OSSR: Player's Guide to the Sabbat
Chapter 3: Character Creation
Hopefully like that.
Our musical accompaniment is going to be
The World is Yours. Firstly because there's no musical suggestions in this chapter. And secondly because Arch Enemy makes a much better pitch for Nietzsche's Master Morality than this fucking book does.
AncientH:
You could write this chapter. Seriously, while we go on about White Wolf books being formulaic, the character generation chapters are like prayers copied by medieval monks. They're not just predictable, they're almost uniform and the few small changes they do have are absolutely unoriginal. This is basically a reprint of V:tM rules, just with a bunch of
antitribu choices in place of regular clans.
And yet, they still find ways to be terrible. For example, the clan descriptions.
Ravnos Antitribu: The Sabbat Ravnos are almost all gorgios (non-Gypsies). Most are members of nomadic packs. They treat all other Sabbat with honor but hate Gypsies and Ravnos outside the Sabbat, especially Romany Ravnos (those of Gypsy descent). They are still among the best liars and tricksters of the vampire world.
Too angry or appalled to meme.
We don't talk about it much, but the Lasombra and the Tzimisce get variations on two of the classic vampire weaknesses - the Lasombra don't appear in mirrors, and the Nosferatu need to sleep with their home soil.
"Not showing up in mirrors" is sort of a "cursed with awesome" superpower: in the panopticon state of the future, these guys are invisible to cameras, making it super easy to live off the grid and even commit crimes - if there are no eyewitnesses, then there are basically no witnesses period. What are they going to do, check your fucking fingerprints? If Vampire had ever done a cyberpunk future, the Lasombra are on easy street. (The whole "reflections" bit originally pertained to people selling their soul no longer having a shadow, and the Lasombra manipulate shadows, hence the weakness.)
The home soil thing is...weirder. Depending on the source material you're going for, it specifically had to be
consecrated soil, from your grave. The exact determinant of what is or is not "home soil" is a fine point and I have no idea how Tzimisce are supposed to determine that, except by what "feels right." I have no idea how players and gamemasters are supposed to decide what constitutes home ground, either - a plot of earth? A cemetery? A city block? Who knows?
It's very much a Dracula sticking point, and at the same time it helps give the Tzimisce their image of being very territorial, for natural reasons, and
that feeds into their backstory as the traditional Transylvanian vampires and a lot of the powers they developed, like Koldunic Sorcery and some of the weirder higher levels of Vicissitude. It also runs into...territory issues. Because if you're a Tzimisce, you basically have troubles traveling. That's not a huge issue for a lot of games that take place in the same city, but sometimes you grow up somewhere shit and don't want to spend the rest of your unlife there. (And this is before you get into weird questions like "What if the vampire was born at sea and spent their whole life on the ocean and was embraced on a boat? Do they have to carry around some salt water with them?" or "Look, I'm a walking corpse and I'm not using most of my torso for anything, can I just cut it open, stuff two fistfuls of dirt in there, sew it up and sleep wherever the fuck I want?")
The Assamite
antitribu don't have the traditional clan curse; instead they get addicted to drinking
vitae super easily. They added a rider that
vaulderie doesn't count, because otherwise these guys would be unplayable, but as it is you're basically still playing with a character that wants to eat
everyone.
Malkavian
antitribu start play with
two derangements; so this is fishmalking squared.
I shouldn't go on about this, but I will. The approach to mental illness in World of Darkness games is bad, for similar reasons that mental illness in Call of Cthulhu is bad. "Derangements" cover anything that is now or was once considered a psychiatric disorder or "madness," but beyond that being "mad" is often depicted as being "lolrandom."
It's not an issue that is
unique to Vampire by any means, but it's a simplistic and inaccurate take on what could be both major parts of the character's...character, and potentially major life issues. Nobody should want to play a vampire with depression, and if they did, they would almost certainly do it wrong. Further, a lot of the "mental disorders" are inherently neurobiological, and vampires don't have a functioning biology for the most part! How are you supposed to have fucking dementia if you can literally get your brain shot out and then regenerate? Moving on...
Tremere
antitribu have the "weakness" that regular Tremere recognize them on sight. This is supposed to be a replacement for the fact that all regular Tremere are in a blood-oath hierarchy, but it's sort of a non-weakness. Any Tremere can just point at another vampire and claim they're Tremere
antitribu - who the hell is going to gainsay them? This only ever comes into play if the Sabbat Tremere come into contact with Tremere (or technically "many other practitioners of magic") anyway, so it's not exactly something you deal with on a night-to-night basis. Also, the
antitribu viewpoint on their Camarilla counterparts is:
Tremere - "They are our brothers and sisters, but they
serve the Antediluvians and therefore must be destroyed."
Motherfucker, Tremere ate
Saulot.
FrankT:
It's definitely true that most of the rules in the chargen chapter could have been almost (or even literally) word for word in some other White Wolf product written five or even fifteen years later. It's kinda weird how rapidly some very weird and bad ideas became cemented in the White Wolf way of doing things. But we can pretty much skip all that shit.
The big draw of being a member of the Sabbat was that you started with 4 dots of Disciplines instead of 3 and 0 dots worth of backgrounds instead of 5. A discipline dot costs more than 5 backgrounds, so the cheese stands alone. We're talking about 2 freebie points, but for real – people got told off for being powergamers many times because of this shit.
But moving small amounts of points around wasn't the only minor change, Steve also decided to rename the virtues that Sabbat characters get. This was a thing that Vampire experimented with a lot in the early days, like where they tried to make new virtues for mummies to have in the original
Mummy. It's also something they never wholly gave up on doing, as the final product of pre-bankruptcy White Wolf was
Scion. And let's get this out of the way: it never really worked. Sabbat vampires tried to make Callousness, Instinct, and Morale work as the three virtues, and that's stupid and also pointless edgelordism.
But fundamentally it also doesn't
work. The virtue system of Vampire was pretty bad, and looked worse when you thought about it for any length of time or tried to interact with it in any game mechanical way. Some of that is that Compassion and Courage aren't really enough to define a character's motivations, and some of that is that these virtues were on a different numeric scale from other dice pools in the game so a Courage Roll was just way different in expected output from a Willpower roll or a Dexterity + Driving roll or whatever. But it's also equally true that Callousness just isn't a thing that can seamlessly fit into all the places in the system where it asks you to use your Compassion. It's just a divide by zero error.
Now mostly people realized that the Nature and Demeanor system worked a lot better for explaining and defining character motivations than the virtues system did. So I wouldn't say that there were a lot of rules that called for you to roll Compassion for anything. But those few places where it did come up, the fact that the Sabbat virtues were sort of negativland evil versions meant that the rules just broke down whenever that happened. You'd have some magical effect that was resisted by the target's Compassion or Self Control, and Sabbat Vampires just didn't even fucking have those things and it didn't really make any sense to have people resist those effects with how Callous they were supposed to be.
Virtues in Vampire: the Masquerade™ were bad design. And all the alternate virtue titles they came up with were also shit. You can kinda see why nWoD went for its Virtue and Vice system, although that was also hot garbage. I could imagine a scenario in which assigning numerical values to virtues made sense, but it's really difficult. As we saw with both the Masquerade and Requiem, characters are quite difficult to describe in terms of the same set of virtues – but if you have the choice of virtues you also have to build in the assumption to the entire game that people will have different virtues that have numbers attached. And that means that all uses of virtues have to be voluntary. No effect or rule in the game can blanket-call for a Self Control roll if characters are not in fact guaranteed to have a Self Control number at all. That's really fucking basic.
AncientH:
Paths of Enlightenment happened because they solved several perceived problems. The first one is that you were playing the
bad guys, and if you did what the bad guys were supposed to do then your Humanity dropped faster that a Call of Cthulhu investigator's SAN, and with the same result: the characters became unplayable. So they wanted something besides Humanity to serve as a measure of...something...and as a character guideline. Paths of Enlightenment filled that niche, since they were measures of spirituality that let you wear somebody's face for an evening without, y'know, no longer being able to play the game.
...and the alternate virtues also helped differentiate the Sabbat/Paths of Enlightenment characters from others. As Frank mentioned, they made a serious hash of the mechanics of it all, but the basic idea came about through a quite natural process of reasoning. Unfortunately, they immediately dropped the ball on "not making Paths a religion," which tends to make these highly Eurocentric and unworkable. Sortof. They're basically formalizations of some stock character viewpoints.
There are seven Paths given in this book:
Path of Caine - Catholicism for vampires, basically. The character believes in the
Book of Nod and the Old Testament (New Testament, Qu'ran, Book of Mormon, and Gnostic gospels are optional add-ons). This eventually led into the Cainite Heresy in Dark Ages.
Path of Cathari - The Cathars were a Christian break-off sect in Southern France, often associated with certain Gnostic beliefs, and were the subject of the Albigensian Crusade. They had a kind of Manichaean view of the world, with a good God and an evil God; vampires were made by the evil God, and should have fun. End of sermon.
Path of Death and the Soul - The basic viewpoint of necromancers, the vampire is an immortal soul trapped in a physical body and is trying to sort out what that all
means. This would have worked better if the Sabbat had any necromancers at this point (next edition!), as it is you're spending a lot of time mooning about in graveyards.
Path of Evil Revelations - Remember those vampires in Anne Rice's novels that thought because they were vampires they were Damned and should worship Satan? Yeah, that's these guys. These are Chick Tract vampires.
Path of Harmony - When is Humanity not Humanity? When you want to be at peace with yourself and also eat people. They work on coming to terms with being a vampire, and being a vampire means eating people, so eating people must be OK in their book. After all, most living humans don't have problems eating cows.
Path of Honorable Accord - This is quite literally a code of ethics spelled out in a book called
The Code of Milan. You can play it like a Klingon or like a lawyer.
Path of Power and the Inner Voice - "It is the penultimate expression of vampiric Darwinism"...well, no. This is you as the Vampire Gordon Gekko. It encourages you to embrace your inner asshole and powergame. Very popular with players.
You'll notice right away that while some of these hew a bit wide from accepted dogma, most of them are still reinforcing the basic Old Testament premises. You don't exactly have a Path for practicing Hindus or Buddhists or Shintoists or anything like that.
FrankT:
My biggest complaint with the paths of enlightenment is that I don't understand how people are supposed to be members of different ones inside the same Pack. Everyone is a member of the Sabbat cult and they all participate in readings from the Book of Nod and getting in a circle to pour out and drink each others' essence and all that. But like Marco Rubio they all apparently go their separate ways to attend a completely different church on Wednesdays where they do different secret rituals away from where their Sunday Church Friends might see them.
How does this happen? How do Sabbat members all manage to be members of two different cults? And how do they manage to be members of cults without involving the other vampires that they spend every night having blood orgies of loyalty formation with? What the actual fuck?
There are of course good solid reasons from a character development side to have each player have several different toggles they can use to personalize their character. But there just isn't a time frame for any of these secret cult things to happen.
Probably what should have happened is that each new Sabbat vampire would be mentored by their personal creator like a Sith lord or a Camarilla vampire for some period of time and then get turned over to a pack as some sort of graduation deal. Probably Camarilla vampires should do something like that too. Really the game sort of demanded that everyone have a reason for giving a shit about various secret clan and cult business but
also that everyone have a reason to join up with the team. The Camarilla had
just the first part, the Sabbat had just the second. But both versions of character generation just blithely assumed that both were covered somehow. But they really weren't.
AncientH:
The interaction between Sect, Clan, and Path are some of the more interesting dynamics in the Old World of Darkness, even if they were never followed through to the point they were quite
functional; Dark Ages devoted much more screen time to the various "Roads" that the Paths were retconned as having emerged from.
And the thing is, again, you can sort of see how this works. Not all people are Christian, and Christianity has many different flavors and permutations - Episcopalians, Catholics, Lutherans, Methodists, African Methodist Episcopalians, Southern Baptists, First Baptists, Primitive Baptists,
Fifthists... but what's the difference between a former Southern Baptist vampire and a former Methodist vampire? Undeath tends to level out a lot of the normal precepts of your former operating religion. But people still like to get high and talk philosophy when they're teenagers and in college. So, Paths.
As Frank mentioned, you've got serious issues here with timeline and population - how many Tzimisce
antitribu who follow the Path of Cathari can there be in the Camarilla? And what happens when they meet up with a Sabbat Kiasyd who followes the Path of Evil Revelations? - and there's not a lot said about how various followers of a Path feel about their co-religionists. It's like when a couple of Fighters meet up in D&D; are they supposed to go have a beer together because they're the same class? Maybe trade notes on feat-trees?
I don't want to trivialized Paths, although if I did I would make each player pick two hobbies for their character, so that they would have something to kibbitiz with the other vampires about at the annual masquerade ball, but they're simultaneously trying to do too much and not enough. They're a score of spiritual...something...that guides/limits your character's behavior and interactions with others, but there's no real
benefit from them except "well, I can still play after ripping the fetus out of the pregnant woman and drinking its blood." So of course players are going to work to find the path that allows (or encourages) them to do what they want to do anyway and then obtain the minimum rating that lets them get away with that shit.
FrankT:
I will grant that the various rants about how various clans feel about each other is at times insane and sometimes has enough hooks to make people want to play in these various groups, we still have the problem where none of this has any back end support. The Lasombra talk shit about how various factions and clans are or are not a threat to “us” but who the fuck is “us”? A new Lasombra climbs out of the fucking ground and then immediately has an orgy with a Ravnos, a Ventrue, and a Gangrel. There is no clan organization to have these opinions and your character wouldn't know about it even if there was one.
AncientH:
Believe it or not, all this ranting about Paths has occurred before we get to the actual Paths.
I'd also like to say that every single one of the Sabbat clans has a schizophrenic viewpoint on the Black Hand, which in no small part probably contributed to
Dirty Secrets of the Black Hand. Which is bad. It's fine to produce multiple opposing possibilities, it is terrible to try and simultaneously realize all of those multiple opposing possibilities.
Chapter 4: The Paths of Enlightenment
FrankT:
Such that VtM was about
anything it was about coping with horrible urges and degenerating into a monster of the night. And the system they had for that was Humanity, a number that gradually went down as you succumbed and compromised with your monstrous nature. And yeah, the specific lists of sins that would get you in trouble were immoral, insane, and not particularly conducive to playing the game. In fact, the whole concept rewarded inaction rather than action. If you didn't have your character do anything, they couldn't lose any humanity. For all its insanity and fundamental brokenness, the Humanity system presented in Nightlife was much better as a starting point. At least in that system you were rewarded for trying to be human rather than punished for taking inhuman actions. That at least has incentives that point in the right direction.
But the big hit against the Humanity system was that you couldn't really play a super hero or a serial killer because it punished actions. Proactive characters were pretty much fucked because they were going to end up punching people and taking stuff that didn't belong to them and shit and they were going to degenerate all to hell.
And then you're like: Wait, defusing a bomb is intentional property destruction and I just committed a level 5 sin. Fuck!
So being a Sabbat dude under the regular humanity rules is basically impossible. Every dumb Sababt prank is a sin and your humanity just evaporates pretty much immediately. And rather than just rolling
with that, or realizing that they should rethink that whole piece of fundamentally fucked game design, they didn't do that. Instead they just wrote up crazy alternate lists of sins for different moral systems to have. So you were still playing the degeneration game, but you were being dinged for crossing whatever arbitrary lines your religion flavor tells you shouldn't be crossed.
AncientH:
I managed to rant about all the Paths in the previous chapter, because I seriously forgot that there was a whole chapter devoted to them. The long-form descriptions of the Paths are not really improvements; aside from a hierarchy of sin, you also get recommendations for preferred abilities/disciplines, how they interact with the other Paths, do's and don't's, etc. Some of these (well, a lot of these) don't make any sense. For example, the Path of Evil Revelations has this bit:
Preferred Disciplines: Auspex and Domination are highly valued Disciplines. Most followers of the Path of Evil Revelations possess secret Infernal powers granted by the demon with whom they have a pact.
Demonic Investments were a thing at this point, but not a
common thing, and even summoning a demon to make a pact with wasn't as easy as killing cats.
So you're basically down to Dark Thaumaturgy, which is an out-of-clan discipline
and leads me off to another rant!
Unlike the Camarilla, where you get nurtured by your clan for a bit and taught how to use your powers, there's really no excuse why the Sabbat shouldn't be more open about sharing powers between different clans. This goes double for Paths. In fact, if you had certain Paths that taught different Disciplines, that would probably work out a lot fucking better than the bloodline bloat that assaulted us in subsequent books/editions/etc. It makes sense, right? It would add an interesting other layer to the whole Sect/Clan/Path divide if there were some actual mechanical deviations. But we never quite get that - although nWoD did try a bit with their new sects, they still preferred bloodline bloat to everything else.
FrankT:
The big issue with all the paths is that they are bullshit. And I don't mean that in the sense that the Path of the Inner Voice is moral gibberish. Although it is. It totally is. The main issue is that there's no way to extrapolate from the list of sins to what actions are in general good or bad. Like, the Humanity system presented in the core VtM rules was an incoherent mishmash of religious edicts, civil laws, and common sense morality. People could kinda sorta get the gist of what it meant to be sinning at any level of Humanity. Yes, you could get into multi-hour arguments about the fine points of whether an activity counted as a level 5 sin or a level 4 sin and sometimes that shit was game mechanically important. But in general people could most agree about what sorts of stuff you weren't supposed to do.
With the new paths, they were based on the teachings of religions that do not in fact exist. The Cathars were real people of course, and they had their own real world moral codes, but the path of Cathari is so tenuously linked to real world catharism that it doesn't even serve as parody. In-world it's the culmination of several hundreds of years of vampire philosophy based on the rediscovery of Christian dualist dogma which belonged to a human sect that had itself been essentially wiped out hundreds of years before the Sabbat came into being. Out of game, it's a minimally sketched out dualist dogma named after the first Dualist dogma that Steve found in an encyclopedia of philosophy. And the fact that real world Catharism was essentially exterminated by the Albigensian Crusade which ended in 1229 (hundreds of years before the Sabbat was a thing) is pretty much beside the point.
This paved the way for really obscure paths in future supplements, like the Setite Warrior Path. Fucking
nobody has any idea what that shit is supposed to be about. From a power gamer's standpoint that is pretty much ideal. You want a path that will never ever fuck with you, and that means picking one where the player expects that none of the sins will ever come up in-game. So shit like “Refusing to participate in the resurrection of Set” is absolutely never going to come up and is perfect. Everyone is pretty much looking for “the path of telling me not to do things I wasn't going to do anyway” but the more thoroughly divorced from real world philosophy the better.
AncientH:
Call of Cthulhu was all about your SAN ticking down to zero; Vampire morality is all about trying to keep your metaphorical head above water. Golconda is not something that's ever going to happen in a vampire game - if you did max out your Humanity/Path score at chargen, you're still not going to survive long enough to hit the magic number when...something happens. Which is up to the Storyteller anyway. (Notably, none of the paths say anything about oral sex, one way or the other.) The Paths in Vampire are there to keep you from being an NPC, like SAN in CoC, but that is about it. It's more forgiving in a morality spiral kind of way, but it's still just holding the player's feet to the fire with the "Look out or you'll
go to hell no longer get to play!"
FrankT:
You actually can't follow these things all the way to the top. I don't know if ascending to perfect moral perfection in the Path of Evil Revelations was supposed to get you to Golconda or what. But most of these paths run into outright contradictions at some point or another. So to max out on the Path of the Inner Voice you have to never spend less than two hours a night in silent meditation (level 10), but you
also have to never use whatever means necessary to achieve greater power (level 9). So if you spend
two hours in silent meditation you aren't using 2 of your hours of night to achieve power but if you don't do that you aren't spending enough time meditating. It's a sin either way. They are all like that: the path of Harmony nails you are level 8 for not hunting but also dings you at level 9 for killing animals. And so on. I don't think you're expected to actually get to the top of any of these paths.
But of course you don't have to. Getting to the top of a path is basically meaningless. The goal is just to not degenerate. And all you need for that is a sin list that is sufficiently bullshit and weird. Of which there are plenty.
The path of Death and the Soul is gibberish all the way down. And players wanted that. Because the Humanity system had failed that badly.
AncientH:
They eventually opened the Paths up to humans. This was supposed to be a sign of something Deeply Wrong, that people had abandoned their humanity and yadda yadda. It was more probably inevitable, given the way Vampire allowed workarounds for damn near everything. If you accepted enough supplements, you could have a vampire cult where mortal blood mages could buy dots in Disciplines using the Sorcery/Hedge Magic rules and take Paths of Enlightenment and even create blood-laced beer to ghoul each other and do blood oaths and shit. The game itself never put all those flavors and options together, but all the different options
existed, if you so chose to do it.
Which is kindof where we get into heartbreaker territory again. Paths of Enlightenment are dumb and don't work. They're a solution to a problem that shouldn't really have existed in the first place; the game designers wanted to quantify morality to a degree, to set a mechanical limit to how being an immortal monster that drinks people was causing you to shed your values and test your limits. To measure, if possible, the depths of how depraved you dare get, and to assign consequences for going past an arbitrary limit of too far.
It didn't work. Arguably, it could
not have worked. Humans do fucked up shit every day, no matter what religion or code of ethics they believe or pay lip service to. There are Marines that believe strongly in their creed, and Marines that raped locals while on deployment,
and some of those are the same Marines. You could say the same thing about any religionist under the sun. Maybe what Paths should have been is more like a creche or finishing school - or some organization that you willingly join as a vampire that cuts across normal clan/sect boundaries, like how you can be American and Buddhist and a Freemason. I don't know. All I know is, as-is these don't work as written and they don't work as intended.
Next up: Sabbat Traits