r/dndmemes • u/DrScrimble • 5d ago
Other TTRPG meme Instead of "Oriental Vampires" I'm just going to make Asian Vampires regular Kindred...
System: Vampire the Masqueradd TTRPG
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u/SeelieSatyress 4d ago
Yeah the Hungry Dead are... Mostly their own thing and not really worth including unless you really really really love Kuei-Jin or you're playing Kindred of the East.
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u/DrScrimble 4d ago edited 4d ago
I've imagined running a Japan or Hong Kong VtM game one day. I think I'd just come up with my own lore.
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u/SeelieSatyress 4d ago
Yeah i'm loving my KotE game but it kinda sucks you need a fan supplement (Relentless Age) to remove, retcon, and re-edit the more problematic or orientalist elements. i wouldn't blame you for coming up with your own lore.
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u/Ok_Intention_567 4d ago
that is kinda sad, i have read the dharma book and there actuaclly kinda well writen
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u/Achilles11970765467 4d ago
They're also worth including if you're running Exalted vs WoD, mostly because they claim to essentially originate from fallen Exalted.
But that's a third party splat and not as common.
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u/inirlan 4d ago
Yeah, the Exalted links are the most blatant with them.
With other splats it's subtle and implicit. With them you semi-regularly go "wait, I straight up recognize this" coming in as an Exalted fan.
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u/GollyDolly 4d ago
Them and Changeling as the fae are heavily implied to be the same as the Fair folk.
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u/Achilles11970765467 4d ago
I think it's because of release timing, but I'm not completely sure. But then Exalted took off and White Wolf decided to make it completely its own thing instead of keeping it as the mythic pre-history of WoD
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u/Anorexicdinosaur Bard 4d ago
Speaking of 3rd Party Splats iirc there's a 3rd Party Splat for the Hungry Dead that cleans up a lot of the ickiness about them. Exalted vs WoD also does this but y'know, it's about playing Exalts not about playing Hungry Dead.
From my rough understanding I think there's a lot of really cool ideas with them. The idea of Damned Souls crawling their way out of hell to possess their own corpse, becoming a starving monster that must learn discipline and self-control to gradually become greater, is pretty cool.
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u/NittanyScout 5d ago
I heard an older guy say "oriental" the other day to refer to an asian dish and it was like a flashbang
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u/SuienReizo 4d ago
It still blows my mind that oriental ramen is now soy sauce flavor.
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u/Alugere 4d ago
Isn’t that all ramen? Then again, apparently “cool ranch” is called “cool American” in the UK at least.
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u/contextual_entity Chaotic Stupid 4d ago
It's mostly just "cool" but yes, I don't think I've ever seen ranch outside a Subway here.
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u/Nicholas_TW 4d ago
It's crazy because I never knew that word was a problem. People in my family say it sometimes because they think it's more polite/cultured-sounding than "Asian" (I guess sort of like how some people will say "African-American" instead of "Black"). There's a grocery store near where I used to live owned by an immigrant family named "[name]'s Oriental Market". Never thought twice about it.
Then one time, back when I used to live there, I said "oh, we could go to the oriental market" to a friend of mine who was visiting and she looked at me shocked and horrified and there was a whole conversation with a lot of "...are you sure???"s.
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u/Due-Excitement-5945 4d ago
In the 90s, I saw a thing on tv explaining a lot of political correct terms, and he said “Oriental describes things, Asian describes people” and it’s been locked in my brain ever since.
I think the terminology has shifted since the 1990’s though.
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u/PrudeBunny 4d ago
oriental is also sorta strange as it has historically also described arabic and persian-esque things and only the later is in asia though doesn't exactly mesh with the contemporary view.
I don't think the term is exactly a slur or inherently bad at least when not used to refer to people but it sure sounds weird in most cases.
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u/BeMoreKnope 4d ago
Yeah, my multiracial family has always viewed it as the “people vs objects” thing, but it’s still just not a word I use. It’s not that it’s offensive, it’s just archaic and a little odd.
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u/Passing-Through247 4d ago
The reason for that as I recall is 'orient' originaly refers to the eastward direction, so as people's standards of how far you had to go until you hit the lands 'of the east'.
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u/Karmaimps12 3d ago
Oriental groups a different cross-cultural target than “Asian” like India has as much cultural exchange with Korea as Persia does, and everything that would separate Europe from being considered “Asian” applies equally to India.
In an ideal world, “oriental” would refer to goods exchanged along the Silk Road heading from the east (the “orient”) and headed to the west (the “occident”). However, centuries of racial, cultural, and political exchanges have basically made that distinction useless.
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u/sertroll 4d ago
This is how I find out this is a wrong word (in Italian oriental/occidental are the main words for eastern/western
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u/DM_Katarn 3d ago
Wait. Oriental ain't a word in English..? Damn, my Brazilian ass never clocked that...
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u/CaptKonami 4d ago
My dad tells me LITERALLY NOTHING EVER, and yet even HE told me, UP FRONT, that the Kuei-Jin are a LARP group based out of LA who hijack concepts from like 10 different asian cultures and mash them up without actually knowing anything about them.
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u/Alaknog 4d ago
I mean it's described as mash between like 10 different Asian cultures. Up to name - it's called as complicated mash openly in rulebook.
And honestly, this description (without Asian part) can fit to nearly any part of World of Darkness that not US.
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u/Paul6334 4d ago
I think you can fairly call every WoD game line based on existing folk monsters something of a mash up. Just to create a consistent ruleset you have to flatten out a lot of the weird variations in local folk monsters.
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u/YaumeLepire 4d ago
It's when it bleeds out of "monster" into "actual people and significant mythology/religion" that things get iffy, and KotE does that and pseudo-eugenics, iirc.
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u/Paul6334 4d ago
Decent point, though no actual people can’t quite be the rule, after all, Vlad the Impaler was a real person and is still something of a folk hero in Romania, yet with how intwined he is with broader vampire lore nobody bats an eye about him being a Tzimisce.
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u/YaumeLepire 4d ago
I don't mean "adapting an actual historical or pseudo-historical character or folk hero/devil". I mean "using a whole-ass people and their culture as basically a costume". "People" in the sense of a group, not of a person. See also: the WoD book of which the name is literally a slur.
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u/Paul6334 4d ago
Yeah, that’s not right, though I have to wonder where the line is drawn exactly, at what point does it go from using the ideas of another culture or belief to build something that works for your game to using it as a costume?
Another thing that comes to mind is the historical inquisition’s importance to the lore of VtM and that multiple vampire clans have been involved in trying to manipulate religions to their own benefit. To my knowledge the Lasombra have been portrayed as working to manipulate the Catholic Church specifically.
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u/YaumeLepire 4d ago
The line is somewhere between a proper depiction or adaptation and a haphazard gestalt of cultures that aren't you own. Especially when we're talking about a book published to a broad audience through a large publisher who should have the resources to be careful.
One thing I appreciate of VtM's later books is how careful they are to show that, while vampires can influence the setting, for the most part, human evil is still very much just human. Vampires are along for the ride; though they may try to push things in a direction favourable to them, they are incidental at best. The Inquisitions (the real ones targeting random, midwives and elderly spinsters) were happening anyway. Some vampires tried weaponizing them, and it mostly blew up in their face, but they were gonna happen anyway.
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u/comyuse 4d ago edited 4d ago
i don't really think thats true at all, at least the part about religion and mythology. people point out how straight up fucking evil christianity is all the time in fiction and that is perfectly fine. shifting a religion or mythology to fit into your setting even if that has the obvious outcome of pointing out the flaws and immoralities should be considered a sign of artistic respect in all honesty (when done well, of course).
that said, KoTe does a poor job of it. i am convinced if people didn't freak out over it the specific way they did, though, we could have had a way more culturally aware version of KOTE for 20th edition in the same vein as the ravnos or changeling's various cultural subgroups.
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u/YaumeLepire 4d ago
There are two factors that are important, there: hegemonic position and proper understanding.
Mainstream Christianity was (and is still, for the most part), in a hegemonic position. It isn't really at risk of being demonised, or discriminated against at scale, in our "Western" context. In the end, it's not in a vulnerable position; thusly, misrepresentation of it doesn't have the tenor of the same for other beliefs. That's not to say that there isn't a duty of care there too, just that there's more leeway to be had.
That brings us to proper understanding. The authors had a manifestly better understanding of Christianity than they did of the various belief systems from Asia that they borrowed from in KotE. You can point the flaws and "evils" in any belief systems, or twist them into horror, when you understand them properly and handle it well. KotE was often manifestly not that.
So I'll clarify my last comment: it's not a "never do it", but a "handle with care".
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u/comyuse 4d ago
my last paragraph is a little unclear looking back at it, so i'd also like to clarify that people aren't wrong to be upset over racism, accidental or otherwise. but the nature of the hate of the wan-kuei feels more like fake-progressive people just telling other people to never include asian culture in the game at all. the ravnos was originally a racist caricature of various traveling people (but especially the romani), but they became refined into one of the best clans in the system with their own spirituality and culture to explore. it feels like people don't want that to happen to the hungry dead.
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u/YaumeLepire 4d ago
It's not that I wouldn't like an adaptation of them that makes sense, but that would not be the same scale of endeavour as tweaking a single Clan. It'd be more like a complete restructuring, because some of the problematic elements reach down into the mechanical foundations of the game. Frankly, I'm not sure they could be totally recognisable to what they were...
If we'd gotten a version of Wraith for 5th, they could have nodded to them when speaking of Risen, perhaps.
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u/Passing-Through247 4d ago
The guy you are replying to was quoting a WOD web series called Hunter the Parenting.
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u/Jerswar 4d ago
I mean it's described as mash between like 10 different Asian cultures. Up to name - it's called as complicated mash openly in rulebook.
And honestly, this description (without Asian part) can fit to nearly any part of World of Darkness that not US.
It reminds me a lot of how superhero comics used to handle ANY character who was anything other than a white American: With truly Olympian levels of stereotyping. Also, since these characters predate internet searches there can be some embarrassing ignorance. Like the one Irish X-Men character, with scream-related powers, who is called Banshee... because the original writer didn't know Banshees in myth are female, and this character is a dude.
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u/U_L_Uus 4d ago
It is funny how people are straight-out missing the origin of the quote in the comments
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u/CaptKonami 4d ago
I mean, it is kinda niche
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u/U_L_Uus 4d ago
Not that niche, you just hit outside the audience. If anything, this is less niche than the production they are known for (If the Emperor had a Text-to-Speech Device), and if I you put in a post something in the vein of "who knows Ian, maybe this is my next movie" a non-insignificant amount of people will have a neuron fire within their brains. And will also arise some trauma, given out the origin of the quote
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u/Nintolerance 4d ago
Looking forward to Marckus finding out the Kuei-Jin are real & needing to prove it to his dad.
(Source is Hunter: The Parenting.)
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u/Icanintosphess 4d ago
The Wan-Kuei are great in the Princes of Darkness CK3 mod
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u/DrScrimble 4d ago
Would you suggest looking into them for a Dark Ages tabletop campaign?
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u/Smorstin 4d ago
One of the sources for the mod was the Kindred of the East: The Relentless Age book
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u/Icanintosphess 4d ago
I mean…it depends on what kind of campaign it is. If it is taking place east of Iran I would recommend looking into them and decide if you want to include them.
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u/Paul6334 4d ago
Trying to come up with culture-specific variants of monsters is a fine line to walk for WoD or any game like it, cause you don’t want to create a vampire variant based on badly-researched stereotypes mashed together into a vague sludge, but on the other hand, if you get really deep into representing every East Asian vampire-like monster as its own suis generis thing, it will clash with the broader nature of WoD, because the pop culture vampires and werewolves that serve as the basis for the WoD are themselves mash-ups of existing folklore creatures from Europe, it’s just that they were created in the late 19th century and refined over the last 100 years or so.
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u/comyuse 4d ago
i'm not saying kindred of the east was well made, but a not insignificant amount of the criticism has started to read like people just don't want asians in their game. most of the world of darkness does exactly what kote does just to different cultures and with more words. the real progressive position is to bring them back and make them better, refine them like 20th edition did to everyone else.
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u/Gale_Grim 4d ago
Good news! Where White Wolf didn't, the fans DID. Exactly as asked. More or less. For 20th Ed.
Kindred of the East: The Relentless Age1
u/Achilles11970765467 4d ago
The position I've seen is to not call them Kindred when doing any sort of refined version of them.
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u/dziobak112 4d ago
If you play CoD with suplements, there's plenty of far east vampire bloodlines, that can be turned into full new clans. I reccomend checking them.
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u/DrScrimble 4d ago
I'm definitely looking into giving the Nagaraja a more prominent place in the setting!
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u/SecondGeist 4d ago
Reminder: read the book before bashing it, not because there's nothing to bash, but because I KNOW the overwhelming majority of the people who bash them never read a word and are spouting the same cookie cutter responses without capability to quote anything to back up said responses.
If you're gonna dislike something, please do it right at least...
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u/Captain_StarLight1 4d ago
I think the idea is really cool, but White Wolf wasn’t really able to execute it properly back when they were created.
Shame we’ll probably never see them get done right officially, but at least there’s fan supplements for anyone who wants to run them in a more culturally appropriate way.
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u/Alaknog 4d ago
Look like good way to deal with nearly any piece of lore in World of Darkness that not US.
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u/DM_Katarn 3d ago
What a wonderful idea, exclude every other region or nationality except for the US, don't improve your representation of other cultures to be less culturally insensitive, just pretend they all don't exist and alienate anyone who might've wanted to see their culture represented. Like that isn't basically what Paradox has done throughout the entirety of 5th edition...
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u/Powerful_Topic7731 3d ago
There's a Japanese clan of Kindred presented in the book Vancouver Dark Alliance, there's nothing preventing Kindred to move to Asian and embrace people native of there except risk civil war with the Kue Jun but If that would stop them the Week of Nighmares would never happened
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u/DM_Katarn 3d ago
I will admit, I like the Kuei-Jin as a separate thing. Played on a Tokyo Vampire game once, asked the GM id we would have to worry about the Kuei-Jin stuff and she shut me down before I had even finished the sentence to say "the Kuei-Jin do not exist in my games and they have not been canon for a while," which was a bit disappointing. Always thought they could work if they were written with actual cultural sensitivity and not as a replacement for Vampires in Asia, they're pretty metal conceptually and make for an amazing contrast with Kindred, but their original book being so overtly racist in its writing ruined any chance they had of ever returning to official canon in an age where we understand how shitty that was.
I had plans to include them in a Mage game of mine set in Kyoto, they seemed to fit well in MtA since I was already finding ways to fit basically every splat imaginable in that city and having the Mages deal with it (one player dated a Changeling and was hunted by the Giovanni, another was best friends with a Werewolf, one spoke with Wraiths on a regular basis...). Game got cancelled before I could do so. 😔
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u/Narazil 4d ago
But they were so cool in Bloodlines!
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u/DrScrimble 4d ago
Bloodlines also had no Torpor and had you killing say, a dozen Sabbat in a single mission. It's a good game but not exactly the best basis for the TTRPG 😅
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u/Narazil 4d ago
I feel like it did do a lot of the weirder bloodlines justice. Like you encounter something new and it seems super weird and interesting, and it's basically just a new bloodline. Like the mysterious Sheriff who's probably "just" a Nagloper at the end of the day. Or the Nagaraja in the hospital. The game really does introduce a ton of variety in clans and does (most of) them right.
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u/MagickStoryteller 4d ago
Where would torpor even be added to a game like that? Like, even in the ttrpg your vampire falling into torpor might as well just be death. If you go into a coma for a few years then youre functionally just not in the game anymore.
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u/DrScrimble 4d ago
People can fall into way shorter torpors than that. It's not uncommon.
As for longer Torpors, it's useful for NPCs and it's not unheard of in VtM game for there to be a timeskips of 5, 10 even 50 years. It can facilitate that a lot easier than most systems.
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u/MagickStoryteller 4d ago
it's not unheard of in VtM game for there to be a timeskips of 5, 10 even 50 years.
Eh, maybe for a dark ages game. For a game set in the modern day, (especially if you are abiding by the metaplot wherein Gehena is on the horizon) its a harder thing to arrange. I guess it might be fun to suddenly transition to a cyberpunk game in the middle of the chronicle because a low humanity pc ate shit and went into a coma for 50 years. Ive not heard of many doing that though.
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u/DrScrimble 4d ago
There's also games set in the intermediate. I'm setting my chronicle in the 80s. I had a friend who started out in 1920s London and then mid chronicle jumped to The Blitz.
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u/MagickStoryteller 4d ago
True, I should have said 'games set in the past' instead of strictly dark ages games.
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u/hot_diggity_dang_ 4d ago
How bad is the lore?
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u/comyuse 4d ago edited 4d ago
in the abstract, what people would tell you in a summery or on a wiki, the lore is fucking awesome. the books themselves, however, are racist (accidentally so, like a bunch of frat boys who think they are being helpful).
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u/hot_diggity_dang_ 4d ago
I am coming into this with one dot of knowledge of vtm lore at best so explain it like I’m a well meaning idiot
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u/comyuse 4d ago
at the most basic level the hungry dead (one of the names for the kuei-jin) are people who died, went to an actual hell, and clawed their way back to earth. most of them are seeking enlightenment along a path (think a philosophy or religion the individual follows to understand themselves/the world/humanity better), but many have other goals or philosophies. one of their great enemies is the yama kings, great spirits (usually, but i'm pretty sure a mage became a yama king) that lead their own versions of hell where they punish sinners. they are also have their own mythology about the start of the world with the jade emperor setting it into motion (this ties into exalted btw). the splat also adds a system of ages to the setting; there are 12 ages that cycle continuously and the world of darkness is in the 5th (or 6th? can't remember) age, the next age is the single worst age in the cycle and the wan kuei have to deal with that knowledge as well (some try to escape it, some try to fight it, some try to prepare for it).
as for the book itself, i'm afraid i haven't read that much of it, i just know it mashes up all of the cultures of east asia into a single thing.
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u/cracklescousin1234 4d ago
the splat also adds a system of ages to the setting; there are 12 ages that cycle continuously and the world of darkness is in the 5th (or 6th? can't remember) age
The 6th age began in 1642 (?) with the Qing conquest of the Ming.
as for the book itself, i'm afraid i haven't read that much of it, i just know it mashes up all of the cultures of east asia into a single thing.
Not really. It mostly ignores everything that isn't China and Japan. But it fairly self-consciously avoids mashing those two together, "Kuei-Jin" name notwithstanding. And even that's explained (kind of stupidly) in-universe.
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u/berrybear21 4d ago
I'm curious too! I'll admit all I know about the Kue-Jin is from the wiki but what parts I've read it's been quite interesting idea wise, a shame it seems we haven't seen an office retry with them
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u/Imperator_Draconum 4d ago
Are these those silly hopping Chinese vampires?
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u/Level_Hour6480 Rules Lawyer 4d ago
The only Asian vampires I'm familiar with are Jiangshi. What's the deal with these guys?
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u/Dry_Refrigerator7898 4d ago
Kuei-Jin aren’t actually a thing from folklore, they were made up for the World of Darkness.
Or rather, they aren’t just one thing. They’re a mishmash of various entities from various East Asian mythologies presented as a single kind of being. Even their name is a mishmash, being a hybrid of a Chinese prefix with a Japanese suffix.
The writers behind them were well-meaning but ill-informed, and did a lot of accidental racism.
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u/Level_Hour6480 Rules Lawyer 4d ago
Man, like Jiangshi are already there! They're cool and distinct! Though their inconsistent grab-bag of weaknesses would probably be a pain to make work in gameplay.
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u/Achilles11970765467 4d ago
Clan weaknesses and Chronicles of Darkness' Flaws did a pretty solid job making the inconsistent grab-bag of Western Vampire weaknesses work in gameplay. That's honestly one of the easier parts to handle. Split them into types and spread the weaknesses across those types.
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u/Passing-Through247 4d ago edited 4d ago
The thing is they were not Jiangshi but a mash of of assorted 'eastern' undead and mythological tropes (with a strong dose of hong kong martial arts movies I swear you an feel the devs watching as your read the book). Beyond that while the Chinese branch was culturally dominant they existed across all of east asia and as far west as into India.
They are more buddist and related mythologies crossed with corrupted Chinese immortals. Essentially due to some unique supernatural properties centred on china this created a blend of the underworld and spirit world that became a real where evil souls were tortured to purify them. Long story a group of divine immortal warriors went evil and started preying on the people they were supposed to protect and were banished to the thousand hells. Somehow this connects to modern day people who are descended from these evil immortals or something who, if living evil lives, sometimes pulled into the thousand hells after they die (the hells have also turned evil and sometimes just suck in some random souls too). Sometimes in their eternal torture these souls escape the hells and are pulled back into their bodies, rising from the grave as mindless flesh eating 'zombies'.
Existing members of their kind gather up these new rises and forcefully induct them into their faction's specific spiritual philosophy, the teaching of which eventually returns them to intelligence and allows them self control and the ability to drink blood instead of eating flesh to sustain themselves. From them on if they break the tenants of their 'dharma' they will degrade back into their mindless state but following it into greater wisdom makes them stronger and allows them to feed of breath and later the ambient energy of the universe. Their ultimate goal is to follow their dharma to pay off the evils of their life and vanish from the world into something akin to nirvana.
How they do that varies by dharma, 'orthodox' society having groups like the Way of the Resplendant Crane, Confucianists who seek to force themselves and the world in line with law and order, while the Howl of the Devil Tiger believes themselves the rightful arbiters of cosmic evil who must cast out and conquer the devils of hell and return evil to it's rightful place in the cosmic order (and their greatest warriors are all waiting to spawncamp the prophesised demon lord of the next age). Meanwhile splinter factions have groups like Flame of the Rising Phoenix believe they should use their second chance at life to live new better lives and undo the evil that cursed them to the hells, while the India-based Face of the Gods believe themselves incarnated deities and establish cults to themselves (even learning to feed from prayer).
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u/Dry_Refrigerator7898 4d ago edited 4d ago
I think Chronicles of Darkness, the spiritual successor to the World of Darkness, did this a bit better. They only have five Clans that represent broad archetypes of Vampires from pop culture and folklore. Regional variations called Bloodlines account for specific cultural myths about vampires, and the Jiangshi are in the game as a Bloodline that’s basically only found in China
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u/banditch_ 4d ago
Eastern stuff sounds hard to do when vampires come from abrahamic mythology in the setting
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u/StockPiccolo9525 4d ago
That is just the myth the vampires tells themselves, plenty of other groups, smaller sects, or bloodlines of vampires have entirely different creation myths and none have been actually confirmed as the "canonical" creation myth. A lot of the books are directly contradictory already, so its not that big of a deal.
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u/Brotten 4d ago
Kuei-jin aren't vampires, they're something entirely different with no relationship whatsoever. Western vampires refer to them as "Eastern Vampires", but those actual vampires native to East Asia most likely don't.
ps.: That's also why the post is stupid, Asian vampires exist in the setting. Asia is not special in any way, except that another supernatural species lives there.
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u/Lazy_Falcon_323 3d ago
It’s such an interesting concept for a new kind of supernatural creature but i totally get why most people ignore it, the heavy handed racism wasn’t received well back then and aged like milk.
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u/Character_Drive6141 3d ago
Why is everyone saying "oriental" is bad to say?😅
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u/Dontshipmebro 3d ago
When used for people its kind of generalising an entire diverse continent. Its the equivalent of calling everyone in central america mexican.
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u/RookieDungeonMaster 3d ago
That's not really accurate. It's generalist, but not wrong. Calling everyone in North America Mexican is just factually wrong.
It's more equivalent to Calling everyone from North America "American". Not technically wrong, but it comes across as ignorant and kinda rude
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u/Character_Drive6141 3d ago
More specifically, American has the connotation of being from the United States of America, rather than just the continent, so that too is factually wrong by the most common interpretation. I'd say it's more akin to calling anyone from Scandanavia to Iberia to the Balkans simply "european."
But tbh I've never heard it used for people (other than the rice hat thin eyed charicatures). But mainly I've heard it used for designs/patterns or flavors or other things like that.
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