V5 Camarilla, Chechnya

[11twiggins]

Okay, so this is pretty grim. If you don't know about the situation in Chechnya IRL, it's very, very bad. We're talking about the most sadistic kinds of torture you can imagine. I'm not going to detail all of it here of course, but the situation is bleak. If anyone is interested I can DM a dossier describing the methods used by the state, which includes examples of known deaths and the torture techniques used.

But it's okay! The "controversy", this media hysteria... it's all fake news! You see in reality, it's all Vampires creating a load of homophobic noise as a COVER for the fact that Chechnya is basically 100% controlled by Vampires! Carrying out hate crimes is Masquerade 101!

You thought this very real, contemporary and horrifying tragedy was about human suffering? No. It's about Vampires. Buy Our Edgy Books Please.

You thought that Malkav's insanity being the reason the Middle East is all messed up was bad writing? Just wait until you read V5 Camarilla!

You can see the preview here; the relevant section is highlighted: https://trulyrural.blogspot.com/2018...shit-show.html

Honestly I am so intensely grateful that I never bought into V5. Now we have an ongoing crime against humanity being labeled a "controversy" and presented as a vampiric islamist operation... The word controversy is particularly interesting. The state of Chechnya claims that the people who are the supposed target of their hate crimes don't exist. You can't attack people who don't exist after all. We don't have homosexuals, it's not part of our culture. So honestly, given the state of this mess, I am not in a mood to be charitable. The way this is worded is giving me extremely fashy vibes. I don't really care if that offends anyone. It's hard to believe that you could throw stuff like this into a preview and not have something incredibly dark going on behind the scenes.

[atamajakki]

This really shouldn’t surprise anyone, given how the V5 crew has presented themselves since well before release.

[11twiggins]

This really shouldn’t surprise anyone, given how the V5 crew has presented themselves since well before release.

I probably shouldn't be surprised, and yet I am.

[CTPhipps]

I created a petition to ask for the chapter to be removed.

https://www.ipetitions.com/petition/...-the-camarilla

[Kammerer]

Holy shit.

[CTPhipps]

But seriously, I think everyone who reads the passage can figure out it's about showing the vileness of the RL regime to readers.

[Kammerer]

But seriously, I think everyone who reads the passage can figure out it's about showing the vileness of the RL regime to readers.

Look, I get that you stan V5 hard, but this is not the place. If this was about showing the vileness of the RL regime, they wouldn't be saying that the purpose of the vampire conspiracy is to make Muslims look worse than they are. Muslims are the ones doing it IRL in Chechnya. This is the opposite of showing the vileness.

[CTPhipps]

[Removed - Changed Opinion]

[CTPhipps]

[Removed - Changed Opinion]

[CTPhipps]

You know, you guys are right.

This is the intro to my review of the Camarilla book:

2.5/5

THE CAMARILLA (sourcebook) is an incredibly flawed book that would have otherwise been a 4.5/5 if not for one incredibly ill-conceived chapter that I think needs to be removed. It would be in the best interests of Modipheus Entertainment as well as the fandom of the whole to remove the chapter and publish the book without it. It's that offensive and I'm not normally someone who plays morality police on a horror game.

But we'll get to that.

Actually, no, it's probably best to get it out of the way before anything else. The Camarilla (sourcebook) contains a chapter devoted to describing Mordor meets Latveria. There's a murerously evil little country ruled by a vampire dictator which is rounding up all the gays and other innocents to be vampire snacks. Here's the problem, it's a real country. You know, you can describe Montreal as a Satan-worshiping hellhole, that's actually funny. It's considerably less funny when it's a country actually doing the things you're telling people are secretly the work of vampires. It's why Hilter was a mortal, 9/11 wasn't caused by the Sabbat, and Columbine wasn't the work of two Thin Bloods (yes, I had that ST and he lasted until that session).

At our table, we have what's called the century rule. It's a simple enough thing that nothing can be said to be the fault of something supernatural until at least a century has passed and all of the people victimized by it are dead. You can state that the Confederacy was actually a massive Ventrue and Toreador scheme where all plantation owners were ghoul families or vampires.

You could even run a kickass game as a Brujah slave liberator. You can say Archduke Ferdidnand was killed by Anarchs ghouls. Don't claim Martin Luther King was killed by the Technocracy. Don't say genocides in Eastern Europe were the work of Belial's cult. Especially if, in this day and age, you can actually talk to the poor bastards who survived it.

So, I'm knocking off two points from my score because of Chechnya's chapter. It's one of those things which will go down with World of Darkness: Gypsies (The Holocaust was Hitler's fear of Romani magic!) and Himmler the Tremere for really bad ideas. If you're going to make up a nation of evil, make up an actual fictional nation. Call it Groznystan or get an actual Russian to make up a name but don't demean real life atrocities.

Thank you for persuading me.

[Manfr]

It must be said that the underlined piece of fiction is written in-character, by the perspective of a Camarilla vampire. I suppose the tone is something like a diplomatic report from the Embassy, telling how unfortunate is, to be forced to rely on these kind of allies.

Nonetheless, the chapter very well underlines how ghastly and murderous (and fascist, this is repeatedly mentioned) the Chechenian regime is, by the way with quite an accurate depiction of their methods, and very clearly speaks of the horrible systemic persecution of LGBT+ people.

It's also picking these things into a plot: I fully understand this may be offensive. However even among the RPG community I think that many don't even know where Chechenya is, and calling out a government for its heinous actions in a RPG supplement it's not something you see every day.

[Jargal]

Nonetheless, the chapter very well underlines how ghastly and murderous (and fascist, this is repeatedly mentioned) the Chechenian regime is, by the way with quite an accurate depiction of their methods, and very clearly speaks of the horrible systemic persecution of LGBT+ people.

"The horrible systemic persecution of LGBT+ people" is less - far less - than a half of that they are doing. Someone can say that the Second Chechen War was officially ended in 2009 but it's here just right now. Only the methods have changed.

[CTPhipps]

I hope everyone will sign and share.

It's a good book spoiled by a very tone deaf chapter. Thanks to Joseph Carriker for talking to me about it (he did Blue Rose and Exalted Second Edition).

[11twiggins]

I've realized this is even more dumb than I had thought, actually.

Forget the hugely important issues with how... morally reprehensible, tone deaf and inappropriate that whole segment was.

Think about Islamic Vampires, how they're presented in VtM, and the logical implications of the religious rules of Islam on being a Vampire.

If you're Islamic, similar to being Jewish, there are requirements with regards to what you can and can't eat. The obvious example is Pork. This likely originated in both religions due to the prevalence of infection with bacterial and parasitic organisms from eating pork in the time period and region. These books are full of rules that helped a society to survive when they were written, like washing your hands and dishes before you eat...

But part of the Islamic deal is Halal meat. The animal is slaughtered in a way which is intended to be more humane, and also ensures that blood is drained from it. This is a big deal in Islam, the whole not eating meat with blood thing. Now think about Muslim Vampires.

Naturally if you're a Vampire, you drink blood. But it's very much in-theme with the religion of Islam to think "okay, but what KIND of blood?". The solution in the WoD, as far as I can see, has been this idea that Vampires of an Islamic background tend to drink the blood of Muslims, as a general rule, thinking of it as being Halal versus the Haram blood of infidels. This practice dates back to the origins of the Ashirra as a sect. Now not all Vampires who come from an Islamic background will do this, but we can see why it would be prevalent in parts of the world where Islamist fundamentalism have a lot of power, or where the Ashirra orthodoxy is prevalent. Not a hard and fast law, but a cultural taboo.

So it makes absolutely no sense to me for the Sultan of Chechnya, an Islamic Kindred, to set up this program where the blood of queer people is harvested. A huge part of the setting with regards to Islamic vampires, prior to V5, has been this idea of shepherding your own community of Kine and drinking from a certain pool of vessels who are part of your community. This is less of a big deal in modern nights, but it's still important. Islamist Vampires draining gay people who are kidnapped by the Chechan state (and again, this is an IRL tragedy we're grafting our supernatural urban fantasy world onto) makes... literally no sense.

So as a small bonus, this segment not only is horribly misguided, disrespecting humanity and LGBT people and a human rights crisis, it also disrespects Vampire the Masquerade as an intellectual property, simply ignoring significant lore and paving over it with edgy bullshit.

That is to say, it's a particularly malevolent microcosm of everything that's wrong with V5's fluff.

Compare the treatment of the Holocaust in previous books. Rather than using an ongoing tragedy, a historical one is used. Rather than making Vampires be the secret cause of it, Vampires are simply exploiting human suffering in a thematic way. I'm not going to pretend that Berlin By Night is a good book, but at least the idea of "no, Vampires didn't set up the concentration camps, but some of them did interact with them, including this Tzimisce guy" is more tasteful and stays within the lane of common decency.

[Kammerer]

The issues of religion are its own bundle of snakes that plagued the entire history of VtM. V20 gave us such pearls as "[True Faith] precludes knowledge — true faith is by definition blind," which is the opposite of how every single religion ever worked.

But the question of "what kind of hypocritical doublethink vampires employ to claim they are not a bad person" is a separate and far less malicious topic than the material that started this topic.