There was a moment in Dharma Book: Bone Flowers (Kraig Blackwelder) that pretty much exemplified my perspective on these guys. It's in a chapter about the Bone Flowers' beliefs and values, narrated as a series of letters from a teacher to a student. Eight of these letters are parables, demonstrating the eight major tenets. The fourth tenet is "Gather what you can from the falling leaves of knowledge."
And the parable that accompanies this is . . . memorably obnoxious. The general gist (attested in my notes) is "Oh, man, everyone but us are idiots, right?" Like, the characters in the parable, one of each Dharma, are presented with a series of obstacles and the Devil Tiger tries to cross a river by attacking it and the Thrashing Dragon tries to move a boulder by kissing it, but the Bone Flower built a bridge and a bigass lever, respectively. And the point of that parable was supposed to be "Nothing is so flexible as knowledge." But my takeaway was, "so these guys are like . . . insufferable."
To be fair to Kindred of the East, putting in an entire faction of insufferable nerds, that's just knowing your audience. (And believe me, I'm lobbing this bomb, but it's exploding right in my face). It's something you can work with. Every adventuring party needs a psychopath, a real horny one, someone struggling with personal identity, a humorless scold, and an absolute buzzkill who knows all the lore. That's just rock-solid team dynamics. I was wrong to doubt White Wolf's splat-building acumen when I read the Kindred of the East Companion. The Dharmas aren't Clans, and I'm not sold on their worldbuilding implications, but if you're assembling a team of elite assholes to fight demons, you've got a real good cross-section of the popular character types.
It's probably a weakness of White Wolf's business model that they're given a spotlight to describe themselves, though. Sorry, Bone Flowers, but for all your waxing poetic about the virtues of cold, dispassionate Yang energy, you're too close to the issue. You can't attain the proper intellectual detachment. It's one of the dangers of valuing intelligence so highly. The hardest, most important lesson to learn regards the limitations of intelligence, and if you're not careful, it'll be your last.
So I guess, overall, I'm okay with these guys. The book maybe gives them too much to do. In addition to being scholars, they can also be assassins and diplomats, which is fine when you think about the Dharmas as emotional and ethical orientations - what sort of jobs might benefit form a completely passionless pragmatism - oh, contract killer and the negotiator you tap when you have to admit you can't win by force or arms. And it does have the effect of telling you that you're allowed to make more than one Bone Flower character. But it also dilutes the strongest possible presentation of the splat - creepy bookworms who are so socially awkward that they will allow their bodies to wither away into corpse-like husks, because looking like a zombie doesn't interfere with your ability to read.
Maybe that just seems like one really narrow character concept, but it's possible that there's nuance to be discovered by digging down instead of broadening the splat by going farther afield. I don't know. I don't hate the diplomat-Bone Flowers or assassin-Bone Flowers or anything like that. It's just, we've got three more of these books to get through, and I wonder if there are going to be enough rpg-friendly jobs to go around.
I'm also getting a better line on the series as a whole. As it accumulates text, it's starting reach that critical mass where its main point of reference becomes itself, and as a consequence, it's starting to feel less racist to me (though I'm sure that if you jumped in at this point, rather than the core, you'd be just as shocked by its exoticism and careless polyglot worldbuilding). And seeing this pure "KotE is inspired by KotE" hall of mirrors, I can't help but think that this is a game that was built with no clear idea about what it was trying to accomplish. Even as the party dynamics and antagonist motivations become more thought out and persuasively engaging, I'm still not sure what a game is actually supposed to look like. It's becoming something, but did anyone in the chain of command here have any plan for what that might be?
The best way to express what I'm feeling might be through a metaphor inspired by this very book. Kindred of the East was created by shoveling a bunch of garbage (Orientalism) into a compost heap, and enough has been put on the heap that the chemical breakdown has already begun. But is this thing I'm smelling fertility or is it merely rot?
Only time will tell.
Ukss Contribution: As the kuei-jin's premier book nerds, the Bone Flowers are basically the only people in the setting to possess a semi-legitimate copy of the Broken Winged Crane, the cursed tome that predicts the course of the coming age of darkness and instructs people how to sell their souls before it's too late.
As far as cursed tomes go, I think "Broken Winged Crane" is a pretty cool title. I also have a certain attachment to it, because it's canonically important in my favorite game. So maybe it's irrational, but I feel like its presence in Kindred of the East opens up the possibility that, when the game finally finds itself, it'll wind up kind of looking like Exalted.
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