(KotE) Half-Damned: Dhampyr

 The insidious thing about Kindred of the East is that sometimes, despite its questionable origins, it threatens to be fun. White Wolf (and I am literally not exaggerating here) as a company was sometimes skeptical of the concept of fun, but they made a game whose theme was "exoticism" and sometimes that means they're willing to experiment with this exotic thing called "fun."

Half-Damned: Dhampyr (Hal Mangold) is a fun book. When a kuei-jin overdoses on life energy, that temporarily restores their reproductive fertility. The children born from that process are called Dhampyr, and this book reveals, for the first time ever, that in addition to the brooding gothic vampire powers you might reasonably expect, Dhampyrs also get an action-movie aura that draws them into ridiculous plots, lets them perform sick-ass stunts, and ensures that they usually win at gambling (which we all know is the best possible income source for an action movie protagonist).

Also, they're the reincarnated souls of the celestial Golden Children of the uncorrupted Ten Thousand Immortals, whose very existence reminds the most ancient and enlightened vampires of their unforgiveable crimes against heaven.

I don't know how true to Chinese mythology it all is, but yeah, I'd trust John Woo to remake Blade. At least, that's what I think Half Damned: Dhampyr was going for. . . mostly.

There's a bit of the ol' gross-out horror here too. There are rules for charging up your powers via cannibalism. I'm not sure they're well thought-out as a story element because unlike drinking blood, which can be sanitized enough to support a half-vampire antihero, there's no way to devour a corpse and not come off looking like a creature, but this is something that can be downplayed. You can pace yourself with the dark magic and avoid the face eating for a very long time.

The personality mechanics are also pretty weird. If you wanted to be hard on Kindred of the East (and to be clear, that would be entirely deserved), you could make an issue of the fact that kuei-jin have entirely different personality traits than kindred. Why, that would seem to imply that Asians have a different variety of soul than westerners.

On the other hand, if you wanted to be generous, you could say that the implication was unwarrented. The two games use different jargon, and subsequently different models for the human experience, but they're about the same thing. Virtues + Humanity + the Beast = Yin + Yang + Hun + P'o + Dharma because a human soul is a human soul, and that doesn't change just because you're looking at it from a different angle.

Fair enough. But then you have Dhampyrs. Like mortal characters, they have Conscience, Courage, and Self-Control ratings. Like kindred (but unlike humans), they have a Humanity rating. Like kuei-jin, they have a P'o rating. But no Dharmas. They are unnecessary because Dhampyrs aren't atoning for sins, and thus they have no fated path they must follow.

So what are the implications here? Asian souls aren't different, but kuei-jin souls are, because going to Asian hell and then coming back permanently changes your soul, and the Dharmas are not a product of kuei-jin culture, but actually part of the machinery of the afterlife?

I don't know. It's all very confusing. And this particular issue is only really relevant when you try to place Kindred of the East in the overall meta-context of the World of Darkness, which is something I generally prefer to do only as a last resort (and this is not just me trying to doge an uncomfortable cultural conversation, I also refuse to entertain the notion that Mage: the Ascension and Vampire: the Masquerade take place in the same universe, except when crossover events like the Week of Nightmares make that unavoidable).

So, I guess what I'm saying is that I'd have preferred if Half Damned: Dhampyr had confined itself to the terminology of Kindred of the East instead of involving the Vampire: the Masquerade core, but it's not a dealbreaker for me. This book is still a lot of fun.

Ukss Contribution: I've been describing the Dhampyrs' "joss" trait as an "action movie aura," despite the fact that the book defines the term as something more akin to luck, but I think this is a case where I definitely know better than the book. We're talking about a pool of points that allows you to survive one-shot hits from powerful enemies, that adds bonus successes to your skills and talents, and has the side effect of doing things like "have their bags mistakenly switched for ones with more interesting contents (like a million dollars in drug money or a couple of severed heads)."

And I just love that as a conceit for a character type. Oh yeah, lets all play the ttrpg where "during a slow moment the GM will stir the pot" is a superpower on your character sheet. And more than that, a setting element as well. Ukss should have something like that.