Vampire: The Masquerade was an awesome game back in the day, or so I have read and heard. The game came out two years before I was born, and I didn't get into White Wolf until January of 2010, years after White Wolf's heyday in the 1990's. Now, I will be the first to admit that I think the World of Darkness is a great concept for a setting that was hobbled by its own insistence on maintaining certain themes, and in the later years of its run, the demand of certain White Wolf writers (most notably Justin Achilli) to enforce thematic purity through the use of a poorly written, intrusive, and downright railroady metaplot. This was especially true of the Revised Edition of Vampire: The Masquerade, but it also affected the other gamelines as well.
I know I normally try to stay positive on this blog, but I'm going to be blunt and state that World of Darkness tends to have one of the more toxic fanbases in the hobby of tabletop role-playing games. I know this first-hand. You can't talk about White Wolf fans unless you are one, and in the immortal words of Jeff Foxworthy, I are one.
The greater Classic World of Darkness fanbase, including the current owners of the IP at Paradox Interactive, have a bad tendency to insist on thematic purity in their pursuit of "personal horror" and a bad tendency to treat the intrusive and de-protagonizing metaplot as holy canon, forgetting that fiction is not history and the World of Darkness is not real.
Personal Horror is a difficult theme to properly execute, and most attempts at it end up as little more than pretentious wangsting, and people like Justin Achilli and Martin Ericsson tend to forget that.
Now, I have nothing personal against either of these people, but I do have issues with a lot of their creative decisions regarding Vampire: The Masquerade. Luckily, as a Game Master, I can just use the older material from First Edition and just invoke Rule Zero and say that the metaplot never happened. As long as my players are happy with it and everyone is having fun, I don't see the harm. After all, it is just a game and nothing more at the end of the day.
My dislike of the more toxic elements of the World of Darkness fanbase both online and in real life eventually led me to develop a near-comical hate-boner for all things Goth and Punk. Which I will admit was dumb on my part. While I do dislike most Goth and Punk music (with the exception of Siouxsie and the Banshees) and I don't care for the people on certain nameless forums who use their identity within the Goth and Punk subcultures (and more importantly, the World of Darkness fandom) to condescendingly bash others for "playing the game wrong" because God forbid that a Vampire game have some action or adventure, or that a game be actually cool and enjoyable and not just whiny moping about lost humanity, (and may Caine have mercy on your soul if your Vampire PC is a good guy or owns a katana) but to hate on the entire Goth and Punk subcultures or the Gothic-Punk aesthetic is admittedly immature on my part.
The tendency to dismiss the idea of an action-oriented World of Darkness game as "Supers with Fangs" is something I have always found grating, especially given the way things were in First Edition and Second Edition Vampire: The Masquerade. I blame a lot of this on the over-corrective nature of Revised Edition following certain missteps during the game's Second Edition (I'm looking at you two, Berlin by Night and Dirty Secrets of the Black Hand) and naturally I overreacted myself in trying to counter this attitude.
In all honesty, I actually sort of like the look and feel of Gothic-Punk settings, at least the way it was presented in the very first edition of Vampire: The Masquerade. The artwork and text of the original softcover corebook for Vampire perfectly encapsulate the good kind of Gothic-Punk, and it can also be found in a lot of 1E supplementary materials such as Chicago By Night, Milwaukee by Night, and adventure modules such as The Succubus Club and Alien Hunger.
I'll admit, I do love the look of the fashions and aesthetics of the Goth subculture of the late 1970's, 1980's, and early 1990's. While I'm more of a bluegrass guy rather than a gothic rock guy, I do love to wear lots of black and gray clothing (they are my favorite colors) and if I could afford to, I would probably dress in an old-school Gothic style. And believe me, I can totally get the cynicism and macabre mindset of the early subculture, I've been in that mindset myself for most of my adolescent years.
But back to First Edition Vampire (or V1 for short), there are myriad reasons as to why it is my favorite version of Vampire, and indeed of any White Wolf game. The first and biggest reason is the lack of any kind of overarching and overbearing metaplot.
In the early days, the World of Darkness had yet to define itself and ultimately pigeonhole itself into a series of cliches and thematic purism as the setting became too cluttered and reliant on a grandiose metaplot.
The World of Darkness in V1 is a lot more mysterious, vague, vast, and less defined. The World of Darkness was a lot more tied into the real world, and while the main White Wolf fanbase may cringe at this, I actually liked the idea of using historical figures as supernatural monsters (such as Alphonse Capone and Helen of Troy in the original Chicago by Night) because it helped remind the players that the game was in a Gothic vision of our own modern world, or at least it was initially.
You had references to other supernaturals such as Lupines and Magi, but they were a lot more vague and open to interpretation than what would occur in the later White Wolf games such as Werewolf and Mage.
Anything was up for grabs and you could easily fit whatever kind of horror tropes you wanted into the setting.
The main conflict was between the Elders and the Neonates, and the Sabbat was a poorly-defined and deliberately mysterious boogeyman wild card, and less of the main antagonist faction that they would become later on in the setting.
The setting was less "evil vs. evil" and more shades of gray. In Revised, you were automatically damned when you became a vampire, while in V1, being a vampire didn't mean you were damned, it just meant it was a hell of a lot easier to become damned.
Redemption was possible, and it was heavily implied that not only was Golconda a real possibility, it was the penultimate step before becoming human once more. Vampire: The Masquerade in its early days was not a game of personal horror, but instead a game of redemption and salvation hidden beneath a labyrinth of Gothic horror and street-level intrigue.
In its purest essence, the style and setting of early Vampire can best be described as "Cyberpunk without the Cyber part", at least on the surface level, and I like that idea a lot.
I love the idea of a very old-school Vampire campaign inspired by works such as The Lost Boys (one of my favorite vampire films) and the anime film Vampire Hunter D where the PC's are young Kindred in a Gothic-Punk cityscape, using the original First Edition rules.
It would be neither "personal horror" or "supers with fangs" but more like "rebellious teenagers and twenty-somethings with fangs and guns" and while I would include other supernatural types such as Lupines and Magi (and maybe Sailor Moon while we are at it) they would more resemble their descriptions in the Antagonists section of the V1 corebook rather than how they turned out in their own gamelines.
The place would be Empire Bay, a Northeastern American city originally featured in the 2010 video game Mafia II and loosely based on New York City (as well as a few other major American cities) and the time would be an unspecified point in the very late 20th Century, some time after Vietnam but before the War on Terror, or approximately anywhere between 1975 and 2001.
The Empire Bay campaign would be steeped in the old-school Gothic-Punk style of the early days of White Wolf and be a loving tribute to those bygone glory days.
I might either run it as a campaign, or write it as an RPG fan fiction. Not sure yet.
It is interesting you have such a complicated, confusing and maybe even contradictory relationship with White Wolf's flagship universe. I have a very complicated love/hate with arguably the middle child of the White Wolf family and, ever so briefly in design, it's prequel-now-stand-alone-universe: Exalted.
ReplyDeleteI'd argue the same pretentiousness and desire for 'thematic purity' is what harmed Exalted, albeit in a different way. Whereas the World of Darkness tried to stick too hard to one singular ethos and way of thinking which had a singular truth/mood/mindset, Exalted (initially) fell into the problem that at time no one knew what the flying fuck the game even was: was it high fantasy heroism divorced from Tolkien's 'elves and dwarves'? High powered sword & sorcery of conquerors and god-kings? Wuxia? Mythological high concepts or grimdark depressing shitfest transhumanist fantasy? Unfortunately in the end it's 'White Wolf' DNA arguably asserted itself way too much and we ended with what I call 'late Second Edition' where everything suck and is horrible, where heroes can't exist and where the Yozi/Infernal metaplot is ten seconds away from destroying the universe.
I admit, I never really cared for Exalted but I do see your point, White Wolf has had a tendency to enforce "the party line" when it comes to game themes, this was especially true after Mark Rein-Hagen and Andrew Greenburg left the company, and people like Justin Achilli and his successors took over.
DeleteI did not know that the same problems that would plague World of Darkness would also plague Exalted. But Exalted never caught my interest like World of Darkness did. I guess I learned something new today!
From what I recall, most of the people who worked on conceptualizing early First edition Exalted for the most part were not the people who ended up working on Second and Third edition. Now normally one could argue who works on a game doesn't define what it is, that it doesn't matter but for Exalted it absolutely did.
DeleteYou see, I'd wager that much like the OWOD, Exalted suffered from what get's called a 'brain bug': an idea introduced early on which grows in size, scope, meaning and relevance far beyond it's intended role or what was healthy. http://www.stardestroyer.net/Empire/Essays/BrainBugs.html
One reason why I enjoyed the early forms of the NWOD was that it was intended more like a 'toolbox' of ideas for a GM/storyteller to use and it was in a way a loose return to what your post describe about the early OWOD. There was a lot of unknown and said unknown weren't help by the policy that not everything had to be canon.
Exalted suffered the same fate as the OWOD, where people became far more interested in 'the lore' and its character and what was properly 'canon' and in the process utter invalidated, if not violated one of the original core tenets of what the game was intended to be. The end result? A return of the dreaded metaplot and elder Exalt wagging their fingers whenever an uppity player stepped out of line, reducing the once-world shaking Exalted PC to mere spectators.
I agree with your statement in its entirety.
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