[OSSR]Clanbook: Assamite

[elotar]

Actually, Thetmes got dominate and there are couple other assamites with dominate in this grouping, so you can have some reasonable bleed defense and space in a deck for something else. Rare for assamites in a card game.

[ArmorClassZero]

The Assamites underline how much Vampire is a game primarily for white people, by white people.

But would that really be such a bad thing if they had just stayed in their lane? If WW had just stuck to writing about Europe + USA, with their target audience of white people in mind, wouldn't a lot of this have been avoided? For example, does anyone shit on L5R for being 97% Eastern Asia Fantasy Land?

I'm not sure what PoC would find more offensive: 1) getting aspects of your culture, history, religion, etc blatantly wrong; or, 2) ignoring those aspects with the dismissive "but this is WoD! things are different from IRL!" defense; or, 3) not having your people represented in a game about vampires; or, 4) tacking your people's culture, history, religion, etc onto these European vampires' culture, history, religion, etc as a footnote; or 5) relying on stereotypes about your people, and relegating them to a single clan and/or niche.

Was it to appeal to non-white people to try to get them into Vampire? Or was it to support some white people's desire to play this or that "exotic" Other? Was it just unthinking greed?

INB4 "ur raycis!"

[Thaluikhain]

Thorny issue. Mind you, I'd imagine the sort of people to get things horribly wrong about issues like that would also be the sort of people who'd not realise (or care) that they'd likely get things horribly wrong.

Now, understanding and depicting other cultures well isn't easy beyond a superficial level, but I'm not sure you need a great understanding to do an acceptable job. You aren't talking about real people so much as purely fictional vampires, you've got leeway there. Say they have to leave most of their own culture and belief systems behind when they gain enlightenment in their vampire cult thingy, and that it includes people from all other for when you mix the remaining parts up.

[Username17]

There's nothing inherently wrong with having Vampires in your game be white people with Eurotrash accents. If you declared that your Vampires were all descended from Dracula and got their start in 15th century Wallachia, that would be fine. You'd have to concede that five hundred and fifty years is a long ass time and there were some African and Asian Vampires now, but accepting that 'Vampire Culture' had an inherently Eurocentric viewpoint wouldn't be unreasonable. This is the route taken by lots of Vampire franchises, from Underworld to the Dracula movies. Even Blacula, which prominently features an African American perspective comes from a place of accepting and building on a European origin of Vampirism and an inherently European Vampire Culture.

But if you posit 'Vampires are Old as Fuck' like Blade or Vampire: the Masquerade, then Eurocentrism of Vampire Culture doesn't make any sense. In Blade the different houses on the council have their titles in pseudo-Cuneiform and some of the houses are culturally aligned to Trans-Polar Indigenous peoples. And logically, Vampire: the Masquerade should be like that too. But it's not. Because the fact that they associated the clans with modern cultures and the fact that they set their origin story in reference to ancient history that predated most of the European tribes even existing in a recognizable form meant that there was a severe and irreconcilable disconnect.

If Vampires are older than reliable history, they should have cultural trappings that reflect that. If you want to assign Vampire Culture to reasonably recognizable Eastern European origins, your Vampires should have a reasonably recognizable (and therefore comparatively recent) Eastern European origin.

Blacula and Blade are both fine ways to handle dark skinned Vampires. The way Vampire: the Masquerade went about it was not.

-Username17

[Ancient History]

If you're going to expand the setting material to include non-Western cultures and ethnicities, then you shouldn't have catch-all clans for brown people. That's pretty fucking basic, isn't it? If you actually want to roleplay characters and people from other cultures, you have to do a little research and make them more than an afterthought. When the fucking council of pirate lords from Pirates of the Caribbean is more balanced than your Primogen council, you've got problems.



The thing is, nobody doing Vampire gave any thought as to why there were X number of clans, or what those clans represented as far as how the vampire population was actually distributed. There should be a shitload of bloodlines, a lot of which would die out because being a vampire is hard. It's okay to say "okay, these are the Clans that survive," but the whole game made a big deal about there being 13 clans, even though there was never just 13 clans.

[Username17]

Also the sales pitch of "you can be any kind of vampire you want" pretty much necessitates that there is coverage for vampires other than Dracula knockoffs. The original Vampire: the Masquerade launched with 10 disciplines that collectively described abilities used by Dracula in the original book. That was obviously insufficient, and the idea that they could patch it out to sufficient coverage one power for one culture was insulting and reductionist.

Fundamentally there's a failure of scope in the very first book. Each vampire type doesn't cover the archetypes it's supposed to and also too there aren't enough archetypes. This is like how Monte Cook thought he was the "vampire guy" because in his circle of friends in the Dakotas he was. Rein Hagen just didn't have the depth of understanding of comparative culture and vampires to make that work.

The choice then was to either radically scale down the vision to something that he could write (basically: Eurotrash Vampires that are descended from Dracula), or hit the books and do some fucking game design. He opted to do neither, and ultimately this is why Vampire: the Masquerade is a disappointment and why it can't be made relevant again with a new edition of modernized edge lordiness.

-Username17

[Ancient History]

That last part is important. Despite the fact that the current edition is nominally 5th or whatever, there's a lot of cargo cultism still going on - keeping clans, disciplines, etc. because that's what existed before, trying to re-imagine ways that keep a lot of the old fiction while elaborating mechanics in ways that should have been done ten or twenty years ago.

It's enough. It's never going to be enough. Vampire needs a top-down scrap-and-rebuild.

One of the things I highlighted during our review isn't that "Assamites are always and forever bad" - but they are poorly conceived and implemented. There is a lot of room in the core concept of a group of vampire assassins, but the writer was crippled by making that particular puppet dance only to the one type of music being played. Ther is a lot that can be done with a 2,000-year-old supernatural assassination group based in the Middle East. You can hit the historical high note and nobody will blink. But what you need is how to make that shit relevant and interesting and different in the Modern Nights, and that as much as anything is one of the main problems with the Assamites as conceived.

[NixingAlignmntCrap>Lur]

One of the odder forms of either story failure or milquetoast racism, or both, is found when speculative fiction authors wrestle with the fact that the oldest people are black. It’s a thing that crops up a bit in geekdom. It showed up in the Battlestar Galactica reboot series finale after a screaming-squealing run of heel-face-turning and/or killing off minority supporitng casts with an enthusiasm that can only be described as gleeful. It has a brother in conspiracy theory: the ancient astronauts stories can be taken as crazy or fun, but the sinister side of them is that a lot of white supremacists like the idea of aliens building the pyramids because that means that brown people didn’t. Advanced math? Aliens. Astronomy? Aliens.

I bought, for cents during a store closing, Kindred of the Ebony Kingdoms, and was shocked into mild numbness by its racism on this point. If you have vampires be old enough to be biblical, they’re going to be brown. Like, really brown. Often. And while WW dodged some of this melanin necessity by being as ahistorical and research-free as possible, when you keep slurping from that well of ancient-ness by shoving more and more of your mythology into Northern Africa 3000 years ago, you eventually just start rubbing your readers’ noses in your own hangups.

But the really weird thing here is that this isn’t even consistent with WW’s inspirations. Anne Rice, whose works and personalities one can and should take many an issue with, nevertheless straight-up had her vampire progenitor(s) be not white. Wasn’t even a big ol’ howdy-do. WW could have just made a bunch of the older vampires be not-nonsensically european and no one would have blinked twice. Have them sire european childer and move on. Instead, the WoD is bizarrely centered on Europe even when it insists it isn’t. It’s petty to the point of self-humiliation.

This goes for all of their books, by the way. The mage Tradition Dreamspeakers was nearly every mage that wasn’t white and american or european. European witches get the own faction, european pointy-hats get their own faction — and that faction, the Order of Hermes, was itself broken down into a dozen factions — but most of the Earth was just slapped into one grab-bag. The only reason the laziness there wasn’t a bigger problem was because the system was so awful and the world background so problematic that you were already to tired from criticizing the other stuff to really hammer that point home.

And, of course, the mage factions also had an arbitrary number limit.

[Thaluikhain]

If you have vampires be old enough to be biblical, they’re going to be brown. Like, really brown.

Er, there's no reason for that to be the case. Now, if you mean that came from any really ancient civilisation people are likely to care about (with the exception of the people who built Stonehenge), or that there are written records about, sure. Fertile crescent and all.

And definitely agree about the racism inherent in ancient astronaut rubbish (again, exception of Stonehenge).

[Username17]

Indeed the actual Anne Rice position was that the ancientest Vampires were brown and we mostly focused on European vampires because they happened to be the protagonists. Not because they were the oldest and most special. There are ancient vampires, who are ancient and brown. Heck, in the movie for Queen of the Damned, they had Akasha played by Aaliyah.

It's fine for a game about Vampires in the modern nights to concentrate on America and Europe. Both Lestat and Blade do that, and it's fine. Just, don't tell me that the history of brown people is empty. It's stupid and offensive. You don't have to talk about brown vampire history, you just have to not tell me it can't be talked about.

Anyway, as we've mentioned the inadequacy of all the Vampire groups in Masquerade was overdetermined. Let's talk about what kind of design flow a Clan should have had.

Step One: Make a Family

• Every Vampire Clan should be able to create a small family of blood suckers that are different characters who fulfill different roles. One of the default adventures is that a group of vampires either comes to your town or causes enough havoc that the PCs go to their town, and you need at least five different archetype characters to make that stick.
  
  Note that this is what I consider step one, and it's a place where fucking Twilight does a better job than White Wolf ever did. The Volturi and the Olympic Coven aren't high literature, but they get the job done of having different social archetypes in them. Better than the Brujah ever did.
  
  And also note that this means that every clan needs to have a plausible means for a group of five to ten of them to survive night to night. It's OK for one character to be 'The Beast' that gets kept in the basement and fed buckets of blood from upstairs - but the whole clan can't be like that. Somebody has to send the blood down! It means also that you can't have any of them have needs that can't be filled five times over and that every vampire needs to be able to get by with no more than assistance from other vampires in their own clan. It's not OK to have clans like the Assamites where literally no one is able to feed themselves night to night.

Step Two: Join a Family

• Players actively attempt to play different things from each other. As such, the expectation will be that a five player coterie will have characters from five different clans. This means that each clan should have 'their thing' such that it genuinely matters and is thematically obvious that each of the characters is a different and specific clan.
  
  This is where Legends of the Five Rings does a better job than Vampire: the Masquerade ever did. The Crab Clan and the Crane Clan have thematic differences that transcend whether a character is a samurai or a ninja. On the flip side, I can't tell the difference between a Brujah and a Toreador. I can't even tell the difference between a Lasombra and a Ventrue unless one of them grabs people with his shadow dick.
  
  But it's not just that they have to bring something to the table to differentiate themselves, it's that they also have to come to the table in the first place. Every clan needs to be able to send a member to go work in a mixed coterie without getting all weird about it, because that's literally the actual fucking game!

Step Three: Make a Hero

• It may seem obvious, but every playable clan has to be playable. That doesn't just mean that their numbers have to add up. It means that they can't have any disadvantages that render them impossible to play such as the inability to travel or interact with society. It also means that they have to have a plausible archetype that is a reasonable choice as a hero protagonist.
  
  Disadvantages like Vampire: the Masquerade's death by sunlight or Vampire: the Requiem's predator's taint are simply not acceptable. But also too the V:tM concept of illegal clans is just obviously a non-starter. You can't have clans like the Assamites that are honor bound to stab all the other kinds of vampires because at the actual table the other player characters are going to be all the other kinds of vampires.

So where does that get you? It means that when you make your noble bloodline clan, it has to have the domineering sire, the brash and haughty scion, the weaselly underling, the efficient vizier, and the dedicated warrior all need to be the same clan. And any of those that are playable should be recognizable as members of the 'noble bloodline' clan when put into a coterie with other vampires that are from different clans.

This in turn implies that you should probably have a concept of 'roles' and think what it means for a character have each and every combination of role and clan. And yeah, obviously Vampire: the Masquerade never did that, with most clans being shoehorned into a single role if that.

-Username17

[ArmorClassZero]

One of the odder forms of either story failure or milquetoast racism, or both, is found when speculative fiction authors wrestle with the fact that the oldest people are black. It’s a thing that crops up a bit in geekdom. It showed up in the Battlestar Galactica reboot series finale after a screaming-squealing run of heel-face-turning and/or killing off minority supporitng casts with an enthusiasm that can only be described as gleeful. It has a brother in conspiracy theory: the ancient astronauts stories can be taken as crazy or fun, but the sinister side of them is that a lot of white supremacists like the idea of aliens building the pyramids because that means that brown people didn’t. Advanced math? Aliens. Astronomy? Aliens.

I thought white supremacists took the stance that white people were responsible for every ancient civilization because white people are the smartest, and that those civilizations fell by being overrun by the brown hordes who now populate the areas. Some of them may also think white people are the descendants of an advanced alien civilization that crashed here on Earth. Hard to say.

[The Adventurer's Almanac]

Those ideas aren't mutually exclusive, hilariously enough.

[Thaluikhain]

I'm not sure putting a great deal of thought into the details is a requirement.

[TheGreatEvilKing]

The saddest part of this is that there are legitimately cool vampires in other cultures that would be more interesting than "another fucking dracula". Look up the impundulu. You're a crazy lightning bird that can turn into a dude and suck people's blood. You have a built in plot hook that people want to murder you for your fat for traditional medicine.

There are a whole bunch of weird ass scary vampiric critters running around the myths of other cultures that going "uh these vampires are black and live in Africa" is just fucking boring.

I would also expect all kinds of weird vampires to be found in the US, just because you have people coming in from all over the world, so you could have a Dracula, an Impundulu, a Soucouyant, and whatever else in the same party for crazy shit. Then you can fight crime!

[Username17]

Certainly a problem with Vampire: the Masquerade is how unread everyone involved was in the subject matter. Rein dot Hagen wrote Vampire: the Masquerade when he was 26 and he thought he was doing deep cuts by referencing Nosferatu - a German unlicensed Dracula knockoff from 1922. Although to be honest the fact that all other references except Dracula itself were from the 70s and 80s, it's entirely possible that they were referencing the 1979 remake by Werner Herzog. When they came to expand the Clans, well... the Followers of Set are a reference to Conan Comics. Not even Lair of the White Worm, just... Conan Comics.

When you're talking about a world of darkness, you'd presumably want to go down to Mexico and bust out the Onaqui, the Tlahuelpuchi, and La Llorona. You'd want to Southeast Asia and bust out the White Lady, Taai si Wong, and the Penanggalan. But you didn't get any of that. Rein Hagen claims hat he didn't even read Interview with the Vampire until late in the design process - and I personally believe him on this point. That he literally thought that if he did too much research it would spoil the originality of his work. It's a jaw dropping monument to hubris, to be honest.

The actual source material used is just very very shallow. But beyond that, even taking as granted that all the source material is the book Dracula plus some books, comics, and movies from between 1976 and 1987, the coverage of that source material is actually pretty awful. Dracula goes out in the daylight without dying, he's just less powerful in sunlight. The Lost Boys fly and use nightmarish illusions.

The thing where the 'Jyhad' is poorly researched to the point of being culturally insensitive and also too is not very well thought out is pretty much a synecdoche of the entirety of World of Darkness. The actual selling point of World of Darkness turned out to be 'look at all the cool vampires you can be!' and not only was the knowledge lacking in breadth and scope of vampire material, but Rein Hagen took deliberate steps to keep himself from being to informed about his subject. In retrospect it's actually kind of insane that that happened.

-Username17

[Lokey]

There's one glaring omission I can see.

We need a pithy wrap-up of why you could care less about Quietus, something along the lines of Frank's "the first 3 dots of Protean are worth less than a flashlight and a shovel." Ancient History's line about you can't rub poison in the Ventrue's condom and expect to get anywhere is heading in the right direction.

[Username17]

There's one glaring omission I can see.

We need a pithy wrap-up of why you could care less about Quietus, something along the lines of Frank's "the first 3 dots of Protean are worth less than a flashlight and a shovel." Ancient History's line about you can't rub poison in the Ventrue's condom and expect to get anywhere is heading in the right direction.

The thing is: Quietus actually does some cool shit. Let's start with the first version from the Player's Guide:

[*] Silence 20-foot radius.

This power is actually fucking amazing. It lets you dispense with subtlety altogether and just go ham with chainsaws and plastic explosives. It's absolute so you never have to worry about setting off alarms or alerting guards or getting the cops called. All fortresses are a fucking joke because there's no limit to how hard you can go without giving away the show.

[*]• Weakness

This ability is well named, because it's weak as fuck. You spend a blood point and tag your opponent and then they don't die. They just lose a stamina point. Now this is secretly the most effective attack against people who know the rules, because Stamina is a dump stat and if you hit zero Stamina you fall into Torpor. But it's useless against NPCs (who all have 2 or more Stamina) and also the ability to take an opponent out in one hit by expending blood is kind of irrelevant when you can take people out in two or three hits by spending zero blood and just attacking with weapons.

[*]•• Disease

This ability does functionally nothing. It's just like Weakness except that it lowers all three physical attributes by one. The one edge case is that you might theoretically encounter someone with 1 dot of Strength and 2 dots of Stamina and then you could paralyze them with a single hit. But you still don't care.

[*]••• Blood Agony

This lets you spend blood to power up a weapon to do aggravated damage. That's... fine. I mean, obviously this is way too fucking expensive to buy a discipline up to level 4 in order to buy aggravated wound hits for one blood point per hit. It does kill things, but Ward Versus Kindred is cheaper and better. And when you have Quietus One you could fight with a fucking thermal lance.

[*]•••• Taste of Death

This lets you spit your blood at people like it was the caustic blood in Aliens. There are scenarios where that would be good, but having a weapon that is "almost silent" when your first dot power makes an actual flame thrower literally silent is puzzling and dumb.

Basically the first dot is frickin amazeballs and the rest of the discipline is totally worthless outside some weird and contrived situations.

-Username17

[Ancient History]

Quietus came into its own in Vampire: The Dark Ages because of the combo power Retain the Quick Blood, which gives you back the blood you spend on Celerity, which means you could use Celerity more often, which means you could kill more people and were generally better at combat. Now, it's a 21 XP power which requires Celerity 3, Quietus 3, so you can't exactly start the game off with it, but it is still a pretty damn good power since you no longer had to really budget blood use for Celerity.

[K]

Was Assamite Sorcery in the Revised Assamite book? I can’t remember where the ritual was that let an Assamite lower his generation with enough bottles of blood of a lower gen?

[Ancient History]

Assamite Sorcery was in the revised Clanbook, the ritual was in Blood Magic: Secrets of Thaumaturgy

[Ancient History]

Which reminds me that we should do an OSSR of Sins of the Blood at some point.

[Libertad]

Basically the first dot is frickin amazeballs and the rest of the discipline is totally worthless outside some weird and contrived situations.

-Username17

This is something that New/Chronicles of Darkness has not really learned in the newer Vampire books either. There's so many high-dot powers which just amount to "you do damage like a handgun but with BLOOD/MAGIC" it's not even funny.

[Ancient History]

In broad terms, that's because most of the Disciplines aren't building to anything or following any kind of set, rational expansion of abilities - Fortitude and Potence might be shit, but at least you know more dots equal more dice or whatever. Too many Vampire disciplines have no real hierarchy of abilities...and the exception, Viscissitude, is so versatile compared to the rest of them that it's often considered horribly overpowered.

It's a lesson I thought about a good bit during Space Madness!, because the general idea of a five-tier hierarchy of powers is cool, but creating a reasonable mechanical and thematic progression is a lot more difficult. For Vampire, it largely didn't fucking happen.

[Ancient History]

I should expand on that a little: there is never any indication among the various disciplines what a 1 dot power is worth, or what a 5 dot power is worth. Frank has a more eloquent rant about this somewhere, but consider this as a sample:

5 dots in Animalism lets you send your Frenzy into someone else
5 dots in Auspex lets you travel the astral plane
5 dots in Dominate lets you possess a mortal
5 dots in Obfuscate lets you hide an entire group
5 dots in Obtenebration lets you turn into shadow
5 dots in Potence gives you 5 automatic successes on Strength roles
5 dots in Presence can awe a crowd
5 dots in Protean lets your turn into mist
5 dots in Vicissitude lets you turn into blood

Potence is a linear discipline, where more dots just equal more automatic successes. There's no individual powers, it's all a numbers game, and she with the most numbers wins. It isn't particularly cool, but everybody can follow it: more dots means stronge.

Presence and Obfuscate's 5-dot abilities both expand on lower-dot abilities. They don't do that in any sort of consistent way across disciplines, but within disciplines you can do a lot worse with "Okay, at this rating you can do X but to a group."

Obtenebration, Protean, and Vicissitude all have variations of "turn into a form that's harder to kill and may have less/different utility." They get there by very different paths, but that's where they end up at. It's like the persons writing those disciplines looked at an initial one (Protean) and decided that the later-detailed disciplines should have an equivalent power (for balance). Turning into mist is pretty basic Dracula-fare; turning into a puddle of blood or a living shadow are a bit more exotic.

Animalism, Auspex, and Dominate are just completely off the fucking chain. Literally, they have nothing to do with the powers that came before. The 4-dot power for Animalism lets you possess fucking squirrels. Or monkeys. The only difference between the 4-dot power for Animalism and the 5-dot power for Dominate is you have to maintain eye contact for Dominate, it doesn't work on squirrels, and you're not supposed to argue that humans are animals for Animalism. You could seriously have a nutter Gangrel with a ghoul chimpanzee army pretending to be a Ventrue jungle lord, and who the fuck is going to know the difference?

You don't have to go that far - most players are never going to see the 5-dot powers, and the 1-dot powers are all over the map too. There's no discipline-making guideline that says X-dot power does Y-equivalent amount of damage if its deals damage, or affects Y-number of people. You just don't have any kind of hard mathematical limit. You get...random shit.

[Username17]

Now the original Quietus was totally forgettable. One bomb-ass sound manipulation power at first level and then four dots worth of weird bullshit attack modifiers you don't care about. But when it got rewritten in Dark Ages, and the Revised Edition and the Revised Clanbook and the 20th anniversary edition and V5 and probably a couple other places that it's been rewritten... it's done other stuff.

Like literally, depending on what book you read and what caste of Assamite you are, the 2nd dot of Quietus might be:

• Weakness
  Ishtar's Touch
  Truth of Blood
  Scorpion's Curse
  Scorpion's Touch

Despite the fact that some have similar names, those are all different powers. And one of them is named after a goddess that Muslims regard as a primary sin to honor in any way, because of course it is. And I am almost certainly missing some of these.

Quietus started as something that was bad and dumb. And it got rewritten so many times that it became an incomprehensible mess. It wouldn't surprise me if some version of Quietus had a few decent powers in a row. but to get back to what Ancient History said there's no actual logic for what any of these powers do. You can't predict the next power by looking at the current power or by looking at the one after that. You can't even predict what they do by looking at the name.

The same power appears by different names in different books. And also too the same name gets used for different powers. And the same rough power gets reworked mechanically so it works totally differently. There is a power called "Blood Essence" in one book as a one dot Quietus power, and there's a power called "Blood Essence" in another book as a five dot Quietus power. Why? What the actual fuck?

-Username17