LARPing (Live Action Role Playing) has long been a significant (perhaps even unforgivable) gap in my knowledge of roleplaying games as a medium. I have no great excuse for it except that a LARP, even more than a regular roleplaying game, feels like a party, and I'm the sort of person who doesn't get invited to a lot of parties. Could, perhaps, my ignorance be driven by bitterness and resentment? Since I, by both inclination and habit, have been confined to the shy, bookish, indoor version of roleplaying, I must therefor dismiss the sexy, convivial, outdoor version of roleplaying.
Shamefully, I must confess that there is an element to truth to that. Everything I have ever learned about Mind's Eye Theater has been against my will. But I've had this weird notion lately, that maybe this project of mine is an education. When it's all over, I'm going to be able to look at rpgs with maximum context, but in order for that to happen, I'm going to have to make an effort to understand LARPs.
(And if you think that perhaps I am just angling to guilt my way into an invitation to someone's LARP, well, I take umbrage at such a scurrilous accusation . . . I'm also desperate for a slot in someone's AP podcast).
I bring this up now, in relation to Dharma Book: Thousand Whispers (Steve Kenson) for a couple of reasons. First, it's just long overdue.
Every one of these Kindred of the East books, with the exception of the core, has carved out space for Mind's Eye Theater rules and they have universally been a bit of a drag. It's not something I want to lay on the MET rules, per se, but it's a structural problem for a book when you read through a bunch of ritual and magic item descriptions and then are presented with a 5 and a half page sidebar repeating everything you just read (flavor text an all), but with a new set of mechanical widgets.
And while I'm indulging my inner crank, there's another thing I need to get off my chest. I do not believe for a minute that there was a large enough Kindred of the East LARPing constituency for this to be at all a good use of White Wolf's time and resources. Like, I know there was a Vampire: the Masquerade LARPing scene, and that in some places it's still going to the current day. And I know that the other various World of Darkness splats sometimes make appearances in these LARPs. So the notion that someone would want to play as a kuei-jin in a LARP is not prima facie ridiculous. However, when Bruce Baugh and/or Peter Woodworth (credited authors of the MET adaptations) pop in to say,
"As always with MET play, players should give a little thought to how bystanders may see things. Meticulous cross-dressing, for instance, looks just fine in a theater or other closed play space but could create problems for the player going to and from games."
My knee-jerk thoughts are: 1)This feels like it's coming from a good place, so I don't want to be too judgmental, but also, nowadays, we would call that victim-blaming and normalizing anti-queer violence. If you're going to go into business creating catnip for drag queens/kings, you need to have their backs a bit better than this. And 2)There's no way two or more people are ever going to need this advice. Messrs. Baugh and Woodworth would have been better served by finding the one, specific person in their social circle this passage was transparently directed towards and having a heart-to-heart talk as friends.
Also, if you're a white person LARPing Kindred of the East, there's a whole other discussion you need to be having and it's probably for the best that no one at White Wolf attempted to have it c2001, but just . . . think about what you're doing. At least a little bit, especially if your costume is elaborate enough to "create problems going to and from games."
Now, that's all stuff that's been a long time coming. It's a diatribe that could have been attached, in slightly reworded form, to any of the books I've read so far (much as if I'd started screaming and weeping towards heaven about the illegibility of the page backgrounds). However, there's another reason I chose now to talk about the LARP rules. The Thousand Whispers, as a society of vampires, as a philosophy of unlife, as a means of coping with the trauma of hell, whatever you want to call them. . . they are all about LARPing.
It's something the book notices. "Fortunately, players in a storytelling game have something of an advantage in understanding the Whispers . . . Hollow Reeds [ed note: "Thousand Whispers"] carry roleplaying to a level even the most skilled method actor can scarcely imagine." Maybe it's a bit precious ("we heard you like roleplaying . . ."), but it's a strong idea.
Basically, the premise of the Thousand Whispers as a splat is that they create a series of false identities for themselves and then they commit totally to these identities, adopting them as full-on personas and "living" the "life" of a convivence store night clerk, or a warehouse night watchman, or a hospital's night nurse (for obvious reasons, most of their false identities are primarily active at night). By investing themselves in these identities, forging new social circles around them, genuinely caring about their triumphs and losses, they learn what it might have been like to live another life. And then, when they feel like they've learned all they can, they symbolically and ritually "die," by going total scorched earth and alienating/killing all of their new friends and found family, so that all possible ties with the false life are severed and they can come one step closer to facing eternity without attachment or regret.
The biggest downside to this splat setup is that it runs the danger of making Thousand Whispers characters seem excessively uniform. It's something of a paradox. These guys are defined by the diversity of experiences they have. Each one can be any number of things, and no two ever need to be the same, but the point behind all these characters is that they efface their own identities and subsume themselves in the people they're imitating. So, in a sense, the "core" identity of the character is lost in the noise. Every single one of them is defined by the quest to become something they're not, and for most people, there is a reasonably large overlap in the universe of "things I am not."
I don't think Dharma Book: Thousand Whispers entirely avoids this pitfall. A lot of the time, it feels like it's talking about one really interesting serial killer. However, it doesn't quite fall into the deepest depths of the trap. Especially in the chapter about Courts and Directions, it valiantly tries to present an entire society of these guys, all bouncing off each other. It just never quite makes the case that they need each other.
I think, overall, it's a pretty effective splat book, though. I'm definitely more interested in playing a Thousand Whisper than I was before.
Which leaves just one last bit of unpleasantness to discuss. This is the second one of these Kindred of the East splatbooks to feature an opening comic protagonist who enacts terrible violence against his romantic partner as a stepping-stone to enlightenment. It's not quite as bad as the Devil Tigers book, because our guy here is systematically killing all of his acquaintances and she was simply the most intimate of his victims.
I know, I know, I seriously just said that it was better because he killed more people, but I guess the narrow focus of the Devil Tiger just made it feel more pointlessly grotesque. Also, there wasn't any specifically sexual component to the crime. Though that's hardly an excuse. It's still a real shitty way to treat a female character. Oh, "your suffering was not in vain, my love, for it has taught me much"? That's your wife you're talking about, asshole. No matter how you cut it, it's domestic violence.
It's a risk that comes from basing your vampire factions on esoteric philosophies and then writing their books from a 1st person perspective - it's not always as clear as it needs to be that they are being self-serving and disingenuous (at least a little, and always at first). I don't necessarily need to be spoonfed "this villain protagonist is a bad person" didacticism, but it would definitely help the presentation of these vampires if the books did just a little more to let us know that the authors were in on the joke and meant for us to read them as being largely full of shit.
I can't help but wonder if the cause of this disconnect might be the theme of "exoticism" from the Kindred of the East core book rearing its ugly head. Perhaps, on some level, the creators of this setting are unironically presenting "Eastern Enlightenment" in lieu of "these clowns are pantomiming Eastern Enlightenment because if they didn't, they'd become mindless killing machines." But I have to be careful, because this is something even mainline Vampire: the Masquerade falls into. It's the same basic problem I have with the Sabbat's "Paths of Enlightenment" - a vampire's Humanity score shouldn't be an in-character artifact that they can swap out with a more convenient morality gauge. It should be the game's judgement on how much like a person the vampire is allowed to be. Maybe it shouldn't exist as a mechanic at all, because like D&D's alignment, it's just an editorial tag that tells us how to contextualize a character's actions, but if it exists, it should be universal, because "is there a sustainable way to constantly act like a dick" is simply not very interesting as a moral question.
Funnily enough, I think a book that was a bit defter at not taking the Thousand Whispers at face value would also go a long way towards clearing up the "maybe there's only one real character" problem. If the Thousand Whispers path is a lie people tell themselves, then maybe there's no escape from the original identity, and if there's no escape, then whatever false lives these vampires choose to adopt, the flaws of their essential nature follow them.
Like the man said, all happy families are alike, each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.
Ukss Contribution: Call me a hypocrite if you must, but my favorite thing about this book was the Thousand Whispers splat as a whole. I think they are fascinating as both a single really interesting serial killer and as a whole cult of monstrous clowns running from conclusions they don't want to face. And I do want to give Mr. Kenson his due. He did successfully convey that there is fascinating roleplaying material to be mined here. My previous reservations should be interpreted to mean "good start, please show me more."
So I'm going to put the Thousand Whispers (in some form or another) into Ukss as a tribute, and because I feel the need to create the "more" that I want to see.
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