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Classic World of Dumbass
2018-Nov-10, Saturday 10:43
I haven't really been paying attention to Vampire: the Masquerade 5th Edition. Originally it was because I was pretty happy with the game and the rules as they were in the 20th anniversary edition of Vampire: Dark Ages, and then I didn't like a lot of the changes they were making to the setting. Using a phenomenon called the Beckoning to pull an unspecified number of the elder vampires away from the day-to-day setting politics to some kind of apocalyptic war in the Middle East, there's a Second Inquisition that's going around and killing vampires all over the place to the point of setting up body heat scanners in places like Heathrow Airport, and the Followers of Set changed their name to "The Ministry" for some reason. The rules were different, I already had the old game, the new one wasn't to my taste.
Well, today it seems that I've been retroactively vindicated.
The V5 Guide to the Camarilla came out on Thursday and people have been reading through it, and there's a section about how Chechnya is now a secret vampire dictatorship, real-world Chechnyan leader Ramzan Kadyrov is secretly a vampire, and the real-world anti-gay pogrom taking place in Chechnya (content warning) is secretly a vampire plot to get more blood. It's still happening, but the vampires don't mean it. They're not doing it based on homophobia. They just want an international controversy to rile people up so that people don't recognize that vampires are running everything. I'm sure I don't need to explain why this terrible.
Old White Wolf occasionally did something this offensive and stupid, but usually in its early days. One of the earliest Vampire supplements, Berlin by Night, had a section about how the Shoah was a vampire plot (and also had Heinrich Himmler as a vampire), and later they published a book called World of Darkness: G****** that literally had a character attribute called "Blood Purity" in it. But over time, they learned. They fixed their mistakes, moving away from the early stereotypical portrayals of non-Western cultures and hiring people who had some personal knowledge of the subject they were writing about. By the 20th Anniversary editions, almost all of those terrible decisions made in the name of edginess were gone. And then CCP sold the rights to the White Wolf IPs to Paradox, Paradox hired a bunch of Nordic LARPers to create a new White Wolf studio and, well, here we are. They wanted to be edgy again, to have the same kind of 90s counterculture appeal that early White Wolf had, and then went about it in the absolute most ham-fisted, idiotic way possible.
There's a public Facebook post with an apology from White Wolf that says they're taking steps "up to and including a change in leadership." I'm sure it'll help, but at this point even the minuscule chance I'd eventually become interested in V5 is gone. And of course the comments on that post are full of people whining about snowflakes and SJWs ruining White Wolf, which is hilarious for anyone who knows anything about 90s White Wolf. I remember huge threads of people complaining that White Wolf used female pronouns in their books instead of defaulting everything to male ones. And now this.
How the mighty have fallen.
Well, today it seems that I've been retroactively vindicated.
There were a lot of directions I expected the new Vampire to go in but "anti-gay purges in Chechnya a vampire psyop" was not one of them pic.twitter.com/5SZ4RLTKMI
— Ettin (@Ettin64) November 8, 2018The V5 Guide to the Camarilla came out on Thursday and people have been reading through it, and there's a section about how Chechnya is now a secret vampire dictatorship, real-world Chechnyan leader Ramzan Kadyrov is secretly a vampire, and the real-world anti-gay pogrom taking place in Chechnya (content warning) is secretly a vampire plot to get more blood. It's still happening, but the vampires don't mean it. They're not doing it based on homophobia. They just want an international controversy to rile people up so that people don't recognize that vampires are running everything. I'm sure I don't need to explain why this terrible.
Old White Wolf occasionally did something this offensive and stupid, but usually in its early days. One of the earliest Vampire supplements, Berlin by Night, had a section about how the Shoah was a vampire plot (and also had Heinrich Himmler as a vampire), and later they published a book called World of Darkness: G****** that literally had a character attribute called "Blood Purity" in it. But over time, they learned. They fixed their mistakes, moving away from the early stereotypical portrayals of non-Western cultures and hiring people who had some personal knowledge of the subject they were writing about. By the 20th Anniversary editions, almost all of those terrible decisions made in the name of edginess were gone. And then CCP sold the rights to the White Wolf IPs to Paradox, Paradox hired a bunch of Nordic LARPers to create a new White Wolf studio and, well, here we are. They wanted to be edgy again, to have the same kind of 90s counterculture appeal that early White Wolf had, and then went about it in the absolute most ham-fisted, idiotic way possible.
There's a public Facebook post with an apology from White Wolf that says they're taking steps "up to and including a change in leadership." I'm sure it'll help, but at this point even the minuscule chance I'd eventually become interested in V5 is gone. And of course the comments on that post are full of people whining about snowflakes and SJWs ruining White Wolf, which is hilarious for anyone who knows anything about 90s White Wolf. I remember huge threads of people complaining that White Wolf used female pronouns in their books instead of defaulting everything to male ones. And now this.
How the mighty have fallen.
