Alt-white wolf?

[elotar]

The Chechnia piece is also just boring. This is real sad part about those whole V5 affair.

[Username17]

The Chechnia piece is also just boring. This is real sad part about those whole V5 affair.

This is the reason V5 is DOA. I genuinely like many Avenged Sevenfold songs despite the fact that Avenged Sevenfold is a homophobic neo-fascist band. I think The Usual Suspects is a fantastic movie despite the fact that Kevin Spacey sexually harassed underage boys. I think The Cosby Show was an excellent sitcom for its period despite the fact that Bill Cosby himself is a serial rapist. It's entirely possible and reasonable to consume and enjoy art that is produced by people who have done abhorrent things or who believe and espouse abhorrent things. I don't stop liking the original Terminator because Arnold was a terrible and corrupt governor of California. His failed policies specifically hurt members of my immediate family and I can still appreciate many of the movies he made.

I don't ask that my sandwiches be made by people whose politics are agreeable to me, nor do I demand that the people at the checkout counter of the grocery store be moral or even non-criminal people. It's perhaps more concerning when the artist is a horrible person, because consumption of art feels more like an endorsement of the artist as a person than other forms of capitalistic interaction, but at the end of the day it's something I'm able to move past if the art is of sufficient quality. The secularization of society works both ways, and just as people are willing to sell me products despite the fact that they don't like atheists, I'm willing to buy products from people who are racist shitheels.

The reason that it's so easy to condemn Rein*Hegen's anti-Russian racist rants and his homophobic slurs and his bizarre pro-Nazi equivocations is because the product as a whole isn't particularly good. If he was writing revolutionary masterpieces, we'd all have to tie ourselves in knots about how the art and artist are separate and we can like the one without endorsing the other. But we don't, because he isn't doing that. Indeed, the Dotmeister hasn't written anything anyone likes or cares about in twenty years. We aren't defending his work on its merits from insults against him as a person because the work's merits do not justify doing that.

-Username17

[TiaC]

There's a difference between a piece of art made by someone with shitty views and a piece of art that contains those shitty views. The Usual Suspects doesn't contain sexually harassment of underage boys, and if it did, its quality would suffer. I don't like a lot of Stallone movies because the contain his terrible beliefs, but when I watch his movies that don't, they are good movies.

There's also the other thing, that art often conveys a message, so while it's bad that the person selling you groceries is a shitwad, the only way you are enabling them is by doing a tiny bit to prevent them from starving. However, an artist who is shitty can act to make more people shitty in a much more effective way. Thus, I'm willing to take the position that we shouldn't support artists who are shitty people just because they are also skilled people. I'm not amazingly consistent about it, but knowing that a work was made by a bad person makes me enjoy it less.

[Thaluikhain]

Personally, I'd also add that it makes a difference if the author is benefiting from my consuming their work. Lovecraft isn't getting anything much from me reading his stories, for obvious reasons, but if he was alive today and speaking about race and/or funding groups, I'd not buy a book with his name on it.

[Dogbert]

At least that spares me of the expense of the Camarilla and Anarch books. While I don't plan on ditching V5 and still care enough for Vampire, after reading that shit, I can't toss money that way on a good conscience.

[elotar]

For your amusement - yesterday Chechnia piece hit Russian mainstream media:

https://www.kommersant.ru/doc/3800037

with the comments of Kadirov press secretary and all such stuff.

[Ignimortis]

Yup, I've read that one, had a laugh.

Also, White Wolf is dissolved and is now not an actual company anymore. They're a part of Paradox now.

https://www.white-wolf.com/newsblog/a-m ... white-wolf

In practical terms, White Wolf will no longer function as a separate entity. The White Wolf team will be restructured and integrated directly into Paradox Interactive, and I will be temporarily managing things during this process. We are recruiting new leadership to guide White Wolf both creatively and commercially into the future, a process that has been ongoing since September.

Going forward, White Wolf will focus on brand management. This means White Wolf will develop the guiding principles for its vision of the World of Darkness, and give licensees the tools they need to create new, excellent products in this story world. White Wolf will no longer develop and publish these products internally. This has always been the intended goal for White Wolf as a company, and it is now time to enact it.

[Iduno]

Yup, I've read that one, had a laugh.

Also, White Wolf is dissolved and is now not an actual company anymore. They're a part of Paradox now.

https://www.white-wolf.com/newsblog/a-m ... white-wolf

Yes, but also new material has been being produced for the TTRPG by (what a quick internet search tells me is) Onyx Path. I don't know if Paradox owns everything and is only licensing the Tabletop to Onyx Path, or if there are owners for every type of media like former FASA properties.

Edit: Or did they just say "fuck you, shut it down"?

[Username17]

Wow.

I mean yes, I referred to V5 as being "DOA" and I wasn't exaggerating for effect. But even so that's a more extreme failure than I was envisioning. I thought that Paradox was going to react to the shitty sales and controversy by kicking it down to a C-team shovelware factory, not that they were going to literally close the entire line without so much as a clan book and farm out the rights to whoever was willing to pay a licensing fee. It took quite a number of setbacks for CCP to get to this stage.

The more fundamental issue of course is that World of Darkness is a dated property that already lost its way long before it was shut down the first two times. It needs to be rebooted, and a very large amount of the material for it needs to be rethought or expunged. People were ready for a hard reboot when they did Time of Judgement, and Time of Judgement is old enough to drive a car.

But of course, if you are going to do a hard reboot, the World ofDarkness brand doesn't bring much to the table. The White Wolf intellectual property includes all the clan symbols, but very few of the clan names. You can't own the word Toreador, and the Setites are directly stolen from Conan comics. You could make a new game or novel about feuding vampire clans and just not call it "World of Darkness." You could make up your own IP, or you could frame it as a reboot of Nightlife or Underworld or Universal's Dark Universe.

Paradox thought they were buying themselves a option on role playing games by being able to revive a dominant franchise. But it doesn't work like that. Owning the old White Wolf IP just guarantees that you'll get a certain amount of interest in whatever the fuck you do. But you still have to make a quality and modern product or that interest is going to fade fast.

-Username17

[Longes]

Paradox thought they were buying themselves a option on role playing games by being able to revive a dominant franchise.

Not at all. White Wolf was acquired under Fredrik Wester, a Paradox CEO who stepped down in February. White Wolf was his baby and he, and his close friend Martin Erricson aka White Wolf lead writer wanted to make a World of Darkness multimedia franchise. Video games and a tv series and books and shit. But then suddenly Wester stepped down, DONTOND released Vampyr and got a deal with Netflix on making a tv series based on Vampyr, and a new CEO Ebba Ljungerud is not a close friend of Martin Erricson. So White Wolf was on thin fucking ice. If they made tiny profit and didn't rock the boat - everything would probably be fine.

But Dotmeister rocked the boat.

And he did it hard enough to get a bashing article in Polygon, response from Ramzan Kadyrov, and some mainstream media mentioning the controversy. So now the whole property is tainted and Paradox needs to wash their hands off the controversy.

[hyzmarca]

Lets be honest. Even the shittiest, shovelwaerist World of Darkness video game that Paradox could possibly make would outsell the best possible tabletop RPG anyone could make. CCP wasted the brand by focusing on one overambitious game to the exclusion of everything else. But the tabletop RPG was never going to be anything more than a collection of metaplot details to provide structure and ideas for more profitable ventures. However many tens of dollars Bloodlines still makes on Steam is worth the entire tabletop franchise and then some. Bloodlines is playable on modern systems because it still has an active and dedicated modding community. There is demand for good World of Darkness video games. There's not so much demand for new World of Darkness books.

[Dogbert]

So, WoD is officially abandonware now...

...that had to be the quickest rise and fall of a fifth edition since dnd.

[hyzmarca]

So, WoD is officially abandonware now...

...that had to be the quickest rise and fall of a fifth edition since dnd.

No.

The WoD is not abandonware. Tis is just a restructuring. In practual terms, the White Wolf devs have gone from having a very long leash, that was entirely around the neck of Martin Erricson, to all of the White Wolf employees being throw into their own cages at the kennel and only let out for walks one a day if that. The IP is still being developed. Offensive crap is being stripped. Controversial people are being fired. And the White Wolf employees are completely losing their autonomy. The semi-autonomous sub-division called "White Wolf" no longer exists and they're being integrated into the Paradox corporate command structure.

In practical terms, this means that future hires will go through Paradox HR, rather than the more nepotistic standards of the tabletop industry. It also means that nothing is going to go to print without someone at Paradox going over it for anything that comes off as absolutely horrible.


It also means that Onyx Path is about to do a lot more kickstarters,. They already have licenses for some V5 setting books, like Chicago By Night. They'll probably end up doing the rest of V5, since Paradox is going to farm tabletop development out from now on.

[Fucks]

That Martin Erricson idiot is still employed, though?

[Longes]

Chechnya is considering suing Paradox Interactive for libel. Tomorrow there'll be a press conference with the Chechen Minister of Truth and three guys from Studio101 - Russian distributors of V20. Because V5 has no official distribution in Russia.

I think V5 might be the first ttrpg to cause an international incident.

[hyzmarca]

That Martin Erricson idiot is still employed, though?

The phrase "New Leadership" generally means that he's been fired. The fact that his division is being managed by someone else from a different division generally means that he's been fired.

If he's still collecting a paycheck, it's for contract reasons. He's a lame duck at best.

[Mord]

The Chechen government response to this is so fucking weird. From Kommersant:

A spokesman for the head of the Chechen Republic, Alvi Karimov, told Kommersant that the game developers "drum up hype for themselves using the popularity of Chechnya and its leadership." “If they tied this game to any other Russian region, then no one would have paid attention to it. This is such an advertising move to stir up interest in the game, ”said Karimov. However, he believes that the creators of the game pursued a "political goal". “This is a continuation of the campaign to slander Russia and Chechnya,” Mr. Karimov believes. “I am sure that the same organizations that made claims about the persecution of sexual minorities stand behind it. They themselves released the game, now they themselves criticize it - this is the real game. Immoral and shameless."

From TASS:

The Chechen Minister for National Policy and External Relations, Jambulat Umarov, called the appearance of the board game Vampire: The Masquerade, where the republic is mentioned in a negative context, the result of "the behavior of businessmen who deceive people with illusions." Umarov also did not rule out the likelihood of litigation in connection with this story.

[...]

“This is the shameless behavior of various businessmen who deceive people with illusions. We are in a state of information war. I do not rule out that this probability is high enough that we will appeal to the courts,” Umarov said. A negative mention of Chechnya, the minister said, appeared in the game due to the fact that the republic consistently upholds traditional values ​​and explicitly expresses "its position on depravity and licentiousness."

The vibe I get is that the Chechen government, from their myopic Chechnya-centered viewpoint, thinks that White Wolf wrote slander about Chechnya just so they could ride the coattails of its popularity, because Chechnya and the Kadyrov government are just that fucking popular. Moreover, it seems to me that they are at least as offended by the unflattering personal depiction of Kadyrov as the part where they are accused of rounding up and murdering gay people, because the official party line is that there are no gays in Chechnya in the first place.

And then the part that really takes the fucking cake is that they're not wrong, not completely anyway, because this passage of the book actually was intended to slander Russia and Chechnya, due to the fact that its author is a Georgian nationalist who doesn't actually give a fuck about human rights for gay people and really did only mention them to make Chechnya look bad.

The tail end of Karimov's statement reveals the depth of depravity at which the Chechnyan government operates with regard to human rights. Karimov sees the backlash against Rein-Hagen's callous disregard for the plight of real people as the next step in some grand scheme concocted by the same international conspiracy that created the accusations against Chechnya in the first place, not as an organic outpouring of scorn against someone who trivialized human suffering. Karimov can only engage with this issue on the "ethno-nationalist politics" axis because he ideologically forbidden to even contemplate the existence of the "human rights" axis.

There are just so many levels of fucked-up that this whole situation is; words fail me.

[Longes]

Well you know. There are no gays in Chechnya - Kadyrov said so. So no human rights are being infringed on.

[elotar]

The situation is much more fucked up than you think - the only reason this theme was picked up by Russian media was that there is a struggle for "war recovery funding", which now goes outside of standard distribution of budget and is controlled mostly by Kadirov (or group for which he works as frontman).

As nearly everybody else in the country wants this money, but got no real political or legal ways to influence Putin (or the group for which he works as frontman ) decisions, they use any possibility to mock Chechnia in media (or blaming them for political murders, but this is quite different story).

Which is quite easy to do, because top Chechen officials are not very sophisticated even for medieval standards.

Idea of human rights is greatly foreign for anybody involved for sure.

[Longes]

Today was a press conference with Umarov (Chechen minister) and Studio101 (Russian games publisher and developer and localizers of V20). It was magical.

Umarov has declared white wolf nazis engaging in the genocide of the Chechen people and blamed games like v5 for suicide bombers. He was initially really mad at the localizers, but then apologized when they explained who they are and what they do. Umarov demands justice for the Chechen people and claims he'll pursue Paradox into international courts. When not going on angry rants he had some reasonable thoughts about the use of fiction to twist and erase people's history.

Studio101 lead is a smartass. He pitched to Umarov an idea of funding them (Studio101) to buy the license from Paradox and write a book about WoD Russia.

[Thaluikhain]

The vibe I get is that the Chechen government, from their myopic Chechnya-centered viewpoint, thinks that White Wolf wrote slander about Chechnya just so they could ride the coattails of its popularity, because Chechnya and the Kadyrov government are just that fucking popular. Moreover, it seems to me that they are at least as offended by the unflattering personal depiction of Kadyrov as the part where they are accused of rounding up and murdering gay people, because the official party line is that there are no gays in Chechnya in the first place.

Eh, whenever I see something like that, I wonder if it's not so much that they are wrong, that they are saying that for domestic political reasons and don't care what it looks like outside their country.

Studio101 lead is a smartass. He pitched to Karimov an idea of funding them (Studio101) to buy the license from Paradox and write a book about WoD Russia.

Huh.

[Iduno]

Studio101 lead is a smartass. He pitched to Umarov an idea of funding them (Studio101) to buy the license from Paradox and write a book about WoD Russia.

I'm not sure it'd be more playable, but it sounds more interesting: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dyatlov_Pass_incident

[Prak]

So... I've been working on writing a horror-focused one shot game using Werewolf, and specifically about the players taking the role of humans who will be turned into fomori in a Pentex facility. I've always found the idea of Pentex and fomori very fascinating.

But... well, ok, so I've always been aware of the tendency of the fomori stuff to use real world tragedy porn to build its game world horrifying stuff. I mean... demon-tainted slasher flick vhses that lead to disaffected youths becoming possessed monsters who reenact Jason or Freddy gore fests... whatever. Maybe it's the fact that I grew up Catholic, and a certain kinda fundie segment of Catholicism sees that as reality, so I'm jaded to it.

But the fomori who are created by actual fucking conversion therapy centers, called Normalites, made from people who sought out an actual gay cure? That's super problematic to me, to the extent that I just mentally excise the whole gay (now transgender in the W20 books) cure part, and in so far as I use that specific kind of fomor in this game, I switch the origin over to a Pentex-run Narcotics Anon group. Which... I have to admit has its own baggage, and I just have the privilege to only be addicted to caffeine and nicotine.

And as I keep reading up, looking for things to include in the game, I keep finding more such examples. And, I have to admit, my reception of each individual one is very biased, as I'm a queer person whose culture sees as white and who grew up in a reasonably lower middle class suburban environment. So the Abliphet, which is an evil spirit that nests in tenement buildings and pushes things so that the slum conditions simmer and create all kinds of negative emotions for it to feed on, that goes in the game. But the Crimson Pestilent, a sickness spirit that first appeared in the 50s but was rare until the AIDS crisis caused their numbers to explode, that I see as exploiting real world tragedy to create an edgy RPG enemy.

The point of all this, I suppose, is to say that the whole "Cechnya is run by vampires and the ..."Gay Genocide"(?) there are lies told by the vampires to make people distrust muslims" or... whatever that bullshit was... is nothing new to the World of Darkness. It isn't just that old WW was a bunch of mid-West white dudes writing about places they knew nothing about pre-Wikipedia with only nominal sensitivity, it's that the entire setting was supposed to be "Dark and Edgy" where there should never be any sense of overall accomplishment (ie, all accomplishment should be small and fleeting) and the best way said mid-West white dudes knew how to do that was to paint tragedy porn all over the pages, especially tragedy porn that involved people other than the Straight White Christian (raised) Cis Men they all were and (extremely inaccurately) envisioned their players as being.

And... that's the bigger problem with White Wolf stuff, to me, than it's shitty, inconsistent mechanics. I can patch the mechanics up to be a bit less shitty and a bit more consistent. And I have fond memories of playing a game that was nominally WoD. But when I look through the books for setting stuff and opposition to put in front of my players... I constantly confront this tragedy porn, some of which hits very close to the mark for me, and some of which doesn't, but can still be recognized as tragedy porn. Hell, there's tragedy porn in the Throwback fomori, which are created by a "workout program" that preys on toxic masculinity-induced male insecurities about not being strong enough, good looking enough, assertive enough... basically it preys on what we now recognize as "incels" afraid they're not "Chad" enough. And I don't use that variety of fomor in my games because they are explicitly homicidal rapists and I don't want to get into that, but there is a tragedy in men whose insecure masculinity drives them to improve themselves, through the lens given to them by a toxic culture, and ends in them losing their mental faculties and being reduced to slavering bestial rapists. And while incels are commonly seen as "acceptable targets," its really not any more fair to use them and this tragedy as a cheap source of RPG enemy than it is people who struggle with their sexuality or identity and society's non-acceptance of it.

And that's the big problem of White Wold/World of Darkness/etc. It wants to be a horror RPG, and it only knows how to do that through tragedy porn and splatterfests.

[Longes]

But the fomori who are created by actual fucking conversion therapy centers, called Normalites, made from people who sought out an actual gay cure? That's super problematic to me, to the extent that I just mentally excise the whole gay (now transgender in the W20 books) cure part, and in so far as I use that specific kind of fomor in this game, I switch the origin over to a Pentex-run Narcotics Anon group. Which... I have to admit has its own baggage, and I just have the privilege to only be addicted to caffeine and nicotine.

My perspective is that you can and you should use fiction and tragedy together, so long as you do it with attention and care. The example you gave here is, to me, fine. Like real conversion therapy, Pentex cure doesn't deliver. Instead people on the inside abuse and brainwash you. Like real conversion therapy.

The issue with Chechnya, to me, is that it's a slapdash black mark on the region for the sake of having An Evil Third World Country. Decades of war and nationalism, of authoritarianism, of varied and deeply troubled history of the region are all swept under the rug for Here There Be Vampires. It's colonialism at its finest.
And of course "Holocaust was a fake news distraction" is a mind blowing cherry on top.

[Prak]

Yeah, I've been thinking about the conversion therapy thing and... Well, part of my objection (aside from my personal feelings about conversion therapy) is that I would think Pentex would be smarter than that (and the whole Canon thing about Pentex being an actual secret is... Dumb). There will eventually be blowback that makes Pentex's job harder, and so there's no reason to associate with a conversion therapy company.

But so too, it makes no real sense cosmologically. The defining trait of Banes is that they feed on negative emotions, which specific emotion depends on the bane, and either conversation therapy produces emotions that can just as easily be created through other means that society will not turn against quite so near into the future, or the bane used feeds on self loathing, and it would be better for Pentex to just donate money to anti gay organizations that cause such emotions (generally speaking).

The problem overall, at least in the case of Pentex, is that WW had this idea of a personification of entropy as the antagonist, but in practice, they wrote it more like the Christian idea of Satan, and just filled the books for it with every objectionable thing they could think of, without regard to whether it made sense as something the personification of entropy would support. Conversion therapy created supernatural monsters make more sense as creations of the Weaver, as does a lot Pentex's Captain Planet villainy.