Suffice to say, Shadow War (Edward MacGregor and Bryant Durrell) might fall into the first category and might fall into the third category, but probably doesn't fall into the second (though I don't want to rule it out because my knowledge of Asian literature and cinema is shallow as hell). Let's get started with the most generous possible interpretation of the material - that it is a Vampire: the Masquerade supplement, set in Asia.
There's an argument to be made for this. It is one of the foundational pillars of the vampire genre, especially in White Wolf's interpretation, that elder vampires beyond a certain age are out of touch weirdos who are full of mysterious ancient secrets, but are a nightmare to deal with because they'll make you do dumb shit for no reason (except it's actually 500 year-old dueling etiquette and you'd have made a total ass of yourself in the court of Louis XII carrying on like that). Get two of these guys together and let them do your event planning and that's a surefire recipe for boring-ass rituals that you have to grit your teeth and sit through because they will literally tear you to shreds for signalling the wrong thing with the flower code.
And that's one possible interpretation of Shadow War's system of highly-mediated kuei-jin vs kuei-jin conflict. You got beef with another vampire and your modern sensibilities might encourage you to get a couple of your friends, maybe a bigass wolf or something, and jump them in a darkened alley. But, of course, the ancient ghoul who thinks the Industrial Revolution is just a bad dream humanity is going to wake up from any day now, who can survive a ground-zero blast of 20 pounds of C-4, that guy is going to insist you do things by the old forms. Agree beforehand to the scope of conflict, declaring either a limited-scale "twilight war" or a nearly-full-scale "midnight war." And if it's a twilight war, you need to engage the services of a professional twilight war matchmaker, who can pick a suitable challenge for you and your rival to test your essential vampire skills (like smuggling 100 pounds of jade across international borders or manipulating a particular politician to visit one of two unlikely locations without directly interacting with politician). But if it's a midnight war, that's a whole other thing where you have to give some very precisely staged public speeches, exchange gifts with various bystanders and revered elders, and commit to the destruction of your declared enemy even if you later learn that they were framed for the offense which inspired the war.
It's all quite elegant. Very civilized. A lot of pointless jumping through hoops, but I think it's a gauntlet the players are going to want to navigate. You wouldn't be playing a vampire game if you wanted to interact with sensible people doing reasonable things out of relatable motives. Shadow War really does make you feel like you're putting up with some thousand-year-old creature's bullshit. It presents a series of scenes that the characters are going to absolutely hate, but which the players will eat the hell up.
And more relevantly, it's right in Vampire: the Masquerade's wheelhouse - a veneer of elegance concealing the deep rot of cynicism and ambition.
It's probably the best way to look at Shadow Wars: it is the Book of Humoring Old People in China, and as such is a pretty decent sourcebook for any vampire-type game. It's got good general advice about vampiric manipulation and conflict - laying out the pros and cons of using your mortal family as catspaws in your schemes, suggesting tactics and resources that young vampires might use successfully counter the amazing mystic might of the ancients.
That's the good news. The bad news is that this book might not actually be about vampires. It might be about Asia. Or, at least, White Wolf's fantasy version of Asia. A vampire's mortal proxies are called their "scarlet screens." Young vampires who rebel against the elders call themselves "Bamboo Princes."
Now, those terms aren't necessarily more poetic than "catspaws" or "Anarchs," but, well, "catspaw" is just the English word for that kind of relationship whereas "scarlet screen" is almost certainly a White Wolf invention and "Anarch" has a clear derivation from "anarchist," an apt description of their goals, whereas it seems highly unlikely that "Bamboo Prince" has a similar degree of cultural transparency.
There's no delicate way to put this - giving flowery, obfuscating names to straightforward concepts is one of the main tools in the exoticism toolbox. And in general this is an area of overlap between vampire fiction and Orientalism (for example, calling the vampires' plan of hiding from humans "the Masquerade" is also a use of this trope), but take it from me, the vibes in Shadow War were not that fun.
Some kuei-jin want to change the world. To a Westerner, that may not sound like a radical idea, but the Middle Kingdom has been a world unto itself for millennia. Its societies have grown from a foundation of ancient polytheism, Confucianism, and Taoism. It has been a place where elders are honored and old ways are revered, where the foreigner is distrusted, the innovative ignored, and the different shunned.
That's from the beginning of the chapter that focuses on elder vs neonate conflict and the next paragraph implies that there are certain attitudes that were cultivated by the elders in order to encourage obedience to the elders, but it never quite makes clear that paragraph I just quoted was meant to apply to vampires and not to Asians. Likewise, all that stuff about twilight and midnight wars I was telling you about, it was inundated with talk of "honor."
Sigh. So honor is definitely something that survivors of ye olden tymes would care about, but it's also something that, stereotypically, Asians care about. And if there's one thing I learned from the Asians Represent Podcast it's that white people talking about "Asian honor" is like bad bad. I don't really understand all the nuances of "honor" as an Orientalist trope, but my gut tells me that Shadow Wars was on the wrong side of the line, which makes all the baroque ceremonial stuff kind of a drag in retrospect.
On the other hand, there were some signs that Kindred of the East is becoming marginally less Orientalist as time goes on. One of the chapters is about the ongoing vampire race war between kuei-jin and kindred and it's . . . not great, but the general thrust seems to be "maybe they aren't so different after all." The kuei-jin as a whole are presented on the same level as a vampire sect, so the conflict is more like "Camarilla vs Sabbat vs the Five August Courts and House Genji" and less like "white vampires vs Asian vampires," even if it often shakes out that way in practice. So the theory is that it is basically inevitable for organized conspiracies of vampires to try and muscle each other out, and that the reason it's happening now is nothing more mysterious than recent advances in travel and communications technology.
It's an explanation that could work, if Kindred of the East had banked more goodwill, but this is still the game that mixes Japanese and Chinese terminology willy-nilly, which covers an area spanning "from Mongolia to Burma and from Hokkaido to Xianjang," but gives vampires a common culture almost everywhere inside that box (and a "basically Chinese" culture at that). I think it's destined to always be hopelessly problematic, such that even when it shows us things that should and could be baroque vampire nonsense, we'd be fools to trust it.
Ukss Contribution: When two kuei-jin are engaged in a (theoretically) low intensity twilight war, the rest of the court will enthusiastically bet on the outcome. That's pretty funny. Betting on a blood feud, behind the backs of the people involved (though, of course, they know all about it because they themselves have bet on other peoples' feuds).
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