[OSSR]Ghouls: Fatal Addiction

[Ancient History]

OSSR: Ghouls: Fatal Addiction



The theme song for this part is Bloodletting by Concrete Blonde

FrankT:

We're setting the wayback machine for 1997, which was a momentous year for White Wolf and also the United Kingdom. The Scots had just cloned a sheep, and the Spice Girls had broken all kinds of records by having four back to back number one hits. But it was really White Wolf's best year, because that is the year TSR went bankrupt and left White Wolf as the #1 company in the industry by default. White Wolf attempted to capitalize on this newfound success by expanding their brand to cover other things, which brings us to the theme of this year: “Year of the Ally.”

Starting in 1995 and running until about 2003, White Wolf tried to drum up business and interest by having “theme years.” This was kind of like when WotC tried to declare 2009 as the “year of 2s” and 2010 as the “year of 3s” but was for a period more successful. 1995 and 1996 were the “year of the hunter” which probably sounds like something that could have been declared for any year for the world of darkness and also probably sounds like it should have been just one year. But, well, the whole theme years thing got off to a rocky start. We're going to be talking about the flagship product of the first theme year to actually hit its publication quotas: Ghouls: Fatal Addiction.

AncientH:

It was arguably the height of the Vampire product line: Guy Davis and Vincent Locke basically owned the art for Vampire: the Masquerade at the time, with art direction so loose that they could (and did) get away with anything. It was a no-fucking-about period for White Wolf. There's BDSM gear on the cover, they had their own official website. Hot Topic had gone public the year before, Interview with the Vampire (1994) was readily available on VHS, Buffy the Vampire Slayer hit television and tens of thousands of teenagers were dressing in affordable black clothing, experimenting with eye-liner, and in dire need of being called someone's thrall.

This is from Wikipedia.

D&D was a dinosaur, and White Wolf aimed to bury them.

FrankT:

Ghouls: Fatal Addiction wasn't the only “year of the ally” book they made. It's just the only book in the series that anyone gives a shit about. Technically, there were a total of seven. There were two books that were just the Ghouls book converted to LARP and Dark Ages. Mage got a “book” but it was just reprints of some “out of print” materials from 1995. Yes. Really. The originals came out in 1995, and they “brought it back” in 1997. I'm not sure how out of print it possibly could have been. Wraith got a book about Mediums, who are people with the dubiously useful power to see ghosts. Changeling got a book about the Enchanted, who are people who got the bad touch from faeries somehow and no one fucking cares even though that book was written be Steve Kenson. But probably the worst one was Kinfolk, which is the Werewolf book about people (and dogs) who have the dubiously useful power that there is a small chance their children (or puppies) will turn into werewolves at puberty if they fuck their cousins. Yes. Really. That one is so forgotten that the White Wolf wiki doesn't have a page for it.

AncientH:

It should be said that Vampire: the Masquerade took an interesting approach to ghouls. The mythological ghūl of Arabic folklore was a cannibalistic demon that haunted graveyards, imported to Western folklore through The Arabian Nights, where it merged with the concept of the revenant. The most modern update to the ghoul was by H. P. Lovecraft & co., who presented them as less human monsters - critters with canine characteristics, who left changeling babies among humans before their unnatural appetites came to the fore.

V:tM's are different, borrowing more from Bram Stoker's Renfield and the local drug addicts from Underground Atlanta.

A more wretched hive of scum and villainy...also, the Underground isn't that cool, I don't know what all the fuss is about.

These were blood junkies, pure and simple, and the writers took full advantage of that.

FrankT:

Ghouls are basically modeled on Renfield from Dracula. They get fed blood from a vampire and get modest super powers and live forever, as long as they keep getting vampire blood. They are explicitly weaker than real vampires, and they are addicted to vampire blood in a physical, emotional, and spiritual fashion. They are pretty much just the bitches of vampires, but they have some real supernatural powers and lack many of the very real weaknesses that define a world of darkness vampire. In many ways, being a ghoul is the preferred state of being – even if you are required to toady to a vampire and have less raw power. And that's probably why this book was so much better received than the other books in the series, which were about people that there was no reason to play and no one cared about.

AncientH:

That being said, Ghouls also had the advantage that just being a ghoul didn't initially rule out a lot of other things they could do with their characters. Ghouls could learn sorcery, or be psychic, pick up medium traits, be a kinfolk - ghoul + mage, ghoul + werewolf, ghoul + changeling, and ghoul + enchanted weren't ideal, but even then weren't impossible. So ghouldom represented a level of interaction between the gamelines that could be both interesting and abused - it's no surprise that Samuel Haight was a ghoul, but it was also noteworthy that years later when they did the Order of Hermes vs. Clan Tremere storyline, ghouldom + Mage powers was a significant part of the story.

Credits

FrankT:

Books in the 90s were almost unbelievably small by modern RPG standards. The takeover of desktop publishing hadn't happened yet, and companies just weren't putting out 400 page magnum opi (WFRP excepted). Ghouls: Fatal Addiction has two authors, two artists, and one developer. It has a lot less content than what you expect to find in a modern book (116 pages and a lot less words per page), but it's much less of a committee production. There is, for good and ill, a relatively clear artistic vision here.

AncientH:

You might never have heard of the authors. Ronni Radner's only other credits are for Mediums and the Dark Ages Companion; I can only speculate, but maybe he graduated college and got a real job. Ethan Skemp has been much more prolific, although not for a lot of products you'd actually read - I don't think I'd write Aberrant under my real name, but that's just me.

We've talked about Guy Davis and Vincent Locke before, both of whom are love-'em-or-hate-'em types - there doesn't seem to be much in between. Guy Davis had a solid career doing some amazing comics like Honour Among Punks and The Marquis, and went on to be one of the guiding artistic lights in the Mignolaverse on B. P. R. D. Vincent Lock is most known for his Cannibal Corpse covers, but has had an interesting artistic career outside of that as well - for example, he provided illustrations to accompany Caitlin R. Kiernan's collections of erotica.

FrankT:

This being 1997, the book directs you to newsgroups. Those were things people used before webforums were a thing. They were trying to funnel people into alt.games.whitewolf and rec.games.frp.storyteller. People used to be able to create new newsgroups on usenet just by declaring their desire to do so, and White Wolf wanted to get people reading and writing to the ones that had official endorsement rather than start hanging out at alt.games.whitewolf.fanfic or alt.abduckted.by.lezbian-vampires.flonk.flonk.flonk – which are of course both actual usenet groups that might give White Wolf a bad name if anyone still cared about usenet or White Wolf.

AncientH:

Or not. White Wolf pretty openly acknowledged the "vampires are sexy" appeal of their demographic, just the same as they realized and capitalized on the inclusion of taboo material like Satanism, "pagan" New Age bullshit (hey, it'll play in Athens, Georgia), blood, violence, rebellion, etc. It was all Hollywood threshold-breaking stuff, pretty tame by the standards of anybody that didn't have a rod up their ass, but it was unapologetic in a way that that D&D - still smarting from the Satanic Panic of the 1980s to a degree - hadn't quite overcome yet. White Wolf was, quite simply, the Bad Boy/Girl of RPGs, a reputation it maintained for quite some time.

Part of the reason it worked, of course, is that Vampire was scripted by believers. We've talked before about the inherent Christian mythological bias of White Wolf, but it bears repeating that as silly as it sounds, atheists and agnostics largely don't write "Satanic" material, and the result is that a lot of the "serious" taboo-breaking stuff is more than a little silly. So just like Jack Chick can unironically include a superpowered Satan tricking people into giving up their souls to try and scare people straight, Vampire wasn't above including the awesome horrors of being a BDSM bloodpet with bitchin' powers. So when you read Ghouls: Fatal Addiction, you have to think of it a bit like a Chick Track for D.A.R.E. It's not quite an anti-drug PSA where you're reduced to giving blowjobs to vampires for another hit, but it's not far off.

[Maxus]

Always liked that part of Preacher.

Ahem.

This sounds like an interesting book on its own merits. By all means, please continue with the reviewage.

[codeGlaze]

You guys are on a kick... don't burn yourselves out. O.o

[TheFlatline]

This was one of the most frequently used splat books in Vampire ever used in our gaming groups.

The book was generally used to give girlfriends a place in the game that is sort of powerful without being full blown vampire. If they stuck around, they got embraced. If they split, they became a retainer dot on your character sheet.

[TheFlatline]

Bonus points: Those Tzimitze ghouls are especially tame compared to some of the fiction descriptions of what the fiends would do to them with fleshcraft.

[Schleiermacher]

Wasn't the Kinfolk book the book that debuted Samuel Haight, where his concept hadn't yet gone completely off the rails and was basically "serial werewolf killer"?

[Desdan_Mervolam]

Wasn't the Kinfolk book the book that debuted Samuel Haight, where his concept hadn't yet gone completely off the rails and was basically "serial werewolf killer"?

No. That was a packaged adventure called Valkenburg Foundation. Its been a while since I read Kinfolk: Unsung Heroes, but flipping quickly through it, it doesn't seem to mention him or his ersatz "Tribe", the Skin-Dancers.

The funny thing is the original idea for Samuel Haight was not a bad one. The idea was that Garou treat kinfolk like absolute shit and that is explicitly a bad thing. Haight got sick of the treatment and started using his intimate knowledge of how werewolves work to become a really effective hunter, and then found a ritual that would allow him to become a werewolf.

This could all be used well, the problem came from the fact that they kept going around and giving him powersets from other rulebooks. He killed a bunch of Tremere and got ahold of Thaumagurgy (fun fact: in first and second edition you didn't need to be a vampire to use Thaumaturgy) turned himself into a werewolf, then he got ahold of a magic item that gave him sphere magic. He basically became a walking symbol of everything the head designers at White Wolf did NOT want in their game.

I think part of it was kind-of accidental, because I believe the second appearance of Haight (Rage Across the Amazon) explicitly states that his attempt to complete the Ritual of Sacred Rebirth was thwarted, and was trying to take him in another direction, but then other people decided that the Skin Dancers were a good idea. Of course, last time I read Valkenburg, I remember the ending being all bullshit boxed text where they get there just as the ritual ends, Sammy turns into a werewolf, realizes that using murdered werewolf skins taints the ritual, going mad from the realization, and then disappearing into the umbra and escaping.

[Maxus]

He's mentioned. I just looked it up. They bring up that he was Kinfolk who went crazy from not being able to Change.

[Ancient History]

Chapter -1: Fiction: Blood Is Thicker



The theme for this section is Your Haunted Head by Concrete Blonde. That's not our determination, the book actually says that.

FrankT:

White Wolf certainly liked to put fiction at the front of their books, and with books like Ghouls: Fatal Addiction under their belt you can kind of see why. A nice piece of genre fiction can set the mood for your book, and it's easy as hell to get some. With the kind of mopey goths you have around the office, someone probably just has some fanfiction on-hand. There was literally a newsgroup dedicate to the stuff back then, but your writers also sit around writing poetry and flash fiction on their own time, so it probably doesn't meaningfully set back production schedules to include it. And it does fill page count and at least potentially serve a purpose. As you go through White Wolf's history, you can see them getting more and more decadent and dependent on the intro fiction, and the intro fiction becomes more and more skippable. By the time they made Scion ten years later, the intro fiction had metastasized into a rambling 38 page behemoth that displaced the fucking table of contents. But in Ghouls: Fatal Addiction, that hadn't happened yet. The intro fic was listed in the table of contents and was reasonably tight. It comes in at just 5 pages (the table of contents claims 6 but is factually wrong about what page it starts on), and with a format that would put just 500 words on a page if it filled them, but it doesn't. Half the pages are filled with pictures and white space, so the opening fic barely counts as a short story.

If White Wolf had kept their intro fiction at this level rather than allowing the fucking things to bloat until they were novellas of TL;DR bullshit, they wouldn't have the bad name they have today.

AncientH:

The nice thing about the Gothic Punk World of Darkness setting is that in the early days, at least, White Wolf wasn't afraid to show the world as a filthy, squalid, hopeless, joyless place where the protagonists were stuck in dead end jobs and generally hate the life they have.


This was not the most disturbing picture from the search term I entered.

So the narrator of this story is a plumber ramming his plunger into overflowing toilets and eyeballing the neon sign on the abortion clinic across the street. It's not social commentary, it's not commentary at all. It's just a bunch of stuff you'd never see in a Dungeons & Dragon sourcebook, and that's why it's important - D&D has always been high concept fantasy, with no real talk of going to the bathroom or abortion. People like to talk about punk like it's the music or the scene or the fashion, but the crux of it and always has been the no-pretensions give-a-fuck attitude.

FrankT:

The actual story is pretty incoherent. It's a series of snippets, to evoke flashes of memory or perhaps just to be too cool for school. A female janitor gets some vampire blood in her and then she starts cutting up vampires with a knife and drinking their blood. It's kind of sad that many WoD vampires are actually bullshit enough that this could work.

It's written as an exercise in minimalism or something. Lots of description is given to how much gum is on the floor or the brand of soda can that was left behind, and relatively little to what the fucking hell is going on. Definitely an experimental work, and if it had dragged on for much longer it would be definitely time to skip the whole thing. But at barely over a thousand words, it's not bad. Just think of it like a bit of pretentious poetry attempting to blend popart and noir elements. Does it work? Not really. It succeeds at evoking the feeling of being in dark, lonely, and filthy surroundings but I genuinely don't even know if the main character was in a train crash or not. That seems to be a pretty important detail to just gloss over in a paragraph skip.

AncientH:

By the second page, you realize this is more than a little bit of a rape fic. Random tall dark stranger comes and sticks a long, snaking tongue down the narrator's throat. That's the other half of the ghoul equation, besides the "fatal addiction" - it's the implicit sexuality of the exchange of bodily fluids, often made explicit as you see here (or, if this was the Giovanni Clanbook, a brief aside on how ghouls might be expected to suck the blood from their relative's undead cocks - literally.) Layering of taboos is something you often see as people start to build up a tolerance - like how every teenage boy starts off sporting a chubby just thinking about tits, and ten thousand tits later it takes some combination of descriptors (Huge, Pierced, Tattooed, Asian, etc.) to get something comparable; drug addicts increase the dosage or play around with different cocktails looking to recapture that high. Same thing happens with literature, depending on tastes and experiences - some people will get to this page and slam the book shut, while others will lick their lips and turn the page.

Chapter 0: Introduction: The First Taste


You don't have to look very hard to find fan art for Vampire that is hyper sexualized.

FrankT:

The actual official Introduction has about a page worth of real material, but there is so much white space on the pages that they splash it over three. No one knows why. Layout and typesetting was done by Robby Poore, and I think it would acceptable at this time to make a crack about how he did a “poore job.” The first part of the introduction is given over to basically apologizing to the audience for the fact that their nomenclature makes no fucking sense. They admit that when you hear the word “ghoul” you think this:


But what you actually get in Vampire: the Masquerade is this:



So yeah, that's pretty weird.

AncientH:

Some mild props to the introduction: White Wolf was never one to sugarcoat things, and often went to great deal of trouble to explain how being the supernatural freak of the week was a bit of a joyless, bleak existence. Partially that's the sell to the teenage goth crowd - they're here specifically for the joyless, bleak existentialism of being a blood junkie to a deranged psychotic.



Other gamers saw it as, well, a challenge. Yes, life as a ghoul could suck, but it didn't have too. These are the kind of people that could form packs of roving humans hunting vampires for their blood. Not the most common campaign in Vampire, but I liked the fact that it was possible.

FrankT:

One of the big themes White Wolf tried to play with is making people think their powers were shitty. Or perhaps more accurately: pretending to feel superior to people who played their characters like supernatural superheroes. So it goes on about how being a Ghoul is a shitty deal and you should feel sad that you have super strength, don't age, and can heal super fast. Because it's WoD and if you aren't at least pretending to feel morose, you'll get shunned by the true roleplayers.

AncientH:

...the horror of Vampire becomes even sharper when you are not the vampire.

More true than most people admit, but not how they mean it. Chances are unlikely that as a new player at the table you'll want to stat out a ghoul character when everybody else is a vampire. You can do it, and you can maybe even make it work, but you're still starting off about three steps lower than everyone else at the table in terms of power (unless you abuse the rules, we'll get into that later maybe). I'm not even talking straight "how many dots you have in Disciplines," ghouls can't heal like vampires, they die ridiculously easy, they can't blood bond anybody and unlike everybody else are more strictly subject to the blood bond, and again unlike everybody else they can't just pop open a blood pak they've been keeping in the fridge whenever they're running low - they need to get their vitae straight from a vampire.


"Dude, who drank the last Pabst?"

FrankT:

The final page of the introduction has maybe a quarter of a page of real text on it. The rest is an irrelevant picture and when that wasn't enough to gap fill – a proper block of actual white space. What text there is is scarcely worth mentioning: just a couple sentences on what to expect in each of the remaining chapters. Frankly, they could have skipped this and just named the chapters things that were less prosaic and more informative.

Book layout is still the wild fucking west for these people, as they feel the need to have a whole chapter that is just four fucking premade characters that you might want to use for something. Or not, you know, whatever.

AncientH:

It's kinda funny, because while we can see here all the things that set Vampire apart from D&D and other games - the visceral approach to art and writing, playing to and fetishizing taboos instead of shying away from them, the willingness and ability to adapt to a contemporary setting instead of building vast, laughably silly fantasy worlds - you can also see all the shit that was going to get them into trouble once D&D3 reared its ugly head. Ghouls: Fatal Addiction wouldn't qualify as a professional product today; the drug/rape combo is fairly blatant and gender-biased piece of prose - why did it have to be a female victim getting raped and hooked on bloodplay? From a gamer standpoint, how many players today would willingly go in for the blatantly underpowered character option just for purposes of flavor? (I know, I know - probably more than I'd like to admit.)

I dunno, maybe I'm overthinking it after reading the rape book, but you can see as the game got older and these traits were exacerbated a bit why White Wolf declined and sold out in its later years.


Also, today I learned not to google image search "blood play."

[Koumei]

When my sister ran a mixed-oWoD game (nicely asking players not to pick the most powerful things and break the game, as she accepted even saying "this book only" isn't going to prevent that), one player wanted to be a ghoul.

They staked a vampire, then kept it locked up in the wine cellar, before hooking up a bunch of IV things to slowly provide human blood and (magical?) anaesthetics, and basically put a tap in its arm. It was a bizarre blend of creepy and comical.

[Prak]

From a gamer standpoint, how many players today would willingly go in for the blatantly underpowered character option just for purposes of flavor? (I know, I know - probably more than I'd like to admit.)

I've been on the other end of the "x#:y# characters can go out:can't go out in the day" equation, playing a vamp in a group of changing breeds. If someone said "let's play Vampire," I would consider playing a ghoul if I could get my fellow players to agree to work with me on the whole thing- eg: "don't blood bond me, and don't go telling the prince I've got an enemy vamp staked, well, in the wine cellar as one of Koumei's sister's players did."

Of course, if someone said "let's play a mixed OWoD game," I would probably play either a demon or (other) possessed (Kami/Fomor/Gorgon, fuck drones).

Hm. I should review Possessed. And maybe Freak Legions.

[OgreBattle]

Do any men get raped, do any women do the raping at all? I thought vampire players were gayer than most RPG groups.

[Ancient History]

Chapter 1: A Clockwork Crimson: Ghoul Physiology

The theme song for this chapter is Black Planet by Sisters of Mercy.

FrankT:

Coming in at 20 pages, this chapter is supposed to be two in-character essays about Ghouls. It's a bit odd, as it gradually fades into talking about mechanics. There's a bit at the end of the chapter for “hard and fast rules” but some rules sneak into the main text. The whole idea of splitting in-character and out-of-character materials spatially in the book had certainly been explained to them, but they couldn't quite bring themselves to actually do it. Or perhaps they had the idea that spatially separating mechanics and fluff would be a good idea after they'd already written some of it, and you know, fuck it.

The first essay is deliberately hard to read. It's not in Da Vinci Forward Regular, but it was printed out onto pieces of paper and then placed onto the page templates at an angle during paste-up. The goal is to make it look like someone had made some grainy photocopies of a series of papers and then scrap booked them incompetently into the book that is in your hands. The effect is kind of ruined by having the first page be only a page fragment worked around the chapter heading. If they wanted to do this, they should have gone with a couple of framing paragraphs at the beginning so that they could do each page in the essay on a page in the book. Also, they should have used a less extreme angle because this is actually kind of painful to read.

AncientH:

Neither the first nor last time that White Wolf would play with this particular gimmick, and the faux-in-character document would long remain a popular device among rpg designers for decades to come. The only thing that really fucks this one up is that...well...nobody talks like that. For example, the first sentence reads:

My noble and terrible liege, greetings!

Now, that's not bad from a writing standpoint. You immediately establish that you've got a subservient talking to a superior, with the intimation that it's one of those old and blue-blooded Count Dracula types. But if you think about it for a minute, that doesn't quite wash, does it? There's no guarantee that old vampires came from the nobility, and quite a bit in the gameline that says they didn't.

FrankT:

The first essay is written by a Malkavian. Malkavians are the “crazy” vampires so anything they say might be because they are “crazy” rather than being “true.” This is a framing device that White Wolf used way too often when they wanted to float an idea that they might have to redact later on. After the debacle of Dirty Secrets of the Black Hand, it seemed like they might need to redact portions of books or even entire books at any time, so even three years after that fiasco they were still having major revelations being given to the readers in-character by Malkavians so that they could be disavowed in a pinch.


Malkavians are unreliable narrators.

The big reveal in the first essay is supposed to be that there's a scientific explanation for ghoul powers. It doesn't make a lot of sense and seems like a totally terrible idea. Ghoul healing comes from flat worm enzymes, and crap like that. There seems to be nothing that adds to the game except he possibility of inventing TruBlood and Mirakuru and destroying the setting.

AncientH:

Scientific vampirism doesn't work very well.


Most of the time.

Especially when you've already established a supernatural mechanic for it. So I'm not going to go into the weird bits about Potence. The author, Dr. Netchurch, would show up again in later books. Instead, I'll talk about something that's only been lightly touched on up to this point: animal ghouls.

These have a suspiciously long history in Vampire, and I don't think I could point to a better mythological source than the classical witch's familiar. That said, yes, you can ghoul animals. You're not supposed to be able to actually embrace animals, although I swear they did that at least once.


No, no, I think it was in the Berlin sourcebook.

Anyway, ghouling an animal works about as well as ghouling a human (in most cases), and there is a long and storied tradition of doing so in different clans and for different purposes. This really reached its peak in the Dark Ages where anybody worth their fangs had a ghouled horse, but you can see the basic advantages and disadvantages here - animals are (usually) more loyal than humans, but not as intelligent, and the whole "lack of opposable thumbs" thing can be a hassle. Also, I have no idea how you're supposed to teach Spot some of the new tricks - there was a weird Setite thing early on where they taught some ghouled snakes Serpentis and taught them how to assume human form, and that was just bizarre on every level.

FrankT:

One of the core conceits of Vampire: the Masquerade is that the blood in Vampires doesn't actually circulate and they don't have beating hearts. I have no idea how you're supposed to take blood out of vampires if it isn't
under pressure in their vessels. So there's this very big disconnect where vampire blood is supposed to not spurt, but you're also supposed to be able to cut vampires with a knife or fangs and have blood come out that you can drink. It's a pretty major contradiction.


Two evocative images that V:tM threw around a lot, but as a simple matter of fluid dynamics, you can only have one.

This book continues the tradition of trying to have it both ways, but when pressed against the pseudoscience backdrop of a pseudoscientific explanation of ghouls,it rings especially hollow.

AncientH:

Well, they're not alone in all of that either. Every vampire film seems to wrestle with it, and at least we don't have scenes from The Night-Flyer to deal with.


You may need to see a urologist.

Part of the annoyance of this section is that so much of it is in game-specific terminology - Clan, Cainite, Discipline, Gangrel, etc. - that is becomes a major fucking annoyance when they don't just bring out the rest of it. Call Potence Potence and be fucking done with it, don't fuck about with it.

The thing about "Ghoul breeding" will come back to haunt us later, especially when dhampirs become an actual major thing late in the life of the game.

This was a terrible movie.

The basic idea is that if you get enough ghouls to breed together, after a few generations they start to be born ghouls (sort of, more or less), producing their own vitae and having their own disciplines and weaknesses. Kind of like a little bloodline! Revenant families didn't get their start in this book, but there were a fuck-ton of them before the end, and they were kind of a fun concept. I swear I read about revenant horses once, but if I did that must have been in one of the later Dark Ages supplements.

FrankT:

If the first essay was pseudoscience biology, the second essay is pseudoscience psychiatry. It's much easier to read than the previous essay, because they don't do any bullshit with the typesetting. It's double column text at regular 90 degree angles to the page interspersed with pictures and box text. It's all supposedly written by a Ph. D. named Nancy O. Reage, and she seems to work with Camarilla ghouls. They have their own secret lingo and there are psychological problems unique to ghouls that are used in their secret fan club. The core is “Renfield Syndrome” which is such a nice name for a psychological disorder revolving around vampirism that it is of course an actual thing that is totally different from the psychological dependency on domination being described in this book. Which the authors of the book could be forgiven for not knowing about since they obviously aren't actually specialists in the medical fields they are writing fake academic works in.

Hey, it was 1997, it's not like you could just fact check this bullshit on wikipedia!

AncientH:

Starting off a two-column pseudo-academic piece in media res wouldn't be my first instinct for this section, but then I didn't write it. The whole thing reminds me depressingly of the club scenes from The Matrix III, where the Wachowski siblings have just succumbed to the fetishwear crowd in a spectacular fashion.



The point being, they're trying to establish ghouls as natural submissives in a BDSM context, which is weird and makes me want to take them by the hand, put down Fifty Shades of Grey Sleeping Beauty and have them page through the first couple chapters of Sunstone (NSFW).

We're all grown-up enough to see a couple of boobies, right?

FrankT:

It is in the psychology section that rules start creeping into the main text. You might think it's weird that they kept the segregation pretty well in the section about physical measurable biological facts and couldn't keep the penis of game mechanics out of the warm embrace of the flavor text in the section ruminating on the best way to secretly classify fictional mental disorders – but only if you were unfamiliar with oWoD. One of the most important game mechanics was “derangements.” These were very important, because by writing a derangement on your character sheet you got extra points that you could spend on making your character good at doing what you wanted them to do. So finding ways to explain your character's actions in terms of psychiatric disorders was a terribly important skill for powergaming. You were tangibly and substantially rewarded for successfully playing armchair psychiatrist – a character whose actions could be pathologized or at least described in pathological terms was simply more powerful than the same character described in terms of neutral adjectives and motivations. If you were “driven” to find the killer of your mother, that was worth nothing – but if you were “obsessed” with finding the killer of your mother you got to fill in extra dots on your character sheet. It was that simple.

So it was actually vitally important to players what exactly happened game mechanically when they had “self defeating personality disorder” or “dependent personality disorder” in a way that it simply wasn't important what kind of proteins were expressed in ghoul blood. In case you were wondering: yes dependent personality disorder is basically free power if you're a ghoul. Because obviously.

AncientH:

As insanity mechanics go, derangements were better than, say, the Sanity score in Call of Cthulhu, but fell short of being able to play a really crazy character - Malkavians, for example, started off with one or two derangements, but one of those could be a mortal fear of carrots or something, so it was a bit weak from the whole fishmalk perspective.

In this essay though, I must say that they dug deep and pulled out some impressive stuff for ghouls, like Severe Dysmenorrhic Psychosis is a condition where female ghouls suffer grave psychological trauma whenever they menstruate, and basically looks like PMS squared.

FrankT:

The mechanics in the “hard and fast rules” section are there to remind us of why we don't use the original Vampire: the Masquerade mechanics anymore. The revised edition came out the following year, and while it still looks like a heap of wet garbage today, at least it wasn't this. Variable target numbers across d10s, where the authors obviously had no idea what that meant. Much of this mini-section is just citations to other parts of the books (or other books). The bit on “animal ghouls” is just a citation to tell you that they don't have any rules for animal ghouls in here.

When ghouls stop getting blood from vampires they get desperate, and if keeps going on they revert to their true ages. For very old ghouls, this means they die. For very very old ghouls, this means that they dry up and explode into dust. This is the kind of overtly supernatural bullshit that makes their pseudoscience bullshit from earlier in the chapter harder to take seriously.


Better drink the right kind of blood.

AncientH:

There are more than a few holes in this section - like, for example, what happens when the 1,000-year-old ghoul with a 20-point blood pool gets Embraced? Well, probably he's fucked. But hey, at least he doesn't have to worry about aging anymore.

Also, this is where the "proper fucked" part of being a ghoul comes in: if you don't have a steady supply of vitae of a high enough generation, then those disciplines you paid so much XP for go away. Permanently. And you have to pay more XP to learn them again. Which is sad.

Some of the rules look weirder in retrospect, like Thaumaturgy - early on in Vampire, you didn't have to be a vampire to learn Thaumaturgy, and Thaumaturgy == magic for most purposes, since they hadn't sorted out different types of blood sorcery just yet. Much later on they had this (mostly fluff) thing in Sorcerer Revised where mortal sorcerers learning could learn magic from vampires and do a kind of cast-from-hitpoints thing, but that never quite gelled with...well...anything.

FrankT:

Bizarrely, the rules section just cuts off in the middle of a page, gives you some white space, and jumps back in with another page finishing the sentence that is itself more than half white space. There are several extra pages in this book is what I'm saying, and with better typesetting this book would be exactly the same but like 10 pages shorter.

AncientH:

My guess is that they had these two half-page, one-full-column illustrations and they wanted to use them both, but they didn't want to put them on the same page, and it was too late in the layout process to get someone to write some more stuff into the massive blank hole they left in the page. But that's just a guess.

[Koumei]

Oh right, animal ghouls. I was once in a game where one player ghouled a pomeranian dog, naming it "Sir Barksalot". Then I, as a Gangrel, ghouled:

• A fruitbat (it grew big enough to wear as a smelly cloak)
• A taipan snake (which grew constrictor-size)
• Various birds and vermin just to send out as scouts
• A Sydney funnelweb spider, causing it to grow tarantula-size

I did not really make actions in combat, I let the pets do it.

[Username17]

Do any men get raped, do any women do the raping at all? I thought vampire players were gayer than most RPG groups.

Men get the bad touch in the setting, but rarely if ever in the fiction. When the books write up a bit of rape fic, the victim is pretty much always a woman, and usually a small woman at that. Ghouls: Fatal Addiction is nowhere near the only book that opens with a rape fic - Clanbook Giovanni opens with a rapefic about murdering young women and filming the sexual defilement of their corpses (yes, really, it's actually one of the better pieces of opening fiction in White Wolf history).

Generally, White Wolf trots out taboo breaking stuff for shock value. And this was the nineties, when you could get shock value out of admitting that gays exist. So you didn't get much actual homo-eroticism, you just got people trotting out the occasional gimp or two-men in a rumored perverted relationship or something.



You see pictures and read stories where male vampires have male ghouls. So obviously sexual stuff happened in a man-on-man sort of way. But I can't recall any story in canon where man-on-man sexualized encounters are actually presented in a sexual way. And while there have definitely been stories that play up the powerlessness of a male character, I can't recall that powerlessness actually being presented in the form of a rapefic. Doesn't mean it never happened, there are a lot of White Wolf books and even when I read them regularly I never read all of them. But it certainly doesn't happen much.

-Username17

[talozin]

You're not supposed to be able to actually embrace animals, although I swear they did that at least once.

No, no, I think it was in the Berlin sourcebook.

Good memory. In "Berlin by Night" Nefertiti has vampiric snakes that she Embraced herself, called "Aabt Kindred." Since Nefertiti is a 4th Generation Setite who is around 4000 years old and the snakes are described having been created a century ago, this means that every one of her cobra vampire followers should be individually more powerful than most starting parties.

If you are currently making noises that sound something like "fucking fuck Nefertiti the fuck in motherfucking Berlin fuck" then rest assured that the explanation there is every bit as stupid as you would expect, even in the context of an adventure that revolves around an evil Setite brainwashing a Ravnos into successfully masquerading as Caine with the help of a magic amulet that makes him into a 2nd generation vampire. Yes, really.

[TheFlatline]

When my sister ran a mixed-oWoD game (nicely asking players not to pick the most powerful things and break the game, as she accepted even saying "this book only" isn't going to prevent that), one player wanted to be a ghoul.

They staked a vampire, then kept it locked up in the wine cellar, before hooking up a bunch of IV things to slowly provide human blood and (magical?) anaesthetics, and basically put a tap in its arm. It was a bizarre blend of creepy and comical.

It's not that difficult to drug the fuck out of a vampire. Just mingle whatever with blood and ingest. If someone is shitfaced drunk vampires according to the rules get shitfaced drunk biting them. Same goes for drugs and other shit. Only it's like fucked up times ten because of how good the bite feels for both parties.

Oh, and since the blood is first in, first out, you stay fucked up until you burn up the drunken/stoned blood points.

Actually, considering that the majority of bite victims are supposedly in nightclubs and shit, I'd say that the majority of vampiric society is shitfaced drunk most of the time. Which explains a *lot*.

But keeping a vampire stoned is easy. Just mix morphine with the blood and let 'er rip. I'm not sure if ghouls would also get all fucked up either drinking the vitae. Personally I think it's easier to just stake the motherfuckers. They still process blood and turn it into vitae and use it too, so why fuck with drugs when a chair leg sharpened more or less does the trick better?

However, keeping a vampire staked in the basement and drinking from them doesn't exactly solve your long-term blood bond problem. You still get bound to them. At 3rd stage blood bound you're going to want to set your beloved free, even if it kills you. The only way to really keep a long term vampire blood supply is to have a whole fucking farm of them. If you don't burn more than your point of vitae a month you could probably get away with pumping a couple vampires dry once every six months (If memory serves ghouls burn a point of vitae a month being ghouls). First and second stage blood bonds go away after a year and a day without the host vampire's vitae. Otherwise you'd probably need like a dozen of the fuckers all taking turns bleeding for you to get a robust supply of vitae without risking blood bond past the "I feel bad for these guys I really like them" stage.

[TheFlatline]

Do any men get raped, do any women do the raping at all? I thought vampire players were gayer than most RPG groups.

Men get the bad touch in the setting, but rarely if ever in the fiction. When the books write up a bit of rape fic, the victim is pretty much always a woman, and usually a small woman at that. Ghouls: Fatal Addiction is nowhere near the only book that opens with a rape fic - Clanbook Giovanni opens with a rapefic about murdering young women and filming the sexual defilement of their corpses (yes, really, it's actually one of the better pieces of opening fiction in White Wolf history).

Generally, White Wolf trots out taboo breaking stuff for shock value. And this was the nineties, when you could get shock value out of admitting that gays exist. So you didn't get much actual homo-eroticism, you just got people trotting out the occasional gimp or two-men in a rumored perverted relationship or something.



You see pictures and read stories where male vampires have male ghouls. So obviously sexual stuff happened in a man-on-man sort of way. But I can't recall any story in canon where man-on-man sexualized encounters are actually presented in a sexual way. And while there have definitely been stories that play up the powerlessness of a male character, I can't recall that powerlessness actually being presented in the form of a rapefic. Doesn't mean it never happened, there are a lot of White Wolf books and even when I read them regularly I never read all of them. But it certainly doesn't happen much.

-Username17

We played with the whole sexuality thing somewhat in our game. Basically, the idea was that your sexuality generally dictated your prey as a vampire. At least, until you got old enough to lose some humanity, and shed that notion.

Which means newly embraced vampires generally focused on particular types of prey. Fledglings tended to continue going after the type that they'd sexually hook up with in life. In the game you weren't considered "breeched" as a vampire until you at least got used to feeding off of both sexes.

It also tended to dictate who you embraced in our games. So if a male vampire embraced your male PC, chances are there was... some endearment. Especially if the sire wasn't that old.

Then again, we were playing in the aughts, and there were enough gay and lesbian folk playing in our group that it didn't particularly feel taboo so much as it was kind of interesting to explore those themes.

[Prak]

As insanity mechanics go, derangements were better than, say, the Sanity score in Call of Cthulhu, but fell short of being able to play a really crazy character - Malkavians, for example, started off with one or two derangements, but one of those could be a mortal fear of carrots or something, so it was a bit weak from the whole fishmalk perspective.

In this essay though, I must say that they dug deep and pulled out some impressive stuff for ghouls, like Severe Dysmenorrhic Psychosis is a condition where female ghouls suffer grave psychological trauma whenever they menstruate, and basically looks like PMS squared.

So... If your female ghoul has this derangement and is on birth control, she may well have literally free extra points. Nice.

[Koumei]

Depends on how much your MC knows about birth control and such. The pill has a small chance of killing you (and various other things), so you can basically guarantee that if the MC knows about that, terrible things will happen to your character.

[Korwin]

The pill has a small chance of killing you (and various other things), so you can basically guarantee that if the MC knows about that, terrible things will happen to your character.

What?

[Koumei]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Combined_o ... ptive_pill

The combined pills can give you blood clots, which can be fatal. The risk is low, and indeed it's lower than that of being pregnant, but it's a thing that can happen and thus the kind of person who runs WW games will do that to you. Also it generally reduces menstruation, so again, your ST will likely say "yeah you still bleed and freak out".

And cancer risks are "kinda maybe I dunno?"

Don't get me wrong, overall it's better for your health, it's just that there's a non-zero chance that a person can die as a result of using the pill, and your ST will dive on that. Also the other variety of pill is less likely to do the above, but in some cases it causes even more bleeding.

[Username17]

Birth control pills operate by changing your hormone levels, and as such have significant effects on your physiology. Perhaps unsurprisingly, they considerably alter your chances of dying from very rare diseases. Your chances of ovarian cancer go way down, but your chances of pulmonary embolism go way up. So yes, birth control pills have a tiny chance of killing you in a horrible fashion, just as they also have a tiny chance of saving your life from a horrible death.

I think it's important to remember that all the birth control pill related complications combined (even discounting the cancers prevented) do not kill as many women as the complications from unwanted pregnancies, so the people who fear monger about birth control pills are being wildly irresponsible and actually killing women.

-Username17

[Koumei]

Yeah, I did not in any way want that to come across as "Stay away from these, you will die!" Merely "Stay away from the kind of person who runs White Wolf games". Because if they so much as catch the scent of "this might actually work for the character", they will do all they can to ruin it.

[OgreBattle]

Can a fetus be ghouled?