White Wolf No More

[blackspiralParticipant 1659xp 0]

Now White Wolf has been consumed by its parent company effectively ending it as a company! https://www.white-wolf.com/newsblog/a-message-from-white-wolf

[shredheadParticipant 5177xp 2]

This isn’t real though, is it?

Here’s a real story: Back when I was in the army I was in a unit that helped train unarmed UN observers and journalists for conflict zones. Basically we role played as (cold) warring factions, simulated abductions, torture and terror tactics (within the limits of the law).

So we rolled out on that maneuver for UN observers and the first thing on day two was an ambush on their convoy. Two armored transports boxed them in and corralled them onto a clearing. There we proceeded to pull them out of their cars, weapons trained at them, and made them kneel in a line. Every one of us (each UN soldier had a handler) yelled at them at the top of our lungs to lose their helmets, vests and finally lay spread eagle on the ground as soon as our “major” gave the orders.

I got to the point when they were supposed to lay flat on their bellies with my guy when he simply locked up. *Guy couldn’t do anything anymore. The man was from Georgia (the Caucasus country). He was in a war down there and had been taken “prisoner” by one of the scum militias in that time. This guy has gotten legitimately triggered that day, he was reliving a trauma, me yelling in his ear and pointing a gun at his skull. This was serious.

This PC crap makes a mockery out of heroes like this man and what victims of severe trauma go through!

Holy cow, looks like I got “triggered” well enough by this. Sorry for the rant, but I can’t just stand it anymore.

 

*I know all that from the debrief and meet and greet at the end of the exercise. It is part of the whole thing to calm down tensions and look each other in the eyes at the end.

[kevlinParticipant 1687xp 3]

It’s always complicated to try and portray an ongoing conflict zone where there is two or more truths about what is happening and whos fault it is. In the end White wolf (or Paradox) decided that this particular conflict cost them more that it gained. I haven’t read the text they are reffering to but I guess it was rather one sided and strongly biased toward one side.

My guess is that the text itself was the real mockery that you speak of @shreadhead and that removing it was the lesser mockery.

[shredheadParticipant 5177xp 2]

That’s certainly possible, but the PR text reads very weird if you try and fit it to your alternative. As I said, I got “triggered”, reading that brought up that particular memory and a lot of grievances I have with this PC stuff. It’s not healthy, and it’s a perverted play for power that I find despicable, to say the least.

So, whatever may be the case, I’ll let that stand as it is, but thanks for your input!

[doctoretherParticipant 9166xp 2]

First off you are using triggered in an inappropriate way.

Triggered means that a environment someone is in causes them flashbacks due to PTSD to serious, violent, and distressing events in their life.

Finding a piece of work of to be gross, poor taste, or juvenile or disrespectful does not mean one is triggered.

For why the text in question is being pulled from the book, https://www.beastsofwar.com/forums/topic/rumour-white-wolf-to-no-longer-develop-books-internally/#post-1303541

I have also written full reviews of both the Anarch and Camarilla books for BoW. And given I have reviewed a massive amount of the WW/OPP library of books I consider myself something of an expert when they have made missteps and mistakes e.g. World of Darkness Gypsies.

[shredheadParticipant 5177xp 3]

No, I’m using the word in the absolutely correct way describing what happened to the Georgian officer. The other times I use it in quotation marks for a reason. I don’t give a single flying F about it being “appropriate” for you, because you don’t decide what I think and say, buddy.

As to your explanation, if the story was written in a “juvenile” way as in, it didn’t meet the standards, fine. I would ask where their QA was then, but whatever. It wasn’t the reason given though, according to your explanation. The reason was “could offend the tiniest minority in a tiny minority”, and that tiniest minority (homosexual Chechnyan refugees that play WoD) wasn’t even asked.

You describe how the RPG provoked reactions from religious nutjobs back then, with a positive outcome, and now all of a sudden it’s necessary to cave to another bunch of screeching religious nutjobs just because? This only makes sense to people without principles. Just as I wrote, it’s a powerplay, and it’s disgusting.

In the end, turning historical events into fiction and comedy is the human way to cope with them and keep the memories alive. Being offended keeps you grounded and forces you to think about your own world view and your place. A society that doesn’t allow offense is a scary place, believe me, I grew up in one.

 

[doctoretherParticipant 9166xp 3]

The reason the text was offensive and ill thought out is the following.

It is presents a situation as just simply being a PR exercise orchestrated to divert from other issues. LBGTQ+ people have reacted adversely to how their situation is presented as some make believe scenario perpetrated by make believe vampires. This is dangerous because, as Russia and Chechnya are doing right now on RT and other news outlets, are presenting this as all a case of Western anti-Russia PR. Now lets imagine if the country in question was the US and they reacted in the same manner.

Then you see why this has backfired so spectacularly.

At this point I think the two threads on this need to be merged.

[shredheadParticipant 5177xp 1]

“It presents a situation as just simply being a PR exercise orchestrated to divert from other issues.”

That presumes malicious intent and makes no sense at all.

Look, I see where people are coming from here, and there’s a reason I don’t play games (TT or on PC) that are set in the present time. But going off about a game not depicting something as it is but putting their fantastic spin on it is pointing the wrong guns on the wrong target. Bring that up with media reps. Maybe they can squeeze something in between their spouting off about “orange man bad”. Write a letter to your representative. Put that energy towards something that can yield actual real results instead of getting some poor sobs fired for not using the right words.

Getting people fired for something benign like this is wrong on so many levels, it’s not even funny. I also don’t care who does it. Imagine playing “Secret Hitler” or however that was called with people like this. Games don’t have a mandate to teach current world politics or make propaganda, they are played for escapism.

[doctoretherParticipant 9166xp 2]

No this is verbatim from the Camarilla book.

Let’s repeat that, but this time take the actual text from the book (Camarilla book that was recently pulled).

“The recurring international controversy over the persecution of homosexuals is a clever media manipulation designed to keep the focus on Sharia law, away from the true inner workings of the republic. While homosexuals are indeed held in detention facilities for days, and humiliated, starved, tortured, and eventually fed upon and killed, this is not the point. The point is to distract from the truth of what Chechnya has become. That said, even among the Kindred any kind of “homosexual behaviour” is punished harshly. …There is unfortunately nothing we can do for our brothers and sisters in Chechnya who suffer under this — interference is ill-advised at this point, but should any Kindred (or even kine) seek asylum within regnums under our control, granting it may win allies to our side who are not just well-trained in combat and thankful to us, but also knowledgeable in the ways of a people who might already be preparing to attack us.”

They literally say in the game book the pogrom is a PR stunt to divert attention from the real truth, that vampires are in control of Chechnya.

[shredheadParticipant 5177xp 1]

I may have misread that sentence, sorry for that. Still, as I said “going off about a game not depicting something as it is but putting their fantastic spin on it is pointing the wrong guns on the wrong target.”

It simply doesn’t justify getting the people fired, period.

[doctoretherParticipant 9166xp 1]

Well given the fall out of this is that people in Russia who were looking to run a KS to do a localisation of V20, and they have been called in by politicians etc, I think there are important ramifications here, including Russia using this as a basis to write off actual news about Chechnya as being more “fantasies”, that there does have to be some consequences.

More importantly the change in leadership at WW was occuring before the book in question came out.

[shredheadParticipant 5177xp 1]

I’m sorry to hear that, but none of this is the writers fault. What even is that standard you try to set here? If something you created is used for propaganda somewhere in the world by bad people you’re to blame? Guess we all better stop creating art for the public to enjoy then, because you will never be able to avoid that!

[doctoretherParticipant 9166xp 2]

The best thing to do is acquaint yourself with this thread where Justin Achilli, one time writer and lead dev for Masquerade, has some very good thoughts on how to treat real world events, given he was writing New York by Night when the Twin Towers fell. https://twitter.com/popeguilty/status/1062654676154363905

[shredheadParticipant 5177xp 0]

Well, shucks, Scooby!

http://archive.is/fdaMz

Seems I was right all along. Disgusting book burners. Authoritarian *************. Seems like more than a hundred years of communism and socialism with more than 160 million people murdered haven’t taught anyone anything!

[Author]

Posts