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White Wolf's World of Darkness

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GardenerBriareus said:
Hrrrrrrm. My first concern is that this reminded me of how pessimistic Vampire is. If your story follows the canon/ES model of vampires by and large being contemptible bastards and/or soulless monsters, I'm not sure I'd be up for getting too involved in that. Not only would that be the kind of thing more likely to stoke my anxiety and depression than anything, but it just feels... hollow to me at this point. Contrived, even, since it uses the conceit of vampires to justify presenting a world where better things aren't possible, the capitalist model of exploitation is a universal law, and anyone telling you otherwise is either an idiot or a conman.
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I feel like there's a divide between thinking that better things are possible, and thinking that it's vampires who can bring that about? There are better and worse vampires, but by and large even the most well-meaning vampire is not necessarily part of a healthy body politic, except in a purely individual sense. Even the Carthians, who too often define mortal humans as the means of production have more to do with the anti-immigrant, anti-black, anti-woman union organizations that inevitably faced divide-and-conquer from capitalist elites.

It's possible to imagine Mages as part of a better world, or Changelings as part of a better world. Werewolves have a role in preserving some level of spirit balance, so even if plenty of Mages, Changelings, and Werewolves are terrible monsters, it seems to be for the same reason that some people are terrible monsters rather than anything inherent.

Vampires, well, that's a lot more ambiguous, and so the drama is usually deeply individual. In this case, the Quest is very much about exploring history and the personal dynamics, but the world will change for both the better and worse in the time this Quest takes place in.
 
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I'm reading the House of Tremere book and it is clearly a load of fake news and anti-Tremere propaganda and I won't stand for it.

And then Goratrix had a small penis and refused to help an old lady across the street and everybody else was too busy feasting on puppies after they made them cry and....

They need a new book telling how it really went down. How the unwashed masses were fucking up reality so the Tremere's hard-won immortality was fading. How brave and selfless Goratrix volunteered an essential piece of himself for the good of the House. How those bastards the Tzimisce attacked and tortured innocent Tremere mages without provocation so valiant Goratrix bravely set out to stop them while also continuing his tireless work to help save the House. And then two Tremere who were Embraced by the Tzimisce nobly sacrificied themselves to the Council to complete Goratrix's research.

Maybe the book gets less biased later on but this is where I am.
 
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I mean, do they? I feel like the actual problem is propaganda in general. You should walk away from any book about a Clan/Covenant/Whatever Group in either V:TM or V:TR understanding their unique viewpoints and excuses... and finding them, at least in general, wanting. :V

If you believe their excuses, something is wrong.
 
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the tremere have always been idiots who damned themselves for eternal life and followed it up by creating a rigid hierarchy of blood bonds to cement their demented internal politics
it's far worse if you take a mage-primary view of the owod where they abandoned the infinite potential of the human soul, but it's stupid even if you think vampires are the biggest shit-kickers on the block
 
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NonSequtur said:
the tremere have always been idiots who damned themselves for eternal life and followed it up by creating a rigid hierarchy of blood bonds to cement their demented internal politics
it's far worse if you take a mage-primary view of the owod where they abandoned the infinite potential of the human soul, but it's stupid even if you think vampires are the biggest shit-kickers on the block
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The Technocracy won. Mages are a doomed people.

The Tremere recognized it a thousand years before the rest of them and so they got a thousand years headstart on making up for all the lost power of mages with cool new vampire powers. And they'll have another thousand years to further perfect their arts while mages go extinct.
 
Nikkolas said:
The Technocracy won. Mages are a doomed people.

The Tremere recognized it a thousand years before the rest of them and so they got a thousand years headstart on making up for all the lost power of mages with cool new vampire powers. And they'll have another thousand years to further perfect their arts while mages go extinct.
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well aside from the mages in the technocracy who can presumably dedicate more time to vampire hunt
but even if we go full late revised 'reality has calcified' on the mages, the fundamental stupidity of becoming a vampire is straight up just Mark 8:36
you have superpowers and a (theoretically) immortal life
you are going to be a miserable, murderous, awful person for the rest of your nights and be cast into the fires at the end of days
congratulations?
 
NonSequtur said:
well aside from the mages in the technocracy who can presumably dedicate more time to vampire hunt
but even if we go full late revised 'reality has calcified' on the mages, the fundamental stupidity of becoming a vampire is straight up just Mark 8:36
you have superpowers and a (theoretically) immortal life
you are going to be a miserable, murderous, awful person for the rest of your nights and be cast into the fires at the end of days
congratulations?
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And isn't even that assuming you're at the top of the hierarchy, rather than mired in the dark and fed like you're a mushroom?
 
Nikkolas said:
The Technocracy won. Mages are a doomed people.

The Tremere recognized it a thousand years before the rest of them and so they got a thousand years headstart on making up for all the lost power of mages with cool new vampire powers. And they'll have another thousand years to further perfect their arts while mages go extinct.
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did you think the whole thing about gehenna, the end of all vampires, the rising of the elders, the withering of the blood and the return of the antediluvians was all metaphorical

being a vampire is the exact opposite of having another thousand years

you are damned

that is the point of the game

Nikkolas said:
They need a new book telling how it really went down. How the unwashed masses were fucking up reality so the Tremere's hard-won immortality was fading. How brave and selfless Goratrix volunteered an essential piece of himself for the good of the House. How those bastards the Tzimisce attacked and tortured innocent Tremere mages without provocation so valiant Goratrix bravely set out to stop them while also continuing his tireless work to help save the House. And then two Tremere who were Embraced by the Tzimisce nobly sacrificied themselves to the Council to complete Goratrix's research.
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also hey wait

the whole thing started by kidnapping tzimisce, nosferatu and gangrel vampires and using them for experimentation

not only was it not without provocation it was quite literally in response to aggression

have we read the same gameline
 
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ManusDomini said:
did you think the whole thing about gehenna, the end of all vampires, the rising of the elders, the withering of the blood and the return of the antediluvians was all metaphorical

being a vampire is the exact opposite of having another thousand years

you are damned

that is the point of the game
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Gehenna is a group of very powerful vampires rising up and killing the rest of them. So vampirekind isn't doomed, just a lot of them.

And even that is iffy. The Elders can be stopped.


also hey wait

the whole thing started by kidnapping tzimisce, nosferatu and gangrel vampires and using them for experimentation

not only was it not without provocation it was quite literally in response to aggression

have we read the same gameline
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whitewolf.fandom.com

Gargoyle (VTM)

The Gargoyles are a vampiric bloodline created by the Tremere as their servitors. Although technically not a Tremere bloodline, the bloodline is largely under their control. The bloodline was first created via Thaumaturgical ritual in 1167[1][2] (or 1121 according to other sources[3]). For the...
whitewolf.fandom.com whitewolf.fandom.com
The bloodline was first created via Thaumaturgical ritual in 1167[1][2]
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According to House of Tremere
1. Somewhere between 998-1000
It was at about this time that Arundinis vanished while on a journey south to Athens, along with a quartet of the House's stoutest bodyguards. A search party followed Arundinis' trail to the Danube's banks, where they found nothing but a destroyed encampment and oddly tangled vegetation.
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And then
2.
Then someone left Arundinis' head at Ceoris' threshold. Servants crossing the drawbridge found its desiccated remains one damp November morning. Individuals unknown had placed it just on the other side of the chasm separating the fortress from the terrain around it. Goratrix claimed the head, wishing to test a spell he'd found in the necromantic texts he'd been consulting. Performing a ritual which involved powdering and ingesting the skull, Goratrix relived crucial moments from Arundinis' last days alive. His party had been set upon during the night by creatures he soon came to know as vampires. He was kept alive for months and tortured to the breaking point. He'd revealed many of the House's secrets to his chief torturer, a sneering beast named Roland. However, in moments of self-control he'd supplied much false information as well, greatly exaggerating the power of the Ceoris mages. Goratrix dictated the contents of his visions to an apprentice, and later sifted them for clues to the creatures' whereabouts. He sent parties out to find landmarks he'd seen.

In 1005, Goratrix sought Tremere's blessing for a daring raid. He personally led a war party to Roland's haven. His most ferociously loyal fighting men hacked their way through the Tzimisce elder's own corps of retainers. Dozens were slain on both sides of the battle, but the assembled mages ultimately bound Roland in sigil-inscribed chains and scorched him with fire. Goratrix promised him his freedom in exchange for answers. From Roland, he gained his first inklings of the breadth of vampire history and power. He learned that the vampires belonged to factions, called clans. Roland, for example, was of the Tzimisce, a family of decaying aristocrats who mold flesh like clay.
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As you can plainly see, the Tzimisce attacked them first which is why Goratrix was able to find them and use them to obtain immortality at all.
 
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The Laurent said:
I feel like there's a divide between thinking that better things are possible, and thinking that it's vampires who can bring that about? There are better and worse vampires, but by and large even the most well-meaning vampire is not necessarily part of a healthy body politic, except in a purely individual sense. Even the Carthians, who too often define mortal humans as the means of production have more to do with the anti-immigrant, anti-black, anti-woman union organizations that inevitably faced divide-and-conquer from capitalist elites.
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I mean, that's part of my point, I guess? Vampires in V:tR are, IC, incapable of not being horrible irredeemable monsters at least on par with our modern RL neofeudal oligarchy, because of X, Y, Z, etc. Therefore, a V:tR story cannot be about anything more likable than, say, a registered Democrat who runs a payday loan business and donates to animal rescue orgs.

At this point, if I'm going to engage with that, it has to be going for broke and deliberately aiming for some flavor of comedy/satire. I'd be down to play as an Ordo Dracul expy of Elon Musk haphazardly destroying peoples' lives and fighting his rival, vampire Peter Thiel, over whether only Kindred should have rights in the Martian techno-future citadel they're definitely going to build, or if select humans can earn second-class citizenship without receiving the Embrace. Using the conceit of Requiem to play around with RL attempts to convince us that good billionaires exist could make for a fun time, if it's handled with an appropriate level of irreverence.

The problem is that nWoD as a whole is kind of dour and gritty and tries to be about serious topics. That works fine... except when you're using a splat that has been thoroughly barred from pursuing any sort of actual positive change or arc. You can't make things better if you're a vampire. You can only exert modest control over how quickly you make things worse, and which parts of the world take the initial brunt of it (at least until you inevitably either meet Final Death or completely devolve into a soulless predator).

Even before this year, my interest in 'canon' nVampire was pretty low, and now I can't see it as anything but a gameline where actual ideals and hopes for a better world are either death flags or pallid excuses a character will use to justify the moral compromise du jour.
 
Hey, since I'm going through a bunch of reading, which is your favorite Vampire The Requiem Covenant book, which is your least favorite? Why?

Ditto for Clan.

I'm trying to figure out what I'll read next once I finish the bit of Secrets of the Covenant (the bit that hasn't anything to do with mechanics) that's interesting.
 
Nikkolas said:
The Technocracy won. Mages are a doomed people.

The Tremere recognized it a thousand years before the rest of them and so they got a thousand years headstart on making up for all the lost power of mages with cool new vampire powers. And they'll have another thousand years to further perfect their arts while mages go extinct.
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There are like, a billion things that a bunch of mages can do in a mage-primary setting which let them survive a Technocracy victory, probably involve fewer moral quandaries than becoming vampires, and let them retain more power and freedom of action than being a vampire

Also as a bonus, you don't catch on fire and disintegrate if you accidentally get up too early
 
Nikkolas said:
Nope, I just know what it's supposed to entail.

Besides, didn't all of the end time books get retconned away or at least seriously altered? The world, after all, didn't end.
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if all the end of the world books got retconned then the technocracy didnt win either lmfao because thats not how the revised technocracy books treat it at all
 
gehenna the book has four scenarios

one where a bunch of deep lore OC antediluvians show up and wreck stuff, the most caine centric
one where the masquerade breaks and then... weird stuff happens, it's the least memorable of the four. you get to kill a couple antediluvians, the plot kills the rest, and the players are (hopefully) made human again as vampires wither away
one where the vampires get thanos-snapped by god except for a handful locked in a church - provided, of course, they repent
and one where the masquerade breaks, humans get the purge on, which works until antediluvian after antediluvian show up and partition the world/get to murdering each other and then the withering thing still happens

none of these are any good for the tremere or, indeed, the vast majority of vampires

(wormwood is the only scenario worth anything dont @ me)

but like even if you assume the core-book status quo is going to continue forever, you're still full on selling your soul for wales some tenuous immortality and temporal power? it's not like masquerade is ambiguous on this point the way requiem is, even if you don't care about the moral ruin of being vampire, it is literally god's curse and damnation upon you
 
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Clan Tremere are big brains talking big words about perfecting their arts while the living mages wither away, but at the end of the day they are dead men who traded a spark of wonder and glory for a withered and static existence. They may be big stuff compared to street magicians and parlour tricks but in the world of the dead they are upstarts playing at power and in the world of true mages, those "arts" of theirs are dust and ashes.

Thats the point.

The Tremere sowed the wind and they will reap the whirlwind.
 
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NonSequtur said:
gehenna the book has four scenarios

one where a bunch of deep lore OC antediluvians show up and wreck stuff, the most caine centric
one where the masquerade breaks and then... weird stuff happens, it's the least memorable of the four. you get to kill a couple antediluvians, the plot kills the rest, and the players are (hopefully) made human again as vampires wither away
one where the vampires get thanos-snapped by god except for a handful locked in a church - provided, of course, they repent
and one where the masquerade breaks, humans get the purge on, which works until antediluvian after antediluvian show up and partition the world/get to murdering each other and then the withering thing still happens

none of these are any good for the tremere or, indeed, the vast majority of vampires

(wormwood is the only scenario worth anything dont @ me)

but like even if you assume the core-book status quo is going to continue forever, you're still full on selling your soul for wales some tenuous immortality and temporal power? it's not like masquerade is ambiguous on this point the way requiem is, even if you don't care about the moral ruin of being vampire, it is literally god's curse and damnation upon you
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God lol. Like, are you kidding? His very existence is questionable and he might even be dead even if he did exist once. Or he might have absolutely no interest in the worl and buggered off.

There are many drawbacks to vampiric existence but I don't think God is one of them.
 
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Nikkolas said:
God lol. Like, are you kidding? His very existence is questionable and he might even be dead even if he did exist once. Or he might have absolutely no interest in the worl and buggered off.

There are many drawbacks to vampiric existence but I don't think God is one of them.
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Uh. In Vampire: the Masquerade, Adam was the first man, Lilith the first woman, Eve the second woman, and Adam and Eve begat Cain and Abel. When Abel was murdered by Cain, Cain was cursed by God to be the first vampire.

Rejecting that Masquerade is mired in this kind of biblical apocrypha is... really odd, given how heavily Masquerade hammers it in. God exists; God cursed Cain; in the end, all the power struggles and treachery and cruelty of the Kindred will earn them nothing but damnation.

Requiem is the one where the existence of God is a matter of doubt and faith. In Masquerade, there's no such doubt at the OOC level.
 
Nikkolas said:
God lol. Like, are you kidding? His very existence is questionable and he might even be dead even if he did exist once. Or he might have absolutely no interest in the worl and buggered off.

There are many drawbacks to vampiric existence but I don't think God is one of them.
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The Christian God pretty clearly exists in Masquerade lol, that's like the definitive ethos of the setting and it has made that much pretty clear. If you think otherwise, you are gravely misunderstanding Masquerade.
 
The Laurent said:
Hey, since I'm going through a bunch of reading, which is your favorite Vampire The Requiem Covenant book, which is your least favorite? Why?

Ditto for Clan.

I'm trying to figure out what I'll read next once I finish the bit of Secrets of the Covenant (the bit that hasn't anything to do with mechanics) that's interesting.
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I mostly got interested in the bloodlines that have built-in sociopolitics, like the Bron or the Gethsemani. Still, barring a few kinda-duds (the Morbians and the Bohagande never quite clicked with me, and a couple, such as the Gulikan, could do with some tweaking), it'd be fucking cool to see almost any of the canon bloodlines actually get some room to breathe in a written story.

Even the ones that are kind of evil even by vampire standards - the Morotrophians, the Macellarius, the Melissidae - could make for interesting villains, although maybe not the Macellarius. Coming back to them in 201X, they're a mite close to QAnon territory for my tastes. And also, on further thought, insanely grotesque.

(For the uninitiated, the Macellarius are a Ventrue bloodline of morbidly obese "gourmands" who get very creepily particular about their meals and, whenever possible, indulge in their bloodline's gift of being able to digest the entirety of the human body, not merely the blood. Yes, this means they prefer to feed by devouring a live victim one mouthful at a time. Yes, their section has art of a Macellarius blithely looking over the terrified child presented for his start-of-the-evening snack by a butler. Yes, there is also art of a Macellarius looking up from (CW: Cannibalism)the partially-excavated ribcage of a very naked, very dead woman and idly mopping his brow with a handkerchief in his free hand, the one not holding his meal's remaining leg out of the way of h- )

...I've lost my original train of thought.
 
Requiem for Rome and the Chronicle/adventure book for it were really good, if kinda sometimes graphic. People should check those out. Images are mostly pretty solid-ish too.

...except for the image of one of the characters where they make an ancient roman Gladiatrix look like something out of a 21st century bondage shop/Punk expo.
 
ManusDomini said:
She's from Fall of the Camarilla. Requiem for Rome, I believe, does not have her present, and also just so happens to be objectively the best World of Darkness book out there.
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Fall of the Camarilla is actually a pretty good adventure book. Even her character isn't bad. It's just... that picture, dear God.[1]

[1] Despite this exclamation, I wouldn't be one of those Lancea.
 
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