Alt-white wolf?

[Username17]

It's well beyond that. This shit storm has been storming for a while now. And the company's earlier press releases on the matter were much more hostile to leftists. Like when the Dotmeister made a bunch of insulting screeds about leftists and the company supported him. But also that they did their playtest scenario 13 months ago. People complained at the time, and previously Nu White Wolf has done absolutely nothing but double down repeatedly.

Can I get a link to these?

Checking right now, it appears that ReinHagen's Facebook doesn't have any visible posts on it since the beginning of 2017. So my guess is that he either deleted it all or made it all private eyes only or something. The offensive playtest materials have been taken down at all the official sites, though I'm sure there are still ways to get them downloaded from somewhere.

In any case, it looks like someone at Nu White Wolf is doing some actual attempts at damage control. And part of that is memory holing all the stuff they said six months, nine months, and twelve months ago that pissed everyone off in the first place.

-Username17

[TheFlatline]

White Wolf 3.0 hired Zak S.? Are you fucking kidding me? I thought saying 'FAILSNAILS is a usable system' killed your career completely in the RPG industry.

Minor criticism of the source: White Wolf games don't have rules. Stop lying and pretending like they do.

Haven't we known about shitmuffin's involvement going all the way back to that really bizarre choose your own adventure thing that they put out on Steam and on smartphone apps? There was one for WW and one for Vampires, pretty sure shitmuffin was the main writer on the Vampire property.

Having read the thread, I for one am ready for the bloodline that goes straight MRA and calls themselves "the red pills".

I gave *all* my RPG books from my youth away to goodwill a few weeks ago. I felt a twinge of nostalgia when I saw all the WW books go. But I have less than zero desire to go back and get these new books now.

[Ignimortis]

So my friend actually got his hands on the V5 corebook. It would be hilarious if it wasn't so sad. All that nu-WW needed to do was to wash their hands of politics altogether and make a game. Not even a good one, we all know this is kinda impossible for them, but a playable one.

I want to reiterate - I do not approve of nazism. I do not approve of any extremist ideology left or right. However, putting a paragraph like this into a game is just appalling to me, and I cannot fathom why this needed to exist:

Vampire the Masquerade is not a fascist-friendly game. If you are a neo-Nazi, "alt-righter" or whatever you're calling yourself nowadays, we urge you to put this book down and call someone you trust to talk about where you went so wrong in your life.

It's the typical old-White Wolf condescending elitism mixed with the poisonous identity politics of today. They also mention that Camarilla and Sabbat are very conservative and of course the text presents that as something terrible and horrifying.

P.S. On an unrelated note, Nosferatu are kinda ruined. They're not monsters anymore, just slightly more hobo-like than the other clans. Slightly, because most art feels like it came from a cyberpunk book, not a vampire game set in the 2010s. Everyone wears clothes a few sizes too big unless they're fancy, and everyone looks like they'd be better off after a hot bath.

[Jefepato]

I kinda want to read the V5 book out of sheer curiosity (even though I have no doubt it will be a bad game and I already have V20 if I want to play a bad Vampire game for nostalgia), but it seems morally unacceptable to actually buy this.

Oh well.

[Username17]

Oh man. That's amusingly heavy handed. I understand why they felt they had to do that, but it's pretty obvious that if you're having to make statements like that to distance yourself from Nazis you are obviously not winning the news cycle.

The reality is that we're in the Age of Trump. You can't say edge lordy shit and have people laugh and assume you aren't serious. The president of the fucking United States said there were great people on "both sides" in the conflict between Nazis and anti-Nazis. Plus, he's putting children into concentration camps and forcing six year old girls to sign letters of fault for their own rapes they received while in state custody having been separated from their parents who were applying for legal asylum. That's not even a joke. That is what's happening right now. There are real people really doing shit like that, and there are tens of millions of people who affirmatively support these atrocities. If you make a dead pan reference to murdering Jews or whatever, people don't giggle and say "Man, that's so edgy" they just think you want to murder Jewish people. Because that is where we fucking are today. Creepy edgelord statements don't get and don't deserve a free pass anymore. People take them seriously now, and also literally.

Since the Swedes bought the White Wolf license, they have done various stuff to try to retake White Wolf's transgressive status from the 90s. You can't do that. Vampire the Masquerade was new and shocking and transgressive and shit in the early 90s, but people who were born after that game was written have graduated from college and had kids of their own. The surviving members of 2 Live Crew go on VH1 to give retrospectives for middle aged moms. Chasing after the coveted status of being new and transgressive is just obviously an unrealistic goal for a 27 year old property.

But beyond just being an unrealistic goal, the act of pursuing it ruffled a few feathers. If you try to offend people you will succeed. And in the current environment of just nobody anywhere having any patience or sympathy for provacative racial statements except actual Nazis, who are a real political force again in the real world. So if you say empty "provacative" shit, people will just assume that's the crew you intend to run with.

So yes, White Wolf did dig themselves a deep hole where they legit had to abase themselves in public and explicitly distance themselves from Nazis. Because they were such a bunch of fucking idiots that they left themselves in a position where it was seriously unclear that they weren't actually Nazis. Especially since some of the people they hired... kinda are actual Nazis. Yeah. That was a thing.

----



The broader issue of course is that NuNuWhite Wolf doesn't have my attention. Vampire has been dead for like a decade. Just slapping the old logos on a new book doesn't make me want to buy it. And childish antics to offend and transgress and buzzword buzzword doesn't do it either.

It's been long enough that I just genuinely don't care about the White Wolf brand anymore. Getting me to give a single shit about whatever they make takes more than just being old or being new. It takes being good. They needed to give me a pitch that implied that they had a vision for a game I'd actually want to play. Spoiler: they did not.

So what they got instead is that they've spent the last year and a half doing tone-deaf edge lord antics with repeated double downs and now they are fucking surprised at where this has gotten them and they are trying to swim bac to shore. Well... good fucking luck with that.

-Username17

[Kaelik]

I do not approve of any extremist ideology left or right. However, putting a paragraph like this into a game is just appalling to me, and I cannot fathom why this needed to exist:

Vampire the Masquerade is not a fascist-friendly game. If you are a neo-Nazi, "alt-righter" or whatever you're calling yourself nowadays, we urge you to put this book down and call someone you trust to talk about where you went so wrong in your life.

Maybe you just live in a more innocent place of the internet, but this sets off all kind of warning flags for me. Not sure why you would be appalled at the presence of such a paragraph, see nothing wrong with telling nazis to fuck off everywhere.

Also the part where you say "extremist ideology left and right" since extremist left ideology is "racism exists, and poor people shouldn't be so fucked"

[OgreBattle]

That Nazi making Guardians of the Galaxy movies got owned good

[Ignimortis]

Maybe you just live in a more innocent place of the internet, but this sets off all kind of warning flags for me. Not sure why you would be appalled at the presence of such a paragraph, see nothing wrong with telling nazis to fuck off everywhere.

Also the part where you say "extremist ideology left and right" since extremist left ideology is "racism exists, and poor people shouldn't be so fucked"

I try to leave my politics at the door if they're not relevant to the discussion. I consider it to be good tone for others to do so, as well. So finding passages about politics not in relation to the actual game world is rather unwelcome.

And since I live in a country that's been thoroughly fucked by the extreme left and doesn't seem like it's about to recover any time soon (poor people are still fucked), I'm pretty sure that's not what it's about.

A societal model that looks good is something like Norway or Denmark. That's left, but far from extremes.

[nockermensch]

And since I live in a country that's been thoroughly fucked by the extreme left and doesn't seem like it's about to recover any time soon (poor people are still fucked)

Unless you're from Venezuela, I find this bit somewhat strange. Care to elaborate?

[Username17]

Yeah, genuinely curious where you could be living where the extreme left has done anywhere near as much damage as even the moderate right? There's Venezuela in the here and now I suppose, and fairly little else.

As to Norway, they do count as extreme left by pretty much any standards you care to apply. It has the second highest tax burden in the world (coming after only East Timor, which is an extremely special case), and mandatory partial government ownership of the means of production. They are more communist in practice than the Soviet Union was at any point in its history. I think Norway is literally the farthest left country in the history of the world, so it's a weird example to bring up when pleading for moderation between extremes of left and right.

That Nazi making Guardians of the Galaxy movies got owned good

Ha.

The James Gunn situation is a perfect example of this sort of things. The dumb edgelord jokes he was making ten years ago were considered risqué but acceptable ten years ago. While the people dredging them up today are not operating in good faith (and several of them also make similar edge lord jokes in the here and now because they are legit terrible people), the reality is that the edge lord jokes that James Gunn made then would not be acceptable to make today. They just wouldn't be. Godwin's Law has been indefinitely suspended, Poe's Law is all. There is no bottom, and you can't double down on edgelording until it's funny anymore.

James Gunn should be rehired, because the bad taste humor he was using at the time was considered acceptable at the time and he's since stopped using that material and said explicitly that he doesn't think it's acceptable to use material like that. And he's right.

NuNuWhite Wolf just had to experience all that in a much shorter time frame, because they tried to use 90s shock jock material in 2017 and that really doesn't fly.

-Username17

[Ignimortis]

And since I live in a country that's been thoroughly fucked by the extreme left and doesn't seem like it's about to recover any time soon (poor people are still fucked)

Unless you're from Venezuela, I find this bit somewhat strange. Care to elaborate?

Oh, it's Russia. It's never been that good, but I figure everyone agrees that neither USSR nor the current situation are anywhere good, despite the swing from totalitarian left to authoritarian center-right in a decade. Nobody just cared to unfuck the situation instead of lining their own pockets, and now we're basically back where we began, but slightly more lax about following the party line.

And the Bolsheviks had been extreme left, I don't think anyone can argue about that? That's the point, both extreme left and extreme right tend to lead into totalitarian or authoritarian regimes, where personal freedoms are subtly or not-so-subtly curtailed.

Yeah, genuinely curious where you could be living where the extreme left has done anywhere near as much damage as even the moderate right? There's Venezuela in the here and now I suppose, and fairly little else.

As to Norway, they do count as extreme left by pretty much any standards you care to apply. It has the second highest tax burden in the world (coming after only East Timor, which is an extremely special case), and mandatory partial government ownership of the means of production. They are more communist in practice than the Soviet Union was at any point in its history. I think Norway is literally the farthest left country in the history of the world, so it's a weird example to bring up when pleading for moderation between extremes of left and right.

As I've said above, the dangerous extremes of the left and right are not about tax rates. As far as I'm aware, Norway implements the good parts of social democracy (living standards and equity) without the bad parts (severe censorship, ideological warfare, segregation by any standard).

I sincerely hope they don't crumble away into a totalitarian state like everyone else who tried to be socialists.

[Prak]

Oh, ffs. Russia was not fucked by the "extreme left." It was fucked by the usual selfish totalitarian fuckwads, who just happened to start by picking up a leftist ideology and selling it to the public as a means of control.

And extremist leftism is literally all about personal liberty. Or do you think anarchy is somewhere in the middle?

[Omegonthesane]

There isn't a well known road map from true far-left social democracy to Soviet Union With All The Bad Stuff Reborn - the USSR is certainly not famous for having once been democratic under Lenin before it went state capitalist under Stalin, and my suspicion is that this is because that didn't actually happen.

ETA: And most places that try socialism got fucked by the US military during the Cold War, because the US thought that poor people having food was an existential threat to Democracy(tm) instead of an opportunity to co-opt the appealing parts of Soviet rhetoric and thereby defang the appeal of Communism(tm).

[Prak]

Ah, yes, I forgot to attribute some of the fucking to the US.

[Username17]

Russia is a weird example. It had various governments that espoused leftist and rightist doctrines, but it's never been anything other than an authoritarian empire. You can set the timeline as far back as you like and even the horse nomads who used to ride across the northern steppes had an imperial and authoritarian clan structure.

There were a couple of major attempts to liberalize and democratize Russia in the 20th century, but those all met with failure. In every case some brutal strongman ended up winning the day and the secret police never stopped keeping dossiers on suspected subversives. Russia stopped having an explicit death penalty in 1996, but obviously the government continues to kill people just using extra-legal means. I don't think anyone thinks that government sponsored assassination is particularly better in practice than government sponsored judicial execution - but it is at least on paper more liberal to not have a death penalty.

I don't think you can find much evidence for Russian totalitarianism being a thing that happened "because of" left wing ideology. Russia had and has totalitarian governments of all nominal political affiliations left and right. You can't really put your finger on a point where people became less free by not being subjects of the Czar and becoming subjects of Stalinist dictatorship. It was a bad time all around, but the transition from monarchist dictatorship to nominally communist dictatorship isn't any more or less of a dictatorship.

-Username17

[Kaelik]

Yeah, the "extreme left" didn't fuck over Russia.

Russia experienced both super fucked up mass murder and also the greatest improvement of standard of living during the USSR, MUCH better improvements than they have experienced since the USSR ended.

The USSR made literally zero changes to actual political self determination and freedom in any direction and vastly improved standards of living at the cost of lots of murders. It's certainly not a success story to brag about, but basically the only argument that increased political deaths came from the "left" is that the left aspects of the government made the country a stronger more advanced country, and therefore better at killing it's own people. Which when you think about it, almost makes it sound like actually the left aspects didn't kill more people, and it was the dictator parts, the same parts that were killing people during the Tsar, and the same parts that have killed people since.

Also, if you are literally my age right now and living in Russia, you have in fact, suffered WAY more from the right than the left, since by any possible metric the "Left" hasn't oppressed you in any meaningful way politically, and the historical economic boons of the USSR are at minimum even, if not improvements over what you could argue you should have expected. Meanwhile, the right has both done 100% of the political oppression in your entire life, and also made the life of the average person economically WORSE when accounting for technological progress, since they have siphoned wealth out of the people and lowered standards of living for the poor for their own benefit.

But yeah, nothing about "increased democratic control over the economy" the thing that is extreme left, is responsible for a single bad thing that happened in Russia, and yet, that is the thing it means to be extreme left.

[nockermensch]

Russia is a weird place to talk about extreme or moderate left fucking over things, because since the end of USSR life expectancy and other well-being indicators just fell and didn't recover.

And even Venezuela's plight is more caused of them being sabotaged super hard by economic sanctions (see also: Cuba) than a fundamental weakness of leftism.

[Starmaker]

Oh, it's Russia. It's never been that good, but I figure everyone agrees that neither USSR nor the current situation are anywhere good, despite the swing from totalitarian left to authoritarian center-right in a decade.

The USSR was the first country to fully criminalize rape, in 1922. The first two countries unaffiliated with the Soviets to do so were Sweden (1955) and Norway (1971). The USSR was already collapsing by the time the oh so enlightened moderate West started catching up. If you are old enough to get appreciably screwed by the Soviet Union, almost everywhere else was a nightmarish hellhole when you were born.

In conclusion, kindly go fuck yourself.

[kzt]

The critical difference between the various ideologies of mass murder is you can't find very many people who will say in all seriousness that "Well, you know that true Nazism hasn't actually ever been tried."

[Kaelik]

The critical difference between the various ideologies of mass murder is you can't find very many people who will say in all seriousness that "Well, you know that true Nazism hasn't actually ever been tried."

The critical difference between the different ideologies is that no one tries to claim that the Democratic Republic of North Korea is a democracy, because they aren't. And the USSR wasn't socialist.

This really isn't hard, Stalin wasn't the first person to come up with the concept of Socialism, so if he tells you something is socialism that violates all the other definitions that everyone else had been using for decades there is no compelling reason to believe his is the most correct version.

We have a definition of socialism that exists, predates the USSR, is heavily studied and theorized about, and is the definition you find in dictionaries and wikipedia. Under that definition, Norway is more socialist than the USSR ever was. You trying to whine about how communism needs to be viewed as evil because of the USSR is basically identical to me railing about how democracy is bad because North Korea is bad.

[kzt]

You trying to whine about how communism needs to be viewed as evil because of the USSR is basically identical to me railing about how democracy is bad because North Korea is bad.

Well, sure. We have all the examples of Communist states that didn't produce mass murder. Like the USSR, China, Cambodia, Yugoslavia, Cuba, East Germany, Vietnam, Laos, Bulgaria, Hungary and Ethiopia. Oh, sorry that's the list of Communist states that engaged in mass murder. I can't find a list of Communist states that didn't engage in mass murders.

Perhaps you can provide that list?

[Bertie Wooster]

I can't find a list of Communist states that didn't engage in mass murders.

You will not find any notable country in the world that wasn't been engaged in mass murder at one point of its history or the other. It is what countries do.

[Username17]

I too would like to see the list of countries that haven't performed mass murders.
There is no absolute moral test for nation states. Or if there is, there has never been one which would pass it. Governments are judged good and bad as compared to the available alternatives. Hungary under the Hungarian Socialist Worker's Party did some pretty nasty things and I wouldn't support moving to that form of government, but pale in comparison to the atrocities committed in a much shorter time by the Regency of Hungary. Thousands of pointless executions of political opponents really pales in comparison to hundreds of thousands of people murdered in extermination camps as part of a concerted attempt at genocide. Doesn't make it right or good, but does make it worthless as a statement of absolute value.

Nation states do immoral things. Those things are bad by definition. But countries also do good things. The good things countries do are not made bad by association with the evil things they do. Nor are the evils made good by the triumphs.

The United Kingdom killed more than twenty million Indians in a series of brutal purges and planned famines. Nothing excuses that or makes that a good thing. But the fact that that happened doesn't make representative democracy evil by association. It doesn't make having a national healthcare service evil by asociation. It doesn't make fighting the Nazis a bad thing. The fact that the United Kingdom has done evil things does not mean that the good things the United Kingdom has done are retroactively not good things. The good things the United Kingdom has done do not make the evil things magically be OK.

-Username17

[Kaelik]

You trying to whine about how communism needs to be viewed as evil because of the USSR is basically identical to me railing about how democracy is bad because North Korea is bad.

Well, sure. We have all the examples of Communist states that didn't produce mass murder. Like the USSR, China, Cambodia, Yugoslavia, Cuba, East Germany, Vietnam, Laos, Bulgaria, Hungary and Ethiopia. Oh, sorry that's the list of Communist states that engaged in mass murder. I can't find a list of Communist states that didn't engage in mass murders.

Perhaps you can provide that list?

While everyone has correctly pointed out that every country does horrific mass murders and that the US and Britain top most of those countries in both absolute and relative mass murders, but you don't condemn their form of government, I want to reiterate my point again in attempt to see if you can perhaps glean the point I made that you completely failed to understand last time:

Here is a different list, this is a list of capitalist representative democracies who committed mass murders. Remember, every single one of theses is a capitalist representative democracy with totally 100% fair elections that definitely elected the leaders their people wanted with absolutely no undue influence and their crimes reflect on that system, and you have to answer for them:

1) United Soviet Socialist Republic.
2) People's Republic of China.
3) Democratic Kampuchea.
4) Federal Republic of Yugoslavia.
5) Republic of Cuba.
6) German Democratic Republic.
7) Democratic Republic of Vietnam.
8) Lao People's Democratic Republic.
9) People's Republic of Bulgaria.
10) Hungarian People's Republic.
11) People's Democratic Republic of Ethiopia or Ethiopian People's Revolutionary Democratic Front. (I couldn't tell what you were referring to since there appear to be a lot of mass murders in Ethiopian history)

Now, I actually didn't know, when I started making that list, that literally 100% of those countries had the words democracy/democratic and/or republic in their country names. I was originally going to just boldly assert they were all capitalist representative democracies, and then force you to explain why they weren't, and then turn it around on you to explain why they weren't communist. But instead, they all SELF IDENTIFY as democratic governments.

Now, once we accept that we cannot in fact, TAKE THEM AT THEIR WORD, you would have to present some argument for why they are communist besides "because I said so!" or "because they said so!"

This will be very difficult for you, because you are a small baby child with the brains of an adult mouse bouncing around in your skull and you've never once in your entire life read a single fucking word about what communism is not written by a Fox News Pundit on a white board.

But when you get around to reading the actual definition of communism, you will discover that in fact, none of those countries were in any way remotely communist, and your allegations they are, to anyone who ever has read any actual discussion of what communism actually, is a laughable fucking self own.

[Wiseman]

But muh communist manifesto!