Sunset Empires (Michael Butler, Dean Shomshak, David Turner, and Guy-Francis Vella) is a historical supplement for Kindred of the East, allowing GMs and players to create campaigns in Asia of Darkness' 19th century. And it is completely above my paygrade as a critic.
The depicted time period is where all the problematic tropes got started - the Orientalism, the colonialism, the cultural appropriation . . . like maybe there were misunderstandings and unneccessary exoticism before the Early Modern Era, but this time, with the East India Company and the Opium Wars and Admiral Perry's gunboat diplomacy, that's when this shit turned septic. The premise of the book is that we're going to go back to the early days of modern racism so we can just sort of act it out with our friends.
But, with that being said, Sunset Empires seems almost, kind of, keeping in mind my own shallow understanding of the subject . . . responsible. I know. I can't believe I'm saying that about a White Wolf book, and a Kindred of the East book at that, but while there were about a dozen individual sentences I could quibble with (mostly those that referred to the region as "the Orient," in a way that wasn't always unambiguously from the point of view of a European NPC), the broad shape of the work is roughly on the right side of history. You are not going to come away from this text with a good impression of European behavior during this time. In fact, the naked greed and incorrigible sordid behavior of the colonizers is a running theme.
It's just, the introduction also has the doozy of a line, "What the British, Germans, Spanish, Portuguese, French and Americans did to this region is unacceptable by modern standards, but any claim Asia was entirely innocent in matters regarding its own fate is too shortsighted - at least for the purposes of this book."
That was straight out the gate, and set my expectations very low, but the subsequent chapters were not as bad as I feared. It wasn't a Killing Streets situation where the narrator was this weird white savior, incidentally insulting and condescending to Asian people in the course of condemning the bad behavior of the modern capitalist order. The editorial voice was actually a bit dry, almost academic. The history sections give the impression that they could have shipped with a bibliography and footnotes.
Which is why I say this book is perhaps above my pay grade. If the events depicted herein actually happened in roughly the way the book says they did, then it comes across as a pretty fair-minded account. You're not going to walk away from this with a great deal of respect for the Qing government, but my understanding is that this isn't necessarily a controversial stance. That even people very friendly to modern China often regard them as the wrong people to meet the moment.
But that's just the problem. My understanding is garbage. Before reading this book, I could probably have given you a rough outline of the Meji Restoration or the founding of Hong Kong, but I wouldn't have been able to go into this much detail. So, if Sunset Empires is as factual as its factual tone would have me believe, then I genuinely learned something. And if it's not factual, I have no fucking way of knowing it. I mean, aside from meticulously vetting its narrative with other sources, that is.
I did check a few things. Like, I'm pretty sure that Hitler did not get the idea for "herrenvolk" from the historical, living in India, Aryans. Wikipedia suggests the term came from a pseudo-scientific misapplication of anthropology that traced the descent of the Germanic peoples to an Indo-European proto-culture.
Also, while I'm not sure how much it would actually affect what the book is trying to do with history, it probably would have been worthwhile to mention that the Taiping Rebellion killed, at a conservative estimate, 20 million people, making it among the deadliest conflicts in human history. Don't get me wrong, it's not like the book is trying to make it sound like a wonderful time or anything, but I just thought it was a significant detail to leave out.
That sort of thing really makes it difficult for me to trust the book. I think I can say with confidence that White Wolf is getting better. If you ranked the Kindred of the East books based on how much they respected the fact that Asia is a real place, with real people, living real lives, with real feelings, then Sunset Empires is definitely at the top. But what is its philosophy of curation?
Like, in the section titled "The Stages of Chinese Life," in the part about "Birth," it says, "Infanticide through drowning is a real threat for female infants and occurs across society's strata."
And look, it happened. And because it happened, it's not wrong to say that it happened. But if I go to my bookshelf and pick up my copy of Victorian Ages Vampire, am I going to find a comparable passage talking about how infant exposure was a common method of dealing with unwanted children prior to the invention of modern medical abortions?
To White Wolf's credit, I'm not actually sure what the answer to that question might be. It is definitely the sort of thing they liked to write about, and even going back to the early 90s, they were never ones to give the Europeans too much credit. So if I went back in a time machine with a copy of Sunset Empires and pointed out the double-standard, I'd probably not have to fight too hard to secure a parity of the grotesque. However, I still have to wonder. Of all the things you could have told me about life in 19th-century China, why did this make the cut? How often are infants of any sort showing up in Vampire: the Masquerade games, and of those, how many are not doomed to get eaten by a creature?
Obviously, it's just a noteworthy behavior that stands out as particularly distant from the presumed values of the book's modern American audience. But also it feeds into certain unflattering narratives about the Chinese people.
It's a tricky issue. I'm not going to say you should whitewash history or anything, but it's a hell of a thing to publish without also mentioning that even in the Qing Dynasty, governments and religious leaders were trying to stop the practice.
Which is sort of where I'm at with Sunset Empires. It is operating at a level above my knowledge of the subject matter. Aside from some incidental choices of wording (like using "fortunately" and "unfortunately" to refer to British victories/losses in India), there is very little that made it into the book that I can say shouldn't be there. But as a company, White Wolf has not exactly earned my trust on these issues, so I also can't be sure that there's nothing missing from the book that should be there.
I guess what I'm saying is that, from where I'm standing, Sunset Empires looks like a decent supplement for playing games set in 19th-century Asia, but you absolutely should not take my word for it.
Ukss Contribution: A mirror belonging to the sun goddess Amateratsu is one of the imperial treasures of Japan. Japanese vampires who tire of their undead existence have been known to sneak into the royal palace and commit suicide by looking into the mirror. That's a pretty cool idea. Just on the right side of the edge where detailed worldbuilding becomes baroque over-thinking.
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