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White Wolf's World of Darkness

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At this point I'm assuming that at least one member of the current WW staff owns a swastika armband. This isn't an attempt to cover up their racism so much as it is a smug, passive-aggressive middle finger to anyone who takes issue with their racism.
 
Jace911 said:
Yeah, that plus the Bruja thing? White Wolf either explicitly hired an alt-righter or one snuck in under their radar.



Off the top of my head I remember someone snuck "JEW" into the background of a panel where Kitty Pride was talking.
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I "can't wait" until new White Wolf gets their hands on oMage and accidentally turns the Technocracy into the unambiguous good guys by associating them with (((globalists))) while turning the Traditions into Neo-Nazi and alt-right avatars

The scarequotes are intentional
 
When this showed up originally I thought the point was emphasizing that werewolf society is super mega fucked and you are implicitly supposed to reject most of it-I mean werewolves committed so much genocide that humans have a genetic memory of werewolf genocide-but now I'm not so sure.

Especially the attempts to make being trans give "justifiable" reasons for werewolf transphobia.

And it's not as if you could get that point across without being viscerally awful.
 
like, the prior tweet thread I posted does talk about how it should be okay for art to include and not shun non-aspirational characters, and even allow for the players to inhabit those characters if they choose to

but that is far removed from "all werewolves are TERF quiverfull antivaxxers and fuck you if you try to get around that"
 
Jace911 said:
like, the prior tweet thread I posted does talk about how it should be okay for art to include and not shun non-aspirational characters, and even allow for the players to inhabit those characters if they choose to

but that is far removed from "all werewolves are TERF quiverfull antivaxxers and fuck you if you try to get around that"
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The funniest shit is that "werewolves can't transition without becoming hated and despised" is also an air breathing mermaid.

This is a setting where there are actual cyborg werewolves. Apparently though transition surgery is harder than having your entire skeleton replaced with living metal?
 
I don't really know much about Werewolf's lore, but while I can understand the hate if you use medicine and surgery and stuff (I don't exactly know the procedure irl, so... yeah) because weaverscum and all that changing your form with evil technology, it's pretty strange that there's no option to use spirits and so on, given it sounds like something they could do. Even the fertility excuse sounds hollow, since I'm pretty sure tribes lacking in males or females (I use the term since they're wolves, just in case) would be happy to have an option to change to whatever they need to continue breeding, right (using a spirit option, given I think you can't have children with the current methods to change sex)?
 
Jace911 said:
The thing is, I don't know if he has done that.

Full disclosure: yesterday I didn't know Zak Smith from a hole in the wall. Then today I see someone I follow on twitter, a trans woc involved in the OSR community, retweeting him. I dig around and find that he's apparently involved in this whole WW Nazi nonsense, and that seems bizarre given what I know of my twitter friend. So I ask her what's up, and she says she knows him, and that the claims of bigotry and harassment are horseshit. She links me to this blog detailing the "Zak Wars" (Fair warning, LONG read with lots of links) and after the better part of a day reading through it I'm really not convinced Zak Smith is who everyone is claiming he is. I keep seeing a lot of he said she said, along with multiple instances of queer/trans/disabled women stepping up to defend him only to be ignored or dismissed or even accused of being his "shield"---sometimes by other queer women, but a lot of times by cis men, and that doesn't sit right with me.
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Yeah, a blog by Zak's friend is not where you'd go looking for incriminating evidence against Zak. Let's try a friend of one of his victim's instead. Much clearer! (Like, seriously, Zak is a scumbag of the highest order with a strange tendency to go after transwomen game designers, like Avery Adler and Olivia Hill to name specific ones. I know of at least two more.)
 
Scia said:
When Holden starts to become the voice of reason...
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Yeah, Holden is an utter piece of crud in a lot of ways, but that section's in the freaking book, so either White Wolf or Onyx Path had someone write it in there and sign off on it at both companies, so uh... I despair for the future of this hobby.

Eukie said:
Yeah, a blog by Zak's friend is not where you'd go looking for incriminating evidence against Zak. Let's try a friend of one of his victim's instead. Much clearer! (Like, seriously, Zak is a scumbag of the highest order with a strange tendency to go after transwomen game designers, like Avery Adler and Olivia Hill to name specific ones. I know of at least two more.)
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Zak S.'s sheer ability to avoid consequences for being a massive transphobic and otherwise harasser and keep getting hired for stuff like this (or his credit in the D&D 5e PHB as a consultant) is basically a massive rage point for me as a whole on the hobby. It's just... agh. The sheer amount for which people are bending over backwards (not here, thankfully) to go "Hey, maybe they're fine because they didn't actively do something horrifying in the last five minutes" is just... infuriating. (Also, they're still selling a game on Steam by Zak S. that is flat out harassment on one of his enemies so uh, I'm not inclined to cut them slack ever.)

EDIT: Also, on the "reverse the numbers" post by WW. I mean... that doesn't even alter one of the numbers in question. My god that's dumb in your obfuscation attempts, jerks.

EDIT2: There was also the time Zak S. impersonated an RPG.net mod for a year to sockpuppet himself on Reddit and claimed it was his roommate doing it when he posted as the wrong account. He is both very obviously malicious and frustratingly hard to get people to acknowledge this.
 
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MJ12 Commando said:
When this showed up originally I thought the point was emphasizing that werewolf society is super mega fucked and you are implicitly supposed to reject most of it-I mean werewolves committed so much genocide that humans have a genetic memory of werewolf genocide-but now I'm not so sure.

Especially the attempts to make being trans give "justifiable" reasons for werewolf transphobia.

And it's not as if you could get that point across without being viscerally awful.
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It is kinda funny how W:tF has the sillier acronym but is straight up the more level headed and all around slicker sibling compared with the methed out fuckup that is W:tA. I mean on the one hand W:tF could absolutely use some better LGBT+ representation but in terms of sins mere absence or a general glossing over isn't nearly as bad as, like, any of this shit. Even Old oWolf (as compared to NoWolf :V) was kinda sketchy about this tbh. The Children of Gaia splatbook was, iirc, two steps forward and then two steps back into the fucking dumpster by a. making one of the POV characters for the running fluffpieces gay and then b. making his boyfriend a Lupus-type with some really unfortunate ambiguities.

But I've legitimately never understood the appeal of oWolf, it's always seemed so, like, gross and sweaty and testosterone poisoned. But that might just be the residual 90's feel.
 
TenfoldShields said:
But I've legitimately never understood the appeal of oWolf, it's always seemed so, like, gross and sweaty and testosterone poisoned. But that might just be the residual 90's feel.
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Back in the day it let me RP as a biker on a Harley who turned into a muscular shark man and sometimes a giant shark to eat the evil industrialists trying to destroy the rain forest.

I am willing to forgive a lot of sins for that.
 
TenfoldShields said:
But I've legitimately never understood the appeal of oWolf, it's always seemed so, like, gross and sweaty and testosterone poisoned. But that might just be the residual 90's feel.
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I always figured the appeal was that you could fight Captain Planet Villains.

Only instead of combining your powers to summon Captain Planet, you and your friends turn into giant floofy murderblenders and eat them.
 
Nervaqus987 said:
I always figured the appeal was that you could fight Captain Planet Villains.

Only instead of combining your powers to summon Captain Planet, you and your friends turn into giant floofy murderblenders and eat them.
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it loses something when the floofy murderblender is an unironic eco-fascist and thinks you should pump out babies for the cause. like, oWolf's IC terrible treatment of the Kinfolk and the way they had a tendency to force people and/or dogs to just pump out kids for t h e c a u s e was definitely A Thing.

also all the rape

god there was just

so much rape
 
aside from Bloodlines I played WoD a grand total of once when my friends and I tried Vampire as a joke

but my defining memory of the series has to be the time I was tabling for an RPG club in college and a dude came up to me and proceeded to spend 40 minutes telling me about his Masquerade LARP until I wanted to garrotte myself with my shoelaces
 
cmwatford said:
Lack of direction mostly. There was some initial issues with editing but most of that got cleared up afterwords.

The game had some solid ideas and lots of cool stuff you could do but no real reason to do any of it. You could easily compare them to low end mages in terms of power and flexibility but their primary antagonists were things that trained mortals could handle. The underworld was cool and thematic but there wasn't any reason to go there unless you raised your power stat real high. You had a ghost riding shotgun in your head who had their own wants and needs but you could just ignore them without consequence. There were no hooks, no reasons to care. That's fine for some groups but it leaves most people lost.
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EarthScorpion said:
The game was literally non functional. They sold me a printed book with rules that were from an earlier draft which referred to things that didn't exist.

Also the game was a confused mess, they don't really cue off a monster archetype, and there's nothing for them to do. Geist felt like an elevator pitch that had never got past the first concept stage.
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Eh, I always felt there were two clear themes they WANTED you to tackle in Geist. There just wasn't much in character reason to, so that doesn't help, but...
  • Guardian and Watch over the dead, the Boarders of Life and Death, and generally being the necromatic equivalent of a Warewolf. It's not quite the same relationship, but you're suppose to help the dead move on if you can, or force them on if you can't, while respecting and guarding the sanctity of Death. Sort of like how Werewolf keep the Spirit and the Mortal separate, except when they don't, because the Spirit and the Mortal are joined and can't be kept completely separate. Death touches Life, and so death has a place in life, but you're suppose to guard against it and minimize it when you can.
  • Seek mystery and ultimately divinity through twisted orphic mysteries.
The first sort of had enough you could do something with, but largely didn't give you enough reason to. The second was interesting, but sort of limiting in what kinds of campaigns and characters you could use of it. Sort of magey (ether edition), but more limited and without any idea of what the endpoint should look like.

Though I suppose providing answers might also be unsatisfying. But you at least needed a path, and... they didn't have one. Just random markers and signposts for when the path would one day be installed.


Xanith said:
Snip horribleness
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Jace911 said:
Snip more horriblness
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Well, I probably wasn't going to buy it anyways, but this made it... easier? Yeah. Unless I hear this situation is cleaned up I'm not buying anything from them.
 
And now WW is planning an AMA on Friday to address the recent controversies

so prepare for thatttttttttttttt
 
Jace911 said:
This thread has some analysis I appreciated:



Edit: the one thing I disagree with is the lumping in of Zak Smith with the GamerGate/Nazi crowd. Like, the Jewish artist who runs a D&D game with disabled/trans/minority women, who canned his own show at Escapist after they hired a transphobe, is a Nazi panderer? srsly? He's an asshole in internet arguments, but come the fuck on.
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The blog linked in this twitter got deleted because the writers were harrassed by, and accussed of harrassing, OP/WW employees, among other things.
 
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