- Location
- Pittsburgh, PA
So, a question that's been rolling around inside my skull throughout the last week.
Is it really possible to run a WoD campaign in the modern US? 201X is a radically different beast from what WoD was taking as read when laying out its thematics and setting - angrier, louder, dumber, sadder, less hopeful (somehow). In the modern day, vampires could openly kill people and only have like a 20% chance of it leading to consequences, because the cops would just arrest the nearest ethnic minority and all it'd take for the entire affair to be rendered un-discussable would be for QAnon people to start talking about it. The typical Changeling court depicted in the corebook seems almost utopian now, because it's a community with shared interests and a shared framework in an era where such things are basically dead and we're all mad hermits trapped inside an Amazon-branded plastic panopticon.
Within the rubric of Werewolf, I'm pretty sure that the world in 2020 would be teetering on the edge of total spiritual implosion; everyone's miserable and broken and hiding behind some form of self-delusion to get by, and overarching forces like the 24-hour news cycle and Facebook keep randomly yanking the emotional timbre of things this way and that, perpetually fucking up any effort to stabilize the Hisil. You'd have entire regions that were more Wound than anything else, deindustrialized hellscapes ruled over by spirits of fentanyl and entropy grown so powerful that no three packs together could so much as inconvenience them.
A 'modern' WoD would feel almost postapocalyptic - a world where everything is completely ruined, it's getting worse with each passing day, and vast Azathothian networks of entrenched power and dysfunction will actively fight any effort to wrench the course of events away from the status quo's inevitable endstate of total global annihilation in the dumbest, shittiest form imaginable. The world is dying, it will continue to die, and there is precious little any of the PCs can do to so much as slow it down.
Sure, nMage 1E might well be able to do something with that, but it'd still be an especially bleak and miserable way of handling its Gnostic themes - Mages are the last guttering embers of the Supernal in a world that isn't just Fallen, but Dead, every axis of its being bent toward absolute emmiseration and absolute annihilation. The Exarchs have won so completely, so resoundingly, that their servants openly revel in their unjust power, aware that none remain who can oppose them in any meaningful way.
This world will fall and fall and fall until the last surviving humans wither and die within the walls of their bunker, until the last human soul dissolves into nothingness within the prison of the Underworld, until the Earth is nothing but boiling deserts and poison seas. Perhaps the Exarchs will then reach down and wrest new life from the dust, having returned everything to nothing that they may bring it forth again under such absolute control as to make the last world seem a Heaven by comparison. Perhaps they'll just note that the Fallen World has finally put itself out of their misery, a tiresome appendix removed at long last.
Perhaps the souls of the Awakened will recongregate in the Supernal Realm for lack of anywhere else to go, and it will turn out that the Exarchs could only be meaningfully fought once nothing remained for their enemies to protect, once it was rendered literally impossible for the Wise to distract themselves with externalities like food or warmth or family.
Is it really possible to run a WoD campaign in the modern US? 201X is a radically different beast from what WoD was taking as read when laying out its thematics and setting - angrier, louder, dumber, sadder, less hopeful (somehow). In the modern day, vampires could openly kill people and only have like a 20% chance of it leading to consequences, because the cops would just arrest the nearest ethnic minority and all it'd take for the entire affair to be rendered un-discussable would be for QAnon people to start talking about it. The typical Changeling court depicted in the corebook seems almost utopian now, because it's a community with shared interests and a shared framework in an era where such things are basically dead and we're all mad hermits trapped inside an Amazon-branded plastic panopticon.
Within the rubric of Werewolf, I'm pretty sure that the world in 2020 would be teetering on the edge of total spiritual implosion; everyone's miserable and broken and hiding behind some form of self-delusion to get by, and overarching forces like the 24-hour news cycle and Facebook keep randomly yanking the emotional timbre of things this way and that, perpetually fucking up any effort to stabilize the Hisil. You'd have entire regions that were more Wound than anything else, deindustrialized hellscapes ruled over by spirits of fentanyl and entropy grown so powerful that no three packs together could so much as inconvenience them.
A 'modern' WoD would feel almost postapocalyptic - a world where everything is completely ruined, it's getting worse with each passing day, and vast Azathothian networks of entrenched power and dysfunction will actively fight any effort to wrench the course of events away from the status quo's inevitable endstate of total global annihilation in the dumbest, shittiest form imaginable. The world is dying, it will continue to die, and there is precious little any of the PCs can do to so much as slow it down.
Sure, nMage 1E might well be able to do something with that, but it'd still be an especially bleak and miserable way of handling its Gnostic themes - Mages are the last guttering embers of the Supernal in a world that isn't just Fallen, but Dead, every axis of its being bent toward absolute emmiseration and absolute annihilation. The Exarchs have won so completely, so resoundingly, that their servants openly revel in their unjust power, aware that none remain who can oppose them in any meaningful way.
This world will fall and fall and fall until the last surviving humans wither and die within the walls of their bunker, until the last human soul dissolves into nothingness within the prison of the Underworld, until the Earth is nothing but boiling deserts and poison seas. Perhaps the Exarchs will then reach down and wrest new life from the dust, having returned everything to nothing that they may bring it forth again under such absolute control as to make the last world seem a Heaven by comparison. Perhaps they'll just note that the Fallen World has finally put itself out of their misery, a tiresome appendix removed at long last.
Perhaps the souls of the Awakened will recongregate in the Supernal Realm for lack of anywhere else to go, and it will turn out that the Exarchs could only be meaningfully fought once nothing remained for their enemies to protect, once it was rendered literally impossible for the Wise to distract themselves with externalities like food or warmth or family.
