Yes, it's another post about RPGs instead of music, though perhaps I will write about music again soon... Getting more involved with LARP has meant these things have been on my mind. I've tried to make this post accessible to those who aren't entirely familiar with the World of Darkness games, but whether you'll find it interesting... who can say? Unfortunately, further recording for the next album has been delayed a bit, though not because of LARP, mind you. So yeah, here's a post about vampires and mages and how evil they are. Hope you enjoy!
(N.B. this post is kind of a work in progress as I consult with more knowledgeable friends who can fact- and logic-check me.)
Why do I play Vampire: the Masquerade? I feel like this is a question that needs to be asked and answered; and even if the first answer is “because I have fun,” then what exactly provides that fun? And why play Vampire specifically instead of another game, or not playing at all? These questions demand answers from me because Vampire is horrible. Vampires require blood to survive and most get that blood via the traditional method: biting humans and drinking it directly from their veins. The bite — or “kiss” — of the vampire provokes an involuntary physical response of exquisite pleasure, both in the mortal and in the vampire. There are more “ethical” methods of feeding — blood bags, animals, informed mortal consent — but the upshot is this: most Vampire players will play characters who treat humans as means to an end by assaulting or coercing them in a manner analogous to sexual predation. This is something the texts make quite explicit at times. If your character isn't a predator, they are the exception to the rule. To make matters worse, most vampires abide by what’s known as either the “Masquerade” or the “Silence of the Blood”, codes of secrecy enforced so mortals remain oblivious of vampires and vampiric institutions. One such institution is the Camarilla, which could be described as a global shadow-mafia pulling the strings of mortal affairs to secure both their own power and their occultation from human eyes. Even the so-called “Anarchs”, a group that seeks revolution or reform of vampiric societal structures, operate by similar methods. So, most Vampire player-characters will be inducted into a conspiracy of vampires that enables the systematic consumption of mortal blood, usually through an act comparable to sexual violation. Even if your PC is at the bottom of the pecking order and doesn’t commit the most heinous of crimes, by ensuring the Masquerade remains secure, they are complicit in enabling the atrocities and material power-grabs of elder vampires. Analogies to real-world conspiracies that enable systematic sexual abuse and consolidation of political power are unavoidable; a good chunk of the UK/US political establishment is implicated in a particularly horrifying one. Why the fuck would you choose to play this game?
One of the remarkable things about RPGs is that each game-as-played is unique in spite of the existing game-as-text. The sourcebooks for Vampire present a host of vampiric clans, supernatural powers, mechanical and hypo-diegetic rules, and alternate histories, and they all exist for the purpose of enabling and enriching a group’s story… but ultimately, each group can choose which parts they use and which they don’t. At what point of stripping away the rules and lore could a game of Vampire no longer be considered a true game of Vampire? There’s no easy answer. An interesting tension quickly arose, however, between the intent of the game’s authors at White Wolf and the wider cultures of play that interpreted the text differently. Vampire has consistently been billed as “a storytelling game of personal horror”; the 5th edition expanded the tagline to include “political horror”. Here’s how the 3rd edition of the Storyteller’s Handbook describes the ethos of Vampire:
‘Concerning horror, the best Vampire stories seep with it. Without horror, this may as well be a superhero game, and that's not what we're after. Consider: All the characters are dead, yet exist in a fragile state beyond death by stealing away the life's blood of the people they formerly were, while fighting to hold back the excruciating urges of the Beast. All vampires are addicts, dedicated, above all else, to acquiring that precious fluid upon which their existence hangs so precariously. To what depths will these characters sink in the pursuit of their schemes and wants? Let's see those depths.’
The authors clearly wanted the players to have introspective, morally challenging experiences that departed from the established hack-and-slash wargaming of D&D and its kin. Unfortunately, if you hand over a game system with rules for exciting supernatural powers and brutal combat to a gamer culture dominated by hack-and-slash gameplay, the game-as-played will become hack-and-slash. The team at White Wolf made their frustration and contempt for these gamers extremely clear in additional materials published after the original 1991 release, but they really should have seen it coming. No matter how strongly you tell people how you want them to play a game, both the mechanics themselves and the players’ calcified play-styles will inevitably determine to a large extent what the game-as-played looks like.
Nonetheless, White Wolf reluctantly concedes that, even if Vampire is geared towards enabling more “profound and moving storytelling” rather than “adolescent alienation-vengeance and power fantasies”, the most important thing is that you have fun, even if you’re just playing vampire-flavoured hack-and-slash. But I can’t help but feel that all potential power-fantasy RPGs aren’t created equal, ethically speaking. If you choose to play Vampire without reflecting on the explicitly and implicitly horrific themes, why play Vampire in the first place? Why not play a different RPG where you’re not playing a vampire, with all its disturbing ramifications? There are plenty! The LARP format admittedly makes it harder to engage with the dark consequences of your character's actions, as feeding and interference in mortal affairs are abstracted away into downtime mechanics, leaving the spotlight on interpersonal politics and relationships; ironically, this could be said to reflect how detached the rich and powerful can become from the harm they enact on the world. The richness of the in-universe history, the fantasticalness of the supernatural world, and the powerfulness of the vampiric Disciplines can also easily serve as a distraction from the horror. In a way, this can be productive: the temptation to use and abuse power and to invest in the vampiric world on its own terms has to be there so it can be rejected with revulsion in the first place. Power and evil are seductive, and to grapple with how easily one can slip into enjoying or becoming complicit in power and evil can be a valuable experience that provokes more thoughtful, careful conduct outside of the game. But the distractions can also all too easily take over the game; I have little patience for players whose main engagement with Vampire is displaying their mastery over the material through lore-dumps and ridiculously powerful, optimised character builds. I would suggest there's a problem with approaching Vampire in this way, because if you’re unreflective and unthoughtful when engaging with a game that confronts you with such glaring ethical issues, you’re less likely to be reflective and thoughtful in your actual life. To indulge in Camarilla politics without dealing with these issues is — if I can attempt to use some critical theory lingo — to uncritically reproduce the ideology of the conspiratorial ruling class. To hell with Letting People Enjoy Things!
Speaking of ethics, I want to briefly touch on the Humanity mechanic. Each edition of Vampire tracks a character’s descent into bestial madness through their Humanity rating. At Humanity 10, your vampire is saintly even by mortal standards, and the symptoms of their vampiric curse diminish greatly. At Humanity 0, they are a mindless monster that is summarily removed from a player’s control. When a vampire does something deemed immoral, their Humanity rating will lower, and they will become less physically, mentally, and some might say spiritually human. A lot of ink has been spilled problematising the notion of “humanity” and how its naturalisation and essentialisation has laid the ideological groundwork for tremendous harm (e.g. by denying the right to be considered human to certain groups of people). Vampire (at least pre-V5) presents a naturalised Human morality with a ranking of sins based on their severity, in which theft is worse than injuring someone, and property damage is worse than accidentally killing someone. To put this outrageous libertarianism into context: Vampire mastermind Mark Rein-Hagen cited Ayn Rand herself as an influence on the game. Other systems of morality exist, as exemplified by the vampiric Paths of Enlightenment, so really a vampire’s ontological degeneration is more closely tied to the abandonment of their subjective values, but these Paths are presented as artificial and inhuman in comparison with the Path of Humanity which has supposedly evolved naturally in mortals. But what is meant by "Humanity" here? Is the implication that this specific moral code (as written by White Wolf) is what makes humans human? Or does it merely suggest that the Path of Humanity is what maintains vampiric connection to the human through social convention? Either way, if vampires are doomed to literally degenerate through violation of a specific moral code, a specifically deontological morality (though this is complicated in V5) becomes embodied, concretised, and it is specifically remorse which prevents a vampire from losing Humanity, supplying a religious character to this reified morality. This is perhaps one of the most interesting (and alarming?) philosophical consequences of Vampire by itself. It also dredges up the question of the ontology of evil. In what way can evil be said to be real? Are there any essentially evil entities in the World of Darkness? There is a fatalism to the vampire: mechanically and textually, the slide into inhumanity is seen as inevitable, and so vampires are ontologically destined for evil (even if they try to do good in the meantime), unless they meet their final death before they are too far gone. Whether they count as an “ontologically evil” entity is up for debate, but I am never a fan of when fantasy stories make certain entities evil by nature. As soon as you can designate something or someone as essentially evil, any action taken against them can be morally justified. I don’t need to detail the gruesome historical ramifications of this kind of thinking when applied in the real world.
So how can I live with myself as a player and storyteller of Vampire: the Masquerade? I’ve run and played a couple of V5 games, and I’m currently playing in a local LARP, with a view to assisting with storytelling in the coming months. The V5 games, being told by a group of close friends, didn’t shy away from the themes of abuse present in the text of Vampire. Vampires and humans alike were responsible for casual and systematic acts of violence (physical, emotional, sexual), and our protagonists worked night in and night out to ethically navigate their own unlives. I detailed a particularly powerful bit of storytelling from a game in a previous blogpost which ended up being a critique of the “rape and revenge” narrative. As for the LARP, there are perhaps 25 regular members of the group, and even more who occasionally turn up or who are temporarily unable to participate. I’m not friends with all of them, and I know not all of them will approach the game the same way I do, but I and the players I’ve befriended most deeply are committed to more thoughtful, emotionally and thematically engaged storytelling in our corner. If we can’t bring heavier subjects to the public LARP event, we can at least roleplay them in private, making them part of our story. As I’ve mentioned before, one of the cool things about LARP is that there are as many stories as there are players.
My PC has been embraced against her will and inducted into the local Camarilla by an older vampire who gets his blood from a cult he runs; he himself was brainwashed by his own sire into accepting the Camarilla's doctrine without question. This is a man who, under different circumstances, she would utterly despise, and yet the blood bond he enforces on her means she has to live with the cognitive dissonance of "loving" him unconditionally and obeying his commands. When she discovered that her will was practically enslaved to his, she had a full-on mental breakdown, unable to distinguish her "real" feelings from her "artificial" ones. Now there's some personal horror for you! In the meantime, she has her own unsavoury vampiric curses and delusions to contend with (I won't detail them here in case some fellow LARPers are reading and don't want spoilers!), which leads to ethical and metaphysical disagreements between her and the vampires she's closest to. In the course of trying to fulfil one of her nasty needs more ethically, she is still going to meddle in mortal affairs by taking over a business and manipulating bureaucracy. One of my favourite dilemmas so far has been the question of how to deal with an obsessed stalker of hers: while her older vampire friends are quick to offer to kill the stalker for her — both for her own safety and to protect the Masquerade — she feels empathy for the stalker even as they violate her privacy, because she worries that they are in psychological crisis and thus deserve help rather than death. And yet still she compromises with her friends and instructs a vampire newcomer who needs to prove himself to investigate and surveil the stalker, violating their privacy in turn. That's just a taste of how we have our fun playing our ethically compromised characters, consciously holding the contradiction that we can still care about them as people while they are undoubtedly doing evil things.
I would argue that World of Darkness games work best when they provide a rich foundation for exploring the horrors of a particular fantastical subjectivity and its real-life analogues, whatever they might be to the individual players. A vampire, for instance, has a horrific embodied experience, requiring blood to survive, at once obscenely powerful and deeply vulnerable, unable to enjoy former mortal pleasures such as food and sunlight, haunted nightly by the Beast within; but there’s the horrific social experience as well, embedded in a vampiric culture maintained by abuse of power, alienated from mortal life, often blood-bound against one’s will to another vampire, curtailing one’s agency. It’s similarly horrific to be a werewolf or a demon or a wraith or a changeling: each game focuses on a different subject with one foot in familiar human subjectivity and another in the supernatural, and asks what it’s like to be that subject.
My least favourite part of World of Darkness is when the focus drifts towards the objective — the finer details of the rules, the facts, the lore — and culminates in “crossplat”, the inclusion of multiple supernatural subjects in the same game-world. Each game’s mechanics, cosmology, and world is tailored to the subject of the game and the themes explored, and it often takes a fair amount of contortion and hand-waving to reconcile them in crossplat. I enjoy Vampire’s approach to "deep lore" very much, because it deliberately leaves cosmology and cosmogony more mysterious; not only that, it also explicitly problematises the various origin myths and histories of vampires by tying them to in-universe political factions, all of whom have an agenda to push in insisting on their version of history while branding other versions heretical. Werewolf: the Apocalypse presents an official cosmology that involves a triad of godlike entities — the Weaver, the Wyld, and the Wyrm — that have become corrupted and failed to maintain universal balance; the werewolves consider themselves enemies of the destructive Wyrm and the protectors of Gaia. To take this at face value as objectively true is very dull to me. One could read this cosmology as subjective to the werewolves, who are deluded in their self-conception and far less metaphysically noble than they'd like to think, and this would be a more interesting take on the world; but in all the game lines that followed after Vampire, their individual cosmologies read like they’re meant to be treated as canon by the storytellers and players. Demon: the Fallen, while presenting another deliciously horrific subjectivity to explore, also imposes its own twist on Paradise Lost’s cosmogony, which — when crossplatted — at best shuts down the mythical speculations of Vampire and at worst is utterly incompatible with Werewolf and Changeling. Having all of these creatures coexist in a single game both muddies the thematics and tone and forecloses metaphysical consistency. The best way to go about crossplat I think is to have the other supernatural creatures remain more mysterious in the eyes of the primary subject, and not go into how any of their powers work, leaving metaphysics resolutely unsolved. I don’t like it, and yet many players and storytellers love it, perhaps because it's exciting to them to have all the facts and lore in one place. It’s a bit like how some people used to insist that every Pixar film takes place within the same universe, somehow. What united all the original World of Darkness games was not a coherent single universe but that 90s countercultural “punk” ethos of “sticking it to the man”, which isn’t exactly a coherent political ethos either…
…Which brings us to Mage: the Ascension. I used to think Mage’s concept was pretty cool. Reality is subjective (supposedly) and determined largely by the majority consensus of humans, but certain individuals and institutions have the power to shape reality through their force of Belief and Will. On a small scale, individual mages bend the metaphysical rules according to their worldview, but on a large scale, the universe is a battleground between massive factions who — if they win — will change the whole of reality as we know it. Instead of a fixed list of spells one can learn à la D&D, each mage has power over certain Spheres of reality, such as Matter or Time, and can combine these Spheres to affect the world in imaginative ways. Mage can be a highly creative problem-solving game. Your mage believes that they can Will-work through certain means compatible with their worldview, restricting what they can do and why. Meanwhile, they have to negotiate with the consensus reality, because if they do something magickal that contradicts what should be possible, the risk of reality biting back with Paradox and hurting them is far greater. Each player has to think deeply about what their character believes and why, and magickal gameplay is inherently roleplay as a result, if these principles are adhered to. I didn’t care for the lore much, but the magick mechanics were conceptually exciting.
There are two great tensions in the very fabric of Mage: 1) objective vs subjective metaphysics, and 2) whether power is venerated or rejected as the ultimate end. The supposed subjectivity of reality is undermined by the meta-metaphysics, so to speak, of the mechanics. Every mage, no matter their belief, casts magick using the exact same rules and from the exact same nine Spheres. Certain things are objectively real, because otherwise the world of the game falls apart: the Avatars that empower mages, the Paradox that fucks them up when they push their luck, the quintessence that fuels magick, the humans that enforce the consensus reality, all of the areas of the extended cosmos that exist without the need for any human’s belief in them, and time and space itself (which still delimit the realities of mages lost in their own dreams). So what is the official metaphysics of Mage if it’s not utterly subjective? It could be a weird fantasy Neoplatonism, seeing how everything is downstream of quintessence, the primal energy that infuses everything in existence. But the idea that a human’s will can have a measurable effect on reality has a more sinister metaphysical theoretician: self-proclaimed “superfascist” Julius Evola, whose influence on post-war fascist movements cannot be understated. Here’s what he had to say in Essays on Magical Idealism:
‘To claim that an individual, as an “I” or self-sufficient (autarches) principle, cannot define himself as the unconditioned cause of representations (viz. of nature), does not imply that such representations are the product of an “other” (of things which are real and which exist in themselves). Rather, this condition merely suggests that the individual does not have complete control over his own actions. […] Yet when will it be possible to truly affirm the Idealist principle that the “I” places all things? It will only be possible once the individual has transformed the dark passion of the world into a kind of freedom; that is to say: once the individual experiences his action of representation no longer as a form of spontaneity and coexistence of reality and possibility, but rather as a form of unconditioned, willed causation and power.’
Evola's Absolute Individual sounds very much like a mage who no longer has to negotiate with the consensus because they've achieved sufficient magickal power. If it doesn't matter what a mage believes in, only that they Will it to be true, there is a radical individualism at play. We've seen that Mage's metaphysics isn't completely subjective, and neither is Evola's: for the superfascist, there is an Absolute with which one can ascend to greater unity and higher consciousness. Evola isn't the only link between magickal esotericism and fascism: the history of “chaos magick” (which was a definite inspiration for Mage) is stuffed full of cryptofascists and actual fascists. Clearly we have to reckon with what could be an inherent fascism in its core concept of individual “awakened” humans shaping a malleable reality through force of will alone. To their credit, the team who produced the 20th Anniversary edition of Mage partially addressed this in a mini-essay called “Magick and the Fascist Urge”, included in the supplemental publication The Book of Secrets, which denounces every big faction in Mage’s universe as guilty of totalitarianism; but I don’t think that sufficiently grapples with the core concept, only its most extreme and organised manifestations. What does the main text of the Mage sourcebook have to say about power and “Ascension”? In truth, very little space is dedicated to discussing Ascension itself, the ultimate state of a mage who has transcended the need for instruments, for practices, for belief… and even for power itself, the book suggests. After a long road of accumulating unfathomable amounts of power, a mage can slough off such petty things and become one with the cosmos... Or something... It leaves the details up to the individual. Even though the title is Mage: the Ascension, most of the game isn’t really about Ascension, and it’s the choice of the group whether it is, eventually. There are a few paragraphs on Ascension as a topic, with no explicit mechanics; there are pages and pages on magickal power, what it can do, and how you use it, including the crunchiest mechanics in World of Darkness. So there’s an implicit contradiction here between the conclusions of the authors and the game encouraged by the mechanics and the rest of the text. And the metaphysics remains the same nonetheless. Mage is often considered the least horrific and most hopeful of the main World of Darkness games; I would argue it’s horrific that people don’t see the horror in living in Julius Evola’s world, in how a mage can become drunk with power and detached from the world of others, even without being driven mad by Paradox. It’s one of the themes Mage encourages exploring, but like Vampire, the potential for unreflective power fantasy is great... and perhaps it’s a superfascist one.
The two Mage games I played were two of my favourite games ever; the second was the last Mage game I’ll ever play. The final session of the game included two different storylines. The first was a lucid dream one of the PCs embarked on in order to try and enact some radical change in the world. No mechanics were involved; it was just a long Lynchian road-trip collaboratively described by the player and the storyteller, full of disturbing and cathartic encounters with versions of other characters. When the PC woke up, they were unable to determine what, if anything, they changed in the waking world… but what they really changed was their own mindset, for the better. In the second storyline, a different PC was involved in a high-stakes poker game at the Bellagio, Las Vegas. We simulated a game of Texas Hold ‘Em, sticking as closely as we could to the rules, while the scene itself was just as strange and inexplicable as the lucid dream: characters present for unknown reasons, behaving with unknown motives, failing to react or reacting unpredictably to events. The storyteller was attempting to exaggerate the friction between the constriction of following rules (supplying an objective metaphysics) and the freedom of telling a story without rules (allowing a truly subjective metaphysics), and it was hugely successful. We, the players, constantly corrected the storyteller when they slipped up on the poker rules but didn’t object at all when one NPC started shooting whichever character won the last poker hand in the head. This scene was the culmination of our characters attempting to unveil an enormous time- and reality-spanning conspiracy in which answers just led to even more questions. The true “Ascension” moment came when the player in the scene deliberately ignored the rules of Mage to swap his PC’s cards with the main antagonist’s using magick he technically wasn’t capable of performing, giving the antagonist the winning hand. The antagonist smiled and said, “Thank you for playing with me;” a gunshot; cut to black. And that was the end of the story; many of its mysteries went completely unresolved, and that was fine. Was this a Mage game? We didn’t use any of the lore. We transcended the need for the mechanics by the end of it. But we arguably achieved its titular concept in a special, unforgettable way. Like I said: the beauty of RPGs is that every game-as-played is unique. At the end of the day, it's not the system or the setting that makes the game great, but the players; and I'm really lucky to play with some wonderful people.
(If you are a fan of World of Darkness games, please share your thoughts with me, especially if you feel I've accidentally misrepresented any of the material or approached it in bad faith; I am admittedly most familiar with Vampire.)