But also, they're kind of still heresies, maybe overly familiar with the Yama Kings (a couple of them are referred to, in apparently out-of-character sections, as "akuma"), and definitely less spiritually potent than the corebook Dharmas. The Face of the Gods chapter has a major plot point revolve around the Dharma's lack of a Bodhisattva, and refers to the Quincunx as "their more spiritually sophisticated neighbors."
I'm not outraged or anything, but I am experiencing the quite sensation of a White Wolf book furiously backpedaling as it tries to incorporate into a supplement the fundamental research that really should have been completed before the core book was even written. "China exerted a great deal of cultural influence throughout the region, so we're just going to write the kuei-jin as if they were basically Chinese" was never going to fly, so it's good that this is getting addressed, but it undercuts the message a little to then make the Chinese kuei-jin be right (or at least less wrong) about everything.
In the chapter about the Flame of the Rising Phoenix, we learn that there are Muslim kuei-jin. Muslims are getting sent to pan-Asian hell, presumably because they live inside the kuei-jin's geographical box (not mentioned: whether the hundreds of millions of Asian Christians can also become kuei-jin). The fact that monotheist with an incompatible soteriology can become Chinese vampires raises some difficult questions about what exactly is going on in Asia of Darkness.
San Francisco by Night implied that the origin of kuei-jin was cultural. New kuei-jin could emerge in Chinese (and other Asian) diaspora communities, so long as those communities maintained a sufficient religious and folkloric continuity with the old country. This book implies that the spread is geographical ("We're Asian vampires. We claw our way back from hell, but only if we actually die in Asia.") and that there is a wide spectrum of cultural beliefs, the ends of which might be totally unintelligible to each other, that can spawn the kuei-jin, so long as the person with those beliefs is Asian.
And honestly, both approaches are problematic because both approaches require you to contemplate the idea of boundaries. When you try to figure out who is at risk of being sent to Yomi, and who is not, you're either going to establish the boundaries of a geographical region or the boundaries of a culture. On the surface, geography seems a little less fraught, but it's also sort of arbitrary. Why did these particular borders get picked and not others? Is there a situation where you might become a kuei-jin if you die in the Punjab region of Pakistan, but won't if you die in Balochistan? It's that very arbitrariness that makes the question a Rorschach test on your perceptions of race. Where do the Asians live? To answer, you will have to have a broad concept of "the Asians" and a willingness to lump them all together as a homogenous group.
The cultural approach is scarecly better. It has the advantage of being less arbitrary - people who believe in Chinese hell have a chance of going to Chinese hell - but then you're left asking the question of who is Chinese enough? That's a job where, if you're Chinese, you shouldn't be doing it, and if you're not Chinese you really shouldn't be doing it.
In the case of Kindred of the East, White Wolf really earned its orientalism by recklessly grabbing the worst of both worlds. They're policing the boundaries of culture, but doing so in an arbitrary way. "Chinese enough" is "Asian," as understood by America's peculiar racial hierarchy. So if you're a Muslim living in Bangladesh, you're basically Indian, which is basically Buddhist, which is basically Chinese, so of course you might go to Chinese hell.
(It's at this point that I remember that Islamic kuei-jin were mentioned in the core book and wonder what it says about me that I'm only now feeling surprised by it.)
I feel like Heresies of the Way, as a new source of KotE lore, is stirring the pot. It's saying that those boundaries are bullshit, establishing that autonomous rival philosophies can exist for the kuei-jin outside Chinese cultural hegemony, and even as it tries to give those philosophies equal diginity to the five corebook Dharmas, it retains the core's "heretical" framing. If theses Dharmas are "probably as old, if not older than the Quincunx" then how can they be heretical?
I mean, obviously, "heresy" is a political label and they are heretics from the perspective of the most powerful vampiric political body in the region, but the question remains - why is White Wolf ratifying this label out-of-character? Again, obviously, because the names and terminology were inherited from previous works in the line and there is a certain amount of inertia that comes with it. They found a place to insert a bit more cultural nuance into Kindred of the East, with the unfortunate constraint that they couldn't directly contradict anything that had already been established. How is that not enough for me?
I don't know. I guess I liked Heresies of the Way just fine. It provided a much-needed expansion of the base game's possibilities, allowing it to come at least a little bit closer to capturing the scope and diversity of its Asian setting. It's just . . . seeing these possibilities expand largely serves to remind me how offputting it is that they weren't here from the very beginning, and seeing the compromises that had to be made to get these option in the game makes me think that Kindred of the East, as a whole, was always doomed to be untenable.
Then again, doing things that were always doomed to failure is kind of a major theme of this particular era of the World of Darkness, so I suppose I should probably give at least some of my thoughts on each of the five chapters:
Chapter 1: Flame of the Rising Phoenix (Steve Kenson)
These vampires, based out of Sri Lanka, but with members pretty much everywhere kuei-jin can be found, believe that they were sent back to earth to redeem themselves for the sins that sent them to hell, try as best they can to live a normal life, and if possible pick up exactly where they left off.
This last tenet, especially, can lead to hilarity, because one way that they slip back into their old lives is by using ritual magic to erase the memory of their death, and "The Phoenixes tell of one murderer who sits in a jail cell . . . uncertain of why he's there. In fact, everyone's forgotten why he's there, so police keep him in custody . . . just in case."
It's kind of a shame this chapter is so short, because I really would have liked to see more discussion about the drawbacks of trying to continue your old life - returning to the toxic environment that sent you to hell in the first place or confronting the fact that your victims might be entirely uninterested in helping you redeem yourself.
My final, reductive verdict on the Dharma - it's basically Kindred of the East's version of the Path of Humanity, and it may not be glamorous but it was sorely needed.
Chapter 2: The Tempest of the Inward Focus (Guy-Francis Vella)
These are the first kuei-jin that are strongly associated with a particular "non-east Asian" (book's words) locale, and unfortunately they never really clicked with me. They're like dark Taoists who seek to learn the nature of all things, sometimes by torturing people to death, and they just sort of struck me as people who were constantly doing random shit for no reason. It probably didn't help that the Dharma was split between two bitterly opposed factions and that a substantial portion of their description was given over to "quotes" from a Quincunx work that asserted they were irredeemably awful.
The most interesting thing about them is that they reject almost the entirety of the Quincunx's cosmology, "dismissing the Wheel and the Yama Kings as mere illusions and having little patience for the concept of karmic debt." I feel like maybe there's something there, if this controversy had been in the setting since the beginning, but at this point, we know the Yama Kings' names and home addresses. The coming Sixth Age of the Wheel dovetails with about a million other World of Darkness subplots. It's doing the Tempest real dirty to make them dissenters at this late date.
Chapter 3: The Face of the Gods (Geoffrey C Grabowski)
This one makes me a little uncomfortable.
A vampire, duping a blood cult into worshipping them as a god? Great. Classic bit. A conspiracy of vampires, who mentor young vampires in starting blood cults, organize to protect the integrity of blood cults, and debate the philosophy and ethics of running a blood cult? A little weird. A little heightened. Maybe something you'd put in a parody, but not at all out of line.
However, the Face of the Gods is based out of India. And this is around the time that White Wolf's Aberrant was using the term "India Syndrome" to describe novas (superheroes, basically) who started cults devoted to themselves. And the uncomfortable conclusion I come to is that someone at White Wolf (or possibly just the company culture as a whole) was under the impression that Indians were especially prone to worship any random creature that came along and presented itself as a god . . . one of the big toxic orientalist tropes.
All-in-all, I'd rather the Face of the Gods be replaced with something . . . better.
Chapter 4: The Spirit of the Living Earth (Ellen Kiley, James Kiley)
It's fine. It's probably more World of Darkness animism than adapted real-world animism, but I'm okay with that. It flirts with recapitulating the original sin of the Dreamspeakers (and, indeed Kindred of the East) - Shinto, Mongolian Shamanism, and Vietnamese Folk Religion are all under its umbrella, but I'm willing to give it the benefit of the doubt and assume that if they had more space, they would have made this alliance something more explicitly negotiated in-setting.
My other main takeaway from this chapter is that it is inexplicably the only one of the five to do the trademark White Wolf Terrible Fonts. I'm not sure how that happens.
Chapter 5: The Scorpion Eaters (Michael Butler)
"Scorpion Eaters live the lifestyle of the archetypal, if not stereotypical, Asian gangster. . ."
A bold gambit, considering the hole Kindred of the East is clumsily trying to dig itself out of, but I think they squeeze in under the wire due to the fact that having a clear, but shallow genre inspiration (in this case Hong Kong crime cinema, specifically the "films of Woo, Lam, and Hark) is like the core methodology for building a World of Darkness splat. Also, it's kind of funny that their gangster movie aesthetic is explicitly an in-character choice. Like, canonically, these movies exist in the WoD, and the Scorpion Eaters are deliberately modelling themselves after them. I'm not saying they're not lazily designed, I'm just saying that the material is all there to present them as an incredibly dangerous bunch of dorks.
Their deal is that they think the Sixth Age is inevitable, so they're getting a jump on the competition by using magic and dark pacts to recalibrate their metabolism to process tainted chi (on the theory that once the Yama Kings take over, it'll be the only kind of chi there is and everyone will start fighting over it). Combined with their unapologetically egoist philosophy, this makes them decent antagonists for nearly any conceivable KotE game.
Yeah, okay, I'm convinced. "Lazy" isn't the same as "bad." I like 'em.
Now, time to wrap things up.
Overall, I'd say Heresies of the Way is an essential book if you're going to keep playing Kindred of the East, but it's difficult to believe that anyone could get this far into the line without realizing how irresponsible it would be to keep playing Kindred of the East?
Ukss Contribution: This is probably the least evil Kindred of the East book I've read so far, so I definitely have to pick something, despite the fact that I'm now 100% convinced that I never want to play Kindred of the East.
There's a sidebar that discusses whether or not Mao Zedong could possibly be an active kuei-jin, handled with a not unreasonable amount of sensitivity, all things considered. Now, I'm definitely not interested in including Mao in Ukss, but there was a line in the discussion that intrigued me:
"famously cruel (and dead) people often have some smartass kuei-jin pretending to be them."
That's a nuance of undead fantasy culture that never occurred to me before, that some poseur could steal the identity of a more famous dead person, or that the values of the undead world might be so twisted that the identity of a notorious asshole could be something of practical value.
I'll have to have a character informed by a similar thought process.
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