Thaluikhain wrote:Ah, thanks. That seems an impressively unwise way of coming up with names. You could hit random keys of your keyboard and come up with something better.
Well... yes. Given enough Hamlet typing monkeys or a machine learning algorithm you
could get a better set of names given a large enough set of arrglebargle and enough time with a real person going through the suggestions. The actual method was to have people in the 80s write down elements from their own D&D campaigns and canonize them in their own fantasy heartbreakers and then port as many of those elements as they could into other games in other genres.
The origins of all these groups are written post-hoc. The idea that the founder of the Malkavians was named "Malkav" was simply the best explanation anyone could come up with because it defied linguistic classification. Fans and authors spent a lot of mental effort trying to come up with historical "fits" for the various vampire groups, and it all could have been avoided if the original writers had spent a few hours with some history books and spitballed some vague secret history back in 1990.
Now obviously this would have been a lot more work in the days before the internet. You couldn't just pull up a Wikipedia page on Romanian history back in 1986 when 22 year old Rein-Hagen was formalizing the writing in Ars Magica. It would have required some actual library time and reading actual dusty historical texts that might not have even been available in a small liberal arts college in Minnesota. But it's not very much work
now. You could do a reasonably intense search on Germanic tribe migration with a few key strokes.
Which gets to a broader point: how much is the Vampire: the Masquerade IP even worth? I don't mean as a financial investment for a nostalgia reboot (although the answer to that appears to be "not very much, actually" if V20 was anything to go by), I mean as an actual starting point for an RPG that you'd actually want going forward. I mean, you wouldn't want to make your next D&D fantasy world actually be DragonLance, because it's fucking embarrassing to have the god of Paladins be named Paladine and Gully Dwarves are ethnically insensitive and also not funny. You'd obviously be influenced by the fact that DragonLance is a thing that happened, but you wouldn't want your next D&D Edition to actually use specifically DragonLance as its default campaign world.
So why make your next Vampire game literally take place in the World of Darkness? What do you actually
get from doing that? A majority of the Vampire fanbase thought the setting needed a hard reboot back in 2003, and they weren't wrong. The specific reboot they did was fucking awful and crashed and burned financially, but the underlying logic of doing a reboot in the first place has not changed and fifteen years passing hasn't made the old embarrassing shit any less so.
Vampire: the Masquerade didn't invent roleplaying games, they didn't even invent roleplaying games where you played in the modern world as vampires and werewolves who were part of a secret society of punk horror movie monsters who had political conflicts involving secret subgroups and had ancient codes they had to live by that didn't specifically rule out eating people. The game that invented
that was Nightlife, which Vampire: the Masquerade eventually ate and destroyed because it had higher production values and a more accessible tone. But there's nothing specific to the old World of Darkness that you'd actually want as itself. There are certainly similar decisions to be made: you
are going to want a flavor of Vampires that are basically Ventrue - even the fucking Twilight books figured that shit out with their Veturi or whatever the fuck she called those guys. But there's no specific reason to have those things literally called "Ventrue." There's some familiarity in using a 30 year old clan name, but there's also baggage you don't want - the classic Ventrue clan disadvantage is actually unplayable as concepted and totally unsalvageable both intertemporally and interregionally. Once you realize that you have to heavily reconcept the Ventrue, why not just use some flavor of Not-Ventrue like Underworld or Twilight?
It's fairly remarkable how
little of what you might care about in terms of clan structures and vampire organizations and shit that World of Darkness (or Nightlife, for that matter) actually owns. They don't own the concept of vampire powers being divided into Disciplines or even for those disciplines to be specifically named Dominate or Celerity. They don't own the concept of Vampires being a secret society, or that society having Clans of vampires or even one of the clans being ugly dudes named Nosferatu! Most of Vampire: the Masquerade is simply public domain, and what little there is that's proprietary is mostly stuff you don't care about and probably wouldn't even want to carry forward. You want art wanky vampires, but as mentioned several times in several ways,
Toreador is a terrible name.
Now Nostalgia is a hell of a drug. Appeal to Tradition may be a formal fallacy, but that doesn't make it an unpersuasive argument. I admit to having a soft spot for the Followers of Set, because I was playing one the first time I slept with a woman. But I'll also admit that despite me thinking they are cool, that
objectively having your Snake Vampires and your Egyptian Vampires be literally the Cult of Set from
Conan the fucking Barbarian is more than a little bit stupid. That is actually a lot stupid. You probably shouldn't do that. But even if you wanted to do that, Conan the Barbarian came out a long fucking time ago. You don't actually have to own the old White Wolf IP to rip off even older R.E. Howard IP. You can just rip off Conan yourself without giving any money to Icelanders at all.
As far as I can tell, the only thing Paradox actually owns is the right to have people take them seriously as people who are going to make a new edition of Vampire and ownership of the actual trademarked clan symbols. Basically anyone could make a new edition of Vampire: the Masquerade as long as they called it "Vampire: War of Shadows" or something and didn't use the specific broken mirror graphic for the crazy vampire clan heraldry. It's not
quite as empty as the Scion IP (where literally everything about the game except the logo on the cover is public domain), but it's damn close.
-Username17