As a white CIS/Het guy, I do get that there are two sides to the representation argument. Some people are happy to just be acknowledged whilst others have valid concerns and/or reactions of disgust to ignorant portrayals perpetuated unpleasant stereotypes.
Weirdly enough I think there's a parallel in how geeky people responded to The Big Bang Theory. A show I adored and made me feel seen right up until it began to make my skin crawl. (This isn't related to any particular change in the show, it actually got less exploitative and tropey as time went on, but as I got older and felt more comfortable in my own skin as a geeky person, I began to feel targeted by the show instead of included by it.)
I have no earthly idea what the Geist discourse is all about (maybe the original poster was thinking of Beast and its very well documented icky subtext about "redeeming others through violence and abuse"?) other than it does play with Voodoo tropes a little bit but I haven't heard of anyone explicitly aggravated by it. Its portrayal of the afterlife is grim AF but that's a constant in OWOD/CofD.
I'm exaggerating for the joke, but Geist 2E made the game specifically a radical power fantasy. The world is haunted by a vast hidden bloody system which is objectively shit, though some antagonists deny the problem and defend it, and all of the player characters are expected to be rebels against it. To quote the intro:
Sin-Eaters aren't an ancient, monolithic culture; they've been around the mass graveyard of history, and there's old wisdom to be found there, but it's modern thinking, progressive morality, and the audacity to stand up and say "the system is broken, let's fix it" that's going to change the world. [...] Sin-Eaters consider "nothing changes" to be a fail state. They're agitators, radicals, and punks. There's a term for Bound who don't want to get out there and change things (even if not on a global/cosmic scale): That term is "Storyteller character."
The fairly despicable sellout antagonist Reapers, meanwhile, are strongly centrist-coded:
With these philosophies in mind, Reapers view the Doctrines of Sin-Eater krewes with a range of emotions, from mild disdain to sheer ire. Sin-Eaters are outsiders, bound to amnesiac ghosts high on stolen power. Their claim that the system is broken has no validity. Even reformist Reapers reject their ideas. Sin-Eaters want too much change, too fast. Their ideals are understandable, even laudable, but invite chaos.
Faced with the potential destruction of the world they know, Reapers fight back by installing themselves into the Underworld's day-to-day life. Reapers serve as teachers, spiritual leaders, and even folk heroes. Some Reapers work as messengers, carrying important news while making sure their destinations are still holding the proper beliefs. Leaders and beloved pillars of riverside towns and graveyards may have a Deathmask hidden away, ready for use. Together, they present the idea of a world that works, and many Reapers take great pride in doing so.
Of course, no amount of public service can stave off the desire to reap.
In practice it's not a straightjacket or anything, but I've been in games that didn't explain this part enough and then struggled when some people didn't want to be revolutionaries. And if Awakening is a game that indulges the metaphysical fantasy of objective truths writ broadly, Geist 2E is committed to a metaphysical/political fantasy of "this time, surely, no one can deny that the system is broken and all of the good guys will agree with me."
In practice it's not a straightjacket or anything, but I've been in games that didn't explain this part enough and then struggled when some people didn't want to be revolutionaries. And if Awakening is a game that indulges the metaphysical fantasy of objective truths writ broadly, Geist 2E is committed to a metaphysical fantasy of "this time, surely, no one cany deny that the system is broken and all of the good guys will agree with me."
2E is a mess in places (especially its layout???) but the core concept is strong as hell and drives good stories, and I think the X-splats in particular are fantastic hooks.
2E is a mess in places (especially its layout???) but the core concept is strong as hell and drives good stories, and I think the X-splats in particular are fantastic hooks.
This is 2E in a nutshell. I am once again asking you (Onyx Path) to use functional section headings instead of prosaic ones that are full of flavor but are completely useless for navigating the book unless you're already an expert.
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.
It depends on how bad it is, obviously, but if we're talking about portraying Jewish people in fiction, I'd rather see a gameline that does a poor job of portraying Jewish culture and relies on stereotypes rather than a gameline that is set in medieval Europe and somehow avoids mentioning Jewish people entirely (though it would be another thing if they're using, like, Nazi stereotypes or some shit). I would of course want them to do better, but in my view they'd get points over the latter case by mentioning us.
I'd be especially irritated if, in response to getting criticized over their portrayal of Jewish culture, they just reduced us to a minor background detail rather than just doing a better job. That's... that's not how you handle poor portrayals of minority groups. It's not impossible to do a good job. I guess that's why I'm most irritated about this--I've always understood nWoD as an attempt to learn from the lessons learned making oWoD. So the Western slant reads like a deliberate design choice, as opposed to trying for multiculturalism--and I really hate when that's people's reaction to getting criticized about these things.
And sure, I'm also white and not intricately familiar with contemporary Native American politics, so maybe I'm underestimating how offensive it is to the relevant groups, but I've read Native Americans talking about how they enjoyed playing Werewolf: the Apocalypse, or like the game (some of them eventually became writers for it). And they weren't avoiding the North American tribes--there's some discussion of it you can find if you look at the Onyx Path forums, and on Werewolf the Podcast.
That's not to say that there's not a lot of problematic material there, or that those people are necessarily representative of all Native Americans (it's not that hard to find members of minorities who will downplay stuff most of the group finds offensive), but they're still seeing things they like in it. A lot needs to be done to bring the setting material up to the level it ought to be--and that's part of what I'm hoping W5 does--but a lot of the playerbase does acknowledge the issues. I think there's enough useful things in there that while the setting should be rewritten, it shouldn't be thrown away.
It depends on how bad it is, obviously, but if we're talking about portraying Jewish people in fiction, I'd rather see a gameline that does a poor job of portraying Jewish culture and relies on stereotypes rather than a gameline that is set in medieval Europe and somehow avoids mentioning Jewish people entirely (though it would be another thing if they're using, like, Nazi stereotypes or some shit). I would of course want them to do better, but in my view they'd get points over the latter case by mentioning us.
I'd be especially irritated if, in response to getting criticized over their portrayal of Jewish culture, they just reduced us to a minor background detail rather than just doing a better job. That's... that's not how you handle poor portrayals of minority groups. It's not impossible to do a good job. I guess that's why I'm most irritated about this--I've always understood nWoD as an attempt to learn from the lessons learned making oWoD. So the Western slant reads like a deliberate design choice, as opposed to trying for multiculturalism--and I really hate when that's people's reaction to getting criticized about these things.
And sure, I'm also white and not intricately familiar with contemporary Native American politics, so maybe I'm underestimating how offensive it is to the relevant groups, but I've read Native Americans talking about how they enjoyed playing Werewolf: the Apocalypse, or like the game (some of them eventually became writers for it). And they weren't avoiding the North American tribes--there's some discussion of it you can find if you look at the Onyx Path forums, and on Werewolf the Podcast.
That's not to say that there's not a lot of problematic material there, or that those people are necessarily representative of all Native Americans (it's not that hard to find members of minorities who will downplay stuff most of the group finds offensive), but they're still seeing things they like in it. A lot needs to be done to bring the setting material up to the level it ought to be--and that's part of what I'm hoping W5 does--but a lot of the playerbase does acknowledge the issues. I think there's enough useful things in there that while the setting should be rewritten, it shouldn't be thrown away.
Firstly, the idea that nWoD represents a Western slant and a move away from the "multicuralism" of oWoD is just... no. VtM is about how the bible was literally true and every vampire, regardless of culture or heritage (except for the "Kindred of the East," but that's just a whole Sinophobic mess) is descended from the actual, literal biblical Caine. oMage takes as a core assumption that the Western idea of chaos magick is 100% correct, and every culture that thinks it's practicing it's own rituals is actual just using crutches to do this Western thing. I'm admittedly less familiar with WtA, but just those two games is enough to see that oWoD is absolutely oozing with whiteness. The games take a 100% Western view of the world, then have a couple of ethnic stereotypes to use as props.
Second, a big part of the reason you don't have some Dreamspeakers 2.0 in nWoD is not because they got scared off trying to represent marginalized groups, but because they decided that making everyone a walking cultural stereotype is dumb. oWoD groups were all just a collection of cultural cliches, even the white ones. It was just a lot less offensive for, say, the Cult of Ecstasy to be party culture stereotypes or the Giovanni to be mafia cliches than it was for the Dreamspeakers to be a lump of indigenous people or the Ravnos to be Romani kleptomaniacs.
It was still dumb though, and so nWoD stopped constructing groups out of existing cultural stereotypes and instead largely tried to construct groups that were a believable reaction to the world they'd created. So oWoD has the Celestial Choristers because zealous Christians are an easy and obvious group to stereotype, whereas nWoD has the Lancea et Sanctum because a lot of people are Christian and so a lot of vampires are probably examining their existence through that lens.
Third... there's still plenty of non-Western views and groups represented in nWoD. True, it's sometimes sort of takes Western as the default, but it doesn't just pretend nonwhite people don't exist. Each of the 2e core books present multiple sample cities for you to use, and a lot of them are non-Western. Actually, I just checked, and all of the big three (Vampire, Mage, and Werewolf) make sure to tell you what Tokyo is like in their 2e core book (which is strangely enough the only city that any of them share, but whatever). And that's without even getting into the supplements, which can be absolutely fantastic in that regard; again, I consider the Dark Eras Companion to be possible the best Mage supplement there is purely because of the Princes of a Conquered Land section.
If you prefer oWoD to nWoD, that's totally fine. I'm not here to start edition wars or police anybody's fun. But when you say that the way nWoD handles marginalized groups is a disappointment compared to oWoD, I just can't take that seriously.
I'm not fond of Kindred of the East, but I happen to know some people who really like it and other White Wolf "Asian" splats because it offers a non-Western perspective despite its flaws. Not gonna pretend that's even slightly representative, but I was surprised that some shared that opinion.
ctually, I just checked, and all of the big three (Vampire, Mage, and Werewolf) make sure to tell you what Tokyo is like in their 2e core book (which is strangely enough the only city that any of them share, but whatever).
I remember reading somewhere that Tokyo was going to be an "experiment" for CofD to play around with metaplot and the main setting, but that idea was dropped at some point.
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."
Some missing of the point was certainly involved there, yes
But I think it makes more sense when you look at what the Pelasgians actually believed. If you see the olympian Gods as usurpers who bask in human worship and punish rebellion with calamity, then I'm sure you would identify with the Atlanteans more than the Athenians.
Even before the Atlantean movement they already believed that the Gods had destroyed the ancient Arcadian kingdom with a flood as punishment for King Lycaeon's attempt to dethrone Zeus.
Now I'm wondering if Dark Eras 2 ever expanded on non-Diamond societies in Africa, Asia, Australia, and the Americas. Since the Diamond's Eurocentric with Persian and Indian influences worldview has its roots in Alexander's conquests and attempts at cultural fusion, the Far East for instance would have had a longer period of significantly less contact between Eastern and Western Magi and would be more likely to have developed its own framework for organizing Mage cosmology. It would be interesting to see how they mapped the Abyss, the Supernal Realms, the Lower Depths etc. and what metaphors they use. Maybe they would conceive of these "realms" in less spatial / geographic terms?
There's also less glorification of a Time Before IIRC, so it would also be interesting to see magical traditions that don't automatically project utopian themes onto relics of the Time Before. Seems like if the right cadre of writers could be tapped, there's opportunity to experiment with the idea that the Diamond is a prisoner of its own metaphors and pre-colonial non-European societies might have some different ways of explaining the Abyss, Supernal etc. that would open things up.
This was, incidentally, one of the most fascinating aspects of the Prehistoric and Alexandrian Mage settings in Dark Eras 1: the way it moved backwards in time to show how the "default" Mage society in the core book is a construct that was built up over time as different philosophical traditions debated, won, lost, merged, or got demoted to Nameless Order status.
Now I'm wondering if Dark Eras 2 ever expanded on non-Diamond societies in Africa, Asia, Australia, and the Americas. Since the Diamond's Eurocentric with Persian and Indian influences worldview has its roots in Alexander's conquests and attempts at cultural fusion, the Far East for instance would have had a longer period of significantly less contact between Eastern and Western Magi and would be more likely to have developed its own framework for organizing Mage cosmology. It would be interesting to see how they mapped the Abyss, the Supernal Realms, the Lower Depths etc. and what metaphors they use. Maybe they would conceive of these "realms" in less spatial / geographic terms?
There's also less glorification of a Time Before IIRC, so it would also be interesting to see magical traditions that don't automatically project utopian themes onto relics of the Time Before. Seems like if the right cadre of writers could be tapped, there's opportunity to experiment with the idea that the Diamond is a prisoner of its own metaphors and pre-colonial non-European societies might have some different ways of explaining the Abyss, Supernal etc. that would open things up.
This was, incidentally, one of the most fascinating aspects of the Prehistoric and Alexandrian Mage settings in Dark Eras 1: the way it moved backwards in time to show how the "default" Mage society in the core book is a construct that was built up over time as different philosophical traditions debated, won, lost, merged, or got demoted to Nameless Order status.
Seriously, read Princes of the Conquered Land in the Dark Eras Companion. It's Mages in the Mutapa Empire (roughly where Zimbabwe is in the modern day) in the 1500's, right as it's being colonized by the Portuguese. Instead of Paths, the local mages have Lineages derived from different heroic/mythological ancestors from whom they draw power. They have no concept of the Supernal Realms or Atlantis, and instead view themselves as spiritual mediums. Instead of Orders, they adapt the local tradition of Mutupos to Mage society; each Mage ritually leaves behind the Mutupo of their sleeper life and joins one of the Awakened Mutupos, meaning that there's a sense of ritual kinship there that the Orders lack (to the point where they even view sex with someone in your Mutupo as taboo and analogous to incest).
It's just a really good supplement for the way it takes the core mechanics and setting assumptions of Mage (the Lineages use the same mechanics as the Paths, there's nothing magically or mechanically different about the local Mages compared to European Mages or Mages as presented in the core book) and uses them to build a completely different society and set of traditions and beliefs. It really drives home the fact that the Pentacle represents one particularly dominant culture rather than the objective truth, and helps to open your eyes to the sheer diversity of beliefs and understandings that are possible even in the framework Mage operates under.
I don't think "eurocentric with Persian and Indian (and Egyptian) influences" is really the early diamond we see in dark eras. It's southwest-asian-centric maybe, but there's no real reason to think that the Greek culture were the most dominant or that there was any significant influence from the artist later known as Europe besides them.
I don't think "eurocentric with Persian and Indian (and Egyptian) influences" is really the early diamond we see in dark eras. It's southwest-asian-centric maybe, but there's no real reason to think that the Greek culture were the most dominant or that there was any significant influence from the artist later known as Europe besides them.
With the way the language and key concepts were updated such as the diminished use of Atlantis in favor of the Time Before and increased use of loan words from other spiritual practices, Mage 2e is admittedly a bit more inaccessible to me insofar as my ability to deconstruct where all the elements came from that make up the Diamond's modern cosmology.
I think if there's any way that "Greek" culture became dominant in the Diamond it would be in the way that Atlanteanism became dominant in the Mahanizrayani Darshana because it appealed to their cultural and magical sensibilities*. As the Proto-Thearchs gained the Adamantine Arrow's loyalty and later became the de-facto leader of the Diamond, this made Atlanteanism the party line.
*Someone noted that the Atlantean Orthodox tale of the Dragon-Dreams might have been adapted from the Naga Kingdom beliefs of the Mantrikis, but there are many shared ideas between the great cults that point to a Time Before.
In practice it's not a straightjacket or anything, but I've been in games that didn't explain this part enough and then struggled when some people didn't want to be revolutionaries. And if Awakening is a game that indulges the metaphysical fantasy of objective truths writ broadly, Geist 2E is committed to a metaphysical/political fantasy of "this time, surely, no one can deny that the system is broken and all of the good guys will agree with me."
I can appreciate the idea of using Geist to build a game about being the envoys of the wrathful dead against an uncaring and apocalyptic world order of necrocapitalism (look it up, it's an actual term). You're a protestor at Standing Rock who still has an ugly scar on their face where they were hit directly by one of the pressurized riot hoses that the cops unleashed on protestors there, instantly fracturing their skull and triggering massive cranial hemorrhaging which killed them in minutes - only to get back up in the medical station behind the frontline of the protestors, for reasons the medic couldn't begin to understand. Now, you walk with another pair of footsteps beside you, footsteps slick with the crude that Chevron dumped into Ecuador's groundwater. Where you walk now, those who prop up the Molochian engines of capital die choking on carcinogenic petroleum slurry, pleading for a mercy they casually denied the children born blind and the parents riddled with tumors, the workers used up and tossed aside like AA batteries to increase their masters' net worth by another infinitesimal fraction of a percent.
However, I just could not get into Geist 2e. I tried my damnedest to hear it out, but from what I was able to choke down before finally giving up, it seems to have octupled down on GRIM BLEAK HORROR. Sin-Eaters are now exclusively spooky tormented undead who SUFFER and are DENIED THE PEACE OF TRUE DEATH, so they must BECOME THE NIGHT. It gets pushed to the point of making a bunch of the basic powers you can have as a Sin-Eater be, in the fluff, actively mentally damaging.
Can you do object reading or postcognition to examine a crime scene, or try to unravel a mystery with The Memoria Haunt, see what you need to see, and then move on while having whatever reaction makes sense for what your character saw? No, according to the fluff. Instead you're going to end up so deeply wired into every emotional eddy and current of what you see that you'll either be reduced to a vomiting, quivering heap or become psychotically obsessed with replaying that memory over and over and over!
Or the 2e version of the Oracle:
The dead have always held secrets treasured by the living. Traditions seeking to contact the dead have existed as long as Underworld itself. The Bound are hard pressed to meet a necromancer not making some claims out of the classics, like Odysseus seeking Tiresias or Saul invoking Samuel. Real amateur-hour Ouija board stuff. Those Bound that practice the Oracle are different. Why bother the dead when they're already one of them? Practitioners of the Oracle are those of the Bound that have realized a single truth — each and every member of the Bound is dead, meaning they have a perfectly serviceable ghost waiting to answer all sorts of questions. The Sin-Eater just needs to die. Again.
In 1e, the Oracle was... essentially a "notice X type of Significant Thing" power, which mediums and other Sin-Eaters could notice from seeing how the reflections in your eyes don't match your surroundings - because you're sort of infusing your eyeballs with the plasmic presence of your geist, semi-literally seeing through their eyes which see beyond those of the living.
Now you use the Oracle by committing suicide, then having your buddies ask your corpse questions so that it can manically scream, frantically write, or combust and write responses in the smoke.
Or, if you take the picture they commissioned to help visualize the 2e Oracle, your character just overdoses on heroin.
The underlying idea of invoking RL spiritualist concepts like automatic writing, or even the more original definition of necromancy - conjuring and questioning the departed - is a good addition. The themes of rebellion against the status quo that I apparently bailed out before finding are totally viable, but the 2e book insists on presenting these things in the most hamfisted, 1990s edgy way possible.
Moreover, even a hypothetical version of Geist 2e that was perfectly concordant with my own opinions would be useless as an actual game for me to run, because my meatspace gaming group is made up of people who, for all I consider them friends, are all at least some flavor of centrist lib. One of them stans Elon Musk, another speaks up in defense of Joe Biden, and I've gotten pushback in the past over bringing RL sociopolitics and crises into our campaigns. There's entire ideas for stories that are just going to sit in a file forever, because they involve me directly synthesizing RL shit into action-horror fodder in exactly the kind of way that 2e Geist seems geared for and that would probably damage my relationship with people I've known for a decade-plus if I tried to run a game like that.
Perhaps worst of all, even for me, a person who is fully down with a game about doing things that would get me put on a federal watchlist if I described them here, is that 2e Geist seems to be so... joyless. It overflows with rage and sorrow and righteous fury, but you need to at least handle that with some kind of balance that this book seems unable to even imagine. You're a being that exists in a state of horrific quasi-life. Your powers constantly fuck you up and mangle your psyche and make you even more of a burnt-out husk of something that once was human. The overwhelming sense I get from the text is that your character dearly wants to die, and presumably will as soon as they conclude whatever business they feel they've left undone. Even if its writers were clearly not aware of or concerned about the kind of systemic atrocity that 2e Geist is putting in its crosshairs, I can't help but remember 1e Geist's focus on Dia de los Muertos, on the celebration of life within death and a focus on characters who are marked by - bound to, even - tragedy and suffering, yet find ways to hold themselves together and keep going.
And then I compare it to the point raised in various left-wing circles on how revolution should be joyous, on how totally surrendering to the misery and pain inflicted by capitalism and misrule not only dampens morale but is, in essence, a capitulation to the enemy. How those who fight for a better world must, must, must seek to provide not just bread, but roses as well. I think of what I've read and seen about modern points of mass conflict and revolt, places like Rojava and occupied Palestine, and how the expression of little humanities and finding of ways to remind oneself that there is more to be had than mere survival, or even freedom, is what often keeps the revolutionary fire from burning itself out.
Geist 2e feels like a failed execution of its concept, one already outdone by projects like Brinkwood.
However, I just could not get into Geist 2e. I tried my damnedest to hear it out, but from what I was able to choke down before finally giving up, it seems to have octupled down on GRIM BLEAK HORROR. Sin-Eaters are now exclusively spooky tormented undead who SUFFER and are DENIED THE PEACE OF TRUE DEATH, so they must BECOME THE NIGHT. It gets pushed to the point of making a bunch of the basic powers you can have as a Sin-Eater be, in the fluff, actively mentally damaging.
Like, yeah things are grim and bleak, but you and your Krewe can make the best of a second chance at life and change it. At the very least there's a path to Catharsis where you and your Geist can make peace with yourselves and move on.
Like, there's a sample Krewe of radical 90s sports guys called X-Treme Unction. There's a whole Krewe archetype about making the afterlife cheerier and happier.
As for the powers being constantly and totally traumatic, well, hardly all that much. I'm in a Geist 2e campaign right now and my character uses Boneyard to run a haunted house on the cheap. Sure some of the haunts can be a bit gruesome, but that's fun, and all Bound start with a free merit that shows they're not all that bothered by that anymore.
also, and i have to emphasize this, there's a ritual your krewe can start with that magically summons food for a party with all your friends that completely refills everyone's willpower and gives a ghosts an easier time hanging out.
One of the biggest themes of 2e is fighting to keep hope alive and hold onto it as a Sin-Eater, hope that things can be better and the Underworld changed. I don't think you can really ignore that in talking about Geist? It's a fundamental part of the mix.
I was looking at the Totem beasts thread earlier today and it struck me that the idea of the thing - that a being of power could bind itself to a community in a
Empyrean: The Redemption You were lost once, deluded and self-defeating. You were an incomplete soul grasping at shallow meaning and fighting to hold onto an
Good news! There's at least 4 splats that have robots and/or robot themes in them. Demon: The Descent is the obvious first one, Promethean: The Created might require a little reskinning but is entirely feasible, Changeling: The Lost has plenty of robot-adjacent stuff, and Deviant: The Renegades has robot-adjacent content in the form of cyborgs.
And robot vampires would barely require any work, honestly; they're already human-shaped creatures that don't work on biology, so it would really mostly just be reskinning.
