Dharma Book: Resplendent Cranes (Bruce Baugh and Emily Dresner-Thornber) has one subtle, but fundamental problem - as a book about damned souls returned to life on a holy mission to instill righteousness in the masses and thereby avert the apocalypse, it neglects to establish what righteousness actually means. There's talk about opposing corruption and injustice, and cultivating virtue, but only in the broadest of terms. I've certainly got some ideas about what those words mean, but would those ideas be at all compatible with the preferences of the reanimated corpse of a 17th century Chinese aristocrat?
Without any grounding in specific, actionable moral or ethical principles, the Resplendent Cranes run the risk of being totally generic. Oh, they're the vampires who support behavior they think is righteous and oppose behavior they think is wicked? What a shocking position for them to take. It totally sets them apart from the vampires who support wickedness and oppose righteousness (which, to be fair, do actually exist in this setting).
It's not a fatal flaw, because the Resplendent Cranes do have some unique distinguishing features. They're all about hierarchy, rule-following, and "instructing" the "ignorant" (anyone who disagrees with them), so they bring a whole "stuffy stick in the mud" vibe to the party that is memorable, if nothing else. It's just that when the book says something like "by following the laws of the enlightened ancestors, the seeker learns to act virtuously, without a second thought" I get a nervous feeling that the laws of the ancestors would have us virtuously denying our homosexual urges to perform traditional gender roles.
So you can see how it's a problem that the book doesn't say one way or another. Though in the book's "defense" its theology is pretty bare-bones and lacking in nuance. The word "sin" is used repeatedly, but never defined, and based off a perusal of the relevant wikipedia article, it's not wrong, exactly, but it is the sort of thing that really could have benefited from a frank discussion to avoid just seeming like the text was defaulting to a roughly Christian approach to the subject.
Likewise with Hell. The premise of the whole game is that player characters escaped from Hell, but it's pretty unclear what the bar is for being sent to Hell. Just going by the brief backgrounds of preconstructed characters, you can go to Hell for - using legal loopholes to benefit your family's business empire, being a member of an oppressed Indian caste and dying of exposure, defying gender roles to become a hunter and selling animal parts on the black market, being one of Pol Pot's victims.
Maybe there's more going on with these guys. None of them particularly seemed like the sort to deserve an afterlife of torment, but their descriptions were only about a half a page each. It's possible that "the Pale Professor" had a myriad of dastardly deeds beyond just being kind of clueless about the political goings-on of his native Cambodia, but I do think it's telling that none of those deeds were deemed significant enough to take up the entry's limited wordcount. The only conclusion I can draw is that we're supposed to find the criteria for entering Hell as whimsical and arbitrary.
That's not a problem in and of itself, but I do feel like for these guys it's a bit of a thematic clash. You're back from the dead, trying your hardest to be a goodboy vampire . . . is that something that means anything at all if you weren't a bad boy when you were alive? Maybe, though I feel like the reason "Good person trying to stay good, despite the Hunger" works in Vampire: the Masquerade is that the standard vampire condition is not a moral judgment. Some vampire creep liked the look of you and decided to make that your problem. By contrast, every kuei-jin out there is someone who was deemed fit for terrible punishment by cosmic forces that (presumably) don't make mistakes. There's definitely compelling drama to be mined from their efforts to avoid becoming monsters, but that drama will likely be the drama of redemption.
Unless, of course, the universe is a cruel and senseless place with no moral order whatsoever, so that the innocent can wind up in Hell just as surely as the guilty, but even then I feel like that story deserves something a bit more . . . punk than the Resplendent Cranes' "hall monitor" vibe.
I think could genuinely enjoy either path - rage against fate in a nihilistic cosmos or "if you knew what these fuckers did, you'd kill them on principle, but they're trying their best to be better, so that maybe one day they won't deserve what happened to them" - but this in-between situation confounds me. Overall, I kind of feel about the Resplendent Cranes the same way I felt about the Thrashing Dragons - they come across as being very passionately behind the abstract idea of Doing Things. Ordinary folk like you or I might do similar things for similar reasons, but for them it's a religion, a way of saving their souls, and their hope for the future . . . being in favor of things that are good and against things that are bad.
Though I need to be a bit more generous here. The book does have a few specific things the Resplendent Cranes are getting up to:
Isolating a Chinese village from the rest of the world and conducting bizarre and cruel social experiments on it in an attempt to find the origin of virtue. ("For example, they starve the village for a while and give food only to one person. They choke off the flow of money to the village and then scatter gold in the streets. They murder all the first-born sons in the middle of the night and record the reactions of the peasants.")
Now, that is very interesting and a great horror/fantasy premise, but it's also like, wait, is that sort of behavior in the remit of the Dharma? Because I have absolutely no problem with "vampires who want to restore their morality but have so missed the point that they've resorted to unethical human experimentation" as an esoteric philosophical faction, but if this is permissible under the Resplendent Crane code, it's hard to imagine what might be forbidden.
And then there's the ongoing vampire race war, which I'd mistakenly thought was being downplayed before reading the two and a half pages it gets in this book. It's astonishing that something can be both yawn and cringe at the same time, but somehow The Great Leap Outward manages to do it. Also, what's with that name? Who is it appealing to? What constituency in the setting would think it was a good idea? Are the kuei-jin unrepentant Maoists? Surely literally anyone else would object to that name. Even to the degree that they're monstrous enough to name their political movement after one of history's largest mass death events, they'd probably still want to avoid the stink of failure that comes with that particular combination of words.
Of course, the Doylist explanation is more illuminating, though the questions in that case are just as pointed. I doubt anyone on the White Wolf staff was a hardcore Maoist, so the only thing I can think of is just an absolutely cavalier amount of carelessness. Probably not malice per se, but just the same sort of sloppiness that leads you to say "in theory, India already is part of the Middle Kingdom." Words have no meaning, they are simply a collection of sound signs associated with particular vibes. Great Leaping in various directions is simply how you signal that the Asians are trying something ambitious.
As a plot, I think it can safely be ignored.
Finally, a bit of levity - The Five Harmonious Avenging Thunders. They're an organization of Resplendent Cranes who have "devoted their entire existences to debunking the terrible, popular, and very profitable business of Western pseudo-Chinese mysticism."
You know, because "the Western world is stealing, appropriating, and mutilating all things Oriental. This must stop!"
Mmhmm.
My note for this passage was "has WW achieved sentience," but my conclusion is that they probably haven't. The Avenging Thunders are planning to attack and shut down "Western publishing houses," but there was no sign at all of Black Dog Studios, WW's cheeky little self-insert that usually shows up when the company is being auto-satirical. The whole section does have an exaggerated breathless tone which seems to indicate that the Thunders are being played for comedy, but I can't be sure of the target.
My dark theory is that this section was inspired by complaints about Kindred of the East, and the sort of mismatch between provocation and response is an attempt to imply that their critics are similarly overreacting. Certainly, if I remember the politics of 2002 correctly "the Chinese are mad because you're doing feng shui wrong" is an idea that would definitely have inflamed the American racial id.
On the other hand, I also have a fun theory - White Wolf, being tenuously, but enthusiastically woke somehow got the impression that they were helping. This is what they thought helping looked like. And maybe that seems like a stretch from the company that brought us Kindred of the East, but another thing to remember about 2002 is that it was the high water mark of New Age curmudgeons - people who took neopaganism and other alternative religions extremely seriously, and who could sort of see the cultural appropriation problem from the other side - the crystal witches, with their extremely shallow Orientalist spiritualism giving people the false impression that all witchcraft was just as vacuous. It doesn't seem too much of a stretch to believe that WW held that portion of the community in exactly the same amount of contempt as they did the Satanists.
Overall, I'd say that Dharma Book: Resplendent Cranes is one of my least favorite entries in the series. The book itself is well-crafted and easy to read, but for a while now, Kindred of the East has been growing on me, because some of the other books have given the impression that it was growing beyond Asia of Darkness, to become its own weird urban fantasy setting filled with creatures and factions so extreme that they barely counted as cultural appropriation any more. This book did not give that impression. Maybe that's just a burden you have to bear if you're pitching an idea as basic as "vampires ironically want to be good."
Ukss Contribution: The creepy vampire social experiment village. It's as perfect a ttrpg concept as I've ever seen. You could base a campaign there.
