(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.

(Scion 2e) Mysteries of the World

It is no secret that I've so far had a contentious (some might even say fraught) relationship with Scion, 2nd Edition, and I'd largely made peace with that, but Mysteries of the World shocked me out of my complacency. The first chapter (GMing advice, naturally) presented a system for varying the presentation of the game, fine tuning it to your particular group's preferences. It broke the game's style down into four different axes - genre, theocentrism, titanomachy, and evidence and showed examples of how you could tweak each axis into one of five levels of intensity (iron, heroic, bronze, silver, and gold).

Now, the thing that surprised me, nay, shook me to my very core, was that I happened to agree with the "default" choice for each of the four categories. . . Mostly. Maybe I'd bump "genre" up from bronze to silver, but even then, in the sidebars where they gave examples of different settings that used all four factors at a particular level (all iron was American Gods, all bronze was Clash of the Titans, etc) the example they used for across-the-board silver was Scion, 2nd Edition.

There's a certain vertigo that came with the revelation. Here I am, thinking of myself as a subtle and nuanced critic with a certain degree of personal integrity and pride in my craft, and thus my mixed feelings about the game must have been at least somewhat justified, but then a new book comes along and says, "here are the decisions we made and why, which one do you disagree with, exactly) and the best answer I've got is a sheepish, "um, maybe boost the action by about 25%."

For a brief moment, I felt bad, like maybe I'd misjudged the game. Luckily, my pride quickly rallied and I realized the issue was incorrectly framed (admittedly, by me). My personal skepticism about "theocentrism" being an essential axis notwithstanding, I agree with most of Scion 2nd Edition's design choices. The reason I'm so ambivalent about the game is that it spent the first 20 pages of The Scion Companion explaining the logic behind the game's design decisions and nowhere, not even in the core books, was there a comparable stretch spent being the game they decided to design.

Like, wow, Scion 2nd Edition is meant to be "highly cinematic, in tune with blockbuster films." It's a world where "the evening news is littered with the occasional supernatural incident, like that time a bunch of drunk centaurs crashed the local racetrack during an important race." That setting sounds like a total blast. I can't wait for you to show it to me.

No, that's not quite fair. There were parts of Scion: Origin that were pretty close to what I'm asking for. I enjoyed Titanomachy. Across all the books, the fictions have been pretty good. And even in the most contentious volumes, there are bits and pieces of lore that shine through. It's just that the game's general approach to the presentation of setting information is to give you a set of abstract principles and then encourage you to apply those principles according to the needs of your specific game, with specific details existing mainly to demonstrate the type of thing you're being encouraged to do. I.e. the god Tyr created a company called Fenris Arms to sell accessible weapons to people with disabilities. . . and other gods have similar ventures, if you happen to think of any, feel free to put them in the World, because that's the vibe we're going for here.

There are times when I wish the game would stop giving me so many fucking choices and just show me something cool already. 

Of course, I'm just as much the problem. When the game does show me something cool, I inevitably give it the side-eye, suspicious that it will vanish in a puff of smoke the second I put any weight on it. You want to tell me that in the World, Julius Caesar was a scion of Venus who hunted the Gaulish gods to extinction and that his deification by Augustus was something that actually worked as advertised, so that he's still around in the modern day, being held back from further conquest by Jupiter Capitolinus due to broader geopolitical concerns? That's interesting. Very interesting. So why do I feel like the Gaulish gods are optional content? That this potential conflict will never be mentioned again and the cultural implications of a world where Julius fucking Caesar is wandering around 2000 years after his apparent death will never be explored?

Oh, of course, they could be explored, by me, seeing as how I'm so interested and all. Maybe what I've been complaining about all this time is that Scion 2nd Edition is too much of a tabletop rpg that I'm meant to play with friends and not enough of a fantasy encyclopedia that I'm able to read for pleasure.

But since when am I the one on trial here? I'm the critic and I'll say it with my whole chest - I'd prefer an rpg with a slightly different ratio of concrete setting examples to abstract worldbuilding advice.

Yeah, I went there. No regrets.

Ukss Contribution: This is one of those cases where most of my top choices have so much cultural baggage that they're not really useable. My absolute favorite thing was the revelation that Julius Caesar is still around and kicking. But that's not adaptable. It just doesn't have the same oomph is a setting not based on the real world. I also like that Bragi, the Norse god of poetry has a blog. And that America has national god, Columbia. That's exactly the sort of nonsense I want from a game of modern myth.

But what am I going to do, put America in Ukss? Introduce to this innocent world the scourge of blogging? Not likely.

So I have to go with my 4th choice. It's more of a theological concept than a setting element, but one thing I really liked about the Loa was that they can "have so many forms that they are effectively small families of Gods all by themselves, with related but different characteristics their devotees can recognize."

There's some deep mysticism there that I think could be fruitfully adapted to a fantasy setting . . . 

(And I'm aware that I'm on dangerous ground here, re: cultural appropriation. And I don't know what to say. I don't like making one-to-one correspondences between real religions and fantasy religions, but I do like allowing my fantasy religions to be informed by the different ways real religions can be.)

(KotE) Half-Damned: Dhampyr

 The insidious thing about Kindred of the East is that sometimes, despite its questionable origins, it threatens to be fun. White Wolf (and I am literally not exaggerating here) as a company was sometimes skeptical of the concept of fun, but they made a game whose theme was "exoticism" and sometimes that means they're willing to experiment with this exotic thing called "fun."

Half-Damned: Dhampyr (Hal Mangold) is a fun book. When a kuei-jin overdoses on life energy, that temporarily restores their reproductive fertility. The children born from that process are called Dhampyr, and this book reveals, for the first time ever, that in addition to the brooding gothic vampire powers you might reasonably expect, Dhampyrs also get an action-movie aura that draws them into ridiculous plots, lets them perform sick-ass stunts, and ensures that they usually win at gambling (which we all know is the best possible income source for an action movie protagonist).

Also, they're the reincarnated souls of the celestial Golden Children of the uncorrupted Ten Thousand Immortals, whose very existence reminds the most ancient and enlightened vampires of their unforgiveable crimes against heaven.

I don't know how true to Chinese mythology it all is, but yeah, I'd trust John Woo to remake Blade. At least, that's what I think Half Damned: Dhampyr was going for. . . mostly.

There's a bit of the ol' gross-out horror here too. There are rules for charging up your powers via cannibalism. I'm not sure they're well thought-out as a story element because unlike drinking blood, which can be sanitized enough to support a half-vampire antihero, there's no way to devour a corpse and not come off looking like a creature, but this is something that can be downplayed. You can pace yourself with the dark magic and avoid the face eating for a very long time.

The personality mechanics are also pretty weird. If you wanted to be hard on Kindred of the East (and to be clear, that would be entirely deserved), you could make an issue of the fact that kuei-jin have entirely different personality traits than kindred. Why, that would seem to imply that Asians have a different variety of soul than westerners.

On the other hand, if you wanted to be generous, you could say that the implication was unwarranted. The two games use different jargon, and subsequently different models for the human experience, but they're about the same thing. Virtues + Humanity + the Beast = Yin + Yang + Hun + P'o + Dharma because a human soul is a human soul, and that doesn't change just because you're looking at it from a different angle.

Fair enough. But then you have Dhampyrs. Like mortal characters, they have Conscience, Courage, and Self-Control ratings. Like kindred (but unlike humans), they have a Humanity rating. Like kuei-jin, they have a P'o rating. But no Dharmas. They are unnecessary because Dhampyrs aren't atoning for sins, and thus they have no fated path they must follow.

So what are the implications here? Asian souls aren't different, but kuei-jin souls are, because going to Asian hell and then coming back permanently changes your soul, and the Dharmas are not a product of kuei-jin culture, but actually part of the machinery of the afterlife?

I don't know. It's all very confusing. And this particular issue is only really relevant when you try to place Kindred of the East in the overall meta-context of the World of Darkness, which is something I generally prefer to do only as a last resort (and this is not just me trying to doge an uncomfortable cultural conversation, I also refuse to entertain the notion that Mage: the Ascension and Vampire: the Masquerade take place in the same universe, except when crossover events like the Week of Nightmares make that unavoidable).

So, I guess what I'm saying is that I'd have preferred if Half Damned: Dhampyr had confined itself to the terminology of Kindred of the East instead of involving the Vampire: the Masquerade core, but it's not a dealbreaker for me. This book is still a lot of fun.

Ukss Contribution: I've been describing the Dhampyrs' "joss" trait as an "action movie aura," despite the fact that the book defines the term as something more akin to luck, but I think this is a case where I definitely know better than the book. We're talking about a pool of points that allows you to survive one-shot hits from powerful enemies, that adds bonus successes to your skills and talents and has the side effect of doing things like "have their bags mistakenly switched for ones with more interesting contents (like a million dollars in drug money or a couple of severed heads)."

And I just love that as a conceit for a character type. Oh yeah, let's all play the ttrpg where "during a slow moment the GM will stir the pot" is a superpower on your character sheet. And more than that, a setting element as well. Ukss should have something like that.

(Scion 2e) Titanomachy

Scion, 2nd Edition has me bouncing around like a yo-yo on a string. I'll read the core books and think I have it all figured out - it's a well-meaning, but somewhat self-serious game that never loses sight of the religious implications of its subject matter, so you play out a mythopoetic journey into the heart of meaning, but maybe sometimes that involves using your superpowers. And when I have that understanding of the game, I respect it. I admire it for doing something different. I'm open to playing it. But I recognize that it's not really for me.

Then, a book like Titanomachy will come along and turn my understanding upside down. There are monster pride organizations! Aten has taken the form of a televangelist! Namazu, the giant catfish monster that causes earthquakes in Japan and Echidna, the serpent-bodied wife of Typhon are totally besties and one day soon "these two monster moms will be able to combine their forces." (Also, apparently, Typhon is a total wife guy, which is . . . dangerously adorable). And it's just so . . . so . . . pulp. I love it. I want you to imagine me like that one lady in the viral video, uncontrollably crying while talking about how much she loves cats. In between heaving sobs of joy, I am trying to tell you the titans . . . have . . . a lawyer, and the book gets weirdly right-wing about it ("Heroes may dislike kraken and scorpion folk, but they hate Timothy Algood.")

Maybe it's because the book is about characters who are usually the villains in their respective myths. Like, who's rushing to defend the honor of Surtr or Cronus? You can depict Apep as a big, dumb snake who hasn't fully thought out the implications of his "eat the sun" plan and that's okay. It doesn't really hurt the dignity of the ancient Egyptian religion. It's not like the gods that fight him off each night are only significant because they're facing a subtle and cunning foe with sophisticated motives. Sherlock Holmes may need Moriarty to be his intellectual equal and dark foil, but the thing that opposes cosmic balance and universal justice is allowed to be both evil and stupid.

A side effect of this is that Titanomachy largely avoids the biggest pitfall of Scion 2nd Edition's worldbuilding - it has specific characters making choices based on their well-established motivations and subsequently taking concrete actions at a particular place and time. 

For very good reason, I always feel like a trollish little shit when I say something like that, but I keep doing it because it gets at something essential. It is impossible to overstate how much more real the World feels when the book tells me that the Aztec moon goddess Coyolxauqui awoke in 1978 and that one of the things she'll do is manipulate groups of scions by threatening to "change the face of the moon to an unflattering likeness of one of the Heroes."

The book doesn't get too much into it, but the mind boggles to contemplate it. The World is a setting where an ordinary person can be minding their own business and then one night they look up at the moon and, I guess, like the craters and shadows and stuff have reformed to display a caricatured portrait of . . . some dude. They could lean over to one of their friends and say, "hey, you see the moon tonight."

And the friend looks up, fails to recognize the face any more than the person we were originally talking about, but doesn't panic at all, because they were aware that this sort of thing could happen. Their grandma saw it first time it happened, the night of her senior prom and only later did she find out it was meant to be Bob Woodward. "I wonder what all that's about," the friend says, deadpan and the two of them look up again for a long moment before going back inside and watching a true crime documentary about New York City's gangs of martial arts centaurs.

I want more of that. I want to hear more about the Brazilian government's "supernatural terrorism team of the federal police (Grupo de Contraterrorismo Sobrenatural)". Politicians had to vote on that. It was debated in the Brazilian National Congress. Some Senator gave a passionate speech about needing to call someone if a dragon attacked the São Paulo airport. 

This is the sort of thing I want to read about. You could fill an entire book with people, places, locations, customs, fashions, and events that show the effects of the gods on the modern world. You could draw the floorplans of Dionysius' night club and present it as a numbered map and I would gobble it up. . .

And I recognize, in my sober moments, that this is a sugar-cereal sort of want. I am a metaphysical materialist. I like it when a story feels like it could take place in the material world, and if I'm including gods and monsters in a story, then I will, in some sense, make them into material gods and monsters. Maybe we're talking about exotic matter, a spirit world filled with ectoplasm and ichor, and maybe even exotic rules of matter, like effects coming before causes. But, essentially, a world amenable to reductionism, to categorization, to understanding. Why are there so many earthquakes in Japan? Because a giant catfish monster is trapped in a system of caves under the island of Honshu. Oh, so could someone gather up a bunch of explosives to widen the cave exit and let her out? They could? The guy who wants to do it is called Jishin and he's in the antagonist chapter? Oh, cool.

But none of that adds up to "the duality of myth" and I'm not going to "confuse the players in enjoyable ways which enrich the story." I'm actually aggressively disinterested in any sort of ambiguity between Apep the Titan and Apophis the Dragon. Are they two different guys? One guy with two names? Two personalities in the same body? Why, that all sounds like the ingredients of a religious mystery. If you were playing a game about myth-making, you'd lean into it of course, but I'm not sure I want to play a game about myth-making. The mystery is simply not that interesting to me. It's two different languages in two different centuries. That's what happens when you tell a story and then someone translates the story and tells it to an entirely different audience with different interests and biases.

Maybe it sounds like I'm complaining, and I am, but the complaint isn't really about the game. Understand, if I made Scion, according to my preferences, it would be sacrilegious. People who followed the living religions featured in the game would complain that I did not respect their sacred figures, and they'd be right to do so. I'd treat them exactly like people doing stuff. And since the only way you can have people doing godlike stuff in a world that looks a lot like ours is if the stuff they're doing includes fucked-up shit like hurricanes and plagues, then my depiction of the gods will inevitably cast them as not very nice people. And it's not right for me to do that.

I'm not trying to get out of that bind. I don't want to be the world's specialist widdle atheist. I mean, I chafe under the boot of the hegemonic cultural influence of Christianity, and I think I could do a sacrilegious take on Milton or Dante with a clear conscience, but that's different. That's me resisting imperialism. Doing the same sort of thing to the Loa or the Manitou is the opposite of that. If you're going to include the religions of marginalized people, you have to do it in a way that captures what followers of those religions value in their faith. And there's very little room for materialism there.

Hence my ambivalence about Scion 2nd Edition as a whole. It is generally pretty aware of the problems facing it and, at least in the core books, decides to depict religion the way religious people think about religion (and when it doesn't, it errs towards an ecumenicism that is difficult to argue against). I don't particularly care for that approach, but if I think about it, I can concede that the game's way is right and my way is wrong. Onyx Path can make Scion. I absolutely cannot.

Nonetheless Titanomachy is a supplement for the game that comes a little bit closer to my personal preferences. I really enjoyed it.

Ukss Contribution: I have no idea how I'm going to pull this off, but there's a mythological story that tickled me like you wouldn't believe. Benandonner the giant challenged Fionn Mac Cumhaill to combat. 

"Believing Benandonner too powerful for him to defeat in a fair fight, Fionn thought of a plan to trick the giant. Oonagh, one of Fionn's wives, greeted the towering man on the shores of Ireland with a baby carriage containing Fionn dressed as a baby. When Benandonner witnessed the size of Fionn's baby, he became terrified by the father's possible size. He fled in terror. . ."

That's amazing. I feel so connected to the past right now. The ancient Irish knew they were shitposting. I can feel it in my bones, an ancestral memory as clear as the words in front of me right now. I am a Celtic child, staring across a campfire at my woad-painted grandfather, and I am shouting "oh, no come on," as he keeps a meticulously straight face. Years later, when I tell my own grandchildren, I won't have a word for "genre," but I understand. I understand.

(KotE) Dharma Book: Resplendent Cranes

Dharma Book: Resplendent Cranes (Bruce Baugh and Emily Dresner-Thornber) has one subtle, but fundamental problem - as a book about damned souls returned to life on a holy mission to instill righteousness in the masses and thereby avert the apocalypse, it neglects to establish what righteousness actually means. There's talk about opposing corruption and injustice, and cultivating virtue, but only in the broadest of terms. I've certainly got some ideas about what those words mean, but would those ideas be at all compatible with the preferences of the reanimated corpse of a 17th century Chinese aristocrat?

Without any grounding in specific, actionable moral or ethical principles, the Resplendent Cranes run the risk of being totally generic. Oh, they're the vampires who support behavior they think is righteous and oppose behavior they think is wicked? What a shocking position for them to take. It totally sets them apart from the vampires who support wickedness and oppose righteousness (which, to be fair, do actually exist in this setting).

It's not a fatal flaw, because the Resplendent Cranes do have some unique distinguishing features. They're all about hierarchy, rule-following, and "instructing" the "ignorant" (anyone who disagrees with them), so they bring a whole "stuffy stick in the mud" vibe to the party that is memorable, if nothing else. It's just that when the book says something like "by following the laws of the enlightened ancestors, the seeker learns to act virtuously, without a second thought" I get a nervous feeling that the laws of the ancestors would have us virtuously denying our homosexual urges to perform traditional gender roles.

So you can see how it's a problem that the book doesn't say one way or another. Though in the book's "defense" its theology is pretty bare-bones and lacking in nuance. The word "sin" is used repeatedly, but never defined, and based off a perusal of the relevant wikipedia article, it's not wrong, exactly, but it is the sort of thing that really could have benefited from a frank discussion to avoid just seeming like the text was defaulting to a roughly Christian approach to the subject.

Likewise with Hell. The premise of the whole game is that player characters escaped from Hell, but it's pretty unclear what the bar is for being sent to Hell. Just going by the brief backgrounds of preconstructed characters, you can go to Hell for - using legal loopholes to benefit your family's business empire, being a member of an oppressed Indian caste and dying of exposure, defying gender roles to become a hunter and selling animal parts on the black market, being one of Pol Pot's victims. 

Maybe there's more going on with these guys. None of them particularly seemed like the sort to deserve an afterlife of torment, but their descriptions were only about a half a page each. It's possible that "the Pale Professor" had a myriad of dastardly deeds beyond just being kind of clueless about the political goings-on of his native Cambodia, but I do think it's telling that none of those deeds were deemed significant enough to take up the entry's limited wordcount. The only conclusion I can draw is that we're supposed to find the criteria for entering Hell as whimsical and arbitrary.

That's not a problem in and of itself, but I do feel like for these guys it's a bit of a thematic clash. You're back from the dead, trying your hardest to be a goodboy vampire . . . is that something that means anything at all if you weren't a bad boy when you were alive? Maybe, though I feel like the reason "Good person trying to stay good, despite the Hunger" works in Vampire: the Masquerade is that the standard vampire condition is not a moral judgment. Some vampire creep liked the look of you and decided to make that your problem. By contrast, every kuei-jin out there is someone who was deemed fit for terrible punishment by cosmic forces that (presumably) don't make mistakes. There's definitely compelling drama to be mined from their efforts to avoid becoming monsters, but that drama will likely be the drama of redemption.

Unless, of course, the universe is a cruel and senseless place with no moral order whatsoever, so that the innocent can wind up in Hell just as surely as the guilty, but even then I feel like that story deserves something a bit more . . . punk than the Resplendent Cranes' "hall monitor" vibe.

I think could genuinely enjoy either path - rage against fate in a nihilistic cosmos or "if you knew what these fuckers did, you'd kill them on principle, but they're trying their best to be better, so that maybe one day they won't deserve what happened to them" - but this in-between situation confounds me. Overall, I kind of feel about the Resplendent Cranes the same way I felt about the Thrashing Dragons - they come across as being very passionately behind the abstract idea of Doing Things. Ordinary folk like you or I might do similar things for similar reasons, but for them it's a religion, a way of saving their souls, and their hope for the future . . . being in favor of things that are good and against things that are bad.

Though I need to be a bit more generous here. The book does have a few specific things the Resplendent Cranes are getting up to:

Isolating a Chinese village from the rest of the world and conducting bizarre and cruel social experiments on it in an attempt to find the origin of virtue. ("For example, they starve the village for a while and give food only to one person. They choke off the flow of money to the village and then scatter gold in the streets. They murder all the first-born sons in the middle of the night and record the reactions of the peasants.")

Now, that is very interesting and a great horror/fantasy premise, but it's also like, wait, is that sort of behavior in the remit of the Dharma? Because I have absolutely no problem with "vampires who want to restore their morality but have so missed the point that they've resorted to unethical human experimentation" as an esoteric philosophical faction, but if this is permissible under the Resplendent Crane code, it's hard to imagine what might be forbidden.

And then there's the ongoing vampire race war, which I'd mistakenly thought was being downplayed before reading the two and a half pages it gets in this book. It's astonishing that something can be both yawn and cringe at the same time, but somehow The Great Leap Outward manages to do it. Also, what's with that name? Who is it appealing to? What constituency in the setting would think it was a good idea? Are the kuei-jin unrepentant Maoists? Surely literally anyone else would object to that name. Even to the degree that they're monstrous enough to name their political movement after one of history's largest mass death events, they'd probably still want to avoid the stink of failure that comes with that particular combination of words.

Of course, the Doylist explanation is more illuminating, though the questions in that case are just as pointed. I doubt anyone on the White Wolf staff was a hardcore Maoist, so the only thing I can think of is just an absolutely cavalier amount of carelessness. Probably not malice per se, but just the same sort of sloppiness that leads you to say "in theory, India already is part of the Middle Kingdom." Words have no meaning, they are simply a collection of sound signs associated with particular vibes. Great Leaping in various directions is simply how you signal that the Asians are trying something ambitious. 

As a plot, I think it can safely be ignored.

Finally, a bit of levity - The Five Harmonious Avenging Thunders. They're an organization of Resplendent Cranes who have "devoted their entire existences to debunking the terrible, popular, and very profitable business of Western pseudo-Chinese mysticism." 

You know, because "the Western world is stealing, appropriating, and mutilating all things Oriental. This must stop!"

Mmhmm. 

My note for this passage was "has WW achieved sentience," but my conclusion is that they probably haven't. The Avenging Thunders are planning to attack and shut down "Western publishing houses," but there was no sign at all of Black Dog Studios, WW's cheeky little self-insert that usually shows up when the company is being auto-satirical. The whole section does have an exaggerated breathless tone which seems to indicate that the Thunders are being played for comedy, but I can't be sure of the target. 

My dark theory is that this section was inspired by complaints about Kindred of the East, and the sort of mismatch between provocation and response is an attempt to imply that their critics are similarly overreacting. Certainly, if I remember the politics of 2002 correctly "the Chinese are mad because you're doing feng shui wrong" is an idea that would definitely have inflamed the American racial id.

On the other hand, I also have a fun theory - White Wolf, being tenuously, but enthusiastically woke somehow got the impression that they were helping. This is what they thought helping looked like. And maybe that seems like a stretch from the company that brought us Kindred of the East, but another thing to remember about 2002 is that it was the high water mark of New Age curmudgeons - people who took neopaganism and other alternative religions extremely seriously, and who could sort of see the cultural appropriation problem from the other side - the crystal witches, with their extremely shallow Orientalist spiritualism giving people the false impression that all witchcraft was just as vacuous. It doesn't seem too much of a stretch to believe that WW held that portion of the community in exactly the same amount of contempt as they did the Satanists.

Overall, I'd say that Dharma Book: Resplendent Cranes is one of my least favorite entries in the series. The book itself is well-crafted and easy to read, but for a while now, Kindred of the East has been growing on me, because some of the other books have given the impression that it was growing beyond Asia of Darkness, to become its own weird urban fantasy setting filled with creatures and factions so extreme that they barely counted as cultural appropriation any more. This book did not give that impression. Maybe that's just a burden you have to bear if you're pitching an idea as basic as "vampires ironically want to be good."

Ukss Contribution: The creepy vampire social experiment village. It's as perfect a ttrpg concept as I've ever seen. You could base a campaign there.

Scion: God 2nd Edition

 Something finally clicked for me while I was reading Scion: God (2e). I've long felt . . . disconnected from Scion 2nd Edition, subconsciously preferring first edition, despite the fact that 1e was a deeply flawed rule system with perfunctory worldbuilding and far too much space given over to a one-time-use adventure arc. It was a bit of a mystery. If 2e was better in every regard than 1e, and arguably it is, then why would I like 1e more? How is that even possible? And it turns out the answer is astonishingly simple, and just as astonishingly petty:

In Scion, 2nd Edition, the Demigod and God books both begin with a storytelling chapter. Maybe it shouldn't make that much of a difference. Maybe I'm weird for being so annoyed by it. (Hell, I used the word "enraged" in my notes). However, I think you could make the case that this counts as a genuine structural flaw. See, there's no delicate way to put this, but GM-advice chapters are . . . something you have to ease yourself into. They completely kill the text's momentum and take everything that is distinctive and original about the game and abstract it to the point of unbearable blandness. 

And that's the good ones. I have harsh words for them, but they need to be that way because the two most important things a GM-advice chapter needs to communicate are "hey, slow down and think about what you're doing" and "all that cool, specific stuff we showed you in other parts of the book, it can be used for any number of stories." It's absolutely essential infrastructure for the game as a whole, but with rare exceptions, it's not the sexiest part of the book. Putting it in the first chapter is sort of like beginning a tour of a fabulous mansion with the crawlspace under the bathroom.

I think what's keeping me alienated from Scion 2e is the feeling I get that this is not merely a mistake, that it is a deliberate design choice, meant to communicate something about the game . . . that if you want to play it, you're going to be spending a lot of time in the crawlspaces. This is obvious in Scion: God, where the "Storyguiding Divinity" chapter quickly knocks out its five signature characters before moving directly into a discussion of safety tools, but it was also implicit in Scion: Origin's opening ("The World") which was ostensibly a setting chapter, but in practice this took the form of lots of GM advice on how to use the presented thematic elements to build your own Scion-like rpg setting.

There's also an ideological component to all this. Origin states, early on, in a section heading that "All Myths Are True" and God dispenses with even that little bit of subtext by having its own section titled "All Religions are True." And on the one hand, it's very noble. Thoughtfully anti-colonialist. Very aware of the dangers of Eurocentrism and white privilege. On the other hand, you can kiss your fucking metaphysics goodbye, because there ain't none of that shit to be seen round these parts. 

My private joke is that Scion, 2nd Edition is Mage: the Ascension if it were permissible for Mage: the Ascension to exist. But truthfully, it's fuzzier even than that. If there's one thing this setting doesn't do, it's "events" involving "characters" performing "actions" while occupying "locations" at a particular "time." So just put that out of your mind.  Like, at some point, your players are going to want to found their own pantheon and there's highly-detailed storytelling advice that covers every step of the process from recruiting new scions to giving your followers highly unsatisfactory answers to the problem of evil, to the ultimate, most essential part of the process, to be completed only after all those other things have laid the proper groundwork - creating the universe.

Now, observant readers might have noticed a bit of a plot-hole here. Not to get all "Cinema Sins" with this, but these high-level God characters are trying to create the universe while they exist inside the universe, and indeed are a product of the historical and material processes of the very universe they are trying to create. I mean, yeah, I'll be the asshole here. The title of the whole damned game is "Scion," a word which strongly implies that characters will not be the first beings to ever exist, because otherwise what would they be the scions of?

I don't know. There's this thing where becoming a God means you transcend space and time and exist in a sublime state beyond here and there, past and future, and thus you have a more relaxed relationship to causality than us mere mortals. Waving your hand and raising a mountain isn't necessarily any easier than waving your hand and raising a mountain yesterday, and once you've got the trick of one yesterday under your belt, you can stack them back to the beginning of time, waving your hand and raising a mountain that has always been there. 

Sometimes it even happens by accident. A Scion saves a young couple, earns their worship, later completes her apotheosis and "suddenly her Godly self has been revered by their families for generations." 

And is this drama? Is it a story we're supposed to be invested in? You pop off with some great deed of derring-do and make a connection with some starry-eyed naifs who sing your praises out of gratitude and because they personally witnessed something awesome. Then you transcend space and time and the NPCs you singled out to blow their minds . . . they're like Presbyterians now. The thing you did for them is just chapter 4 of their scriptures . . . the part they napped through when their parents forced them to attend religious education at your temple.

I suppose it could be a kind of tragedy, like a rock-and-roller who has lost their edge and is licensing their hardcore shit to a car commercial, but if that's what the book is going for, why would it encourage players to create the universe? That's just the same problem, at the largest possible scale. Nice job retroactively creating the universe guys, hope you didn't like too much about the way it was before. 

Except, of course, that the issue is largely rendered moot by the fact that you're surrounded by your fellow Gods, and among that set, creating the universe is impressive, something that only the top Gods do, but also not particularly extraordinary. All the top Gods did it at one point or another. All Religions are True, even the one you create yourself, and the rules of the setting are such that no matter how unusually you create the universe or write your cult into 17th-century Europe's religious wars, you can't actually affect the broad arcs of history ("prevent[ing] all Europeans from reaching the Americas" is explicitly called out as something you can't do), so really it's unclear what the stakes even are. At best, your new pantheon's newly legendary past is just another totally true story to put on the pile. 

I can't shake the feeling that there's something just a little bit disingenuous about Scion 2e's particular brand of inclusiveness. Nothing sinister, exactly, just covertly trying to have it both ways. Like they know that for many (perhaps even most) players, the game's appeal is camp - the process of changing the Eddas' Thor into Marvel's Thor, but they conscientiously warn us away from camp, so that whatever happens at the table isn't their responsibility. "Oh, you ran a highly problematic Scion game where the religious figures held sacred by marginalized people spun off into a sprawling comic-book/soap opera epic of fighting and fucking. Weird, because we're pretty sure that we made a game about comparative ethnography and politely discussing the finer points of theology."

Not that I'd call it that openly two-faced. . . except for the sidebar on p 159, which says "attributing historical atrocities to the actions of a God by, for example, making Hernán Cortés a Scion of Quetzalcoatl, is best avoided." That was pretty underhanded. Wow, what a totally random example to pull out of nowhere. It kind of reminds me of something I read in Scion: God, 1st Edition, page 266. Is there any connection or is it just a weird coincidence? 

No, that's not fair. I looked at the credits of both books and the only name in common is Rich Thomas in his role as Creative Director. The new book doesn't necessarily need to be accountable for the old. It just bugs me because it's such a classic White Wolf move - slyly allude to a past fuck-up, but mistake the slyness for restitution. Why, they are listing one of their own misdeeds as an example of something you shouldn't do! That means that they now know it was wrong! It's practically the same thing as an apology! It's clear as day to all eight of us who got the reference.

But for the most part, the two-step is subtler than that. Like, all the mechanical widgets you play with are for action-adventure, procedural, and intrigue-based games, but much of the storytelling advice is for something rather more contemplative. . . or, at least, broad to the point where nothing particular can be tied to it (for example, the section on "Godly Rivalries" spends a couple of paragraphs talking about the importance of being associated with a purview as a potential motive for a divine squabble, but gives no space to power scaling or tactics). I don't necessarily want to make too much of this dichotomy, but it sometimes feels like I'm being sold both burglars' tools and an instructional pamphlet introducing me to the perfectly legal world of hobbyist locksmithing (*wink).

The clearest example of this is probably the sidebar titled "God of the Phoenicians, God of the Israelites."

To avoid confusion, while historical evidence of the Phoenician religion and Pantheon may refer to ‘Ila with names overlapping the God worshipped by both ancient Hebrews and modern Lutherans, Scion materials utilize only non-overlapping names. Your group may choose to add those names back in if this suits your chronicle.

*wink.

Overall, though, I think I like Scion: God. I'm probably one of the people referenced in that one, chill sidebar ("Some groups aren’t going to want to devote time in a game that started with Heroes throwing pick-up trucks at trolls to coming up with answers to issues of suffering and death that real-world theologians have been wrestling with for thousands of years"), but I'm not ashamed of that. Obviously, if I play this game, it's going to fall significantly short of best practices, not necessarily out of callousness, but because I think the "all myths are true" ideal is unattainable in practice. There is simply no way to depict these figures as characters in a fanfic without also committing heresy in the process. That's just an inevitable consequence of making particular choices in my characterization, establishing particular events as having occurred (and others as having not), and having a metaphysics where knowledge is possible and thus there's a difference between "truth" and "any random statement being asserted with sufficient conviction." But I will say that Scion 2e, even when played "wrong" is a robust game that can survive different tiers of play, provides a bunch of compelling characters for its highly non-specific setting, and doesn't skimp on action-adventure spectacle. For that, I'll gladly absolve Onyx Path of responsibility for me being a heretic.

Ukss Contribution: As is tradition, I've spent an inordinate amount of time complaining about game's . . . conscious delicacy, and the way it seems to eschew specific worldbuilding. But I suspect that at least some of the writers are chafing under these constraints, because you occasionally get glimmers of camp peeking through. Like the social media site Nymphstagram. Which is a solid pun that belongs in a game that embraces how goofy it is.

Most of these little nuggets are pretty interesting, or at least amusing. The one I think would work best for Ukss is the revelation that body of the primordial Goddess Nut is so intertwined with the night sky that the World's largest observatories keep some of her astrologer-priests on staff just to help interpret strange events. Ukss will probably not have an analogue to Nut specifically, but its observatories will have people who do a similar job (and honestly, given the way the World is presented, a single astrologer specialized in a particular pantheon would probably not be sufficient, so this is really just me playing off those implied characters.)

(KotE) Dharma Book: Thrashing Dragons

 There's a bit in Dharma Book: Thrashing Dragons (Geoffrey C. Grabowski) that pretty much sums up the appeal of Kindred of the East as a whole - "the vicarious thrill of acting on the kuei-jin's rigorous but monstrous ethics." 

Yeah, okay, I can see it. A philosophical puzzle and challenge in active empathy - Imagine an extremely unpleasant person and become their advocate, but the only words you are allowed to use are a form of gibberish so incoherent it is borderline obscene. "Rargh! I must eat that infant!  Why?! Why?! You dare to ask me 'why'?! Me? Who has heard from the lips of a great prophet that one who eats a thousand infants is destined to save the world from an infant-eating dragon?" And it all becomes very philosophical when you learn that the infant-eating dragon was going to inevitably eat 1001 infants and now your character's moral decisions become fodder for OOC discussions about different variations of the trolley problem.

It's a very particular type of fun ("If it didn't make you at least a little uncomfortable, it wouldn't be as much fun to play" - classic WW), where maybe you should tread carefully lest you accidentally (?) imply that your character's alien moral code obligates them to be a rapist:

"Fuck when you are horny. If you cannot find a willing partner, take what you want or use taking's better-dressed sister, seduction. If you can do neither of those, or if they would take too much time, then masturbate."

Now, that's an in-character quote from an NPC, so it's not exactly like Grabowski is telling us that our PCs should be out there raping people, but then again . . . the NPC in question is a vampire Boddhisattva, who is canonically as enlightened in the ways of the Thrashing Dragon as it's possible to get, so the takeaway here is at least that being one of the Vampires Who Fuck does not require you to be a Vampire Who Consensually Fucks.

And I don't know, man. Like this is an inference that you could probably have made. They're vampires. Their whole deal is violently attacking people to satisfy their monstrous urges. If the book had said, "Drink blood. If you cannot find a willing donor, take what you want" I'd have found it completely unremarkable. Imagine a vampire asking permission, getting consent, before they bit into someone's neck and drained their blood. It's entirely missing the point.

So, like, should I be shocked that the Vampires Who Fuck are monsters who fuck like vampires? No, obviously not, but we're not actually talking about some sort of anthropological study of vampires here, nor even about a fictional vampire story. This book, as an artifact, is meant to be functional. It's meant to illuminate your character choices in a tabletop roleplaying game. Whoever these vampires are, that's who I'm going to be, for about 2-4 hours per week.

It's not like it's a big deal or anything. It's part of a throwaway line in a sidebar from an unreliable narrator, so it's not like Grabowski took some time out of the book to explicitly advocate for player characters having a more accepting attitude towards rape or anything . . . 

. . .

And that ominous pause was me rushing to look at the credits for Exalted: the Lunars, but Grabowski was only the developer of that book, not an author so . . . I'm not actually sure what point I'm getting at here. I don't know enough about the comparative responsibilities of authors v developers when it comes to the content of roleplaying books. I've never been privy to the process behind-the-scenes. Suffice to say, turn-of-the-millennium White Wolf had a tendency to . . . not exactly downplay sexual violence, per se, but to just dump it into a big stewpot of undifferentiated edge.

The Thrashing Dragons are the vampires who LIVE! They fuck. They do drugs. They kill things without remorse, because that's basically like eating them, like a wolf or a tiger might do. Sometimes they work at hospice care, because that's a part of life too. In fact, we could boil their complex religion down into the abstract idea of "having experiences" and be only a little bit sarcastic in the process.

There's an interesting idea that shows up a couple of times, where elder vampires caution the young to not have too many novel experiences, too quickly, lest they use up all their novelty and find themselves, decades or centuries later, unable to have truly have the life-affirming experiences necessary to advance in their dharma. I wish it had been explored just a bit more. Show us the monstrous acts that would be dreamed up by an ancient demon who is absolutely desperate for novelty. Get way deep into the weeds of the game's moral and philosophical speculation.

On the balance, though, I'd say that the Thrashing Dragons are the weakest of the dharmas so far. Sometimes they seemed like they were the faction that was obligated to do whatever it is they were going to do anyway. What experiences are definitely not part of "life?" There's no hierarchy of sins saying you lose progress for sitting quietly reading a book, honoring your ancestors, or waiting to do your research before committing to a course of action (all things that are characteristic of their "opposites," the yin-oriented Bone Flowers). It never quite feels like they're giving something up to pursue their esoteric philosophy. 

Maybe that could be a tension. Maybe the Thrashing Dragons have a reputation as a dumping ground for "miscellaneous" kuei-jin, who aren't particularly serious about enlightenment. Maybe doing what you want all the time has certain social or strategic drawbacks that could drive potential plots. But whatever else they are, the Thrashing Dragons aren't (intentionally) "miscellaneous" either. They've got a bunch of highly specific things that they do, like intentionally infecting themselves with diseases, because diseases are alive and so that's part of "experiencing life." Or getting up early/staying up late to show respect to the sun, which is a fun bit of vampire religious texture. 

The result, though, was a faction that never quite meshed for me. There were elements that worked for me, but the whole thing felt a bit like it was created to fill out a grid. A decent enough book (notwithstanding misteps about race and gender, of which there were a few more I neglected to mention), but I'm so ready for Grabowski to move on to Exalted. (There's an ad for it at the back of the book! How weird is it that I'm retroactively excited for the release of a game that's now deep into its 3rd edition?)

Ukss Contribution: One of the example vampires is a computer scientist who created an incredibly accurate model of future political events. However, no matter how he adjusts his assumptions, all of his models fail catastrophically when they try to predict past the year 2010 (approx 10 years into his own future). It's as if there's some spiritual force in the near future that's actively attempting to thwart prognostication.

These sorts of prophecy wards are not unheard of in fiction, but this is first I've ever seen that affects even non-magical statistical models. I'm intrigued by anything that blurs the lines between science and magic like this.