From time to time, maybe about once or twice a year, but more frequently in recent months and with anticipation of even greater frequency in the months to come, I get on my high horse about Orientalism in tabletop rpgs. I talk about it as if I'm some kind of expert and even at my most generous I posture like, "ooh, this is embarrassing, maybe even dangerously immoral, aren't we all glad that we know how to spot this sort of thing nowadays and are too virtuously worldly to succumb to it."
But my all-time favorite rpg is Exalted.
It's a hypocrisy that I'm aware of. And maybe it's just the spotlight effect of social anxiety talking, but I worry sometimes that a deep, complex, self-reflective discussion of the role of the late 90s/early 00s rpg scene's Orientalism in the construction of Exalted has so far been conspicuous in its absence. It's a way of thinking highly of myself by assuming you all think so highly of me that you are capable of being disappointed by this lapse in intellectual rigor.
Truthfully, though, I'm worried about writing that post, because there's no way to get through it without deeply implicating myself. It's not like Al Qadim or the OA books, where I try to be gentle because I can acknowledge a genuine past interest in the material. The Complete Ninja's Handbook was one of teen-John's prized possessions, and so I don't want to roast it too harshly, but I also feel no need to defend it or apologize for it. I can write it off as an artifact of a less sensitive time, perhaps instrumental in my personal development, but fairly consigned to the naughty part of the library.
I can't do that with Exalted. I love Exalted. It is part of my identity, not even kidding. I can acknowledge (some of) its flaws and rue its obvious missteps, I can even suggest that it be scrubbed to the bone and rebuilt from the skeleton up, but I can never disclaim it. And I can never not be defensive when a non-fan expresses their distaste.
Now, the relevance of all that to The 1000 Hells (and I normally cut off author citations at four credited authors because at that point the responsibility becomes too dilute and also it takes up a lot of space, but I'm going to make an exception here because of a very pertinent piece of data: Kraig Blackwelder, Tim Clancy, Geoffry C. Grabowski, and Lindsay Woodcock, with Jack Norris and Richard E. Dansky) is that, for reasons that are obvious in retrospect (I didn't look at the author list until just now), this book bears an intermittent but unmistakable resemblance to some of the more outré parts of Exalted.
(I bolded the name of Exalted 1st Edition's line developer, for those in my audience who did not immediately gasp in recognition at the list).
I actually noticed something like this in the Kindred of the East core book. One of the kuei-jin disciplines has a technique called "Flow Like Blood," which is sort of an iconic keystone to Dodge-based builds in every edition of Exalted. Then there's things like the use of the term "The Second Breath." In Kindred of the East, it refers to the damned soul returning to the body after escaping from hell, but in Exalted it refers to the moment of exaltation. Two important figures from the backstory of both games are The Ebon Dragon and the Scarlet Queen/Empress, but they have very different roles. Little stuff like that.
And The 1000 Hells could be dismissed in a similar way. Like, the fact that both games feature "Akuma" - people who sold their souls and surrendered their free will to the lords of hell in exchange for awesome powers - could just be a recycling of terminology. And the similarity between Yama Kings of Yomi (KotE's ultimate demonic figures) and the Yozis (their Exalted counterparts) might be something of a stretch ("Yomi" is a real piece of religious terminology, for one). And the fact that the last, forbidden tome of demonic lore, written about the inevitable triumph of evil in an age of darkness to come is called "The Broken Winged Crane" in both games is probably just an easter egg.
But it's not just these recurring "coincidences." As of The 1000 Hells, but maybe even foreshadowed in the Kindred of the East Companion, the two games . . . kind of have a similar vibe. In my last post, I complained about Dharmas being a poor replacement for Vampire: the Masquerade's clans, explicitly because they were set up in a way that the ideal party has one of each, but what if they weren't a replacement for clans? What if they were a prototype for Exalted's castes?
I open one of these books and see an art piece in the unmistakable style of Melissa Uran, I read about borderline-magical martial arts or an explicit distinction between infernalism (pledging your loyalty to demonic powers) and diabolism (using sorcery to compel demonic servitude), I'm inspired to imagine the epic feats of enlightened elders, who somehow mix virtue, corruption, and power into one unimaginable moral and spiritual dilemma and I think . . . "oh, no, I could be persuaded to love Kindred of the East."
The potential is there. Which is going to make the forthright discussion of Orientalism in Exalted even harder to avoid.
Though perhaps we can avoid it for now, because while The 1000 Hells does have some prototype Exalted vibes, it's probably not going to be the book that sells you on Kindred of the East.
I think the issue here is that the book's content is accurately reflected by its title. It's about hell, with all the grotesquerie that implies. I can't be sure of its religious accuracy (I suspect it owes more to Big Trouble in Little China than the traditional Chinese Diyu, though my main piece of evidence is that it has locations called "The Hell of Being Skinned Alive" and "The Hell of Upside Down Sinners" which are evocative lines from the movie but not reflected in the wikipedia article on this subject), but I can say that it fits into an ongoing rpg tradition of "alternate planes that will probably kill you but where you definitely don't want to go even if you could survive." So you know, if you were really clamoring for a White Wolf Baator sourcebook in the late 90s, The 1000 Hells delivers.
But on the off chance that's not something you're interested in, this book doesn't have a lot to offer. There's a mini-monster manual where we get stats for more than a half-dozen demonic creatures, and that's absolutely something you could use to spice up Earth-bound campaigns. And the various agendas and personalities of the Yama Kings ("king" is gender neutral in this usage, though "Yama queen" explicitly is not) could add some much-needed conflict to the setting's otherwise staid politics. But you're probably not going to want to add "field trip to hell" as a regular part of Kindred of the East's adventure repertoire.
(Ach! I'm thinking about a campaign here - opposing the machinations of demonic forces in the looming shadow of a coming age of darkness, learning progressively more powerful magic and martial arts until you have the strength to take the fight to hell itself, where the grand champions of the demon princes, raised up from your contemporaries and arrayed with corrupt powers, bestowed by their inhuman patrons, stand ready to test your abilities to their utmost - and, like, yeah, that's an Exalted game).
Aside from the hell stuff, which you're either on board with or you're not, the main flaw of The 1000 Hells is that it continues to be extremely weird that "Asia of Darkness" is a self-contained subsetting. Here's a couple of interesting facts for you:
The Yama Kings "found that none of the realms of the spirits of the western lands was accessible to them" and "they could not affect the western world in any way."
But also, if you're a kuei-jin in the market to sell your soul, you should be aware that "the entities that the Nephandi of the West consort with are considerably different from the Yama Kings of the East."
Now, just as a reminder, the Nephandi worship powers that exist beyond the Horizon, the mystical barrier roughly coterminous with the solar system's asteroid belt, that separates the knowable parts of the Umbra (and already "knowable" is doing a lot of heavy lifting) from the primordial chaos of the Deep Umbra. Great Old Ones, basically. So the implication is somehow that these beings of the outer darkness, for whom the Earth is naught but a pale blue dot, can distinguish, with their baleful gaze that hates and envies all light and life, between the parts of the globe that are Asia and the parts that are not.
Or perhaps just as bad, that the Celestial Bureaucracy, which governs all matters under heaven, just sort of gives up when it reaches the nebulous borders of "Asia." The Yama Kings can definitely affect spirits in India, but if we go west from there, where's the line? Pakistan? (Actually pretty unlikely, because we will find in the Year of the Reckoning that the kuei-jin can be very active in Bangladesh). Afghanistan? Iran? Probably no farther west than that. And going north, the central Asian republics are kind of iffy, though they've been effectively forgotten by both Asia of Darkness and the rest of the line. But then you start getting to Russia and that definitely feels out-of-bounds. Are there Siberian kuei-jin? What border do I have to cross to exit the Yama Kings' jurisdiction?
I once described the late-90s approach to Asian-inspired fantasy as "a mental forcefield," and that actually seems pretty apt here. What Kindred of the East is doing is "Asia as genre," basically. Despite myself, or perhaps because I recognize that my favorite game is at least a little (and potentially very) guilty of doing the same thing, I think there's a possibility that a standalone Kindred of the East, which extends its cosmology to the whole world and lets heaven rule everything under heaven, could actually work. Maybe "Asia as genre" isn't so bad if you're doing it in rural Arizona, circa 1999, and the vibe is "Hong Kong cinema makes an awesomely inaccurate western." But to do it in the existing World of Darkness? Where you're now forced to racially segregate the demons of hell?
I think that is, genuinely, offensive.
Ukss Contribution: But probably not directly offensive enough to trigger my temporarily strict standards for what qualifies for exclusion from Ukss.
And I'll admit to a conflict of interest here, because this book has a subsetting that I think could legitimately be spun-off from Asia of Darkness the same way Asia of Darkness should have been spun-off from the WoD. It's called "The Wicked City" and it's the best kind of Mad-libs-style rpg gibberish. Here's the pitch:
Cyberpunk. Demon. Ninja. Afterlife.
They should have sent a fucking poet. Chief among the torments of hell is economic precarity. Literally.
"Those victims who show the capacity to return to the same dull position they held in life - textbook salesman, telemarketer, burger-flipper, export agent - do so, day after day and week after week, with no hope of improving their lot. Such prisoners are give enough salary to barely cover rent, so they can almost support themselves while enduring the agonies of hell . . ."
And then, in the streets, shadowed by the looming high-rises, there are gangs of outcast demons and damned souls who have blasphemous cybernetic implants and serve to advance the Yama King's grand design of immiserating the poor, even as they ostensibly rebel from his rule.
Someone needs to make this rpg. Like, yesterday.
I'm far too busy to do it myself, but I think the least I can do is tweak the presentation of Ukss' infernal courts to make it fit.
