(KotE) Dharma Book: Thrashing Dragons

 There's a bit in Dharma Book: Thrashing Dragons (Geoffrey C. Grabowski) that pretty much sums up the appeal of Kindred of the East as a whole - "the vicarious thrill of acting on the kuei-jin's rigorous but monstrous ethics." 

Yeah, okay, I can see it. A philosophical puzzle and challenge in active empathy - Imagine an extremely unpleasant person and become their advocate, but the only words you are allowed to use are a form of gibberish so incoherent it is borderline obscene. "Rargh! I must eat that infant!  Why?! Why?! You dare to ask me 'why'?! Me? Who has heard from the lips of a great prophet that one who eats a thousand infants is destined to save the world from an infant-eating dragon?" And it all becomes very philosophical when you learn that the infant-eating dragon was going to inevitably eat 1001 infants and now your character's moral decisions become fodder for OOC discussions about different variations of the trolley problem.

It's a very particular type of fun ("If it didn't make you at least a little uncomfortable, it wouldn't be as much fun to play" - classic WW), where maybe you should tread carefully lest you accidentally (?) imply that your character's alien moral code obligates them to be a rapist:

"Fuck when you are horny. If you cannot find a willing partner, take what you want or use taking's better-dressed sister, seduction. If you can do neither of those, or if they would take too much time, then masturbate."

Now, that's an in-character quote from an NPC, so it's not exactly like Grabowski is telling us that our PCs should be out there raping people, but then again . . . the NPC in question is a vampire Boddhisattva, who is canonically as enlightened in the ways of the Thrashing Dragon as it's possible to get, so the takeaway here is at least that being one of the Vampires Who Fuck does not require you to be a Vampire Who Consensually Fucks.

And I don't know, man. Like this is an inference that you could probably have made. They're vampires. Their whole deal is violently attacking people to satisfy their monstrous urges. If the book had said, "Drink blood. If you cannot find a willing donor, take what you want" I'd have found it completely unremarkable. Imagine a vampire asking permission, getting consent, before they bit into someone's neck and drained their blood. It's entirely missing the point.

So, like, should I be shocked that the Vampires Who Fuck are monsters who fuck like vampires? No, obviously not, but we're not actually talking about some sort of anthropological study of vampires here, nor even about a fictional vampire story. This book, as an artifact, is meant to be functional. It's meant to illuminate your character choices in a tabletop roleplaying game. Whoever these vampires are, that's who I'm going to be, for about 2-4 hours per week.

It's not like it's a big deal or anything. It's part of a throwaway line in a sidebar from an unreliable narrator, so it's not like Grabowski took some time out of the book to explicitly advocate for player characters having a more accepting attitude towards rape or anything . . . 

. . .

And that ominous pause was me rushing to look at the credits for Exalted: the Lunars, but Grabowski was only the developer of that book, not an author so . . . I'm not actually sure what point I'm getting at here. I don't know enough about the comparative responsibilities of authors v developers when it comes to the content of roleplaying books. I've never been privy to the process behind-the-scenes. Suffice to say, turn-of-the-millennium White Wolf had a tendency to . . . not exactly downplay sexual violence, per se, but to just dump it into a big stewpot of undifferentiated edge.

The Thrashing Dragons are the vampires who LIVE! They fuck. They do drugs. They kill things without remorse, because that's basically like eating them, like a wolf or a tiger might do. Sometimes they work at hospice care, because that's a part of life too. In fact, we could boil their complex religion down into the abstract idea of "having experiences" and be only a little bit sarcastic in the process.

There's an interesting idea that shows up a couple of times, where elder vampires caution the young to not have too many novel experiences, too quickly, lest they use up all their novelty and find themselves, decades or centuries later, unable to have truly have the life-affirming experiences necessary to advance in their dharma. I wish it had been explored just a bit more. Show us the monstrous acts that would be dreamed up by an ancient demon who is absolutely desperate for novelty. Get way deep into the weeds of the game's moral and philosophical speculation.

On the balance, though, I'd say that the Thrashing Dragons are the weakest of the dharmas so far. Sometimes they seemed like they were the faction that was obligated to do whatever it is they were going to do anyway. What experiences are definitely not part of "life?" There's no hierarchy of sins saying you lose progress for sitting quietly reading a book, honoring your ancestors, or waiting to do your research before committing to a course of action (all things that are characteristic of their "opposites," the yin-oriented Bone Flowers). It never quite feels like they're giving something up to pursue their esoteric philosophy. 

Maybe that could be a tension. Maybe the Thrashing Dragons have a reputation as a dumping ground for "miscellaneous" kuei-jin, who aren't particularly serious about enlightenment. Maybe doing what you want all the time has certain social or strategic drawbacks that could drive potential plots. But whatever else they are, the Thrashing Dragons aren't (intentionally) "miscellaneous" either. They've got a bunch of highly specific things that they do, like intentionally infecting themselves with diseases, because diseases are alive and so that's part of "experiencing life." Or getting up early/staying up late to show respect to the sun, which is a fun bit of vampire religious texture. 

The result, though, was a faction that never quite meshed for me. There were elements that worked for me, but the whole thing felt a bit like it was created to fill out a grid. A decent enough book (notwithstanding misteps about race and gender, of which there were a few more I neglected to mention), but I'm so ready for Grabowski to move on to Exalted. (There's an ad for it at the back of the book! How weird is it that I'm retroactively excited for the release of a game that's now deep into its 3rd edition?)

Ukss Contribution: One of the example vampires is a computer scientist who created an incredibly accurate model of future political events. However, no matter how he adjusts his assumptions, all of his models fail catastrophically when they try to predict past the year 2010 (approx 10 years into his own future). It's as if there's some spiritual force in the near future that's actively attempting to thwart prognostication.

These sorts of prophecy wards are not unheard of in fiction, but this is first I've ever seen that affects even non-magical statistical models. I'm intrigued by anything that blurs the lines between science and magic like this.