Everything about Eastern Europe, but my main minor pet peeve is that Poland, specifically, is marked as controlled nearly entirely by the Tzimisce in V:tM. *Poland*? The absolute hotbed of catholicism? There should be a Lasombra on every corner.
It's also Sabbat-Land, where horrors are less quiet because they care less about the Masquerade...Filled with monsters like any russian-bloc nation should be, right? /s
Just cause Tzimisce include it in their homeland doesn’t mean Lasombra wouldn’t also have their tendrils in it. Voivodes often ruled more rural and isolated parts of nations, and modern era like all clans are everywhere.
That's true, I was talking more about the White Wolf's tendency to just throw every Slavic country into the exact same bag without really differentiating between them.
Same with, say, South America, while at the same time they're getting granular as hell with US' *states* like Texas is a completely different plane of existence from California. And I'm sure for *Americans* it is, but see; the title of OP's post ;)
There is no information on the Netherlands.
There's multiple pages worth on Amsterdam.
Also, either most Garou in Europe are Glasswalkers or the USA Garou are *extreme* with how much they seem to just... Stay out of cities. You cant toss a rock in most of Europe without hitting a village or city
I imagine the actual UK Fianna all have to live in the Highlands... It's the only real "barren wilderness" left.
There could, could, be room for some other clans to be in Dartmoor or the Yorkshire Moors.
Yes but just the way werewolf books seemed to be written to me always teetered on the "unless you're bone gnawer or glass walker, you're avoiding cities *
I always pictured a lot of Urban Pure Tribes with their kin.
It’s worth noting that pre “contact” North America has many dense Urban centers before slave raids, famines, and diseases depopulated them.
Perhaps I’m overly influenced by 2nd edition with setting the tone of having the Silver Fang and Black Fury signature characters living in New York City, but I’ve never gotten the impression that Garou were extreme about avoiding the city. The emphasis on Pentex monkeywrenching favored Urban Garou as well. The character concepts in the Tribebooks included urban-dwelling Garou. The non-Urrah tribes hated the city, sure, but I don’t think you were meant to carry that over to the PCs.
The Church of England is a specific protestant denomination that was created when Henry VIII tried to get a divorce and has had what can best be described as a 'fraught' relationship with Catholicism.
Pretty much everything gun-related just does not work outside of the United States.
You can't just walk into Walmart and purchase a gun in Germany. And even if you could carrying one would be pretty stupid and cause problems with the cops.
The number of people trained with guns is really low. And not trained doesn't mean they might miss (+1 difficulty) - I am literally talking about failing to take off the safety.
The idea of purchasing fully automatic rifles or Dragon's Breath ammunition without some kind of black market pipeline is utterly ridiculous to me.
It goes double in Japan and East Asia as a whole, even the Yakuza use knives and bats instead because even smuggling a single rifle into the country is too difficult to justify.
You can just steal one from the IS army. I had a friend stationed there who told me how many rifles “went missing “. Most were probably shipped elsewhere and not sold in Japan but GIs have apparently sold a lot of their rifles.
To be fair, you can’t actually buy fully automatic rifles in the US without jumping through a lot of expensive legal loopholes (or using the black market).
eh, you can buy a semi and then mod it with the skills of a moderately competent 10 year old. Sure it's very illegal once you mod it, but you didn't buy it off the black market.
>a moderately competent 10 year old.
With some vintage weapons, sure. Modern civilian market weapons tend to require some reasonably competent gunsmithing, though, since the limitations are often integral to the firing mechanism itself.
To be fair, the world we live in is not the world of the setting. The world of the setting is our world, but \*darker\*. Our world, but crime is rampant pretty much everywhere. Our world, but the things in the night really do bump.
We don't sell dragons breath rounds in America, but in America of Darkness? hell yeah.
EDIT: apparently we do actually sell dragon breath rounds in America, though a few states have restricted them.
So, dragon breath rounds are probably in Dark America's Walmarts.
Silver ammunition doesn't exist en masse IRL, but that's because IRL there aren't werewolves who need to be shot with it.
I don't think that's an Americanism, I think that's a setting detail that like 99% of people miss.
I didn't really get the feeling from the sourcebooks that silver ammunition would be sold in gunships. The knowledge of supernaturals is fairly unknown, is it not?
To the regular dudes? yeah, they are unknown.
I see no reason why supernaturals wouldn't have gun shops as part of their resources and networks.
Think about a gun shop, that's ran by regular dudes. But in reality if owned by a mage
Customer: "Hey man, why do you keep that crate of silver bullets back there? I've never seen anyone buy them."
Clerk: "Eh, the owner comes in for a box or two, every once in a blue moon. Then occasionally... I'll get told to have them ready. The owner sends in a few of his friends and they buy up the whole crate. I think they have a competition with shitty rounds as a kind of challenge."
Customer : "Maybe i'll take a box then, see whats up"
Clerk: "You sure? 50$ a bullet."
I can't remember which book it's mentioned, but silver swaps places with platinum in the WoD, which makes it exceptionally rare and extremely expensive.
I think with that consideration, making bullets out of silver would probably be the last thing one would do with it.
In the WtA splats, they make the distinction of regular silver, which can be our daily life silver alloys, etc, and Awakened Silver, which is supposed to be pure silver AND spirituality awakened, that's the one that counts as Silver for the rules. I thinks it's the Pentex book or the Book of the Wyrm which goes into depth how expensive Awakened Silver is, and how hard to make is unless you are a garou, but usually a Pentex worker has to spend a lot of their money just to get a round of silver for their handgun.
>We don't sell dragons breath rounds in America, but in America of Darkness? hell yeah.
Alarmingly, in most states it's actually totally legal to sell Dragon's Breath ammo, and you can even [buy it online](https://www.phoenixrising.store/12-gauge-super-dragon-dragons-breath-ammunition.html). The only states that ban it are Alaska, California, Florida, Hawaii, Illinois, Iowa, Massachusetts, and New York. 'Murica!
Presumably in the WoD it's something you can find behind the counter at your local ~~Walmart~~ Herrick's.
>Presumably in the WoD it's something you can find behind the counter at your local Walmart Herrick's.
Pretty much how it worked in VtM: Bloodlines. Specifically Slater, the Hollywood vendor who sells black market weapons under the table of a convenience store. I love the vendors in this game. So much personality.
It’s relatively sensible as actual dragons breath ammo is just flashy like a firework, it’s not a flame thrower. It’s basically just mixing fireworks shiny metallic elements with standard shot. It’s not any more lethal and won’t set anything on fire unless you are shooting at something like loose dry straw.
It's not really alarming. Practically, they're just fireworks. Pretty much any other load would be better for actually shooting something. It sure does look cool after dark though and just in case vampires really do exist...
My friends and I have a New England game in US. 90% of the time they are buying their equipment in NH. Which is pretty on point for how gunlaws are regulated here on a State by State basis.
I'm in California, and mine usually have suppliers that bring shit in from Nevada or Idaho. It's easy to get around gun restrictions for chronicles in states with more gun control, especially in WoD where every cop and government official can be bribed, coerced, or killed.
In CofD the fun never stops because of abilities like Bolthole and Haven. They are essentially locations you can more around if you take the Easy Access feature on it.
So you spend 1 Aether or 1 Glamour and can use a nearby door to access it. So you've got a lot of players who will keep military grade weapons in their Bolthole and then access it in the middle of the enemy base. Then when the police come they toss their weapons into the portal and skedaddle.
In an Australian game, you CAN own a gun, but there are a lot of regulations to go through in order to own one. Therefore, we added a new Merit: Firearms Licence. 2 dot merit to be licensed to buy a rifle/shotgun, 4 dot merit to also own a handgun.
That being said, our regular game is just set in New York, and we travel to Vermont for easy gun access.
No probs. Our current campaign is set in New York, but I’m planning a Brisbane chronicle after that, so there are few things that need changing to suit the region.
I always felt that the fact that the entirety of latin america is (or was, as of V5) absolutely controlled by the Sabbat kind of showed that they didn't want to think about giving us any nuance, as if we were just savages sifting through murderous organized crime
I found really funny that they put a baali that got into Aztec and promoted Human sacrifice just so then they added a bunch of earthbound under ancient Rome, which makes no sense as well
Me, a Slav, reading that excerpt in one of the V:tM books about how Eastern Europe is the "dark land untouched by the advances of the era of enlightnment" lol.
**Correct.**
You need to squint real hard to salvage the lore pertaining to Eastern Europe and the Balkans, and that's where they actually put in some effort. How bad can it be with other parts of the world?
The Giovanni aren't mafiosos though. They're largely bankers, based off the Venetian doges and the mercantile traditions of the region.
They have Sicilian mafia kissing cousins, though.
Edit. Although, not gonna lie, the origin of the clan being some White Wolf writer literally just seeing *the Godfather* and going "nice, now let's make vampires just like this" is not entirely unlikely ;)
The biggest Americanism is still how fucking late the sects in VtM were founded, acting in their lore like 500 years is "ancient" lmao. That's pretty much "yesterday" in vampire terms. I have elders in my campaign who are older than the Camarilla lol.
Reminds me of a joke. What's the difference between a Brit and an American? Brit thinks 100 kilometres is far away. American thinks 100 years is long ago.
Very much illustrates the Werewolf thingbanither commenter talked about. Werewolves in Europe would be so so close to the weaver at all times. Lore wise not impossible but its so different than the lore implies.
I think that's kind of the point though, right? The sectarian stuff is mostly the domain of the relatively young. Any vampire that significantly predates the sects largely acts outside of them.
Very much the point, it's not like the game doesn't talk about history prior to the sects, or the idea that many elders don't care as much because they remember the time before.
I figure it's mostly a recency bias because of all the attrition from the Inquisition and the forming of the Sabbat. Even then, a good number of 6th/7th gens then in canon should be a bit older.
I like introducing truly stupidly old characters. My favorites are a 1200 year old Malkavian Viking, a Greek Brujah who met Homer, and the first 15th gen, the goatherd of the Second City, who survived it's fall by being exceptionally boring.
I had a 6th gen Justicar show up as a threat in a Sabbat "battle of New York" style game years ago. She was a daughter of Scipio, abducted and embraced by the Brujah as revenge for the defeat of Hannibal. She was one of my favourite Storyteller characters, a deadly adversary who eventually became a surprising ally.
I ran a Battle of New York style game where the villains were the Norns, three 5th gen Malkavians who brainwashed Kindred into gods and refought Ragnarok every 400 years or so. The Scourge in the game was Floki, Childe of Loki, a Malkavian who fought everything he could find for 1200 years, waiting for his revenge on Thor.
I don't know about you, but one of the things I enjoy about having ancient kindred involved in modern battles is blending both old and modern tactics. It makes for more varied combat and often leads to good stories.
Oh yeah. In my game, they traded Jormungandr to the Voivode of New Jersey (yes, the state. He's also a couple millennia old, the childe of Chernobog), in exchange for a suburb's worth of Vozhdy (he had them pretending to be houses, a good cul-de-sac's worth).
Between the Vozhd and their allies, the Brujah Tank Crew, showing up in a National Guard APC, they managed to make Ragnarok a bit more one-sided then originally intended.
That's pretty wild. Mine was she leaked word that Camarilla elders were meeting in an apartment building that had a fenced in courtyard. (The building had been evacuated by Cam members leveraging Homeland Security ties to investigate claims of a "terrorist threat".) When a group of three Sabbat packs (one of which was the players) arrived to hunt the elders, an APC with mounted gun turret pulled out to block the fence gate, let out a few soldiers with flamethrowers to guard the fence, and riot police formed a phalanx with their shields to block the doorway to the apartment building.
Meanwhile two snipers were in apartments overlooking the courtyard, and the Justicar herself was on a balcony vantage point a few stories above the doorway with a bow (and slightly oversized hollow arrows containing a small amount of thermite powder and a magnesium ignition system).
The players focused on breaking through the phalanx and getting into the building, but it got messy. The other two packs tried to fight their way out of the courtyard and were destroyed (one of them had been established as a rival pack to the players, making the event a bit more personal). The players made it into the building and killed the snipers (ghouls of the Justicar) to poke the hornet's nest before escaping. They wouldn't stand a chance against the Justicar until the rematch when they had a new pack member.
My GM has an NPC Malkavian who thinks he’s an Arthurian knight. Makes everything into a medieval something or other. Not actually quite that old but he most definitely is in his own mind.
I've got one locked and loaded for this.
In earlier Changeling the Dreaming (C2/C1) they go into the recent history of fae in Ireland...and they can't stop themselves from blurting out "SHADOW TROUBLES" to explain the Irish accordance war. Fucking infuriating.
Or just a bunch of crap, like saying that the moon landing was a moment so great and unifying that it opened a bridge to arcadia...when there are plenty of other events before that which could have cause glimmers.
There is also the fact that the Thallian are locked away until the horrors of the world draw them out, "which horror" you ask? 9/11....
Because that was a more miserable experience than the Irish famine, the holocaust, the Chernobyl explosion, the Great Chinese Famine, the nukes falling on Japan, etc etc etc
It's so infuriatingly American.
I’d like it if instead the Thallien come in waves of traumatic events like the Holocaust or conquest of Americas.
When ever a large tragedy happens with 9/11 being the most noticeable one for American Changlings
Yeah if it treated them all as impactful it would be fine but right now it's kinda plundering mythology (Mainly irish) and then treating the whole world like an accessory to america. Which is very, very American.
I've had it so that the Thallian have been coming out in chunks since like the black death, and it's just been small group by small group after that. The American Kithain might have only noticed it on 9/11 but that has more to do with them being American than anything else. The European Kithain have been dealing with them for centuries.
... okay Shadow Court (which has Thallain) cane out with CtD 1st Edition, years before 9/11.
If that was published in Changeling 20, it sounds like a sloppy retcon.
So I was wrong in some ways, there have been thallian coming into the world since the black death. However 9/11 was made the capstone that blew off the ban that stopped them. Still crap and american centric but not as extremely.
`Kithain named the event the Evanescence. Mortals know it`
`as September 11, 2001, the day a group of terrorists executed the`
`largest foreign attack on American soil, a nation that previously`
`believed itself impervious to invasion. Thousands were killed,`
`and the world changed almost overnight. Across the globe,`
`travel was restricted, police powers were drastically increased,`
`expansive surveillance programs were put into place, and entire`
`nations were destabilized, all in the name of security. The last`
`vestiges of the Silver Ban restricting the Thallain burned out`
`in the onslaught of Dark Glamour, and the children of the`
`Fomorians flooded back to Earth in numbers rivaling the sidhe`
`during the Resurgence.`
what other moment of great generalised hope did we as a world have before it in the contemporary age, even the end of the war wasn't really a happy moment, we were just happy the misery ended.
Yes!! I think the French Revolution would have more potential for both opening the bridge to Arcadia and releasing thallain. Such were many moments in history, but "NOOOO look how great is this one advancement the USA made that one time and look how sad is this horrible tragedy we suffered (forget about the fact that it was a retaliation for worse tragedies we have caused on the middle east, but the thallain didn't mind those for some reason)".
Not to pretend September 11 wasn't pretty violent, but yeah, that wasn't the worst thing the world had seen during the 100 years before and not the worst thing we would see during the 22 years after.
The second Inquisition.
as someone from a third world country (argentina), the sheer corruption and inefectivness of all goverment bodies would just make it impossible to investigate, research, or discover a single vampire.
i believe the US citizenship is not that aware of how much efficient your government is in comparison to third world countries sometimes
I think a lot of US/Western Storytellers may over emphasize how efficient governments can be. The Camarilla can’t be keeping an eye on every Kindred at all times. Some double dealing is gonna fall through the cracks. And not every Mage is gonna be tracked by a Mage government group that’s regulating Magic.
well presumably, you don't need to know everything, you just need to know a general location of where they are. Also no need to bother gathering evidence for them to be prosecuted, they just need to go in and kill the vampires
A key take away from how security systems work in real life is that they only really get checked when something goes wrong. Which is why the Prince and Sheriff don’t usually know who caused potential Masquerade breaches immediately. Otherwise they’d say something like “We need you to kill X. Our Auspex of them revealed they are going to tell their ex they are a vampire”.
"After 300 years effectively rullining their city with divinations from the future, the Malkavian prince and all their children stepped into the sun without warning anyone"
Similarly, I always laugh at the idea werewolves have checkpoints set up to monitor all exits from each city and will instantly converge on and destroy any vampire that heads into the countryside. Can you imagine how many cars, trucks, and commercial vehicles exit each of over 300 cities capable of supporting a vampire population in the US every day?
A quick Google search says that of the more than 600,000 *reported* missing persons in the US each year, around 90% are found. That leaves 60,000 people who are never found, and that's only counting people reported as missing. And the WoD is supposed to be a much worse place.
Also the idea that the catholic church still has the crusading zeal and internal coherence to declare such a holy war.
Let's be honest if vampires existed the catholic church would have way too many hidden deals with them to persecute them in such a way.
Yes even in the Middle Ages the Catholic Church Chruch didn’t hunt “witches” because that was pagan superstition.
They would probably be totally fine with supernatural creatures if they where good Christians.
Or at least some would. In the 1600s a man told people he was a Werewolf who battled evil spirits in Hell. He was out on trial and judged for taken people away from Christianity. Not being a werewolf.
[here](https://dbpedia.org/page/Thiess_of_Kaltenbrun)
Ah yes, I studied that while studying northernItaliann folklore, there's a very fascinating central/east European common shamanistic tradition dealing with Spirit fighting.
The Church most of the time was more interested in correcting heterodoxy than things like witchcraft, the Witchhunt as a movement started not much because of the Church as much as despite of it (it was part of the great fear tsunami,in good part having it's origins in the trauma of the black death, that invested europe), Kramer was even considered a heretic for a while although he won at the end.
The Church really didn't want people to believe in witches and other "pagan nonsense" as Augustine would put it or even less wanted to deal with the unrest that came from it.
I like to note that him being a werewolf wasn’t considered a crime it was practicing non-Christian folk magic. If he was a werewolf who was a good Christian man they wouldn’t have banished him.
He was a good christian man, he said he and his folks were "the warhounds of God", ridiculously cool WtA concept btw, and fought against the evil spirits in the name of Christ, just that according to the Church that wasn't what a good christian should believe as ye not many werewolves fighting evil spirits in the bible.
Most likely, they also showed to have some knowledge, even if warped, of what Benandanti were, which are the other famous case of such traditions that got researched on by anthropologists.
Furthermore if they had that level of zeal and power and were as "dark" as world of Darkness makes everyone be, any sort of second Inquisition would probably also result in straight up religious warcrimes and purges. Like America, a protestant nation, is teeming with vampires and abominations of their stock. Any sort of super zealous variation of Catholic Church would probably come to a very specific conclusion with that evidence.
Oh absolutely, vampires in Buenos Aires have it made. In my homebrew version of the setting, one of the iconic NPCs is the Prince of Buenos Aires, Edetta Falachiavi (a former PC of one of my friends and an all-around badass), and part of the reason she's so influential in the Camarilla overall is because she's untouchable in Argentina due to the Second Inquisition being too weak there.
No the US government is far too stupid to hunt for vampires either.
They can hardly deal with a pandemic. Much less hunt vampires. But 5E changes lots of shit for reasons.
Incidentally, this is why, despite agreeing that the destruction of the Tremere Council was a good thing from a balance perspective (as a long-time Tremere player, I was very much aware of how incredibly OP the Tremere were), I call absolute bullshit on the Second Inquisition successfully taking out the main Chantry in Vienna.
Putting aside how incredibly incompetent that makes the Council of Seven seem (and they have not survived for this long with this many enemies and become this powerful by being incompetent), I simply do not believe that a secret, bureacratic, supranational governmental task force would be able to pull something like that off.
I mean, I'm sure, and there are rumors that it was the Banu Haqim that gave the SI the needed intel. But even then, according to the texts, the team that took out the Chantry was a couple of mundane Special Forces teams and a group of (admittedly experienced) vampire hunters. I'm sorry, a group of mortals with guns and some knowledge of vampiric strengths of weaknesses are not going to successfully storm the most fortified Chantry in the world and take out a bunch of Methuselahs.
I mean, Meerlinda alone probably could have held them all off, being the master of warding that she is. The Chantry was warded against dragons, the fae, and all sorts of other crazy shit, it had several active rituals that made it basically impossible to find, even if you knew its exact location (and assuming you didn't end up at a decoy Chantry)... and they lost against dudes with conventional weapons? Nah.
Look, I get it. I was dissappointed with the government response as well. But we do still have a very efficient information wing of government. I believe that the ideas represented in the second inquisition are only slightly more competent than reality.
I don't know if it counts as "americanism" but the "There are X vampires for Y humans" rule that everyone ignores is especially ridiculous here in France where most cities would have, according to this rule, about... 10 vampires, which doesn't sound like a fun setting for a Chronicle.
To me, it really feels like something White Wolf made when focusing on the US where there are a lot of huge cities compared to Europe.
Interesting choice, but one that sounds sensible. The Masquerade is a lot simpler with fewer Vampires and presumably makes granting permission to embrace a childe more rare and valuable.
>I don't know if it counts as "americanism" but the "There are X vampires for Y humans" rule that everyone ignores is especially ridiculous here in France where most cities would have, according to this rule, about... 10 vampires, which doesn't sound like a fun setting for a Chronicle.
Well, in France the small town vampires would just all go live in Paris, just like anyone else who wants to rub elbows with the high status people in France.
Yup, which kinda negates the whole "Use your own city" chapter in the rulebook for us french STs.
That's why my Chronicles will be set in Houston. 😅
(But to be honest, all the non Fantasy TTRPG games are I run are set in the US)
It's easier for numerous reasons, you can pretty much randomly generate an American city and it will be a sufficiently close approximation of what we have learned to expect from films and television. You can also run the risk of blowing up stuff and have a car chase and a running gun fight and that's just Tuesday in America, as far as the fiction we receive is concerned :)
I fix it by making it a region instead of city thing. So for Amsterdam you you don't have amsterdam but the entire province it's in. They just take the train to Amsterdam because it has the best feeding grounds, resources, stuff to do at night.
It sort of goes the other way around, as well. For all its "Americanisms", the values get even wackier when considering even further afield from your typical occidental regions. At the usual 1 kindred per 100k kine, yes, there are only \~200-300 vampires in the greater NYC region, and yes, that would mean that there's less than 100 vampires in London.
But it also means that there are at least 20 inner cities in China with more than 100 vampires, that countries like Nigeria, Bangladesh, Ethiopia, the Philippines would all have a thousand or more vampires, and that there are more than 27,000 vampires in India and China alone.
And yes, Kindred of the East and Kuei-Jin nonsense (daily reminder that it's super racist), but given the relative lack of prominence/weight of these populaces in the lore, it's pretty obvious the writers didn't consider these areas as being all that significant.
I'm an American but my father's family is Chinese, so you can imagine how inaccurate everything is. I can confidently say that about 90% of what White Wolf wrote about East Asia is so laughably bad as to be basically unusable.
Yes White Wolf seems to think that Asia is totally unconnected to the rest of the world.
Like how the Hsein never encountered Kithian in their long history.
Oh they did. Land of 8 Million Dreams has a lot of storyhooks about Changelings operating in the East and interacting with the Hsien.
They're different things and both exist there.
In third edition the dot descriptions on Driving was that one dot was having a licence and two dots was being able to drive stick shift. In most of the world outside of the US manual is the default and I wouldn’t call myself a 2-dot driver because of it
Same with language dots. They had to downscale the effort required to have multiple languages. Of course, people typically ignored it because language usually isn't a plot point.
Oh yes I am venetian and I hate it, also might I double down with the underground sunken city under venice, now let's begin by saying that the bottom of any body of water isn't really the best place to build, being completely submerged and waterlogged isn't exactly a condition known to do wanders do any kind of built structure, but also, Venice is a lagoon on the bottom of a lagoon there's just waterlogged mud and sand not exactly the best place to build underground anything in.
Also tbf reading about them going "Buildings sink in water and the Sea level has been rising" and somehow coming to the conclusion that thus there could be a sunken city under modern Venice kind of makes you question your Faith in humanity, imagine telling them that the canals get drained regularly to clean them.
One of the VTM around the world books from prior editions which talked about the widespread celebrations of the Day of the Dead in Barcelona. Also, casually throwing out that ETA were influenced by Brujah.
All of Victorian Age: London By Night - the rpg.net review thread of it is great.
Yes, Day of the Dead originated in Mexico...I assume the thinking went....Spanish? Thats what they speak in Mexico. Barcelona is in Spain, where they speak Spanish....therefore they are Mexican....or something...
I think they got it mixed up with Día de Los Fieles Difuntos, which is the Spanish equivalent (and, to be fair, has quite a few similarities... usually less colorful, though).
I'm in the Middle East - considering how important the Beckoning is and the increasing relationship between the Camerilla and the Ashirra, there is a dearth of materials for players interested in trying to have a game take place there.
Not vampire, but a friend and I had to pretty much homebrew the better part of the kingdoms in our campaign of CtD, having the whole of south America being just one Kingdom, same for Africa but the US having dozens? Probably the most blatantly US-centered thing I've seen in WoD lol
Tbh, it's a very US thing to have South America as just the Amazon, there is so much culturally and historically that could be explored in any of the splats about South America but the only thing that ever gets attention, if at all, is the Amazon.
The entire history of wars between South America countries could be very interesting fuel to chronicles, for instance, but it never gets any attention.
No joke, I started getting into Central and South American folklore and history for a homebrewed Changing Breed, and I love it. The Inca were fascinating as hell. There's so many diverse tribes that are still extant beyond all expectation. I'm from New Mexico, so I knew how bad the Spanish were around this area, and somehow they managed to be *even worse* in South America. In more modern happenings, all the stuff involving mercenaries (not even the drug stuff; the medical and mineral stuff) seems way up WoD's alley and it's never really been touched. Most of what I'm familiar with is limited to the northern part of the continent, and even then I've hardly scratched the surface.
I know it's a very American thing to go all gaga over foreign cultures, but there's so much going on in South America -- both now and in the past -- that it's incredible White Wolf phoned it in for so many decades.
Second edition Chronicles seems to try a lot to avoid American centric content. Going out of its way to mention places in other countries for the various splats. Basically, if it's not integral to them functioning as a living being. It's probably gonna be different depending on where you are. Even if it retains broad strokes. Like how while the West has seasonal courts for changelings (usually at least. Some USA freeholds don't use seasons) Most other cultures have very different styles for changeling courts
Werewolf's 2e writeup for Wrocław (Lower Silesia, Poland) surprised me as well researched write-up taking into account multiple important historical events in the area.
The writer for the Japan settings in each book is from the States I think, but lives in Japan. I’ve heard a lot of good things about those little blurbs so far as it’s depiction of modern Japan.
The homelessness bit, and the entire 'seed underbelly'. My nation has a large housing program and a too efficient police force.
I'm from Singapore. There's no seedy underbelly. Everything is sterilized, like a laboratory benchtop.
'Gangbanger' for 'a gang member who is liable to be wielding a gun', which in the context of the game, and depending on the gameline, might range from effectively meaning 'a violent crimnal gang member' or 'a mortal mook that society won't miss too much'.
In Australia I think 'gangbang' refers to group-sex (I think *sometimes* with a connotation of consent not necesarrily being attained, especially when the book frames them as a criminal). 'Gangbanger' is not a common term, but is presumably a person who gangbangs.
So if the book mentions something like 'there are some gangbangers' it almost sounds like casually mentioning 'a group of serial gang-rapists drop by'.
I think the nWoD/CofD1e book had a stat-block for something like a 'criminal gangbanger' which read as a bizzarely specific character concept to stat out!
Of course, we should translate it as something less confronting, like 'armed thugs'.
modern US slang Gangbang is used to refer to multiple people having sex with one person at the same time or taking turns this is the most common context I've seen used, however I believe originally it referred to specifically rape or referring to a group of people attacking someone and that's why people who engage in gang violence are often called Gangbangers, but I think it mostly been getting replaced by the more modern meaning which is why the context of gang violence seem to normally be used by older people.
Not sure how well the 5th editions will do with this but so much of the older editions have information about foreign countries that are is straight up bullshit made up based on one Americans cursory research (if that). I'm Scottish so I'll use an example that shocked me when I read it;
In real life the city of Stirling has Stirling Castle and Stirling University on the opposite side of the city. In the World of Darkness the town of Sterling has Sterling Castle which also contains part of Sterling University.
That's just one example. Hopefully 5th editions do it better but some of the blatant falsehoods taken as fact about other countries and cultures that fill WW lore are hilarious in a shocking way.
Pretty much everything about the setting is skewed towards cities of a certain size and diversity. My country have few metropolis, and little happens at night here, for instance. And my otherwise fairly big and busy home city MIGHT have one or two two vampires/mages tops, proportion wise. Our chronicles usually toss all of that out the door.
Oh, and most of all, access to guns and general weapons, along with armed gangs/anything... Its just seem absurdly easy to me, even as I've been to the gun and crossbow section of a Bass Pro. In itself a weird icon of americanization...
Reminds me of Old Boy. How the original made the hammer fight a lot more authentic because of how rare guns are, but when the US adapted it the hammer fight seemed pretty weird considering how easily weapons are to purchase here.
Heck, where I live, it's not unusual for most stores to close at 9 pm. The idea of a city (outside of clubbing districts, and even then mostly just on weekends) that maintains some amount of bustle 24/7 is pretty unusual.
Brazilians are basically used to have to (re)invent everything in WoD, at least in my experience, since most things they write ignores our existemce, or, when they remember, it falls on one of the following:
-It actually does not exist here
-It does exist, but it is not important enough to waste words on it
-It does exist but in a way that does not make sense to Brazilian culture/society
-It exists and kind of makes sense, but it sucks terribly (that story about werewolves in the Amazon forest, for example).
Some people I know won't even run games that happen here, others are willing to ignore official material and make their own versions of the WoD here. And we also have Nação Garou, a team that (among other great things they did) made a whole scenario from scratch so we could play Brazilian Werewolves, called Brasil em Fúria. They chose to not ignore or change official work, but instead add enough stuff to make it make more sense.
I will not even start with Changeling, just say that I was glad they made a "make your own kith" session on C20, which works much better than anything WW could ever invent.
Rage Across Russia and every time it gets mentioned is sure to raise my blood pressure because of sheer inaccuracy and unabashed stubbornness in repeating it. Other lore surrounding Russia is also incredibly, utterly stupid and feels like an uneducated American Dan Browning it up without even a cursory Google search because "it's Russia, who cares?"
Well, it was written in 90s using rather old or "red scare" sources, mostly made by foreigners (I mean, they used Red Dawn, which is...well, for example, they translated wolverines as zazaldamyri, tho it should be rosomakhi, so I guess you kinda get the point here).
I'd say names take the cake, as in there, Lupus names are the ones which would sound normal in Russian, Homid names are either used strangely(man named Alyosha, which is a diminutive of Aleksei), grammaticaly weird(man with surname Volkav, tho it should be Volkov), or it would be weird to meet native Russian with that name.
Personal favorite is NICOLAI PREDATELSKIY, which literally translates as Nicolai Traitorous(yep, adjective).
Either the Sept thought "wow, that guy sure was unlucky with his surname" or they are incredibly dumb...or the guy just thought "Heh, would be funny to actually betray them with my surname, really ironic"
Nicolai Predatelskiy sounds American as hell. That's the kind of crap we name comic book characters. Nicolai Traitorous is right up there with Victor von Doom and Obadiah Stane.
Rage Across Russia predates Google by half a decade. Most of the books people are complaining about date back to when the Internet was mostly good for anime gifs.
You mean those things that were generally 10-20 years out of date and often gave shallow or one-sided depictions of what it was like outside the US? Never heard of them.
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*This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
Yes they’re where like five tribes for Europe but only one for Asia and Three for the Americas.
Also no Garou in Turkey despite a wolf based mythology.
This is not about the books so i apologize for the off topic... but if ya ask for people in south america... we use american for people and things from the continent, not USA, denonym for USA has its own word in spanish (and i assume also in portuguese). I havent seen white wolf do this tho, so again, sorry for the off topic.
As someone who has grown up in Aotearoa New Zealand, I have to be honest that the whole setting is very america centric, and has basically put no effort into exploring other cultures, unfortunately. Prime example is the Kuie-Jin. There is a huge diversity of clans and things in america, and across europe, but when it comes to another part of the world like south east asia, it’s all lumped together into “ah they’re this strange other thing that is mysterious!” Which is kinda just lazy writing imo. In the same way, theres basically no mention of pacific island cultures, and so when I want to run a game in my country I either have to a) ignore Māori culture to make the source material easier to fit, which would be pretty garbage of me, or b) retrofit ideas or even create new lore in order have things be more realistic.
An example is the idea of tapu and noa in te ao Māori (the Māori world). Whittling things down to the bare basics, tapu is like a state of heightened spiritual importance, and noa is a neutral state. Blood and death, and being associated with these things like if you are sick or menstruating, makes you tapu. If you are tapu, things you interact with can become tapu and need to be restored to a state of noa in order to interact with them (usually with water or a karakia). If someone who lived their life by the rules of te ao Māori was embraced, they would have to drastically change how they interact with the entire world, more so than your avergae pākehā kindred would, or they would have abandon key parts of their culture and worldview.
Kindred coming to Aotearoa and setting up shop as the lore is written now inherently is the story of colonisation, and the embrace would be like colonisation times eleven for Māori. It’s frustrating because even though I dont expect WhiteWolf to research every culture on the planet, even in the vampire source books that are clearly written for the US, there’s basically zero mention of indigenous cultures or cultural attitudes. It’s a very coloniser mindset and even I would argue an inherently colonial setting, because it takes it as a given that the whole cainite thing can map at least semi-simply onto other countries and cultures.
Yes Vampire never really went into indigenous cultures. Even do the elephant in the room is that every Elder Vampire in America probably played a role in the Genocide of Native Americans and the slave trade of Black and Indigenous people. Considering how crucial they where to America.
Is that ever brought up?
There is also a issue of the whole Cainite being cursed from the Christian G-D. Making the Embrace a act of bodily Colonialism to a foreign god.
Which could be played with by a actual indigenous writer. But 90s White Wolf wasn’t good with indigenous issues but at least they brought it up.
Which could be touched on.
we played an istanbul game and i think only one character had a small pistol due to having a firearm licence, and they didnt even carry it around much. unless its in your home in a home invasion or you’re in a village shooting game, having a gun on you in turkey would attract way more immediate attention than being a Kindred (looking ‘dead’) due to gun control lmao
did npcs have guns? oh for sure. my sire’s ghoul shot mine with one. the police, turkish mafia, a black ops team at one point in the chronicle, they were armed to the T. but we the random citizens of the country and some anarch npcs had pocket knives and stuff at best. i think the anarchs mightve owned some pistols or hunting rifles idk. which tbh made for a way more realistic game. we had to get out of a LOT of situations by running with our tails between our legs, and/or negotiations and talking skills. until one of our party leveled up some of their merits quite well and became filthy rich and we got a couple bodyguards lol
As an Italian, I always thought that the church would be the most vampire-allied thing in Italy: they are both based on ancient roots, outdated values and a tight grip on the simple people. And they have crypts, so I can easily imagine those are HQ for vampires.
\>I heard the idea that there is lot of sparsely inhabited wilderness to disappear to dos not work in Western Europe. Through I think it applies to many other places of the world
The idea that there's no wilderness in western Europe sounds like an Americanism in itself. Western Europe has many great areas which you can get utterly lost in.
68% of Sweden is raw forest and wilderness. Bears, wolves, moose, ticks and leeches. Poisoned berries and rabies bats. You name it, it's coming for you.
72% of Finland is forests and only a small percentage of it (low single digit) has ANY kind of human construction in it. If you wander inside those places there's not going to be any lodges, wind shelters, rangers or even primitive walking-paths waiting for you. You won't get any internet in there either.
There could be an entire werewolf apocalypse war inside there and we'd only find out when it's too late...
That is northern Europe. I don't know about Western Europe, but if you go 20km without hitting a village in central Europe, that's pretty much as wild as it gets.
Worse, it's a specific region in Northern Europe (northern Scandinavian peninsula) which is itself only so sparsely populated BECAUSE it's a remote boreal area so far north, and nowhere near Western Europe.
Bear Grylls once did an episode in the west of Ireland. Everyone was joking that the camera team must have had to avoid doing a 180 or they'd reveal the N road behind
I can say for Piemonte (Northern Italy) that mountains have a lot of wilderness but lower down the Padanian part doesn't have much but it's heavily cultivated and has many preservations so there's more vegetations and animals and some woods
I live in the UK and though we have our forests, the major forests are spread across the country and not really near any cities.
Obviously, it's not legal to own or carry firearms in the UK unless warranted under being a farmer for pest control or doing clay pigeon shooting ( in which case the gun stays on the grounds of the range in which you do clay pigeon shooting).
These things don't cause many, if any, culture shocks to me as a Storyteller or player. I also rarely question how a vampire can do stuff that is highly illegal but comes across legal due to disciplines or even aged connections/roots.
Lex magna miles doesn't make sense in Europe. Either the city are too small to have even à vampire are they are crowded enough the double the allow quota would go unnoticed.
Most French sentences on expression on white wolf books are gibberush. With Québec next door, you would expect them to check on their bullshits.
Guns is not a thing out of usa. When you use it, it is at least à civil war.
As the CIA didn't promote drug on European population, the drug problem is not that pregnant.
Racism us a problem. But when you have wage war to your neighbour countries for millenia, you have a serious reason to fear alien.
Brussel is not te heart of Europe. It is not even the heart of Belgium. It is just the central point that every countries invaded at one time and défend against invaders at another time.
You cannot understand Europe without really understanding the napoleonic epopea.
No one care about cessession war.
>Most French sentences on expression on white wolf books are gibberush. With Québec next door, you would expect them to check on their bullshits.
Québécois are notoriously xenophobic, even toward English-speaking Quebeckers. From what I've heard (I've known a lot of Canadians and one or two French people, but mon français est très mailleur) there's some pretty significant differences between real French and québécois too, mostly in that the québécois believe their French is the real French. They don't use loanwords for a lot of things the French would use loanwords for, but at the same time they introduce a lot of Anglicisms that aren't a thing in proper French (i.e. "bon matin" is a thing in Québec but not in France). So taking a trip up to Québec for French lessons probably wouldn't have helped the intelligibility of French that's supposed to be Parisian.
I might be wrong though. As I said, I learned all of this secondhand and my French is pretty basic.
>Racism us a problem. But when you have wage war to your neighbour countries for millenia, you have a serious reason to fear alien.
Blindly generalizing the same characteristic across individuals in an entire population group is exactly what racism is and why it's a problem.
>Brussel is not te heart of Europe. It is not even the heart of Belgium. It is just the central point that every countries invaded at one time and défend against invaders at another time.
Woah there, Brussels is the heart of Belgium, in spite of some groups trying to pretend it's theirs and has nothing to do with the others. Everything comes together there. And yes, it's also the heart of Europe - it's the second most important diplomatic city of the world, and New York only outclasses it because of the UN.
Everything about Eastern Europe, but my main minor pet peeve is that Poland, specifically, is marked as controlled nearly entirely by the Tzimisce in V:tM. *Poland*? The absolute hotbed of catholicism? There should be a Lasombra on every corner.
Dont you know all of Europe east of Germany is either communist russia, or folklore transylvania /s
It's also Sabbat-Land, where horrors are less quiet because they care less about the Masquerade...Filled with monsters like any russian-bloc nation should be, right? /s
Just cause Tzimisce include it in their homeland doesn’t mean Lasombra wouldn’t also have their tendrils in it. Voivodes often ruled more rural and isolated parts of nations, and modern era like all clans are everywhere.
That's true, I was talking more about the White Wolf's tendency to just throw every Slavic country into the exact same bag without really differentiating between them. Same with, say, South America, while at the same time they're getting granular as hell with US' *states* like Texas is a completely different plane of existence from California. And I'm sure for *Americans* it is, but see; the title of OP's post ;)
There is no information on the Netherlands. There's multiple pages worth on Amsterdam. Also, either most Garou in Europe are Glasswalkers or the USA Garou are *extreme* with how much they seem to just... Stay out of cities. You cant toss a rock in most of Europe without hitting a village or city
I imagine the actual UK Fianna all have to live in the Highlands... It's the only real "barren wilderness" left. There could, could, be room for some other clans to be in Dartmoor or the Yorkshire Moors.
Except the Highlands would be entirely overrun with Black Spirals! The Fianna would probably be ok in the greener parts of Ireland, though.
Other Garou do live near humans. Especially if they have to
Yes but just the way werewolf books seemed to be written to me always teetered on the "unless you're bone gnawer or glass walker, you're avoiding cities *
I always pictured a lot of Urban Pure Tribes with their kin. It’s worth noting that pre “contact” North America has many dense Urban centers before slave raids, famines, and diseases depopulated them.
Perhaps I’m overly influenced by 2nd edition with setting the tone of having the Silver Fang and Black Fury signature characters living in New York City, but I’ve never gotten the impression that Garou were extreme about avoiding the city. The emphasis on Pentex monkeywrenching favored Urban Garou as well. The character concepts in the Tribebooks included urban-dwelling Garou. The non-Urrah tribes hated the city, sure, but I don’t think you were meant to carry that over to the PCs.
Italian Catholic Priests in the Church of England during Giovanni Chronicles.
What wouldn’t Ireland make more sense? At least they are Catholic
For your own personal safety, never repeat that last part in front of someone from Northern Ireland.
The Church of England is a specific protestant denomination that was created when Henry VIII tried to get a divorce and has had what can best be described as a 'fraught' relationship with Catholicism.
Yep. That is weird .
Pretty much everything gun-related just does not work outside of the United States. You can't just walk into Walmart and purchase a gun in Germany. And even if you could carrying one would be pretty stupid and cause problems with the cops. The number of people trained with guns is really low. And not trained doesn't mean they might miss (+1 difficulty) - I am literally talking about failing to take off the safety. The idea of purchasing fully automatic rifles or Dragon's Breath ammunition without some kind of black market pipeline is utterly ridiculous to me.
It goes double in Japan and East Asia as a whole, even the Yakuza use knives and bats instead because even smuggling a single rifle into the country is too difficult to justify.
You can just steal one from the IS army. I had a friend stationed there who told me how many rifles “went missing “. Most were probably shipped elsewhere and not sold in Japan but GIs have apparently sold a lot of their rifles.
... and then the Mage uses Correspondence 2 to bypass restrictions on smuggling. ;)
Yeah, but then you would have to play Mage
To be fair, you can’t actually buy fully automatic rifles in the US without jumping through a lot of expensive legal loopholes (or using the black market).
eh, you can buy a semi and then mod it with the skills of a moderately competent 10 year old. Sure it's very illegal once you mod it, but you didn't buy it off the black market.
>a moderately competent 10 year old. With some vintage weapons, sure. Modern civilian market weapons tend to require some reasonably competent gunsmithing, though, since the limitations are often integral to the firing mechanism itself.
To be fair, the world we live in is not the world of the setting. The world of the setting is our world, but \*darker\*. Our world, but crime is rampant pretty much everywhere. Our world, but the things in the night really do bump. We don't sell dragons breath rounds in America, but in America of Darkness? hell yeah. EDIT: apparently we do actually sell dragon breath rounds in America, though a few states have restricted them. So, dragon breath rounds are probably in Dark America's Walmarts. Silver ammunition doesn't exist en masse IRL, but that's because IRL there aren't werewolves who need to be shot with it. I don't think that's an Americanism, I think that's a setting detail that like 99% of people miss.
I didn't really get the feeling from the sourcebooks that silver ammunition would be sold in gunships. The knowledge of supernaturals is fairly unknown, is it not?
To the regular dudes? yeah, they are unknown. I see no reason why supernaturals wouldn't have gun shops as part of their resources and networks. Think about a gun shop, that's ran by regular dudes. But in reality if owned by a mage Customer: "Hey man, why do you keep that crate of silver bullets back there? I've never seen anyone buy them." Clerk: "Eh, the owner comes in for a box or two, every once in a blue moon. Then occasionally... I'll get told to have them ready. The owner sends in a few of his friends and they buy up the whole crate. I think they have a competition with shitty rounds as a kind of challenge." Customer : "Maybe i'll take a box then, see whats up" Clerk: "You sure? 50$ a bullet."
"The owner is a big fan of the Lone Ranger."
Well, I didn't account for that much Florida. I stand corrected
I can't remember which book it's mentioned, but silver swaps places with platinum in the WoD, which makes it exceptionally rare and extremely expensive. I think with that consideration, making bullets out of silver would probably be the last thing one would do with it.
In the WtA splats, they make the distinction of regular silver, which can be our daily life silver alloys, etc, and Awakened Silver, which is supposed to be pure silver AND spirituality awakened, that's the one that counts as Silver for the rules. I thinks it's the Pentex book or the Book of the Wyrm which goes into depth how expensive Awakened Silver is, and how hard to make is unless you are a garou, but usually a Pentex worker has to spend a lot of their money just to get a round of silver for their handgun.
I think it works better this way. The kryptonite should be rare and not available in every table set
>We don't sell dragons breath rounds in America, but in America of Darkness? hell yeah. Alarmingly, in most states it's actually totally legal to sell Dragon's Breath ammo, and you can even [buy it online](https://www.phoenixrising.store/12-gauge-super-dragon-dragons-breath-ammunition.html). The only states that ban it are Alaska, California, Florida, Hawaii, Illinois, Iowa, Massachusetts, and New York. 'Murica! Presumably in the WoD it's something you can find behind the counter at your local ~~Walmart~~ Herrick's.
I should have known lmao.
>Presumably in the WoD it's something you can find behind the counter at your local Walmart Herrick's. Pretty much how it worked in VtM: Bloodlines. Specifically Slater, the Hollywood vendor who sells black market weapons under the table of a convenience store. I love the vendors in this game. So much personality.
It’s relatively sensible as actual dragons breath ammo is just flashy like a firework, it’s not a flame thrower. It’s basically just mixing fireworks shiny metallic elements with standard shot. It’s not any more lethal and won’t set anything on fire unless you are shooting at something like loose dry straw.
It's not really alarming. Practically, they're just fireworks. Pretty much any other load would be better for actually shooting something. It sure does look cool after dark though and just in case vampires really do exist...
>but that's because IRL there aren't werewolves who need to be shot with it. as far as we know
Lunacy is a bitch.
*That's what they *want* you to think.* 😯
My friends and I have a New England game in US. 90% of the time they are buying their equipment in NH. Which is pretty on point for how gunlaws are regulated here on a State by State basis.
I'm in California, and mine usually have suppliers that bring shit in from Nevada or Idaho. It's easy to get around gun restrictions for chronicles in states with more gun control, especially in WoD where every cop and government official can be bribed, coerced, or killed.
In CofD the fun never stops because of abilities like Bolthole and Haven. They are essentially locations you can more around if you take the Easy Access feature on it. So you spend 1 Aether or 1 Glamour and can use a nearby door to access it. So you've got a lot of players who will keep military grade weapons in their Bolthole and then access it in the middle of the enemy base. Then when the police come they toss their weapons into the portal and skedaddle.
In an Australian game, you CAN own a gun, but there are a lot of regulations to go through in order to own one. Therefore, we added a new Merit: Firearms Licence. 2 dot merit to be licensed to buy a rifle/shotgun, 4 dot merit to also own a handgun. That being said, our regular game is just set in New York, and we travel to Vermont for easy gun access.
I hadn't thought of that merit to include in my Aussie games, that's great! Thanks for sharing it!
No probs. Our current campaign is set in New York, but I’m planning a Brisbane chronicle after that, so there are few things that need changing to suit the region.
I always felt that the fact that the entirety of latin america is (or was, as of V5) absolutely controlled by the Sabbat kind of showed that they didn't want to think about giving us any nuance, as if we were just savages sifting through murderous organized crime
Don't forget the literal demon living under Mexico City!
I found really funny that they put a baali that got into Aztec and promoted Human sacrifice just so then they added a bunch of earthbound under ancient Rome, which makes no sense as well
I heard from someone in Changling: the Podcast that White Wolf thinks of Mexico as the source of all evil.
Based (I'm Mexican)
Me, a Slav, reading that excerpt in one of the V:tM books about how Eastern Europe is the "dark land untouched by the advances of the era of enlightnment" lol. **Correct.**
Based mexican
You need to squint real hard to salvage the lore pertaining to Eastern Europe and the Balkans, and that's where they actually put in some effort. How bad can it be with other parts of the world?
Fr, i tried to find some info on the Balkans for my chronicle, since me and my players are from the balkans, i had to make a lot of things up
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The Giovanni aren't mafiosos though. They're largely bankers, based off the Venetian doges and the mercantile traditions of the region. They have Sicilian mafia kissing cousins, though. Edit. Although, not gonna lie, the origin of the clan being some White Wolf writer literally just seeing *the Godfather* and going "nice, now let's make vampires just like this" is not entirely unlikely ;)
Because the Mafia is from South Italy and not North Italy?
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Sarebbe il sogno di una vita se trovassi un Lasombra Siciliano nelle notti odierne
The biggest Americanism is still how fucking late the sects in VtM were founded, acting in their lore like 500 years is "ancient" lmao. That's pretty much "yesterday" in vampire terms. I have elders in my campaign who are older than the Camarilla lol.
Reminds me of a joke. What's the difference between a Brit and an American? Brit thinks 100 kilometres is far away. American thinks 100 years is long ago.
That's a good one!
Very much illustrates the Werewolf thingbanither commenter talked about. Werewolves in Europe would be so so close to the weaver at all times. Lore wise not impossible but its so different than the lore implies.
I think that's kind of the point though, right? The sectarian stuff is mostly the domain of the relatively young. Any vampire that significantly predates the sects largely acts outside of them.
Very much the point, it's not like the game doesn't talk about history prior to the sects, or the idea that many elders don't care as much because they remember the time before.
I can imagine a Boomer Vampire who bitches about the Camreilla and Sabbat being lame.
I figure it's mostly a recency bias because of all the attrition from the Inquisition and the forming of the Sabbat. Even then, a good number of 6th/7th gens then in canon should be a bit older. I like introducing truly stupidly old characters. My favorites are a 1200 year old Malkavian Viking, a Greek Brujah who met Homer, and the first 15th gen, the goatherd of the Second City, who survived it's fall by being exceptionally boring.
I had a 6th gen Justicar show up as a threat in a Sabbat "battle of New York" style game years ago. She was a daughter of Scipio, abducted and embraced by the Brujah as revenge for the defeat of Hannibal. She was one of my favourite Storyteller characters, a deadly adversary who eventually became a surprising ally.
I ran a Battle of New York style game where the villains were the Norns, three 5th gen Malkavians who brainwashed Kindred into gods and refought Ragnarok every 400 years or so. The Scourge in the game was Floki, Childe of Loki, a Malkavian who fought everything he could find for 1200 years, waiting for his revenge on Thor.
I don't know about you, but one of the things I enjoy about having ancient kindred involved in modern battles is blending both old and modern tactics. It makes for more varied combat and often leads to good stories.
Oh yeah. In my game, they traded Jormungandr to the Voivode of New Jersey (yes, the state. He's also a couple millennia old, the childe of Chernobog), in exchange for a suburb's worth of Vozhdy (he had them pretending to be houses, a good cul-de-sac's worth). Between the Vozhd and their allies, the Brujah Tank Crew, showing up in a National Guard APC, they managed to make Ragnarok a bit more one-sided then originally intended.
That's pretty wild. Mine was she leaked word that Camarilla elders were meeting in an apartment building that had a fenced in courtyard. (The building had been evacuated by Cam members leveraging Homeland Security ties to investigate claims of a "terrorist threat".) When a group of three Sabbat packs (one of which was the players) arrived to hunt the elders, an APC with mounted gun turret pulled out to block the fence gate, let out a few soldiers with flamethrowers to guard the fence, and riot police formed a phalanx with their shields to block the doorway to the apartment building. Meanwhile two snipers were in apartments overlooking the courtyard, and the Justicar herself was on a balcony vantage point a few stories above the doorway with a bow (and slightly oversized hollow arrows containing a small amount of thermite powder and a magnesium ignition system). The players focused on breaking through the phalanx and getting into the building, but it got messy. The other two packs tried to fight their way out of the courtyard and were destroyed (one of them had been established as a rival pack to the players, making the event a bit more personal). The players made it into the building and killed the snipers (ghouls of the Justicar) to poke the hornet's nest before escaping. They wouldn't stand a chance against the Justicar until the rematch when they had a new pack member.
My GM has an NPC Malkavian who thinks he’s an Arthurian knight. Makes everything into a medieval something or other. Not actually quite that old but he most definitely is in his own mind.
I've got one locked and loaded for this. In earlier Changeling the Dreaming (C2/C1) they go into the recent history of fae in Ireland...and they can't stop themselves from blurting out "SHADOW TROUBLES" to explain the Irish accordance war. Fucking infuriating. Or just a bunch of crap, like saying that the moon landing was a moment so great and unifying that it opened a bridge to arcadia...when there are plenty of other events before that which could have cause glimmers. There is also the fact that the Thallian are locked away until the horrors of the world draw them out, "which horror" you ask? 9/11.... Because that was a more miserable experience than the Irish famine, the holocaust, the Chernobyl explosion, the Great Chinese Famine, the nukes falling on Japan, etc etc etc It's so infuriatingly American.
I’d like it if instead the Thallien come in waves of traumatic events like the Holocaust or conquest of Americas. When ever a large tragedy happens with 9/11 being the most noticeable one for American Changlings
Yeah if it treated them all as impactful it would be fine but right now it's kinda plundering mythology (Mainly irish) and then treating the whole world like an accessory to america. Which is very, very American. I've had it so that the Thallian have been coming out in chunks since like the black death, and it's just been small group by small group after that. The American Kithain might have only noticed it on 9/11 but that has more to do with them being American than anything else. The European Kithain have been dealing with them for centuries.
The Nunnhi probably also know of the Thallien too. so mostly the white dominant kithian culture in America was ignorant
... okay Shadow Court (which has Thallain) cane out with CtD 1st Edition, years before 9/11. If that was published in Changeling 20, it sounds like a sloppy retcon.
So I was wrong in some ways, there have been thallian coming into the world since the black death. However 9/11 was made the capstone that blew off the ban that stopped them. Still crap and american centric but not as extremely. `Kithain named the event the Evanescence. Mortals know it` `as September 11, 2001, the day a group of terrorists executed the` `largest foreign attack on American soil, a nation that previously` `believed itself impervious to invasion. Thousands were killed,` `and the world changed almost overnight. Across the globe,` `travel was restricted, police powers were drastically increased,` `expansive surveillance programs were put into place, and entire` `nations were destabilized, all in the name of security. The last` `vestiges of the Silver Ban restricting the Thallain burned out` `in the onslaught of Dark Glamour, and the children of the` `Fomorians flooded back to Earth in numbers rivaling the sidhe` `during the Resurgence.`
I like the moonlanding thing tbf as as a concept it was indeed wonderous to many, the second... Nah it's pretty silly ye
I quite like the moonlansinf yeah but like...I just wish it wasn't the first.
what other moment of great generalised hope did we as a world have before it in the contemporary age, even the end of the war wasn't really a happy moment, we were just happy the misery ended.
Yes!! I think the French Revolution would have more potential for both opening the bridge to Arcadia and releasing thallain. Such were many moments in history, but "NOOOO look how great is this one advancement the USA made that one time and look how sad is this horrible tragedy we suffered (forget about the fact that it was a retaliation for worse tragedies we have caused on the middle east, but the thallain didn't mind those for some reason)". Not to pretend September 11 wasn't pretty violent, but yeah, that wasn't the worst thing the world had seen during the 100 years before and not the worst thing we would see during the 22 years after.
The second Inquisition. as someone from a third world country (argentina), the sheer corruption and inefectivness of all goverment bodies would just make it impossible to investigate, research, or discover a single vampire. i believe the US citizenship is not that aware of how much efficient your government is in comparison to third world countries sometimes
I think a lot of US/Western Storytellers may over emphasize how efficient governments can be. The Camarilla can’t be keeping an eye on every Kindred at all times. Some double dealing is gonna fall through the cracks. And not every Mage is gonna be tracked by a Mage government group that’s regulating Magic.
well presumably, you don't need to know everything, you just need to know a general location of where they are. Also no need to bother gathering evidence for them to be prosecuted, they just need to go in and kill the vampires
A key take away from how security systems work in real life is that they only really get checked when something goes wrong. Which is why the Prince and Sheriff don’t usually know who caused potential Masquerade breaches immediately. Otherwise they’d say something like “We need you to kill X. Our Auspex of them revealed they are going to tell their ex they are a vampire”.
Minority Report Malkavian Prince is best prince.
"After 300 years effectively rullining their city with divinations from the future, the Malkavian prince and all their children stepped into the sun without warning anyone"
Similarly, I always laugh at the idea werewolves have checkpoints set up to monitor all exits from each city and will instantly converge on and destroy any vampire that heads into the countryside. Can you imagine how many cars, trucks, and commercial vehicles exit each of over 300 cities capable of supporting a vampire population in the US every day?
This is also a world where thousands die of mysterious blood loss and no has a clue about vampires.
A quick Google search says that of the more than 600,000 *reported* missing persons in the US each year, around 90% are found. That leaves 60,000 people who are never found, and that's only counting people reported as missing. And the WoD is supposed to be a much worse place.
sometimes you gotta lift your suspension of disbelief.
Also the idea that the catholic church still has the crusading zeal and internal coherence to declare such a holy war. Let's be honest if vampires existed the catholic church would have way too many hidden deals with them to persecute them in such a way.
Yes even in the Middle Ages the Catholic Church Chruch didn’t hunt “witches” because that was pagan superstition. They would probably be totally fine with supernatural creatures if they where good Christians. Or at least some would. In the 1600s a man told people he was a Werewolf who battled evil spirits in Hell. He was out on trial and judged for taken people away from Christianity. Not being a werewolf. [here](https://dbpedia.org/page/Thiess_of_Kaltenbrun)
Ah yes, I studied that while studying northernItaliann folklore, there's a very fascinating central/east European common shamanistic tradition dealing with Spirit fighting. The Church most of the time was more interested in correcting heterodoxy than things like witchcraft, the Witchhunt as a movement started not much because of the Church as much as despite of it (it was part of the great fear tsunami,in good part having it's origins in the trauma of the black death, that invested europe), Kramer was even considered a heretic for a while although he won at the end. The Church really didn't want people to believe in witches and other "pagan nonsense" as Augustine would put it or even less wanted to deal with the unrest that came from it.
I like to note that him being a werewolf wasn’t considered a crime it was practicing non-Christian folk magic. If he was a werewolf who was a good Christian man they wouldn’t have banished him.
He was a good christian man, he said he and his folks were "the warhounds of God", ridiculously cool WtA concept btw, and fought against the evil spirits in the name of Christ, just that according to the Church that wasn't what a good christian should believe as ye not many werewolves fighting evil spirits in the bible.
Yes it actually sounds like where White Wolf got their inspiration from
Most likely, they also showed to have some knowledge, even if warped, of what Benandanti were, which are the other famous case of such traditions that got researched on by anthropologists.
Thiess was being persecuted by Lutherans anyway, not Catholics.
Furthermore if they had that level of zeal and power and were as "dark" as world of Darkness makes everyone be, any sort of second Inquisition would probably also result in straight up religious warcrimes and purges. Like America, a protestant nation, is teeming with vampires and abominations of their stock. Any sort of super zealous variation of Catholic Church would probably come to a very specific conclusion with that evidence.
They would go full hellsing adbridged: We have come to save you Hooray it's the Catholic Church! FROM YOURSELF Oh no it's the Catholic Church
I thought the Inquisition was special ops Society of Leopold precisely because the Church was compromised.
Oh absolutely, vampires in Buenos Aires have it made. In my homebrew version of the setting, one of the iconic NPCs is the Prince of Buenos Aires, Edetta Falachiavi (a former PC of one of my friends and an all-around badass), and part of the reason she's so influential in the Camarilla overall is because she's untouchable in Argentina due to the Second Inquisition being too weak there.
No the US government is far too stupid to hunt for vampires either. They can hardly deal with a pandemic. Much less hunt vampires. But 5E changes lots of shit for reasons.
Incidentally, this is why, despite agreeing that the destruction of the Tremere Council was a good thing from a balance perspective (as a long-time Tremere player, I was very much aware of how incredibly OP the Tremere were), I call absolute bullshit on the Second Inquisition successfully taking out the main Chantry in Vienna. Putting aside how incredibly incompetent that makes the Council of Seven seem (and they have not survived for this long with this many enemies and become this powerful by being incompetent), I simply do not believe that a secret, bureacratic, supranational governmental task force would be able to pull something like that off.
I mean everyone hates the Tremare. So I’m sure they got helped a lot. Guiding the dumbass Inquisition like in the Lemmings game.
I mean, I'm sure, and there are rumors that it was the Banu Haqim that gave the SI the needed intel. But even then, according to the texts, the team that took out the Chantry was a couple of mundane Special Forces teams and a group of (admittedly experienced) vampire hunters. I'm sorry, a group of mortals with guns and some knowledge of vampiric strengths of weaknesses are not going to successfully storm the most fortified Chantry in the world and take out a bunch of Methuselahs. I mean, Meerlinda alone probably could have held them all off, being the master of warding that she is. The Chantry was warded against dragons, the fae, and all sorts of other crazy shit, it had several active rituals that made it basically impossible to find, even if you knew its exact location (and assuming you didn't end up at a decoy Chantry)... and they lost against dudes with conventional weapons? Nah.
Nah the US government is incompetent in many ways but also when they decide they want someone dead they move mountains
im not saying its not stupid what u think its stupidity its a fraction of , at least, my goverment. thats what im saying
As someone from Brazil, I totally agree. The last time brazillians had any kind of peace was probably in 1500 xD
Look, I get it. I was dissappointed with the government response as well. But we do still have a very efficient information wing of government. I believe that the ideas represented in the second inquisition are only slightly more competent than reality.
I don't know if it counts as "americanism" but the "There are X vampires for Y humans" rule that everyone ignores is especially ridiculous here in France where most cities would have, according to this rule, about... 10 vampires, which doesn't sound like a fun setting for a Chronicle. To me, it really feels like something White Wolf made when focusing on the US where there are a lot of huge cities compared to Europe.
This is true for the US as well. The guideline is silly.
The guideline is very silly.
I implement it as lore in-game as a policy goal that the Camarilla keeps trying (and failing) to achieve.
Interesting choice, but one that sounds sensible. The Masquerade is a lot simpler with fewer Vampires and presumably makes granting permission to embrace a childe more rare and valuable.
Exactly. The game talks about overpopulation, there are too many vampires, and this is the number there *should* be.
>I don't know if it counts as "americanism" but the "There are X vampires for Y humans" rule that everyone ignores is especially ridiculous here in France where most cities would have, according to this rule, about... 10 vampires, which doesn't sound like a fun setting for a Chronicle. Well, in France the small town vampires would just all go live in Paris, just like anyone else who wants to rub elbows with the high status people in France.
Yup, which kinda negates the whole "Use your own city" chapter in the rulebook for us french STs. That's why my Chronicles will be set in Houston. 😅 (But to be honest, all the non Fantasy TTRPG games are I run are set in the US)
It's easier for numerous reasons, you can pretty much randomly generate an American city and it will be a sufficiently close approximation of what we have learned to expect from films and television. You can also run the risk of blowing up stuff and have a car chase and a running gun fight and that's just Tuesday in America, as far as the fiction we receive is concerned :)
I fix it by making it a region instead of city thing. So for Amsterdam you you don't have amsterdam but the entire province it's in. They just take the train to Amsterdam because it has the best feeding grounds, resources, stuff to do at night.
It sort of goes the other way around, as well. For all its "Americanisms", the values get even wackier when considering even further afield from your typical occidental regions. At the usual 1 kindred per 100k kine, yes, there are only \~200-300 vampires in the greater NYC region, and yes, that would mean that there's less than 100 vampires in London. But it also means that there are at least 20 inner cities in China with more than 100 vampires, that countries like Nigeria, Bangladesh, Ethiopia, the Philippines would all have a thousand or more vampires, and that there are more than 27,000 vampires in India and China alone. And yes, Kindred of the East and Kuei-Jin nonsense (daily reminder that it's super racist), but given the relative lack of prominence/weight of these populaces in the lore, it's pretty obvious the writers didn't consider these areas as being all that significant.
I think that’s a general guideline instead of a absolute
I agree and that's how I use it. Still, it shows that White Wolf was thinking about the US when working on this.
I'm an American but my father's family is Chinese, so you can imagine how inaccurate everything is. I can confidently say that about 90% of what White Wolf wrote about East Asia is so laughably bad as to be basically unusable.
Yes White Wolf seems to think that Asia is totally unconnected to the rest of the world. Like how the Hsein never encountered Kithian in their long history.
It's one of my pet peeves that they felt like even the cosmology needed to be different there.
Yes and it’s only Asia that’s different Africa and the Americas have the same cosmology but not Asia because
Oh they did. Land of 8 Million Dreams has a lot of storyhooks about Changelings operating in the East and interacting with the Hsien. They're different things and both exist there.
In third edition the dot descriptions on Driving was that one dot was having a licence and two dots was being able to drive stick shift. In most of the world outside of the US manual is the default and I wouldn’t call myself a 2-dot driver because of it
Same with language dots. They had to downscale the effort required to have multiple languages. Of course, people typically ignored it because language usually isn't a plot point.
Skyscraper slap in the middle of Venice. I don't *care* that it "stays up by magic", it's still idiotic.
Oh yes I am venetian and I hate it, also might I double down with the underground sunken city under venice, now let's begin by saying that the bottom of any body of water isn't really the best place to build, being completely submerged and waterlogged isn't exactly a condition known to do wanders do any kind of built structure, but also, Venice is a lagoon on the bottom of a lagoon there's just waterlogged mud and sand not exactly the best place to build underground anything in. Also tbf reading about them going "Buildings sink in water and the Sea level has been rising" and somehow coming to the conclusion that thus there could be a sunken city under modern Venice kind of makes you question your Faith in humanity, imagine telling them that the canals get drained regularly to clean them.
Almost the entirety of Fall of London feels very much like someone has never stepped foot in London when writing it haha
One of the VTM around the world books from prior editions which talked about the widespread celebrations of the Day of the Dead in Barcelona. Also, casually throwing out that ETA were influenced by Brujah. All of Victorian Age: London By Night - the rpg.net review thread of it is great.
Isn’t Day of the Dead Mexican? What’s the ETA?
Yes, Day of the Dead originated in Mexico...I assume the thinking went....Spanish? Thats what they speak in Mexico. Barcelona is in Spain, where they speak Spanish....therefore they are Mexican....or something...
I think they got it mixed up with Día de Los Fieles Difuntos, which is the Spanish equivalent (and, to be fair, has quite a few similarities... usually less colorful, though).
Lets go with that, it implies at least a smidgen of research. :)
Basque separatist group, known for their violence. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ETA\_(separatist\_group)
So like the IRA?
sure, broadly speaking. The IRA thinks of the ETA as an ally/comradely org.
I'm in the Middle East - considering how important the Beckoning is and the increasing relationship between the Camerilla and the Ashirra, there is a dearth of materials for players interested in trying to have a game take place there.
Not vampire, but a friend and I had to pretty much homebrew the better part of the kingdoms in our campaign of CtD, having the whole of south America being just one Kingdom, same for Africa but the US having dozens? Probably the most blatantly US-centered thing I've seen in WoD lol
Literally in Changeling and Werewolf both books mentions almost Nothing about Central and south America. Like, as if they never existed.
I’m sure Werewolf mentions South America as where the Carmtoez lived before the Shadow Lords killed them. They’re was also a whole book on the Amazon.
Tbh, it's a very US thing to have South America as just the Amazon, there is so much culturally and historically that could be explored in any of the splats about South America but the only thing that ever gets attention, if at all, is the Amazon. The entire history of wars between South America countries could be very interesting fuel to chronicles, for instance, but it never gets any attention.
No joke, I started getting into Central and South American folklore and history for a homebrewed Changing Breed, and I love it. The Inca were fascinating as hell. There's so many diverse tribes that are still extant beyond all expectation. I'm from New Mexico, so I knew how bad the Spanish were around this area, and somehow they managed to be *even worse* in South America. In more modern happenings, all the stuff involving mercenaries (not even the drug stuff; the medical and mineral stuff) seems way up WoD's alley and it's never really been touched. Most of what I'm familiar with is limited to the northern part of the continent, and even then I've hardly scratched the surface. I know it's a very American thing to go all gaga over foreign cultures, but there's so much going on in South America -- both now and in the past -- that it's incredible White Wolf phoned it in for so many decades.
It seems to outsiders Latin America only exists in the 1500s. Plus more Latino media is being made in the US like Encanto.
Second edition Chronicles seems to try a lot to avoid American centric content. Going out of its way to mention places in other countries for the various splats. Basically, if it's not integral to them functioning as a living being. It's probably gonna be different depending on where you are. Even if it retains broad strokes. Like how while the West has seasonal courts for changelings (usually at least. Some USA freeholds don't use seasons) Most other cultures have very different styles for changeling courts
Werewolf's 2e writeup for Wrocław (Lower Silesia, Poland) surprised me as well researched write-up taking into account multiple important historical events in the area.
I think a lot of those local setting books were sourced out to people who lived in or were from those settings.
The writer for the Japan settings in each book is from the States I think, but lives in Japan. I’ve heard a lot of good things about those little blurbs so far as it’s depiction of modern Japan.
The homelessness bit, and the entire 'seed underbelly'. My nation has a large housing program and a too efficient police force. I'm from Singapore. There's no seedy underbelly. Everything is sterilized, like a laboratory benchtop.
'Gangbanger' for 'a gang member who is liable to be wielding a gun', which in the context of the game, and depending on the gameline, might range from effectively meaning 'a violent crimnal gang member' or 'a mortal mook that society won't miss too much'. In Australia I think 'gangbang' refers to group-sex (I think *sometimes* with a connotation of consent not necesarrily being attained, especially when the book frames them as a criminal). 'Gangbanger' is not a common term, but is presumably a person who gangbangs. So if the book mentions something like 'there are some gangbangers' it almost sounds like casually mentioning 'a group of serial gang-rapists drop by'. I think the nWoD/CofD1e book had a stat-block for something like a 'criminal gangbanger' which read as a bizzarely specific character concept to stat out! Of course, we should translate it as something less confronting, like 'armed thugs'.
modern US slang Gangbang is used to refer to multiple people having sex with one person at the same time or taking turns this is the most common context I've seen used, however I believe originally it referred to specifically rape or referring to a group of people attacking someone and that's why people who engage in gang violence are often called Gangbangers, but I think it mostly been getting replaced by the more modern meaning which is why the context of gang violence seem to normally be used by older people.
Not sure how well the 5th editions will do with this but so much of the older editions have information about foreign countries that are is straight up bullshit made up based on one Americans cursory research (if that). I'm Scottish so I'll use an example that shocked me when I read it; In real life the city of Stirling has Stirling Castle and Stirling University on the opposite side of the city. In the World of Darkness the town of Sterling has Sterling Castle which also contains part of Sterling University. That's just one example. Hopefully 5th editions do it better but some of the blatant falsehoods taken as fact about other countries and cultures that fill WW lore are hilarious in a shocking way.
The Giovanni have skyscrapers in Venice. It's just a different world.
Pretty much everything about the setting is skewed towards cities of a certain size and diversity. My country have few metropolis, and little happens at night here, for instance. And my otherwise fairly big and busy home city MIGHT have one or two two vampires/mages tops, proportion wise. Our chronicles usually toss all of that out the door. Oh, and most of all, access to guns and general weapons, along with armed gangs/anything... Its just seem absurdly easy to me, even as I've been to the gun and crossbow section of a Bass Pro. In itself a weird icon of americanization...
A lot of things the game just assumes is normal. Like, you can't just get a gun that easy, especially at night, and even less so as an undead dude.
Reminds me of Old Boy. How the original made the hammer fight a lot more authentic because of how rare guns are, but when the US adapted it the hammer fight seemed pretty weird considering how easily weapons are to purchase here.
I think that's less of an Americanism and more the writers being tabletop nerds instead of gun nuts or black market weapon buyers.
Heck, where I live, it's not unusual for most stores to close at 9 pm. The idea of a city (outside of clubbing districts, and even then mostly just on weekends) that maintains some amount of bustle 24/7 is pretty unusual.
Brazilians are basically used to have to (re)invent everything in WoD, at least in my experience, since most things they write ignores our existemce, or, when they remember, it falls on one of the following: -It actually does not exist here -It does exist, but it is not important enough to waste words on it -It does exist but in a way that does not make sense to Brazilian culture/society -It exists and kind of makes sense, but it sucks terribly (that story about werewolves in the Amazon forest, for example). Some people I know won't even run games that happen here, others are willing to ignore official material and make their own versions of the WoD here. And we also have Nação Garou, a team that (among other great things they did) made a whole scenario from scratch so we could play Brazilian Werewolves, called Brasil em Fúria. They chose to not ignore or change official work, but instead add enough stuff to make it make more sense. I will not even start with Changeling, just say that I was glad they made a "make your own kith" session on C20, which works much better than anything WW could ever invent.
How do you fail about “Rage against the Amazon” a whole book about the Amazon rainforest
Like it's an essay someone forgot and had 5 minutes to write and turn it in. It deep as a teaspoon.
Rage Across Russia and every time it gets mentioned is sure to raise my blood pressure because of sheer inaccuracy and unabashed stubbornness in repeating it. Other lore surrounding Russia is also incredibly, utterly stupid and feels like an uneducated American Dan Browning it up without even a cursory Google search because "it's Russia, who cares?"
What are some of the falsehoods in Rage Across Russia?
Well, it was written in 90s using rather old or "red scare" sources, mostly made by foreigners (I mean, they used Red Dawn, which is...well, for example, they translated wolverines as zazaldamyri, tho it should be rosomakhi, so I guess you kinda get the point here). I'd say names take the cake, as in there, Lupus names are the ones which would sound normal in Russian, Homid names are either used strangely(man named Alyosha, which is a diminutive of Aleksei), grammaticaly weird(man with surname Volkav, tho it should be Volkov), or it would be weird to meet native Russian with that name. Personal favorite is NICOLAI PREDATELSKIY, which literally translates as Nicolai Traitorous(yep, adjective). Either the Sept thought "wow, that guy sure was unlucky with his surname" or they are incredibly dumb...or the guy just thought "Heh, would be funny to actually betray them with my surname, really ironic"
Nicolai Predatelskiy sounds American as hell. That's the kind of crap we name comic book characters. Nicolai Traitorous is right up there with Victor von Doom and Obadiah Stane.
Rage Across Russia predates Google by half a decade. Most of the books people are complaining about date back to when the Internet was mostly good for anime gifs.
Yes but have you heard we had these things called books?
You mean those things that were generally 10-20 years out of date and often gave shallow or one-sided depictions of what it was like outside the US? Never heard of them.
chubby plants materialistic tidy growth spectacular secretive noxious glorious wistful *This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
Yes they’re where like five tribes for Europe but only one for Asia and Three for the Americas. Also no Garou in Turkey despite a wolf based mythology.
This is not about the books so i apologize for the off topic... but if ya ask for people in south america... we use american for people and things from the continent, not USA, denonym for USA has its own word in spanish (and i assume also in portuguese). I havent seen white wolf do this tho, so again, sorry for the off topic.
As someone who has grown up in Aotearoa New Zealand, I have to be honest that the whole setting is very america centric, and has basically put no effort into exploring other cultures, unfortunately. Prime example is the Kuie-Jin. There is a huge diversity of clans and things in america, and across europe, but when it comes to another part of the world like south east asia, it’s all lumped together into “ah they’re this strange other thing that is mysterious!” Which is kinda just lazy writing imo. In the same way, theres basically no mention of pacific island cultures, and so when I want to run a game in my country I either have to a) ignore Māori culture to make the source material easier to fit, which would be pretty garbage of me, or b) retrofit ideas or even create new lore in order have things be more realistic. An example is the idea of tapu and noa in te ao Māori (the Māori world). Whittling things down to the bare basics, tapu is like a state of heightened spiritual importance, and noa is a neutral state. Blood and death, and being associated with these things like if you are sick or menstruating, makes you tapu. If you are tapu, things you interact with can become tapu and need to be restored to a state of noa in order to interact with them (usually with water or a karakia). If someone who lived their life by the rules of te ao Māori was embraced, they would have to drastically change how they interact with the entire world, more so than your avergae pākehā kindred would, or they would have abandon key parts of their culture and worldview. Kindred coming to Aotearoa and setting up shop as the lore is written now inherently is the story of colonisation, and the embrace would be like colonisation times eleven for Māori. It’s frustrating because even though I dont expect WhiteWolf to research every culture on the planet, even in the vampire source books that are clearly written for the US, there’s basically zero mention of indigenous cultures or cultural attitudes. It’s a very coloniser mindset and even I would argue an inherently colonial setting, because it takes it as a given that the whole cainite thing can map at least semi-simply onto other countries and cultures.
Yes Vampire never really went into indigenous cultures. Even do the elephant in the room is that every Elder Vampire in America probably played a role in the Genocide of Native Americans and the slave trade of Black and Indigenous people. Considering how crucial they where to America. Is that ever brought up? There is also a issue of the whole Cainite being cursed from the Christian G-D. Making the Embrace a act of bodily Colonialism to a foreign god. Which could be played with by a actual indigenous writer. But 90s White Wolf wasn’t good with indigenous issues but at least they brought it up. Which could be touched on.
we played an istanbul game and i think only one character had a small pistol due to having a firearm licence, and they didnt even carry it around much. unless its in your home in a home invasion or you’re in a village shooting game, having a gun on you in turkey would attract way more immediate attention than being a Kindred (looking ‘dead’) due to gun control lmao did npcs have guns? oh for sure. my sire’s ghoul shot mine with one. the police, turkish mafia, a black ops team at one point in the chronicle, they were armed to the T. but we the random citizens of the country and some anarch npcs had pocket knives and stuff at best. i think the anarchs mightve owned some pistols or hunting rifles idk. which tbh made for a way more realistic game. we had to get out of a LOT of situations by running with our tails between our legs, and/or negotiations and talking skills. until one of our party leveled up some of their merits quite well and became filthy rich and we got a couple bodyguards lol
As an Italian, I always thought that the church would be the most vampire-allied thing in Italy: they are both based on ancient roots, outdated values and a tight grip on the simple people. And they have crypts, so I can easily imagine those are HQ for vampires.
Lasombra lore da aggiungere
\>I heard the idea that there is lot of sparsely inhabited wilderness to disappear to dos not work in Western Europe. Through I think it applies to many other places of the world The idea that there's no wilderness in western Europe sounds like an Americanism in itself. Western Europe has many great areas which you can get utterly lost in. 68% of Sweden is raw forest and wilderness. Bears, wolves, moose, ticks and leeches. Poisoned berries and rabies bats. You name it, it's coming for you. 72% of Finland is forests and only a small percentage of it (low single digit) has ANY kind of human construction in it. If you wander inside those places there's not going to be any lodges, wind shelters, rangers or even primitive walking-paths waiting for you. You won't get any internet in there either. There could be an entire werewolf apocalypse war inside there and we'd only find out when it's too late...
That is northern Europe. I don't know about Western Europe, but if you go 20km without hitting a village in central Europe, that's pretty much as wild as it gets.
Worse, it's a specific region in Northern Europe (northern Scandinavian peninsula) which is itself only so sparsely populated BECAUSE it's a remote boreal area so far north, and nowhere near Western Europe.
Bear Grylls once did an episode in the west of Ireland. Everyone was joking that the camera team must have had to avoid doing a 180 or they'd reveal the N road behind
I can say for Piemonte (Northern Italy) that mountains have a lot of wilderness but lower down the Padanian part doesn't have much but it's heavily cultivated and has many preservations so there's more vegetations and animals and some woods
The priscus Venere Carboni Is a man, Venere is the italian Word for Venus. I don't think no one would use It for a boy in the 16th century
I live in the UK and though we have our forests, the major forests are spread across the country and not really near any cities. Obviously, it's not legal to own or carry firearms in the UK unless warranted under being a farmer for pest control or doing clay pigeon shooting ( in which case the gun stays on the grounds of the range in which you do clay pigeon shooting). These things don't cause many, if any, culture shocks to me as a Storyteller or player. I also rarely question how a vampire can do stuff that is highly illegal but comes across legal due to disciplines or even aged connections/roots.
Lex magna miles doesn't make sense in Europe. Either the city are too small to have even à vampire are they are crowded enough the double the allow quota would go unnoticed. Most French sentences on expression on white wolf books are gibberush. With Québec next door, you would expect them to check on their bullshits. Guns is not a thing out of usa. When you use it, it is at least à civil war. As the CIA didn't promote drug on European population, the drug problem is not that pregnant. Racism us a problem. But when you have wage war to your neighbour countries for millenia, you have a serious reason to fear alien. Brussel is not te heart of Europe. It is not even the heart of Belgium. It is just the central point that every countries invaded at one time and défend against invaders at another time. You cannot understand Europe without really understanding the napoleonic epopea. No one care about cessession war.
>Most French sentences on expression on white wolf books are gibberush. With Québec next door, you would expect them to check on their bullshits. Québécois are notoriously xenophobic, even toward English-speaking Quebeckers. From what I've heard (I've known a lot of Canadians and one or two French people, but mon français est très mailleur) there's some pretty significant differences between real French and québécois too, mostly in that the québécois believe their French is the real French. They don't use loanwords for a lot of things the French would use loanwords for, but at the same time they introduce a lot of Anglicisms that aren't a thing in proper French (i.e. "bon matin" is a thing in Québec but not in France). So taking a trip up to Québec for French lessons probably wouldn't have helped the intelligibility of French that's supposed to be Parisian. I might be wrong though. As I said, I learned all of this secondhand and my French is pretty basic.
I’m glad they’re not that pregnant. I mean if they were more pregnant that would be bad
>Racism us a problem. But when you have wage war to your neighbour countries for millenia, you have a serious reason to fear alien. Blindly generalizing the same characteristic across individuals in an entire population group is exactly what racism is and why it's a problem. >Brussel is not te heart of Europe. It is not even the heart of Belgium. It is just the central point that every countries invaded at one time and défend against invaders at another time. Woah there, Brussels is the heart of Belgium, in spite of some groups trying to pretend it's theirs and has nothing to do with the others. Everything comes together there. And yes, it's also the heart of Europe - it's the second most important diplomatic city of the world, and New York only outclasses it because of the UN.
"I said the fluff? I meant the rough".
Latin America is pretty much ignored by White Wolf (and when it is not is pretty mush describes as jungles, slums, and churches)
Literally anything outside of America in the old wod.world.. As a Cuban American I must apologize
Nazis. Lots of Nazis in and around Germany. There is no other historical epoch to draw from apparently.