World/Chronicles of Darkness Politics

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So we've had multiple threads on here about Warhammer 40K's politics and their problematic aspects. But I'm getting into WoD now and I have little knowledge of the fandom's views and opinions and how those views and opinions line up with the work.

So, posters of SV: how do you feel about the various settings and factions? I swear Bloodlines' Damsel could be a poster on here.

I also read this poster earlier elsewhere when discussing CoD:
Maybe they were well written there, but I'm mostly familiar with their writing and characterization from 1st edition, where they were a bunch of imagery and language lifted from revolutionary movements applied to vampire society, but much too literally and with little thought as to how a revolution in a small, essentially parasitical society of paranoid humans would differ from real revolutions that shook entire societies.

Vampires can't really form mobs or march in the streets like they are described as doing because there just aren't enough of them. They could at best form paramilitary style assassination squads. Vampires couldn't really invoke the same kind of paranoia of your surrounding citizens like as described in Carthian cities, because most o the surrounding people are food, not peers.

I think one of the Carthians problems, and again the writing may have gotten much better in Secrets if the Covenants, is that they are written as if vampire society and human society are more comparable than they are. The authors want you to equate them to real revolutionaries and ask questions like: "They are improving society, but at what cost? Are they becoming the REAL monsters?"

And like... no. The society they are reforming is pretty much antithetical to peaceful and healthy human existence. Why the fuck would I ever think of them as the good guys especially when you keep insisting that all vampire covenants are pretty much evil? The authors use every cliche and trope relating to revolutions, reformers, leftists, and fascists that it all just becomes an incoherent mess.

If they wanted cool, rebel good guy vampires who don't kill people and who relate to real political positions like the Anarchs, they should have just made them that. If they wanted superficially human-friendly but ultimately inhuman reformers seeking to more efficiently use the means of production that are humanity they should have done that. As it is they've done both and it's just a mess.

I might make a post about how I would change them if I were to use them in a game again later.
 
World of Darkness, like all of White Wolf's stuff, is Edgy 90's and early 2000's pulp written by a bunch of white dudes who think they're being progressive and edgy, but are just a bunch of pretentious nerds who ended up causing an International Incident. And they wrote Infernals.
 
World of Darkness, like all of White Wolf's stuff, is Edgy 90's and early 2000's pulp written by a bunch of white dudes who think they're being progressive and edgy, but are just a bunch of pretentious nerds who ended up causing an International Incident. And they wrote Infernals.
Yeah, I have a deep fondness for the WoD, but it is racist and historically ill informed. Some authors were better about things than others, but as a whole it is just bad on a lot of issues.

It wasn't usually especially bad about gender or homophobia that I remember. There were a couple of "edgy" books (that were eye-rollingly lame) that managed to blunder into misogyny while trying to be risque, but it wasn't universal the way racial and cultural bias were.

Nothing will beat the "Kindred of the East" explaining how Asians have special souls with a different afterlife than everybody else. (Never mind that it contradicts existing stuff from Wraith). But they only go there if they are surrounded by enough other Asians, engaged in "Asian Culture". (Which apparently includes everywhere from Japan to Cambodia, and possibly India depending on the day of the week.)
 
Nothing will beat the "Kindred of the East" explaining how Asians have special souls with a different afterlife than everybody else. (Never mind that it contradicts existing stuff from Wraith). But they only go there if they are surrounded by enough other Asians, engaged in "Asian Culture". (Which apparently includes everywhere from Japan to Cambodia, and possibly India depending on the day of the week.)

I've been told by lore buffs that none of the settings really work together on a metaphysical level. There are theories that try to combine it all but the theories tend to demand you privilege one set of beliefs over the others and try to fit everything else into the chosen belief system.

Also you both talk in the past tense - there is new stuff. Some things seem to have changed. At least some of the more racist stuff was dumped..
 
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Be it a book about GYPSIES that is so racist even europeans will go "Hey that's kinda racist towards the romani", Books set in Atlanta or New Orleans without a single minority character, Fucking INFERNALS, or pissing off the LGBT community, The Government of Chechnya and Russia, and everyone in between; White Wolf is consistently able to do one thing: cock it up.
 
I've been told by lore buffs that none of the settings really work together on a metaphysical level. There are theories that try to combine it all but the theories tend to demand you privilege one set of beliefs over the others and try to fit everything else into the chosen belief system.

Also you both talk in the past tense - there is new stuff. Some things seem to have changed. At least some of the more racist stuff was dumped..
Yeah, but I don't have any of the new stuff, and my impression is that not many other people do. Not that it is failing, but it is one game among many, largely (but by no means exclusively) drawing interest from nostalgic former players. In the 1990s, tabletop gaming had something of a renaissance (with that sweet Pokemon money) and Vampire (and to an extent the rest of the World of Darkness) were very popular, second only to D&D, with all the others following at a significant distance. So while my information stops around the early 2000s, I knew the whole setting top to bottom at that point. Given those caveats, here are my thoughts:

Back then at least, the politics of the setting were either very shallow liberalism or wholly unintentional and kind of embarrassing. Vampire was probably the least so, because every political faction was despicable (so there was no cheerleading for any unfortunate ideological strains) and vampirism largely erased race or gender.

Werewolf could have had some interesting themes, and in the original first edition seemed to hint at some level of nuance, but that was an anomaly. Instead it embraced a kind of cartoonish narrative that, while nominally environmentalist and anti-colonialist, was muddled up by weird primitivst elements and unintentionally but profoundly racist caricatures of non-western societies. (And even of some western ones. (The Irish werewolves were always drunk and kin to faeries. The German werewolves were Naziish etc.)

Mage was interesting. It had some weird choices. A religion invented in the early 20th century gets to be its own ancient faction. So do "Thugee but nice" and western hermticism. All animists are lumped into one faction, as are all monotheists. Though to be honest, it probably matched the demographics of the players. Among 20 something goths, pagans and "vaguely eastern" are vastly over-represented and Christians and Muslims much less so, relative to the population at large.

The game also had a fairly strong anti-science slant. Reality is fluid, so "knowledge" is a trap and a prison. "Cool" and "creative" sciences, like computers, space travel, and kooky anti-gravity nonsense were fine, but medicine, engineering, and economics are all tools of the oppressors. Which works fine for a game, I suppose, but it gets a little unpleasant to treat anti-vaxxers and charlatans as freedom fighters and actual scientists as frauds, villains, and dupes.

Wraith actually had a pretty interesting political dimension that could be approached from several different positions. The Hierarchy (real subtle) is explicitly Roman, and has the baggage of basically all of western culture. People are literally used as tools, resources are controlled from the top, and you're expected to listen to some medieval or Victorian jackass because he died the same way you did. They are also your best chance to survive and claim to be the only thing holding back complete destruction. The various renegades range from anarchist freedom fighters to pirates, and the heretics are everything from Quaker-style pacifists to cultists trying to steal souls to furnish private hells.

It is the only game in the series that manages to take issues of exploitation and resource extraction seriously without also painting the villains as devoted to destruction for its own sake. The Hierarchy is undeniably evil, but it is a very practical option, and the game works pretty much the same whether you support it or not. It also has Charnel Houses of Europe. An RPG supplement about playing the ghosts of death camp victims that somehow manages to make that premise something other than embarrassing, crass, or insulting. I learned things about the Holocaust and the death camps that were new to me reading it in 1997, which is not something one can say about many RPG books.

Changeling was interesting. It had its share of weird racial stuff. (Only European fairies feed on human dreams, the Native American and Asian equivalents are spirits with access to the cosmology of Werewolf because those cultures are "in touch with the spirits"). But even the first edition was pretty clearly LGBT positive, with Changeling culture just not giving a damn how you dressed, identified, or fucked.

The major political conflict was class based. The commoners kept the lights on during several centuries of concentrated suck, and now the nobles were coming back and demanding their old powers. But the nobles are literally born to rule and are glorious and beautiful and seductive, and really hard to deny. Interestingly, there isn't a clear good guy in that conflict from the writers perspective. (Though I was always sympathetic to the commoners.) The other political conflict was between the hedonists and survivalists who figured the world was screwed, and they should take what they wanted regardless of the moral costs, either to enjoy the end, or stockpile for the long winter, and the factions who actually thought things might be improved. Which is a weirdly relevant conflict for the 21st century.
 
What did INFERNALS do wrong? I've heard about Gypsies and V5th along with Changeling being for Otherkins but I've never heard about anyone complaining about Exalted's Infernals. Mostly complaints about Exalted's female character armor and Lunars being NPC Garou.
 
What did INFERNALS do wrong? I've heard about Gypsies and V5th along with Changeling being for Otherkins but I've never heard about anyone complaining about Exalted's Infernals. Mostly complaints about Exalted's female character armor and Lunars being NPC Garou.

The first two chapters of the book get rapey and disturbing and everybody ignores their existence while using the rest.
 
Infernals contains some if the edgiest garbage White Wolf ever wrote. The rest of the book is a fantasy master class and one of the coolest and most creative splats ever written.

This is indicative of how White Wolf works.

The W/CoD is a massive sprawling thing comprising many gamelines/editions/splats/tie-ins/spinoffs. Many of these are genuinely mature, thoughtful and creative while often being a little edgy. It has also frequently been juvenile, crass, offensive, dumb and shortsighted. Often both at the same time.

Insofar as you can deduce common politics in these things they're generally, where they mess up, on the vibe of "rich white hippie writing like a shock jock". But with how good the CoD has been since Onyx Path took over (Changeling and Geist 2r are splendid and so is V5, one major misstep that's since been corrected aside) and all the goodness to be had I think this thread's estimations are a little too harsh. People play and love these games for good reason.
 
So, posters of SV: how do you feel about the various settings and factions? I swear Bloodlines' Damsel could be a poster on here.

To build off of what @mothematics said, W/CoD is pretty vast and expansive, we're talking close to thirty years worth of material across multiple mediums here. And politically oChangeling isn't nChangeling isn't oMage isn't nMage etc etc etc. Different authors working on different properties with different goals and uh, different degrees of skill and talent.

If you want anything with specificity you're going to need to narrow it down to classic/chronicles and which set of game lines.
 
To build off of what @mothematics said, W/CoD is pretty vast and expansive, we're talking close to thirty years worth of material across multiple mediums here. And politically oChangeling isn't nChangeling isn't oMage isn't nMage etc etc etc. Different authors working on different properties with different goals and uh, different degrees of skill and talent.

If you want anything with specificity you're going to need to narrow it down to classic/chronicles and which set of game lines.


It's precisely because it's so diverse that I framed it so broadly. Somebody might know a lot about Vampire or Mage but nothing else. So when I asked about your view of the politics of WoD, I meant your opinion on what you know within W/CoD. Asking just about WtA or whatever is too limiting.

Even then, I have seen some general grumbling about how oWoD was more revolutionary than Chronicles. and had better politics.

Vaguely relevant is a big argument going on elsewhere about the politics of Mage, both old and new. Example: if the Technocracy books are just propaganda or if they are a legitimate attempt to make "the fash" sympathetic.
 
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Politics in the WoD are fighting over what the big dick NPCs of your splat deign to give you. Politics in Co'D are fighting for president of the Anime Club.

The worldbuliding of WoD is equal parts stupid, offensive, and offensively stupid, but evocative enough that folks will endlessly wade through shit for diamonds. The worldbuilding for Co'D doesn't exist. :V
 
The worldbuilding for Co'D doesn't exist. :V
The worldbuilding for CoD is closing your eyes and pretending it doesn't exist as the haunting shadow of the worldbuilding stands in your night-shrouded door, only lit by the faint glow of alien light.

(The worldbuilding in this case is Changing Breeds, you don't want to look at Bruccato's weird politics.)

(Actually, thinking of it, this is also a problem in CWoD :thonk:)
 
The worldbuilding for CoD is closing your eyes and pretending it doesn't exist as the haunting shadow of the worldbuilding stands in your night-shrouded door, only lit by the faint glow of alien light.

(The worldbuilding in this case is Changing Breeds, you don't want to look at Bruccato's weird politics.)

(Actually, thinking of it, this is also a problem in CWoD :thonk:)
[God Machine wants to know your location]
 
The worldbuilding for CoD is closing your eyes and pretending it doesn't exist as the haunting shadow of the worldbuilding stands in your night-shrouded door, only lit by the faint glow of alien light.

(The worldbuilding in this case is Changing Breeds, you don't want to look at Bruccato's weird politics.)

(Actually, thinking of it, this is also a problem in CWoD :thonk:)

Just how bad could it be?
 
World of Darkness is so weird to me because you can see it trying to be progressive, and then when the Roma come up it suddenly turns into Racial Holy War.

Ravnos

The Ravnos are one of the fifteen clans of Kindred in Vampire: The Masquerade. Known for being wandering vagabonds and hucksters, the Ravnos are charlatans who gleefully practice their arts of deception and theft. Nobody in the west understood the Ravnos, and now in the Final Nights, it is too late to do so. Misunderstood as a clan of gypsies and tricksters, the western Ravnos are a minor and heretical branch of the undead lords of India.

Due to their inherent clan weakness, the Ravnos clan are all criminals; each Ravnos has a specific vice ranging from plagiarism to mass murder. When the opportunity to indulge that vice is present, Ravnos must succeed in a self-control check to avoid indulging it.

As with everything else in the clan, Embraces differed between Indian and Western Ravnos. Western Ravnos generally embraced only Gypsies (with the exception of the Ravnos antitribu who were noted for embracing gorgios) and generally embraced for any reason. Indian Ravnos viewed the Embrace as a means to fulfilling the fledgling's svadharma. In India, one's Jāti in life also defined one's Jati in undeath.

(emphasis mine)



Like holy shit, what is going on here.
 
World of Darkness, like all of White Wolf's stuff, is Edgy 90's and early 2000's pulp written by a bunch of white dudes who think they're being progressive and edgy, but are just a bunch of pretentious nerds who ended up causing an International Incident. And they wrote Infernals.

I invite you to make a Venn diagram of the WoD books written by the people who caused an international incident, the books in the oWoD, the books in the nWoD, and the WoD books written by the people who wrote Infernals.

I'm also very surprised to learn that Lisa Stevens is a white dude. She could have fooled me!
 
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...what? I mentioned an argument I'm reading that is relevant to the topic of the WoD's politics.
I think @MJ12 Commando's reaction is because oMage political discussion's been a fairly controversial topic around here for a while (that you might have been involved in in the past IIRC?) and you just kinda randomly threw in a hot take that's sorta insulting to people who like or are sympathetic to the Technocracy. Because here the general consensus on the Technocracy's politics is 'ivory tower neoliberalism + centrist transhumanism', which is a lot of interesting things but not really fash or fash propaganda, at least in the current sense. Obviously MJ or another oMage knowledgeable can correct me on this because I haven't actually read the books.
 
I think @MJ12 Commando's reaction is because oMage political discussion's been a fairly controversial topic around here for a while (that you might have been involved in in the past IIRC?) and you just kinda randomly threw in a hot take that's sorta insulting to people who like or are sympathetic to the Technocracy. Because here the general consensus on the Technocracy's politics is 'ivory tower neoliberalism + centrist transhumanism', which is a lot of interesting things but not really fash or fash propaganda, at least in the current sense. Obviously MJ or another oMage knowledgeable can correct me on this because I haven't actually read the books.

I just got into WoD earlier this month and only VTM until like a day ago. I have certainly never been involved in any WoD Mage debate. I didn't know this was a controversial discussion point at all, sorry.

The argument I was reading on mages was centered more on Chronicles and the Exarchs and Banishers but the Technocracy were brought up as fascist because they are supposedly all about brutal control. They play it up as being FOR SCIENCE but it's just a thin veil to justify their desire to subjugate everything in existence to them.

They were apparently blatantly evil bad guys until a book or two came out humanizing them and the debate on them mostly centered on if these books were satire or actually intended to make the previously one-dimensional evil faction sympathetic.

In any event, it is precisely this kinda thing that made me start this thread. Knowing there is this big mage argument going on is good to know for me as a newcomer to the WoD fandom.
 
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The worldbuilding for CoD is closing your eyes and pretending it doesn't exist as the haunting shadow of the worldbuilding stands in your night-shrouded door, only lit by the faint glow of alien light.

(The worldbuilding in this case is Changing Breeds, you don't want to look at Bruccato's weird politics.)

(Actually, thinking of it, this is also a problem in CWoD :thonk:)
I'm morbidly curious about Brucato's politics now. I remember him being a fairly nice guy back when I was really involved in the fandom. (Most of the line devs were pretty cool. Bruce Baugh was a real sweetheart, very patient with even the most obnoxious posters, like teenaged me.)
 
I'm morbidly curious about Brucato's politics now. I remember him being a fairly nice guy back when I was really involved in the fandom. (Most of the line devs were pretty cool. Bruce Baugh was a real sweetheart, very patient with even the most obnoxious posters, like teenaged me.)
Oh, his politics are more or less harmless, they're just weird. He's a guy who legally renamed himself Phil Satyros Bruccato and believes you shouldn't put descriptions of how spells are actually cast into Mage books because he doesn't want people to do actual magic. He's also a chaos magician, and where most people believe Mage: the Ascension is a fun little game with some weird arguments, to Bruccato, it is a harsh documentary of reality.

EDIT: Also he has some weird mother nature thing going on.
 
I'm morbidly curious about Brucato's politics now. I remember him being a fairly nice guy back when I was really involved in the fandom. (Most of the line devs were pretty cool. Bruce Baugh was a real sweetheart, very patient with even the most obnoxious posters, like teenaged me.)

speaking as someone who read it out of mostly morbid curiosity, it uh-

changing breeds is basically brucato's, like, serious-faced attempt at writing gritty furry fic and trying to make the characters and set up morally ambiguous and engaging but mostly it's just like...monstrous assholes. and a lot of hastily sfw'ed anthro animal guys and girls. crow ladies with big boobs. elk guys with hastily shopped out coke can cocks. that blend of "clearly horny" and "really convinced he's writing mature thematic gold here" with a side dash of "trying to be woke and landing squarely on the aging hippy flavor of Painfully Awkward" (some shit about "oh you can have same sex pack leaders but one has to be masc and one has to be femme otherwise it's weird", that kinda thing) and "incredibly uncomfortable sex shit" (intro fic has a woman nearly being raped for stakes, iirc one of the example characters is a teen girl who's dad's friends all transparently want to gang fuck her and she's dreaming of a saytr oh isn't that odd mr. goat of desire).

it'd probably be at home in the WtA line tbh and at best can, like, still see it from a glass bottomed boat.
 
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it'd probably be at home in the WtA line tbh and at best can, like, still see it from a glass bottomed boat.

It stands in very... rigid contract to the last chapter of War Against the Pure, which is a Forsaken book that decided that its last chapter should have five pretty cool "alt shifters" as options for "things that might have a war against your characters which aren't Pure werewolves".

(WeReRoAcHeS)
 
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