"Such a small world 'till it's on your shoulders."
-Run by The Birthday Massacre
-Run by The Birthday Massacre
All right, how about this for something to talk about: the shameless ripping off of a Dan Olson video?
Okay, to be fair, this subject has been on my mind for a while. People who seen my essays over the year are probably familiar with the trend to breaking down a splat to emphasize how they are monsters, and while How Beasts are Monsters is super damn obvious, discussing their potential for humanity was both long overdue and an interesting challenge to consider. As it evolved, it also became clear that one of the things that needed to happen, at least in the meta (no denying it has a place in the books, though), was how Beast functioned in terms of the larger picture of the Chronicles of Darkness's larger dialogue and how, when framed that way, some of what Beast does and is is essential for the role that it fills. THis has gotten further exacerbated by recent conversations regarding things like Z-Splats and philosophical directions for Beast, and every time I sit down to write what is effectively To Kneel Before the Maw Part 2: Primordial Boogaloo, I found myself getting stopped by the fact that I needed to explain what Family does to this game in relation to the larger dialogue and the correlating effect on conversations regarding game direction and options.
But here's the real heart of why: I frequently make the dual-claims that a) Beast is not a complicated game to figure out, and b) everything Beast needs to make it a great game is there and just has to be presented correctly. Now I stand by those claims, but what I have not addressed and have to admit might be a large part of my frustrations with the dialogue around Beast is that, while those points may be true, Beast approaches the conversation of Chronicles from an angle that is very different from the way readers and players are trained by the rest of the gamelines to understand that conversation, and part of what trips people up is having to switch those gears with this one game in particular. A big of that is that the goals and interests of Beast as a crossover and how that means it exists in context to the rest of the Chronicles of Darkness, that it has a sideways angle to the big picture. This is not a weakness, per se, but by laying it out, it makes it clearer for me regarding discussions and possible projects for the line.
So here we are: Chronicles of Darkness, and how Beast fits into it.
This Human Heart in a Monster's Hand-Chronicles on Humanity and Monstrosity
So we can keep our bearings: Chronicles of Darkness is a 2004 urban horror tabletop game, updated to a second edition with a fairly sharp re-shifting of mechanics and the focus of it's themes in 2013, with eleven gamelines featuring iconic monsters with their own thematic beats that work in harmony to it's own core themes and unique look at "Our World, but with Monsters in it." While the elements of stylish horror, dark mystery, dread and personal horror, threatening symbolism, and the concurrence with our everyday lives are at present within Chronicles and it's other gamelines, for our purposes we are most interested in the collected theme of humanism as expressed through the conflict of "humanity vs monstrosity" and the many ways that can be expressed and, more importantly, muddled about with and made complex for the purposes of producing clarity and depth.
Okay, on the same page? Cool. Let's drop the formality and get gut-deep into this fucker.
That conflict of "humanity vs monstrosity" is present in every single gameline on every level and is often baked into the mechanics, even where it's not obvious-and it occurs to me right now that for those you who might have hung-ups thinking of your hero-of-the-masses storm mage as a monster, just do me a favor and go read Skeletons Poised in the Bedrock, come back when you're done. I'm also gonna handwave the big question of "What do we mean by 'humanity' and 'monstrosity'?" because I've talked up a lot about it, By What Measure is a Monster Found? is probably still good enough for covering that in brief despite showing the wear and tear of the times and subsequent perspective, if that doesn't work, an idle search of my liked comments'll probably do, and if worse comes to worst, there's a fun conversation for the comments.
Anyways, We could be here for fucking ever if I went through all the elements present in every gameline ever, but fortunately for a salient conversation, I don't have to-I can point to the Integrity-alikes.
For some, the analogy is pretty open-Humanity and Pilgrimage explicitly spell out their relationship to the humanity/monstrosity conflict on their sleeves. Other's bury the lead a little more so-no, Wisdom's angle on self-possession and controlled expression of self to the dictates of will is not immediately a human argument, but a High Wisdom mage, whether saint or a l'enfant diabolique, keeps their semblance of of humanity more keenly than a Low Wisdom mage whose obsessions and magics drive them as surely as a vampire's hunger. Cover is easy to read as, well, just that, cover with little human/demonic push/pull present, but a Demon with a higher cover is incentivized to lean more into human behavior and thinking in order to maintain and build that Cover (through the soft, lived experience way of doing such), where as a Demon with a low Cover (so long as they have others) is more incentivized to go ahead and go nuts on the monstrous behavior because the cover is more easily burned, and demon who only has a low Cover can't quite keep the seems of their monstrosity from showing, and is probably in a desperate spiral to recover that Cover in contrast that also means they still need to take riskier monstrous behavior to get the yields they need because, you know, they need Cover Now. But either way, there's a general rule that High Integrity-Alikes (or undamaged Clarity/Stability, for the purposes of Changeling and Deviant) allows a creature to assert a human reasoning or motivation over their monstrous urges and necessitated actions, and by contrast a Low Integrity-Alike (Or highly damaged Clarity/Stability) is a a basis for more feral and darkling cravings, and frightful and predacious behavior more free to slip from a character's actions. Humanity lies at one end, Monstrosity lies at the other.
There are two main things to keep in mind with this understanding. The first is that those two forces are intended to treat and act upon a character, in a loosely twilit meta/subtle metaphysical way*, as a tug-of-war, twin forces pulling on a character this way or another. Frequently it's player involvement and discretion that provokes the human element of this (the game uses the loose relation of the monstrous and the impulsive/natural/instinctual, and thus reason and choice tend to thusly drive the character in humanity-one must make the decision to be human**), but from the narrative point of views, these game's derive their sense of dramatic conflict on the individual character by thusly pulling this way or that.
The second big one is that all Integrity-alikes posit a perfected state for their game, as far as that argument as expressed by the Integrity-alikes. And with saying that, I have two caveats to get out of the way, because I can hear you-1) These perfected states do not necessarily have to be aimed at Humanity, per se, so much as they are perfected for the creature-so yes, your Werewolf has an explicit number they aim for and strive to sit on, in a perfect world, but they feel the push and pull of humanity against monstrosity all the same even if their ideal state is "Smack dab in the middle of these forces", 2) There's a difference between Perfected States within this argument and Acceptable States to the characters, because trying to be running hot on an Integrity-alike (or empty on Clarity/Stability) is a lot of work for a fairly easily lost paradise, and it's often easier to find a more comfortable state of misery down the line, leading to characters who comfortably sit around 5 to 3 on most scales. THAT SAID, as a general rule, there is a specific number deemed as the ideal to chase after on these lines.
Honestly, the weirdest one of these, outside of Satiety, is Synergy, where in low synergy often keeps a personal humanity at the exchange of basically one of the most haunted fuckers out there and all of the splats drawbacks being the most hard-baked into that lower strata, wherein a high Synergy brings in all of those hauntings and generally means the Sin-Eater has practiced the skills for human behavior in order to arrive there-but on the other hand has the increased capacity to express themselves monstrously and none of the barriers to prevent them. The gist is still there, but it's...muddier than any of the others.
Anyways, that's the humanity/monstrosity conflict on the personal scale, but it spirals out in the formation and look at the world, which leads us to...
Everyone Hail to the Pumpkin Song-Monstrous Societies and the Dark Gray Line
First, clarifying some language just to make it easy- I'm going to talk about what we consider the "tell you who to be and what to do" Y-Splats as Monstrous Societies even though things like Refinements, Agendas, Tribes, and such are more like philosophies than actual organizations just to keep things easy for myself. That basically covers everyone but Beast and Deviant, and we'll talk about Deviant in context....probably in another thread.
Okay, so the big thing to wrap our head around when discussing Monstrous Societies, the organization of monsters, is that their first role is to reconcile monstrosity. I bring this up because the opposite is just as true and important to understand-monstrous societies are not interested in leading their constituents, as a rule, back to humanity. No, they are primarily here to help a young monster find their feet in their condition and give them a direction to go, preferably one that advantages the group (and in particular, those at the top of that group, which invariably happens even among the more democratic societies).
And while we're here, we should address one of the main reasons why Monstrous Societies are an appealing answer to one of the recurring questions about Beast even though this isn't quite the thread for it-Monstrous societies usually the place readers go to for formulating their ideas of what a character is and, more importantly does. It's the answer for most people to "So what do I do as X?" And honestly, that's not just an meta thing, it's very much a part of the reason why the characters will go with a group, among the other factors that come into play (insert social manipulation of all sorts here). characters are inherently drawn into a world where they find out where they are to be what they now are, where they can retreat back into humanity, to what ends they can do and be a monster-and most importantly, judge what's entirely too much.
Now this is gonna get finicky and interesting, so let's do some laying out. Playable protagonist factions are generally in this gray area on the human/monster spectrum of conflict, indulging in monstrosity while still making an appeal to reasonable human interests or presentations (Whether or not it's actually gray in execution is dependent on the gameline, but while most actually do a decent job of playing that game, Mage, Mummy, and Demon exist). Some of the fractured elements hew closer to being overtly monstrous without crossing the line-the Guardians of the Veil and the Autumn Court are classic examples, though I'd argue a lot more of them subtly exist.
All of that said, for the...let's say First Edition primarily-for the First Edition of Chronicles, there was a lot of incentive make it clear that, by contrast, antagonists were distinctly in the black as this argument goes, highly monstrous and quite as often really bad people (for a quick point of context, here's a post from Dave Brookshaw discussing the presentation of the Pure and Seers in contrast, say, World of Darkness's Technocracy and some of the thinking in development at the time). To contextualize it, if the protagonist faction explored reasonable realms to be a monster, a gray area of operation, then antagonists were to represent when monsters had crossed a line, where it was "too much".
There are still elements of this in the Second Edition, to be be sure-Belial's Brood are monsters who have gone so far as to give themselves over to the Beast, the Seers ARE shitbags covered in an asshole sauce, however bad the Lost can be, at least they aren't exchanging people over to the Strangers like the Loyalists, Sin-Eaters aren't as bad as Tyrants, Arisen as to the Deceived and Shuankhsen, Renegades as to Devoted, etc. etc. However, I mention it getting finicky and interesting, particularly with some forward looking for Beast in particular, because the design principle for the Pure (and the Forsaken) has actually been given a lot of flex room as explained by Bunyip here and it at work in Night Horrors: Shunned by the Moon. I'll probably get more into that after this essay, but I wanted to mention it here.
Nevertheless, you have the gist- you have humanity as a personal end that characters can chase at, a general middle ground of gray monstrosity with various definitions, directions, and restraints, with some being darker than other, but then a general dark coalition of monstrosity that took things too far for the discussion. It's a neat and pretty usable model that can work out decently for any theme that you care to break down. It's a fairly strong set of guidelines.
And then White Wolf released a game that blew all of that up, and it's important we understand that.
Contrast by Candlelight-You Thought It Was Beast, but It Was Me, Hunter, All Along
Hunter: the Vigil is a horror urban gameline within the Chronicles of Darkness, first released in 2008 and then released in a Second Edition form in 2019, and it is the first proper crossover game in the entire franchise of Chronicles. Oh sure, not so much in terms of being a game that brings multiple splats into the same game at the table in the way Beast and later the Contagion Chronicle would, but it was the first gameline to basically look at the Chronicles franchise as a whole with a unified perspective that worked directly into the franchise's main goals. Oh sure, various bluebooks took a look at the available gamelines at the time thoroughly, but it was to the tune of that game's general themes and objectives first, and never really unified in the way that Hunter did.
Hunter: the Vigil is a game wherein you play as one of the many victims of monstrous activity and decided to do something about it, to take to some kind of action the help prevent such victimization again and possibly end it permanently. You are, well, a hunter, and you hunted monsters***.
The timing of the release of this game, at both points in time, was actually really perfect. At the time of the first edition's release, it came off the heels of Changeling and Promethean before that, and with that and the first editions of Werewolf and Mage starting to find their feet well and truly, there was a real disposition to view the monsters of the other gamelines through Protagonist-Centered Morality colored glasses in forum conversation. The Second Edition came out after all Second Edition releases of the monsters had come out, and the games were at the most risk of losing sight of other pictures.
Hunter took the player characters of the other gamelines by stripping them of their context and grouping the lot of them in the same box (mostly, we'll get to that in bit), destroying the dark gray line between protagonists and antagonists and looking at them all as a whole, and letting the actions and behaviors of the monsters speak for themselves, and that picture was ultimately one of monsters still being a significant cause of strife for humanity-people weaker, more scared, and more at a loss of knowledge than the monsters themselves were. It was a cutting indictment of the monsters at both times, and if that's all they did, Hunter would still be a hell of a gem for having done that...but Hunter got a little trickier and more incisive than just that.
The first thing that Hunter did that makes it more interesting than just than that is that it actually ignored the conventional logistics of what should gather their interest in favor of doubling down on that accountability to monster's actions. See, barring supernatural senses, the typical targets of hunters should be the mosnters who are excessive and more bizarre in their actions and leftovers, where monsters leave a more noticeable impression of their presence-in expectation, the antagonists of most of the other splats are more likely to leave a damnedably noticeable wake for hunters to follow than the player types, because basically every monster group hews to a level of caution is that is not similarly present in their antagonists. Instead, Hunter seems to delight in making a roast of monsters who we as readers of the other gamelines can recognize as the "better guys" but, reasonably to a hunter's eyes, are damnedable and worthy of, well, hunting. Mechanically, the incentive is that since the antagonists of the other gamelines are intended to take on empowered protagonists, it would be too much to take on with the under-powered hunters-but thematically, it additionally wrenches the conventional player view into an even more uncertain place, as even their "heroic" actions are made clearly and undeniably monstrous.
The second thing takes that principle and really jams it up and makes the entire "humanity vs monstrosity" argument complicated as fuck through the Conspiracies and a handful of the Compacts. In one of my more infamous posts on Hunter, I've pointed out how there's a lot of monsters with their fingers in the pies of Hunter Organizations (and have still missed a few)-and not just monsters, George, but often the antagonists of the other gamelines, to one degree or another.
Now while this makes a lot of Hunter fans uncomfortable, I find it a really damn interesting angle of presentation. Most people will be used to my optimistic read of these operations, but for this conversation, what I want to point out is how this factor puts a human face on what are otherwise entities and organizations that were otherwise deemed to alien or malicious to give credit to, and provided a empathetic angle and twist of consideration-which quite frankly is fucking phenomenal for the overall discussion, creating nuance demonstrating complexities that allow for greater empathy-and even better, empathy that doesn't deny that judgments should still be made. It's just kind of a masterpiece.
And this neatly dovetails into the third thing-how hunters are also wrong, and often monstrous. Yes, hunters were victims and speak and act on behalf of the victims and contextualize the inhuman action of monsters-but by the very virtue that lets them do that (namely, decontextualization), hunters often fail to-or outright choose not to-see the monsters as the people they are, with their own victimizations and righteousness's and foes who must be stopped for the good of everyone. Hunters do a lot to bring in humanity to the conversation, yes, but they aren't inherently the good guys, and struggle just as much with the conflict of humanity vs monstrosity as any other gameline. They can fall and be fallible, and that's awesome.
A lot of my dialogue on the matter is the result of having my longest run game be a Hunter: the Vigil game, and that way of looking at the broader themes of Chronicles is just damn powerful and thought provoking.
And it also really helps to make a lot of things about the second crossover game come into focus.
Yes, at long last, I am actually talking about Beast.
Hunger and Satiation are One Eternal Round-How Beast Resolves the Humanity/Monstrosity Conflict, and the Fallout
With that setup, it would be easy to explain simply what Beast does-after all, what Hunter comments on through contrast, Beast does through comparison, easy enough. And there's a lot of truth to that.
But I feel like leaving it at that misses how Beasts takes that simple base, and gets wildly inventive with it. Namely, the big thing that Beast does is consolidate and simplify in interesting ways that do just as much as the explosion of decontextualization from Hunter does-and a big way it does that is that it welds concepts together and then grinds it down into a seamless integration.
I've talked a lot before about how the Devouring is an actualization for Beasts on the subject of humanity vs monstrosity, and it's worth going into that again, so:
Beasts begin their descent into monstrosity as their first victim, as the Horror that acts as the id-shadow to the future ego-self Beast begins to feast on the soul that will be the superego-persona. The Beast-incumbent suffers nightmares that strip them of the security blankets they rely on for hiding from realities, and as they go through these devourings, they come to realizations about the way the world works and come to terms with the crutches and misconceptions they relied on and how to be and see and act without them, even finding ways to transform those old reliances into healthier understandings and behaviors. As they do, they begin to realize, having had to deal with their fears and find their own strengths, how very much they begin to identify with the monster that took them in the night. All the while, they get to experience both the physical and psychological effects of those aggressions and develop a sense of empathy and understanding for those going through them, so they intimately understand the pains of such growth and revelation, the initial reluctance to face those grievances, and the results, good and bad, of digging into them, and thus have a knowledge of how thresholds work for people. At the end, when they become identical to one another, a beast completes the circle and becomes the monster that bedeviled them, wiser and stronger for the result-and in so have also assumed a mantle of power that allows them to better care for people who deal with these conflicts and trials, even as they are now those conflicts and trials.
The Devouring is a commitment to monstrosity that is nonetheless directly welded into the very human experience that it took to get there, in this way. And for a further demonstration, nothing communicates that better than Satiety.
I mentioned earlier that no better example exists for the humanity vs monstrosity argument than the Integrity-alikes, and here's the thing-Satiety isn't exempt from that. While unconventional in presentation, High Satiety still translates more easily into more human behavior, since a Beast is now well fed enough to not warrant feeding for a long time (comparatively, depending on Lair, and barring expenditures) and strongly ties them to humanity through the strengthening of Nightmares and the increased ease of connecting to Lair, both factors that are emblematic of their increased connection to humanity. Likewise, Low Satiety translates into more feeding, ie monstrous behavior, and the increased emphasis on Atavisms and Power when merged with a Horror incentivizes feral and darkling action. The forces of humanity vs monstrosity are still present, and even maintain the work...with two critical differences.
First, a Beast has no Perfected State, as it were. No Extreme that reads as a very good thing-in fact, Satiety 10 and 0 are both very dangerous states for them to be in. No Harmonious balancing point-Satiety 5 is an open bit of flesh for Heroes, and is otherwise just kind of a place to be. No damage or freedom thereof, as with Changelings and Deviants. A Beast can prefer a state of Satiety to be in, like anyone, but at the end of the day, the wandering up and down of the Satiety track is the whole of the ideal-free to change for a lack of overt punishment. It's not so much that being more in tune with humanity or monstrosity is desirable, as they are a continual flow between one and the other, and that the whole is the Perfection, the actualization that other monsters will spend a lot of times coming to as they struggle against both monstrosity and, at times, humanity.
Second is the method of travel. Sure, humanity and monstrosity pull at a Beast in a way that causes them to wander up and down the track-but the methods of push and pull are reversed from their conventions. As a broad overlook of the other Integrity-alikes, to pursue the more human end of things, you commit yourself to being more human-like in the context of your given gameline, in so far as you do not completely betray your monstrous side as the bare necessities of monstrous life demand, and visa versa with monstrosity. Beast is motivated by human-like and monster-like activity to travel you-but in reverse. In order to attain High Satiety, you have to be willing to commit to acts of Monstrosity to fill yourself up to it. By contrast, committing to a Humanity driven way of being drops you down into Low Satiety****.
These two factors tie the forces of humanity and monstrosity that form the tug-of-war conflict in the rest of Chronicles into a mobius strip, an eternal round where each flows into the other and back again, that makes permissible any spot on the spectrum for the entity. Barring the most egregious of dives in either direction, and with only some investment to not sit happily in the middle all the time, Beast comes to terms with it's conflicts, accepting both monstrosity and humanity as aspects of their selves that may take face at a moment but is no eternal condemnation. Details and specific cases are to be dealt with as they come, but the broad principle accepts both elements and puts them to the use of the ego-self driving a Beast.
And that's really cool!
And also is kind of problematic!
See, take all of that and mix it in with my fourth footnote below, and as a general rule you may have a person who is at peace with the franchises most central struggle, but as such is much more free and loose with their monstrosity on the whole, who accepts it where there are occasions, if humanity is to be desired, it should be challenged. It's not so much as they don't so much as they roll with it and accept where it conflicts with the terms they came to. if other monster's central axis is in the grey of the divide, a Beast's nature is likely to incline to towards the dark grey-in fact, they pretty much sit on the Dark Gray Line.
Of course, you'd have to convince them (and yourself) of that.
Ohana Means Uncertanity-Family and the Death of Monstrous Societies in Beast
THIS, by the way, is the section I wanted to write regarding the larger organization principle arguments.
Okay, so as we just established, Beast's complex take on the central conflict of the game means that between conventionally gray and black arguments, their inclination and reconciliations leave them right smack dab in the middle of it. And that would be tough enough, but Beast isn't done making things interesting-and tough-on you yet. Because those fancy little boxes you use to understand monstrosity all dissolve where Beast is concerned. Beast takes that nifty little divide and smudges and smears and blends the fuck out it with one of it's core themes and primary ways of viewing the world-Kinship.
Family complicates every argument and every fight.
The short and simple answer for why that is comes down to the idea that family just isn't other people-you can't just get into anything with kin the way you can with a disassociated stranger, or even a friend. This isn't to say things can get heated, vicious, personal, brutal or bloody-in fact, in the case of family, you can more often than with others-but that the relationship means it's at an odd tilt wit everything else. There are things a stranger could get away with you'd never let family let go of, and there are things you'd do with a stranger that you'd never do with a family member. Fights that might be academic in other that turn into shouting matches, crimes that might be called out left ignored.
I, personally, give my brother a break where I would not otherwise be kind regarding libertarians, because I still have to meet up with him for holidays and weekends and any time my mother is involved, and also kind of have some leeway in some ways because, you know, he's my brother, I got to let some stuff go-and yet there are also times I take him right to fucking task with anger and vitriol and want to murder because he is my brother. You want to see a confused ball of knots, look at the relationship between me and him. I simultaneous can have fun unlike any other and fury unlike any other regarding him.
And this is actually a source of a lot of the conflict for Beast, as much as it is also a source of the great humanity at work in the game-because yeah, this girl may be a Predator King bitch, but she's also my sister. Oh, sure, that guy may be a fucking valiant Adamantine Arrow, but I've got kick his ass for what he did because he's also my brother.
The main thing that can be said about Family is that, even if it doesn't come first for you, it has this all pervasive power to recolor and re-contextualize everything you look at.
TO make matters worse is condensing that down into the two other world views of any Beast-Nightmares(as seen through Families) and Hungers. Almost any argument can be stripped down to an emotional level that Beast's are primed to recognize-and since they feel that kinship, are often willing to speak with, because families have an easier time digging into how a person feels and how that motivates their actions and sense of being. Sure, any Beast can be interested in the political standpoint of a conservative American-but what speaks more clearly to them is the feeling of fear at having been forgotten in the advance of a strange new developing world that they don't quite understand because they somehow missed how we got here, the hunger to feel stable and secure, free to enjoy life as they once did before everything got complex and weird and so counter to the way they understood things before. And that feeling of kinship means that even if they don't share those feelings, they can empathize with it, and some connection to this person demands some sort of recognition that is bound to be more intense because it's not motivated by the justifications and high-minded argument, but strikes right to the heart of it all. And since these are things a beast has reconciled with to some degree, they often have a perspective on those feelings that are useful, comforting at the very least in terms of commiseration, but might actually allow them to know more of what they can do with those feeling, and leave it to them to reconcile it with their rhetoric. Beasts are primally driven to understand on a deeper, psychological and emotional level because that was the journey they had to take to get where they are.
Going back to the line before destroying it, the use of Family as a crossover element creates the action that allows for the comparison and contrast- a Beast is incentivized to be with you and help you out (because you're family), but that closeness allows you to see versions of yourself that take things just a hair too far, who are comfortable with things you might not be. The familiarity with Beasts, the way they can be comforting to be around, so like you, is the same element that makes it so damn uncomfortable. By similar token, a Beast can cozy up to those antagonists and, through still being lighter in the gray that simple black, can embody empathy for the devil, making cases that were previously off the map because of the divide-and therefore just as easily demonstrate how the temptation to that side of the argument happens all the same. And the best part is that it can just as easily work other other ways too through their own contradictions existing at peace-a Beast can help the protagonist monsters realize something about their humanity in the way a Beast takes their terrible side and builds it into something beautiful, and at the same time use that same turn to double down on where an antagonist has fucked up.They provide a human face to monstrosity and a monstrous face to humanity, a way to see yourself in any different light and have it be home-These conflicts, in fact, come to rest and are home with the Beast's reconciliation.
And here's the thing-when lines are removed, or at least smudged and lightened up because you basically have the perfect devil's advocate for anything, someone who can find a little bit of themselves in every, the factions that define the rest of Chronicles divide begin to fade away and allow for blurrier arguments. For a Beast, you're not a Free Councillor and he's not a Seer-you both are the asshole college brothers that she gets frustrated to hell and back because your both wrong, but stands up and helps you both out and helps you both understand each other a little better. The Family matter blurs and becomes complex because there's always a friendly face who gets, on at least a primal level, what's going and and can convey it, someone who strips down the dressing and can actually communicate the fears and the bids for security of the other, someone who speaks the language that is under all other motivations and actions-and they can do it because they are those things, and have gone through them on a fundamental level and speak to both their pains and their profits, their struggles and their revelations.
And this is the big reason why broad scale factionalism/philosophy doesn't work in Beast-because it destroys the way the theme of Family muddles and makes complex all the other arguments, by removing the friendly-but-terrifying face that dives under everything and gets to the primal fears, bids for security, and ultimately belonging that intensify, mute, and twist sideways all other arguments. It would destroy the way that it makes the arguments of other games, largely academic things to debate with words and gun, and instead translates them into personal, human attachments and factors-not high minded philosophy, but pure want and fear and connection. To factionalize is to raise barriers, arguments that do not allow a familial connection to do the talking, the driving, the reconciling and the fighting. Beast is enriched by the way it simplifies these arguments, ties them up, and then fuels it with emotion and place. Factions depersonalize where Family personalizes, and that's a big part of what makes conflict in/with Beast so damn great-it bring characters together in such a way that allows them to conflict and resolve things on a level that so easily translates both into humanity and monstrosity.
So, with that said, where does that leave a Beast to go?
Be Your Own Monster-To Curse and Love As Thou Should Want
So I feel like we've hit a dovetailing of two big questions-the grand one being that, if this is the grand position of Beast the Primordial in relation to Chronicles, then what does that say about the Humanity of Beast, and Where does a Beast go when the conventional directions are muddled, interlinked, and simplified.
The title of this section and previous discussions give away my answer, but it is still never the less where it creates the answer-so let's come to terms with it.
The thing about a Beast having their monstrosity and humanity tied together so intimately and reinforced by their conception of reality that intimately deconstructs the larger argument down into personal motivations, connections, and feelings, that not only sees self as human and monster as one at once but as the humanity and monstrosity of other as equally freeflowing and circular means that almost anything a Beast does can be retranslated into one or the other. The dark gray monstrosity of Beast just as easily becomes a dark-gray humanity with a flipping of perspective and action. One the one hand, the fear a Beast instills can be used to spite and terrorize. On the other hand, it can allow a person to finally reach out and connect to others, to finally allow a person to ask for help and get feelings of weakness addressed. On the one hand, satiating Hunger can be used to rob a person of power, ability to act, a malicious bite that impairs, wounds, maybe even kills. On the other hand, it can be used to remove a crutch from someone long ready to run, to allow them tap into their true strength, to transform a reliance into a stronger and fuller form. On the one hand, kinship can be used to demoralize and fatalize a person, taking their flaws and casting into a long maze of dark reflections. On the other hand, kinship can give people a place to be, shoulders to cry on, assurances in the face of conflict. Beast's humanity is fundamentally in the freedom to roll their monstrosity around into whatever they want for whoever they want for whatever reason they want, their ability to observe context from any angle from such a fundamental position of emotional basis allowing them to love or curse anyone they want, to take the selfish and apply it to the selfless, and back again.
And it's in that power of an eternal rounding of perspective and action that it thus falls on a Beast to make the tough decisions of who they act for, how they act for them, and why they act for them. It's not an answer anyone can give them because every answer blurs into the personal, higher-scaled argumentation and logic not quite finding purchase in a person who knows more about themselves than most of their peers do in likewise cases. A Beast makes themselves out of the family that surrounds them, and draws distinctions by the masses by making a choice about it.
Which is one of the most fundamentally human things there is-that while we are subject to our environments, our families, the schools of thought around us that teach in many ways, upon discovering ourselves, our ability to act in ways that both self-define and shape the world is a thing that may be shared, but is fundamentally ours-a core principle to reconcile the conflict between self and community, darkness and light.
Beasts are monsters-and in their monstrosity, they are painfully, personally human.*****
*Which I here mean that there's often a flow between "it operates this way because game mechanics and we've no need to undress the stage" and that the characters in these games are often subject to forces beyond the physical and mere psychological that can affect behavior/disposition/nature/whatever.
**Which is why frequently say, when people want heroes or good guys in the game , that they exist, but it falls on the characters to BE those good guys-no organization is going to compel you to be human, or good.
***Okay, so, idly fun tangent: prior to the game's release, there was actually a lot of overt speculation as to what Hunters were going to be and what they were hunting, with a lot of really wild guesses that ranged from Hunter: the Reckoning but Chronicles to revived shades of the dead combating Cthulian entities in extra dimensional spaces and weirder and far afield things than that. One person had the gall to suggest it was going to be about humans hunting monsters, and like, that was it, and then developer Chuck Wendig went "DING DING DING, we've got a winner!", which was then followed up by three forum pages of the rough equivalent of people slapping their heads and going "Oh, duh." "Forums never change" is the moral of the story.
****Okay, and it must be merited that any time where a Beast spends Satiety also rapidly descends a Beast back to lower Satiety, which is often itself an expression of monstrous action, but there's a reason this section is going to end with Beast sitting pretty on that Dark Gray Line.
*****Okay, not the strongest ending-gimme a break, I wanna go to bed.
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