 |
| So, yeah White Wolf released new Vampire rules & an adventure yesterday and people started talking |
 |
| What indeed?? They wondered |
 |
| Across the web fans tried to figure out what White Wolf was getting at with these grotesqueries |
 |
| This, for example, really struck people as strange |
 |
| (Something Awful's site replaces "fucking" with "loving" for some reason) |
 |
| Here's the byline on the adventure. |
 |
| That's the random encounter table in the Vampire adventure. |
 |
| You might recognize this. |
 |
| Oh here's a picture of Kenneth Hite from when we were in Sweden |
 |
| Oh that's something Ken said once. |
 |
| ....about Vornheim |
 |
| Oh and that's Martin's Facebook. He mentioned 2 days ago, his home groups' still playing this campaign. |
 |
| And here's Ken tweeting |
 |
| Another fan theory. |
 |
| Here's Martin being interviewed |
 |
| Here's Martin talking more about what he plays at home |
 |
| Oh here's a picture of me working at the White Wolf Entertainment's table at the Indiecade showcase at the E3 game convention this Wednesday next to a painting I did for them |
 |
| "I think the controversy over what the R in OSR stands for is settled. The R in OSR means "Fuck you, we won." -James Edward Raggi, author of Lamentations of the Flame Princess, May 24, 2017 |
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
20 comments:
"Like D&D but with more baby eating."
Challenge accepted V5! Challenge accepted.
Rorschach is the perfect forum post investigator
He's relentless and insane and in the end nothing he does matters.
I often see you post about the degenerates who are constantly whining about RPGs on Storygames and RPG.net and I wonder, do these people exist irl? I see their crap online plenty enough, but I have yet to ever meet someone as pedantic and fragile as the people who complain about imaginary scenarios in a fantasy game.
I don't know.
I live in a big city in a hyperdiverse neighborhood and always have, I figure maybe folks that conservative just live in middle class suburbs and quiet college towns and so are just really sheltered from real life.
Oh boy... Now I want to run Maze of the Blue Medusa but using Vampire: The Masquerade...
Baby eating goes all the way back to Bram Stoker. The male vampire was into virgins and the female vampires ate babies. Baby eating is classic vampire shit. How do people into pretending to be vampires not know this?
If your grandmother was wearing shorts and a big hat and was teleported to 17th century puritan village they'd throw rocks at her and call her a Scarlet Woman and tell her she's just wearing that to appease Satan.
Something Awful and RPGnet are basically the same thing--their values about what should be represented in fiction are soooooo conservative that pretty much any scenario invented by a 21st century human seems like some "edgelord" attempt to deliberately provoke them rather than, yknow, when it's hot in the garden you wear shorts, duh?
This applies to your reply on Herman Klang's comment, too - are you so sure they are conservative?
I live in a middle-class neighborhood of a college town. While I am sure they exist somewhere, I have yet to encounter the type of people that make those forums so awful to visit. From the FLGS to coffee shops, I just am not seeing the type who take part in the moral outrage that seems to follow you and the White Wolf saga.
If I could take a guess, it seems to be the polar opposite of what you may suggest: instead of culture-smothering conservatives, I think it may be white knights with a perverted sense of what the SJW movement is.
From what I've seen (admittedly not the whole length and breadth of these type of people, but I digress) it would look as if the outrage stems from a sort of orthodoxy that has grown out of a mutated definition of progressivism common to the aforementioned forums.
As in, the "disgust" over a female scifi version of succubi in Numenera - the hate machine churning at the fact that Monte Cook dare make a female-looking monster that feeds on men.
I may very well be wrong, but from where I stand (which I will admit, is very much on the left) the scene seems to be some sort of response to conservatism that has now looped around and formed it's own sense of what is considered acceptable that is above and beyond what a regular person would get upset about.
Oh they may, like Tipper Gore, Frederic Wertham and Max Norda, THINK they are on the side of progress--
But outrage about real life being reflected in art is always essentially conservative:
http://dndwithpornstars.blogspot.com/2014/09/d30-ways-to-be-worst-critic-in-history.html
That's what I mean - they have formed a sort of liberal conservatism that rails against anything they deem not PC.
There's always been some sort of nerd-game drama associated with the hobby, but you'd never have guessed it would reach where we are today. 2017 is weird.
Oh it was extraordinarily easy to predict--as I pointed out, every period of artistic expansion in any medium is accompanied by people who want to dial back the clock under the cover of protecting people from the "danger" posed by things that are happening in imaginary pictures.
Prudes are gonna prude.
1. My grandmother is not about to wear shorts.
2. Those 17th century puritans would have understood that vampires eat babies though.
My issue is not with the prudishness. People are going to be prudish. They can play prudish games. My problem is when people are ignorant about shit they should know about. The brides of Dracula ate babies. It is well established in the canon that vampires eat babies. This is not a scenario invented by a 21st century human. This shit is deeply rooted in folklore.
Ok. Here is my real problem with this whole baby eating thing. When I started playing rpgs I learned all sorts of random shit. I learned about old weapons. How governing a village worked in feudal times. What torch light is like. Who Jack Vance is. Who Michael Moorcock is. What Hawkwind sounds like. How public conceptions of elves changed post TOlkien. Blah blah blah.
THese people are into vampire games and they don't even know about baby eating as a way of illustrating the rejection of the birth life death cycle/ renunciation of motherhood/ all sorts of other good symbolic shit in vampire folklore/literature.
To me its not the prudishness but the lack of curiosity. rpgs are a gateway to fonts of useless knowledge.
Imagine if they had said something like, "the problem i have with this version of Vampire is that it draws too much from older ideas. We are no longer trying to simulate a secret cabal of abominations of nature whose selfishness is so strong that it perverts the laws of nature, we really want to draw on Buffy the Vampire slayer and album covers of goth bands. Eating babies is vulgar not because it doesn't have its place in the canon but because our vampires are symbols of escape from mortal concerns not complete subjugation to and perversion of the drive to survive/pre scientific ignorance."
You know something nice and pretentious like that. I love shit like that.
"Or fuck this weird victorian sex shit, we are into weird prudish twilight shit"
You know something that addresses their issues without implicit lies about the source material. I have been drinking.
Everyone has their hill I suppose
People being prudish is the reason me and other adult industry people can't, for instance, use PayPal
People not being knowledgeable enough about literary history has led to exactly zero civil rights violations i'm aware of, so it's a much less urgent issue for me
YES - this is my new dream too
I clicked on the link, saw the RPG.net border and eyebrows went up. Saw the thread mentioned and started to laugh. Saw Rorschach and fucking lost it laughing. Nicely done.
Careful you don't mess with these laurels if you sit on them!
"To me its not the prudishness but the lack of curiosity. rpgs are a gateway to fonts of useless knowledge."
Useless knowledge is not what everyone is after. Some people want to change the (real) world. Some people want to change it and make better and some, make it worse.
Knowing or recalling the brides ate babies won't help them change the world.
Of course it will, Jorge, the study of what affects people in art (and how and which) is the study of human nature.And only with that knowledge can the world be changed.
There is no such thing as useless knowledge where humans are concerned.
Post a Comment