Cairn

What's this, my second grumpy post on a single grumpy day? Well, yes, but Cairn (Yochai Gal) has left me considerably less grumpy than V20 because at least it didn't make me read 500 pages before I could have a neutral opinion about it. Cairn is only about 20 pages, and those pages are about half the size of an average rpg book . . . but the text size is also smaller . . . but also there were a lot of tables. Let's just say it took less than an hour to read and leave it at that.

So what did I get out of that hour?

Like all rules-lite rpgs, Cairn reminded me that the core of the hobby is just "saying things happen." The players say what their characters are going to do, based on the nouns and adjectives written on their character sheets, and then I, as the GM, say what happens based on my logical assessment of the likelihood that those actions will have an effect. Sometimes, there's an element of uncertainty in the likely outcome, and in those situations, I'd have the players roll a "Save" against one of their three Abilities, and assign good or bad outcomes based on the quality of the roll (though, in this game, low rolls are better than high ones).

There's also a very simple combat system. It's streamlined even compared to other rules-lite d20 games. You have no to-hit roll. Everyone just rolls damage. The main tactic just seems to be picking your battles by persuading the GM not to call for a fight. 

I don't want to get too backhanded, though. I knew, upon picking this book up, that it would be minimalist. Do I really want to penalize it for that?

On the other hand, why do I need it? What am I getting out of it? And those aren't really questions I can answer. I've been doing this hobby for 30 years. I could make a more complex game than this in the space of a day. I'm fairly certain I have. But would "more complex" automatically mean "better?"

I guess that's the lesson that rules-lite games teach us. What is it possible for us to live without? How much can you take away and still have the essential heart of the hobby? And if we're talking about the essential heart, then Cairn persuasively argues that you can take away quite a lot. . . Even if I, personally, cannot live without exception-based design.

Anyway, this is a short book, featuring a game with more random charts than pre-defined rules and I think it would probably work. You can tell a fantasy adventure story by just saying what happens and occasionally rolling dice. Who knew?

I do, however, have to take a quick moment to give credit where credit is due and say, for only being one (half-sized, small print) page long, the "Principles for Wardens" section gives some pretty useful general GMing advice, like "Players do not need to roll dice to learn about their circumstances" or "Use binary 'so A or B?' responses when their intentions are vague."

Overall, this was not the book to make me a convert to rules-lite OSR, but I kind of liked it. And that was enough to briefly make me forget my cold.

Ukss Contribution: There's not a lot of room for setting flavor in this book, but the spell-list, which is little more than a name and a brief (1-2 sentence) description does manage to do some fantasy worldbuilding. Based on the names in the Random Spellbook Table alone, I'd narrowed my choice down to:

Anthropomorphize
Bait Flower

Cone of Foam

Marble Craze
Objectify
Summon Cube

And while some of those are more useful than others, when I finally got around to the descriptions, it could only be Marble Craze: "Your pockets are full of marbles, and will refill every 30 seconds."

That spell was some mage's senior thesis at magic academy. I can just feel it.

Vampire: The Masquerade 20th Anniversary Edition

I am so fucking grumpy about having to write a post about Vampire: the Masquerade 20th Anniversary Edition. (Justin Achilli, Russell Bailey, Matthew Macfarland, Eddy Webb) Mostly, because I have a cold, and I am really eager to climb under my covers and take a nap. But also because this book is . . . is . . . fine.

Normally, I'm able to forgive something for being fine. Maybe I'll wag my finger and say, "you're on thin ice, Mr. Fine" but it'll be a playful sort of teasing. I'd have to be a real ogre to get actually mad at a book for being fine. But here we are. My nose is running. My head is swimming. I am barely conscious, and all I can think is, "What the hell do you think you're doing, being all uncontroversially conservative and blandly competent? Why can't you be more like your brother, Mage 20? He was an absolute shitshow, in a way that pays tribute to the true spirit of the White Wolf games studio we've all come to love and fear."

I mean, there are still hints of the old White Wolf. A couple of slurs, here and there. One of the rules examples suggests the PCs meet "behind a coffee shop in an ethnic ghetto." The lore has been rolled back to the pre-Revised status quo and that means they've completely tossed out the institutional memory for why the Ravnos were a bad idea (well, maybe they're toned down a little bit, but yeah, the g-slur shows up again).

But honestly, these are minor quibbles. Bad habits that might inevitably emerge from the "Vampire: the Masquerade voice," but nothing you'd be surprised about. I think I'd almost be disappointed if I'd read a 500 page Storyteller-system corebook and not seen a bad-guy NPC commit a hate crime. The real flaw, that condemns this book to an unforgiveable fineness is simply that it doesn't really adopt a point of view. You've got a game with a decade's worth of rollercoaster metaplot and a mandate to create a new edition that draws on everything that came before, to be a luxury collector's edition for nostalgia-addled xennials and the approach you decide on is . . . archival?

This shit is barely pretentious. You've changed, man.

You might be tempted to look at the immense size of this volume (513 pages vs Revised edition's 308) and think that it's MOAR VAMPIRE. But at the risk of revealing myself an unbearably shallow thinker, if you compare the books' Tables of Contents you find - the V20 version of "A World of Darkness" is 8 pages shorter, "Clans and Sects" is 4 pages longer, "Character and Traits" is 4 pages longer, "Rules" is 2 pages longer, and Revised's "A History of the Kindred" is removed entirely. The bulk of the extra pagecount comes from the "Disciplines" chapter (Revised: 44pgs, V20: 118pgs) and the all-new "Morality" and "Bloodlines" chapters. What it all adds up to is an extremely conventional Vampire: the Masquerade core book with a couple of big lore dumps bolted on.

Now, fair's fair. My ambivalence right now is being fed by my general bad mood. If I were in a good mood, I might, at this very moment, be going "ZOMG, they remembered to include the Kisayid! Faerie-tainted vampire scholars that inexplicably work with the Sabbat! This game is so camp!"

But I can't quite do that, because when that mood dial swings back towards pessimism, I can't help but feel like the camp is tucked away. They just gave each of the canonical bloodlines two pages and a Discipline write-up (which, if you're keeping track, that's 154 pages, more than 30%, of the book devoted to "kewl powerz" - Justin Achilli must be rolling over in his grave), but no extended worldbuilding, no mandatory canon events, nothing that would at all annoy someone looking to play a "serious" game. Hell, the Storytelling chapter doesn't even mention "superheroes with fangs," not even derisively. Excuse me, what game are we playing? Because it sure as hell doesn't seem to be Vampire: the Masquerade.

Or, at least, it doesn't seem to be all of Vampire: the Masquerade. I'm out here looking for the game where closeted bisexuals can discreetly slut it up (am I speaking from experience . . . I'll never tell). I'm looking for the game where you can get a trenchcoat and katana and pump blood points into your shotgun's accuracy. (Actually, I went back and checked my old core books and only Mage: Revised had a separate stat line for katanas, which means I need to cut V20 some slack . . . or, at least, I would if I didn't remember Vampire as being the game with the katanas.) Why, this is a 20th anniversary party and it looks like you just completely forgot Samuel Haight's invitation. Shameful. 

I tease because I love. Obviously, one of the things the designers learned in the previous 20 years was how to be less cringe, and while I don't think that tendency works entirely to the book's benefit, I can at least concede that I understand the temptation to seize the opportunity to at last create a version of Vampire: the Masquerade that was darkly decadent gothic punk personal horror. I think I need to interpret the book's curation as a show of faith that we'll be able to discover the goofy version of the game on our own.

So, session zero, we've got a Kisayid, an escaped gargoyle, and a dark and gritty Salubri antitribu, and we're all following Paths of Enlightenment that reward us for diablerizing elders, and except for the katanas, all of this is completely by the book. I really have nothing to complain about. It's just that's it's all so perfunctory. Maybe because "the whole of 90s Vampire" is just too much to put into a single book, even one that's 500 pages long. I find myself asking, "why are you doing this?" and the only answer that makes sense to me is "because it's the 20th anniversary of Vampire: the Masquerade."

And don't get me wrong. That's enough. This book is enough. It's fine. If you were on the fence about whether to buy V20 or Revised, and money was no object, then you should definitely get V20. But . . . whatever issues I may or may not have with Brucato, he very clearly had some axes left to grind re: Mage: the Ascension and that came through in the text. And maybe it's only because I came into M20 having read all the extant Mage books and V20 having only a few Revised-era supplements under my belt, but I could not detect any axes being ground. It's all very professional, but it yields a book that you'd barely have to hold someone's pet hostage in order to extort them to read. Nostalgia entirely without regrets.

In the end, I'm forced to confess to my personal perversion - I'd rather have bad novelty than a good version of something I've seen before. And except for a few of the more obscure bloodlines, this book is entirely made of things I've seen before. 

And so, from the depths of my sickness, I must point a trembling finger and level the worst insult this blog has to offer: Creators of Vampire: the Masquerade 20th Anniversary Edition, you did a good job updating a familiar classic. I have no substantial complaints. You should be proud of your work.

And may God have mercy on your souls.

Ukss Contribution: I like the Sabbat's practice of creating "shovelheads." Basically, they do a bare-minimum Embrace to a bunch of randoms, bury them in a mass grave so they awaken as scared, confused, furious, and hungry vampires, and then they just sort of unleash them on a city as a kind of biological terror weapon. They can't be controlled, but control isn't actually salient to the Sabbat's goals.

It's a pretty effective action-horror plot, no matter what setting you're working in.