(KotE) Sunset Empires

Sunset Empires (Michael Butler, Dean Shomshak, David Turner, and Guy-Francis Vella) is a historical supplement for Kindred of the East, allowing GMs and players to create campaigns in Asia of Darkness' 19th century. And it is completely above my paygrade as a critic.

The depicted time period is where all the problematic tropes got started - the Orientalism, the colonialism, the cultural appropriation . . . like maybe there were misunderstandings and unneccessary exoticism before the Early Modern Era, but this time, with the East India Company and the Opium Wars and Admiral Perry's gunboat diplomacy, that's when this shit turned septic. The premise of the book is that we're going to go back to the early days of modern racism so we can just sort of act it out with our friends.

But, with that being said, Sunset Empires seems almost, kind of, keeping in mind my own shallow understanding of the subject . . . responsible. I know. I can't believe I'm saying that about a White Wolf book, and a Kindred of the East book at that, but while there were about a dozen individual sentences I could quibble with (mostly those that referred to the region as "the Orient," in a way that wasn't always unambiguously from the point of view of a European NPC), the broad shape of the work is roughly on the right side of history. You are not going to come away from this text with a good impression of European behavior during this time. In fact, the naked greed and incorrigible sordid behavior of the colonizers is a running theme.

It's just, the introduction also has the doozy of a line, "What the British, Germans, Spanish, Portuguese, French and Americans did to this region is unacceptable by modern standards, but any claim Asia was entirely innocent in matters regarding its own fate is too shortsighted - at least for the purposes of this book."

That was straight out the gate, and set my expectations very low, but the subsequent chapters were not as bad as I feared. It wasn't a Killing Streets situation where the narrator was this weird white savior, incidentally insulting and condescending to Asian people in the course of condemning the bad behavior of the modern capitalist order. The editorial voice was actually a bit dry, almost academic. The history sections give the impression that they could have shipped with a bibliography and footnotes.

Which is why I say this book is perhaps above my pay grade. If the events depicted herein actually happened in roughly the way the book says they did, then it comes across as a pretty fair-minded account. You're not going to walk away from this with a great deal of respect for the Qing government, but my understanding is that this isn't necessarily a controversial stance. That even people very friendly to modern China often regard them as the wrong people to meet the moment.

But that's just the problem. My understanding is garbage. Before reading this book, I could probably have given you a rough outline of the Meji Restoration or the founding of Hong Kong, but I wouldn't have been able to go into this much detail. So, if Sunset Empires is as factual as its factual tone would have me believe, then I genuinely learned something. And if it's not factual, I have no fucking way of knowing it. I mean, aside from meticulously vetting its narrative with other sources, that is.

I did check a few things. Like, I'm pretty sure that Hitler did not get the idea for "herrenvolk" from the historical, living in India, Aryans. Wikipedia suggests the term came from a pseudo-scientific misapplication of anthropology that traced the descent of the Germanic peoples to an Indo-European proto-culture. 

Also, while I'm not sure how much it would actually affect what the book is trying to do with history, it probably would have been worthwhile to mention that the Taiping Rebellion killed, at a conservative estimate, 20 million people, making it among the deadliest conflicts in human history. Don't get me wrong, it's not like the book is trying to make it sound like a wonderful time or anything, but I just thought it was a significant detail to leave out. 

That sort of thing really makes it difficult for me to trust the book. I think I can say with confidence that White Wolf is getting better. If you ranked the Kindred of the East books based on how much they respected the fact that Asia is a real place, with real people, living real lives, with real feelings, then Sunset Empires is definitely at the top. But what is its philosophy of curation?

Like, in the section titled "The Stages of Chinese Life," in the part about "Birth," it says, "Infanticide through drowning is a real threat for female infants and occurs across society's strata."

And look, it happened. And because it happened, it's not wrong to say that it happened. But if I go to my bookshelf and pick up my copy of Victorian Ages Vampire, am I going to find a comparable passage talking about how infant exposure was a common method of dealing with unwanted children prior to the invention of modern medical abortions? 

To White Wolf's credit, I'm not actually sure what the answer to that question might be. It is definitely the sort of thing they liked to write about, and even going back to the early 90s, they were never ones to give the Europeans too much credit. So if I went back in a time machine with a copy of Sunset Empires and pointed out the double-standard, I'd probably not have to fight too hard to secure a parity of the grotesque. However, I still have to wonder. Of all the things you could have told me about life in 19th-century China, why did this make the cut? How often are infants of any sort showing up in Vampire: the Masquerade games, and of those, how many are not doomed to get eaten by a creature?

Obviously, it's just a noteworthy behavior that stands out as particularly distant from the presumed values of the book's modern American audience. But also it feeds into certain unflattering narratives about the Chinese people. 

It's a tricky issue. I'm not going to say you should whitewash history or anything, but it's a hell of a thing to publish without also mentioning that even in the Qing Dynasty, governments and religious leaders were trying to stop the practice. 

Which is sort of where I'm at with Sunset Empires. It is operating at a level above my knowledge of the subject matter. Aside from some incidental choices of wording (like using "fortunately" and "unfortunately" to refer to British victories/losses in India), there is very little that made it into the book that I can say shouldn't be there. But as a company, White Wolf has not exactly earned my trust on these issues, so I also can't be sure that there's nothing missing from the book that should be there.

I guess what I'm saying is that, from where I'm standing, Sunset Empires looks like a decent supplement for playing games set in 19th-century Asia, but you absolutely should not take my word for it.

Ukss Contribution: A mirror belonging to the sun goddess Amateratsu is one of the imperial treasures of Japan. Japanese vampires who tire of their undead existence have been known to sneak into the royal palace and commit suicide by looking into the mirror. That's a pretty cool idea. Just  on the right side of the edge where detailed worldbuilding becomes baroque over-thinking.

(SW d20) Alien Anthology

There may, in fact, be such a thing as too much backstory. I know, I know, it's a scandalous thing to suggest, and certainly something that I, a died-in-the-wool "MOAR BACKSTORY" guy would ordinarily be ashamed to express, but I read Alien Anthology (Steve Miller and Owen K.C. Stephens) and I was forced to conclude that it was possible to know too much about Max Rebo, the dumb-looking felt elephant alien that played keyboard in Jabba's palace.

He's an Ortolon, which means he's part of a people who "take great joy in music," and not that eating him is a shameful act you must hide from God, as I originally assumed. And it's like, I get it. Over the years, people freeze-framed the cantina scene and told stories about each and every one of the weird creatures, even the one that was very clearly a guy in a werewolf mask (He's a Shistavanen and "Many take advantage of their superior speed and reflexes and become bodyguards, soldiers, bounty hunters, or even big-game hunters"). Honestly, that's kind of beautiful. No irony. I love that. The Star Wars expanded universe is a big, patchwork quilt of stories, sewn by a hundred hands

However, when you're trying to rebuild the setting into a single thing, as you might do for an rpg campaign (or even just a new work in the expanded universe), the hundred streams of information can work at cross purposes. I think back to the cantina scene and what I liked about it, what it said about Star Wars as a science-fiction world. And it was something that had a singular purpose in a singular work - whoa! All these creatures are just hanging out with each other! This universe has so many weird-ass creatures!

And so, if I'm trying to capture an authentic Star Wars feel for my table, maybe the best alien to use is the one no one's ever seen before. Or better yet, a half-dozen aliens no one has ever seen before. You walk into the Space Post Office and ahead of you in line are a three-eyed bat creature, a long-armed guy with four elbows on each arm, a lizard person who snaps up a fly that wafted in behind you, two identical moppets that are hot-pink from head-to-toe, a chain-smoking letter carrier with a perfectly rectangular head, and a single token human who looks like he rolled straight out of bed and into a garbage can. One of these people is the Jedi Master you were looking for. 

Alien Anthology attempts to deliver this fantasy by giving us dozens of alien species to choose from, and that sort of works, but I think the overall effect is diminished by work that went into giving each of them a distinct identity. Not that I'm ungrateful, and of course if the PCs get a wild hair and decide to follow the Squib merchant back to their homeworld, the cultural and historical details could be pretty useful. But I kind of feel like if you're doing a Star Wars game right, most of the information is going to be irrelevant.

Because the galaxy far, far away is kind of presented, at least in the strongest works of the series, as this impossibly diverse monoculture. Chewie and Han Solo can talk to each other in their respective languages and it's not that big a deal, because they're two bros in the same line of work who frequent the same social circles. Obi-wan learned about the Millenium Falcon by chatting up Chewbacca in a bar!

So, like, I didn't need to know that Pomda Baba (the guy whose arm Obi-wan chopped off in A New Hope) was one of the Aqualish, aliens who "admire strength and are openly contemptuous and hostile to the weak," nor that "It is customary and accepted social behavior for an Aqualish to be pushy or belligerent to people he or she is interacting with for the first time."

Yeah, that perfectly explains his behavior in the cantina scene, but you know what else would explain it? Mos Eisley being a "wretched hive of scum and villainy" and Pondo Baba just kind of being like that. Maybe the gentle Aqualish matriarch, Mama Baba, cries herself to sleep every night, wondering how her son could have gone so wrong, to get the death penalty in 12 systems.

On the other hand, an undeniable part of the series is also Landing on a Planet and Learning the Folkways of the Colorful Locals. The Ewok village on Endor, the Gungan city on Naboo, even the Jawa sandcrawler on Tatooine - these interludes contribute to the adventure serial feel that is such a core part of what makes the movies enjoyable.

So I don't know, I guess I'm chickening out and taking the position that a balance is necessary. Maybe there are all these countless planets with their indigenous aliens and their fascinating customs, but when you're out and about in the more cosmopolitan systems, any aliens you meet are probably assimilated natives of the galactic metaculture. Ask Greedo where he's from and he'll say "Tatooine," rather than the Rodian homeworld of Rodia. He has more in common culturally with Annakin Skywalker than he does the jungle hunters of "his people," despite becoming a bounty hunter, in line with the "Rodian idealization of hunting" (source: wookiepedia, and yeah, Star Wars lore is frequently that on the nose).

What the game really needs is some kind of "just folk" generation system for aliens, where completely ordinary galactic citizens can have any wild collection of physical traits, with only the bare minimum of mechanical modifications (just enough to give the decision weight, really). Or perhaps the individual entries could do what modern Lineage systems do and break the modifications down between Physical and Cultural traits, allowing characters to mix and match to their hearts' content.

But I'm once again doing the thing where I wish technology existed before it was invented, so I'll just take the foot out of my mouth and say Alien Anthology was a bit of a workhorse of a supplement, but a worthwhile read.

Ukss Contribution: On Dagobah, there's a tree whose seeds resemble "knobby white spiders" and spend the early part of their lifecycle as mobile predators, devouring prey to grow progressively larger until they become the size of elephant, whereupon they plant themselves in the ground and become massive, sinister trees.

That's some pretty cool imagery and some pretty cool speculative biology. I can find a place for it.

(KotE) Killing Streets

 Evidence continues to mount supporting the theory that White Wolf game studios was in truth an elaborate false flag psy-op by the Georgia GOP to develop a way to trick goths into saying the n-word. And if it seems to you that I'm coming in a little too hot here, well let me tell you, I don't think I'm coming in hot enough because Killing Streets (Michael Butler and Guy-Francis Vella) literally tries to trick you into saying the n-word.

Or, at least, the Chinese equivalent. The word you would use if you were translating a Tarantino film into Chinese. I looked it up. There's a glossary of "Chinese Slang and Triad Terms" and one of the entries is "an insulting term for a black person" (lack of capitalization in the original) and already, by this point, 16 pages into the book, my danger sense was going off. "Oh, the guys who said, in the first paragraph of the introduction, 'In Asia, with its tyrants and poverty, criminal activity can reach depths rarely seen in the complacent and wealthy West' are now suggesting I 'spice up the dialogue' of my characters. Gee, I wonder whether this 'insulting term' is actually an unforgiveable racial slur."

And maybe it's wrong of me to act so shocked here. Like, what exactly was I expecting to find when I googled the term? What else could it have been? But that just raises the question - if the only thing it could have been was a racial slur, why the fuck is it here? You know, in the list of words we Kindred of the East players might borrow from Chinese to make our crime drama dialogue more immersive.

Now, it does not seem implausible to me that Chinese gangsters frequently use racial slurs in casual speech. It's not as if organized crime has an HR department. You can't sue them for discrimination. And, of course, cruelty to others is part of the macho mystique. But we aren't making a movie or writing a novel, we are playing a tabletop roleplaying game. How did they imagine this was going to play out? What were they thinking would happen at the table, in the story, to make "an insulting term for black people" an essential bit of information? Is there going to be a Black NPC and then all of our fictional Asian gangster vampires are going to be racist towards them? Is that an eventuality you wanted us to be prepared for when you wrote the glossary?

My most generous guess, based on the fact that they included Pulp Fiction in the bibliography, alongside a bunch of Chow Yun Fat movies, is that they wanted us to be able to authentically create a translated version of Tarantino's cameo. I think the likelier explanation is that they just weren't fucking thinking.

Because if we're talking about racist tropes in media, a big one is just the existence of the glossary as a whole. The thing they're imagining is an rpg session predominantly in English, but peppered with polyglot slang. But that's just the ttrpg version of a common exoticising translation convention. You've got a story set in China, but it's being told in English and two characters are talking. The dialogue written on the page (or shown on the screen, etc) is in English, but the characters are speaking Chinese. Easy enough concept to get one's brain around. But some words are left untranslated. A character will say, "can you get me a Sháozǐ from the drawer" and the audience will be like "whoa, what is that," but it's just a spoon. They could have just said "spoon." To not use the word for "spoon" implies there's a reason not to call it a "spoon." Like there's a notable difference between a "Sháozǐ" and a "spoon." China is such an exotic foreign land that they don't even use spoons over there. They use Sháozǐ instead.

Now, granted, this is a delicate line to walk, especially when talking about sub rosa subculture, or just jargon in general (for example the thing I just did, using "sub rosa" to mean "hidden" - a perfectly valid English usage, more common in literary criticism than in the vernacular, of a borrowed Latin phrase meaning "under the rose" which I imagine would be pretty hard to translate into Chinese, because its literal meaning, its figurative meaning, and the cultural nuance of using it instead of a more straightforward term are all different - btw google renders it "secretly; privately" when translated and translated back).

So if you've got a jargon or slang term that has a literal meaning that could be translated, but is experienced in its native context as only and specifically referring to a particular thing, then maybe a direct translation won't work, and if you want to preserve the jargon-ness of its original context, that's when you consider using the untranslated term directly.

We actually experienced a very good example of this phenomenon on this very blog, when talking about the Feira da Ladra in Lisbon, Portugal.

The direct, literal translation of those words is "thieves' market," but you'd only use that translation if you were willing to be sneaky and let people mislead themselves into thinking it's a cool, shadowy underworld event (as Shadowrun does in the book Shadows of Europe, and I would do if I ever went on vacation in Lisbon).

If you want people to have an accurate picture of the event, you'd translate it as "flea market" because that's the closest English term in meaning, and indeed it's so established as an idiomatic expression that I'm led to believe native Portuguese speakers don't even parse it as a "thieves' market" at all.

And if you want people to find it on a map, you leave it as it, because "Feira da Ladra" also does duty as a proper and noun and that's what it's going to say on the signs.

(What you would never do is falsely claim that, actually, a "Ladra" is a kind of bug, so that the "flea market" translation is both idiomatic and literal, like those rat bastards in the Lisbon tourism department, and note to future translators - I am not referring to rodents born out of wedlock).

If you really want to capture the feel of specifically Hong Kong crime drama, as Killing Streets claims to want to do, you're going to need a mixture of all three approaches. Using the term "public toilet" to refer to someone whose loyalty can be easily bought should probably be translated directly instead of being left in its original Japanese. It's an evocative bit of slang that's easy to understand. Using "the 49s" to refer to "the rank-and-file criminals making up the bulk of Triad membership" should probably be translated idiomatically, because it's clearly something with cultural meaning, but it's unclear what it might be. And "shan chu" can probably be used as-is because it's the Triad bosses' traditional title and basically a proper noun.

Although, of course, that's just my intuition as a book critic. A professional Chinese interpreter would probably have a more informed take on the matter, and it's certainly possible to assemble a list of slang/jargon that is most respectfully left untranslated. That's just not what White Wolf did in this case. And do you know how I know?

It's because they put a fucking racial slur in the glossary.

Also, their romanizations are really weird and I had a hard time using google translate to verify the words meant what they said they meant. I'm really just taking their word for it, even if I'm about 75% sure that they translated "gaki" wrong (the glossary says it means "shorty" and is a crude reference to genital length, the internet says it's derived from "hungry" and refers to a bratty kid . . . is this a case of poor research on WW's part, semantic drift over the course of two decades, the internet being unreliable, or just crossed wires in romanization causing confusion between two similar-sounding words. . . fuck if I know).

Anyway, that's 1300 words about the glossary section of the Introduction, now it's time to talk about the rest of the book!

Sigh. I don't want to. It mellows out about halfway through, modulo some really disgusting sexual assault stuff in the NPC chapter, but the first chapter is rough. I should tell you all about it, because it's rough in an interesting way, but the thought of experiencing it all again, even in the form of a critical blog post . . . it's a lot.

So I'm going to quote something extremely offensive. Like, you are not ready for how shocking this is. And if you want to understand the roughness of Killing Streets' first chapter, all you need to do is come to grips with the fact that this offensive quote is coming from a section labelled "Telling Story From Reality" and the purpose of the section is to act as a gentle reminder to prospective Kindred of the East players to not indulge in harmful racial stereotypes.

Okay, here it is, the quote urging players not to be racist:

"One of the best ways to handle this is to turn the typical view of a character that first comes to mind on its head, so a white slaver may be a suit-wearing European yuppie and not the cliched greasy Arab."

Holy shit. Normally, it's a bit fatuous to be all like "anti-racist education taught me about more racial stereotypes than racists ever did," but . . . wow, you really just had that in the chamber, didn't you? I'm definitely sure they meant to be anti-racist, because they were urging us not to do that, but also they're using the term "white slavery" without any hint of irony or self-awareness and they're like, weirdly confident that they can predict the precise horrible place peoples' minds are going to go.

(Also, since when were Arabs part of "the Middle Kingdom?")

And it's not an isolated incident. European colonialism is portrayed as this almost-supernatural form of evil, but also the Asians are "backwards" (literally, that exact word is used) and "modernization" is associated with European ideas. Drug addiction is an imported European vice, and so is democracy. At one point it refers to modern Asian governments as "the aping of Western political forms."

Look, there's a complex history here of imperialist overreach displacing indigenous power structures and imposing foreign traditions that are an ill-fit for the local culture, but you can't say that non-white people are "aping" something white people are doing. You just fucking can't.

Sometimes, it feels like the book is trying to have it both ways, implying that Oriental Despotism is the natural state of these people, but it was only when the wicked Europeans came along that these practices became dysfunctional.

"Among the poor, the concept of selling children is neither alien nor the horror that it may appear . . . Modernization and Western-style lusts turned this traditional practice into a living hell . . ."

Oh, god, I don't think I have the rhetorical deftness to do this subject justice. . . So people everywhere, in every time, we're all made of the same stuff. And one of the tools of imperial oppression is to deny this, by focusing on aspects of an oppressed culture that seem, on first glance to be dangerous or foolish or even odious and to deny the humanity of their victims on the pretext that they themselves are dangerous, foolish, or odious, as a matter of their fundamental nature. The only counter to this propaganda is to focus on our shared humanity, to take every culture on its own terms, and seek to understand the context to the practices that make us uncomfortable.

And we may find that something we initially found incomprehensible actually makes a lot of sense when we consider the context, but we might also find that the practices we found odious from the outside are also odious on the culture's own terms. We are made of the same stuff, and so we all yearn for justice. We are all made of the same stuff, and so we all tolerate invidious practices that endure out of cultural inertia. We are all made of the same stuff, so we all have reformers, abolitionists, and revolutionaries. We are all made of the same stuff, so we all have to deal with powerful conservatives who think nothing should ever change.

The practical upshot being that the people of Asia were not just waiting for Europeans to come along and save them from themselves. There have always rebels and philosophers and holy figures who tried their best to appeal to better natures of their societies, to end harmful practices. So there's no need for us to imagine some kind of edenic pre-colonial tradition of child selling. Those "scholars, ministers, and generals of humble background who came through such servitude to power and promise" that's just propaganda. Horatio Alger bullshit the rich use to placate the poor.

And look, I don't envy anyone the task of threading the needle - treating a foreign culture's self-justifications with the proper amount of skepticism while avoiding the easy moralizing of the colonialist gaze. . .

Which is why it's maybe a bad idea to base an entire roleplaying game on the most egregious sort of cultural appropriation imaginable. Bad Kindred of the East! Bad! Stop existing this very instant!

Sigh. I am both a fool and a monster for having bought this book. Reading it was my justly-deserved punishment.

Ukss Contribution: I can't with this one. I just can't. I didn't say half of what I needed to say, and I'm already so tired. Just no.

Star Wars Revised Core Rulebook

 How does hubris always sneak up on me? I'd been on such a hot streak in the month of July, I thought for sure I could keep the momentum going long enough to breeze through a chore I'd been dreading for years - making my way through Star Wars Revised Core Rulebook (Bill Slavicsek, Andy Collins, JD Wiker), a massive beast of a tome (~375 pages) that is, all things considered, the driest possible way to experience the Star Wars universe.

If we look at it as a matter of pages-per-day, it's not really that bad. I can hold my head up high reading an average of 20 pages of a d20 corebook every day for two weeks (and if you exclude the weekends where I kicked back and played video games instead of reading, it's actually more like 25). But oh man, between the attack of opportunity rules, the half-page skill descriptions, and back-to-back chapters on Vehicles and Starships, there were times when I was white-knuckling it.

Hardcore.

To the EXTREME!!!

Well, sarcasm aside, it's not as if I actually want the book to lose its dryness. Not entirely. Not even mostly. I just wish the dryness was deployed with greater precision. This is Star Wars, for crying out loud! How are you making me wish for the spectacle and excitement of an evening quietly browsing Wookiepedia? I'm not sure what exactly I want it to do differently, but it needs something. Interstitial fictions maybe? An editorial voice with a bit more pulp flair, as if we're having the text dictated to us by a 1940s news reel?

I guess it boils down to genre. Genre has always been something George Lucas has understood pretty well, to the degree that Lucas' genre fluency is the series greatest asset and most Star Wars media lives or dies by how much that it internalizes that (I think the prequels would have been much better received if someone could have gently reminded Lucas that the geopolitics stuff should have been pulp too).

The natural conclusion is that the best possible Star Wars game would be "Powered by the Apocalypse." But that's not going to be possible for several years. This book came out in 2002, to coincide with the release of Attack of the Clones, and so it is condemned to try and do genre with the d20 rules system. . .

I'd say it's actually a pretty valiant effort. It introduces a split between "vitality points," which are easily restored and represent near misses and cinematic superficial wounds and "wound points" which come back only slowly and represent serious injury to your physical body. The intended effect is to model Star Wars' pulp-inspired fights, where heroes and villains both make it through elaborate set-piece battles and only really get hurt with a final decisive blow. The implementation has a couple of problems, though. First, critical hits bypass vitality points and go directly to wound points. And humanoid characters only have wound points equal to their Constitution score. So imagine a crit-fishing build where 15 percent of the time, your character is rolling 3d8 or more damage against an average of 12 hit points. It's not even that strange an NPC build. You could stumble across it randomly. (Hilariously, Obi-Wan Kenobi not only falls into that trap with his stat block, but whoever wrote it used the busted D&D version of the Improved Critical feat, giving him a crit range of 17-20, meaning 20% of the time anyone who fights him just dies).

Don't get me wrong, this sense that someone pointing a gun at you is always a threat, regardless of your character level, is itself very genre . . . but the genre is noir, or possibly horror. It would be more pulp if wound points were lost only after vitality points ran out.

And just to rag on the mechanic some more, yeah, they come back relatively fast, but still only at a rate of one per level per hour, which means a high con character might not even top off after a night's rest (and that all characters will need at least a 3-4 hour rest to heal up). If you really want characters to move from one scrap to another, like they do in the movies, you gotta make vitality points even cheaper. Although the Professional classes, which get defenses, saves, attacks, and skill points, but no vitality points as they level up are a good idea. Players are going to be able to mow through whole hordes of thugs, but it will still be a level-appropriate challenge.

It almost feels churlish on my part to point out that Minion-type enemies would have worked even better.

But that's the Star Wars Revised Core Rulebook all over. It's almost where it needs to be. Ditch the last few lingering connections between vitality points and D&D hit points, let them restore according to the dramatic pace of the game instead of modeling "healing," get deeper into asymmetric NPC design, because in the source material, the main characters really do operate by a separate set of rules, be more generous with Force Points (metacurrency that can retroactively boost dice rolls when spent) and decouple them from the morality system to encourage bigger, more ambitious stunts. These are all things games learned subsequently to the publication of this book, so it's really unreasonable of me to ask for them . . . but if the best I can hope for is something inchoate and still kinda too-D&D, then what exactly am I supposed to gain by reading this book?

What indeed?

I guess in 2002, I was still pretty enamored with both the d20 system and the Star Wars prequels (and this book very conspicuously ties into Attack of the Clones, specifically - the "What's New" section of several of the book's chapters goes out of its way to mention added material from the new movie - bye-bye Jar Jar and Sebulba, hello Jango Fett and Count Dooku) so at the time I was just excited to have a Star Wars rpg, no matter how D&D it was under the hood (and to be fair, Star Wars is closer to D&D than most other licensed media would be). Maybe the real reason the book seemed like such a . . . chore to me is that it couldn't magically make me 20 years old again. If I'm being honest, at that age, I'm not sure I'd have known what to do with all the genre, even if the book delivered.

Let's call it an artifact and respect it for its historical context.

Ukss Contribution: So there's this group of aliens, the Yuuzahn Vong that I know only second-hand, through my two Star Wars rpgs. I've gathered that they're sort of the metaplot antagonists for Expanded Universe novels set 20 years after the end of Return of the Jedi and that like all sequel villains they try and escalate the threat by being ridiculously overpowered - they're somehow immune to the Force, despite that making absolutely no sense under the setting's metaphysics.

My choice is not the Yuuzhan Vong. Even after all this time, I couldn't so much as describe their appearance. That's how little charisma I think they have as a threat.

However, I was reminded of one really amusing fact about these guys. Their signature weapon is the ampistaff, "a serpentine creature that can become as rigid as stone and is generally employed as a quarterstaff."

What kind of berserk Flintsones nonsense is this? 

I'm choosing to imagine it less like terrifying biotech and more like "pet snek does a halp!" That's right, buddy. Turn to stone so I can bonk bad guys on the head. There's treats in it for you when we get home.

(KotE) Heresies of the Way

Heresies of the Way is a much-needed course correction for Kindred of the East as a setting, as it fleshes out the alternative "heretical" Dharmas in a way that attempts to reflect the incredible diversity of the lands it calls "The Middle Kingdom" (roughly, Asia, but certainly everything between Pakistan in the west and Japan in the east, Mongolia in the north and Indonesia in the south). So now you've got things like the Face of the Gods in India or the Tempest of the Inward Focus in southeast Asia and they represent a sort of indigenous vampire tradition that predates and resists the Chinese cultural imperialism of the Quincunx. 

But also, they're kind of still heresies, maybe overly familiar with the Yama Kings (a couple of them are referred to, in apparently out-of-character sections, as "akuma"), and definitely less spiritually potent than the corebook Dharmas. The Face of the Gods chapter has a major plot point revolve around the Dharma's lack of a Bodhisattva, and refers to the Quincunx as "their more spiritually sophisticated neighbors."

I'm not outraged or anything, but I am experiencing the quite sensation of a White Wolf book furiously backpedaling as it tries to incorporate into a supplement the fundamental research that really should have been completed before the core book was even written. "China exerted a great deal of cultural influence throughout the region, so we're just going to write the kuei-jin as if they were basically Chinese" was never going to fly, so it's good that this is getting addressed, but it undercuts the message a little to then make the Chinese kuei-jin be right (or at least less wrong) about everything.

In the chapter about the Flame of the Rising Phoenix, we learn that there are Muslim kuei-jin. Muslims are getting sent to pan-Asian hell, presumably because they live inside the kuei-jin's geographical box (not mentioned: whether the hundreds of millions of Asian Christians can also become kuei-jin). The fact that monotheist with an incompatible soteriology can become Chinese vampires raises some difficult questions about what exactly is going on in Asia of Darkness.

San Francisco by Night implied that the origin of kuei-jin was cultural. New kuei-jin could emerge in Chinese (and other Asian) diaspora communities, so long as those communities maintained a sufficient religious and folkloric continuity with the old country. This book implies that the spread is geographical ("We're Asian vampires. We claw our way back from hell, but only if we actually die in Asia.")  and that there is a wide spectrum of cultural beliefs, the ends of which might be totally unintelligible to each other, that can spawn the kuei-jin, so long as the person with those beliefs is Asian.

And honestly, both approaches are problematic because both approaches require you to contemplate the idea of boundaries. When you try to figure out who is at risk of being sent to Yomi, and who is not, you're either going to establish the boundaries of a geographical region or the boundaries of a culture. On the surface, geography seems a little less fraught, but it's also sort of arbitrary. Why did these particular borders get picked and not others? Is there a situation where you might become a kuei-jin if you die in the Punjab region of Pakistan, but won't if you die in Baluchistan? It's that very arbitrariness that makes the question a Rorschach test on your perceptions of race. Where do the Asians live? To answer, you will have to have a broad concept of "the Asians" and a willingness to lump them all together as a homogenous group.

The cultural approach is scarcely better. It has the advantage of being less arbitrary - people who believe in Chinese hell have a chance of going to Chinese hell - but then you're left asking the question of who is Chinese enough? That's a job where, if you're Chinese, you shouldn't be doing it, and if you're not Chinese you really shouldn't be doing it.

In the case of Kindred of the East, White Wolf really earned its orientalism by recklessly grabbing the worst of both worlds. They're policing the boundaries of culture, but doing so in an arbitrary way. "Chinese enough" is "Asian," as understood by America's peculiar racial hierarchy. So if you're a Muslim living in Bangladesh, you're basically Indian, which is basically Buddhist, which is basically Chinese, so of course you might go to Chinese hell.

(It's at this point that I remember that Islamic kuei-jin were mentioned in the core book and wonder what it says about me that I'm only now feeling surprised by it.)

I feel like Heresies of the Way, as a new source of KotE lore, is stirring the pot. It's saying that those boundaries are bullshit, establishing that autonomous rival philosophies can exist for the kuei-jin outside Chinese cultural hegemony, and even as it tries to give those philosophies equal dignity to the five corebook Dharmas, it retains the core's "heretical" framing. If theses Dharmas are "probably as old, if not older than the Quincunx" then how can they be heretical? 

I mean, obviously, "heresy" is a political label and they are heretics from the perspective of the most powerful vampiric political body in the region, but the question remains - why is White Wolf ratifying this label out-of-character? Again, obviously, because the names and terminology were inherited from previous works in the line and there is a certain amount of inertia that comes with it. They found a place to insert a bit more cultural nuance into Kindred of the East, with the unfortunate constraint that they couldn't directly contradict anything that had already been established. How is that not enough for me?

I don't know. I guess I liked Heresies of the Way just fine. It provided a much-needed expansion of the base game's possibilities, allowing it to come at least a little bit closer to capturing the scope and diversity of its Asian setting. It's just . . . seeing these possibilities expand largely serves to remind me how off-putting it is that they weren't here from the very beginning, and seeing the compromises that had to be made to get these option in the game makes me think that Kindred of the East, as a whole, was always doomed to be untenable. 

Then again, doing things that were always doomed to failure is kind of a major theme of this particular era of the World of Darkness, so I suppose I should probably give at least some of my thoughts on each of the five chapters:

Chapter 1: Flame of the Rising Phoenix (Steve Kenson)

These vampires, based out of Sri Lanka, but with members pretty much everywhere kuei-jin can be found, believe that they were sent back to earth to redeem themselves for the sins that sent them to hell, try as best they can to live a normal life, and if possible pick up exactly where they left off. 

This last tenet, especially, can lead to hilarity, because one way that they slip back into their old lives is by using ritual magic to erase the memory of their death, and "The Phoenixes tell of one murderer who sits in a jail cell . . . uncertain of why he's there. In fact, everyone's forgotten why he's there, so police keep him in custody . . . just in case."

It's kind of a shame this chapter is so short, because I really would have liked to see more discussion about the drawbacks of trying to continue your old life - returning to the toxic environment that sent you to hell in the first place or confronting the fact that your victims might be entirely uninterested in helping you redeem yourself.

My final, reductive verdict on the Dharma - it's basically Kindred of the East's version of the Path of Humanity, and it may not be glamorous but it was sorely needed.

Chapter 2: The Tempest of the Inward Focus (Guy-Francis Vella)

These are the first kuei-jin that are strongly associated with a particular "non-east Asian" (book's words) locale, and unfortunately they never really clicked with me. They're like dark Taoists who seek to learn the nature of all things, sometimes by torturing people to death, and they just sort of struck me as people who were constantly doing random shit for no reason. It probably didn't help that the Dharma was split between two bitterly opposed factions and that a substantial portion of their description was given over to "quotes" from a Quincunx work that asserted they were irredeemably awful.

The most interesting thing about them is that they reject almost the entirety of the Quincunx's cosmology, "dismissing the Wheel and the Yama Kings as mere illusions and having little patience for the concept of karmic debt." I feel like maybe there's something there, if this controversy had been in the setting since the beginning, but at this point, we know the Yama Kings' names and home addresses. The coming Sixth Age of the Wheel dovetails with about a million other World of Darkness subplots. It's doing the Tempest real dirty to make them dissenters at this late date.

Chapter 3: The Face of the Gods (Geoffrey C Grabowski)

This one makes me a little uncomfortable.

A vampire, duping a blood cult into worshipping them as a god? Great. Classic bit. A conspiracy of vampires, who mentor young vampires in starting blood cults, organize to protect the integrity of blood cults, and debate the philosophy and ethics of running a blood cult? A little weird. A little heightened. Maybe something you'd put in a parody, but not at all out of line.

However, the Face of the Gods is based out of India. And this is around the time that White Wolf's Aberrant was using the term "India Syndrome" to describe novas (superheroes, basically) who started cults devoted to themselves. And the uncomfortable conclusion I come to is that someone at White Wolf (or possibly just the company culture as a whole) was under the impression that Indians were especially prone to worship any random creature that came along and presented itself as a god . . . one of the big toxic orientalist tropes.

All-in-all, I'd rather the Face of the Gods be replaced with something . . . better.

Chapter 4: The Spirit of the Living Earth (Ellen Kiley, James Kiley)

It's fine. It's probably more World of Darkness animism than adapted real-world animism, but I'm okay with that. It flirts with recapitulating the original sin of the Dreamspeakers (and, indeed Kindred of the East) - Shinto, Mongolian Shamanism, and Vietnamese Folk Religion are all under its umbrella, but I'm willing to give it the benefit of the doubt and assume that if they had more space, they would have made this alliance something more explicitly negotiated in-setting.

My other main takeaway from this chapter is that it is inexplicably the only one of the five to do the trademark White Wolf Terrible Fonts. I'm not sure how that happens.

Chapter 5: The Scorpion Eaters (Michael Butler)

"Scorpion Eaters live the lifestyle of the archetypal, if not stereotypical, Asian gangster. . ."

A bold gambit, considering the hole Kindred of the East is clumsily trying to dig itself out of, but I think they squeeze in under the wire due to the fact that having a clear, but shallow genre inspiration (in this case Hong Kong crime cinema, specifically the "films of Woo, Lam, and Hark) is like the core methodology for building a World of Darkness splat. Also, it's kind of funny that their gangster movie aesthetic is explicitly an in-character choice. Like, canonically, these movies exist in the WoD, and the Scorpion Eaters are deliberately modelling themselves after them. I'm not saying they're not lazily designed, I'm just saying that the material is all there to present them as an incredibly dangerous bunch of dorks.

Their deal is that they think the Sixth Age is inevitable, so they're getting a jump on the competition by using magic and dark pacts to recalibrate their metabolism to process tainted chi (on the theory that once the Yama Kings take over, it'll be the only kind of chi there is and everyone will start fighting over it). Combined with their unapologetically egoist philosophy, this makes them decent antagonists for nearly any conceivable KotE game.

Yeah, okay, I'm convinced. "Lazy" isn't the same as "bad." I like 'em.

Now, time to wrap things up.

Overall, I'd say Heresies of the Way is an essential book if you're going to keep playing Kindred of the East, but it's difficult to believe that anyone could get this far into the line without realizing how irresponsible it would be to keep playing Kindred of the East?

Ukss Contribution: This is probably the least evil Kindred of the East book I've read so far, so I definitely have to pick something, despite the fact that I'm now 100% convinced that I never want to play Kindred of the East.

There's a sidebar that discusses whether or not Mao Zedong could possibly be an active kuei-jin, handled with a not unreasonable amount of sensitivity, all things considered. Now, I'm definitely not interested in including Mao in Ukss, but there was a line in the discussion that intrigued me:

"famously cruel (and dead) people often have some smartass kuei-jin pretending to be them."

That's a nuance of undead fantasy culture that never occurred to me before, that some poseur could steal the identity of a more famous dead person, or that the values of the undead world might be so twisted that the identity of a notorious asshole could be something of practical value.

I'll have to have a character informed by a similar thought process.

(Scion 2e) Saints and Monsters

The only real flaw I'd attribute to Saints and Monsters is not truly a flaw at all - it reads like five separate books bundled together into one title. The downside is that we get four separate character creation sections - one for saints, one for prophets, one for sorcerers, and one for titanic scions - the bulk of which are redundant with the character creation section of Scion: Origin. The upside is that it's all completely modular. No one is forcing you to read the whole book at once. . . 

Unless, of course, you're driven by your own inner demons to systematically read all your books cover-to-cover, in which case I find that a very understandable and relatable motivation and think we'd probably get along pretty well if we met in real life.

So I'm try to digest this as a whole work. What does it mean that a book like this exists? I could make my life easier and just engage on the level of the trivial - it's a grab-bag of topics that expands the Scion, 2nd Edition setting in a bunch of random ways, its only purpose to satisfy the ever-present rpg-obsessive desire for more.

That's certainly why I bought it. Specifically, I was intrigued most by Sorcerers, because that's an archetype that appeals to my secular, materialist sensibilities in a fantasy setting that is otherwise (at best) ambivalent to those impulses. Seize the power of the gods via knowledge and technique! Create changes in the world (and the World) by identifying the ways in which the rules of reality make changes possible and then choosing to create the conditions that lead to your desired outcome. You don't have to be born special, with a connection to the sublime and unknowable forces that precede creation. It's a path anyone can walk, if they would but dare!

So you know, it's all pretty exciting. I did get the feeling that maybe the authors weren't quite as into it as I was, but the section didn't disappoint. I might be a little worried about the cognitive load of learning a parallel magic system (it's broken down into Workings, Techniques, and Charms instead of Purviews, Marvels, and Boons, and is slightly less freeform, but you definitely get the feeling that you can do effective things with magic), and I'm curious how mixed-parties play out, and it's a little bit of a bummer that scions who do magic are generally more effective than mortals (though it's not that big a deal because scions outshine mortals in every field of endeavor, and it would seem less materialist to me if the people with broad general advantages did not also have an advantage in this). However, I would be happy to use the system as-is. You can play a Taoist immortal at every tier of the game, even God, and while you might not be directly competitive with a similarly experienced scion, the opportunity costs are enough to give you a secure niche.

But that sort of analysis is me nibbling around the edges. "Now do it for Saints," I think, and the spirit quails. I think beyond the obvious question of power scaling (who would win? A saint or a prophet? Presumably, the saint would get prep time, but the prophet wouldn't), the best way to look at this book is as more religious content for the game about religion. Now you can really dig into themes and cultures that the core books can't really handle. It was always just the slightest bit inconceivable to play as a Christian scion (you're, what, like Jesus' half-brother, and assuming you survived to apotheosis, are you adopting one of God's mantles? making the trinity a quaternary?), but a Christian Saint or a Christian prophet are both quite doable. There's room for different human relations to the divine, and that holds across the first three chapters. Sorcerers steal power from the gods, Saints perform miracles by embodying the virtues of their gods, and Prophets are blessed (or cursed) by the gods to know when miraculous things are going to happen (which works out in play a lot like a character power).

It's a shame, then, that all three chapters feel so siloed off. Far be for me to call for yet another of Scion, 2nd Edition's trademark Storyguide chapters (and, indeed, four of the book's five chapters get their own Storyguide sections), but I think the book would have benefited from tying it all together. The core books' pantheon structure is versatile enough to include several living religions, but it doesn't get them all. If you really wanted to hammer home your theme of "all religions are true," you could use these new mechanics to read in Christianity or Islam, but also maybe that's something players could use some expert guidance on. (For example, given my knowledge of Islam, I think an Islamic prophet or saint would likely be problematic, but a sorcerer who drew power from jinn might be . . . okay? I'd actually be very interested to hear a Muslim take on the issue). 

Overall, though, Saints and Monsters continues of the Scion 2nd Edition tradition of delivering supplements that make the game more of a game. In addition to four new chapters of character options (including one that really should have been in Titanomachy, and which makes the inexplicable choice of presenting four new sets of knacks that are almost, but not completely different than the ones in the other book), we get a much needed xp sink in the form of Edges, allowing us for the first time to play a scion with some degree of personal wealth and a new lifepath system that I expect will be fun the first two times you use (not a knock, just my estimation that a group of five players is going to use approximately half the life events between them in a single campaign). Even the new rules-lighter game system had potential (though I'd like to see it in practice before I give a definite opinion on the subject). There's not a thing in this book I didn't like.

Ukss Contribution: I really liked the "Transylvanian Scholomance, a school [of sorcery], said to be run by the devil." Each of its classes consists of thirteen students, twelve of whom will matriculate as masters of the dark arts. "The very top of the class is taken by the Headmaster, never to be seen again."

That's a fun dynamic. Nobody gets into Scholomance if they're not ambitious enough to learn absolutely as much as possible, but they all know that learning too much gets them kidnapped by the devil, so they sort of reverse-sabotage each other, hoping to squeeze by as the second-best student. I'd love to base an entire campaign around that.

(KotE) San Francisco By Night

CONTENT WARNING: Sexual assault

Writing a coherent post about San Francisco by Night (Kraig Blackwelder and Steve Kenson) has so far eluded me. I've written and discarded about four different introductions to this post, and in a very broad way have been about the task for approximately eight hours before even getting to this point (though, in the interest of full disclosure, about four of those hours were me deliberately playing a video game as a way of avoiding this particular chore). The source of this delay is not at all mysterious to me. I know exactly what's holding me back. I cannot think of a responsible way to express the idea that

IN THE 2002ND YEAR OF THE COMMON ERA, WHITE WOLF STUDIOS RELEASED A SUPPLEMENT ABOUT A LITERAL RACE WAR, OMFG! WHAT DO I DO?!

I know, in the past, I've glibly referred to The Great Leap Outward (ugh, I think I'm going to be sick, that name is the absolute worst) as "the vampire race war," but, like, guys . . . guys, guys . . . the races in question, they're not "kuei-jin" and "kindred," as we've been lead to believe. They are, in fact, "Asian" and "miscellaneous (white)."

The NPC chapter of this book is quite long (about 40 pages) and generously illustrated, in that turn-of-the-century White Wolf style. So we can see quite clearly the races of all eight named Camarilla characters. Six of them are white. One is inexplicably a Hopi (which, to be clear, is not something that needs to be explained, per se, but her heritage is a big part of her character, so it's not like she just happens to be a Hopi woman who moved to San Francisco to be part of the tech industry or anything). And the last one is Chinese.

Which undermines my point a little, but while there are Asian kindred, the book treats them strangely. They''re like this weird middle ground between the V:tM-style vampires and the KotE-style vampires. They act as diplomatic envoys or defectors or spies and I don't know, it feels objectifying. There's this mostly-impermeable barrier between the kuei-jin and kindred, but Asian kindred can sort of pass through . . . because of their mortal race?

For the kuei-jin's part, they've divided up the city of San Francisco into different regions, and apparently have the physical power to mostly keep the kindred in their designated zones (using the Chinese Tongs as muscle, naturally). And with only a couple practical exceptions, they want to control the zones where Asians live . . . and nothing else. The nuances of ethnicity don't seem to enter into it. They want to extend their reach into nearby San Jose, purely because of the large Vietnamese community there. 

If you wanted to parse it as generously as possible, you could read this as being about dueling occult conspiracies (the reason the kuei-jin want the Vietnamese community in San Jose is because they believe "the Asian presence is large enough to support a self-renewing population of kuei-jin"), but honestly it's weird to be reminded that the World of Darkness has an empirically verifiable Asian Hell, but Christian Hell is . . . less substantiated (at least, until Demon: the Fallen comes along). It all comes across as very racialized.

Especially in the way that the kuei-jin's imposition of vampire travel bans is continually framed in terms meant to evoke FDR's internment of Japanese-Americans. The words "internment camp" and "virtual concentration camp" are used to describe certain neighborhoods where kindred are permitted to lair and hunt.

Never mind that we're talking about approximately 80 people, total, across all factions, assuming we use the upper end of the estimated vampire carrying capacity (1 per 10,000 mortals). There's simply no way any organized group is going to have the coverage to meaningfully deny the enemy territory. The "New Promise Mandarinate's" borders should leak like a sieve. 

Supposedly, the kuei-jin's influence over the Tongs is supposed to be their main enforcement tool, but then I think about the fact that they're keeping the Ventrue out of the Finance District and imagination fails me. Maybe the police are heavily bribed and controlled with dark magic, but it's hard to believe that they could ever be so off-mission that they'd allow Chinese gangsters to assemble in a neighborhood frequented by white millionaires. "Oh no, the guy whose name is on the country club can't get to a board meeting because he's afraid of getting killed by the sort of people we ticket for loitering aggressively" - a scenario from an rpg fever dream.

I mean, it's a premise of the game that the Prince of a city can enforce rights of introduction and dominion, so it's not surprising that vampires are controlling territory, despite their small numbers. However, the main difference is that usually "this vampire is not where they're supposed to be" is treated as a one-off. There are only 80 guys, but 79 are enforcing their rules against the 1. When the scale opens up even a little, all bets are off. The Camarilla is immensely powerful and highly motivated, but if the Sabbat decides to come to town, well, that town's infested by Sabbat now.

It's a tricky thing to disentangle, why San Francisco by Night's "Munificent Transitioning Sectors" feel so bad. Am I imposing a double standard here? Like, if it were a white Prince, enforcing rules of domain, would I still have this problem? And I think, on a personal level, I would, but I'd frame it as "I don't want to be controlled" and I would direct my resentment at the Camarilla's outdated social structure. So it shouldn't intrinsically be a problem that I feel resentment at the Quincunx's similarly outdated social structure. "Young vampires wanting to go somewhere, being thwarted, and starting fights about it" is part of the DNA of the game. However, the difference here is that when I feel resentment towards the MT sectors, I'm feeling resentment towards . . . Asians? Like the game is trying to manipulate me into Sinophobia?

The plot of the whole damned book is "immigrants have come to steal our jobs, destabilize our housing markets, and spread organized crime." And maybe I'm being a little silly, because the jobs are "sucking blood," the real-estate is "sun-proof havens," and the organized crime is "vampire thralls," but it really feels like this book is trying to turn me Republican. Like, if you had one opportunity to turn John Bolton goth, this is the book you'd reach for.

And I don't think they were trying to do that on purpose. There's nuance to be had here, if that's what you're after. The New Promise Mandarinate has plenty of kindred collaborators. It's presented as a sustainable alternative to the Camarilla. Yeah, they micromanage where you are allowed to live, and make it a point to let you know that they can send gangsters to kill you when you're asleep, but it's not an age-based hierarchy. Advancement and the attainment of new privileges is possible through individual merit (read: ass-kissing). The implication is that the reason the Quincunx got so much power so quickly is that they exploited existing fractures and secured the buy-in of groups that were marginalized under the Camarilla.

But it's just an implication, because there are no concrete examples of, say, former Anarchs thriving under the new regime.

Also, it's like 80 guys, so why are the kuei-jin giving their "move to San Francisco's Chinatown" plan a grandiose, state-like name? Why is this being treated as a clash of civilizations? "The New Promise Mandarinate? Oh, you mean the ten guys who moved to Chinatown and are now murdering people in the financial district?"

Now, I've complained a lot, but I do need to take a step back. I don't think it's necessarily out of bounds to tell a story about a vampire race war. They're vampires. Ideally, they'd not be racist, but in terms of their collective crimes against humanity, that's just another thing to add to the list. It's similar to how I would not be shocked if a gritty prison drama featured a storyline about a conflict between a neo-nazi gang and an Asian gang. Prison gangs often divide up on race. A world where vampire conspiracies do the same isn't an implausible world. It may even be a compelling world. However, there is one point I've made about White Wolf in the past that I feel I need to make again:

This is a tabletop rpg. Everything you put in the book is potentially something I will have to say out loud, to my friends.

And that makes the book's attempts at nuance problematic. "Quincunx versus Camarilla" isn't intrinsically "Asians vs whites" any more than "Chinese Tongs vs Italian Mafia" would be. These are specific groups with specific agendas and some white vampires actually prefer Qunicunx rule, just like there are some Asian Camarilla who are committed members of the organization. But let's not kid ourselves, race is a factor. You really think those Mafia guys are going to avoid using racial slurs about their criminal rivals? You think vampires are going to be any better?

The book has a whole storytelling chapter. It does not, in any way, address the elephant in the room. It's so focused on the idea that these are two different types of vampires, using two separate White Wolf core books, that it never noticed it was depicting something that looked an awful like a race war in the streets of San Francisco. So there's no advice on how to make the conflict look less like that. Nor on how to lean into the skid, explore its adult themes, and walk away without being racist IRL. But maybe it's for the best, seeing as how the very existence of San Francisco by Night (and, indeed Kindred of the East as a whole) is compelling evidence that White Wolf wasn't ready to have that conversation.

I'm so tired of talking about this book, but I have to keep going because when I roast a White Wolf book for being weird about race, it leaves the impression that I didn't notice it being weird about gender and sexuality. This is San Francisco we're talking about. It has a reputation as a cultural center for LGBTQ people that was even stronger in 2002 than it is today. The opening fiction features the world's straightest homosexual getting seduced and tossed aside by two hot gay vampires (I actually liked that part, though, despite the fact that the victim's internal monologue did the "Schmitt's Gay" routine of taking standard issue bro-speak and doing a find-and-replace of "chicks" for "dudes"). So we're talking about the most explicitly and non-judgementally queer rpg sourcebook I've read so far (largely because the bar is in the basement, but still).

However, in the section about San Francisco's famous Castro district it says, "The Kuei-jin's deeply traditional nature includes many homophobic attitudes, so in their eyes giving the Camarilla the Castro is a subtle slight."

And I don't know. It's not like the section is bad. Surprising no one, the Camarilla is rainbow capitalist (their nickname for the Castro district is "the cash-flow" district), and the rest of the text goes on about how homophobia backfired because Castro and its people are awesome. But there's something that didn't sit right with me. The kuei-jin aren't Chinese. They are Chinese vampires. "Traditional attitudes" aren't really their thing. What's the traditional Chinese attitude towards killing someone and eating their flesh I wonder? So why do we have a group of guys who openly tolerate the Devil Tigers "we were sent to hell and therefor we must become the perfect demons" philosophy, but only if they append it with "no homo?" The conclusion I reached is that no gay Asian has ever gone to hell. The only other alternative explanation is that White Wolf somehow forgot that one of the main advantages of being a vampire is that you are now free to be as gay as you want to be, but that seems unlikely. The works of Anne Rice are cited in the Introduction's "Resources" section.

Finally, women. White Wolf is frustrating because it is undeniably, empirically ahead of the curve when it comes to female representation (I counted the featured NPCs and it broke down to 14 female, 17 male, 1 nonbinary), but that representation is laced with landmines of problematic tropes. 

There are three separate female characters who have rape as part of their backstory. Two of them are kuei-jin and it's kind of hard to read their entries and not come away with the conclusion that they went to hell because they were raped. (It doesn't help that the physical description of one of the women includes the line "it is a beauty that brought about her death" - victim blaming in its purest form).

The third character was somehow even more fucked up - a mortal demon hunter who was saved from demons by some sleaze who made her his "child bride" and was subsequently tossed aside and replaced by another child after she reached puberty. Like apparently there was this pedophile demon hunter out there, constantly trafficking young girls and somehow the takeaway here is that the featured NPC was jilted. Sigh. I can't even do it justice. I'll just quote it at length:

Having no family, Xiu Ping asked to travel with the man, who instructed her comprehensively in the arts of the Shih. All Xiu Ping had to do in return was sleep with the old man. While it was not a relationship she sought out, it served its purpose. Xiu Ping acted as Chu Fang's child bride for seven years before he rescued another girl, took her for his child bride, and cut all ties with Xiu Ping.

At the age of twenty-two, with no ties to any community, Xiu Ping became a wandering devil slayer herself. Her rage at Chu Fang's betrayal was enormous, but she channeled it into her fight against unbalanced shen. When she heard that Chu Fang and his concubine had met their demise at the claws of a trio of vicious old Kumo, she rejoiced - and then she avenged their deaths by slaying the spider devils.

Oh, is that the psychology at work here? Xiu Ping "rejoiced" that the "concubine" who replaced her in the coveted "have sex with a pedophile who will dump you with no support as soon as you grow pubes" position was torn apart by demons? Maybe it is. People can be wired strangely. But I need you to take a step back and think about what you're saying for five goddamned seconds. Please.

Then there are two other female characters who weren't raped, but had very rape-adjacent backstories (in one there's a trusted male friend who betrays the character, but it's a utilitarian vampire blood bond and not anything even implied to be sexual, in the other a vampire offers a girl's parents money to sex traffic her, but the offer is just a test and he kills them when they accept, making her his vampire apprentice in a way that seems genuinely respectful, but is still pretty fucked up when you think about it).

All right. I think I need to be done now. I hated this book. I don't like using that word. It's too absolute, and it makes me doubt myself, because there were parts of San Francisco by Night that were perfectly fine. But on the balance? As a whole work? There's no mitigated or ambivalent alternative which also feels honest. 

I hated this book.

Ukss Contribution: Let's be real, Kindred of the East, even at its best, is very close to the line. This book is not Kindred of the East at its best. I'm skipping it.