(KotE) San Francisco By Night

CONTENT WARNING: Sexual assault

Writing a coherent post about San Francisco by Night (Kraig Blackwelder and Steve Kenson) has so far eluded me. I've written and discarded about four different introductions to this post, and in a very broad way have been about the task for approximately eight hours before even getting to this point (though, in the interest of full disclosure, about four of those hours were me deliberately playing a video game as a way of avoiding this particular chore). The source of this delay is not at all mysterious to me. I know exactly what's holding me back. I cannot think of a responsible way to express the idea that

IN THE 2002ND YEAR OF THE COMMON ERA, WHITE WOLF STUDIOS RELEASED A SUPPLEMENT ABOUT A LITERAL RACE WAR, OMFG! WHAT DO I DO?!

I know, in the past, I've glibly referred to The Great Leap Outward (ugh, I think I'm going to be sick, that name is the absolute worst) as "the vampire race war," but, like, guys . . . guys, guys . . . the races in question, they're not "kuei-jin" and "kindred," as we've been lead to believe. They are, in fact, "Asian" and "miscellaneous (white)."

The NPC chapter of this book is quite long (about 40 pages) and generously illustrated, in that turn-of-the-century White Wolf style. So we can see quite clearly the races of all eight named Camarilla characters. Six of them are white. One is inexplicably a Hopi (which, to be clear, is not something that needs to be explained, per se, but her heritage is a big part of her character, so it's not like she just happens to be a Hopi woman who moved to San Francisco to be part of the tech industry or anything). And the last one is Chinese.

Which undermines my point a little, but while there are Asian kindred, the book treats them strangely. They''re like this weird middle ground between the V:tM-style vampires and the KotE-style vampires. They act as diplomatic envoys or defectors or spies and I don't know, it feels objectifying. There's this mostly-impermeable barrier between the kuei-jin and kindred, but Asian kindred can sort of pass through . . . because of their mortal race?

For the kuei-jin's part, they've divided up the city of San Francisco into different regions, and apparently have the physical power to mostly keep the kindred in their designated zones (using the Chinese Tongs as muscle, naturally). And with only a couple practical exceptions, they want to control the zones where Asians live . . . and nothing else. The nuances of ethnicity don't seem to enter into it. They want to extend their reach into nearby San Jose, purely because of the large Vietnamese community there. 

If you wanted to parse it as generously as possible, you could read this as being about dueling occult conspiracies (the reason the kuei-jin want the Vietnamese community in San Jose is because they believe "the Asian presence is large enough to support a self-renewing population of kuei-jin"), but honestly it's weird to be reminded that the World of Darkness has an empirically verifiable Asian Hell, but Christian Hell is . . . less substantiated (at least, until Demon: the Fallen comes along). It all comes across as very racialized.

Especially in the way that the kuei-jin's imposition of vampire travel bans is continually framed in terms meant to evoke FDR's internment of Japanese-Americans. The words "internment camp" and "virtual concentration camp" are used to describe certain neighborhoods where kindred are permitted to lair and hunt.

Never mind that we're talking about approximately 80 people, total, across all factions, assuming we use the upper end of the estimated vampire carrying capacity (1 per 10,000 mortals). There's simply no way any organized group is going to have the coverage to meaningfully deny the enemy territory. The "New Promise Mandarinate's" borders should leak like a sieve. 

Supposedly, the kuei-jin's influence over the Tongs is supposed to be their main enforcement tool, but then I think about the fact that they're keeping the Ventrue out of the Finance District and imagination fails me. Maybe the police are heavily bribed and controlled with dark magic, but it's hard to believe that they could ever be so off-mission that they'd allow Chinese gangsters to assemble in a neighborhood frequented by white millionaires. "Oh no, the guy whose name is on the country club can't get to a board meeting because he's afraid of getting killed by the sort of people we ticket for loitering aggressively" - a scenario from an rpg fever dream.

I mean, it's a premise of the game that the Prince of a city can enforce rights of introduction and dominion, so it's not surprising that vampires are controlling territory, despite their small numbers. However, the main difference is that usually "this vampire is not where they're supposed to be" is treated as a one-off. There are only 80 guys, but 79 are enforcing their rules against the 1. When the scale opens up even a little, all bets are off. The Camarilla is immensely powerful and highly motivated, but if the Sabbat decides to come to town, well, that town's infested by Sabbat now.

It's a tricky thing to disentangle, why San Francisco by Night's "Munificent Transitioning Sectors" feel so bad. Am I imposing a double standard here? Like, if it were a white Prince, enforcing rules of domain, would I still have this problem? And I think, on a personal level, I would, but I'd frame it as "I don't want to be controlled" and I would direct my resentment at the Camarilla's outdated social structure. So it shouldn't intrinsically be a problem that I feel resentment at the Quincunx's similarly outdated social structure. "Young vampires wanting to go somewhere, being thwarted, and starting fights about it" is part of the DNA of the game. However, the difference here is that when I feel resentment towards the MT sectors, I'm feeling resentment towards . . . Asians? Like the game is trying to manipulate me into Sinophobia?

The plot of the whole damned book is "immigrants have come to steal our jobs, destabilize our housing markets, and spread organized crime." And maybe I'm being a little silly, because the jobs are "sucking blood," the real-estate is "sun-proof havens," and the organized crime is "vampire thralls," but it really feels like this book is trying to turn me Republican. Like, if you had one opportunity to turn John Bolton goth, this is the book you'd reach for.

And I don't think they were trying to do that on purpose. There's nuance to be had here, if that's what you're after. The New Promise Mandarinate has plenty of kindred collaborators. It's presented as a sustainable alternative to the Camarilla. Yeah, they micromanage where you are allowed to live, and make it a point to let you know that they can send gangsters to kill you when you're asleep, but it's not an age-based hierarchy. Advancement and the attainment of new privileges is possible through individual merit (read: ass-kissing). The implication is that the reason the Quincunx got so much power so quickly is that they exploited existing fractures and secured the buy-in of groups that were marginalized under the Camarilla.

But it's just an implication, because there are no concrete examples of, say, former Anarchs thriving under the new regime.

Also, it's like 80 guys, so why are the kuei-jin giving their "move to San Francisco's Chinatown" plan a grandiose, state-like name? Why is this being treated as a clash of civilizations? "The New Promise Mandarinate? Oh, you mean the ten guys who moved to Chinatown and are now murdering people in the financial district?"

Now, I've complained a lot, but I do need to take a step back. I don't think it's necessarily out of bounds to tell a story about a vampire race war. They're vampires. Ideally, they'd not be racist, but in terms of their collective crimes against humanity, that's just another thing to add to the list. It's similar to how I would not be shocked if a gritty prison drama featured a storyline about a conflict between a neo-nazi gang and an Asian gang. Prison gangs often divide up on race. A world where vampire conspiracies do the same isn't an implausible world. It may even be a compelling world. However, there is one point I've made about White Wolf in the past that I feel I need to make again:

This is a tabletop rpg. Everything you put in the book is potentially something I will have to say out loud, to my friends.

And that makes the book's attempts at nuance problematic. "Quincunx versus Camarilla" isn't intrinsically "Asians vs whites" any more than "Chinese Tongs vs Italian Mafia" would be. These are specific groups with specific agendas and some white vampires actually prefer Qunicunx rule, just like there are some Asian Camarilla who are committed members of the organization. But let's not kid ourselves, race is a factor. You really think those Mafia guys are going to avoid using racial slurs about their criminal rivals? You think vampires are going to be any better?

The book has a whole storytelling chapter. It does not, in any way, address the elephant in the room. It's so focused on the idea that these are two different types of vampires, using two separate White Wolf core books, that it never noticed it was depicting something that looked an awful like a race war in the streets of San Francisco. So there's no advice on how to make the conflict look less like that. Nor on how to lean into the skid, explore its adult themes, and walk away without being racist IRL. But maybe it's for the best, seeing as how the very existence of San Francisco by Night (and, indeed Kindred of the East as a whole) is compelling evidence that White Wolf wasn't ready to have that conversation.

I'm so tired of talking about this book, but I have to keep going because when I roast a White Wolf book for being weird about race, it leaves the impression that I didn't notice it being weird about gender and sexuality. This is San Francisco we're talking about. It has a reputation as a cultural center for LGBTQ people that was even stronger in 2002 than it is today. The opening fiction features the world's straightest homosexual getting seduced and tossed aside by two hot gay vampires (I actually liked that part, though, despite the fact that the victim's internal monologue did the "Schmitt's Gay" routine of taking standard issue bro-speak and doing a find-and-replace of "chicks" for "dudes"). So we're talking about the most explicitly and non-judgementally queer rpg sourcebook I've read so far (largely because the bar is in the basement, but still).

However, in the section about San Francisco's famous Castro district it says, "The Kuei-jin's deeply traditional nature includes many homophobic attitudes, so in their eyes giving the Camarilla the Castro is a subtle slight."

And I don't know. It's not like the section is bad. Surprising no one, the Camarilla is rainbow capitalist (their nickname for the Castro district is "the cash-flow" district), and the rest of the text goes on about how homophobia backfired because Castro and its people are awesome. But there's something that didn't sit right with me. The kuei-jin aren't Chinese. They are Chinese vampires. "Traditional attitudes" aren't really their thing. What's the traditional Chinese attitude towards killing someone and eating their flesh I wonder? So why do we have a group of guys who openly tolerate the Devil Tigers "we were sent to hell and therefor we must become the perfect demons" philosophy, but only if they append it with "no homo?" The conclusion I reached is that no gay Asian has ever gone to hell. The only other alternative explanation is that White Wolf somehow forgot that one of the main advantages of being a vampire is that you are now free to be as gay as you want to be, but that seems unlikely. The works of Anne Rice are cited in the Introduction's "Resources" section.

Finally, women. White Wolf is frustrating because it is undeniably, empirically ahead of the curve when it comes to female representation (I counted the featured NPCs and it broke down to 14 female, 17 male, 1 nonbinary), but that representation is laced with landmines of problematic tropes. 

There are three separate female characters who have rape as part of their backstory. Two of them are kuei-jin and it's kind of hard to read their entries and not come away with the conclusion that they went to hell because they were raped. (It doesn't help that the physical description of one of the women includes the line "it is a beauty that brought about her death" - victim blaming in its purest form).

The third character was somehow even more fucked up - a mortal demon hunter who was saved from demons by some sleaze who made her his "child bride" and was subsequently tossed aside and replaced by another child after she reached puberty. Like apparently there was this pedophile demon hunter out there, constantly trafficking young girls and somehow the takeaway here is that the featured NPC was jilted. Sigh. I can't even do it justice. I'll just quote it at length:

Having no family, Xiu Ping asked to travel with the man, who instructed her comprehensively in the arts of the Shih. All Xiu Ping had to do in return was sleep with the old man. While it was not a relationship she sought out, it served its purpose. Xiu Ping acted as Chu Fang's child bride for seven years before he rescued another girl, took her for his child bride, and cut all ties with Xiu Ping.

At the age of twenty-two, with no ties to any community, Xiu Ping became a wandering devil slayer herself. Her rage at Chu Fang's betrayal was enormous, but she channeled it into her fight against unbalanced shen. When she heard that Chu Fang and his concubine had met their demise at the claws of a trio of vicious old Kumo, she rejoiced - and then she avenged their deaths by slaying the spider devils.

Oh, is that the psychology at work here? Xiu Ping "rejoiced" that the "concubine" who replaced her in the coveted "have sex with a pedophile who will dump you with no support as soon as you grow pubes" position was torn apart by demons? Maybe it is. People can be wired strangely. But I need you to take a step back and think about what you're saying for five goddamned seconds. Please.

Then there are two other female characters who weren't raped, but had very rape-adjacent backstories (in one there's a trusted male friend who betrays the character, but it's a utilitarian vampire blood bond and not anything even implied to be sexual, in the other a vampire offers a girl's parents money to sex traffic her, but the offer is just a test and he kills them when they accept, making her his vampire apprentice in a way that seems genuinely respectful, but is still pretty fucked up when you think about it).

All right. I think I need to be done now. I hated this book. I don't like using that word. It's too absolute, and it makes me doubt myself, because there were parts of San Francisco by Night that were perfectly fine. But on the balance? As a whole work? There's no mitigated or ambivalent alternative which also feels honest. 

I hated this book.

Ukss Contribution: Let's be real, Kindred of the East, even at its best, is very close to the line. This book is not Kindred of the East at its best. I'm skipping it.