get a job working for White Wolf if you don't have a top three favorite list of 19th century Gothic Horror? I mean seriously, what the actual fuck?

AncientH:

The Victorian Gothic is about as historically accurate as the Gothic Punk Modern Nights. It's all a bit of mascara and artistic license.


Batman's been hitting the 'roids. And vampire blood.

There's a couple pages on the Camarilla and the Sabbat, as the Victorian vampires might understand them. There's a couple problems with this. The first is, vampire generations don't work like human generations. There are totally vampires that were around when the Camarilla started who are still running the god-damned thing, and you can go ask them questions about who was fang-banging whom way back in the Fifteenth Century during the Convention of Thorns...and old vampires don't go senile, dementations notwithstanding. So Vampire history should generally be much easier to learn about and keep straight. "Legends" about shit that happened three centuries ago are like internet "legends" of shit that happened last week, except Snopes is the elder working in the British Library that helped draft the Six Traditions.

With the Sabbat, there's just a lot of...sloppy terminology. The thing is "Cainite" is standard nomenclature for a vampire in V:tM. It's not specific to the Sabbat, and never was. But in this section, it claims that the Camarilla calls themselves Kindred and the Sabbat calls themselves Cainites. WTF? It also makes it sound like Humanity/Via Humanitas/Road of Humanity is the default for Camarilla but the Sabbat follows "older codes of vampiric behavior"...and this isn't quite wrong, but it's not quite right either. Because yes, Humanity is the default in the Modern Nights, but only because for years and years it was the only option. Even in VtM 3rd edition they had plenty of different "Paths of Enlightenment," and back in Dark Ages they just up and made multiple Roads a default of the setting.

Which was kind of clever, because it gave you another thing to base your character on and interact with other characters, because Paths of Enlightenment can cross clan boundaries. You don't have to be a Cappadocian or Giovanni to follow the Road of Bones, and if you're a Tremere and she's a Giovanni and you both follow the Road of Bones...hey, you've got something in common. Maybe you don't have to kill each other. It's not a given, but White Wolf didn't give a lot of help in that basic regard as far as "tolerating each other's existence" and "working together." So you have to take what you can get...except, as here, where they piss all over it.

I also feel they give short shrift to the Sabbat for another thing. Back in the original Sabbat Handbook days, they were pretty strong on painting the Sabbat as the "bad" vampires. Lots of the hallmarks of Satanism, including an organization in parody of the Catholic church that could have been inspired by La Bas. They pretty much embodied the anti-Christian faction of the setting, against which your Camarilla characters, burdened with Humanity and feeling bad for your sins, were pretty much anti-heroes (at least, if you still got guilted into going to church on Sundays by your parents).

The thing is, religion works a little differently in England during the Victorian era.

It's not just that the Anglican church tends to be a lot more transactional, but the Victorian era saw a rise in interest in spiritualism, seances, mediums, etc. as well as interest in ancient and oriental religions, especially Egyptian religion (with the discovery of Tutankhamen's tomb) and Theosophy. So it's not that people aren't religious, but it's not all Catholic masses or Baptist ministers; it's much more M. R. James than Hammer Horror. This is the time when the "Wickedest Man in the World" impregnated a housemaid, sodomized a few dudes in Paris, and liked to masturbate while thinking of golden coins in the hopes it would magically make him rich, and spelled magic with a "k." And for all these sins he was reviled. For the Sabbat, that's a bit of a tame evening.

So it's not just that they don't do a great job selling the Sabbat, but it comes across as a very bad fit for the setting.

The most important treaty in the Sabbat's history, the Purchase Pact of 1803, defines its members allegiance against all who would oppose them. The pact forbids them from warring from each other, and thus, they have turned against the territories of their greatest enemies. In so doing, these Victorian vampires have become the enemies of civilization itself. They launch continual crusades against the civilized lands, enacting their will through violent fervor. The youngest among them know no other way of existence.

FrankT:

To recapture the spirit of that bygone age, its very Zeitgeist, you must die and be reborn: You must see the world anew as a vampire's childe.

All capitalization and spelling fail as in the original. So just imagine all of the clauses are followed by a big fat:


That bit of text is pure shovelware. I'm not going to tell you the context, because the context does not matter. It could literally have appeared absolutely anywhere in the book and it would have been just as pretentious and just as useless. It goes on for quite a while about how in Victorian Age Vampire you are an outcast from society and a villain in your own tale. But I am completely unable to identify any evidence that any of the authors actually read anything about the subject in fiction or non-fictional form. But that's still not as offensive as the civilization/barbarity thing.


Yes, that's the White Man's Burden. Yes, it's super racist. Like SUPER racist.

Victorian Racism is like level 2 evolved racism. You have to get your racism up to a certain level and then trade it while holding a dark stone to get your racism to turn into Victorian Racism. Like, if you read actual Victorian Era racialism, your mouth just hangs open while you think “Holy shit, you did not write that shit down where anyone could read it. What the fuck?!” This is the period of Charles Darwin, and when he wrote down that he was pretty sure that white people and black people were the same species, people called him a race traitor. So when you talk about racism in the Victorian Era, you gotta say some things that maybe you don't wanna say.


Hugely controversial during this period.

What this book presents is incredibly sanitized, and because of that it's incredibly problematic. The talk about Kipling's '“burden” of spreading civilization around the globe.' No. He didn't call it the “burden,” he called it the “White Man's Burden.” That is what it was called, because it's racist as fuck. And putting the fucking quotes around the part where it isn't immediately obvious that you're talking about enslaving brown people for their own good and offhandedly omitting the rest doesn't make it nice, it makes you a liar. The idea of the world being divided into the gas lit civilization and the torch lit savage wilderness is certainly evocative, but going with that was the casual dismissal of the cultural value of colored people everywhere. Victorian people said things with a straight face that would get you booed at a Trump rally. And this book does itself no favors by pretending this isn't an issue they have to talk about.


Irishmen. Basically no better than Blacks or dogs.

Now it would actually be OK if the book's conclusion was “19th century racism is super uncomfortable, and you should probably downplay it or ignore it altogether." But to talk about really racist things without even so much as mentioning that maybe they might be a little bit extremely offensive and racist is just fucking cowardly. This book isn't just lazy, it's cowardly.

They have a rant about “history and mystery” saying basically that you can do as much reading on the time period as you like and do as much historical accuracy as you like, but that ultimately it's a story you're telling for fun and that nothing bad will happen if you don't get the right prices in shillings or whatever the fuck. And this is true. But like the similar rant in Ars Magica 5
th Edition, it really seems like the authors are using this as a crude shield against accusations that they haven't done the most minimalist reading on their fucking subject and are talking in the generalities and ass pulls of students who didn't study and are trying to bullshit their way through an essay exam.

AncientH:

There's no getting away from the crap racism. They actually call Native Americans "red-skinned savages" at one point. In scare quotes, but still, you don't see them painting Mormons as a secret, murderous cult of polygamists, and they were one of the first Sherlock Holmes villains. No seriously: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Study_i ... _Mormonism

I think they were trying to forget World of Darkness: Mummy. Like the Egyptian Revival wasn't a thing. The Followers of Set get a couple paragraphs, but seriously, Cthulhu by Gaslight gave more shift to ancient Egypt than that.


It was a thing.

I'm finding it harder to give a fuck here, and we're only about forty pages in. This is all just all the shit from the generic Modern Nights vampire book, only instead of "undead" they spell it "un-dead," like the hyphen is where it gets its power. Zero fucks are given in trying to adapt these guys to the syntax of the era.

Also, at one point they mention the Hellfire Club, which stopped meeting around the time of the American Revolution. THAT'S NOT VICTORIAN, ASSHOLES.

FrankT:

The Camarilla, the Sabbat, and the Anarchs all had slightly different ankhs and you do not care.

There are a lot of pages given over to vampire history. The war between the Camarilla and the Sabbat. This shit never made any sense, and this retread doesn't make it make any sense. I'm honestly not sure what the point is, save that it fills up space. There were certain wordcount requirements, and rehashing some Dark Ages historical shit fulfilled those obligations. I wouldn't be surprised in the least if this shit was copy pasta from some other World of Darkness book, although I would be damned before I took the time to actually do the textual comparison to figure out which one.

There's a two paragraph rant about how each of the seven original basic Camarilla clans are treated in the Camarilla in the Victorian period. It's um... exactly the same as the modern nights version. Like, exactly. Someone got paid moneys to write that Victorian Brujah were “Rabble” and Victorian Ventrue are Nobles. Later on, we repeat the same process for the Lasombra, Tzimisce, Ravnos, Giovanni, and Settites. Lots of space used, but no new information. Let's consult Grumpy Orangutan about this.


I think he's got the right idea.

There's a half assed attempt to to map British classes onto Vampire clans. This doesn't even. I mean, that's not how it would work. Tremere and Gangrel can't be the “bourgeoisie” because that doesn't make any fucking sense. Class maps to age and power, not to clan affiliation. There are Nosferatu princes, so they can't all be low class. It's just gibberish. I understand that this is a shovelware book, but what the fuck? I hate this book so much.

AncientH:

They kind of tried this in Dark Ages, too, with the "High Clans" and the "Low Clans." But even then they made it weird by having some bloodlines be of higher status than the Low Clans and lower status than the High Clans and...uh...yeah, whatever. The British caste system never made any sense to anyone except the fucking British.

They try to push Hunters as a major problem. They point at consulting detectives like Sherlock Holmes and occult detectives like Carnacki the Ghost-finder. They probably would have done better to leave it with Van Helsing from Dracula. Because at best, you're going to be statting out your own steampunk vampire-huntin' gear, like a maxim gun that fires wooden bullets of a cross made from two sticks of dynamite.

The usual take on the "others" in the setting is kind of predictable. Werewolves are cast as something a little closer to the cursed gentlemen of the film - I mean, they're still recognizably lupines, but they're "half human" and try to maintain a gentlemanly (or, I suppose, womanly) exterior. I actually do wonder how a female Victorian Glasswalker would work in this setting. Then I remember that Werewolf is all about the dog-fucking and I don't want to think along those lines any more.

Mages are actually sort of interesting, since Mary Shelley's Frankenstein and the Industrial Revolution show the nascent Technocracy (not called that yet) is winning. Which you would think means that the occult revival of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn and Rosicrucians and shit was a last-ditch attempt by the Traditions to show the world the glories of an amulet against plague demons that protects you from syphilis or something, but supposedly the Freemasons and shit are under the control of the Technocracy? Even though I'm pretty sure that there are Mage books that said that wasn't how it worked? Well, whatever. If they can't be fucked to read their own source material, neither can I.

Ghosts: Wraith was long dead at this point, but this was the aspect of the World of Darkness that just wouldn't die. The creepy part is that technically the closest books to this setting were Wraith: the Great War, Wraith: Charnel Houses of Europe, and The Shoah. I feel dirty just writing that.

Faeries are given short shift too, which is too bad. This is the era of the Cottingham Faeries, after all.



Seriously, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle bought into these things. The Kiaysd were a thing. Even the Malkavians used to have dealings with faeries. They should have made more of this.

Also, for reasons I cannot explain, this section includes a section on the Astral Plane. If you're confused about WoD cosmology, the Astral Plane was sort of like the Underworld only...uh...not? Because when they wrote the astral projection rules, it was before they wrote the Underworld rules? I guess?

FrankT:

A major problem that Vampire: the Masquerade has is that vampires don't get enough powers. It takes five dots in all ten of the original disciplines to do pretty much what Dracula does in the book. So you're never gonna be able to play Dracula. You're probably never even going to be able to play one of Dracula's brides.


These characters have names, but you don't know or care what they are. They are still way more powerful than any Masquerade character you will ever be allowed to play.

Mostly that's just emasculating. You don't get to play Dracula. You get to be a shoe shine boy who might aspire to being Dracula in a thousand years. It's fucked. But where that really comes to a head is the whole act of feeding itself. Vampires need to drink blood. They need to do it fairly often. And that means they need a means of getting blood out of people. But most of the vampires in Vampire do not have any special ability to feed. Ventrue, Malkvian, and Tremere all have the potential to get Dominate, which in sufficient quantities lets them feed off humans and cloud their memories of the violation. Most of the vampires in those clans do not have that, because we are talking about a 3 dot discipline and you only get three fucking dots to spend on your fucking disciplines. The Toreador, Brujah, and Ventrue can have Presence, which can make mortals want to fuck you badly enough that they will “voluntarily” let you suck their blood and then lie about it later. Nosferatu and Gangrel can have Animalism, which can give them the ability to summon animals to drink the blood from. So theoretically every vampire in the basic clans of Vampire has access to some magic power that could potentially let them feed without blowing the masquerade for everyone. But it's just available, they don't actually get it necessarily. They have 3 dots to distribute between three disciplines and only by putting 3 dots in one of them and not the other two is there any ability to actually survive from night to night. Everyone who splits their discipline dots or wants to have super strength or whatever the fuck basically just has to take peoples' blood the old fashioned way by beating them up and cutting it out of them.


As a vampire in Vampire, this is pretty much you.

If you're actually killing people to get their blood, you need to drain someone dry about every week and a half. That's 36 murders a year, or three to seven Jack the Rippers every fucking year (depending on how many of the murders you think were the same dude). One vampire who doesn't have the ability to feed nonlethally and in secret is a serial killer for the ages. And Vampire presents vampires that suck so hard at getting their sucking on that most of them have this problem. There's some weaselly rants about how Jack the Ripper shows that humans are as brutal and horrifying as any vampire, but the holocaust that is World of Darkness vampires gives that the lie immediately.

AncientH:

I've gone ahead from Frank in my ranting, so let me back up a bit.



Victorian culture was fucked up as shit. Life was cheap, the technology was way ahead of the tactics, but technology was on the side of the English. The cavalry charge wasn't dead yet, but mainly because there weren't enough machine guns yet. And there is no reason this should not have scared the living fuck out of Elders, or given an edge to younger vampires. Even in the modern nights, a fledgling vampire with an AK-47 could probably take down his sire with Fortitude. Hell, a red neck vampire with some methane tanks could do it. As technology advances, it becomes easier to kill vampires.

But the game world never really embraced or acknowledged this. It's part of the reason there must have been a Masquerade, why the Camarilla tries to control its numbers - because the Elders are scared. They know how easy it is to die the Final Death.



But as much as vampire fans might like to dream of immorality while popping their zits, or whine about watching their family and friends grow old and die while getting high out in the woods, most of them haven't really confronted death. So they don't really get the fear. Because teenagers have a really hard time not thinking they're already immortal. What kills me is that the WoD writers never really embraced the rebellious aspect of the younger vampires and did a proper War of Ages. Maybe that would have been too meta.

FrankT:

They rehash the Traditions. This book takes three and a half pages to rehash the traditions. There is no new information here. The Traditions are not different or understood differently in 1890 than they were in 1990. It's exactly the same.


This doesn't take three and a half pages!

AncientH:

There are two paragraphs under the section title "The Dark Continent." 3/4 of it is about British Egypt. Fuck this book.

FrankT:

There are little samplers bits about all kinds of shit. It's like the undeveloped crap in Midnight Roads. It's difficult to get across how fucking shallow this shit is. How every bit is basically what you would write if you were given a word count and an hour glass and told to gibber some shit out to fill wordcount requirements. How there is no scholarship or understanding or insight or plot development or fucking anything anywhere in this entire heap of garbage. But I think I have the perfect example of how few fucks these assholes gave:

This is the time of Boss Tweed and Tammany Hall, when money can buy and sell political influence at bargain rates.

Boss Tweed died in 1878.
This book's time starts in 1880.
Fuck you.

AncientH:

They talk about how gas lighting scares Kindred. The tone-deafness would be astounding, but honestly at this point we're 45 pages in and there's been nothing new. If you asked a random vampire fan with a copy of the core book from any edition to write this chapter, they could have done it. Mostly by cribbing. It is boring.

FrankT:

The final page of the chapter is a suggested reading list. Most of the works are simply namechecked. So one of the lines reads:

• The Castle of Otranto by Horace Walpole

Now the thing you're probably going to expect me to harp on is that The Castle of Otranto was written in 1764, and is arguably the first Gothic novel. But in any case was written over a hundred years before VAV's nominally time setting. But there's another thing that kind of leaps out at me: I wrote out the whole entry up there. Five of these works have little blurbs attached to them. Some of them are very little, like simply admitting that Age of Innocence is set in America (neglects to mention that it is also set in the 1870s and not the 1880s). But the rest of the books on this list don't have blurbs at all.


The authors seem genuinely confused on whether New York in the 1870s is the same as London in the 1880s. This seems like an odd thing to be confused about.

Option one is that different authors were contributing works to the reading list and only one of the authors thought they were supposed to annotate them (and the developer and editor didn't think it was a problem to simply collate this shit). Option two is that the authors haven't actually read most of the things they are recommending and were just regurgitating things off a Gothic Fiction reading list they saw somewhere.

Either way: fuck this book.

Next up: The Clans. I know that they've actually spent a bunch of pages ranting whilst providing us with no new information about the Clans. But now there's a chapter that's just about the Clans.

AncientH:

I feel "Fuck this book" is going to be are new motto going forward.

[Lokey]

For my clarification: aside from the mandatory blood orgies, wasn't Sabbat >>> Camarilla? The discipline sets seemed to mesh so much better (i.e. Gangrel) when they weren't the same (like Malk, Tor) and you didn't have to deal with the omg masquerade rules. Might be too much CCG influence to my thinking too, although that was Tzimisce find you and eat you and thus win unless you're far enough away to win before all your vamps burn

The OSSR pile has been pretty samey lately. Surely there's something else besides badly researched, lazy shovel-ware in the queue?

[Username17]

For my clarification: aside from the mandatory blood orgies, wasn't Sabbat >>> Camarilla? The discipline sets seemed to mesh so much better (i.e. Gangrel) when they weren't the same (like Malk, Tor) and you didn't have to deal with the omg masquerade rules. Might be too much CCG influence to my thinking too, although that was Tzimisce find you and eat you and thus win unless you're far enough away to win before all your vamps burn

The Sabbat were created later and used more source material. The Camarilla are written before the Assamites, so apparently they don't have any. But the Sabbat are written after the Assamites, so they do. Then on top of that, a bunch of people noted that various clans had discipline combinations that weren't all that good and presented clan variants that were supposed to improve things. Sometimes this worked out (Swapping Presence for Auspex makes Ventrue happy because Dominate and Presence are redundant). Sometimes it didn't (Dementation is actually a shit discipline and Malkavians would be better off with Dominate). Sometimes it's just taking things in a different direction (the "City Gangrel" are just combat monsters, while the forest Gangrel are crap at combat but can do a lot with their animal powers).

The later clans are almost universally superior to the original clans (exception: Tremere). Part of that is simple power creep. Only the Tremere kept getting powers written for them to take, because of the original disciplines only Thaumaturgy is open ended. But the big issue is that the original seven clans have ten disciplines that are supposed to equal Dracula from the book when you have all ten of them raised to maximum. The later clans are supposed to do vampires from other source material and that means that they usually get a discipline that covers an entire concept rather than a tenth of one. As a Follower of Set you can do your entire snake vampire shtick with just a few dots in Serpentis. While if you want to do a Dracula entrance you need Thaumaturgy for the fog, Protean to come in as a bat or fog, and Presence to make everyone treat you like Bela fucking Lugosi. And not only is that three disciplines, there isn't any basic clan that gets even two of those to play with.

Basically, vampires in Vampire are way underpowered, and later writings had both deliberate and incidental power creep. The Sabbat were written up later and benefit from a lot of that power creep because they were written with it in mind. Where the Sabbat falls down is their social organization. They don't really do the Masquerade thing, so it's pretty much impossible for the Sabbat to exist in the modern world or even the Victorian world. They'd give the game away right away and get hunted to extinction.

What I do not understand is, that given that one of the biggest problems with Vampire: the Masquerade is how underpowered the vampires are, why Requiem elected to hit everyone with the nerf stick. That's not even part of the set of possible solutions. The problem is: vampires in your setting are so weak that most of them don't have the ability to fucking feed themselves night to night. "What if we made all the vampires even weaker and have a harder time passing themselves off as human?" is not an answer.

The OSSR pile has been pretty samey lately. Surely there's something else besides badly researched, lazy shovel-ware in the queue?

Well, there was requests for this one. I suspect it's because White Wolf is being reconstituted and people want to be reminded why that's not necessarily a great thing.

-Username17

[Smirnoffico]

For my clarification: aside from the mandatory blood orgies, wasn't Sabbat >>> Camarilla? The discipline sets seemed to mesh so much better (i.e. Gangrel) when they weren't the same (like Malk, Tor) and you didn't have to deal with the omg masquerade rules. Might be too much CCG influence to my thinking too, although that was Tzimisce find you and eat you and thus win unless you're far enough away to win before all your vamps burn

Sabbat still do masquerade and they even have their own elders, only it's all darker and edgier that vanilla-camarilla guys have.

[Ancient History]

That was talked about back in the original OSSR for the Baali, I think...White Wolf almost never met a villain faction that they didn't allow you to actually play at some point, and then regret it and make it punkass. But "darker and edgier" was the whole point of the World of Darkness. They were all edgelords, all the time, and they had real arguments over what was acceptable edgelording (having Giovanni ghouls suck blood out of a vampire's cock, check) and what wasn't acceptable edgelording (vampires can't actually have sex - wait, what? No, really. They went back and forth on that a few times.)

...and that's what the audience wanted. You have to understand, right up to and through the beginning of 3rd edition, the default target audience for a D&D game could be as young as twelve. White Wolf with it's World of Darkness was aiming at the slightly more evolved thirteen to fifteen demographic, who had decided church was boring (but still went) and titties were cool, and maybe that black goes with everything.

[Smirnoffico]

Yeah... I know all of this from first-hand experience. I was that 13-15 demographic when revised edition hit
That's what I meant - we have 'normal' edgy guys and then we have super edgy guys and omg there's also the black hand. It's like seven stages of incorruptibility of Matt Ward.

[Longes]

For my clarification: aside from the mandatory blood orgies, wasn't Sabbat >>> Camarilla? The discipline sets seemed to mesh so much better (i.e. Gangrel) when they weren't the same (like Malk, Tor) and you didn't have to deal with the omg masquerade rules. Might be too much CCG influence to my thinking too, although that was Tzimisce find you and eat you and thus win unless you're far enough away to win before all your vamps burn

The OSSR pile has been pretty samey lately. Surely there's something else besides badly researched, lazy shovel-ware in the queue?

For all its problems, Sabbat had one amazing thing. One thing that fixed the core problem of party making and stopped the PCs from killing each other on sight. Sabbat had the Vaulderie. Vaulderie is a magic ritual where members of the pack mix their blood in a bowl, the pack priest says the magic words, everyone drinks the blood and bam! Your previous blood bonds are broken and now everyone in the pack has a low-level blood bond with each other. Vaulderie is literally the rite of party making. Why they never ported it into the Camarilla is beyond me.

[Omegonthesane]

For my clarification: aside from the mandatory blood orgies, wasn't Sabbat >>> Camarilla? The discipline sets seemed to mesh so much better (i.e. Gangrel) when they weren't the same (like Malk, Tor) and you didn't have to deal with the omg masquerade rules. Might be too much CCG influence to my thinking too, although that was Tzimisce find you and eat you and thus win unless you're far enough away to win before all your vamps burn

The OSSR pile has been pretty samey lately. Surely there's something else besides badly researched, lazy shovel-ware in the queue?

For all its problems, Sabbat had one amazing thing. One thing that fixed the core problem of party making and stopped the PCs from killing each other on sight. Sabbat had the Vaulderie. Vaulderie is a magic ritual where members of the pack mix their blood in a bowl, the pack priest says the magic words, everyone drinks the blood and bam! Your previous blood bonds are broken and now everyone in the pack has a low-level blood bond with each other. Vaulderie is literally the rite of party making. Why they never ported it into the Camarilla is beyond me.

Well the Watsonian reason is right there - in character, the Camarilla object to breaking blood bonds - but I'm a bit lost as to a Doylist reason. Maybe they actively wanted there to be a lack of internal loyalty in parties for some fucking reason.

[Longes]

For my clarification: aside from the mandatory blood orgies, wasn't Sabbat >>> Camarilla? The discipline sets seemed to mesh so much better (i.e. Gangrel) when they weren't the same (like Malk, Tor) and you didn't have to deal with the omg masquerade rules. Might be too much CCG influence to my thinking too, although that was Tzimisce find you and eat you and thus win unless you're far enough away to win before all your vamps burn

The OSSR pile has been pretty samey lately. Surely there's something else besides badly researched, lazy shovel-ware in the queue?

For all its problems, Sabbat had one amazing thing. One thing that fixed the core problem of party making and stopped the PCs from killing each other on sight. Sabbat had the Vaulderie. Vaulderie is a magic ritual where members of the pack mix their blood in a bowl, the pack priest says the magic words, everyone drinks the blood and bam! Your previous blood bonds are broken and now everyone in the pack has a low-level blood bond with each other. Vaulderie is literally the rite of party making. Why they never ported it into the Camarilla is beyond me.

Well the Watsonian reason is right there - in character, the Camarilla object to breaking blood bonds - but I'm a bit lost as to a Doylist reason. Maybe they actively wanted there to be a lack of internal loyalty in parties for some fucking reason.

The Doylist reason is that White Wolf is hyperallergic to retconning anything. That's why there are Paths in VtM and Roads in DA:V and the Victorian Age gives a tortured reasoning for Roads falling out of favor with the Camarilla. Despite the Roads being more playable and having a better structure and providing roleplaying hooks.

[Smirnoffico]

Despite the Roads being more playable and having a better structure and providing roleplaying hooks.

Being more playable doesn't equal good. Paths are outright bad. Like really bad. Humanity was the best they made because it served (a shitty) purpose. Roads are better but they are meaningless. You take a 'road of whatever I was going to do anyway' and just forget you have morality trait altogether.

It was such a disappointment - I really like the idea of multiple roads that unite vampires outside of clan, but the execution is... well... is frozen dung better than one on fire?
What ww probably should have done is make roads into societies, smaller sects or whatever with agendas and goals and not something like 'I become a raving monster if I don't chop off 10 heads today'

[Longes]

Despite the Roads being more playable and having a better structure and providing roleplaying hooks.

Being more playable doesn't equal good. Paths are outright bad. Like really bad. Humanity was the best they made because it served (a shitty) purpose. Roads are better but they are meaningless. You take a 'road of whatever I was going to do anyway' and just forget you have morality trait altogether.

It was such a disappointment - I really like the idea of multiple roads that unite vampires outside of clan, but the execution is... well... is frozen dung better than one on fire?
What ww probably should have done is make roads into societies, smaller sects or whatever with agendas and goals and not something like 'I become a raving monster if I don't chop off 10 heads today'

Humanity is horrible and no one sticks to it closely. White Wolf doesn't stick to Humanity. This asshole, Ferox, has Humanity 9 and True Faith 9 (true faith only goes up to 5). He's a big penis NPC and is literally chosen by God. He's a serial killer who hunts down and kills vampires, unless they repent and accept the Lord, and is racist against the Nosferatu so he doesn't accept them ever. He violates Humanity 8, 6, 4, 3 and 2 all the fucking time.
Dark Ages: Vampire 20 talks about True Faith being only for vampires with high Humanity, and suggests concepts like "crusader against evil" and suggests increasing True Faith after especially grand moments, like "killing an evil Prince". Except it's a sin against Humanity to violate another, so what the fuck.

Path of Whatever I Was Going To Do Anyway is a better roleplaying aid than Humanity 9 times out of 10.

[Smirnoffico]

But it's no aid at all. It's a get out of our stupid morality system free card. Not that it is not needed - no argue here. It's just so much wasted potential for being something useful

[Longes]

But it's no aid at all. It's a get out of our stupid morality system free card. Not that it is not needed - no argue here. It's just so much wasted potential for being something useful

Road of Kings is one of the more popular roads among the DA:V players in my experience. Its level 2 sin is "Breaking your word or oath". Trying to wrangle an oath out of the elder and trying to never promise anything yourself without a good reason is more interesting than Humanity's ban on being a murderhobo. A ban that official NPCs gleefuly ignore might I add.
Road of Beast level 5 sin is "Doing something for nothing". Forgotten Realms had an entire character built around a curse like that, where Kelemvor turns into a panther whenever he does something without a reward.

[Username17]

Humanity and Roads and Paths and all that shit are negative incentives for roleplaying, which means that the best they can do is no harm. The game trundles along until the Storyteller remembers or believes that something your character is doing is on the naughty list, and then your character is punished. There is no incentive to act in accordance with your morality number, no incentive to act at all. There is nothing but a capricious punishment for acting in ways that your Storyteller believes post hoc were sins.

That's like 2nd edition AD&D Alignment levels of shitty. The only purpose of the label is to pick something that you think your MC isn't going to shit all over your character for. It serves no positive purpose at all.

Vampire also had Natures, which gave you a reward for playing in character. Those were a net benefit to the game. But because Humanity was structured with a stick and no carrot, the best it could do was get the fuck out of the way. The Road of "Ten Sins that don't even make sense and will literally never come up" is the best thing that could happen to Vampire.

So things like the Path of Self Focus which let the MC bone you for frenzying (level 2) and also for not frenzying (level 4) are shit. Because you're fucked no matter what you do and the MC can troll you no whenever they feel like it. But Path of Honorable Accord, which dings you only for doing things that you don't have a reason to do are as good as it gets. They get out of the way.


-Username17

[Schleiermacher]

I think the whole structure of "rating" sins from 0-10 is what makes the system crap moreso than the actual contents of those tables. Those are easy to fix after all, but even if you do the system just doesn't do what you'd want it to.

It's all well and good to say that until your Humanity hits 4, you won't consider murder an option on the table to solve your problems (or whatever), but one traumatic experience later it's no big deal anymore? Or if your Humanity was higher than that, and you killed someone anyway in desperately unreasonable circumstances, you're now okay with theft and vandalism because you feel the killing was justified?

I can see what they were going for but like so many other parts of the Vampire rules, what they made just doesn't do the job. The game acts as if you should try to keep your Humanity up, but it's the exact opposite of the slippery slope it's presented as. It is in fact impossible to keep your humanity high and still be a functional member of vampire society, so unless you stick your fingers in your ears and avoid doing anything that Vampire is supposedly about, you will rapidly lose Humanity until you hit level 4-5... but then stay there because you'd have to go out of your way to lose more unless your character concept is "giggling psychotic sadist."

Edit: I think Frank is right about why this is -that there is no incentive for actually playing true to your morality or even any coherent explanation of what that would entail, just a list of ten things you aren't allowed to do, some vague, contradictory purple prose and whatever you can extrapolate from that. (When I ran a short Sabbat game, I had to rewrite the Path of Metamorphosis from first principles, since it made absolutely no sense as written.)

[Lokey]

Oh right, there's that thing we ignored, the thing we rewrote, the other thing we kinda used as written. Nostalgia has been ending in pain a lot lately, here

Good thing we didn't do much with the humanity table, I'd have been an NPC after our second encounter. (Can't break the Masquerade so kinda rough leaving witnesses--even criminals who want to light you on fire for kicks. It was good for the other players anyway, they were really gunshy and needed to know they were playing vamps and were slightly hardier than toddlers (the bullets aren't going to kill you but they are going to kill the guys causing you problems).)

At least we learned the important lessons like a $5 shovel is better than the second point in Protean and the other usual things. Now I learn that thankfully we didn't actually play VtM, dodged a bullet there.

[hyzmarca]

The entire point of Humanity is that it lets you be Louis from Interview with a Vampire, and brood about how horrible and evil all the things you have to do to survive are.

Unfortunately, it prevents you from being Lestat, who doesn't extend empathy outside his monkeysphere and responds to immortal ennui by starting a wildly popular rock and roll band.

[Smirnoffico]

The Camarilla, the Sabbat, and the Anarchs all had slightly different ankhs and you do not care.

I'm pretty sure the only reason ankh made it into the game as a symbol is because David Bowie and Catherine Deneuve used ankh-shaped knives to kill in Hunger.

As with humanity being a louis-meter, vtm, has lot of 'we just want to emulate those vampire fics/books we like'. And wasn't Sabbat the 'lestat faction' in the beginning?

[Lokey]

At least we know all the Vamp Diaries mains would be npcs after 2 minutes of screen-time (their run of the mill newly-turned vamp would probably wreck an VtM elder anyway...haven't seen True Blood, but probably true there too).

Character fragility is probably the bigger fail of the system for me. Blood ties into lots of things and there's tons of reasons to spend blood, which makes success on anything more difficult. Doing vamp shit should have limits, but shouldn't make you one kid with a snap-cracker away from being a pile of ashes.

Have we made it to the character creation section yet? I wonder if it can top VtM: Africa-it's-one-country for their lol you're gen 14 and have more limitations to using the worse versions of disciplines than usual.

[Smirnoffico]

Have we made it to the character creation section yet? I wonder if it can top VtM: Africa-it's-one-country for their lol you're gen 14 and have more limitations to using the worse versions of disciplines than usual.

s far as I remember, the whole book is just a recap of revised rulebook, only in victorian age. Pretty much like vampire: the dark ages that came before dark ages: vampire (white wolf not only sold the same book three times, they sold same cover two times)

[Ancient History]

Victorian Age Vampire
Chapter 2: The Clans


Sure. Why not.

AncientH:

If you've read one WoD core book, you've basically read them all. Or at least, you know what to expect. And while Frank and I (rightly) declare this formulaic fanaticism because of its tendency to shovelwear, it's also important to recognize its advantage and why it represented something of an improvement over similar RPGs.

Because the World of Darkness players and storytellers knew what to expect.

You don't really appreciate that until you try to read books from back in the dim mists of gaming history - or plenty of indie products today - and realize it was not always thus. The standard formats that White Wolf create and stuck to not only made the books easier to write and organize and dole out in chunks to freelancers, they made it so that the reader familiar with one WoD product would know pretty much what to expect in any other WoD product.

For good or ill.

FrankT:

This chapter is allocated 64 pages (complaints about incomplete and empty pages still apply), making it the longest chapter in the book by a considerable margin. The chapter intro is about how Victorian Age Vampire treats morality as more black and white than normal Vampire: the Masquerade. And also how they are going to treat the clans as more monolithic and less interesting than normal Vampire: the Masquerade. In short, that discussing nuance and diversity is effort, and they have absolutely no intention of putting any of that effort in. To anything.

It seems like a weird place to draw the line. This is a time period when even progressive champions of modernity could unironically hold forth on the inferiority of Negroes or the female sex. Where a major issue of public discussion was whether it was tactically effective to starve the wives and children of Boer rebels the British empire was holding in concentration camps. To just shrug and say “Yeah, good guys are good, bad guys are bad” about such a period is well beyond lazy. This is an era where the modern zeitgeist was newly forming, where the philosophical underpinnings of what we think of as good were fresh and new and incompletely accepted even by their creators. This is the period of the development of the Welfare State, where even the concept of good governance as we define it was a revolutionary idea.

• How Many Potatoes Does It Take To Kill An Irishman?

Zero.

This is not an era where a modern person can see black and white morality. Anywhere. We can look back and see heroes like Darwin, Lincoln, Marx, and Mill because they presented ways to make society more moral. Not because they had all the answers at the time. They all said racist and horrible stuff. But they strived for something better and presented solid ways that improvements could be made.

Anyway, the chapter has a few pages for each of the 13 clans it cares to recognize (none at all on any of the weird blood lines or decapitated clans). That gives them about four and a half pages per clan. Some of this space is filled up with simple white space – each clan starts at the top of a fresh page and when the previous clan doesn't stretch to the bottom of the previous page there's just white space. Some of this is taken up by putting the clan quotes in really big fonts – many of the quotes are just generic and could go on any clan.

Ah, the Queen has reigned for almost eight decades! How cute the mortals are, with their trifling conceptions of time.

Name that clan!

Fucking generic bullshit. The quotes aren't really there to tell you anything about the clan, it's just space filler. Something that someone who happens to be a member of a clan happened to say, and I think only the Assamite one is particularly relevant to anything (not that it isn't also racist).

AncientH:

As part of the Revised-era series of Vampire books, we've tried to create archetypes without letting them lapse into stereotypes.

This is on the "cover" page for the chapter, right after something that could have been in-character text, just to fuck with you. Such is life.

I'm on the fence with Vampire (well, WoD) archetypes. On the one hand, I think a good example is invaluable, and it is appropriate to give your readers plenty of ideas to steal for their own characters. That said, WoD archetypes tend to suck. It's not that they're stereotypes...often...it's more that the art tends to suck and the stats do not support the concept. WoD archetypes are not playable characters. They're not well-rounded, they're often not able to feed themselves or succeed at any of the basic rolls they'll need to make. The pretty posterchildren of the clans tend to be inadequate humans, much less vampires.

But they are what you had to go by.


It's actually kind of funny when you think about it, because there's no specifically Irish vampire clan. The closest you got was the Lhiannan bloodline, and they were extinct. That's probably a good thing considering what happened with Twilight.

FrankT:

Every clan gets their own piece of metalwork symbol. I guess there's a thing going on where all the vampires have a secret code by which they have special patterns made of wrought iron that they put on their domiciles and meeting places. That's cool I guess, but it really calls out for a whole secret society thing that there isn't any support for. I mean, I get that it's a cool image to come up to a creepy Victorian mansion with creepy Victorian ironwork out front and to have your knowing magical characters note that there's a secret sign in the ironwork that shows that the master here is a vampire of an ancient house. But... these clan ironwork thingies don't actually do that.


The Master is a vampire of an ancient lineage...

The first problem is that being a Brujah or a Ventrue isn't like being a Hapsburg. It's like being Polish or Italian. It doesn't say anything about what lands you have claim on or what ancient alliances you are part of. To the extent that there are really any families at all, it's all one family. A tenth generation vampire is at most seven generations removed from the siblings of the ancestors of any other tenth generation vampire. And while there have been various casualties over the centuries, there are still unliving dudes in every generation in between. All the vampires are cousins in the sense that they share common ancestors. But also in the sense that actually know someone who knows the brothers or sisters that spawned your two sides of the family.

If you're a Ventrue and you meet a Settite, there's still the thing where you actually have met one of your ancestors who has met the original Ventrue. And that Settite has met one of his ancestors who has met the original Set. And Ventrue and Set were brothers. It's very proximate in a way that human coats of arms really aren't. All over the world, every clan is still a cadet branch of the same family. It's extremely weird and presumptuous that they don't all use the same symbol with extremely minor variations. It's also really condensed vertically as well as horizontally. The leaders of the Camarilla and all the other groups are from the 4th generation. They are all first cousins. And vampires reproduce asexually, so there's only a single line of ancestry to worry about.

The game keeps trying to get us to buy each of the clans as powerful ancient dynasties, but really all of the clans are equivalent to really young families. The son of the clan founder is alive and the head of the clan. The clan founder is alive too, she's just on sabbatical (and possibly going to go on a murder rampage when she comes back).

I think I'm rambling a bit. But the long and the short of it is that Vampire: the Masquerade never got their dynastic metaphors firing on all cylinders. And I just don't understand how the fashion of putting wrought iron filigree on things to signify clan allegiance would have had time to be a thing. The demographics and time constraints don't support this sort of thing.


Toreador!

At best, we're looking at a thing that's placed behind the chair of a primogen in the Prince of London's meeting chamber. I don't see how this could have been formed into a tradition. For fuck's sake, vampires don't have generational turnover. They can't really have ancient traditions, they can only have fads.


Asking your sire about her clothing choices in the 1700s is like asking your aunt about her fashion choices in the early 80s.


If you go look at the old portraits, you can find evidence of the primogen wearing a very silly hat.

And then there's the other thing, which is that those ornate iron work things are actually a Baroque period thing. They appear in creepy old castles in Victorian stories because they are fucking old during that period. So we have vampires marking themselves with century old fashions. Which is fair enough, they are immortal and they can do that sort of thing. But I didn't sign up for Victorian Vampire to see a bunch of fuckers running around in Roman outfits.


Victorian Era people did dress up in Roman outfits sometimes. But you know what I mean.

AncientH:

The thing is that the clans tend to go through symbols every fucking generation. In the Dark Ages it was heraldic shields (that disobeyed the laws of heraldry); in the Modern Nights it was little symbols, in the Book of Nod and the Ericyes Fragments it was vague appellations...it was sort of meant to imply that clans were old and changed to the syntax of the times, but effectively I think it really does speak of an innate faddishness which only works when the majority of the vampires representing the clan are very young. If Great-grand-sire hasn't been seen in three hundred years and it's Young Johnny running the Brujah shop the last fifty years, then the image of the Brujah to Johnny's childer and grandchilder is...Johnny. But it pretty much requires a disconnect with the past which doesn't make a lot of sense when you're dealing with a society of immortals.

FrankT:

Each clan has an introduction, a section called “Overview,” a section called “Domain,” and a section called “Interests.” If those all sound kinda similar, that's because they are all pretty similar. It's a whole lot like they wrote the same information four times so that they could fill four pages instead of getting it all over and done with in one page. Here are four different sentences from different sections of the Toreador writeup. See if you can spot a theme:

While the term “shepherd” may have some ring of truth to it, the Toreador are simply the most adept at following mortal trends, though they rarely found them.

While other Kindred may associate with kine here and there, traffic with mortals is the Toreador's stock in trade.

At this point, however, the noteworthy Toreador aptitude for monitoring the mortal world comes into play –

In no small part, Toreador interest mimics the social trends of mortals at any given time.

The information in this book is not new. It's basically just slightly restated versions of previous writeups. But it's also slightly restated four times within this chapter. And that's not the beginning or end of it. Here's a bit from the couple paragraphs on Toreador from the last chapter:

Toreador flourish where mortals thrive and mortal arts evolve. They praise humanity more than any other clan, even if they do not emulate it as well as they would prefer. Toreadors master the intricate dance of high society, often claiming to lead it by example. They would act as shepherds of humanity –

That's the same. Fucking. Thing. Again. And again.

AncientH:

If I had a major complaint about these clan write-ups, it's that they're way too generic. The Gangrel are recognizably Gangrel, which is good, but their place in the Victorian setting...isn't. The thing is, we know a lot about the Victorian era; we have whole maps of Victorian London, tens of thousands of books, hundreds of thousands of photographs, more of their pornography than we'd like to admit...leaving aside how terrible Vampire handles the logistics of vampires, look at the population numbers:

Victorian London - Populations - Census - total population of London

1801 - 864,845
1811 - 1,009,546
1821 - 1,225,694
1831 - 1,474,069
1841 - 1,870,727
1851 - 2,362,236
1861 - 2,803, 921
1871 - 3,300,000

But, taking the population of the four counties in which London stands, we shall arrive at a number perfectly Chinese in its density; and when we come to consider that, according to the income-tax returns, three-fourths of those paying the tax in the metropolitan districts are living on incomes of less than £300 and the great mass on less than £100 a year, we shall arrive at a fair approximation of the industrial character of the inhabitants.

Routledge's Popular Guide to London, [c.1873]

Three million kine living in their own shit in 1871. Even if you allow one vampire for every ten thousand - which is a lot, considering each one will probably be eating thirty-plus people a year - that's a shitload of vampires in London. You could forgive the designers if they had just focused on London as a vampire setting, with a vampire population in the fluctuating low-three figures - that would give about ten regular Kindred for each clan, maybe as many transients and "just visiting" for the week from the country.

But they don't do that. Which is to say, I have no idea how a solitary gangrel is supposed to survive in your average pissant little English village, and this section does nothing to tell me.

FrankT:

The original seven clans are all solid vampire archetypes. I'm not saying that they are all good for a cooperative storytelling game (looking at you: Malkavians), but they are all solid. You can give the elevator pitch quickly and efficiently and there are people who will be on board. You have your stodgy aristocrat vampire, your bestial forest monster vampire, your crazy vampire, your vampire who looks like the vampire from Nosferatu, you have the handsome and rebellious vampire, you have your evil wizard vampire, and you have your tortured and artistic vampire. All cliché, but cliché because they have resonance.


Curse you Cocoafang!

Now what's really missing from all this is any real explanation for how these stereotypes get propagated. The Ventrue concept is that it is more powerful than other characters, but Ventrue characters don't any more points than any other. The Brujah concept is that they are young and rebellious, but they age at the same rate as everybody else and in five hundred years they will be just as much an elder as any Ventrue or Tremere.

There was never any real explanation of how the Ventrue got and kept their status. They were written that way because it's an important archetype, but the worldbuilding to justify it just wasn't there. And Victorian Age Vampire is a piece of shit, so as you might imagine they didn't actually solve this issue.

Fuck this book.

AncientH:

The Malkavian write-up pays lip service to Freud, but Sigmund Freud didn't even get his M.D. until 1881, and it took a while for his psychoanalytic theory to be published and gain ground. And I don't see them making a big deal about Havelock Ellis or Carl Jung, just because they happened to be born and grow up in the later Victorian era. So this is typical bad scholarship.

The Nosferatu are another case of opportunity lost. There was somewhere in excess of 13,000 miles of sewers in London by 1870. Not, like, all sewers you can stand up in and do Indiana Jones or Goonies-style shenanigans in, but we're talking a huge underground construction, with lost rivers and ancient temples from Roman Britian and fuck knows what else was down there. The Nosferatu should have been all over that like stink, but the "Sewer Rats" appear to spend most of their time playing Artful Dodger. FAIL.

FrankT:

The independent clans are clans where the clan is also the sect. If your sire was a Setite, you go to Setite meetings and respect Setite traditions and you aren't part of the Camarilla or (for the most part) the Sabbat. It's actually a kind of terrible idea. Nobody wants to run single-clan games, and telling players that their only peers are also their sisters is so lonely and hillbilly that it's no fun to even think about, let alone tell cooperative stories. Indeed, the entire structure of the Camarilla and Sabbat war was bad for storytelling. And the go-it-alone clans were if anything worse.

Then there's the other issue where the independent clans are actually pretty racist.


Assamites are Middle Eastern assassins. Giovanni are Italian mafiosos and sex perverts. Followers of Set are North African drug dealers.

But the real cherry on that shit sundae is the Ravnos. They are Gypsies. And they are described:

Sneak thieves and vagrants, liars and cheats, itinerant wanderers and slippery con artists, this clan of nomads serve as the dumping ground for Kindred prejudice.

It hems and haws about how Ravnos get discriminated against and shit. But like World of Darkness Gypsies, it's really hard to take this book seriously when it talks about how unfair antiziganism is when it pretty much accepts antiziganist propaganda at face value.


This sort of thing is a really big fucking problem in the real world and people fucking die. It's not a joke.


True story time: the person depicted on this is Johann Trollmann. The similarity in last name does not appear to be a coincidence.

The bottom line is that the independent clans came to stand in for much less iconic concepts and ended up being racist stereotypes. The Assamite and Ravnos portrayals are the most offensive, but only because discrimination against Italians is largely a thing of the past, while discrimination against Arabs and Romany is still very much a thing.


If this shit was still going on, I think we'd all be a bit more offended by the portrayal of Italians as sister fucking mobsters.

AncientH:

The Setites really should have gotten a better Vampire London setup. I mean for fuck sake, it was the era of brothels and opium dens and the Egyptian Revival. Maybe it's just because I've been reading a lot of Call of Cthulhu's London by Gaslight books, but the paucity of the material that applies specifically to the Victorian setting gnaws at me.

You can also sort of tell which clans get the writers' interests; the Giovanni get like six pages, even if it doesn't really tell you anything new.

FrankT:

There are no mechanics in this chapter. There's no new information. There's no reason to read it.

The clans and sects of Vampire needed to be rethought. It's not just that they weren't as good as they could be, but that they actually had game destroying flaws and were actually pretty offensive in a way that there just isn't a lot of excuse for.


Yeeeah.

But Victorian Age Vampire was not the book to solve these issues. The issues should have been solved in nWoD. The reboot to Requiem should have been the time to clear out all this embarrassing bullshit and move to firmer and less offensive ground. But it was a catastrofuck for other reasons and now it looks like the whitest people on Earth are going to bring it all back. Looking at Victorian Age Vampire's presentation of the clans, I can't help feeling a mix of resignation and dread with regards to the new White Wolf's upcoming World of Darkness offering.

AncientH:

Which is pretty much why everybody has their own Vampire Heartbreaker, somewhere. Mine is set in a sort of punk Bronze Age.

Anyway, we knew going into this chapter what to expect. The fact that there were no surprises was, ironically, not a surprise. And you can maybe respect the position of the writers, at least a little: the Modern Nights and the Dark Ages had already been written, so they couldn't shake the boat too much...but they still could have done something interesting with each of the clans, instead of what they did. Which was nothing.

FrankT:

Next up: Chapter Three: Characters
Actually get some rules up in this.

[hyzmarca]

The reason why the Ventrue run everything always seemed obvious to me. Some really old Ventrue spent a lot of XP on Presence and Dominate, and used those disciplines to effectively enslave every powerful vampire in his domain while giving them the illusion of free will. And then, realizing that he'd painted a giant target on his own back by taking power openly, he sires your PC, mind-controls you into essentially being his puppet, and then officially gives the throne to you with the unanimous support of the Primogen. And thus he gets to do whatever it is that elders do while a disposable pawn dodges all of the assassination attempts, or not.

Eventually, a pawn grows too powerful, eats some elders spends some willpower, and throws off the mind whammy that his sire put on him. At which point he repeats the cycle, thus ensuring an unbroken line of Ventrue princes.