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White Wolf's World of Darkness

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Citrakayah said:
If Werewolf 5th edition manages to expand the Thirteen Tribes and Fera in an interesting, anthropologically and ethologically grounded way, in addition to advancing the metaplot and making the rules more elegant, I'd snap it up in an instant. I'd like it more than 20th, actually, which had no tribe or breed books and also had the genius idea of bringing back the Swords of Heimdall, thus leading to a million Internet arguments about the Get of Fenris that should have been buried alongside the eviscerated corpses of Nazi werewolves.

Basically, give me well-researched lore that's not two decades out of date.
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Thoroughly seconding this.
 
grommile said:
Like, a shit-tonne of WoD lore is built on frequently-shitty takes on marginalized real-world cultures.

(I'm not familiar enough with Werewolf to comment on its particular sins in this regard, but it's a safe bet they're there.)
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Yes, Werewolf has a problem with that. It's something they've tried to do better, and I actually think it does it better than a lot of New World of Darkness (which often seems to take the attitude that marginalized cultures just don't exist), but the game has issues with inaccurate/disrespectful portrayals of Native American cultures; most famous among them is the Wendigo tribe, and their totem they're named after. In the game's cosmology, if they're going to have a wendigo show up, it really ought to be Wyrmish, but it's the patron of one of the PC groups. They also had issues with "noble savage" stereotypes and not appreciating the cultural diversity of the Americas.

These are resolvable issues if you're willing to do a few minor retcons and expand the background information to give a more nuanced portrayal, which they did particularly badly for W20 and look like they'll do better in W5.
 
There's also the Dreamspeakers in the original Mage, which came with the implication of 'Indigenous peoples are all one big blob'. I did hear they tried to amend it to an alliance between Indigenous peoples and pooling together of magic traditions later on
 
Yeah, they did. They also created more distinct groups that weren't part of the Traditions, and framed indigenous people being granted only one seat as the product of colonial attitudes of the time. It could still use reworking.

But I still like this approach than what Mage: the Awakening did, which was to just to use European occultism as the basis for the entire planet's magic system regardless of local cultures. I can't help but feel that a certain cowardice motivated that design choice: "We didn't do a great job of portraying non-European cultures, so we'll just be completely Eurocentric and not even make an attempt."
 
Citrakayah said:
Yeah, they did. They also created more distinct groups that weren't part of the Traditions, and framed indigenous people being granted only one seat as the product of colonial attitudes of the time. It could still use reworking.

But I still like this approach than what Mage: the Awakening did, which was to just to use European occultism as the basis for the entire planet's magic system regardless of local cultures. I can't help but feel that a certain cowardice motivated that design choice: "We didn't do a great job of portraying non-European cultures, so we'll just be completely Eurocentric and not even make an attempt."
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I have bad news for you - if you claim that Awakening with its gnosticism is "European occultism as the basis for the entire planet's magic system regardless of local cultures" then Ascension is doing exactly the same thing, only with chaos magic rather than gnosticism.

And frankly Ascension with its "oh you're just not aware enough to realise you're doing chaos magic, so you need the cultural trappings to fool yourself until you can discard them" is rather more grievous in its Western occultism enforcement.
 
Got some ideas for the fanmade Matango Clan, the Mushroom vampires have grown on me....
What kind of stuff would be considered Too Overpowered to use?
i.e
"use up a non-insignificant amount of Blood Points to create a Starter Mould.
Feed it blood and corpses (not necessarily human) and it will grow.
the Mass can be altered by the creator/strong enough clan members similarly to tzimisce using Fleshcrafting.
a skilled enough clanmember couild create artificial mushroomy prosthetics (for loyal ghouls), or even mobile minions of various sizes.
the Mass could be used to heal as well, with the mass being used up to replace what was lost.
a sort of last resort could be the wounded Clanmate jumping into the mass itself, reshaping it and taking control of it in its entirety.

the Mass could also be spread out over the Lair, tendrils connecting particular spots to move the Mass to areas that need to be regrown.
Mushrooms acting as security cameras, trip wires, e.t.c
mushrooms merging together, shifting and changing to create the appearence of their controller, a barely functional mushroomy communication device.

of course, to get enough Mass for all of this would take a lot of time and resources....
time is something a lot of vampires have to spare...
based kind of on Resident Evil stuff.
 
I've been talking about the Shoujo romcom Tokimeki Tonight on SV lately, and I'm thinking it's main character, Ranze Eto, might be impossible to stat up in Vampire, Masquerade or Requiem, at least without doing a very AU version of her

First off, she's the daughter of a vampire and werewolf, but is personally considered a Vampire (or half-vampire) for all intents and purposes, and not any Vampire-Werewolf. I do know being an outright Vampire-Werewolf hybrid was technically possible in oWoD through roll-botching, definitely not in nWoD

But her main power is she can transform into anything she bites, other people, animals, inanimate objects, and so on, which I'm pretty sure there isn't a Discipline for. Granted, she has to be able to bite the thing first, has to bite the thing again to transform into it a second time, and presumably she can't become anything too much bigger than her
 
EarthScorpion said:
I have bad news for you - if you claim that Awakening with its gnosticism is "European occultism as the basis for the entire planet's magic system regardless of local cultures" then Ascension is doing exactly the same thing, only with chaos magic rather than gnosticism.

And frankly Ascension with its "oh you're just not aware enough to realise you're doing chaos magic, so you need the cultural trappings to fool yourself until you can discard them" is rather more grievous in its Western occultism enforcement.
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I think all the Atlantis stuff is the more obvious example of how the game privileges Western occultism. Now, as time has gone on they've moved things more and more into the realm of "this is a useful myth that most people accept" rather than "this is literally the exact truth," but you're still left with a setting where society is organized around a very Western myth.

This is actually one of the things I like about the Dark Eras books, they show off some examples of Mage societies with very different beliefs and structures. The Pentacle (well, the Diamond I guess) even gets cast as a colonialist force seeking to supplant these local cultures on one or two occasions. I just wish that sort of dynamic had more of a presence in the core book.
 
Don Alverzo said:
I think all the Atlantis stuff is the more obvious example of how the game privileges Western occultism. Now, as time has gone on they've moved things more and more into the realm of "this is a useful myth that most people accept" rather than "this is literally the exact truth," but you're still left with a setting where society is organized around a very Western myth.

This is actually one of the things I like about the Dark Eras books, they show off some examples of Mage societies with very different beliefs and structures. The Pentacle (well, the Diamond I guess) even gets cast as a colonialist force seeking to supplant these local cultures on one or two occasions. I just wish that sort of dynamic had more of a presence in the core book.
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Yeah, it is absolutely much more interesting to do the 2e Mage thing where the Diamond is a historically bound set of Orders that have risen and, in theory, could fall. Admittedly this leaves you kinda having to make up a lot of shit: what is China up to, how much penetration does the Diamond have in China, etc, etc, writ large everywhere. But it does kinda make sense.
 
Citrakayah said:
Yes, Werewolf has a problem with that. It's something they've tried to do better, and I actually think it does it better than a lot of New World of Darkness (which often seems to take the attitude that marginalized cultures just don't exist),
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I don't feel like this is actually what NWOD/CofD really does. What they don't do is shoehorn IRL marginalized people into game rules and make them "classes" or "races." In some ways, I suppose you could argue this erases marginalized peoples (except they're prominently depicted in the fiction fluff) or reduces them down to "skins" that are applied to the rules as written. However, you could argue it the other way: anyone of any race, religion, creed, or gender identity can undergo the First Change, have an Awakening etc. and while the rules describe how the mechanics of their new existence work, the lore (especially in 2e) takes great pains to repeat as often as it can that to the degree that characters are aware of the mechanics, their own personal understanding of their new existence is subject to a lot of conjecture, experimentation, and has abundant room to be viewed through a specific cultural lens.

In 2e especially the core "splats" are more oriented around representing particular tropes rather than specific cultural relationships and subjectively I think that's more respectful. A particular Mage Path can represent a particular cultural understanding of witchcraft if you want it to, but you can also opt out if it feels gross.

From a meta point of view, Onyx Path's commitment to trying to have authors with an authentic claim to the cultures they're writing about do the work places restrictions on how ambitious they can be with their portrayals of diversity. As a smallish contractor working for a large imprint that is not insignificant but doesn't have the market share to throw around that a Wizards of the Coast has, there are certain...shall we say....dirty deeds going into the sausage. If you want to correctly depict a people who represent a single digit percentage of the human population, then you need a writer from that community who is interested in writing horror fiction or horror game fluff and mechanics, is willing to do it for peanuts, and preferably won't get outed later as actually just wearing [subculture] face and generally being problematic.
 
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Larrygorn said:
I don't feel like this is actually what NWOD/CofD really does. What they don't do is shoehorn IRL marginalized people into game rules and make them "classes" or "races." In some ways, I suppose you could argue this erases marginalized peoples (except they're prominently depicted in the fiction fluff) or reduces them down to "skins" that are applied to the rules as written. However, you could argue it the other way: anyone of any race, religion, creed, or gender identity can undergo the First Change, have an Awakening etc. and while the rules describe how the mechanics of their new existence work, the lore (especially in 2e) takes great pains to repeat as often as it can that to the degree that characters are aware of the mechanics, their own personal understanding of their new existence is subject to a lot of conjecture, experimentation, and has abundant room to be viewed through a specific cultural lens.

In 2e especially the core "splats" are more oriented around representing particular tropes rather than specific cultural relationships and subjectively I think that's more respectful. A particular Mage Path can represent a particular cultural understanding of witchcraft if you want it to, but you can also opt out if it feels gross.

From a meta point of view, Onyx Path's commitment to trying to have authors with an authentic claim to the cultures they're writing about do the work places restrictions on how ambitious they can be with their portrayals of diversity. As a smallish contractor working for a large imprint that is not insignificant but doesn't have the market share to throw around that a Wizards of the Coast has, there are certain...shall we say....dirty deeds going into the sausage. If you want to correctly depict a people who represent a single digit percentage of the human population, then you need a writer from that community who is interested in writing horror fiction or horror game fluff and mechanics, is willing to do it for peanuts, and preferably won't get outed later as actually just wearing [subculture] face and generally being problematic.
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Eh, there's some argument to be made that the social structures of the splats tend to be very western, even if the core mechanics and setting assumptions tend to be more culturally agnostic. Like VtR, for example, doesn't say that the biblical Caine (and therefore the biblical God) is objectively true like VtM does, it doesn't privilege western mythology when defining or explaining it's supernatural shit (outside the obvious fact that it's a game about being the sort of vampire popularized by Dracula). It does, however, present vampire Christians as one of the main factions in kindred society. Every other real world religion is either lumped under the Circle of the Crone (which is a vague pagan mish-mash that's still coded as fairly western) or entirely ignored.

I'm personally not too bothered by this, since the games give you plenty of space to come up with a faction of vampire Muslims or Buddhists if you want that in your game, but I can see how it might rub somebody the wrong way. And it's of course much better than the oWoD approach of fetishizing irl marginalized groups, stripping them for parts, and/or treating them as character classes. I'll gladly take a game that vaguely assumes a western audience over a game full of Ravnos and Dreamspeakers any day of the week.
 
Don Alverzo said:
Eh, there's some argument to be made that the social structures of the splats tend to be very western, even if the core mechanics and setting assumptions tend to be more culturally agnostic. Like VtR, for example, doesn't say that the biblical Caine (and therefore the biblical God) is objectively true like VtM does, it doesn't privilege western mythology when defining or explaining it's supernatural shit (outside the obvious fact that it's a game about being the sort of vampire popularized by Dracula). It does, however, present vampire Christians as one of the main factions in kindred society. Every other real world religion is either lumped under the Circle of the Crone (which is a vague pagan mish-mash that's still coded as fairly western) or entirely ignored.

I'm personally not too bothered by this, since the games give you plenty of space to come up with a faction of vampire Muslims or Buddhists if you want that in your game, but I can see how it might rub somebody the wrong way. And it's of course much better than the oWoD approach of fetishizing irl marginalized groups, stripping them for parts, and/or treating them as character classes. I'll gladly take a game that vaguely assumes a western audience over a game full of Ravnos and Dreamspeakers any day of the week.
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They do try to address the Muslim end of things in the splat-book for the Lancea, but it's as pathetic as you can imagine to the point you wish they had the courage of their convictions (and their INCREDIBLY rad backstory for the Lancea et Sanctum) and just made different alternate Covenants/organizations to cover other religions or so on.

But as far as I know, they never go, "Muslims join Circle of the Crone, Buddhists are obviously Ordo Dracul people" or whatever.
 
Don Alverzo said:
It does, however, present vampire Christians as one of the main factions in kindred society. Every other real world religion is either lumped under the Circle of the Crone (which is a vague pagan mish-mash that's still coded as fairly western) or entirely ignored.
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That's quite fair although I think behind the scenes, a lot of that is market forces and the self imposed handcuffs of trying not to repeat the mistakes of the past. When the 1st edition of VTR came out, you couldn't throw a rock without hitting someone who was very comfortable writing about Christianity going terribly wrong or how Christianity might be reinterpreted by people who have found themselves undead but with no fully credible angels or demons to provide more insight into "what's really going on" - just a mishmash of Spirits, Ghosts, Owl demons, and other assorted ephemera who are all more than happy to pretend to be whatever a Kindred expects in order to extract whatever they want from the Kindred, assuming they're even lucid or sentient enough to be legible to a Kindred.

Its much less of an ask nowadays to dig up someone who might be comfortable dabbling in the intersection of role playing games, horror fiction, and how their specific religious and cultural context might get mangled by the universes Onyx Path have created (and modestly easier to vet them.)
 
Yeah, I do find the idea that CofD/nWoD is worse than oWoD RE: non-white non-Christian perspectives kind of hilarious, considering oWoD had an entire book literally called 'World Of Darkness: Gypsies' and I'm not aware of CofD falling that low.

(Also all the very, very racist Werewolf stuff (Wendigo, Uktena, probably like half the other tribes, I'm not big on OWerewolf, pretty sure they've got a very racist 'top o' the mornin'' always drunk Irish werewolf tribe too?), all the exceptionally racist Vampire stuff (Ravnos (triple yikes), Children of Set, Assamites, all the other racist shit that's wedged in there), all the racist Mage stuff (really not a big oMage guy but I know that there's plenty in there).)

There's certainly an Anglosphere slant to the given setting information for CofD - see Lancea Sanctum and Atlantis - but it's never really stated or implied that these are the only views, only that they're the predominant ones in the implied-USA setting that all the books are written for. It's definitely not in any way perfect but it doesn't make me stop and stare at the page in horrified disbelief like a lot of oWoD stuff does.
 
The Laurent said:
They do try to address the Muslim end of things in the splat-book for the Lancea, but it's as pathetic as you can imagine to the point you wish they had the courage of their convictions (and their INCREDIBLY rad backstory for the Lancea et Sanctum) and just made different alternate Covenants/organizations to cover other religions or so on.

But as far as I know, they never go, "Muslims join Circle of the Crone, Buddhists are obviously Ordo Dracul people" or whatever.
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Yeah, I had vague memories of Muslims being mentioned as having a subfaction of the Lancea somewhere, but honestly that almost feels worse to me? Bringing up the Muslim vampires just to lump them in as somehow being a minor sect of the Christian vampires is just... ugh. Not only is it implicitly privileging Christianity, it just doesn't make sense. Why would these two religions with very different teachings, culture, theology, etc. suddenly be lumped together just because everyone's vampires now? Why would Muslim vampires accept and adapt the Christian explanation for vampirism instead of trying to make sense of things from their own perspective?

And I think you're basically right about the other covenants. There are noises about how the Circle of the Crone tends to pull from indigenous religions and paganism, but I don't think they ever get into specifics with it. I think they might get more into things like that with bloodlines, but I'm only saying that because I have vague memories of some Shinto Nosferatu in 1e.
Larrygorn said:
That's quite fair although I think behind the scenes, a lot of that is market forces and the self imposed handcuffs of trying not to repeat the mistakes of the past. When the 1st edition of VTR came out, you couldn't throw a rock without hitting someone who was very comfortable writing about Christianity going terribly wrong or how Christianity might be reinterpreted by people who have found themselves undead but with no fully credible angels or demons to provide more insight into "what's really going on" - just a mishmash of Spirits, Ghosts, Owl demons, and other assorted ephemera who are all more than happy to pretend to be whatever a Kindred expects in order to extract whatever they want from the Kindred, assuming they're even lucid or sentient enough to be legible to a Kindred.

Its much less of an ask nowadays to dig up someone who might be comfortable dabbling in the intersection of role playing games, horror fiction, and how their specific religious and cultural context might get mangled by the universes Onyx Path have created (and modestly easier to vet them.)
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Yup, that's why I don't really blame them too much. They're writing a niche rpg in English for an established western fanbase, it's not really a stretch to assume that people buying the game are going to be more interested in what vampires are like in America than in China or something. And now that the gamelines are more established (and social media has made it easier to find qualified writers), they're starting to branch out a bit more and explore some of those perspectives that they'd previously ignored. That's part of what I liked about the Dark Eras books; I was definitely buying those books to read about medieval Arabian vampires and ancient Chinese Changelings, not what the various splats were doing during the French revolution.
 
VtR is a sort of weird example here, too. For a few reasons.

1. It more or less is a setting were western vampire covenants did ride the wave of imperialism and their own hubris to overwhelm or absorb foreign covenants.

2. It's something that was trashier in 1e than 2e, which has largely backed off of the more "just brush them into the big western buckets" handwaving.

3. It's the first and oldest.

But this doesn't apply as much to other nwod games. Werewolf's splats are entirely universal. Mage's splats are largely universal and their social construction of y splats is explicitly multicultural from its earliest incarnations, and Atlantis is a reality glitch and a metaphor. Other than a mildly cursed effort to do asian-influenced "directional courts," Changeling has universal splats. Every line after that only gets less culturally specific, by and large, until you reach Geist, which you're not allowed to play if you're a lib, and Mummy, which is kemet-supremacist.
 
Potato Anarchy said:
VtR is a sort of weird example here, too. For a few reasons.

1. It more or less is a setting were western vampire covenants did ride the wave of imperialism and their own hubris to overwhelm or absorb foreign covenants.

2. It's something that was trashier in 1e than 2e, which has largely backed off of the more "just brush them into the big western buckets" handwaving.

3. It's the first and oldest.

But this doesn't apply as much to other nwod games. Werewolf's splats are entirely universal. Mage's splats are largely universal and their social construction of y splats is explicitly multicultural from its earliest incarnations, and Atlantis is a reality glitch and a metaphor. Other than a mildly cursed effort to do asian-influenced "directional courts," Changeling has universal splats. Every line after that only gets less culturally specific, by and large, until you reach Geist, which you're not allowed to play if you're a lib, and Mummy, which is kemet-supremacist.
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I'll give you Werewolf, but the Mage social splats are based around the myth of Atlantis. They might have a very idiosyncratic and unusual interpretation of that myth, but it's still rooted in western legends and mythology. Like, if the Diamond was instead organized around a weird and unorthodox interpretation of the Tao Te Jing or something, you wouldn't say there's no cultural bias in Mage's social splats.

Now I agree that most of the smaller games are a lot less culturally specific, but Vampire, Mage, and Werewolf are widely regarded as "the big three" and are the games that receive the bulk of the attention and writing. Two of those three have a noticeable western slant. Again, I'm not really bothered by this, and I certainly think any attempt to compare it to oWoD is absolutely laughable, but it's still there and I could understand if someone was annoyed by it.
 
Kadmus said:
Yeah, I do find the idea that CofD/nWoD is worse than oWoD RE: non-white non-Christian perspectives kind of hilarious, considering oWoD had an entire book literally called 'World Of Darkness: Gypsies' and I'm not aware of CofD falling that low.

(Also all the very, very racist Werewolf stuff (Wendigo, Uktena, probably like half the other tribes, I'm not big on OWerewolf, pretty sure they've got a very racist 'top o' the mornin'' always drunk Irish werewolf tribe too?), all the exceptionally racist Vampire stuff (Ravnos (triple yikes), Children of Set, Assamites, all the other racist shit that's wedged in there), all the racist Mage stuff (really not a big oMage guy but I know that there's plenty in there).)
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Ultimately it depends on whether it's better to have media try to portray other cultures and not do it well, or basically ignore them. I take the attitude that the second one is usually worse. There are, of course, limits; White Wolf's depiction of the Romani was egregious and it would better if they didn't say anything at all. But in the gamelines I'm most familiar with--Werewolf Revised and W20--as far as I can tell it's usually not so bad (especially for the time) that I'd rather they just cut it all from the gameline.

I will say I'm saying this from the perspective of someone who generally plays with people aware of these issues, and who tends to do a lot of fluff homebrew whenever I get the opportunity. I consider it easier to try and fix the problematic fluff Old World of Darkness gave us than invent entirely new material, complete with new mechanics, and convince the DM to accept it.

Potato Anarchy said:
Mage's splats are largely universal and their social construction of y splats is explicitly multicultural from its earliest incarnations, and Atlantis is a reality glitch and a metaphor.
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Mage's splats are, but at least in 1e (which is the version I play), the cosmology is basically Gnostic, the Supernal realms use specifically Western imagery, and the history most mages are shown as believing in (and that the game implies is actually true) involves a Greek tale. If your premise is that magic throughout the whole world stems from a common source, that pretty much all the cultural markers that you do find are Western seems a little weird.
 
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2E basically did away with pure "Atlantean Orthodoxy" in its construction of Mage. The Silver Ladder still adheres to it, but that's because it's not only a legitimizing claim but because some of the earliest proto-thearchs were Pelasgians who were literally there to hear Plato talk about Atlantis and thought "Huh, that's an interesting way to put it."

The other members of the Diamond will be less attached to Atlantis as literal truth, whereas most others won't even bother to think about it. It also helps that "Atlantean Ruins" need not look western at all, since their appearance and content vary by time and location when found. In general, I think that 2e and Dark Eras did a pretty good job at minimizing (if not eliminating) any western bias in the Splat; I admit I'm not an expert on such matters, but I really like the writeup for the Shona Mages in Princes of the Conquered Land and how they associate their knowledge with ancestral spirits and heroes, and how the Portuguese mages try to shoehorn this different understanding into the traditional "Diamond" conception in a way that both misses the point and ultimately overruns the former through force of colonialism.
 
Citrakayah said:
Ultimately it depends on whether it's better to have media try to portray other cultures and not do it well, or basically ignore them. I take the attitude that the second one is usually worse. There are, of course, limits; White Wolf's depiction of the Romani was egregious and it would better if they didn't say anything at all. But in the gameline I'm most familiar with--Werewolf Revised--as far as I can tell it's usually not so bad (especially for the time) that I'd rather they just cut it all from the gameline.

I will say I'm saying this from the perspective of someone who generally plays with people aware of these issues, and who tends to do a lot of fluff homebrew whenever I get the opportunity. I consider it easier to try and fix the problematic fluff Old World of Darkness gave us than invent entirely new material, complete with new mechanics, and convince the DM to accept it.
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See, I don't really get this. I'm admittedly white, but thinking about it in terms of marginalized groups I do belong to, I'd much rather have no queer rep than have the only queer rep come from straight guys writing weird fetishy shit. It's much easier for me to invent my own shit than to excise or rewrite large swaths of the setting that are just straight up offensive.

I straight up can't do oWoD games because of how much of the setting needs to change before I'd be comfortable with it. That's not work I want to do as a DM, that's not work I expect my DM to do for me as a player, and at the end of the day it'd render the setting basically unrecognizable, at which point I have to question why we're even using oWoD to begin with. Compare that to nWoD where, sure, there might be occasional gaps, but there's nothing I need to get rid of, and the games are constructed in such a way that they encourage you to fill in the gaps anyway.

It's much easier for me to invent a Nameless Order of indigenous Mages in nMage than it is for me to rewrite half the Traditions in oMage.
Amidatelion said:
2E basically did away with pure "Atlantean Orthodoxy" in its construction of Mage. The Silver Ladder still adheres to it, but that's because it's not only a legitimizing claim but because some of the earliest proto-thearchs were Pelasgians who were literally there to hear Plato talk about Atlantis and thought "Huh, that's an interesting way to put it."

The other members of the Diamond will be less attached to Atlantis as literal truth, whereas most others won't even bother to think about it. It also helps that "Atlantean Ruins" need not look western at all, since their appearance and content vary by time and location when found. In general, I think that 2e and Dark Eras did a pretty good job at minimizing (if not eliminating) any western bias in the Splat; I admit I'm not an expert on such matters, but I really like the writeup for the Shona Mages in Princes of the Conquered Land and how they associate their knowledge with ancestral spirits and heroes, and how the Portuguese mages try to shoehorn this different understanding into the traditional "Diamond" conception in a way that both misses the point and ultimately overruns the former through force of colonialism.
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Princes of the Conquered Land is probably my favorite part of Dark Eras and genuinely one of the most valuable supplements there is for nMage as far as I'm conccerned.
 
Amidatelion said:
2E basically did away with pure "Atlantean Orthodoxy" in its construction of Mage.
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This isn't even a 2e thing. Secrets of the Ruined Temple had already done that, and that was the 1e "Atlantean ruins" book. Also see the Orderbooks, which were pretty much all great (apart from Free Council, but the Free Council remain shit and a waste of space and should have never been added and 2e doesn't make them any better by trying to make them into the Anarchs).

And oh boy, people really don't want to deny people from using supplements if they're trying to argue that oWoD does anything better because then you have to baseline yourself on oWoD corebook material too and can't use supplements.
 
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